Sovereignty and obligation are not enemies

The argument reported by National Review runs, in brief, as follows: no supranational entity should hold a veto over the security decisions of the United States, because those decisions belong to America's elected leaders and, through them, to its voters. Secretary Rubio's case is framed as a defense of democratic self-governance. I take that framing seriously. I spent years of my life defending precisely that principle.

And yet I must press on a distinction the argument elides. Sovereignty, properly understood, is not a license to act without restraint; it is the authority to enter into binding obligations and to be held to them. When I negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States was not surrendering its sovereignty to Britain — it was exercising that sovereignty to create a legal settlement both parties would be bound by. The binding was the point. A promise that dissolves the moment it becomes inconvenient is no promise at all, and a nation that makes no binding promises cannot claim the benefits of others' promises either.

The International Criminal Court is an institution I could not have known in my own time — its architecture, its jurisdictional reach, the precise texts of the Rome Statute — these are beyond what I can speak to with authority. What I can speak to is the shape of the question. When a republic of laws declines the jurisdiction of a court, it must offer a reason grounded in law, not merely in preference. The argument that elected leaders should define their own accountability is, I submit, the oldest argument tyrants have ever made. That does not mean the ICC is beyond criticism; every court may be criticized on its construction, its procedures, or its selective application. Those are legitimate objections. But they are legal objections, not a wholesale repudiation of the category.

The founders of this republic — and I count myself among them, with appropriate humility — understood that the law of nations was not a foreign imposition. It was the shared grammar by which civilized states communicated. To tear pages from that grammar whenever they constrain us is to leave future negotiations conducted in noise. If the United States wishes to reform or withdraw from an international tribunal, let it do so by the treaty process, with stated reasons, with an offer of alternative accountability, and with an eye toward what it asks of other nations when they resist international process.

The dignity of the republic rests not on its power to refuse, but on the quality of the reasons it gives when it does. A diplomat's task — and I say this from long experience — is to leave a quarrel less inflamed than he found it, and to ensure that the word of his country, given or withheld, means something precise. Secretary Rubio may yet have a sound case against this particular court. I ask only that it be a legal case, argued in the language of obligation, not merely a sovereign's declaration that it answers to no one. That declaration, taken to its conclusion, is not the founding creed of this republic. It is its undoing.