Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on a roll. Docket his consistently robust responses to Hamas, Iran and NATO for future delectation. On July 13, he wrote a brilliant op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “Why We’re Dismantling the International Criminal Court.” Then, on July 20, the State Department released “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” a 64-page report detailing Cuba’s 40-year effort to infiltrate susceptible groups in the United States. As a prefatory summary notes, Cuba’s campaign was less about politics or economics than, at bottom, “a revolution against western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.”

The two documents share an overriding concern with the integrity of American sovereignty. “Sovereignty,” indeed, is a sort of masterword playing about in the background – and often the foreground – of Rubio’s public statements. The ICC, brought into being by something called the Rome Statute in 1998, presumes to exercise global jurisdiction over activities or personalities its prosecutors or judges deem unacceptable. In this, it is like the Kyoto Protocol, the Lisbon Accords and everything that oozes out of Davos and the headquarters of the EU.

The question of sovereignty is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives

The question of sovereignty is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives

For example, the ICC called for American service members in Afghanistan to be prosecuted for “war crimes,” where such “crimes” had been defined unilaterally by them. Last year, ICC officialdom demanded “immediate and meaningful action” against the Trump administration for........

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