https://www.forever-wars.com/r/42e96ad9?m=b656041a-c61a-4a6b-910d-7d396ec2db1f
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
YES, I KNOW. The United States has not ratified the Rome Statute, the foundational text acceding a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Neither has Iran. The United Nations General Assembly is not automatically a theater of ICC jurisdiction.
But, just saying, Donald Trump again threatening to "annihilate" Iran—"to drive them into hell with no chance of survival," said the president of the United States during his remarks to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning—is the sort of threat for which the Rome Statute's Article 25 (3)(e) was written.
The relevant text reads: "In accordance with this Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person … In respect of the crime of genocide, directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide." In this case, that would be the U.S. commander in chief, as here threatened, ordering the U.S. military to make his words real.
Again: Yes, "within the jurisdiction" is likely an insurmountable obstacle; I do not actually subscribe to the idea that you can ICC your way out of Trump; the ICC is designed to be a rigged game "for Africa and thugs like Putin," in the quote ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan attributed to Lindsey Graham; the institutions of the Rules-Based International Order are not meant to constrain Americans. If the ICC couldn't stop the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Gaza, it is not going to stop Donald Trump from making obscene, cavalier threats of indiscriminate destruction.
The point here is that the mechanism to impose ultimate sanctions against officials making speeches like Trump's doesn't work; but that only makes the need for a more powerful mechanism more urgent. We should probably start conceiving of one.
Trump, far from a deviation from American history, represents every corrosive, violent, officially licensed impulse in American history from the White Lion to the Trail of Tears to Manzanar to—you get the idea. Because Ronald Reagan refused to trade away the never-developed Strategic Defense Initiative when Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik proposed to eliminate all U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons by the mid-1990s, Trump, like every American president since Truman, possesses the ability to make good on his threat. (I read Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History over the weekend. That's on pages 540-1.) To borrow something John McCain once said about torture, rejecting this is about demonstrating you still possess a basic humanity, even if the other person does not.
It would be incredible if Iran decided to ratify the ICC and then pursued a case of genocidal incitement against the United States, even if I'm mostly just making a dark joke here. We can't accept a world in which a president deliberately makes repeated civilizational threats he has the means to carry out. The ICC is plainly insufficient and comes pre-assaulted in American politics. And yet there has to be some kind of consequence for this.
That is the reason Article 25(3)(e) exists, and that is what concerns me, not its particular applicability. I am not a lawyer. I am a journalist who writes jeremiads. We should sound more like Jeremiah when the iniquitous and powerful are talking about extermination; and probably especially when it concerns the descendants of the conquerors of the Babylonians. [See footnote.—Sam*]
I'm not talking about looking at a still-ideational rule book and saying what Trump said violates some still-ideational and obscure rule. I'm talking about building the world that comes after whatever emerges from the disgrace of the present. The way we get there involves imposing consequences sufficient to deter this happening again.
Over the past several years, we have seen a surge in sheer, unbridled animosity toward all post-1945 attempts to limit war. We saw it from Russia in Ukraine; from Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Iran; from the U.S. in Venezuela and Iran. It is deliberate. I caught glimpses of the same glee (Who are they to tell the United States how to wage wars?) from the Bush administration when it un-signed the Rome Treaty, declared its doctrine of Preemption and invaded Iraq. But even they had to publicly posture as if they were strengthening the United Nations and international law. In recent years, the decimation of the worthy task of restraining war before it becomes total has become part of the point of the decimation of entire peoples.
We're so far past a mask-off moment in the American Empire that it's past time for certain of us to accept that the mask will never go back on, and that the problem here isn't the mask.
I'm sputtering and I admit it. But a threat like Trump's, happening in a forum like the United Nations, is a challenge. It reflects a correct assessment that the machinery of international law and deliberation is past repair. The challenge is to accept that and build something that can deter a world leader from threatening another people with an extermination he has the capacity to carry out.
*These days I think a lot about Jeremiah 29, where God assures the Israelites that he’s not just going to let them rot in Babylon while Ahab rules over the Israelites and a bunch of people claiming to be His prophets suck up to Ahab. (I assume you can see the parallels.) Take it away, Jerry: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, who are prophesying a lie to you in my name: I am going to deliver them into the hand of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and he shall kill them before your eyes. And on account of them this curse shall be used by all the exiles from Judah in Babylon: ‘The Lord make you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire’, because they have perpetrated outrage in Israel and have committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and have spoken in my name lying words that I did not command them; I am the one who knows and bears witness, says the Lord.” I usually hear this in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. – Sam
RELATEDLY, Bloomberg published on Friday a frightening piece reporting on overreliance on Palantir's Maven AI as a critical factor behind the U.S. missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebah Elementary school in Minab, Iran. The piece illustrates perfectly how the oft-invoked AI safeguard of "a human in the loop" for making life-and-death decisions is the wrong construct.
Long story short: Military analysts fed outdated satellite imagery into Maven for targeting selection. On the garbage-in-garbage-out principle, Maven gave no indication the location-that-housed-a-school was anything but a righteous kill. Palantir responds in the piece that the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies."
On a strict level: indeed. But Palantir has spent over a decade portraying its data-analytic and AI products to the military as miraculous tools that perform analytic connections far more comprehensively than humans can. And so that's the structural problem. The analysts—who are very much in the decision loop here—expect Maven to perform a function it is not built to perform. They rely on their own due diligence. They instead assume whatever comes out the other end of a command typed into Maven has performed superior diligence. More than 120 children are dead because of this expectation. It is an expectation central to the adoption of AI. It is a hideous demonstration of how adoption of AI substitutes for critical thinking and basic probity. And the U.S. military and the intelligence agencies, to say nothing of the president, are unequivocal in their adoption of AI.
The debate over whether AI is capable, now or in the future, of destroying all humanity is speculative. It obscures, and I suspect deliberately on the part of its military-tied entrepreneurs, the enormous amount of human destruction it is causing right now. Because that destruction is less than all humanity, it seems like not the thing to be worrying about. And that's how that entire thought-experiment moves frictionlessly past Lavender or the Gospel or the schoolchildren of Shajarah Tayyebah Elementary.
WHEN YOU DO NOT PUNISH the practitioners of extraordinary rendition, you will get more extraordinary renditions, against ever more cohorts of people.
IT'S CRAZY HOW FAR DOWN you have to read in this CNN story before encountering the line "The CIA’s outpost in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for example, was effectively destroyed by an Iranian attack." Now, ah, I can't help but notice the Iranians sure like hitting the Erbil airport base in Iraq more than the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad…
YOU KNOW WHAT'S A RECORD that pairs really well with the sentiments expressed here? The Terrifying Power of Bombardment by Philadelphia crustpunks Kinetic Orbital Strike. This record is very much not for everyone but is headed for my best-of-2026.
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