The warrant and the visit

According to Fox News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded to Prime Minister Netanyahu's accusation — that Mamdani supports Hamas — by pointing to the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. I was not present for these exchanges, and I do not pretend to know the underlying facts of the conflict. What I can speak to is the shape of the legal question, because that shape is one I labored over my entire public life.

A treaty is the law of the land. That was not merely my view; it was the construction I advanced in Federalist No. 64, and it was the construction the Framers placed into Article VI of the Constitution itself. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, is the treaty instrument from which the ICC derives its warrant authority. The United States is not a party to that statute — a fact of no small consequence — but many of its closest allies are. When those allies received the warrant, they faced a genuine legal obligation: the statute requires states parties to arrest an indicted individual present on their territory.

This is not a minor procedural matter. The binding force of a treaty obligation is precisely what gives the international order its structure. I spent months in Paris negotiating the Treaty of 1783, and I understood then that a treaty's value is measured entirely by whether the parties honor it under pressure, not under convenience. An obligation observed only when it is easy is not an obligation at all — it is a preference.

Mayor Mamdani's invocation of the warrant is, whatever one thinks of the underlying charges, a reference to a live legal instrument. Prime Minister Netanyahu's characterization of that invocation as support for Hamas is a rhetorical substitution — replacing a legal argument with a political accusation. I recognize the maneuver; it is as old as diplomacy itself. A diplomat who cannot answer the legal point attacks the person raising it. That does not make the legal point disappear.

I will mark as inference what follows, since it extends beyond the news account before me. The deeper question is whether the international community has the will to treat international criminal law as law, or merely as a vocabulary of condemnation deployed selectively against the weak and ignored when applied to the powerful. That question does not resolve itself along the lines of any particular conflict. It applies with equal force wherever a warrant issues and a government chooses comfort over obligation. The credibility of the entire framework — the slow, difficult accumulation of international legal precedent since 1945 — depends on consistency.

What should be done? The parties with treaty obligations under the Rome Statute should state clearly whether they regard those obligations as binding, and if they do not intend to honor them, they should explain why in legal terms rather than political ones. The United States, not being a party, has no arrest obligation but does have an interest in whether international law retains its authority. A world in which warrants are issued but never enforced is a world in which the next warrant — perhaps one directed at interests we value — will likewise be ignored. The public faith of nations is not divisible.