Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on a roll. Docket his consistently robust responses to Hamas, Iran and NATO for future delectation. On July 13, he wrote a brilliant op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “Why We’re Dismantling the International Criminal Court.” Then, on July 20, the State Department released “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” a 64-page report detailing Cuba’s 40-year effort to infiltrate susceptible groups in the United States. As a prefatory summary notes, Cuba’s campaign was less about politics or economics than, at bottom, “a revolution against western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.”
The two documents share an overriding concern with the integrity of American sovereignty. “Sovereignty,” indeed, is a sort of masterword playing about in the background – and often the foreground – of Rubio’s public statements. The ICC, brought into being by something called the Rome Statute in 1998, presumes to exercise global jurisdiction over activities or personalities its prosecutors or judges deem unacceptable. In this, it is like the Kyoto Protocol, the Lisbon Accords and everything that oozes out of Davos and the headquarters of the EU.
The question of sovereignty is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives
For example, the ICC called for American service members in Afghanistan to be prosecuted for “war crimes,” where such “crimes” had been defined unilaterally by them. Last year, ICC officialdom demanded “immediate and meaningful action” against the Trump administration for deporting violent criminals to El Salvador. Ditto with respect to the administration’s strikes against narcoterrorists in the Caribbean. Those, too, were said to be “a crime against humanity.” How about the more than 100,000 American lives lost to the drugs peddled by those miscreants? In March, a left-wing Arabist group in Washington, DC suggested that Iran ask the ICC to investigate “apparent war crimes” allegedly committed by Americans. And on it goes.
What was originally billed as an emergency legal backstop to address the gravest international crimes has, by the familiar logic that infuses all left-wing, globalist enterprises, burgeoned into an all-purpose machine to detect and punish deviations from the gospel of woke identity politics.
Most of us, Rubio writes, would find it hard to imagine a world in which “US soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.”
But what prevents such infractions is not any self-regulating impulse on the part of the court, but American resolve – buttressed, it may go without saying, by American economic and military might. Perhaps, Rubio speculated, other nations would be willing to make their peace with the new globalist order in which national sovereignty drains away to reveal a cadre of unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats.
But the United States, especially on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is not going to follow suit, especially when led by a President whose entire administration can be summed up in the phrase “America First.”
Quoting from the Declaration, Rubio reminded his readers that our forefathers had embarked on a revolution against a foreign power “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” Accordingly, Rubio said, the US is launching “a diplomatic campaign with a simple message – sovereign states over globalism.” This is where the tenon of communism fits into the mortise of globalist ambition. Communism is by nature the enemy of national sovereignty. In essence, “sovereignty” is just a fancy word for freedom, underwritten in the indelible ink of legitimacy. Communism and its avatars are enemies of freedom, abetted by the scribes of utopian aspiration.
The commentator John Fonte summed up the process in the evocative phrase “transnational progressivism,” the perfect slogan for this anti-nationalist impulse that seeks to transfer political power and decision-making “from democratic nations to supranational authorities and institutions” such as the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and kindred organizations (“judges from the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court… NGOs such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace”).
The true political ends of such elite enterprises are generally swaddled in emollient rhetoric about freedom and democracy. But Fonte uncovered some revelatory gems that speak candidly about what’s really at stake. For example, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution put it with all possible clarity when he declared in 2008 that the “United States… should not oppose, but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty.” “Pooled and diminished national sovereignty.” At least we know where we stand.
The question of sovereignty is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives and has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has been called variously the “deep state,” or administrative state, has intruded more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of western democracies.
In his first speech to the UN’s General Assembly in September 2017, Donald Trump told a startled roomful of diplomats that “we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty.” He continued:
Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens – to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first. All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.
This is the battle that Rubio is helping President Trump prosecute with such eloquent effectiveness.
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