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I have to admit, crying foul over national sovereignty and international law is a bit rich coming from the US. After all, the general position of the US for the last quarter century or so has been that US law applies within the US and to US citizens, and the US president has unlimited jurisdiction over the life of freedom of anyone else. If you annoy the US (or get mistaken as someone who did so), perhaps you will get blown up in the middle of a wedding reception, or you will get kidnapped and brought to some torture prison the US runs where their constitution does not apply. I guess if you are really lucky, you will merely get kidnapped and brought within proper US jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, the US military is very reluctant to investigate possible war crimes of their soldiers, because the civilian leadership has no interests in doing so. The officer who mis-id'ed that school in Iran will obviously not face a military tribunal on charges of negligent manslaughter. The sailor who decided to shoot the shipwrecked survivors of a strike against a suspected drug smuggling boat will likewise never see a court martial.
I do not know how Trump would have handled the judicial aftermath of the Yugoslavia war. I doubt he would have cared much about foreign war crimes, so likely the accused would have gotten a presidential pardon in exchange for 'investing' in one of his shitcoins. Perhaps he would also have made up some ad-hoc military court to try and hang them. Perhaps the soldiers arresting the suspects would have been simply under orders not to take anyone alive, as they were with Bin Laden. Perhaps he would have let the Bosnians try any Serbs accused of crimes against humanity, with predictable results.
But it seems clear to me that all of these options would have been worse than just trying the suspected war criminals in the Hague, where they got their day in court, and if their guilt was proven beyond reasonable doubt, and they mostly got just sentences by judges who were non-partisan.
The ICC is just the generalization of that tribunal. I do not think it is very hard for a country to keep out of the crosshairs of the ICC -- simply conduct your wars (if you have to) while taking proper precautions to protect civilians, and if indivdual soldiers break the rules of engagement and commit crimes against civilians or PoWs, give them sentences similar to what civilians would have gotten for doing the crime against other domestic civilians.
A lot of the US courts are thoroughly politicized, starting with the SCOTUS (Roe vs Wade, among others) and continuing to the lawfare first against and then by Trump. My feeling is that the ICC is no worse than that (and likely a lot less political), despite Israel's whining to the contrary.
The US strategy for dealing with Hegseth, if he was working against rather than for the US, would be to blow him up and accept any bystanders as collateral damage. I am against this, not because I think he is especially deserving of legal protections he denied his enemies, but because legal protections should apply universally. So I would much prefer him and the people above and below him in the chain of command getting their day in court in the Hague, thereby strengthening international law rather than further weakening it.
No but you see when the US and its allies mess with the Middle East and Latin America for the umpteenth time, bomb their countries to smithereens and/or try to install their own puppet governments in the area, this is an act of magnanimity and liberation of the downtrodden as well as a justified act of retaliation against evil dictatorships. When US competitors exercise power on a much smaller and less consequential regional scale, for example China enforcing their sovereignty over Hong Kong or throwing their weight around in the South China Sea, this is uncalled-for aggression, authoritarianism and belligerence and a violation of international law. As always everything is just realpolitik and the ideological justifications are created ad hoc to legitimise it.
It's literally just rules for thee, not for me; their mode of engagement has never been particularly consistent. The actual basis for their objection to the ICC is primarily just that the US and its interests may be subject to some external power that constrains their ability to act, it has nothing to do with any serious belief in consistently-applied "international law" or "rules-based order". In this context, it's very hard for me to care about any arguments about how the ICC is trying to gain and keep power as an arbiter of international affairs, when we already live in a system where flagrant overexercise of power is the norm. America is just not used to being on the wrong side of that dynamic, and as such suddenly feels obliged to care.
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Yes, the Bush and to a lesser extent Obama era depredations were bad. There is no excuse for torture.
Woe to the conquered.
All the more reason not to willingly relinquish sovereignty to people who hate you.
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