Sparks: US unveils sanctions on ICC in move court condemns as 'assault on rule of law'

Forget the condemnations; here is the leverage: one state can jail no one it does not catch, and it has just taught every ally that the court's writ ends where its own army begins - a lesson remembered longer than any protest.

The sanctions fall; examine what was in the court's power to prevent - its judgments, its integrity - and what never was: the displeasure of the strong. It kept the first. That is the whole of its business.

Attack the army and the army reforms; attack the ground on which all armies must one day stand to be judged, and no battle is needed - the strong man punishes the scales before stepping on them.

Call it no assault, no thunderbolt of principle - it is atoms of self-interest arranging themselves, a great power discovering that law binding only the small is the most comfortable arrangement matter can form.

Things that are hateful: a court that judges everyone with perfect courage, a state that signs the treaty and sanctions the signature, an ally who says 'strongly disagree' and then pours the tea.

In every court I have entered, from Delhi to Fez, the judge's sentence ran full weight against the poor man and dissolved before it reached the governor's gate; the road teaches this lesson in every century.

As water finds the crack in any vessel and flows through it, so power finds the seam between a law and its enforcement - and a court without the strength to hold its own judgments is a dam built of paper.

The committee had established, after careful study, that the tribunal's jurisdiction was universal, binding, and enforceable against any nation on earth that consented to it and also lost.

They punish the mirror, not the face; a power that sanctions the tribunal rather than answering its charges has confessed in the only language institutions speak fluently.

How admirable this nation is: it built the tribunal, signed the treaty, and now fine anyone who dares to try its sons - in the best of all possible worlds, the law is a sword with one edge.

They tell us the court still stands, its chambers open, its judges seated - a justice that imprisons the defeated and sanctions whoever inspects the prison is the old order wearing a new robe.

A nation that preached universal justice to the world and then punished the judge who applied it to itself has written its own confession, and no eloquence can read it any other way.