Initially, it was created to address human rights violations[...]"
Yet here we are: it's being used to harass judges who address human rights violations.
This sort of fallacy, of widening a category such that the initial meaning is lost, and then advancing an argument on that false category, is something I'm seeing a lot more these days in political topics. But I'm not sure I have a name for the fallacy.
It's like people that argue that the US civil wars was "actually" about states' rights and economic differences rather than slavery. It wasn't a war about the concepts of states rights in general, it was about the right of states to do one thing: legalize slavery. It wasn't about the idea of economic differences in general, it was about one specific economic difference: chattel slavery and whether those slaves get paid and have economic freedom.
American interests. (America, like China and Russia, is not subject to the ICC.)
Not really. The poster you're agreeing with specifically stated that "nothing has fundamentally changed" and that the US has been "using human rights as an excuse". I don't know if you're completely unaware but Trump is definitely not using human rights as an excuse when sanctioning the ICC judges or whoever fits his fancy. In fact, he's not even using international law as an excuse as the term "human rights" actually means something under the UN. That is the change. And it's just as likely he'd do it if it was in his interest but not American interest. That also would be a rather fundamental change.
The original poster is absolutely correct in this. Whether the excuse is human rights or something else, the key point being made is that its intention is to advance a geopolitical cause behind an excuse. It doesn’t matter what the excuse is.
The article specifically states that there are some 15,000 sanctioned individuals, many of which are IS and Al Quaeda members. These actors are often considered non-state terrorists. If you wish to dispute the article's claim that these actors represent the majority of sanctioned individuals feel free to do so, otherwise please explain how much practical pressure sanctioning the rest of the lot-- those compromised mainly from the top brass of authoritarian regimes -- could have effects remotely comparable to sanctioning an entire country composed of millions of people. Those sanctioned individual are also the people least affected by sanctions, since they have direct access to their countrie's financial and natural resources and could care less whether their daughter's visa or mastercard works at that fancy ski resort in the Austrian Alps.
Trump is sanctioning ICC judges because their rulings are complicating his blatant direct personal enchrichment and his family business's real estate dealings for the "Gazan Riveria", which he wants implemented unopposed. It is just silly to say that this amount of in-your-face direct personal enrichment angle having an oversized impact on American foreign policy is just your regular American geopolitical machinations, as you would have to argue that the USA has always been a banana republic no different than any other.
Look up who the US has sanctioned historically, and what the geopolitical objective was. Someone is always being enriched, question is who.
It's even more egregious it used the Magnitsky Act for that...
Nobody cares when usa was sanctioning random Iranians or Russians comitting human rights abuses, but the ICC is relatively popular in europe and the optics of this makes america look like gangsters. Obviously nothing is going to happen in the short term, but i wonder how it will errode american soft power in the long term if they keep this sort of thing up.
I think Trump has successfully destroyed all of that and replaced it with (rhetoric about) threats of hard power.
The Trump administration is the equivalent of a lazy/absent parent. The kids have no respect for them whatsoever, but they're sick with them for time being and aware that belt hurts when it's deployed.
As such, the US's soft power will remain until the EU is willing to compromise on its welfare state to build an actual functioning defense industry and an economy that prioritizes innovation over taxes/regulation.
But I am skeptical the EU/UK will ever reach such a compromise (see: mass riots in France over raising the retirement age, despite it being objectively and clearly necessary; the UK's reluctance to release the triple lock pension despite it impoverishing the country, etc.)
This will require a significant shift of public funding allocation away from welfare, and the public will need to approve it. Will they? I doubt it.
It is understandable that you would have this impression, given that the US leader has total legal immunity, directly controls the judiciary, Congress, tariffs and formerly independent financial agencies, openly threatens journalists and news media companies, appoints untalented lackies and openly enriches himself and his family and associates, openly uses federal legal entities to pursue opponents, deploys the military within the country against its own citizens, and has made federal arrest without warrant a common daily event.
It you live in a country where your government does not exhibit such characteristics, it's easy to mistake the above as an indication of something suspiciously unlike democracy.
From TFA: "In concrete terms, the rule of law is equality for all individuals, globally, before justice."
The rule of law has now become — for those who enjoy American expressions — a type of fan fiction.
Only 33% of the population opposed it the second time (when it was already clear what their Dear Leader is like), so it's very difficult to escape the conclusion that they're gangsters and fine with that. Even here on HN they're blithely saying "might makes right"...
As far as the tankers go, they're not transporting Toys for Tots, they're transporting Oil for Oligarchs, so I'm not sure how much sympathy I'm going to be able to muster on that one, even though the lawlessness leaves a bitter taste.
Two wrongs don't make a right, nor does the second wrongdoer make me more sympathetic to the first.
Frankly, none of the oil wealth in Venezuela has been doing anything to improve the life of the average Venezuelan, and that is a terrible state of affairs. It has only served to drown the corrupt rich in their own champagne. Would Maduro be where he is if he were not a dictator robbing the poor of his own country of the benefit of their own natural resources?
I have great sympathy for the nation of Venezuela and its people, but also for the rule of law -- both internationally, as this was surely an illegal action, but also the rule of law internally in Venezuela for the past long while. The ICC didn't start investigating Venezuela for nothing. The people of Venezuela deserve better.
I have very little sympathy for the oligarchs, Maduro, any number of corrupt related subordinate officials and facilitators that led to the exodus of millions of Venezuelans and the precipitous decline inside Venezuela, in terms of everything from national finances to civil rights to economic opportunity for the average man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_i...
I am not at all sympathetic to anything the Trump administration is doing. I don't believe any of it makes much sense, not even from the perspective of greed or stupidity, but I don't need to go into all of that right now. That has no bearing on my lack of sympathy for the ex-Government of Venezuela.
-------------------
ICC member states should take steps to ensure the sanctioned judges and prosecutors do not suffer as a result of U.S. sanctions. The goal should be to ensure that they feel no repercussions that might bias them one way or the other in future cases and thus maintain impartiality. If this is not done, it could create an apparent feedback loop, if only in the public's imagination. i.e. After some future ICC ruling goes against them (or Israel/Russia), the U.S. may claim that ICC judges and prosecutors are prejudiced against them and are seeking revenge. Protecting ICC personnel now could blunt such claims. Sadly, I fear that the U.S. may have need of defence from ICC rulings relatively soon.
When it really comes down to it, usa is a super power. Might makes right in international politics. The ICC has had quite a lot of successes when it comes to small and even medium sized countries, but at some point pragmatism has to win out. Nobody is going to war with the USA on behalf of the ICC. I highly doubt the ICC is going to push any issue with america unless the evidence against them is extreme. Its simply not powerful enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump's been doing a lot of "inconceivable" things with the US's international relations.
Trump himself makes this difficult.
He has already done things that a reasonable outsider would expect to be mere bluffs. And also TACO'ed backwards, turning things he's done into, effectively, theatrics.
And OFC Wall Street heading down faster than in 1929. Fucking up your main client would yield a disaster so huge to the US economy than no war would save them. If any, they would be fucked, because the EU might even temporally ally with Russia. Then the shit would hit the fan in Alaska.
Your army it's the best in the world? Say hello to a coallition between Europe-China-Russia. No one would dare to throw any single atomic bomb because the outcome would be MAD for everyone.
The US would attempt then to invade Mexico/Canada. But that would yield to its own people siding up with Canada and Mexico against an obvious corrupt US war-machine-corporate state, up to the point to getting former Mexican territory back to Mexico.
Texas and California might have declared indepent countries themselves to avoid any war. The smart move, you know.
I've seen far right regimes in Europe -Spain- siding up with the Communist Cuba because of the common backgrounds over politics.
And the Cuban regime itself under Castro mourning over Franco's death. As crazy as it sounds.
Under an US-invaded European Union Spain would team up with Cuba and Venezuela the first day no matter which party would be ruling, left or even neocon-close right. The Spaniard state's survival would be the top priority. No state, no economy, no Ibex 35. And shit would hit the fan from Latin America too.
Oh, and expect hell with guerrillas spawning here and there from Latin America backed up from Europeans and maybe the Moccromafia and the former Italian Mafia themselves. Spain, France and Italy have contacts over all the Mediterranean and you knows what Mediterranean means. I wouldn't be there if I were an American trying to invade Europe... because once you kick the wasp nest of the Islamic regimes being generously supported from Mafias, you would have both the Jihad and the Narcoguerrillas at home with European army support. Try to stop that. Because something the Southern Europeans know well it's learning to have friends even in Hell "just in case". Spain has the Hispano-spehere, they know how to put a whole political spectra on its side with ease, and the French have the Francophonie. And for sure they have contacts in the Arabic world as I said.
If they don't have a badass archive of ETA contacts with Islamic camps beforehand, and they own the triumph card of Marbella too. You would be nuts trying to invade some sickos there; they know who to call in case of emergencies. The Spanish state already did that against terrorists themselves.
You can. But if Russia is threatening American troops in Europe, irrespective of the local framing, that’s a nuclear proxy war.
The US has the most advanced software and CPU's, the EU has sofisticated and pretty complex industrial hardware not even seen in the US. China, well, it's China, the factory of the world.
The example you gave isn't too surprising if one believes authoritarians attract authoritarians.
pats head That's nice, Billy, it sure is fun to play pretend. Now you run along and play with your marbles.
Which would be put down before it even could start.
With enough power people would rather accept bad in-practice results rather than have to confront the fact that they screwed up. So in practice the people in power don't usually care about hypocrisy. But they would be materially better off if they had actually cared about it. It is a bit like the oligarchs in some traditional communist country. Living the lie got them lifestyles of unbelievable wealth and luxury - but the oligarchs in the capitalist countries got lifestyles of even more unbelievable wealth and luxury, and passed on a much more impressive legacy. Not to say they weren't still hypocritical, but the degree of the disconnect from reality matters.
If you keep your eye on the places where hyper-competent people gather and accumulate power they tend to actually be quite honest. Organised groups of talented people tend to have the easiest time securing a social advantage when honesty and straightfowardness are abundant. The people who would naturally be socially weak are the ones who rely on saying one thing and doing the opposite.
I think its also about the moral ambiguity itself and perhaps even the meaning of life in my opinion.
Because like, I really think that world has its flaws but at the end of the day, this is perhaps still the most rarest moments in the whole universe when we think about it
So I'd much rather do work which benefits other humans that I enjoy (although I sometimes think of it from, I would probably want to do something after retirement, maybe I get retire early or not suppose, but if I can already make the thing I want to do as retirement as job [computer related] and they pay really nicely, why not just do them right now)
It's a shame to me that tech right now feels so inhumane. I don't want really a billion trillion dollars. I just want "enough" and I want to perhaps help people once I get that "enough" not this hyper growth-focused almost will sell you snake-oil kind of tech
Perhaps most people don't have that definition of "enough" or they have materialistic desires or fame desires which one wants to get through money but I don't have many of such desires but I don't really know why people want to be so materialistic.
Like take Elon Musk, richest man in the world, Man, his ego is really fragile. Donald Trump feels like having a really fragile ego to me as well.
I really don't understand what's the point of having all these billions of dollars? Yes nobody is offering me a billion dollars but I'd rather just take "enough" and then give others to some projects I want to help smh
Also logically, it doesn't make sense to lie to me that much. To me trust seems the most valuable resource and the easiest way of generating and securing trust for a long time is being honest. And this helps me grow into a better person (who has his flaws) but still honesty mostly helps I guess idk.
I think we all just want our lives to have meaning in one way or another but it would be so much better if the sources of generation of meaning were human and not inhumane stuff as I was saying
Of course parent's comment is weird anyway. US is a superpower and that's a fact.
It is easy to express opinions about how things should be, but only with power can you make them so. There's of course the fractal complexity of who gets to decide how to spend the power budget of a nation, but that is besides the point. We may decry the human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia, China and the United States, but what good are our cries if we have no power to improve the lives of those affected? Am I saying this to whine about how powerless are we? No, I believe this should be the motivation, the call for greater economic development so that we can attain the power we feel like we need to make a positive change in the world. If not, we will be subjects of those who wield more power - and this isn't even advice exclusively for Europeans. You either build power in groups that are inclusive, or you steal power and form exclusive groups. The quality of life that most of the free world has been enjoying stemmed from the former, and it is the latter groups that will put us back into the dark ages.
Is this cynical? If so, I can confidently say I am a cynic.
The expression should not be understood to mean that might makes things morally just. In the weak form it means the strong can do what they want because what are the weak going to do about it? The stronger form of the expression is the idea that strong players set up the rules (legal code, etc) and as such they rig the rules in their favour.
Beautifully explained.
And I want to ask is there anything we can do bottom line about it?
I think like stricter rules against corruption should be in check, but that requires the govt. to do something and I feel like govt.'s themselves are being corrupt
It's this cyclical loop and I don't know if there is rather anything that we can do to break out of it.
We have the rights to vote, but those end up being squandered in most/all countries with corrupt politicians, those right to vote aren't really used mostly to bring real change, maybe a different name perhaps
At the end of the deal, its more so an faith in overall humanity that we can figure out what's right for all of us but we just fight over petty differences sometimes.
Do you guys have faith in overall humanity in aggregate? At times I feel like some instances restore my faith whereas others reduce it so its all just feelings for me perhaps.
Regarding your comment, its very interesting, where have you shifted now if I may ask or more details about it?
I am not really American but I still hear that its startup culture is well although with all of the other downsides we have mentioned, it does become moot.
A lot of people feel like the system is unfair but they want to be on the other side of unfairness rather than making the system fair from what I've observed. And this observation kind of fits globally sometimes imo
If you want to be in startup culture SV is still the place to be. I didn’t like it because of all the trend following, if you want to succeed there it’s best to jump on a trend. I’m more of an applied researcher and had my own ideas I wanted to explore.
As inequality continues to get worse those who initially benefited from it will generally find themselves on the other side of the transition and losing out.
AI is going to increase inequality far more than economic policy, I’m 5x more productive with AI and am able to compete with much larger orgs. What happens when they lose their job, what happens when someone does the same to me. The Pareto distribution of productivity is about to get a hell of a lot steeper.
So I guess India's the best option considering all factors I guess.
but one of the problems especially in India is the saturation of the market for software engineers and the competition to get into college is so cut throat that I can't even start to tell smh
I think perhaps remote jobs from india might make more sense but I clearly am not the only one with this idea so might be hard to differentiate I suppose
> AI is going to increase inequality far more than economic policy, I’m 5x more productive with AI and am able to compete with much larger orgs. What happens when they lose their job, what happens when someone does the same to me. The Pareto distribution of productivity is about to get a hell of a lot steeper.
That's great but I think I have nuanced discussion on AI, I think that we are gonna have much bigger financial issues all around the world because of the AI bubble itself
The USA's might is highly dependent on the world order it fostered after WW2, and especially after the Cold War.
Erode that, and the USA as we've known the past 70 years starts to crumble. If in a couple decades the rest of the world works to decouple from the dollar as the main reserve currency; decouple from the dependency to sell to the USA; and decouple the dependency on American tech you still have a rich country but definitely not the superpower with the might as it exists today.
It's not possible for the USA to be funded with the astronomical deficits it runs to keep its war machine, it's not possible for the US, culturally and politically, to majorly increase taxes to cover this deficit. Slowly there would be cuts to its defence spending, diminishing its might.
Not sure why Americans decided this was a good path, didn't expect to see the era of Pax Americana to be so abruptly shaken during my lifetime but here we are.
I was discussing this with my cousin today and about how here in my country, we have multi party system. Sure, there is still two major parties but there are definitely small parties as well and we were discussing that even India should move towards more decentralization akin to switzerland.
I really hope we have a more decentralized option and where people from all around the world feel that their vote, in fact, does matter.
What interests me about this comment is the statistic that 50% of US consumer spending comes from people in the top 10% of earnings (first google link, probably not the best source: https://www.warc.com/content/feed/top-10-of-wealthy-american...)
So while the US might look like a really juicy market, I start to wonder how much juice is in the lemon?
Why the dependency to sell to the US if 90% of the US population doesn't have the free cash to buy things?
Yes, I know I'm stupid, and look at all the cheap stuff americans buy; I've seen the miles of warehouses from companies like 5 Below. My concern is how long this lasts?
Most of the US's power is from being a land of opportunity and of high ideals, with military power being secondary backup. As the US lessens opportunity and openly betrays its ideals, that power disappears. The Greenland and Canada threats alone probably require $500B-$1T/year in additional military spending to try to gain through force wha was previously given freely to the US. Add in the huge cost to the US from the tariff idiocy and cutting things like USAID and we could never spend enough militarily to make up for it.
Look at Putin's weakness in Ukraine. He tried to take by force what was not his, and ended up costing himself far more in lost trust than he could ever have gained with the war, and he has gained so little in the war. Putin had a better chance by continuing to try to divide Ukrainian society internally and have the majority of society side with Russia. Much like what is happening in the US right now.... but attack with bombs and the charade disappears. The US is going to discover the same loss of power through its attempts and threat of force.
The consequence is that Europe will slowly move its financial and IT systems away from US solutions. It's a very, very slow process because it was believed for almost a century that US wouldn't actually bully Europe. But for example, there will be more pressure to roll out Wero and have the systems completely European. Before Trump, there was decent chance the whole thing would be just Visa/MasterCard with extra steps. Now it's clear that EU needs its own independent payment system.
But the whole point of Nuremberg was to prevent this, the whole idea of international law was meant to prevent this. The judges of Nuremberg warned us about this outcome.
In a world where human rights are not respected, why would we think that the Jewish people are anything but disadvantaged? Have we forgotten the important parts of history, in our urgency to prevent it repeating?
If might makes right, you've already accepted that the world belongs to China.
Lots of people realize the importance of this, but if the country who plays world police doesn't want to collaborate on making it reality and they literally still perform violent actions against other sovereign states without repercussions, what is the purpose?
While it will not control the murderer, it can and will influence it (violence going 10% down is better than 0%)
This is also what protection payments look like on paper; surely we can reduce violence much more.
I say: let every country have nukes, or let no country have them. This halfway bullshit is worse than either.
Idealists create worse outcomes than realists and pragmatists.
Violence going down 10% can be worse than it going down 0%, if the difference comes from reducing counter-violence done by the oppressed - and reducing based on the agenda and whims of the big time abusers responsible for a big chunk of the other 90%.
To be nitpicky here, the goal of the ICC isn't to prevent aggressive acts or war in general. They are only punishing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide - which is a small subset of potential violent acts a state may commit. The ICC does not have juridsiction over crimes of aggression.
[Yes technically there is an optional thing that countries can sign to give the ICC juridsiction over crimes of aggression, but so few countries have signed it that it may as well not exist]
The ICC could never be anything but what it is -- powerless against those with bigger guns. This is the fundamental nature of law and power. Barring the subjugation of all states to a supranational sovereign capable of universal enforcement, there is, ultimately, no such thing as international law.
Queue’s/line’s in shop are not formally enforced by some authority to my knowledge, but most participants adhere to such order. (I would call it tradition)
That seems a little silly on the face of it when you realize most people complicit during the war in what we would now call war crimes weren't even charged to begin with. Many on the losing side found lucrative jobs with the side that won, and the side that won wasn't even considered for charges.
> In a world where human rights are not respected, why would we think that the Jewish people are anything but disadvantaged?
That also seems a little farcical any way you twist it
> If might makes right, you've already accepted that the world belongs to China.
Actually, I think we're moving towards a world that is more earnestly determined by market forces. Or, these were always the same concepts; we just can't force the world to take our "deals" anymore.
So what, you should just keep your head in the sand instead? Not that I accept that claim anyways (quitter talk).
The whole point of Nuremberg was to put on a show against the defeated, and establish the "good guys" who now run international order.
Acts like Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the rest of allied abuses weren't on trial there or elsewhere.
Better, imagine the ICC ordered the arrest in 1943 of Franklin D. Roosevelt over ... let's say ... the forced relocation of Unangax̂ (Aleut) villagers in the Alaska Aleutian Islands.
The result wouldn't have been better for the ICC than the Gaza warrants.
I don't think you appreciate the way justice becomes irrelevant in fascist and tyrannical countries.
The 'show' of fair justice, dispensed with care and deliberation, is something you seem to take for granted.
In most countries you get put up against a wall, and shot, for saying the wrong things about the right people.
I find your argument uniquely cowardly: Power without justice is a recipe for tyranny. And the position that tyranny should be the norm is something an evil or cowardly person espouses.
Yes, there is plenty of atrocity. Pretending the allied behavior is as atrocious as Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or Hitler, is pretentious relativism.
In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem
That's not how history works.
There's no end of historical accounts, transcripts of the proceedings, etc to learn about it. Neither being there, nor taped proceedings are needed.
And neither being in the court or watching taped proceedings will give you what that show meant in the larger historical context, and in the context of the geopolitics of the time. The books, actual knowledge of the before and after, and more, might.
>I find your argument uniquely cowardly: Power without justice is a recipe for tyranny.
That's exactly what the goverments who run those trials had for themselves, before, during, and after.
>Yes, there is plenty of atrocity. Pretending the allied behavior is as atrocious as Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or Hitler, is pretentious relativism.
Only because it was mostly done to brown people in Africa, or to Asia, or Latin America, so you don't care.
You know why the League of Nations didn't work (supposedly)? Because the US wasn't involved. So with the United Nations, the US is involved. What do you think happens when the US decides to not abide by the United Nations' decisions? Nothing.
The US has vetoed UN resolutions 89 times, and ignored resolutions dozens of times. It voted against Palestinian rights, and its Iraq war and ongoing foreign drone strikes go against the UN charter. Basically, whatever the US wants, goes. If they don't want you to have rights, you won't have them. If they want you to control some piece of land and anyone who lives on it, it's yours. If they don't like your government, they'll take it away and install their own, or call it terrorist and sanction it.
The whole thing is a sham and everybody knows it. There is no justice, there's just the powerful and the powerless.
So have China and Russia. The rules-based international order has been explicitly rejected by the world’s great powers.
> whole thing is a sham and everybody knows it
There was a legitimate attempt. It had flaws. But so does any system of justice. It was ultimately done in by a combination of Russian and Chinese revanchism, American neoconservatism and global nihilism.
You may be mixing up the ICJ, which “settles legal disputes submitted to it by states” and is 80 years old [1] and the ICC, which was created in 2002 [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice
The ICC applies international criminal law, just like nuremburg trials did (a notable difference though is the ICCs lack of juridsiction over crimes of aggression which was a core part of the Nuremburg trials). The ICJ is not a criminal court and does not apply international criminal law. It cannot find individuals guilty. A rough analogy would be that the ICJ is more similar to a civil court.
And yes, I do understand how utterly bonkers it is to suggest something this big changing over just 3 years.
The War in Ukraine is dampening trade with Russia. The EU is struggling in their trade relations with the PRC even more than with America right now, and fears them more than they fear us. A trade deal (“Mercosur”) with South America is in the process of potentially blowing up, and if it’s not passed in its current state, Brazil is looking to walk for the remainder of their President’s term in office.
So the EU’s options are limited.
The problem I see is the risks are not under the EU's control. We may face becoming much more insular regardless of what any of us ourselves actually want.
Trump is behaving in a manner not consistent with EU nations retaining indepdendence and sovreignty. And also betting the future of USA on economic development plans (and military plans) that do not seem realistic.
That’s also not a viable option for the EU, or more specifically: the constituent nations of the EU. They’re as dependent on trade as we are, maybe even more so, and so we are stuck in this relationship where we constantly piss each other off in various ways, and believe me when I say it goes both ways.
Part of the issue if that as you move up the value chain your list of potential trading partners shrinks, as lower-income partners aren't viable.
Look at GDP per capita (I picked nominal, for export consumption purposes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Europe's options for high-value exports at scale are... who?
Although I would add that what makes good export partners is not GDP directly, but changes in GDP and that mostly comes from changes in the debt levels of these countries. So, ironically the Russian threat, and the EU debt increase in response to it, can probably be expected to raise the GDP of EU countries by 2-3% or so. So EU-US trade should actually increase, tariffs or no tariffs. Besides, tariffs are a tax on the poor, and it's not the poor importing stuff (just ask the poor in the EU how it's been going). US basic needs manufacturers, like farms, are the ones that are going to lose big, and keep losing big, due to tariffs. Oh, and the poor, of course. I'm sure Trump will make some of his typical eloquent remarks about the poor needing to lose weight and spend less on children.
By contrast, the US will need to do it's very best to not reduce public debt or really increase interest rates they're paying in the next year and a half. Not because of Trump's intentions but because of how he scheduled the massive debt increase last time he was in office. The way he was probably actually fucked by Biden, you know what he was screaming about for years, is that he put a $10 trillion dollar refinancing requirement for the US in for 2025-2026-2027 that he expected to fuck up his successor. Then Biden "stole" most of the good part of Trumps debt increase: the decrease in debt repayments for the US government 2016-2020 ... and delivered the refinancing disaster right back ... to Trump.
That was Trump's financial plan: massive debt increase in 2017, scheduled to come due (require refinancing) ... 8 years later. "Apres-nous le deluge" I believe this principle is called. So Trump's plan was 2017-2021: lots of debt repayment paid by massively increasing US debt, including refinancing debt due in 2021-2025. then 2021-2025, spend the extra income, knowing the bill isn't due until 2025-2029. Then, Biden got to spend the 2021-2025 money ... and send the bill to Trump. Like is often said when it comes to Trump's supposed brilliance: "ooops...".
Probably Trump expected to be out of the office at the start of 2025 and just leave his successor with a massive and difficult refinancing ... and Biden and democrats dropped that hot iron right back into Trump's lap.
So Trump introduced a massive new tax, which of course won't cover the sums he needs. He will raise taxes further.
each other. Intracontinental trade has always been a large part of Europe's wealth.
Merz is actually doing a masterclass in beggar thy neighbors policies right now by breaking the debt brake mostly to pay for subsidies in Germany rather than investments. It's pretty surreal to see them somehow stuck to sell side policies when they have no one to actually sell to and refuse the mean to create an actual market in Europe.
You don't really need rivals outside when your core members act this way.
Trump policies look extreme because tariffs are often seen as crude and outdated but it's very much a continuation of economic hostility rather than a novelty.
I think your main point is valid, but it would be more compelling if you'd taken a few seconds to read it before submitting, to catch this double-negative.
Add in other nato countries and we’re cooked.
Military might has plenty to do with bluffing. That's what politics is all about.
But when the music stops and the ball drops, US and EU aren't going to war with each other any time soon. So measuring military might doesn't really matter.
If Putin decides Poland is propping up Ukraine he might expand the war into Poland because right now it isn’t clear that the US would honor their NATO commitments.
If EU countries commit to a conflict, Russia has no chance. It makes nuclear escalation a real risk though.
Or it could just end with mutual total nuclear annihilation of course.
Edit: now if they were to attack the eu over a decades long interference campaign with its member state democracies, funding anti eu parties, stoking separatist sentiments, and covertly subverting the fundamental pillars of its liberal democracies, on the other hand…
Poland alone has a population comparable to Ukraine, and a significantly larger economy.
China can already detect and track stealth aircraft using a combination of ground based passive radar and StarLink signal, as well as satellite reconnaissance. Europe could have this capability whenever they're ready to spend and, in the case of a satellite, lift to orbit. Use hypersonic vehicles for anti air defense and carrier busting [9].
[1] https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/12/24/u-s-hunts-sanctioned-t...
[2] https://www.stripes.com/branches/coast_guard/2024-03-06/coas...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130106
[4] https://www.gao.gov/military-readiness
[5] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...
[6] https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/
[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/06/6-facts-a...
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355005
[9] https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/12/18/eu-flag...
If anything, the US society is more divided today.
Americans culturally have seen ourselves as the "Good Guys" for the last century or so, and Good Guys imply Bad Guys. If there aren't any credible Bad Guys external to the US, Americans start thinking the Bad Guys are the rich, or the coastal elites, or flyover country, or liberals, or whatever. That's just 'cause there's no one else to be against, though; it'll pass.
Didn't Trump have the army attack democratic cities earlier this year?
The US military cannot be used to perform domestic policing functions (Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ), except in times of insurrection or when state unable or unwilling to suppress violence that threatens citizens' constitutional rights (Enforcement Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_Acts ).
Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.
The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.
It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).
There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.
Given that background, what actually happened...
- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor
- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors
- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground
- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)
- After state governments sued, the courts generally agreed the deployment was unlawful ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-rejects-trump... )
The US could have continued to tread water for another 5 years, or another 10 years, or another 15 years, and would have lost even more men and spent even more money, and it would still have faced the same problem: there was no way to win the war. Every day that the war continued just meant more deaths and more money wasted.
What the US needs is to invest right now in fusion technology and learn the damn Math right. Hint: hypercubes and physics.
They have it easy:
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-fourth-dimension-scientists-gl...
https://wt3000.substack.com/p/scientists-just-built-a-fourth...
They don't need a war to feed the industry, they need the balls to evolve themselves as the Chinese did. First from pure Maoism to Deng Xiaoping, and next from coal to clean energy. It's a decades bound plan, but if Beijing becames clean it would be one of the greatest things for China (and the world) ever.
This would mean acknowledging that some sectors are best stated supported, such as healthcare; while others are best company supported/evolved, such as telecos and R+D, but with proper regulations, so net neutrality stays as is and patents get open over few decades so everyone can play the game.
And, no, you don't need to put social credit, social surveillance or any other bullshit such as Chat Control.
Programmers with concepts such as the Hamming distance and nodes in a network are pretty much ready to understand the further reasons of my comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube_internetwork_topolog...
Hint: rotating/translating objects will be cheaper than moving over time.
But also Europe (besides Ukraine) doesn't have much to gain from fighting Russia. They're happy to assist in air raids in North Africa / Middle East for energy reasons (see Libya) but it's fighting for practical purposes.
The table can also be turned against the US. Despite the endless complaints about Mexico sending drugs & drug dealers into the US it's not like we are doing effective (or drastic).
Much more likely they invade another non-EU, non-NATO country like Moldova.
You’re vastly underestimating how resource rich America, North America and the Western Hemisphere are.
…to where we need to mine or drill Europe?
What is your source for any of this?
If the EU ally’s with Australia, pics up an enemy of an enemy - China, they can withstand a US embargo.
About our increasing consumption, you can read the report here (https://www.unep.org/resources/Global-Resource-Outlook-2024).
We can’t extract our way out of this. We’ll have nothing left. We need space minerals and more rocks that aren’t home. We’re fighting over less and less sand in the sandbox.
We were never debating if Europe could survive an American embargo.
You said “most money won't buy you much resources in a decade.” This was about America surviving a European freeze-out. The simple truth is, there are more resources in America and within its military’s undisputed reach than there are in Europe.
Your UNEP report doesn’t show why America alone couldn’t extract its way out of an embargo. (While it puts its military to use.)
Oh. Sure. Fair. But not relevant in our lifetimes, at least not from the position of the United States. If push came to shove, we'd take those last bits of sand. That's one of the problems with might makes right: it lets those in power put off hard choices.
The EU is a vassal state through and through, they just haven't accepted this yet.
What on earth are you talking about???
We have accepted that for a long time, and there are no plans to change it.
Why do you think there is zero movement to disentangle from any important US dependencies? Such as software. There is nothing whatsoever happening to be any less dependent on the US, part from defense, and that only after repeated urging and finally some real force-pressure to get the EU moving (even after Trump's first term little to nothing actually happened).
European countries are perfectly fine with where they are, if any less dependency on the US is to happen, it will only be after huge pressure from the US.
That is deliberate, they just don't see value in e.g. trying to recreate the Microsoft and other software ecosystems. After all, it already exists, so why compete at that point? It does not make economic sense. Also, it is not Europe's strength: Every country would, in practice, (have to) develop their own version, while in the US a company can easily scale across the entire nation. For Software, it makes no (economic) sense for Europe to compete in an area where this kind of scale is important.
And that strength argument, only some minor politicians, and some journalists, keep bringing up headlines such as "Can Germany save Europe?", or celebrating "Germany back on the world stage" when there is some minor meeting hosted by Germany (seen recently). The vast majority of people could not care less about being "number one" and "leading (anything, politically)".
Not trying to reinvent the wheel, or many wheels actually, out of some "pride" moment seems pretty foolish to me. If the US is good producing this or that, we get it from there, so what? Everybody, including the US, made even more far-reaching similar decisions with industry moved to China. Compared to that, European reliance on the US is not much, and pretty much unavoidable, unless one gives up lots of wealth.
France has nukes, so those aren't a plausible threat. Any kind of land invasion is doomed to fail - the US didn't even manage to beat a bunch of goat herders in one of the poorest countries of the world. A naval blockade is the most likely to succeed - except for the whole "land bridge to Asia/Africa" part. And if the blockade does succeed and the continent starts to starve, there's the whole "France has nukes" part again...
Besides, do you really think China/India won't get involved? And do you really think the US public is going to accept their friends and family dying because some power-hungry politician got the braindead idea to send them against Europe? The reception will be worse than Vietnam!
Or worse they may need that French aircraft carrier if war breaks out with China.
Just because you try to do something doesn't mean you succeed. The way the world ought to be is not the same as the way the world is.
> Wasn’t the whole justification for the west supporting Ukraine that might shouldn’t make right?
Which involved buying them weapons in order to make them mighty.
And lets be real, there are plenty of other conflicts in the world that nobody gives a shit about (just look at africa). The real reason Ukraine is getting support is that its geographically right next to europe and having them not be controlled by Russia is strategically valuable to western interests. Having Russia wear itself out in Ukraine is also strategically valuable.
It was a superpower, until Trump got back in office. He's been taking an axe to US soft power, and our institutions in general. We're on the edge of losing Global reserve currency status. That's what's driving the re-monetization of Silver and Gold.
I disagree. Tomorrow France can tell Visa/MC/Banks they must service ICC judges or lose the ability to bank in their country and suddenly said providers will be concerned about the predicament they are in.
The EU better pull its head out of its ass about following everything the US does at this point. It's obvious over here in the states things have gone off the rails, and they'll go down with us if they want to remain so tightly coupled.
Absolutely. You get the Visa executives lobbying the American government to stop this madness and it will stop.
This is a tractable problem, except for the lack of political willpower to create a solution.
Every country that works at an international level assumes said risks.
I for one am tired of internal national companies playing pick and choose on the best options and ignoring everything else. If the world wants to go multipolar again it's time for corporations to get kicked in the sack.
> The military is irrelevant as long as usd is the reserve currency most countries use.
The USD is rapidly losing this status, though. The current president's policies has turned the US into an extremely unreliable trade partner, so more and more trades are being done in EUR.
At this point, they should do so. With America weakened and behaving erratically, this is a good time for Europe to assert itself and put America in our place.
You are quite wrong, of course, as any reasonably informed observer will know. Whether you're just ignorant or ill-intentioned: It's so easy to fire off these poisonous comments whose effect is to undermine and deligitimize the norms and institutions that keep things reasonably okay, as imperfect as they are. I hope you will never have to yourself experience the difference that you so easily dismiss.
Would your logic apply to all the people of Gaza, would them resisting qualify as "undermine and deligitimize the norms and institutions that keep things reasonably okay"
Is genocide reasonably ok?
Of course not, and nothing I wrote leads to that conclusion.
Rejecting the notion that "everywhere at every level not only international politics... democracy and human rights are a joke" does not mean that things are non-horrible everywhere, at every level.
Having a way for the public to regularly and non-violently change leadership and lawmakers, having checks and balances between the holders of power, and certain norms we strive towards is the only thing that gives us a chance at preventing authoritarian, absolutist and arbitrary rule - within the constraints where these things have effect.
That they do not work everywhere and do not work perfectly is a sign that we continue to need them. Concluding the opposite, that they're entirely useless, is not only dangerously foolish and fatalistic, but also logically fallacious.
It's an argument often used by those who wish to undermine these norms and institutions. I don't automatically think that this is you, but it might be interesting to examine your line of reasoning and what makes you read things in my previous response that are not there.
In any case, I don't think either is true, formally or for practical purposes. It also does not follow that accepting "might is right" on the international level makes a farce of the ideas of democracy or human rights, whether one regards it as a desirable state of international affairs or as an undesirable fait accomplit, as we both seem to agree. I will not bore us with logical formalities and stay on the practical side of things:
Because, if you allow any group of actors, or the predominant state of things in any place, on any level, to spoil the whole concept simply by them not adhering to it, then indeed you have needlessly given up everything without even trying. Nothing better can exist when you let bad actors doing bad things define the floor and the ceiling of what can be.
Islands of decency exist. They are flawed, and yet they are the best and only real thing we have in this regard. They are under threat, as you say. Undercutting them by pretending that they have no worth or indeed value at all only plays into the hands of their enemies.
You will also find that force and violence has been done in the name of every good idea that ever came about. If you let good ideas get "ruined" whenever someone uses them as a shield for bad ends, you will have none left. Nothing at all. Just because you gave the bad more power than the good. That is not practical at all, to say it mildly.
For now. Once upon a time Russia was one too. These things are not set in stone and the way the United States is behaving it is not entirely out of the realm of the possible that they will stop being one.
And that's assuming they will survive as a nation.
From what I've read from the ICC:
1. Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute.
2. The ICC recognizes the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be Palestinian territories
3. The ICC Article 12(2)(a): “The Court may exercise its jurisdiction if the crime in question is committed on the territory of a State Party to this Statute.”
4. Therefore, ICC argues it does have jurisdiction
So, according to the ICC, you don't need to be apart of the Rome Statute for the ICC to have jurisdiction
at least thats the argument for ICC's jurisdiction over Israeli nationals. IDK if the ICC ever tried that with the USA
Article 70:
“It shall be a crime for any person to commit any of the following acts:
(a) giving false testimony;
(b) presenting false or forged evidence;
(c) corruptly influencing a witness, expert, or court official;
(d) interfering with or intimidating a witness, expert, or court official;
(e) committing any other act which perverts the course of justice in relation to proceedings before the Court.”
Article 70's jurisdiction is not tied to member states. It applies to anyone, anywhere that may affect the court's functioning.
edit: maybe you're saying the ICC cannot have jurisdiction over people/nations that never agreed to be apart of their jurisdiction, regardless of what the Rome Statue says?
In the US, this has all the legal power of Joe Sixpack declaring legal power, or a Russian court. If the ICC tried, the US would tell them to pound sand (or more likely, increase sanctions).
Since the US is not a signatory, as far as they are concerned, the ICC is just a random organization claiming to hold powers it doesn't have.
Generally speaking courts usually claim juridsiction over actions that take affect in their territory even if comitted outside of it (e.g. someone running a scam call center specificly targeting americans would likely get in trouble with us courts even if they never step foot there. Someone hiring an assain to kill an american will still get charged even if they never step foot in america). The ICC is not unique in this regard. The limiting factors here are politics and power not traditional views of how juridsiction works.
There is a difference between juridsiction and actual ability to execute judgements/orders.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
I meant if someone who is abroad (and never sets foot in usa) pays an assain to go to usa to murder someone on us soil.
1. Palestine is a state, whose territorial extent includes the gaza strip (the most controversial proposition)
2. Under international law, a soveriegn state has the right to prosecute any crime that takes place on their territory. In many ways this is kind of the definition of soveriegnty - the ability to control and make decisions in your territory (in the caee of war, subject to the restrictions imposed by the geneva convention)
3. Soverign states can delegate this power to anyone they chose
4. Palestine delegated this power to the ICC, subject to the provisions of the Rome statue.
> So, according to the ICC, you don't need to be apart of the Rome Statute for the ICC to have jurisdiction
The idea that courts have juridsiction over foreign nationals who commit crimes in their territory is very standard and is generally true for all courts.
E.g. if you are a tourist visiting another country and murder someone, you still get arrested by local authorities. There is no get out of jail free card because you are a foreigner. What is relavent is where the crime took place not who comitted it.
In the case of the ICC, the ICC is acting on behalf of Palestine. So its juridsiction would be the same as whatever Palestine's would be minus any additional restrictions imposed by the rome statue.
That said, it should be noted that the Hamas members publicly charged are all dead now and you can't arrest a dead person (the icc can also make warrants in secret so its possible there are secret warrants). But even if they weren't, it is clear they don't have the ability to enforce justice (or anything else) in Gaza, nor did they have that ability in the past.
This would be lovely. It’s not going to happen, and it would be stupid for Europe to pursue alone.
The ICC was born out of the optimism of the 1990s. When China was accepted into the WTO because trade was equated with democracy. When the world powers at least pretended to heed an international rules-based order.
That order is dead. The EU is—nobly—trying to resurrect it. But the great powers, together with most regional powers, have explicitly rejected it in favor of spheres-of-influence realpolitik.
Upholding the Rome Statute would mean picking simultaneous fights with America and Russia, and probably Israel, Iran, India and China, too. It’s simply not a tenable situation in a world where the rules are being re-written in multiple theatres.
Nothing sad about a well-deserved reckoning.
They'll come? and the fact that's a question shows American Justice has been absent for quite some time.
> Both men are indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in the destruction of the Gaza Strip.
Role in destruction isn't a war crime they are being indicted for and as such irrelevant in this context.
The statement is simply referring to that. Not everything has to be maximally technical.
This is why so many non-Western states call "rules-based order" a branding exercise: the same legal tool that hits warlords and cartel bosses is repurposed, with no structural checks, against judges whose decisions you dislike. And once you normalize that, you've handed every other great power a precedent: "our courts, our sanctions list, our enemies." The short-term message is "don't touch our friends"; the long-term message is "international law is just foreign policy with better stationery."
The ICC was warned before picking on Israel, but it did not listen. Now they’re paying the consequences.
While the events on Oct 7th were horrific and undoubtedly deserved eliminating Hamas, Israel has collectively punished the civilian population of Gaza in the extreme (as they have been doing for years)
On the other hand, the US didn’t try to prevent Slobodan Milošević from being tried at The Hague for war crimes and genocide, as Serbia wasn’t a vassal state or proxy.
What the US has argued historically is that American people and institutions are not subject to it because the US has a functioning civilian and military justice system, and so prosecution for such crimes can be handled within it, even by foreign nations and NGOs.
Obviously that’s a load of bullshit, especially (but not only) these days, but “sovereignty for me but not for thee” has long been the rule and with its weakening international position the US may come to find that to be less achievable in the future.
Compared to how much of a mess most of the world's powers are on matters on sovereignty, the US is actually one of the more conservative ones here (e.g., see OFCOM in the UK).
Let me restate: The US position is that the US justice system “works” and thus *US persons and institutions* must be pursued *within the US system* even by foreign entities.
In other words, the US position is not that if (say) North Korea commits a crime against humanity they must be pursued in US courts; the US is fine with the ICC in that case. The US position is that if the US commits a crime against humanity that must be pursued in US courts, not the ICC.
It’s an obvious (and bullshit) double standard, but it’s also not a denial of the legitimacy of universal jurisdiction. It’s just the US, as usual, trying to have its cake and eat it too.
That this standard is complicated, and different from those that argue that international law should be the supreme law, doesn't make it a double standard. It's also not what is meant by universal jurisdiction, as it does not depend on overriding sovereignty.
Edit: Seeing your other comment, it's also worth noting this was a large reason why the US didn't sign the Rome statute, since as you note, the US isn't inherently opposed to the idea of international courts, only the supremacy of their jurisdiction.
Anybody can look into any country’s actions unless that country has authority over them and forbids it.
4 State immunity evolved in close connection to the development of the concept of sovereignty
and the territorial State. It can be traced back to the principle of par in parem non habet
imperium which was mentioned as early as 1354 by Bartolus de Saxoferrato in his Tractatus de
regimine civitatis. It stipulates that a sovereign should not have jurisdiction over another
sovereign.
[...]
22 State immunity entails that a State itself or its property is not subjected to the
proceedings of the court of another State. It does foreclose any proceedings or judgment on the
merits, but does not hinder the service of process and a court decision about the admissibility.
Likewise, it protects the property of a State against any measure taken in relation to the
proceedings.
Many others have already pointed out the fact here - that Palestine is under ICC jurisdiction.
Instead what I want to focus on is WHY YOU DID NOT KNOW THIS, despite the fact that the ICC literally ruled on this matter quite a while ago, specifically. The court itself approached this question, evaluated the evidence, and made a ruling. You missed all that?
So is any atrocity allowable if you have enough civilian human shields?
The birth of Hamas was quite literally supported by Israel because they wanted to undermine the unity of the Palestinians
But really, it's not dubious at all: It's utterly absurd.
ICC claims that since PA claims to represent 'Palestine', and UNGA Resolution 67/19 "Reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967", and that since they consider Gaza "Palestinian territory occupied since 1967" (despite the fact that Gaza has certainly not been occupied by Israel for decades and a completely separate entity exercises sovereignty there), therefore 'Palestine' is a State Party properly represented by the PA and covered by its accession to the Rome Statute, and thus the ICC totally have jurisdiction over Gaza.[0]
Bonkers.
Anyway Israel never acceded to the Rome Statute and the doctrine of state immunity applies. Even if PA were sovereign in Gaza and had properly delegated that sovereignty to the ICC, ICC's claim that Article 12(2)(a) grants them jurisdiction over Israel and Israeli leaders for their actions in Gaza is still a brazen claim to jurisdiction not well supported by customary international law.
[0]: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/itemsDocuments/p...
The ICC's jurisdictional claim is here is rather based on the idea that PA is the de facto government of Gaza, even though they never controlled it.
[1] https://www.state.gov/releases/2025/08/imposing-further-sanc...
I don’t think the ICC was plotting to undermine US or Israel sovereignty. The dispute is about jurisdiction. The ICC has a pretty expansive theory that says it can go after nationals of non-member states if the alleged conduct happened on the territory of a member state. That theory has been around for years and mostly lived in briefs and conferences. What changed in 2025 is that the ICC started acting on it and advancing real cases that implicated non-members. At that point it stopped being academic and started looking like a real-world precedent with consequences for allies and potentially US personnel. That’s the slippery slope. The administration had already tried protests and non-recognition and concluded it was not changing behavior. The August sanctions were framed as a last-resort escalation to draw a hard line against what they saw as ongoing overreach, not as a response to some new hostile intent.
A lot of the US' bad things post WW2 were seen favorably by the governments that were already US-friendly, and who either way saw the US as a critical ally.
That has drastically changed in general. The situation is not remotely comparable.
Europe in particular is more confident, isn't bordered by a power that Europe believes it can't handle alone if it has to (a threat, yes, but not an existential one like the USSR). There isn't remotely the same sense of needing the US at all costs.
The ICC decisions simply wouldn't have been allowed to happen in a way that caused a rift with the US shortly after WW2. It'd have been inconceivable. That the ICC decisions have not just been allowed to happen but haven't caused uproar from most European governments is itself evidence of how much weaker the US position is seen by European eyes in particular.
But in terms of finance in particular, it's also just not the case that there is no one able to take its place.
Of the top 20 largest banks in the world by assets, only 5 are American, the top 4 largest are Chinese, and China has 7 total, UK 2, France 2, Japan 3, Spain 1.
Extend that list to the top 50, and it only adds one more US bank.
Those "handful of countries" who do not recognize the ICC have more than 2/3rd of the world population btw.
Was Brazil's justice trying to impose its legal authority outside of its jurisdictions? Nope. Was it hurting humans rights? Nope.
It's simply to bully, and meddle with entities that go against the interests of the current administration.
I don't buy your justification why this case is not the same, at all.
Note that eg if you're from (picking two random countries) Nepal and commit a crime in Italy, then Italy still has jurisdiction. Italian police can arrest you. [1]
Also, there's certain crimes that any country is allowed to arrest you for, for instance piracy on the high seas.
[1] Also explicitly taken into account in the Rome statue 12(2)(a) https://legal.un.org/icc/statute/99_corr/cstatute.htm
On a nation level the power of a court to prosecute individuals is supported by a policing force that is capable of resorting to violence on a local level that is acceptable for the greater peace.
On an international level, enforcing justice would ultimately require going to war, with mass casualties and likely numerous incidents of potential breaches of the law itself.
In the example of Israel vs Hamas, the ICC warrant included the leaders of Hamas - but the ICC had zero chance of actually arresting them, they were killed by Israel though. So half of the defendants carried out the justice sought by the ICC on the other half.
Neither of those are certain and even for people that a) applies to, b) can be a big hassle.
Just ask Netanyahu.
In the case of Israel the ICC used a loophole to work around this, since the Israeli courts are actually able to prosecute Netanyahu (and are currently doing so on other matters).
Don't you think that counts as a chance that wasn't taken?
So far, Israel has not provided any sort of proof that they have initiated a serious independent criminal investigation into the alleged misconduct. If they did, i suspect the warrant would go away.
Almost no other justice systems require notice that a mere investigation has been opened. So to answer your question, basically all of them.
In almost every other system, investigations are kept secret. The complementary thing is pretty exclusive to the ICC.
I would also say that this is a matter of politics not justice, since such investigation notices are not addressed to the accused and in general it is expected that the accused is not told that they are the subject of an investigation. As such even if the notice was handled incorrectly, it wouldn't impinge on any of the accused rights and hence not be an issue of "justice"
This indicates that the prosecutor was on a witch-hunt.
Perhaps the Israeli courts, who are independent of the Netanyahu government, have not initiated proceedings because they don’t believe there’s a valid case to be made.
...without trial. And assuming guilty and sentenced to death.
This is standard rules of war. Soldiers don’t have to convene a court before shooting at enemy combatants.
Well, the ICC ?
OP states that "one the defendants carried out the justice sought by the ICC". That's incorrect. One of the defendants went farther than any sentence the ICC would have decided.
As you say, this is an act of war (killing ennemies), not an act of justice (trial and prosecution) .
I'm pretty sure no military in history has ever delayed taking out an active threat in order to conduct legal proceedings. They don't need to, because enemy combatants don't have to be guilty of any crimes to be valid targets under IHL.
They did something else (an act of war) that should not be conflated with justice.
The ICC is an international court but it administers trials (mostly) local to the members' jurisdiction so this point is moot. A warrant from the ICC doesn't ask the member states to go to war and hunt the target, it asks them to arrest them if the target is within their jurisdiction
The fact that the ICC warrant was unlikely to lead to Hamas' leaders arrest in the short term is not particularly meaningful
The "mostly" qualifier is because IIRC there are some provisions for truly extraterritorial prosecutions in the Rome treaty but I don't know that they've ever been actually used
They have a warrant out for Putin, has that made any impact on the war in Ukraine?
The objective of the ICC is not to stop wars
The objective of the ICC is to provide a framework to enable prosecuting and punishing the people ordering particularly egregious acts in a way that is more consistent with liberal rule of law principles than post-hoc tribunals like after WW2 and that is more accessible to fragile / new countries due to having the legal infrastructure set up and at least partially legitimized by it being an international body
The fact that Putin (for example) might at some point get extradited / captured, prosecuted and jailed for whatever crimes he gets found guilty of is a moral good in and of itself
If this being done at the ICC rather than in an Ukrainian or Russian (in an hypothetical regime after Putin's) helps others accept the verdict as more based on fact than politics then that's why the ICC exists as an entity
If this makes someone down the line think twice about ordering war crimes then that's an added benefit but it's not the point
However don't let that take away from the other work the ICC has done. They have thrown people in jail.
There are two sides in this conflict. Israel denies these allegations.
Some on the other side are openly calling for the genocide of Israel - while claiming that Israel is doing it.
Furthermore, everyone has the right to be pressumed innocent until proven guilty. That includes people accused of heinous international crimes like genocide or crimes against humanity.
(To date, the only person the ICC has ever accused of genocide is Omar al-Bashir from Sudan)
Israel can't do sanctions for Israelis?
I mean, the realpolitik of these sanctions by the US is in hope that the USs involvement in Gaza doesn't get arrest warrants for their own officials / Presidents. Or for war crimes and human rights violations against Venezuelan boats.
Does make Israel look either weak or like a small person puppeteering a much bigger person though.
Additionally, tangentially, I find it interesting the reluctance the US has had, for three entirety of Trump's term so far, in extending sanctions on Russia for it's continued bombardment of Ukraine.
Speaks volumes about the (confusing, although maybe just rapid direction/ally change) motivations of the current administration.
How is this anything but DARVO? Israel receives criticism in the UN for reasons that are easily verified and quite understandable - namely its deliriously racist, brutally violent, textbook illegal, and long-lived occupation of Palestine and attempts to annex its territory.
Blaming Muslim countries writ large for the UN complaining about Israel's blatant and continuous violation of the UN Charter and various other international laws is shockingly racist.
It's just a way of "othering" some group of people, which certainly seems to fit the facts, regardless of whether you personally think some set of characteristics should be called a race.
This includes countries that have ethnically cleansed their Jews, and countries that do not allow Jews to enter.
Is Israel an apartheid state? of course not; 25% of its population are Arabs who enjoy equal rights by the law (in comparison, 0% of Saudi Arabians are Jewish).
Is Israel a "rogue nuclear state"? It is a nuclear state, but so are France and Britain. What makes it anymore rogue than them?
Does Israel have "an history of terrorism"? You'll need to expand this one as I'm not sure what is the terrorism you mean.
Is Israel "carrying out a genocide"? Well the number of people in Gaza increased during the war. Don't believe me, hear out Hamas leaders [0].
Israel is in a tough neighborhood. Never before has any country faced such a campaign of ongoing hostility and delegitimization from its neighbors and far away countries alike. Israel is doing very well though.
The fact that Israel refuses inspections, something that no other country on Earth is permitted to do.
> Well the number of people in Gaza increased during the war.
This is just absurd holocaust denial. Israel has murdered almost 400,000 under the age of five https://x.com/i/status/1968772985227010398
[0] https://x.com/arikouts/status/1968935650263978009/photo/1
"regardless of what Israel does" they haven't tried ending the occupation yet; do you really think they would be condemned for doing so?
> and countries that do not allow Jews to enter.
Which countries are these exactly?
Next came Hamas, then the rockets, then the incursions and finally October 7th.
This is misinformation. Although Israel did pull its settlers from most of Gaza in 2005, it retained air, sea, and land border control. That is still a military occupation. The reality is, Israel never ended the occupation in Gaza.
While Israel retained air and sea passage control, the blockade as we know it only came after Hamas was elected as the Gaza government and not before.
(this is the opportunity to note that after the Israeli pullout from Gaza, Gazans could have chosen many different paths but they chose Hamas to lead them into the catastrophe they've become)
> this is the opportunity to note that after the Israeli pullout from Gaza, Gazans could have chosen many different paths but they chose Hamas to lead them into the catastrophe they've become
Even in 2005, after Israel's removal of their settlers and before Hamas came to power in 2007, Israel was still occupying Gaza, according to an ICJ ruling, based on Israel continuing to exert control over Gaza.
That's not what the court said. Its language was
> In light of the above, the Court is of the view that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control over the Gaza Strip.
As it often does, the court used intentionally ambiguous language to try to get a majority of judges on board. But the most natural reading seems to be a novel idea that occupation is non-binary, and Gaza lies somewhere on a spectrum of being occupied or not.
https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186...
The litmus test is if they were just opposed to the policies of the South African government, or did those countries also hate South Africa and South Africans?
Did they have a history of persecution of South Africans in their own country?
Were they funding armed groups to attack South Africa?
Did they believe that South Africa has no right to exist anyway?
The only relevant litmus test is:
"Did the accused party commit the offense they are accused of?"
...everything else is whataboutism, red herring, ad hominem, and DARVO.
If the worlds worst person says 2+2=4, you still can't evaluate that claim by testing how many people like or hate the person. Only by whether the content of their words is true or false.
> Ah but what about many many decades ago in history the minority ruling the apartheid state were treated badly! In other places! Did you think of that?
OTOH, why would anybody not be biased against an agressive, xenophobic theocracy bent on illegally occupying and annexing its neighbour, all the while whining that "they want to destroy us and deny the existence of the Israeli state", and then with the other side of their mouth "all Palestinians must die and their homeland belongs to us"? The mind boggles.
> many are officially against the very existence of Israel and have always been
Here we go.
> and they happily vote on any condemnation of Israel regardless of what Israel does.
Israel following up on their promise and actually applying the treaties they signed never got them any condemnation. Them doing the exact opposite obviously does.
> This includes countries that have ethnically cleansed their Jews, and countries that do not allow Jews to enter.
Someone being oppressed does not justify them then oppressing others. I can’t believe this still needs to be said.
That’s not the point. A country that has a history of hatred against a group, to the point of ethnic cleansing, and has not changed on the matter, has no legitimacy in critisizing or making judgments on that group.
I think this would be obvious in any other context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
This is legit the kind of stuff we used to use as examples as why "Russia is bad".
These false equivalencies amd attempts to hint that Ukraine war is anything else then a territorial expansion are not just "regardless".
They are the core issue.
And likewise, the importsnt part for me was to negate the false equivalency.
I am ok with sanctioning Russia as such, as much as possible. Sadly they have powerful allies in US now ... but for now, Russia and US are the greatest threats to freedom in Europe.
Those who so flippantly censor and ostracise dissidents deserve a periodic taste of their own concoctions.
Assuming that someone should not be allowed to freely earn, spend, invest and participate in the economy without a proved felony is a dystopian concept.
Either have a proper fair public trial and put criminals in prison for serious violations or don't discriminate against anyone's stuff at all if you don't have any proofs. Otherwise it's massively used to give advantages to citizens of several nations to do business and earn while discriminating against others because of 'high risks' without any public court hearing, based on nationality, citizenship or organizational relations.
I haven’t seen anything about it here, but another example that is worse because it’s an attack on a private person, is the EU recently sanctioning the former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud, living in Belgium which he now cannot leave, for seemingly, essentially reminding the people of Europe and EU politicians’ of the things they said.
Likewise if it backs off it's foreign support, hundreds of millions will die.
Are we singularly carrying the worlds on our backs - which sounds hegemonic - are is the US free to stop spending our money on everyone elses problems?
Perhaps the UK or Germany can fund everything for a few decades and be the next major world power for a bit.
The question isn’t whether the US is allowed to stop spending, but what it wants the world to look like if it does.
It's just the case that some people at the top don't seem to understand that.
Whether NATO still exists as a defense organisation is a good question.
were the host countries in Europe pushing for US base deployments or was it really the US and its insane desire to land explosives anywhere in the world in 30 minutes or less and sustain two simulateous land conflicts.
none of this is that simple. were the Europeans happy to take the security and invest more in their civil societies? absolutely, but they eroded their own sovereignty by doing so and the US was more than happy to act like the big brother in control of the whole situation.
the US wanted worldwide military dominance and the dependence of its allies. it really quite weird to say its all their fault.
The US seems "winning" right now because its imposing measure that need time to be bypassed, but will be bypassed.
They’re all vastly mutually beneficial systems of alliances. That said, America flipping out over the ICC is basically as old as the ICC.
Last I checked I never voted for Netanyahu.
It was incredibly obvious this would be inflicted in the other direction to anyone who followed what happened to Wikileaks supporters or people around Ed Snowden.
To everyone saying this is about US hegemony, note not only Canada but also UK (see Nigel Farage) has inflicted this on their own citizens - so they certainly helped lay the groundwork for what amount to extremely petty sanctions (and they too have participated in sanctions efforts).
When was Trump debanked?
> the trucker protestors in Canada
Speaking as someone on the other end of the spectrum from the trucker protestors in Canada, I was mortified by this
It’s very easy to google this.
Btw they never denied but per usual said they could not comment on individual accounts. But he did at least sue capital one.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-bank-lawsuit-florida-28c05c...
Some social media accounts were suspended and fundraisers were stopped.
Your media consumption may be particularly biased if you didn't hear of this! I recommend following outlets from "both sides" even if you find the "other side" offensive. I hate to shill for Ground News, but it's great for this.
The Truckers were on Canadian soil and subject to Canadian law, there was no reason to freeze their accounts like this. They should have been pursued in criminal courts, during which their access to legal counsel should not have been obstructed.
https://hongkongfp.com/2025/04/01/us-sanctions-6-officials-i...
One of the sanctioned officials reportedly keeps "piles of cash" at her house.
https://news.bitcoin.com/unbanked-hong-kong-leader-carrie-la...
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706056
'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life
As for the US slapping European politicians etc, it's high time the people on high horses in Europe feel the shit they push on ordinary people.
On one hand, this shows how important it is for paper cash to have first-class citizen status when it comes to legal tender.
On the other hand, how does the largest single currency zone in the world not have its own debit card settlement system? The Germany-only Girocard appears to have been mostly phased out, and doesn't work outside Germany unless it's co-branded with MC/Visa. Same with France's Card Bancaire. Besides that, 39% of online purchases in Germany are made through PayPal or MC/Visa.
[0] https://stripe.com/en-ca/resources/more/payment-methods-germ...
It comes with a full digital wallet infrastructure part of it too. So some of the fundamental tech scene is definitely changing in Europe.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
This is currently being solved with Wero, which is intended to be an EU-wide online payment platform which can replace PayPal/MC/Visa, and a bunch of national payment systems.
(And a layer that is potentially worse than Visa / MasterCard, as long as it's only implemented on Google / Apple smartphones.)
No notice, no reason why, no recourse for them. They had google for their life for weeks talking to people online who it happened to and make dozens upon dozens of phone calls and explain the whole saga every time. Tons of false leads and promises for folks to call them back who never did.
They eventually found that it was some old bank they were in good standing with who after weeks of not responding, still couldn't explain why, but they said they apparently flagged them. It was undone after about 12 weeks and ultimately only because someone at this random bank took the initiative to lift the flag, but they didn't have to.
The process is completely opaque and you effectively have no rights to know or resolve anything.
> The 125 member states of the Court will hold their annual Assembly in The Hague, Netherlands, in early December.
I wonder if they made any progress after that.
Nearly four decades ago, the then senator Joe Biden told Congress that Israel was “the best $3bn investment we make”, claiming that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”. The US regards Israel as an indispensable strategic asset, which is why it is the biggest ever recipient of US foreign aid, including military assistance. Washington will keep supplying the weapons that enable Israeli war crimes – and then threaten anyone who tries to hold the perpetrators to account.
Guillou and his colleagues issued their warrants after a lengthy, cautious legal process. The case against the Israeli politicians focused on the use of starvation, which Israeli leaders routinely confessed to.
mkleczek•1mo ago
I wonder if (when?) elites are going to use and support Bitcoin. Oppressive governments will force citizens - even such powerful as judges - to search for escapes.
tgv•1mo ago
integralid•1mo ago
krior•1mo ago
lmz•1mo ago
rounce•1mo ago
mothballed•1mo ago
CaRDiaK•1mo ago
bdcravens•1mo ago
xvector•1mo ago
bdcravens•1mo ago
tgv•1mo ago
Arguments about amount are immaterial to me. Cash transactions of say $500k are physically doable in many systems.
And cash transaction don't require burning the Amazon, of course.
OutOfHere•1mo ago
No, society will not collapse; it will stabilize. There are many forms of taxation, e.g. property, tarrifs, etc. that are unaffected.
Those who call Bitcoin utter shit always have an agenda and insecurities rooted in a feared loss of status.
pixelpoet•1mo ago
alecco•1mo ago