The Washington Post Today's Worldview : The United States and ICC have an awkward history and more...

 

    

Read online

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall  Email   The United States and ICC have an awkward history The International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2019. (Peter Dejong/AP) In June 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on Fatou Bensouda. Within weeks, Bensouda found that banks were closing her accounts and canceling her credit cards. Even her relatives had assets frozen as banks attempted to comply with rules set by the U.S. Treasury. What was Bensouda’s alleged transgression? Was she a terrorist? A human rights abuser? A corrupt foreign official? No, she was the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. And the sanctions were placed on her for doing the job she was appointed to do. The ICC sits in a grand building in The Hague, the administrative capital of the Netherlands. It is backed by 123 other nations, including U.S. allies all over the world. Bensouda’s office is designed to prosecute major crimes, including war crimes, when the national courts are unable, or unwilling, to do the job. The Biden administration belatedly rescinded the sanctions upon Bensouda, which were placed on the prosecutor and other senior officials at the ICC by the Trump administration over the court’s investigation into whether U.S. forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda stepped down shortly afterward at the end of her term, replaced by Karim Khan, a British lawyer. With the Ukraine war looking to be a pivotal moment in the ICC’s 20-year history, the court’s fraught history with the largest and most powerful nation on earth can only complicate matters. Awkwardly, though the United States and Russia may be at odds over the war in Ukraine, they have long been united in a selective hostility to international justice. That may now be changing. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the complexities of international justice, with many holding out hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin could eventually face trial for war crimes committed by his forces in Ukraine. Khan has opened an investigation into possible war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. After his most recent trip to Ukraine, Reuters and the New York Times reported that he was planning to issue his first arrest warrants against Russians allegedly responsible for the mass abduction of children and the targeting of civilian infrastructure. To fully pursue the matter, Khan could benefit from the help of the country that sanctioned his predecessor. It’s tempting to dismiss the 2020 sanctions on the ICC as a moment of typically Trumpian excess. President Donald Trump had a reflexive opposition to international cooperation, pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization and leaving the Paris agreement on climate change. But the poor relationship between the United States and the court goes back far further. The ICC was established by the Rome Statute, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1998. (Only seven countries voted against the treaty: Qatar, Yemen, Iraq, Israel, Libya, China and the United States.) President Bill Clinton later signed the agreement but never sent it for ratification in Congress, while successive U.S. administrations have essentially rejected the court’s jurisdiction. Under President George W. Bush, the United States implemented a law that allowed the president to “use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of a U.S. or allied person detained or imprisoned by the ICC (this law was informally dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act”). The Obama administration made little formal policy change. The Trump administration was abnormal in its hostility, but notably, some of the most fervent were the Republicans from the more-mainstream wing of the party — such as former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, with the latter claiming the court had “become corrupted” and the former saying it was “already dead to us.” The key problem with the court, as made clear by successive administrations, is the idea that an international court could try U.S. citizens, including American soldiers. Bensouda, who had been in office since 2012, moved to open proceedings into war crimes in Afghanistan, the first investigation opened by the court that would involve U.S. troops. When the ICC approved the investigation in 2020, the United States responded with sanctions. Relations improved from this nadir under the Biden administration, but it took months for the administration to remove sanctions on the court’s prosecutors. After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, Khan announced he would focus on alleged crimes by the extremist group and the Islamic State-Khorasan, a rival. The war in Ukraine could prove to be a chance to reimagine the U.S. relationship with the ICC. Last year, a group of lawmakers led by hawkish Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham passed a new law that allowed more scope for cooperation with the court, with Graham praising Putin for rehabilitating “the ICC in the eyes of the Republican Party and the American people” during a trip to The Hague. Biden and other senior officials have spoken of the need for justice in Ukraine, with the president himself calling for Putin to face a war crimes trial. It wouldn’t be a huge change. Washington has played a key role in numerous war crimes investigations over previous years, including some that took place at the ICC itself. The U.S. government’s vast intelligence capabilities could well prove important in any legal case going forward, while U.S. backing could also help settle a split between the ICC and the European Union over a potential special court put forward by the latter. But the old adversarial relationship isn’t entirely gone either. The New York Times reported last week that the Pentagon was blocking the sharing of evidence with the court, wary that it could create a precedent that could be used against U.S. citizens. Adam Keith, director for accountability at Human Rights First, warned in Just Security this month that the United States’ “muddled” official stance on the ICC could leave it “flat-footed and unable to assist” when the court begins to issue arrest warrants. Oddly, the U.S. position on the ICC is the same as the one that Russia has taken in regard to the court — an argument that the ICC has no jurisdiction over countries that are not party to it. Russia, much like the United States, signed the Rome Statute but much later withdrew from it. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “We do not recognize this court; we do not recognize its jurisdiction.” The court, however, maintains that it can pursue cases in Afghanistan and Ukraine as they are ICC member states. That idea is not necessarily unusual. If a U.S. citizen commits a crime in France, it is expected that they would be tried in the French legal system. The Biden administration has pushed back against other international rules — including the World Trade Organization, with the United States refusing to accept that body’s rulings when they went against U.S. interests. But perhaps with the ICC, his administration may forego a policy of America First to help its ally Ukraine.   1,000 Words A fence marking the boundary between Finland and Russia near the Pelkola border crossing is seen in November. (Alessandro Rampazzo/AFP/Getty Images) My colleague Júlia Ledur visualized the “barbed-wire curtain” that European nations are building to physically isolate Russia and Belarus. Finland and six other European countries have put up border fences in recent years, with many also drawing up plans to extend those barriers in the coming years.   Talking Points • Credit Suisse said it will borrow up to $53.7 billion from Switzerland’s central bank, after the banking giant disclosed problems in its financial reporting. Credit Suisse has long struggled with a host of problems, and its latest troubles differ from those that brought down SVB. But the Swiss bank is much larger and more integrated with the global financial system, and its problems come amid growing worries about bank stability globally. • The leaders of Japan and South Korea will hold their first summit together in 12 years. The Thursday meeting between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida marks a cautious step toward rapprochement after years of bitter lows in the relationship of the two biggest U.S. allies in Asia. • Moscow said it will try to retrieve the wreckage of a U.S. surveillance drone that crashed into the Black Sea after a collision with a Russian jet fighter. And, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the U.S. military would “continue to fly and operate wherever international law allows,” rejecting Moscow’s claim of a self-declared exclusion zone over extended parts of the Black Sea the day after the U.S. drone was downed. • Mikhail Korotkov, 31, a lifelong “trainspotter,” spent years tracking and photographing Vladimir Putin’s special hush-hush, deluxe armored train. The Russian president is known to be fanatically cautious — detractors would say paranoid — when it comes to security. Now, fearing his trainspotting posts could be used to jail him on sabotage or terrorism charges, Korotkov has shut his blog, he said, for “my personal security.” • The world’s largest refugee encampment, home at the moment to roughly 1 million Rohingya, is set to receive less than half the funding required to support it this year amid a drastic drop in donations.   Top of The Post Steps from the Capitol, Trump allies buy up properties to build MAGA campus By Paul Schwartzman ●  Read more »   Abortion pill fight may have broader implications for FDA drug approval By Rachel Roubein, Laurie McGinley and David Ovalle ●  Read more »   Inside the movement to remake America’s city streets By Reis Thebault and Alice Li ●  Read more »     Viewpoints What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance? By Rebecca Solnit | The Washington Post ●  Read more »   Iraq veterans, 20 years later: George W. Bush ‘owes me a beer, at the least’ By Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker | The New York Times ●  Read more »   Forget Nazis, Britain’s cruel refugee plan mimics its own history By Priyamvada Gopal | Al Jazeera ●  Read more »     Reagan’s example fading Former president Donald Trump speaks on the third and final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4 in Fort Washington, Md. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) When Ronald Reagan addressed a brand new organization of upstart conservatives nearly five decades ago, he cast U.S. entanglements abroad as part of the nation’s destiny to take on “leadership of the free world” and to serve as a shining “city on the hill” that inspired other countries, sparking thunderous applause. At a dinner named after the former president at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering earlier this month, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake pushed a very different message to the party’s activists. “We are living on planet crazy where we have hundreds of billions of dollars of our hard-earned American money being sent overseas to start World War III,” Lake said in her keynote address, inflating the amount of U.S. aid that’s been sent to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. “This is not our fight. We are ‘America First!’” Lake’s strident aversion to deepening American involvement in Ukraine, echoed by many speakers at CPAC, has been dismissed by some Republicans in Congress as a fringe viewpoint. Congress has appropriated more than $113 billion since the war started in multiple bipartisan votes. But Republican voters are increasingly adopting those same skeptical views. Beneath the shift from Reagan to Lake is a story of the Republican Party’s own transformation on foreign policy in the past few decades, as a segment of notable conservative figures — most influentially, Trump — began to overtly reject the Cold War-era Reagan posture of leading the “free world,” to push a very different view of America’s role in the world. “This is an ongoing civil war, and I think that the realists and those of us who believe in a more restrained foreign policy have momentum,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president at the Center for Renewing America, the policy shop led by former Trump White House budget director Russ Vought. “You are seeing more Republicans at the grass-roots level, at the policymaker level, and even at the institutional and donor level embracing a foreign policy of realism and restraint.”  In recent memory, the Republican Party has often been aligned with a muscular foreign policy summed up by Reagan’s “peace through strength.” Long before Reagan, however, there had been a tradition on the American right of nationalism and skepticism toward foreign intervention (sometimes called isolationism, though today’s conservatives reject that term). The motto of “America First” originated with a group of influential conservatives who opposed aiding the Allies at the outbreak of World War II. After the war, the threat of the Soviet Union and international communism served to unite Republicans behind a more aggressive foreign policy, temporarily papering over ideological differences over America’s role in the world, according to Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University. “As soon as the Cold War comes to an end, that kind of nationalistic, noninterventionist strain of the conservative movement comes roaring back,” Hemmer said. Most prominently, failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan revived the “America First” slogan to advocate for withdrawing from overseas military entanglements in the 1990s. Republicans criticized President Bill Clinton’s interventions in Somalia and Kosovo, and George W. Bush campaigned for president in 2000 by opposing the concept of nation-building abroad. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed Bush’s plans, and his presidency became dominated by a doctrine of preemptive strikes and interventionism premised on promoting democracy. For a time, the anti-interventionist strain of conservative thought appeared extinct, summed up by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot as “four or five people in a phone booth.” But by the time Bush left office, the costly and drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan became a drain on his approval rating, including among Republicans. A resurgence of antiwar sentiment fueled Rep. Ron Paul’s long-shot, but attention-grabbing, presidential bid in 2008 and the tea party wave of 2010. In 2014, the network of conservative groups led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch expanded investments in foreign policy, setting up think tanks, advocacy groups and activist organizations that built an intellectual case for a more restrained approach to foreign affairs. “Being more hawkish isn’t necessarily a real political winner in 2012, and by the time that Trump comes around in 2016, he sees an opening with key parts of that Republican base that are done with the Bush wars and this idea of remaking large parts of the world in America’s image,” said Douglas Kriner, a professor of government at Cornell University. Kriner’s research with Harvard professor Francis X. Shen found that places that suffered more casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan tended to turn away from Republicans starting in 2006 and gravitate toward Trump in 2016, even controlling for other factors. “Trump very skillfully tapped into something that was there, a real softening in that support,” Kriner said. – Liz Goodwin, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marianna Sotomayor Read more: A Republican ‘civil war’ on Ukraine erupts as Reagan’s example fades