In another reversal from the previous administration, Joe Biden on Friday lifted sanctions and visa restrictions that President Trump had imposed on officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The ICC is an international tribune based out of The Hague, Netherlands, and claims the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes within member nations. It deals in cases involving genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The Trump administration had placed penalties on the ICC because of the court’s efforts to investigate the actions of the American military in Afghanistan.
While the Biden administration claims that it disagrees with the ICC’s efforts to meddle in affairs involving non-member nations, as with recent moves to investigate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Democrat White House nevertheless believed it better to soften relations with the international court.
“We continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that announced an end to the sanctions. “We maintain our longstanding objection to the Court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-States Parties such as the United States and Israel. We believe, however, that our concerns about these cases would be better addressed through engagement with all stakeholders in the ICC process rather than through the imposition of sanctions.”
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During the Trump era, the administration placed economic sanctions on leading ICC officials, such as Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. These September 2020 sanctions froze any American assets Bensouda may have possessed.
Earlier last year, the Trump administration revoked Bensouda’s visa due to her efforts to investigate alleged crimes in Afghanistan. It also declared that it would ban visas for others linked to the court. President Trump even called the ICC a “threat” to America.
The international community went up in arms at the Trump administration’s actions toward the ICC. Dozens of countries joined together to put out a statement asserting that “any attempt to undermine the independence of the court should not be tolerated.”
The Friday announcement from the White House noted that Biden revoked a Trump executive order that had provided the legal basis for the sanctions of the ICC officials.
Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was among the lawmakers who called on the Biden administration to terminate the ICC sanctions.
“The staff of the International Criminal Court are public servants who dedicate their life to enforcing the most heinous crimes imaginable,” she said in a statement. “If we are to live up to our values of respect for human rights and democratic norms, United States should be leading the pursuit of international justice, not blocking it.”
If President Trump’s sanctions represented a move away from internationalism and toward his espoused America First policy of national sovereignty, Biden’s reversal is a return to the status quo of ceding American independence to unelected foreign bodies.
It’s another instance of a developing pattern in the Biden White House, one of undoing actions by President Trump that had protected the United States from foreign influence.
One of the most notable examples took place on Day One of Biden’s term, when he terminated a Trump executive order that had kept China and other foreign powers from taking control of America’s bulk power systems.
The Trump order was made to ban, replace, and set new criteria on bulk-power system (BPS) electrical equipment from a foreign country or foreign national that poses a national security threat.
The policy “prohibited any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of BPS electric equipment by any person or with respect to any property to which a foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that poses an undue risk to the BPS, the security or resiliency of U.S. critical infrastructure or the U.S. economy, or U.S. national security or the security and safety of U.S. persons.”
Moreover, the DOE was charged with identifying existing BPS electric equipment that violated the aforementioned prescription and “develop recommendations to identify, isolate, monitor, or replace this equipment as appropriate.”
All that, however, ended with Biden’s tenure.
The globalists’ goal is to replace elected, representative government in the United States with rule by international entities that will turn America into little more than another province in a socialist global empire. Not America First, but America Last.
And Joe Biden appears to be just the man they need for the job.
