Rules-Based Order: Terms and Conditions Apply
Plausible Genocide with a White House Welcome Mat
There is an arrest warrant with Netanyahu’s name on it. He flew to Washington anyway. Nobody blinked. Elon’s Grok confirmed on X:
The International Criminal Court issued its warrant in November 2024. The charge: war crimes and crimes against humanity. The rule, as stated plainly by international law, is that any signatory state receiving Netanyahu must arrest him. As reported by Simon Dixon:“by international law, if Netanyahu lands in your country, he is immediately meant to be arrested.” It continues: “he could only route via countries that were just ignoring international law like America.”
America is not an ICC member state, technically. But Britain is. Germany is. France is. Every NATO country that lectures the Global South about the rules-based order: signed, ratified, bound. And not one of them moved.
Let me be precise about what happened, because the word “hypocrisy” is too soft for this.
Frame-control first. There are two things called “international law.”
The first is international law (for you): the legal architecture that governs what smaller, poorer, and darker nations can do with their militaries, their resources, and their heads of state. This version has teeth, enforcement mechanisms, and tribunals that sit in The Hague and issue warrants with deadlines.
The second is international law (for us): a set of aspirational statements that Western powers invoke at press conferences and abandon the moment compliance becomes inconvenient. This version has no teeth, only rhetoric.
The confusion between these two things has cost millions of lives. It has also cost Africa specifically, and I am not speaking loosely.
The receipts on the ICC’s African record are not subtle.
Between 2002 and 2023, the ICC issued indictments against 45 individuals. Of those, approximately 33 were African. One hundred percent of the cases that actually went to trial in the ICC’s first decade involved African defendants. The prosecutor’s office spent its formative years building cases in Uganda, DRC, Sudan, Kenya, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Mali, Burundi.
Omar al-Bashir President of Sudan, indicted in 2009 for genocide in Darfur, spent a decade rerouting his flight paths, cancelling trips, watching which African Union summits he could attend and which states had quietly agreed to honor the warrant. Malawi blocked him in 2011. South Africa’s government nearly arrested him in 2015 before its own courts intervened. The man lived under a cloud of international legal exposure for eleven years.
Charles Taylor former President of Liberia, convicted in 2012 for war crimes in Sierra Leone, is currently serving a 50-year sentence in a British prison. The Special Court for Sierra Leone, backed by the UN and Western donors, pursued him with resources, political will, and international media backing.
These are the same institutions now watching Netanyahu fly to Washington.
Do not let anyone tell you this is about individual cases. It is about the gravitational field of enforcement, who it pulls toward, and who it leaves alone.
South Africa changed the architecture. Slightly.
In December 2023, South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice not the ICC, but the ICJ, the UN’s principal judicial organ, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. As reported: “South Africa actually launched a case and put forward all of the incredibly genocidal quotes that Netanyahu, various other senior ministers were effectively calling for a genocide.”
The ICJ issued provisional measures in January 2024, ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts and preserve evidence. This is the closest the international system has come to naming what is happening in Gaza with legal precision.
This is not nothing. South Africa used a Western-designed institution, paid for partly by Western contributions, against a Western-backed state. It was a judo move, use the enemy’s weight against him. And it worked, procedurally. The ICJ’s provisional ruling stands. The genocide case continues.
But here is the part the liberal/mainstream press skipped: provisional measures are not injunctions. The court cannot enforce them. There is no marshal’s office. There is no air support. There is no mechanism by which the ICJ’s January 2024 order translated into anything Israel was required to stop doing on January 27, 2024.
The ruling was real. The compliance was optional.
Iran did it right. That’s what makes it worse.
Simon Dixon makes a point that deserves to sit in the room longer than it does: “Iran during the first retaliation to Israel strikes, they went to United Nations, they filed article six. You’re meant to do a formal declaration of war, you’re meant to describe your actions. And Iran did that, but Israel and America and Britain and Germany, none of them have followed international law. In fact, they’ve torn it up.”
Iran, a country under maximum sanctions, locked out of SWIFT, its currency repeatedly targeted, its scientists assassinated by Mossad operations on its own soil filed the proper paperwork before retaliating. The Islamic Republic, which we are told is a rogue state run by apocalyptic clerics, notified the United Nations through proper channels before launching its April 2024 drone and missile response to an Israeli airstrike on its Damascus consulate.
Meanwhile: the countries that wrote those channels, funded those institutions, staffed those secretariats, did not notify anyone of anything when they shot down Iranian drones over Jordan and Iraq alongside Israel. Britain sent RAF jets. America repositioned carrier groups. Germany publicly supported the defense operation.
No Article 6. No notification. No procedure.
This is not inconsistency. This is the system functioning exactly as designed. The rules were written for the colonized to follow. They were never meant to bind the colonizers.
Nigeria knows this. The continent knows this.
In 2023, after the coup in Niger, ECOWAS threatened military intervention with language directly drawn from the AU’s “responsibility to protect” framework: the same legal architecture the West invokes for Libya, Iraq, and Kosovo. Nigeria under Tinubu was the enforcement threat. The rhetoric was: international norms, democratic backsliding, rule of law.
Meanwhile: in the same period, the United States maintained military bases in Niger, ignored the coup for weeks before grudgingly calling it what it was, and eventually negotiated its own base access separately while ECOWAS deliberated.
The pattern is not that international law doesn’t exist. It is that it exists on a sliding scale calibrated by strategic value. Niger is not strategically valuable enough to excuse. Gaza is.
When the African Union pushed the ICC in 2016 with Burundi, South Africa, and Gambia formally initiating withdrawal, the Western press called it an attack on accountability. What it was, was a diagnosis. Thirty-three African indictments out of forty-five total is not impartiality. It is a pattern. And a pattern, as any prosecutor knows, is evidence of intent.
The ICC warrant still exists. Nobody served it. He continues warring looking for blood.
Since Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, Netanyahu has visited the US 6 times, including the current Feb. 2026 trip. He met with Trump. He attended joint press conferences. Photographs were taken. No State Department lawyer resigned in protest. No congressional resolution was introduced. No question was asked at the White House briefing that received a direct answer.
The warrant, as of this writing, is still active. The court did not withdraw it. The charges did not disappear. The evidence: satellite imagery, testimony, forensic reports, the quotes of Israeli ministers invoking Amalek. Even today:
What this tells you is not that international law is broken. It tells you international law was never the load-bearing wall. It was the wallpaper.
The load-bearing wall is veto power. The load-bearing wall is SWIFT access. The load-bearing wall is carrier groups and air bases and the petrodollar system and who controls the cables under the oceans.
Here is the question I’m sitting with:
When the next African president, and there will be a next one, is indicted by the ICC for conduct materially indistinguishable from what is currently being documented in Gaza, what will the majority say? Will they remember this two tiered justice or revert to racist dogmas?
More importantly: what will African Union say? Or what will the ICC expect them to say?
The warrant is still active. Watch who serves it, and who doesn’t. That gap is the actual map of power in the world.
Share this essay. Not because it's satisfying or correct but because the warrant is still active, and somebody should be talking about it. Forward it to the person in your timeline who still believes the rules-based order applies equally.
"What this tells you is not that international law is broken. It tells you international law was never the load-bearing wall. It was the wallpaper. The load-bearing wall is veto power. The load-bearing wall is SWIFT access. The load-bearing wall is carrier groups and air bases and the petrodollar system and who controls the cables under the oceans."
Brilliant as always, Ope. The cables under the oceans were a complete surprise to me, when I researched them for my chapter on Libya. Were those charged by the ICC the ones USrael had set up as terrorist thugs who were no longer useful, or those like Gbagbo who were never meant to be in power, according to them?