Today brought the startling news that Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda has presented himself to the U.S. embassy in Kigali and asked to be transferred to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ntaganda has been a leader of the M23 rebel movement in eastern Congo, which has reportedly enjoyed support from the Rwandan government (although Rwanda has vehemently denied this). The ICC issued a sealed arrest warrant for him in January 2006. Two years later, the court made the arrest warrant public.

To this point, Ntaganda has mostly lived openly in eastern Congo, where the Congolese government lacked the wherewithal and inclination to challenge him directly. His fortunes began to change recently, however, as the M23 militia movement clashed directly with government forces -- and then apparently splintered from within. The Rwandan government first reported the news that Ntaganda had made his way to Kigali and presented himself to the U.S. embassy.

Neither Rwanda nor the United States is an ICC member and neither has a legal obligation to effect the warlord's transfer. U.S. law limits official cooperation with the court and prohibits the provision of funds to the court. The law -- the American Service-members' Protection Act -- also prohibits the U.S. government from transferring any Americans to the court, but there is no explicit prohibition on U.S. involvement in transferring non-U.S. citizens.

That legislation notwithstanding, the U.S. approach to the court  has been gradually evolving from the outright hostility on display during the Bush  administration's first term. In 2005, the United States allowed a Security Council referral of Darfur to the ICC. Shortly after it took office, the Obama administration began attending annual meetings of ICC members. In 2011, it voted affirmatively to refer the Libya case to the court.

To this point, however, the United States has not been directly involved (at least publicly) in the transfer of indictees to the ICC. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland reported today that the United States "strongly supports" the ICC investigation in Congo and is seeking to facilitate Ntaganda's transfer to the Hague. Whether the United States will seek to involve another government as an intermediary and whether the Rwandan authorities will cooperate with the transfer remains to be seen.

British prime minister David Cameron will deliver a major speech on the country's relationship with the European Union this Friday. Via Reuters:

"He sees it as important to set out his view about it being in the British national interest to remain in the European Union, though (with) a changed relationship," the spokesman said.

Cameron has repeatedly said he wants Britain to remain in the EU but has made it clear he intends to try to repatriate a wide range of powers from the bloc in policy areas where his ruling Conservative party believes Brussels' influence has become overbearing and pernicious.

The government's current strategy is to seek reform in the relationship with the EU (including, likely, the repatriation of some powers) and then subject the new relationship to a referendum, likely in 2017 or 2018. That approach has led certain European leaders to  charge that Britain is "blackmailing" other EU members by holding out the implicit threat of withdrawal.

Others, including the Obama administration, are concerned that by opening fundamental questions about the relationship British leaders may be unleashing a process they cannot control. Anders Aslund argues that Britain is perilously close to a catastrophic decision:

If the United Kingdom were to have a referendum on its relationship with the European Union and actually depart, it would lose most of its relevance in Europe and with the outside world, notably the United States.

With its departure from the European Union, the United Kingdom would more specifically lose all its influence with the European Union. It would decline to the kind of dependence and high costs of financial contributions that Switzerland and Norway face. Little wonder, that the elites of those two countries want their nations to join the European Union.

A British exit could only be understood as a stab in the back to the European project, so the United Kingdom should not expect any sympathy. Such alienation would in all probability lead to the United Kingdom suffering worse conditions than Switzerland and Norway.  A departing United Kingdom cannot take its access to the much-appreciated single European market as granted.

Less commented upon has been the danger that Cameron's strategy poses to the sovereigntist bloc in British politics. If the renegotiation-and-referendum strategy succeeds, the prime minister will have dealt a strong, and perhaps lethal blow to the Euroskeptic wing of his own party.

I have a piece on the FP mainpage arguing that the steady accretion of global influence by key Non-Aligned Movement players poses a long-term challenge for the movement. How long will coming powers like India and Indonesia find the NAM identity useful?  This post at the Wall Street Journal's IndiaRealTime blog makes clear that the Tehran summit has created some headaches for Indian diplomats:

The Prime Minister’s trip has placed New Delhi’s ties with Tehran under fresh scrutiny. On Wednesday, Mr. Singh is set to meet the Islamic Republic’s top rulers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the first meetings of this level since 2001.

Mr. Singh is expected to try to advance India’s energy and security interests by developing closer ties, but doing so without making the U.S. uncomfortable will be a challenge.

“India is not going to abandon Iran just because the U.S. wants it to,” says C. Raja Mohan, a fellow at New Delhi’s Observer Research Foundation. “But it doesn’t mean it will pick a fight with the U.S. either.”

Former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal argues here that, on balance, the NAM still serves Indian interests:

While extracting whatever is possible from it, India should treat its NAM membership as merely one component of its international positioning. While being clear sighted about NAM's limitations, for India it is nonetheless diplomatically useful to mobilise the movement to counter onesided, inequitable western prescriptions on key issues of trade, development, intellectual property rights, technology, environment, climate change, energy etc, and build pressure for consensus solutions.

Iran is trying its hand at ad hoc multilateralism on the Syria crisis. More than a dozen countries will be participating in a conference today in Tehran. Via Reuters:

At least 12 nations with "a correct and realistic position" would attend a meeting on Thursday in Tehran to discuss the conflict, a senior Iranian diplomat said this week, indicating that no nation that backs the opposition and calls for Assad to leave power would be present.

Russia - which along with Iran has strongly supported Assad since the crisis erupted 17 months ago - has said it will attend the meeting at ambassadorial level but it was unclear which other key players would be present.

Iranian media has reported that China would also be present, along with Algeria, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Pakistan, India and six members of the Arab League but there was no independent confirmation.

Kishore Mahbubani argues that China achieved a tactical victory but a strategic defeat when ASEAN ministers splintered badly earlier this month over what to say on the South China Sea:

For the first time in 45 years, the Asean Ministerial Meeting (AMM) failed to agree to a joint communique, ostensibly because Asean's current chair, Cambodia, did not want the communique to refer to bilateral disputes in the South China Sea. But the whole world, including most Asean countries, perceived Cambodia's stance as the result of enormous Chinese pressure.

China's victory proved to be Pyrrhic. It won the battle of the comminique, but it may have lost 20 years of painstakingly accumulated goodwill, the result of efforts such as the Asean-China free-trade agreement, signed in November 2002. More importantly, China's previous leaders had calculated that a strong and unified Asean provided a valuable buffer against any possible US containment strategy. Now, by dividing Asean, China has provided America with its best possible geopolitical opportunity in the region. If Deng Xiaoping were alive, he would be deeply concerned.

For a similar argument from the Lowy Institute's Graeme Dobell see here:

China overplayed its power to get a short-term diplomatic win in Phnom Penh; very short term. The cost of Beijing's 'win' was to galvanise ASEAN to a point of such anger that it tore up the final communiqué altogether. A bland document with the usual ASEAN-speak about ongoing dialogue would have been the usual ASEAN response. Instead, ASEAN is confronting its own purposes in a way that must have astounded Beijing even as much as it is surprising ASEAN itself.

What happened in Phnom Penh was a sign of how high the stakes have become. The diplomatic struggle reflects the power interests in play. A China that pushes so hard to win the communiqué argument is just as likely to overplay its naval strategy.

Bangladesh's government is engaged in an increasingly tough war of words with the World Bank. Last month, the lender cancelled funding for a high-profile bridge project, citing evidence of high-level corruption. The Bangladeshi authorities have chosen not to take the rebuke quietly. Via today's Guardian:

Ministers have sought to contain the damage from the highly embarrassing accusations of corruption made by the World Bank, portraying the row with the lender as a matter of "national honour", and calling on the World Bank not to punish the people of Bangladesh.

In a speech in parliament on 8 July, [Prime Minister] Hasina appealed to nationalist sentiment by invoking memories of the 1971 war of liberation. "They want us to beg. They want us to continue as guinea pigs," she said. "We will go ahead with this project using our own resources."

Hasina's government has laid out ambitious plans to mobilise resources, including levying surcharges and issuing sovereign bonds worth at least $750m (£480m). The prime minister said she had already told different ministries to slash development projects and divert the money to fund the $2.9bn Padma multipurpose bridge – a key election pledge.

As the article points out, this strategy carries risks for the government. External lenders  could be available, but they would likely charge much more than the Bank. If it diverts its own scarce resources away from other projects, the government may face domestic consequences.

The confrontation could be consequential for the Bank as well, which has ramped up its efforts to combat corruption in recent years. Bangladesh is no bit player for the institution;  last year, it was the largest recipient of loans through the Bank's International Development Association, dedicated to lending to low-income countries. If Bangladesh is able to finance the project without Bank support, that may create an important precedent for other low-income borrowers, many of whom chafe at the Bank's instrusive conditions and monitoring.

The dust from the May 2011 U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden has long since settled. Bin Laden is dead and buried, the Pakistani authorities have razed the compound where he lived, and the troubled U.S. relationship with Pakistan limps along. In the legal academy, however, the raid remains a hot topic; the debate on the legality of the operation is just hitting its stride.

That debate has several distinct but overlapping elements, including whether a state of war exists (or even can exist) between the United States and  al Qaeda; to what extent the "zone of conflict" in Afghanistan extends into Pakistan; whether Bin Laden himself was a "combatant"; and whether U.S. special forces should have attempted to capture bin Laden. To my mind, the most interesting question is whether the raid violated Pakistan's sovereignty and, in so doing, the UN Charter's restrictions on the use of force. That issue is a subset of a broader question that is critical to military operations against transnational groups: when do you need the consent of a state to conduct operations on its territory? 

Several recent articles offer new perspective on that question. Writing in the Israel Law Review, German legal scholars Kai Ambos and Josef Alkatout remind readers that nothing in existing UN Security Council resolutions on terrorism explicitly allows for cross-border raids without the permission of the territorial state: "Quite the contrary, the relevant-antiterrorism resolutions...confirm the need for  respect of the integrity of the territorial state concerned." Given this, they are skeptical that bin Laden's presence created a threat immediate enough to trigger the U.S. right to self defense and allow a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty. Meagan Wong, writing in the Chinese Journal of International Law, mostly concurs:

As a general rule, prior consent from the territorial State should be a prerequisite to the use of extraterritorial force on its territory. In the light of these circumstances, a limited exception to this general rule may be allowed when there is an immediate necessity to use force to either halt or repel an armed attack. It goes without saying that the use of force can only be directed against the non-State actor and its military objective and not the territory of the State.

Responding to Ambos and Alkatout, David A. Wallace insists that the Pakistani government's incapacity or unwillingness to deal with terrorists on its soil rendered the operation perfectly legal: "the raid into bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad did not violate Pakistan’s sovereignty because Pakistan was unable or unwilling to prevent bin Laden from hiding in its territory and planning future attacks against the United States." But Wallace's analysis begs the question of how governments should assess unwillingness or inability. For a fuller elaboration of what that standard might mean, see this article by Ashley Deeks.

The Obama administration has made reengagement with the UN's human rights infrastructure one of its signature accomplishments in the multilateral realm. In 2009, the U.S. campaigned for and won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, a body that the Bush administration had spurned. Active U.S. diplomacy on the Council has helped produce a number of notable accomplishments, including condemnation of abuses by Iran, Libya, and Syria. As former State Department official Suzanne Nossel wrote recently:

Due in significant part to vigorous, determined efforts by the United States, the Human Rights Council demonstrates a newfound credibility as a human rights watchdog. The story of how the United States and others turned around the Human Rights Council since joining the body in 2009 offers a case study on effective tactics for achieving U.S. policy goals through multilateral diplomacy and advancing human rights norms at the United Nations.

The United States has laid special emphasis on the Council's use of special experts, individuals given a mandate to investigate some particular country or human rights theme. The U.S. fought successfully for the appointment of a special rapporteur for Iran and has urged states to cooperate fully with these and other experts. As a 2010 report by the Brookings Institution emphasized, these experts are highly dependent on cooperation from involved states: "Lack of state cooperation...represents the chief obstacle to their work. Failure to accept requests to visit, to respond to allegations and to follow up on their recommendations as well as hostile attacks on their work are the most glaring and widespread areas needing attention."

So how does the United States react when the council's experts want to scrutinize its  behavior? In many cases, the U.S. record is positive. James Ayana, the Council's expert for indigenous issues, reported excellent cooperation from the administration. "I met with every agency and department with which I asked to meet in the administration," he told National Public Radio (Ayana did indicate however that he got little response from Capitol Hill).

Ted Piccone, author of the Brookings study, characterizes the United States as a "middling performer" in engaging with UN experts. A large number of rapporteurs have visited the United States and met with U.S. officials, but the U.S. government has not issued the kind of standing invitation that many other Western countries have. What's more, the United States often lags badly in responding to written requests from UN experts. "A lot of rapporteurs get no responses or get very insubstantial ones," he says.   

Unsurprisingly, U.S. cooperation is least fulsome when UN experts request information about sensitive areas of national security and counterterrorism policy. The Human Rights Council's point person on extrajudicial killings recently expressed frustration with what he argues is a policy of evasion regarding U.S. targeted killings:

Christof Heyns, the U.N.'s independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, had asked the United States to lay out the legal basis and accountability procedures for the use of armed drones. He also wanted the U.S. to publish figures on the number of civilians killed in drone strikes against suspected terror leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.

After a two-day "interactive dialogue" with U.S. officials at the United Nations in Geneva, Heyns said he was still waiting for a satisfactory reply.

"I don't think we have the full answer to the legal framework, we certainly don't have the answer to the accountability issues," he told reporters on the sidelines of a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting.

Heyns' predecessor, Philip Alston, was also displeased by the limited detail and exceedingly vague legal justifications U.S. officials offered regarding its drone campaign (U.S. officials issued a statement yesterday regarding the UN's inquiries here). Other UN experts have encountered similar obstacles. According to Piccone, a group of special rapporteurs that sought to visit Guantanamo Bay prisoners during the Bush administration were presented with a list of conditions they could not accept. More recently, the UN's rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, was repeatedly frustrated by the government's unwillingness to let him meet privately with the accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning. Mendez was investigating whether holding Manning in solitary confinement for an extended period constituted torture.  

The mixed U.S. record, particularly on sensitive national security matters, creates a potentially significant problem of double standards. After all, the issues the United States wants other countries to address tend to be their own most sensitive points, often going directly to national security and regime survival. Helping to reinvigorate the UN's human rights machinery has been positive in many respects. But it also invites some uncomfortable questions about how seriously the United States takes the system it's touting.     

Last week, I wrote about Russia's prodding of the International Criminal Court to investigate any NATO war crimes in Libya. In that post, I argued that the UN Security Council resolution referring the Libya situation to the court precluded prosecutions of non-ICC member state nations. Not so fast, says Kevin Jon Heller, writing at Opinion Juris. He argues that the Security Council can't refer only part of a situation to the court:  "Paragraph 6 of Res. 1970 might have made non-member NATO states feel better about the ICC referral, but it does not prohibit the ICC from prosecuting their nationals."

Heller and I agree that any prosecution of NATO forces is extremely unlikely,and the question of ICC jurisdiction will almost certainly remain an academic one. But it's an academic question that gets at an important dynamic: the relationship between the ICC and powerful states. Mark Kersten offers a great take on that here:

A wider issue, alluded to by Heller, Bosco and others, remains the relationship between the UN Security Council powers as the dispensers of ICC jurisdiction via referrals and the ICC as the guardians of the Rome Statute. The Libyan referral...was tailored to the political interests of the most powerful states on the Security Council. Not only did Operative Paragraph 6 seek to exclude citizens of non-state parties from the ICC’s jurisdiction, the Council also restricted the Court’s temporal jurisdiction to crimes committed after February 15, 2011, in contradiction to the Rome Statute which gives the Court jurisdiction back to July 1, 2002. But if  these restrictions on the ICC contradict and contravene the Court’s legal mandate, has the OTP made an issue of it? The answer is no.

The OTP has remained completely silent on both the imposed restrictions on who can be investigated and prosecuted and the time period when the ICC can investigate. This silence falls precariously close to re-affirming the view that the infusion of political interests into international criminal justice will be unchallenged at best, eagerly accepted at worst.

One of the more notable trends in South Korea's recent foreign policy has been an embrace of multilateral institutions, both at the regional and global level. When Seoul hosted the G20 summit in 2010, the government spared no effort to highlight South Korea's global role, and particularly its potential to serve as a bridge between the developing and developed worlds. There were even reports that the Korean government was keen to host a permanent G20 secretariat. Seoul's embrace of international summitry has continued.  In March, the country hosted the Nuclear Security Summit, which brought together more than fifty countries.

Seoul's enthusiasm for multilateral diplomacy is being reciprocated. Quietly, South Korean nationals are collecting an impressive set of multilateral posts. Most notable of course is Ban Ki-moon, former Korean foreign minister, who was elected to his second term as UN Secretary-General last year. But Korea also boasts the president of the International Criminal Court, Sang-Hyun Song. The next World Bank president, Jim Kim, is American of course, but he was born in South Korea and lived there as a child. Kim was not shy about highlighting that fact as he sought global support for his candidacy.

The South Korean winning streak continues. Just a few days ago, the World Trade Organization named a new member of its powerful Appellate Body, which has final say on trade disputes. He is Chang Seung-wha, a trade expert from Seoul National University.  

In today's New York Times, David Gordon and Douglas Rediker (who was, until recently, one of the U.S. representatives to the Fund) worry that the Euro crisis is undermining the independence of the International Monetary Fund. Because the IMF has played second fiddle in bailouts orchestrated by Europe, they see a danger that the Fund is subordinating its analysis functions to elements of the EU: 

Moving forward, the I.M.F. must loosen its partnership with the commission and the E.C.B. While coordination remains critical, the I.M.F. should make clear that on financial matters, it remains in sole command of how its resources will be deployed.

In particular, the fund must present its financial analysis separately from any key political deals that might be struck by other troika members, allowing markets to assess the underlying assumptions. Only then will I.M.F. programs lend market players the confidence to re-engage with those countries that desperately need private capital. Maintaining credibility will also reassure the fund’s shareholders that I.M.F. resources are being deployed in a manner consistent with the organization’s mandate as a global financial truth-teller.

If the I.M.F. is involved, it needs to be on its own, and not anyone else’s, terms. Ignoring that truth will have dire consequences for global finance, and bolstering the fund’s resources this week won’t change that.

The trick, of course, is that Europe is heavily represented on the IMF board and led by a former European finance minister. It is of course reasonable to demand that senior IMF officials and staff, whatever their state of origin, act in the best interests of the institution and the international financial system more broadly. But it makes little sense to ask European board members (appointed by European states) to analyze potential loan packages without reference to the broader strategy of their governments. What's missing from the piece is an acknowledgement that the IMF is in very important respects an intergovernmental organization, and that European governments are key players. 

I also think Gordon and Rediker greatly overestimate market confidence in the IMF. They cite the African overlending of the 1990s and the current Euro crisis as unfortunate departures from an otherwise strong record of independent analysis. But in fact there's very strong evidence in a much broader array of cases that IMF analysis and lending practices have been influenced by political considerations. Randall Stone, in particular, has done great work documenting how the United States has often intervened informally to loosen IMF conditionalty for key allies and strategic partners. Nor does the IMF have a strong recent track record of independent analysis. The Fund failed completely to sniff out the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and an internal evaluation determined that a variety of cognitive biases may have played a role.

In short, it's hard to imagine that the Eurozone lending packages are teaching the markets anything new about the Fund's shortcomings.

Today's Guardian features a good examination of the broad legal arguments surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Like a post I wrote several weeks ago on the subject, it pits the views of legal scholars like Anthony D'amato against the more conventional interpretations of what uses of force are permissible.

But that article and my own posts have focused entirely on international law addressing the resort to force (questions governed by the UN Charter and by customary law regarding self-defense and aggression). Almost all writing that I've seen on the subject has omitted a different but potentially important legal question: whether striking a nuclear facility can be legal under the rules that govern how conflicts are fought. Reza Nasri, a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, sent me some interesting thoughts on the matter:

Under [international humanitarian law], not only are these [nuclear] facilities considered civil objects by nature and purpose, but they also fall under a particular category of specifically protected objects.  This is what Article 56 of Additional Protocol I expressly provides in this regard: “Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population”.

This means that under the laws of warfare, the humanitarian cost of attacking such hazardous installations is deemed to be so high that no military considerations will likely justify their targeting. In fact, some authors even argue that attacking nuclear installations should be subject to an absolute prohibition just as the use of chemical and a biological weapons is, no matter what “military advantage” their destruction could confer to the assailant.

The provision that Nasri cites is not included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but the Rome Statute does include a provision that makes illegal:

Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.

Of course neither Israel nor Iran are members of the ICC, and so the question is academic for the moment. But it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that Iran might, in advance of a strike, take a page out of the Palestinian playbook and submit a declaration giving the ICC jurisdiction over its territory. Doing so would, at the very least, create some headaches for Israeli legal advisors.

More: Martin Holterman, a researcher at the European University Institute, offers this reaction:

Given the politics of the matter, Israeli lawyers wouldn't need a "guaranteed-win" argument. Instead, all they need is an argument that is plausible enough to convince people who are already on their side and everyone who is more or less neutral. In order to do that, all they have to do is prove (in the court of public opinion) that the attack is not “clearly excessive”....What we’re comparing is the loss of life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects on the one hand, and that only insofar as it was foreseeable, and the advantage of not being nuked by Iran on the other hand. Now obviously the latter is to be discounted by the fact that an Iranian nuclear attack is by no means a certainty, but still. (I’m ignoring the “natural environment” thing because, well, come on…) Let’s put a number on it: Unless the Israeli attack gets hundreds or thousands of civilians killed, they’ll be OK in the court of public opinion, and therefore also in the actual Court in The Hague. 

In today's Washington Post, Fred Hiatt accuses the president of being soft on freedom. As he tells the story, the Arab Spring has been a historic opportunity that the White House has mostly fumbled; successes--Libya notably--have mostly been at the insistence of others. This argument is a familiar one and has been well debated. What interests me most is Hiatt's explanation for the absence of presidential passion. It's not because the president is a realist, says Hiatt, it's because he's a multilateralist:

[Obama's] stance also reflects his own brand of idealism, which values international law and alliances more than the promotion of freedom. The democrats’ uprising in Iran threatened his hopes of negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran’s rulers. Aid to Syria’s democrats requires approval from the U.N. Security Council, which is unattainable without Russian and Chinese acquiescence.

His instincts might have been predicted from the 2007 article, which was contemptuous of the “conventional thinking” of the Bush administration that viewed problems as “state-based.” Obama promised to “rebuild the alliances, partnerships and institutions necessary to confront common threats.”

Hiatt doesn't make the case all that persuasively.  But his analysis is a good reminder of a fundamental difference between the neoconservative worldview and the liberal interventionist one: the role of international institutions and law. Those of a neoconservative persuasion aren't much interested in global architecture; they're intent on achieving liberal, democratic governance at the national level whenever and wherever possible. Indeed, they believe that consensus-based international organizations and procedures tend to obstruct that enterprise as often as facilitate it.  Liberal interventionists share the desire to spread freedom and the conviction that outsiders can help do so, but they also care deeply about building international architecture (almost always) and respecting international rules (usually).

There appear to be two principal differences at work. First, the two camps likely disagree over the extent to which international organizations and rules are an obstacle to maximizing freedom. Neoconservatives seem to have burned in their collective image of the United Nations the spectacle of dictators, despots, and fellow travelers employing their voting weight to protect their own and attack actual democracies. Liberals, as is their wont, acknowledge the problems but see progress and growth. A key recent example would the work of the UN Human Rights Council. Neoconservatives remain highly dismissive of the body while mainstream liberal interventionists have hailed its moves on Syria, Libya, and a host of other issues.  

Second, and this is even more speculative, neoconservatives and liberal interventionists may part ways on the importance of global architecture once freedom has been maximized and despotic regimes ousted. In the neoconservative worldview, it often seems that collective action problems other than getting rid of despotism either do not exist or are so insignificant that they do not merit the kind of international architecture that liberals cherish (or perhaps they believe that we should contemplate new forms of global governance only once the overwhelming majority of states are liberal democracies). To liberals, by contrast, it is self evident that more advanced global governance is necessary not just to promote democracy but to deal with a host of other shared governance issues. This assumption is so hard wired in liberal thinking that the development of international organization often appears to be an end in itself.

More: Over at Andrew Sullivan's place, Zach Beauchamp argues that an even more salient difference between the camps is confidence in the efficacy of military force:

While both liberals and neoconservatives are often supportive of military interventions, the former group doesn't require a belief in the general efficacy of military force as a condition of entry.

Liberals often differ sharply about, for example, humanitarian intervention: it's entirely coherent to self-describe as both a foreign policy liberal and believe that humanitarian intervention usually does more harm than good. Neoconservatism, by contrast, makes a belief in the morality and efficacy of preventative wars against rogue states (Iraq, Iran), nation-building endeavors (Afghanistan post-2009), and overwhelming US military dominance more broadly into bedrock principles. While liberals might endorse any or all of those three, it's not at all required by liberal commitments that they do so.

Even more: A reader offers this smart take:

Liberal Interventionists care about international legitimacy, but they also care about going to war for humanitarian reasons.  When the two come into conflict, the liberal interventionist comes up with some fig-leaf of legitimacy--a UN Resolution twisted behind recognition, a NATO sanction, an Arab League invitation--that serves as a green light to go to war. 

The neoconservative sees the US as moral authority enough, pausing for international sanction only as a coalition-building tool, either domestically (securing votes in Congress) or to get allies on board. 

Liberal internationalists may, in the end, be as willing as neoconservatives to ride roughshod over international law.  But they feel sort of bad about it and wish they didn't have to do it.

I spoke recently with Judge Sang-Hyun Song, who serves as president of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Elected by all the ICC judges, the president oversees the operations of the court and often represents the institution internationally. Judge Song was in Washington for a series of meetings marking the tenth anniversary of the court, which opened for business in July 2002.

We spoke at some length about the recent verdict in the Lubanga case--and the fact that it took more than three years to achieve. He acknowledged that the length of the proceeding suggests a need for reform:

We at the ICC have repeatedly talked about a need to conduct a lessons learned exercise as soon as one judicial cycle is completed...we believe now is the time to commence this lessons learned exercise.

But Song also cast the prolonged Lubanga trial as an important exercise in institution-building. The case featured repeated clashes between the prosecutor and the panel of judges assigned to it, and Song believes those clashes were critical in enforcing judicial limits over the prosecutor.  

There was some procedural tension between the chamber and the prosecutor and this tension itself was a cause for delay. Eventually, the judiciary successfully reined in the Prosecutor’s possible abuse of power. It’s the first case that the ICC has ever handled. We the judges and that particular chamber were determined to set the procedures straight and correct, once and for all, despite all the objections from the prosecutor and the defense.

One of the persistent objections that the ICC faces is that its work embodies a double-standard: tough scrutiny for weaker states, particularly in Africa, but a hands-off approach to conflicts involving big players. Song insisted that the court is simply following the world's worst crimes:

I don’t think the ICC has deliberately targeted weaker, poorer African countries. In my view, what is being targeted is not any country, what is being targeted is impunity, which is more rampant in that particular continent than any other part of the world.

There's been plenty of impunity in Syria, where the death toll is approaching 10,000, mostly civilians. For jurisdicitional reasons, the court has not opened an investigation of the conflict, and I asked Song whether the Security Council should now refer the matter to the court. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose not to comment on the Council's performance: 

[T]o reach that decision the 15 countries on the Council will inevitably be engaged in all kinds of political debates. It’s their job. As the representative of a judicial institution, I’m not in a position of indicating anything one way or the other. It’s a political decision of the Security Council.

Song was somewhat less restrained, however, when it came to matters the Security Council has already referred to the court (Sudan and Libya). I asked him, in particular, about the Council's lack of action on visits to neighboring countries by Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, in defiance of an outstanding arrest warrant.

The ICC in the form of judicial findings sent a non-cooperation report to the Security Council for action. Every time non-cooperation has happened, we sent our report to the Council, and the Council has been sitting on them for quite some time. We hope that as a leading member of the Security Council the United States will play a more active role to get these things done. 

That frustration aside, Song was almost joyful about the way in which the court's relationship with the United States has evolved in the past decade, including under the second Bush administration.  

A group of us arrived at the court in March 2003....[and we] were not at all sure about whether this new baby would be able to survive all the hostility shown by the big powers....At that time the U.S. embassy in the Hague was under instructions not to even make contact with the ICC judges. We were never invited to the July 4^th reception. As of three or four years ago, this attitude completely changed. The U.S. is now flexible, open, and cooperative with us. When I went to the  State Department and met with Stephen Rapp, Harold Koh and Esther Brimmer, they all gave me one common catchphrase: positive engagement on the part of the Obama administration.

The South Korean jurist believes that, but for intervening events, the rapprochement between the court and the superpower might have gone even further:

[Bureaucratic obstacles] completely prevented the new administration from doing any overall review of their policy and then as the economic situation deteriorated, the ICC has to yield to other items in terms of priorities. The ICC became less of a priority than many other things.