by Roger Kimball
Laws have force only to the extent that their legitimacy is recognized. The United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Well, Marco Rubio has done it again. Just weeks after his extraordinary address in front of the Parthenon, he delivered a magnificent keynote address on November 13 at the Federalist Society’s annual national lawyers’ convention in Washington, D.C.
Coming so hard on the heels of the midterm elections—elections that were a disaster for Republicans—it is not surprising that Rubio began by reminding his audience that the fate of the Republic is not determined by a single election. He drew on the example of Ronald Reagan to make his point. In 1980, Reagan won in a landslide against Jimmy Carter. Reagan won 44 states to Carter’s six and took the Electoral College vote 489 to 49. Two years later, the country was courting a recession, and Reagan’s popularity seemed to be in a tailspin. “In less than a year,” Rubio noted, “the approval ratings of the Reagan administration had plummeted from . . . 68 percent down to 43 percent.”
By March of 1982, President Reagan was four points less popular than Jimmy Carter at the same point in his term. The economy had taken a nosedive. In fact, it faced a full-fledged recession. Unemployment was approaching double digits, the worst it had been in 40 years, with many, fairly or unfairly, blaming the president for all of this. Even his foreign policy ambitions were beginning to lose ground, with rising fears of nuclear war with Russia spilling out into a popular revolt against his efforts to take on the Soviet communism around the world.
Reagan lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm election. But even in the midst of that gloomy situation, the embers of renewal began to glow. As it happens, 1982 was the year that the Federalist Society was founded. Formed by a handful of conservative jurists, including Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, the organization was dedicated to reshaping the legal profession by “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning.” Nineteen-eighty-two was also the year that Reagan’s economic policies began to bear fruit, sparking what would become the greatest generation of wealth in history. The electorate took notice. In 1984, Reagan resoundingly won his second term. He took 49 states to Walter Mondale’s one (plus the District of Columbia), 525 electoral votes to 13. As Rubio stressed, one of those lessons of that turnaround is that “politics requires more than simply winning elections.” Why? “[B]ecause the government is not the only source of political power.”
This is a key point.
Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives in the whole expanse of civil society, all of the institutions that define and shape our understanding of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society . . . has an elite, has a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress or the courts; it also resides in academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organizations. It resides in corporate boardrooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture.
One of Rubio’s greatest intellectual strengths follows from his understanding of the real, as distinct from the utopian or politically correct, metabolism of power: what it is and what legitimates it.
In a democratic society, elections are important. But they provide snapshots of a people’s needs and aspirations, not the living reality. Elections, Rubio sees, “do not decide by themselves what our institutions teach or what our lawyers believe, which ideas are treated as respectable or normal, and which are deemed beyond the pale. . . . Who defines these things and to what end—that is what power is.”
It is one of the great peculiarities of our time that success so often turns rancorous and self-consuming, laced through with unwarranted ecstasies of guilt and limitless cravings for expiation. Such are the fetters in which the marauders of Globalist, Inc., continually seek to capture the United States. Many in academia and its outposts in the media and the leftover Left have signed up for service in that brigade. But Rubio is having none of it. Consider, for example, his response to the International Criminal Court, a spurious entity whose jurisdiction the United States has never recognized.
When the Trump administration locates and destroys drug runners in the Caribbean, the wizards of the ICC say the U.S. is violating “international law.” When the U.S. extracts Nicolás Maduro from his pleasure palace in Caracas, the ICC gibbers about “crimes against humanity.” When the U.S. secures its own borders, seeking out and deporting illegal aliens, the ICC skirls impotently about our violating “human rights.” As Rubio points out, the “law” that the ICC propagates is “not a neutral body of rules.” On the contrary, it is “an instrument to advance their interests under the pretense of universal principles.”
For example, they’re staunch defenders of democracy—until particular elections challenge their interests. They lecture us on the importance of sovereignty even as they demand that nations surrender control of their borders and outsource their immigration laws to unelected international courts. They oppose, they say, all forms of imperialism, of conquest, of domination, but they seek to exercise authority over every country and every government on Earth.
Alert readers will note that this same song is being sung at home by activist judges who seek to “govern by injunction, twisting the law to fit whatever their preferences happen to be at any given place or time.” The bottom line, Rubio points out, is that for such people, American power is in itself an affront. For them, American success by definition is intolerable because it is American.
Until recently, the American response to such globalist complaints has been a muted, hangdog semi-acquiescence. But now, under President Trump, a more robust response is the order of the day. “There is nothing,” Rubio said, “in our history or the history of any other great nation that requires us to recognize the authority or legitimacy of any of these ridiculous ideas.”
Arguing against “the leveling and pessimistic spirit of the age,” “the menial consensus of the world,” Rubio offers a hymn to American boldness and ambition. “The ultimate question of our time,” he says, “is whether Americans have a moral right to exist as a distinct nation and a distinct people, and thus to demand a government that defends and pursues our interests above all else.”
Those who tell us that we are living on stolen land, as an example, that our nation was founded and built upon slavery and genocide and oppression, are telling us clearly that they do not believe that we do. They would have us think that America—and more broadly, that the West—are uniquely burdened by guilt, guilt that we can only atone for through total surrender—by opening our borders, by renouncing our laws, by retreating from the world, and allowing them to remake our society in their image.
One of my favorite parts of Rubio’s speech was when he noted that the ICC has threatened to arrest Americans abroad for violating some politically correct diktat or other. “They can certainly try,” Rubio acknowledges. But our response, he continues, is likely to be like that of the Roman general Pompey when Sulla sent him to Sicily to secure his hegemony over the Marian rebels there. Most cities capitulated. The Mamertines in Messana held out, citing an ancient Roman treaty (foedus) that limited the Romans’ jurisdiction over them. Pompey scoffed and said, “Won’t you stop quoting laws to us who gave swords girt about themselves?” (In Plutarch’s telling, οὐ παύσεσθε . . . ἡμῖν ὑπεζωσμένοις ξίφη νόμους ἀναγινώσκοντες;)
Rubio cheerfully acknowledged that his allusion to Pompey’s words was not politically correct. True enough. Rubio was also right that Pompey was uttering an uncomfortable truth. Was this just a “might-makes-right,” “How-many-divisions-does-the-Pope-have?” retort?
Not really. Rubio was not advocating the lawless exercise of force. The “laws” to which the International Criminal Court appeals are simply diktats that the United States has never recognized. A savage in Africa might say that his law allows him to boil and eat a missionary. A bureaucrat in Europe might say that his law allows him to incarcerate Americans who make fun of the EU, laugh at climate change fanatics, or point out that Islam is a murderous political ideology that is incompatible with modern secular democracy.
But laws have force only to the extent that their legitimacy is recognized. The United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. The tertium quid to which Rubio appeals with his allusion to Pompey is that grown-up element that makes Karens of all sexes nervous: power. The ICC might meet, threaten, and stamp its feet. Exactly what is it going to do when facing the greatest military and economic power in history? Whine and bluster.
Besides, should the ICC decide to incarcerate service members or other government officials, there is plenty of legal cover for the use of military force. Consider 22 U.S. Code § 7427, “Authority to free members of the Armed Forces of the United States and certain other persons detained or imprisoned by or on behalf of the International Criminal Court.” That statute explicitly authorizes the president to employ “all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release “members of the Armed Forces . . . elected or appointed officials . . . , and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the United States Government,” as well as “military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally,” i.e., just about anyone. In any event, it is nice to know that the President has that statute in his back pocket in case he needs to send SEAL Team Six or Delta Force to storm The Hague.
The ICC can posture all it likes. A shorter translation of Pompey’s words might be “Pound sand.” That, in essence, is what Marco Rubio said about the ICC. I like to see such a forthright, masculine, realist parry. Rubio’s speech is a politically mature, patriotic masterpiece.
Photo: Secretary Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, in Washington, DC on November 13, 2026. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images)
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/15/marco-rubio-reasserts-the-moral-legitimacy-of-american-power/
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