Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.

On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders. Almost all of the court’s top funders are Western democracies or their allies. Now, for the first time in its history, the ICC would be asked to assess the actions of a democratically elected government allied with the West, and to show that it could do so without special favor.

Last Thursday, the ICC rose to this challenge. A three-person panel at the court approved arrest-warrant requests for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli officials are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder and starvation of Palestinians.

[Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court’s folly]

Back in May, prosecutors also asked for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, who stand accused of extermination, murder, rape, and sexual assault against Israeli citizens during the attacks of October 7. Two of the three (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) have since been killed by Israel. The ICC issued the arrest warrant for the third, Mohammed Deif. Israel claims to have killed him too, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The three judges who made the decision hail from Benin, France, and Slovenia, but were elected by all 124 member states of the ICC and went through a rigorous vetting process. Their months-long deliberations included engaging with the Israeli government and assessing its claim that its own courts could handle the matter.

Since its foundation, in 2002, the ICC has investigated crimes all over the world. It is limited in both the types of crimes it can investigate (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression) and its territorial jurisdiction (restricted mostly to its member states, which include countries in the European Union, Latin America, the antipodes, and half of Africa). Yet it has managed to levy charges for crimes committed in 17 countries and issue arrest warrants for despots such as Vladimir Putin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Omar al-Bashir.

For years, however, many non-Western leaders have accused the court of having a pro-Western bias. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders offer the ICC an opportunity to prove otherwise. But much will depend on how seriously countries allied with Israel take the court’s orders.

The court’s members include the majority of Western countries, which will now be obligated to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot in their territory. Canada, one of the court’s biggest funders, was among the first to commit to doing so. Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Spain, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Slovenia have followed suit. Most other Western countries have treated the warrant with vagueness, generally agreeing that it is valid without committing specifically to arresting Netanyahu and Gallant.

Initially, only one EU member, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy,” outright opposed the warrant and even asked Netanyahu to visit. But on November 27, France declared that it considered Netanyahu immune from the ICC’s order because Israel is not a member of the court. If this principle is to be applied elsewhere, Putin, too, should be considered immune, given Russia’s non-membership in the ICC. The United States is also not a member of the court and is in fact openly hostile to its operations. The Biden administration has declared its disagreement with the arrest warrants, and surrogates of President-Elect Donald Trump have accused the court of anti-Semitism, promising a much tougher approach when Trump comes into office.

Netanyahu, like many others wanted by the court, will probably never appear before it. But that doesn’t make the ruling meaningless. International law has always been aspirational, in part because the world lacks an international law-enforcement agency (Interpol serves only to coordinate among various national police forces). But international justice has more significance in the world today than at any previous time in human history. Dozens of treaties obligate countries around the world and are referenced every day in national and transnational courts, sometimes leading to real results for victims and perpetrators. Viewed from a long historical perspective, this is a grand achievement. And last week’s ruling, by demonstrating an equal application of international law to a Western country, advances that cause.

In Governing the World: The History of an Idea, the historian Mark Mazower writes that the quest for a global court began before the First World War, with an enthusiastic, international group of peace activists who hoped that arbitration could bring an end to war. President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of that movement, helped give tooth to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, founded in 1899 at The Hague. But advocates’ hopes soon crashed into the gory realities of the 20th century. The First World War killed millions. The League of Nations, created in its aftermath, was soon overtaken by events: Liberalism retreated behind fascism and communism in the 1930s, and a Second World War followed the first, culminating in atrocities with little precedent in human history.

[Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Still, the quest for international justice did not die. The defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan, and the revelation of the extraordinary extent of their crimes, led to international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo and the foundation of the United Nations.

Nearly a century later, the International Criminal Court was founded during the optimistic period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Democracy appeared ascendant, maybe even inevitable. The genocides in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia tempered that period’s hopes—but they were met with international tribunals, which held out the promise that war criminals could no longer expect impunity. A United Nations conference in 1998, attended by representatives of 161 states, adopted the Rome Statute, which established the ICC four years later.

Many of the legal professionals who went to work for the ICC had been shaped by the experience of working for the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were relatively successful in delivering verdicts against human-rights offenders. For example, the Iranian Canadian lawyer Payam Akhavan served as a legal adviser at the tribunals for both Rwanda and Yugoslavia and then argued cases before the ICC, where he represented post-Qaddafi Libya as the country attempted to bring officials of the former regime to justice. In his book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, Akhavan describes the establishment of the ICC as the consummation of the idea of justice propounded at Nuremberg.

But the ICC has been bedeviled by controversy for much of its short life. In its early years, the court focused largely on African war criminals, because many of its member states were African. This led to allegations of bias. In the years since, it has expanded its operations across the world. And yet, most people live in countries where the court has no jurisdiction. Powerful nations such as China, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia never joined. The United States, Israel, and Russia signed the Rome Statute but then withdrew their signatures. The year the court was founded, the United States adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, in which it promised to take any necessary measures to release “any U.S. or allied personnel” detained by the court.

A far simpler way of denying the court’s authority is to ignore it. In 2015, South Africa refused to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an ICC warrant. Earlier this year, Mongolia all but rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ICC’s warrant for his arrest notwithstanding.

But none of this means that the court, or the quest for international justice more broadly, is ineffectual. Putin has had to skip many an international summit (he skipped the recent Group of 20 meeting in Brazil, just as he did last year’s BRICS meeting in South Africa). And the ICC’s legal work can be used by other courts to prosecute alleged perpetrators. In the case of Israel, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to ever be tried in The Hague, but the world has become much smaller for them. The warrants also provide an opportunity for Israel’s judicial system to prove its mettle: The ICC has declared that if Israel chooses to prosecute the allegations in its national court system, the warrants will be dropped.

The quest to have human conflicts decided by men and women in robes and wigs, and not just those in berets and boots, should resonate deeply with Israel’s founding ideals. The state’s declaration of independence in 1948 promised that it was “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” But it anchored this right in international law, pointing to the newly formed United Nations, which is mentioned seven times in the declaration.

Israel’s first government was led by nationalists and socialists. But the country’s first justice minister, and the architect of its judicial system, was one of the few signatories of the declaration who defined himself primarily as a liberal. A Berlin-born lawyer, Pinchas Rosen had moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1926, at the age of 39, having earned law degrees in Germany before the country’s liberal traditions were destroyed by Nazism.

Israel was hardly a liberal paradise in its early years. It enforced a military rule over its Arab citizens until 1966. But Rosen did establish a robust court system and was adamant that the State of Israel was to be a state of law. The country joined the United Nations and, with such legendary diplomats as the British-educated Abba Eban, overcame the isolation of its early years to establish a seat for itself at the table of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has rightly called that commitment to the law into question; but it has also been the subject of contestation within the country.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Practically all of Israel’s political leaders have condemned the ICC’s decision. But some voices of dissent are audible. Naama Lazimi, a progressive member of the Knesset, called Thursday “a sad day for Israel” and put the blame for the decision on Netanyahu, not the court. “This was unnecessary,” she wrote on X, adding that it could have been avoided if the Israeli government had undertaken an independent inquiry and pursued a settlement to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas. “But Netanyahu chose and still chooses his own position and cynical and personal interests,” she concluded: “The Hague has come out against Netanyahu, Netanyahu against Israel.” The Israeli organization Peace Now has taken a similar position, blaming the country’s leadership.

The long-term interests of Israel and those of enthusiasts for international law need not diverge. As a small country with many ill-wishers, surrounded by militias that clamor for its destruction, Israel often feels itself under siege and classifies any action against it as an unforgivable betrayal. But the country owes much of its past success to its recognition under international law and its membership in the community of democratic nations. Illegally occupying the Palestinian territories, and disregarding competent international forums such as ICC, serve to undermine that status. A world where liberal democratic norms, such as respect for international legal institutions, are more prevalent will ultimately be a safer one for Israel, especially if it wishes to fulfill the dream of its founders to be a Jewish and democratic state.  

The call from The Hague should thus be seen as an urgent message that the country needs to correct its course and step back from the campaign it has pursued since October 2023. True friends of Israel are not those who attempt to shield it from international justice. They are those who remind it that as a sovereign nation, it has the right to defend itself—but not the right to be immune from legal judgment.

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Former President Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College, four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York. He ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.  

But he won. When all the votes are counted, he may not have won the popular vote, but he will have won a decisive victory in the Electoral College nonetheless. Behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes, including national bans on abortion, a mass deportation that could wreck the economy and subject Americans of any immigration status to invasive state scrutiny and force, and an immense distribution of income upward. The Democrats’ reward for steering the economy out of the post-pandemic economic crisis will be watching their opponent claim credit for the prosperity that their work created—an economy unencumbered by inflation and the high interest rates once needed to tame it. If Trump seems popular now, he will likely be much more popular in a year.

Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does. He did that when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory in 2016, and he will do it now. But there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

The Trump administration’s record of union busting, repealing workplace regulations, and cutting the welfare state to enrich the already wealthy will have few obstacles. The coterie of extremists that surrounds Trump has a radical conception of what America should be that includes suppressing the speech and expression of their political opponents; a racial hierarchy entitled to legal protection and enforcement; a society in which women’s bodies are treated as state property and LGBTQ people have few rights that others need respect. They will have a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable this agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it.

The Biden administration sought to bring down the temperature of the Trump era by offering aid to families, revitalizing American manufacturing, and easing inflation without increasing unemployment. That politics brought them few rewards, and the Democrats are unlikely to pursue such an agenda again, if they ever return to power. Trump has expressed admiration for nationalist strongmen such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds power in a country that still has elections but where there is little chance of the opposition succeeding, because both the state and social levers of power are under the purview of one man. The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.

I believe that, as in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community, something conservatives claim they want from newcomers, should lead a nation where all are supposed to be created equal. They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies, to the point of treating them as mere reproductive vessels not worth saving until they are bleeding out in an emergency room.

Millions of Americans are already asking themselves these questions this morning. All of the potential answers are disquieting. Choosing Trump in 2016, prior to everything he did as president, was frightening enough. Choosing him in full knowledge of how he would govern is worse. But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy. Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him to build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a re-elected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half-measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs–and intensify a global trade war against not only China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history when America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

Hungary's prime minister hails a "much-needed victory for the world", and France's president said it would work with him "with respect and ambition".