Where were you on 17 March 2023 when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin? You probably don’t recall. Unless you are one of a coterie of people who follow these things and want the ICC to matter, or a Ukrainian holding out hope that Putin and his regime will be punished by some force beyond blood and iron, the arrest warrant was one of life’s sideshows. 

Contrary to a vocal group of internationalists, international courts hardly matter for the workings of international politics. Statutes on war crimes provide an extra instrument for the strong to enforce their will. But they barely touch strong states. Indeed, they are like a spider’s web, tough enough to snare small animals and bad luck for mice. But in the face of elephants, irrelevant. 

The lion’s share of those indicted before the Hague are Africans. Racism might have something to do with this, though notice that it’s still very hard to arrest and prosecute the heads of the stronger African states with entrenched or protected rulers, like Egypt or Sudan. It has much more to do with the hard reality of power and weakness. Unless and until their states implode or revolutionaries seize power and seek vengeance, no American, Chinese, Russian or Indian leaders will appear in any international assize.     

Let’s be blunt about this, because the point is important. Understanding how things really work and how they are bound to work, beyond demands for “should” and “ought”, shapes what those with power and their advisors decide to do and where to allocate their energy. And continually calling for an authoritative world court is as useful as shouting at the moon.

For some time now, a particular thread of liberal opinion has run through atrocious conflicts in Darfur, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, that offending princes should be made into “pariahs”, and “held to account” by the enforcement of the ICC’s writ (against individuals) or the ICJ’s (against countries). 

This line of argument does not just say that war criminals or genocidaires should be first defeated and overthrown and then tried. That would be a simple matter of victor’s justice, or hard power creating facts and courts reflecting those facts. Rather, the call for pariahdom and accountability wishfully looks forward more ambitiously to arrest warrants or UN resolutions somehow exerting an independent effect, turning the accused into isolated, disgraced figures whose example will then deter others.

And how much and how often internationalists recycle this hope. When the ICC issued its theoretical arrest warrant for Putin, Le Monde’s editorial pronounced like a righteous but muddled undergraduate. Putin’s arrest made him “officially a political pariah”, sending a “signal of justice to Ukraine”, with a “considerable” effect of some kind. And yet Putin in the Hague is “not, at this stage, a realistic scenario” (when would it be?), and though his travel was now restricted for fear of arrest, he could still visit 60 countries that were not signatories to the Rome statute, including the “not insignificant” ones China and India. When Xi Jinping visited Moscow soon after, he would know that his “interlocutor was a man wanted for war crimes.” Note that since Xi’s March 2023 visit, China has hardened its partnership with Russia, traded ever more extensively, increased military consultation, and hosted Putin’s foreign minister in Beijing. Is it possible China cares more about its narrow interests than an arrest warrant? Might the “signal of justice” sound very faint in Ukraine? Valiantly holding on to its idealism, Le Monde struggled against that deadly foe, reality.

A similar pattern holds in most other cases. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest for the razing and starving of Gaza. Yet he is still welcome to visit and harangue a supporting superpower. Despite repeated claims that his regime and Israel are becoming a “pariah”, he still commands a state that in recent time has if anything strengthened its regional power position, inflicted damaging blows on its principal adversary, Iran. And his neighbours, as per their old repertoire, walk a careful line, tolerating some protest but maintaining the collaborative ties of the Abraham Accords era. As ever, the Gulf monarchies will not bleed for Palestine or compromise their tangible interests in the name of international norms. 

The problem is also the lack of a moral and political consensus

The problem here isn’t just that international courts lack a true international government or authority that will enforce their writ. The problem is also the lack of a moral and political consensus. To speak of the “international community” making bad actors into “pariahs” implies that the world is a kind of intimate medieval village that keeps order by laying down a consensus and acting more or less in unison, with an authoritative clergy who can cast offenders into outer darkness.

It simply doesn’t and can’t work like that. The world tends not to treat offensive regimes as pariahs because it is made up of many disparate countries and governments who have many citizens to look after, and serious interests to pursue, all of which is unbound by any single consensus or governance. 

Many internationalists, and governments, wanted the world to treat mad, bad Robert Mugabe, who liberated but then beggared, plundered and terrorised Zimbabwe, as a pariah. But Jacques Chirac’s France wanted to enlarge its influence in Africa, and numerous African countries lobbied Paris to extend its hand to Mugabe with an invitation to the Franco-African summit in February 2003. Mugabe always had valuable allies, whether for current interests or out of old allegiances, including Nelson Mandela. Likewise, state-owned French oil firms helped Saddam Hussein, the despot of Baghdad, to profit while evading sanctions. Even Ba’ath-ruled Iraq, the weakened, encircled, economically strangled ward of the “international community”, had partners, concerned only about whether the goods are ready and the price is right. 

And no, this isn’t just about French Realpolitik. Britain’s effort to recapture the Falklands from the Argentinian junta’s invasion in 1982, a damned close run thing, depended on covert radar intelligence from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, another architect of torture and massacre. True, years later he ended up arrested and dying under house arrest, but that was after he had relinquished power to his opponents. He was never a pariah in office. If anything, a lesson to future tyrants never to abdicate. 

… the world does not revolve around your grievances

Ah, some will say, what about Nuremberg and Tokyo, the prosecutions of Axis powers for crimes against humanity? Well, what about them? They only happened in the first place as a result of brute force, the immense effort to grind down fascist powers. Such post-conflict arrangements will be harder to implement in the nuclear age. And when those trials did happen, notice that no Soviets joined the accused in the dock, despite the Katyn massacre and industrial-scale rape across Eastern Europe. And without drawing false equivalences, given the difference between subduing an active adversary and presiding over a defeated people in custody, no Allies who firebombed cities were prosecuted. 

Indeed, even in the new postwar age of supposed international justice, there was Realpolitik to spare. The U.S. went to detailed lengths to shield Emperor Hirohito from prosecution, despite his complicity in war crimes, to preserve a legitimising figurehead for liberated Japan. And it spirited Nazi scientists, spies and military officials away from international justice, to employ their useful skills and knowledge and further American power, thereby building the new order by incorporating the old. There are few international pariahs. Aggrieved? Be aggrieved, but know that the world does not revolve around your grievances.