An international court capable of holding political and military leaders accountable for war crimes was first suggested by world leaders at the Paris Peace Conference, whose crowning achievement — the Treaty of Versailles — officially brought the First World War to an end on June 28, 1919.

The idea gained traction again in 1937, though a League of Nations convention attempting to establish the court garnered only 13 signatories and was never ratified.

The first materialization of an international criminal court came in 1945 with the convening of the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent year with the convening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. These tribunals prosecuted numerous Axis and Japanese leaders throughout 1945–1946.

Despite efforts by various member states of the UN to establish a permanent international court following the conclusion of the Nuremberg and Far East tribunals, the idea fizzled and never picked up sufficient momentum.

Former Nazi war crime investigator and Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz published numerous books from 1975–1988, in which he argued that an International Criminal Court could bring us closer to world peace.

In 1989, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, A.N.R. Robinson, argued for the creation of an international criminal court to fight the international war on drugs. While Robinson’s suggestion percolated within the General Assembly, the first Tribunals since the Nuremberg and Far East trials were established.

In 1993, the UN Security Council established the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. The following year, the Security Council also created the decidedly less wordy International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

On July 17, 1998, at a conference in Rome, 120 countries voted to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC). Twenty-one countries abstained from the initial vote, while seven voted against the Rome Statute, including the United States, China, Israel, and Iraq.

Following the affirmation of the Rome Statute, an optimistic Ferencz said “an international criminal court — the missing link in the world legal order — is within our grasp.” The ICC has been in effect since July 2002, putting the United States in the awkward position of supporting the two active international criminal tribunals authorized by the security council while opposing making the court permanent.

The Rwanda tribunal dissolved in 2015, and the Yugoslavia tribunal issued its last judgement on November 29, 2017. You might remember the dramatic video of Bosnian Croat general Slobodan Praljak drinking poison as the judge upheld his 20-year sentence.

While the Trump administration’s decision this week to revoke the VISA of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is a dramatic show of legal force, it is hardly surprising when you consider the war crimes our leaders are culpable in.

The ICC is currently investigating war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya —three of the seven countries where the U.S. acknowledges we are currently fighting wars.

As much as watching washed up U.S. military and elected officials take shots of poison as judges in the Hague read out verdicts might be cathartic for the victims of their war crimes, it’s highly unlikely to ever happen as long as our federal government maintains sovereign control over the world’s most powerful armed forces.

Regardless, as the ICC pushes forward in its investigations undeterred by U.S. obstructionism, our leaders will only drive an increasingly large wedge between us and the rest of the world. Our military dominance may give our leaders confidence today, but our economic dominance is shaky at best and the two are inherently intertwined.

What would the ramifications for our military industrial complex be if the U.S. economy collapsed and the rest of the world got together and ditched the dollar as the global reserve currency?

Of course that’s a dramatic hypothetical, but it serves to illustrate a deeper theme emerging as the 21st century world order takes shape — U.S. political leadership continues to recede as the rest of the world vies to fill the vacuum we leave behind.