For those of you who haven’t yet read it, George Will’s “‘Up From’ Accountability” articulates quite well the objections many of us have to calls for U.S. participation in the ICC. Particularly forceful, I think, are Will’s concluding paragraphs:

Because the ICC is a facet of the European elites’ agenda of disparaging and diluting the sovereignty of nations, it is especially ill-suited to this moment, when the primacy of the nation-state needs to be reaffirmed. Terrorism is the leakage of violence out from the control of nations. And it cannot be controlled without enforcing the principle that a nation is accountable for terrorism that emanates from its territory.

In asserting these principles, and in other defenses of U.S. interests, the Bush administration is accused of ‘unilateralism.’ That term has become more than a mere antonym for ‘multilateralism.’ And more than (although it is this) a carrier of European resentment about U.S. refusal to pretend that Europe is a coherent and formidable political entity comparable to the United States.

Rather, the root of the European complaint of ‘unilateralism’ concerns the U.S. refusal to move ‘up from’ the defense of national sovereignty. The ICC — ‘up’ there, untethered to the governance of any nation or settled legal system — presupposes, among much else, the universality of a common conscience. That presupposition is refuted by the very nature of the ICC’s principal enthusiasts, the European elites who are incorrigibly tolerant of Yasser Arafat’s terrorism but scandalized by U.S. ‘unilateralism.’

By staying out of the ICC, the U.S. is re-asserting its belief in constitutional democracy grounded in a system of checks and balances. As well it must, should it wish to remain recognizably the U.S.

Sorry, but given the choice between knee-jerk, “e’body’s doin’ it!” treatyhumping and principled “unilateralism,” I’ll take the Henry Fonda-in-12 Angry Men-position every time.

I guess I’m just “liberal” that way.

[update: Den Beste on European reaction to the UN deal, granting 12 months of immunity from ICC prosecution to US peacekeeping forces:

For all the rhetoric about the US not being in peril from the ICC, the deep agenda of its proponents is precisely that the ICC be able to target everyone, big and small, signatory or not. As soon as it becomes clear that it only applies to those who are parties to the treaty then this is gutted, and that’s what has happened now.

Let’s hope so.

For additional commentary, visit LGF, where the discussion branches off from Victor Davis Hanson’s “European Morality?”]