Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) a philosophical analysis of language, a political allegory of liberal overreach, or a Menippean satire that, by following curiosity over the edge of logic, exposes legal order as a word game, proving nothing but its own emptiness?
You know from the question that the answer is “All of the above.” Alice in Wonderland isn’t nonsense in the way of Edward Lear’s nursery gibberish or John Lennon’s “I am the Walrus.” It shows how the exploitation of language creates legal and political power, the self-perpetuating commodities that everyone covets though no one, Tolstoy noted in the same decade, can define its sources.
The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his erstwhile defense minister, Yoav Gallant, claim to see “reasonable grounds” for “criminal responsibility” for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s fight against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Israel is not a signatory to the ICC. The court has also issued an arrest warrant for the terrorist Mohammed Deif, though the Israelis killed him in July. We are through the looking-glass.
“Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” the Red Queen tells Alice. The ICC’s warrants are a joke. But, as the Red Queen tells Alice, “Even a joke should have some meaning.” In this case, it means the end of the post-1945 system of international law. The ICC is Liberalism in Wonderland. The humane ideals of the West were universalized at the zenith of Anglo-American military power and commercial influence through international law and institutions. As the United States loses its quantitative and relative superiority, the institutions turn against their liberal democratic creators.
“A word means what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less,” the Red Queen says. Arbitrariness is the proof of power. The international legal apparatus is flexing its muscle, but it has no power of its own. The ICC was created in 2002 out of the Rome Statute of 1998. The Rome Statute was created at the behest of the U.N. General Assembly. All General Assembly rulings are advisory and nonbinding. The General Assembly is a union of terrorists, thieves, and thugs who don’t even pay their parking tickets. Their claim to legal authority rests on nothing but the patience of the United States and the cynicism of the Europeans.
In 1946, when the General Assembly met for the first time, George Orwell wrote that political language is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The ICC’s inversion of good and evil derives from these perversions of language. Its warrants aim to stop the democratically elected government of a liberal democracy from defending itself against an Islamist war of extermination.
This kangaroo court serves our enemies. It also serves our friends. Not just the Palestinian Authority, which talks peace and takes American cash but incentivizes terrorism and campaigns to delegitimize Israel in international law, but also the Western Europeans. The empire of law is a substitute for the power they have lost and one of many free rides on the American order. The same goes for the Canadians, except they never had any power.
The European Union’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, said that EU member states, as signatories to the Rome Statute, must arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they can. In May, when Britain’s Conservative government refused to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction in the war between Israel (a nonsignatory state) and Hamas (a nonstate terrorist organization), Labour’s shadow foreign minister David Lammy called for Britain to enact the warrants. Lammy is now foreign secretary.
“We respect the independence of the ICC,” said a spokesman for prime minister Keir Starmer. That was before Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) threatened Britain, Canada, France, and Germany with sanctions if they implement the ICC warrants. The incoming Trump administration may sanction the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, a British citizen. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations were right to reject ICC membership.
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The American attitude to international law has wavered between that of the Walrus and the Carpenter in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, who philosophize about cabbages and kings while stuffing their faces with oysters, and the Snail in the “Mock Turtle’s Song” from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?” the porpoises and lobsters ask the Snail. The other dancers will throw him into the English Channel, but don’t worry, they say, France is near. Their dance may be fit for porpoise, but the French eat snails.
Our liberal proceduralists have forgotten the rules of a dance that they designed. Western states created international organizations to export their influence. When the United States eclipsed the British Empire, the English channeled their efforts into the forerunners of today’s international institutions and enticed their Atlantic cousins to dive into the legal net. After 1945, a bipartisan consensus saw jumping in as an American interest. But international law is an instrumental fiction, mock turtles all the way down. The fiction no longer serves its purpose. It’s time to turn the page and make the ICC warrants the last word in international law.