“Outrageous.” That was how President Joe Biden reacted to the announcement this week from the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to charge them with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The president did not mince words about the ICC prosecutor’s decision to levy similar accusations against leaders of Israel and Hamas. “There is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas,” he declared.
His administration is so incensed by the ICC’s actions that it’s not just criticizing the court’s claims, but considering punishing the body. When Sen. Lindsey Graham, hardly a regular White House ally, asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “support a bipartisan effort to sanction the ICC,” Blinken replied, “I welcome working with you on that.”
Biden’s position on the ICC underscores the hollowness of his rhetoric on America’s role in the world.
Blinken’s response doesn’t commit Biden to signing legislation that would sanction the ICC. Future legislation could seek softer penalties, such as the U.S. reducing funding that indirectly supports some ICC programs. But any public consideration from this administration of sanctioning the ICC is a remarkable — and reprehensible — development.
Biden’s position on the ICC underscores the hollowness of his rhetoric on America’s role in the world. Throughout his presidency, Biden has emphasized the alleged importance of upholding a “rules-based order.” He invoked the concept in his condemnations of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and has used it to justify the United States’ extensive support of Kyiv in that war. But when it comes to Israel, Biden seems to take offense at an institution trying to uphold that order.
If Biden really cared about a rules-based order, he’d champion the ICC’s decision and allow it to investigate the issue under the auspices of international humanitarian law, not try to silence it. The ICC may be the world’s top war crimes court, but it is not a powerful institution. It has no enforcement arm and requires the cooperation of the global community. It has jurisdiction only over countries that have signed the Rome Statute. While more than 120 countries — including many of the United States’ top allies — are signatories, neither the U.S. nor Israel has signed it.
But Palestine — which is recognized as a state by the majority of U.N. member nations — is a signatory. In reality, it’s unlikely that, even if the ICC issues an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, he would ever be tried for war crimes. But it could limit his ability to travel for fear of arrest by an ICC member state, and it could dramatically accelerate Israel’s status as a pariah or quasi-pariah state in the eyes of many countries around the world.
While Biden was rankled over the ICC prosecutor’s decision, human rights organizations and some U.S. allies such as France and Belgium have defended the independence of the ICC. (The United Kingdom however, ever America’s meek sidekick in global affairs, deemed it “not helpful.”) Graham’s rationale for sanctions in his question to Blinken provides a window into why the U.S. is so fiercely opposed to the ICC’s maneuvering: “Not only for the outrage against Israel but to protect, in the future, our own interests.” American politicians know that the U.S. has perhaps more to lose than any other country over an emboldened ICC willing to challenge American actions. In its self-appointed role as the world’s police, the U.S. regularly violates the sovereignty of other countries. And human rights watchdogs have documented how the U.S. has violated international humanitarian law in countries it has intervened in, including Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s no surprise, then, that even after President Bill Clinton signed the Rome treaty late in his tenure, he complained about “significant flaws” and declined to send it to the Senate for ratification. His successor, George W. Bush, reversed that signing, and no president has come close to recognizing the ICC since. More recently, Trump slapped sanctions on ICC personnel in 2020 after the court announced it was opening investigations into war crimes in Afghanistan by all parties in the country, including the U.S. Biden commendably removed those sanctions after he entered office. And he also rightly welcomed the ICC’s issuing of an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023 for allegedly committing war crimes in Ukraine. Now that the ICC has done something that threatens U.S. geopolitical interests, however, international law seems to have become not just unimportant for Biden but threatening. And if someone only respects rules when it suits them, then they’re not really rules at all.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
