Oh he no longer wants nothing to do with Spain any more? What a fucking piece of trash.

Genuine reservations are actually irrelevant in this. The Maga fascists are threatening other countries for supporting the court. This isn’t about improving the ICC it’s about blowing up international law. Democrats cannot hide behind “objections”.

But I would even push back on your premise. Even such reservations are overstated. The ICC is a complementary court of last resort. If a national authority conducts a genuine investigation and decides not to prosecute the ICC must respect that decision and cannot intervene. The ICC can only step in when a national legal system is inactive, unwilling, or unable to carry out justice. So if the US wants to ensure speedy trial etc, all it has to do is to hold itself to the already existing legal standards it has for itself.

The Democrats have been silent about this…

The opposition Democrats haven’t said anything about this afaik. They are being complicit.

Hey USAian, out here in the rest of the world, we see your governing party going full fascist about the ICC, and your opposition party staying silent. And that’s not fucking funny because it means this shit is the position of the sum of your political system. You want me to blame USAian voters? Sure whatever. But don’t expect me to engage in your little intra-tribal blame game dance about Kamala in your last election.

And the Democratic Party responded with …crickets.

I mean that’s literally the Turkish playbook here…

“closely connected”, not “X was a direct consequence of Y”

Correlation is an even worse legal/political justification for the law. Advances in rail infrastructure and in chemical engineering are also “closely connected to Germany’s responsibility for the Shoah”. WTF are we even talking about?

Yes, the 1897 First Zionist Congress in Basel predated the Nazi Party by 20+ years. One of Zionist organizer Herzl’s motives was to ensure refuge from European anti-Jewish racism. Same racism that led to the Nazi death camps.

That’s my point exactly. But there were other Jewish political projects that tried to address the same racism, that were not themselves racist (the founders of the Zionist movement, including Herzl himself, specifically characterized Zionism as a colonial project), such as the Jewish Bund. German pro-zionists today don’t get to play time-travellers and retroactively change what the foundation of Israel was about.

The Bundesrat added that Israel’s establishment and acceptance by the international community are closely connected to Germany’s responsibility for the Shoah and the necessity of finding a secure homeland for Jews.

That’s historically incorrect. Israel was not created because of the Holocaust.

Not to mention of course that the Israeli apartheid regime is far from any kind of “secure homeland for Jews”.

I guess we are reading the word “disadvantage” slightly differently. You, I suspect, use it purely descriptively. I am interpreting it normatively (disadvantage viz. the proper rules). I am not pushing back on the descriptive bit. I am pushing back on what I consider to be normative baggage smuggled in by the framing. Aka maybe I’m reading too much in a word.

My behaviour is judged by the laws of the country I live in.

The behaviour of countries is judged by international law.

When the USA and Israel launched this war of choice, they stepped outside international law.

In the absence of credibly enforced international law, the only thing we have to go by is historical precedent.

Historical precedent says that junior allies being attacked in retaliation for the acts of their senior allies is extremely commonplace. So Iran is not being “terroristic” in any kind of historically exceptional way. We don’t talk about Napoleon being a “terrorist” for invading Portugal in 1807 to get at the UK. The Iranians are fighting a war the same way wars have been fought since Hannibal laid siege to Saguntum. Retaliatory attacks against offshored military facilities and materially participating coalition partners are just a recurring feature of warfare. To be clear: I’m not justifying Iran here, I’m de-exceptionalizing their conduct of warfare.

If somehow enforcement of international law were to be re-instated, and I absolutely would want that to be the case, then Iran’s war crimes (such as any targeting of civilians) should be judged by a competent tribunal. Of course, it should be judged with exactly the same severity as the ones of the USA and Israel (who actually started this war in the first place) by the same tribunal.

If you actually care about civilian casualties, and you’re not just being a campist for the US/Israel, you should be condemning the entire illegal war to begin with. Without US/Israeli adventurism, none of this would have happened. Are you anti-war? Or just anti-Iran?

So your whole argument is about labelling this or that side “terrorist”? This is about moralizing an illegal war? Cry me a fucking river.

I reject the framing. It is us Europeans that chose to be “disadvantaged” because we made the political choice to trust in the mumbo jumbo of neoliberal economics, because we thought we were going to be “advantaged” by the invisible hand of the market gods. We made a bad policy choice. Instead of calling it a “disadvantage”, our political institutions should do their own self-criticism.

Which is exactly why I used the phrase typically used to excuse Israel’s actions.

Iran has the right to defend itself.

That’s only a “fair” argument to make if one assumes that orthodox neoliberal policies such as the EU’s ban on state aid are somehow the universal ethical norm. Will, they aren’t.

If we made neoliberalism our dogma and the Chinese are outcompeting us maybe our dogma is fucking wrong.

Let’s start calling them militias.

Why does Iran get to dictate what happens in Oman’s territorial waters?

Because the US and Israel killed international law.

Iran has the right to defend itself.