H. A. Hellyer is a nonresident scholar in the Middle East Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London, where he focuses on geopolitics and security studies. Diwan interviewed Hellyer after Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, asked the body to arrest Hamas officials as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. What does this mean for a rules-based international order, the topic of a recent article by Hellyer for Foreign Policy? He can be followed on Twitter/X @hahellyer
Michael Young: You argued in a Foreign Policy article earlier this month that a rules-based international order “is the best model we’ve come up with, civilizationally, to reduce widespread war and conflict.” In light of the decision by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request that the ICC issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their alleged criminal responsibility for crimes in the state of Palestine, and the very negative reaction to this accusation in many Western states, above all the United States, is such a model remotely possible?
H. A. Hellyer: Otto von Bismarck’s adage still holds, which is that politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best. The notion of a rules-based international order, underpinned by international law, remains preferable to any other model that we’ve come up with historically, which have all been variations on the idea that “might is right” or the “law of the jungle.” That is why the Biden administration’s response to the ICC declaration that the prosecutor was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant was so damaging. However, it goes even further than that, because Washington has also been intent on dismissing and casting aspersions on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), because of its investigation of the charge of genocide by Israel, which South Africa presented last December.
I continue to believe that a rules-based international order is not only possible, but preferable. However, it requires serious commitment from the world’s most powerful actors, and it is especially important that those countries that claim to uphold such an idea be at the forefront in this regard. When Russia ignores the ICC, we correctly don’t bat an eyelid, because we know that Moscow isn’t particularly interested in such an order, and it doesn’t claim otherwise. When the United States, on the other hand, rejects the ICC’s decisions on Israel, but accepts them when it comes to Ukraine, the message it sends to the rest of the world is that the most powerful country in the world is inconsistent. Hence, why should anyone else be consistent?
MY: Why has this idea of a rules-based international order not made headway in the Global South, as you imply in your article? After all, during the current Gaza conflict, countries such as South Africa and Brazil have resorted to international tribunals and the UN General Assembly to voice their displeasure, in other words international institutions that embody such a rules-based order?
HH: I’m not sure that the idea hasn’t made headway in the Global South. In fact, I would point to the examples you cite as evidence that many “middling” countries do see value in such an order, which is very positive. But they want it to be consistent, and I think that’s fair, even if they also have to be consistent themselves. South Africa, for example, had a controversial domestic saga over whether or not to enforce the ICC arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been invited to the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August 2023. If states are going to be consistent, they have to be so across the board, even if others are less consistent. Having said that, the lack of consistency is most impactful, negatively speaking, when it’s the powerful nations who are responsible for it, not the less powerful ones.
MY: Tony Karon and Daniel Levy have written in The Nation that “[a]cross the Global South and in the cities of the West, Palestine now occupies a symbolic place as an avatar of rebellion against Western hypocrisy and an unjust postcolonial order.” Do you agree with this view, and if so, how would your desire to advance a rules-based order fare in a global environment marked by such a spirit of rebellion?
HH: I suppose it all depends on what you mean by rebellion. From where I’m seeing things, having a rules-based order is in itself a rebellion. The spirit of rebellion you’re identifying is fundamentally concerned with justice, and law is meant to uphold justice. A consistent global order underpinned by international law? Consistency instead of hypocrisy? Law instead of postcolonial injustice? That’s not just rebellious, it’s pretty revolutionary, I think.
MY: Many have argued that the United States has lost a great deal of credibility by being so outspoken in its criticism, even dismissiveness, of the ICJ and ICC decisions. Yet all this seems unacknowledged in the American bubble. Has the United States indeed lost a great deal, and in what ways or where will this be most visible in the coming years?
HH: I don’t think there’s any point in people denying that U.S. credibility internationally has taken a massive hit over Gaza, particularly among nations beyond its Western allies. Remember, President Joe Biden came into office on the back of a promise to restore the standing of the United States worldwide, following the debacles of the Trump administration and its taking aim at the United Nations, NATO, and other international and multilateral organizations. Over the past seven months, however, the Biden administration has consistently been throwing shade, to say the least, at the United Nations, the ICJ, and now the ICC.
At the UN, it has suspended funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinian refugees, and held to that, after even Germany restored such funding. It has vetoed several UN Security Council resolutions, and called one resolution aimed at imposing a ceasefire in Gaza “non-binding,” which was an incredible thing to say. On the day the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced the intention to seek warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Biden aggressively rejected the very notion, and went further, saying that irrespective of what the ICJ said or didn’t say, Israel was not guilty of genocide.
Biden could be right, but that’s a legal question, and the ICJ is the foremost international court worldwide. This means that in order to show respect not simply for the court, but for a fundamental building block of a rules-based international order, you have to at least display deference to the court’s decisions. Instead, the U.S. president just dismissed it out of hand, putting the United States in the position of defending a state, Israel, that is in the dock for genocide, and officials, Netanyahu and Gallant, who are accused of war crimes. Israel is becoming more and more like a pariah state in the international community as a result of such legal measures.
For the United States to be so dismissive of those same measures has a huge impact on its credibility worldwide. If this isn’t immediately apparent inside the beltway, then it is very telling about the nature of the Washington bubble.
