Benjamin Netanyahu Left and Yoav Gallant
Kevin Ovenden UK
The International Criminal Court was to be a major advance for the imposition of a Western-dominated "rules based international order" when it was established in 2002. You had the international economic institutions of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. You had an expanding European Union and Nato.
You had the War on Terror, which was a war of US expansionism and to guarantee its dominance well into the 21st century.
New US-centred alliances in different regions. And an international court and tribunals system to try those who fell outside this western international order. That is why the issuing of the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant is so significant. The ideology of the Rome Statute setting up the ICC was that it would be a neutral body bringing war criminals to book without fear or favour.
Now that for the first time it has moved against a key part of the Western military and security system - Israel - you have all sorts of politicians boiling over in indignation and fury. What is at stake in all this is whether they - the US, Britain and so on - are going to openly accept that their "rules-based order" is dead. And that they have killed it.
We might say, so what? It was always a pious fiction anyway.
But the point is that for three decades it has been a fiction that has dominated international affairs.
If you dispense with it, what do you replace it with - other than a recognition that raw imperial power has been the reality all along and now it will have to be our understanding also, unveiled?
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