It will be pretty amusing to watch all those westerners who, not so long ago, were talking about "rules based order" pretend nothing is happening or to justify it.
Our leadership are war criminals, and should be treated as such.
Some, specifically, are war criminals who have committed crimes that carry the death penalty, and should be arrested, tried, and (if found guilty) executed.
I think you've been had with the whole "rules based order thing". You can keep winding the clock back and it's the same thing. Iraq 1, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia. When exactly would you say this alleged "rules based order" was great?
If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes, and the guilty parties were cooling their heels in a jail cell, then we probably wouldn't be seeing this action tonight.
and yeah who is gonna charge them ???? US have (arguably) strongest military on earth, who can put justice to them if not themselves ???? and themselves I mean US Gov. which is would never happen since every administration have "blood" in some form and another
Trump 45 could have come on board with a clean slate. Hell, Trump 47 started out without too much war-crimey cruft from his first term.
Dude went on a witch hunt and forgot to bring his pitchfork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Taliban_...
It must be us. It must be the American people.
This is (one of) the deepest moral failings of our voting public that we haven’t demanded it of our leadership.
You’re right that our leadership won’t do it unless the people absolutely demand it.
And… well, we haven’t demanded it.
So, the failure to bring them to justice belongs to me, and to every other American citizen that is eligible to cast a ballot.
Simpler: send them to prison at home. There is no world in which the Hague can enforce its law in America without the U.S. government's consent. At that point, skip the extra step and make war crimes actually illegal.
To be clear, war crimes are illegal here. They can carry the death penalty.
I think there's a strong case to be made for Pete Hegseth to be executed for his crimes, according to US Law.
But you're right. There's no expectation that the Hague enforce international law without the consent of the US Government. Our government should either try our leaders in our courts, or hand them in manacles and chains to the ICC and The Hague.
But I agree, I don't expect the international community to be able to do this over our objections. It's something we must do.
Asking to learn: under what law?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441
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There are also provisions in the UCMJ that are applicable to members of the military
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(I also had a consequential typo in my earlier post, which I've now edited. I originally wrote they "carry the death penalty", but I meant to write "they can carry the death penalty", and it depends on the specific circumstances of the war crimes committed.)
Hmm. Filing this away for 2028 or 2032.
[1] ¶ (d)(1)(D)
This is very relevant to the second strike on the Venezuelan boat. I think the original strikes are also war crimes, but the second strike on the shipwrecked survivors is like… beyond all doubt a murder
Remember when we bombed Yemen and in the Signal chat they laughed about killing a High-Value Target while he was visiting his girlfriend? Sounds like this section would apply for her.
The US previously never faced real pressure on this, a new administration would see it as an easy win.
The U.S. is not a signatory. (Most of the world's population isn't subject to ICC jurisdiction [1].)
> All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again
Nobody is treating the ICC seriously [2].
To be clear, this sucks. But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/world/middleeast/france-n...
Being a signatory is not required for being subject to ICC jurisdiction, though it is one route to being subject to it, and, in any case, not being a signatory is not an immutable condition. So the upthread suggestion that “All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again” is not rebutted by observing that the US is not currently a signatory of the Rome Statute.
> But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).
No, the US despite rhetorically appealing to it when other countries are involved, has led, not followed, in rejecting the rules-based order when it comes to its own conduct.
Please let me know what was the established precedent for allowing extrajudicial assassination of American citizens is.
Edit add:
He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
A 16-year-old American boy accused of no crimes was killed in American drone attack
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a14796/abdulrahma...
So please, I would love to see the precedent.
Securing indictments and going to trial is an instance of actually trying. So you really can’t say they didn’t try, because that is factually false. It’s true they could have done more, but they didn’t do nothing as others are saying.
One thing about prosecuting a former POTUS for the first time is it has to survive the test of time. You can't behave like them if you want the prosecution to be legitimate, because they are lawless. But it was the failure of voters to do their due diligence to not elect a felon who bear the ultimate blame, as they are the final check. Now we bear the consequences. But again, not for lack of trying.
And in the 21st century? not so much. It is a different world now.
Europe is powerful but the Royal Navy couldn't go today to Hong Kong and seize control of it for example.
And military power influences diplomacy.
Negatively. That has always been the problem of the US, it's the reason why they cannot act like the most of the rest of the world. The military has way too much influence on decision making.
And things work like this at every level in every organization. For example people in your line of reporting at work can veto any decision you make unless you are protected by law, which is an entity that can shut down your company by force.
Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.
Americans voted for a man who promised no foreign wars and, in his first term, was relatively peaceful [1].
[1][ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_first_Tr...
Except Mexico (https://www.vox.com/policy/363146/trump-policy-war-mexico-tr...) and Iran (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4898919-trump-iran-smi...).
But America's armed populace and the stalwart vigilance of its militias are supposed to make that impossible.
Americans were more up in arms (literal and figurative) over Obamacare and Covid lockdowns than anything Trump has done, domestically or abroad. The only rational conclusion is that they're either complicit or else they simply don't care.
Those who could effectively field a real protest or uprising are either too busy trying to keep their credit cards from defaulting, or are living on the streets addicted to drugs. General strikes? Forget it, America doesn’t have the infrastructure in place (local food sources) to sustain such a thing…
The right got Jan. 6th and the left got Portland, so resistance is possible on both sides. In any country that took things half as seriously as the US claims to, Washington DC would look like a war zone. But what are we doing? Twerking in front of ICE in frog costumes?
Once again, the people who are broadly approving of violence as a way to solve problems, and who actually have the guns, are largely supportive of what ICE is doing. Many of them are quite literally itching to pull the trigger on some libs. I've been in the middle of that crowd and seen it all close up. Those people are not the potential solution - they are a part of the problem.
Countries with oppressive regimes see revolutions if the population gets discontent enough that a strong majority wants it, or is at least willing to go along with it. That is certainly not true of US right now.
In general international law is much more lenient than people are willing to believe. e.g. it's legal to kill civilians if you are attacking a military target which is important enough
Hegseth allegedly double tapping survivors is almost certainly against the Geneva Conventions [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-stri...
So I don't think double tapping is a war crime, any more than bombing a car with terrorists in the first place and that doesn't seem to be regarded internationally as a war crime. However, they could have done better to highlight Venezuela actual involvement with terrorism (which is real but not enough for this) rather than magically declare them terrorists just to not go through Congress
Regarding double tapping, that's exactly the modus operandi of assassinations, as the UAVs goal is not the car/ship but the people inside.
That said, the Venezuelan case is a huge overreach
That's not to say that I would in any way support extrajudicial killings, in many cases the high civilian/bystander casualties have been completely unsupportable. I just wanted to point out the stark difference between "normal" extrajudicial killings and these murders.
There are some credible war crimes accusations (in fact, some pretty flagrant war crimes), but the most critical crime is actually not a war crime, but one precedent to their being a war at all, the crime of aggression.
Rudolph Hess, notably, was convicted and imprisoned for life solely for this crime.
And in many cases western societies tend to express the idea that inn other, dictatorship countries, people sort of "let the dictators dictate", while "westerners" not.
But I think this current case (and Trump's presidency at large) is an example of how little we can decide or influence. Even in the supposed "democracy".
I wish to believe that voting matters, but Trump showed that you can make people vote for anything if you put massive upfront effort into managing information/missinformation and controlling the minds through populism, etc. Then voting becomes... Powerless. As it has no objective judgement.
And despite possible disagreements some might voice - revolutions don't happen anymore. People can't anymore fight the leaders as leaders hold a monopoly on violence through making sure the army is with them.
Well... We as people lost and losing the means to "control" our leaders. Westerners, easterners - doesn't matter.
So now the question is how to do you capture this leadership without foreign intervention while they are still in power?
Talk is nice... but there is no real mechanism to impose what you are proposing besides this.
External or internal (which seems rarely feasible unless the government is highly incompetent) regime change realistically is the only thing that worked.
What do the Venezuelans actually think about this, given that Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?
Thats probably true, but trump also tried to rig an election, so its not really up to him to unilaterally decide is it? Especially as hes bumchums with putin who shocker, rigs election, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people invading other countries.
> had the USA stayed in South Korea
Korea was a UN action, not US unilateral. but alos hugely costly in everyone's lives
"Chavez was elected to a third term in October 2012. However, he was never sworn in due to medical complications; he died in March 2013.[95] Nicolás Maduro was picked by Chavez as his successor, appointing him vice president in 2013."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela#Bolivarian_governmen...
MAGA is a rejection of the international rules-based order. Trump joins Putin and Xi in explicitly rejecting it. To the extent anyone in America is calling for a return to that order, they're doing it while criticising Trump.
This feels so foreign: since Suez the UK government has been backing the US and giving them the fig leaf of international legitimacy in their actions.
Genuine request for a source here.
(They said law and order, because they couldn't say anti black)
Law and order != rules-based international order.
Anybody who wants a rules based order is extremely anti-Trump, just as they are anti-Putin.
In this case probably attitude is probably similar
Your comment is just bigotry.