[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

The International Criminal Court is seeking warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas chiefs, one of whom was the mastermind of the October 7 massacre. A German government official has pledged to execute the warrant should Israel’s Prime Minister set foot on German soil.

This shameful stunt––like South Africa’s earlier charges of genocide against Israel via the International Court of Justice ––reminds us of the moral idiocy and political corruption of what British historian Corelli Barnett called “moralizing internationalism.” That century-long attempt to set aside human nature as it actually is, and replace violent conflicts with “diplomatic engagement,” international law, and transnational institutions like the ICC, has now reached its reductio ad absurdum with its disgraceful and hypocritical bout of moral preening.

The ICC was created in 1998, and like most of the “rules based international order” since the League of Nations, it came into being at a time of feckless optimism––the West’s arrogant pretensions that the tragic nature of interstate relations had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, human rights and justice under law, were now poised to expand freedom and prosperity to the whole world. With peace and trade, nationalist and ideological passions along with autocratic gangster regimes would wither away, and with them armed conflict.

Typical of this wishful thinking were the sentiments George H.W. Bush proclaimed in 1991, when he announced a “new world order . . . where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

Yet despite the repudiation of this idealism on 9/11 by the horrific display of diverse creeds and beliefs about justice and violence, George W. Bush doubled-down with dubious begged questions. In the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush defined U.S. foreign policy as a focus on the promotion of a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” for “these values of freedom are right and true for every person across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”

However, subsequent history has exposed the arrogance and naïveté of this radical simplification of global diversity, which comprises an irreducible complexity of ethnicities, histories, cultures, religions, ambitions, traditions, and notions of honor and vengeance. As such, many of these global folkways necessarily conflict with our own, and those diverse markers of identity make many peoples resent the power and influence the West possesses.

These realities also preclude the unifying “harmony of interests” that seldom exists for long on a global scale, which is why multinational institutions like “international law” are a chimera, artifacts of treaties that nations can choose not to join––as the U.S. wisely passed on the ICC–– or the terms of which they violate when their national interests clash with those terms. For as Prime Minister Lord Palmerston said of Great Britain, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Next, there’s the absence of coherent, universally accepted principles upon which to base international law. Nor can “customary norms” or practices fill that lack. As Robert Bork writes in Coercing Virtue, “There is nothing that can be called law in any meaningful sense established by custom. It there were, it would not restrain international aggression; it is more likely to unleash it . . . if custom is what counts, it favors aggression.”

This judgment has been empirically validated by the incessant warfare, ethnic cleansing, civil wars, invasions of neighbors, and genocide that have attended the modern international order since its birth in the 19^th century, and still roil the world today.

Given that reality, what transnational courts claim to be justice is in fact politics, the privileging of some ideologies, national interests, and purposes over others in the zero-sum, geopolitical tournament of power, influence, and dominance. As such, they run the risk of becoming a malign influence on our own jurisprudence, the result of our cognitive globalist elites who self-identify as “citizens of the world” and prefer European laws to our Constitution.

Indeed, in those circumstance, as Bork suggests, the creation of institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights represents a very real danger to American democracy: by “creating international law the New Class [Bork’s moniker for the cognitive elite] hopes to outflank American legislatures and courts by having liberal views adopted abroad and then imposed on the United States.” We have seen in the past this phenomenon in the eagerness of some of our own Supreme Court justices to refer to other nations’ judicially sanctioned progressive prejudices when adjudicating culture-war disputes such as marriage, abortion, or capital punishment.

Another problem with multinational courts is how actionable offenses are defined. For example, the ICC’s charter, as Bork explains, made “aggression” a crime, even though the ratifying nations “were unable to agree on a definition of what constitutes aggression. We will find out the answer when the ICC makes up the rules and, given the pervasive anti-Americanism in much of the world, our soldiers and officials are likely to be subject to it.” The current court’s efforts to prosecute Israeli government officials is playing the same Orwellian game with distorted or mendacious language like “disproportionate” and “genocide.”

All these questionable features of politicized international law have been turbocharged by the ICC’s attack on Israeli government officials. Most glaring is the ICC’s treatment of a legitimate, liberal-democratic, accountable state, in the same way (or worse) that it does a notoriously violent terrorist gang that is openly committed to inflicting genocidal violence on the whole Jewish people––a case of grotesquely egregious moral and intellectual equivalence.

Also, the ICC seemingly has no concern with accurately distinguishing the sadistic aggressor from his innocent victims. As the Wall Street Journal commented, “Lumping them together is a slander for the history books. Imagine some international body prosecuting Tojo and Roosevelt, or Hitler and Churchill, amid World War II.”

But the ICC’s corruption manifests itself on many more levels, such as its claim that Israel is “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population,” even as it ignores Hamas’ decades-long crimes of using their own people as human shields, and staging attacks to maximize Israel’s inadvertent killing of Hamas’ own civilians, such as storing munitions and weapons in hospitals, schools, and mosques, and dwellings which they booby-trap with explosives.

This practice is already illegal under international law––but as @omriceren tweeted, in 2019  “Sen. Cruz wrote and passed into law language requiring the President to impose sanctions on Hamas for using human shields. The sanctions are mandatory (the statute says ‘shall’ not ‘may’). The law had a 5 year sunset but was recently renewed with language out of his Hamas Sanctions Act.” So much for the president’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

And don’t forget, for all the Biden administration’s recent rhetoric about the ICC’s “outrageous” charges, it has undercut and roadblocked Israel’s efforts to finish off Hamas and finally end decades of terrorist murder. The ICC no doubt has been encouraged by such interference, like Biden’s putting Rafah, Hamas’ last redoubt, off limits, while cutting off “smart” munitions that critical for helping Israel minimize civilian casualties.

Additionally, the administration’s mouthpieces for months have accused Israel of “having no credible plan” for protecting 1.3 million civilians endangered by the offensive. “Yet the Israelis went ahead anyway,” the Journal writes, and two weeks later they have safely evacuated an estimated 950,000 people.” So much for the charge that Israel is callously indifferent to the lives of civilians.

In fact, no country in history has worked as hard to minimize civilian casualties as Israel has. Commenting on Biden’s hectoring Israel about minimizing civilian casualties, the Journal emphasizes, “Israel doesn’t need prompting to provide humanitarian aid or to act with caution. According to retired British Col. Richard Kemp, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1 to 1.5. This is astonishing since, according to the United Nations, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare has been 1 to 9. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas seeks to maximize civilian casualties and use them as a propaganda tool.”

The ICC has reminded us how dysfunctional and dangerous Western foreign policy idealism has been, but Israel has borne the brunt for many reasons. The modern progressive West’s animus against nationalism and faith, and what historian J.B. Kelly called the “oil cringe of the West” that gives the Islamic Middle East immense international leverage, are just a few. But if we don’t restore some clear-eye realism to our foreign policy, and treat our allies like friends rather than nuisances, we will face a reckoning we might not be able to pay.