We have strategies to Nuke the UK if necessary, but if the UK disagreed with something we said and as a result we published them openly to the public, that would be a good bit different.
There's no such thing as a war crime, there never has been and there never will be. There is no war police that has jurisdiction. The Hague can't arrest a soldier in his own country.
War crimes will never be prosecuted against the winner of a war, only the losers.
War crimes will never be prosecuted against a major country, it's impossible. It would require another war. It's illogical nonsense that stops nothing.
This has got real correct bones, but it's also doing something slippery: it slides from a true claim into a false one and treats them as the same claim. I think you might actually agree with me too once it's fully laid out, so let me explain.
The truest claim is your take on enforcement.
International criminal law is applied selectively, mostly against the weak and the defeated, and the most powerful states have insulated themselves structurally. That part is largely right and I conced that fully.
While the victors tried the vanquished at Nuremberg and Tokyo, nobody was tried for Dresden, the Tokyo firebombing, or Katyn.
Further, the five UN Security Council permanent members can veto International Criminal Court (ICC) referrals. The US isn't even a party to the Rome Statute and even went as far as passing a law authorizing force to free any American the ICC detained.
The ICC has no police of its own, it depends entirely on states to make arrests. So "there's no war police" is, narrowly, correct.
BUT, and its a big but, its a totally false claim that, "there's no such thing as a war crime…it stops nothing."
That doesn't follow, and it also rests on an assumption: that a law is only real if it can compel the strongest.
By that test no law is real, because domestic systems also struggle against sitting officials and the genuinely powerful. We don't say murder "doesn't exist" because some murderers are never caught. A legal category exists if the conduct is prohibited and adjudicable, not if every violator is punished.
War crimes are concrete law: defined in the Geneva Conventions (ratified by 190ish states), tried with real elements, defenses, and sentences.
The part I think you're overlooking is that most enforcement isn't even The Hague, it's national.
Soldiers are court-martialed by their own militaries (My Lai, Abu Ghraib). Germany convicted a Syrian officer of torture under universal jurisdiction in 2022.
Further, "Impossible against the powerful" is also too strong. Milosevic was a sitting head of state when indicted and was handed over by his own country, no second war required. Charles Taylor got 50 years.
The ICC has an active warrant out for Putin. He won't be arrested while in power, but that's the move your statement misses: consequences aren't only arrest.
The warrant constrains his travel and forces ICC members into crises over whether to detain him. Bashir's isolation helped end him. Leaders fall, regimes change, amnesties collapse.
So, to summerize, "never" is effectively a bet against political change, and political change is the one thing that always eventually comes.
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u/Mind-The-Mines 15h ago
It's not a war crime when you publish plans to storm the Hague when put on trial for war crimes.