What's frustrating about that is that a lot of the US's early efforts to not get involved in the ICC was to protect Henry Kissinger from prosecution, who, most objective observers tend to agree did commit or authorize multiple war crimes, from assassinations of Chilean leaders, to the carpet bombing of Indochina, particularly Cambodia, and others.
> What's frustrating about that is that a lot of the US's early efforts to not get involved in the ICC was to protect Henry Kissinger from prosecution
No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.
Both the unsigning and the “Hague invasion act” were in 2002, during the runup to the 2003 Iraq War; it was about protecting people then in office from consequences in the war of aggression they were about to launch, to the extent it was about protecting specific people and not just the broad idea of American exceptionalism and opposition of the US government of the time to the idea of international institutions not fully subordinated to the US.
> No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.
The ICC was formed out of the ICJ, to tackle matters that rose beyond 'dispute' between states. The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials, which defined war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time, so it would not have been really retroactive. These things were already crimes, there just wasn't a body capable of prosecuting them.
It was a permanent successor to ad hoc criminal tribunals like the International Military Tribunal, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
> The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials
No, it didn't, it was the UN system's successor to the League of Nations system's Permanent International Court of Justice (the ICJ statute is modelled on that of the PICJ, the PICJ transferred irs assets and archives to the ICJ on its dissolution, the ICJ was headquartered in the Peace Palace that had held the HQ of the PICJ, and the ICJ even adopted the PICJ seal.)
The ICJ—like the PICJ, a court for disputes between nations—was in no respect a successor to International Military Tribunal, which dealt with crimes by individuals (and, indeed had most of its lifespan during that of the ICJ, starting work only a few months before the ICJ.)
