[mdhb]

I don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer. All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again.

The US previously never faced real pressure on this, a new administration would see it as an easy win.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer

The U.S. is not a signatory. (Most of the world's population isn't subject to ICC jurisdiction [1].)

> All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again

Nobody is treating the ICC seriously [2].

To be clear, this sucks. But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/world/middleeast/france-n...

[dragonwriter]

> The U.S. is not a signatory.

Being a signatory is not required for being subject to ICC jurisdiction, though it is one route to being subject to it, and, in any case, not being a signatory is not an immutable condition. So the upthread suggestion that “All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again” is not rebutted by observing that the US is not currently a signatory of the Rome Statute.

> But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

No, the US despite rhetorically appealing to it when other countries are involved, has led, not followed, in rejecting the rules-based order when it comes to its own conduct.

[OgsyedIE]

The "allies" would have mass riots and six-digit death tolls (shortly after an initial 3-6 month period of adjustment) without the supplies of LNG, fertiliser and payment clearing services the U.S. exports. America has the rest of the west by the balls, with maybe the exception of Australia and Japan. Nobody will even give the C-levels responsible for Grok arrest warrants for the many serious crimes their product carries out.

[babypuncher]

I hope to god the next administration actually holds the criminals in the current administration accountable. Gerry Ford set a disgusting precedent when he loudly said that those who hold the office of the President should never be be held accountable for their actions.

[OgsyedIE]

He believed that within the limits of the political culture of America introducing accountability would lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of imprisonments and executions by each party against the other under the cover story of accountability, with the possibility of gradual escalation towards an end state of states mobilising armored brigades against each other to siege cities and cleanse target populations. Like the Congo, or Rhodesia. His memoirs are wacky stuff.

[dnautics]

unlikely. trump didnt held obama accountable for all sorts of crazy things that happened during his administration (bombing libya, drone striking a us citizen minor, using USAID to mount a fake vaccination campaign for DNA surveillance in pakistan e.g.). why would the next administration hold trump accountable?

[ModernMech]

The Biden administration was prosecuting Trump though. They didn’t complete the prosecutions because Trump’s strategy to avoid accountability was to be reelected and then shut down the investigations, and that worked. But the fact he was indicted by Jack Smith who very likely could have convicted him goes to show lack of accountability is not for lack of trying.

[woooooo]

Its very much for lack of trying. They had 4 years, we got no epstein files and they slow walked prosecutions to happen during the election, thinking it would help them. It didn't work, here we are.

[ModernMech]

It’s clear you didn’t follow these cases if your opinion is the SC slow walked them to enhance Democrats’ electoral out look. They secured multiple indictments and were heading to trial, which they were likely to win. Delays were caused by Trump appointed Judge Cannon and Trump appointed SCOTUS justices.

Securing indictments and going to trial is an instance of actually trying. So you really can’t say they didn’t try, because that is factually false. It’s true they could have done more, but they didn’t do nothing as others are saying.

[woooooo]

I'm not a lawyer, and I didn't follow every motion, you're right. Still, in my book, fast walking would have meant moving faster. Venue shop if you have to. Release/declassify documents to make the bad guys look bad. There's lots of "improper" stuff they could have done and are currently getting owned by.

[dnautics]

i would feel better about that if the biden administration also prosecuted obama. they didn't. besides trump I (nor biden) didnt do any new foreign adventures AFAICT. we had a blissful 8 years of waning US imperialism

[qwytw]

It's unclear if most if not all of those things you were actually crimes legally (regardless of how morally and ethically reprehensive they might have been). Regardless there was an established precedent for what Obama was doing. Not so much for the crimes Trump was being accused..

[themaninthedark]

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, a country with which the United States was not at war with.

Please let me know what was the established precedent for allowing extrajudicial assassination of American citizens is.

Edit add:

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

A 16-year-old American boy accused of no crimes was killed in American drone attack

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a14796/abdulrahma...

So please, I would love to see the precedent.

[dnautics]

pretty sure when obama murdered Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (nb: not talking about the more famous Anwar) that was unprecedented. Trump later murdered Abdulrahman's sister, but at that point, it was "precedented" by obama.

[qwytw]

He did prosecute his political opponents like Bolton though for doing exactly what Trump did just on a likely several magnitudes smaller scale...

[orwin]

All this fuckery date from at least bush 2nd. Election mess, with heavy involvement of his brother the governor despite promises to revise, crowds attacking poll workers, war crimes, putting incompetent friends at the head of agencies (remember FEMA response to Katrina? Or the initial response to the subprime crisis?), attacks on science programs and schools, and the use of executive orders to bypass congress. Obama was so tame compared to Bush2.

[29athrowaway]

Europe is not the military power that once was at the beginning of the 20th century... aging populations, economic decline, trade deficits, their former colonies are now independent, they haven't waged war in a while.

[mdhb]

Seems extremely telling that you would phrase things that way.

[29athrowaway]

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a European power could prevail in India, China, Japan, etc.

And in the 21st century? not so much. It is a different world now.

Europe is powerful but the Royal Navy couldn't go today to Hong Kong and seize control of it for example.

And military power influences diplomacy.

[jonathanstrange]

> And military power influences diplomacy.

Negatively. That has always been the problem of the US, it's the reason why they cannot act like the most of the rest of the world. The military has way too much influence on decision making.

[29athrowaway]

Just watch one of the sessions of the UN general assembly. There are many speeches about fixing all kinds of situations. If the best ideas were implemented we would be in a utopia with flying cars, free ponies for everyone and open bar. But we don't live in such world because if one motion somehow makes one of the countries with veto power uncomfortable, they will just veto the resolution and that's the end of it. And countries with veto power are backed by military power. That's the world we live in and it has always been like that.

And things work like this at every level in every organization. For example people in your line of reporting at work can veto any decision you make unless you are protected by law, which is an entity that can shut down your company by force.

[kelipso]

That’s just the reality of it. The GDP of Russia and Canada is about the same but nobody cares about Canada from a geopolitical context because it has an irrelevant military.

[pqtyw]

ICC is a joke though. It can only accomplish anything if the home country of the perpetrator is cooperating. Those allies also have much politically important economic and geopolitical concerns than prosecuting war criminals (unfortunately only small minorities in western countries care about things like that at all)

[vintermann]

No, they wouldn't. Not if they're the Democrats as we know them. They fight tooth and claw against the new normal, until it's the new normal, and then they fight tooth and claw to defend the new normal. There's very little principled opposition to Trump in the corridors of power. There's plenty of opposition, but it's more about which horses have been bet on.