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Then the issue of a rules-based international order is settled in favor of the US's actions here, and further complaints are, as @Dean said, about a vibes-based order.
If rule 1 is "I always win" is it still a rules-based order? Legally, yes! And yet something seems wrong.
"Rule of law" or "rules-based order" is usually taken to mean an impartial system that constrains great and small alike. My argument is simply that America's actions re: the ICC demonstrate once again that it has no interest in submitting itself to such a system and that the only system of rules that America is interested in is one where it gets to make the rules. I do not think that this is stable long term.
This is smuggling connotations into international law that the principle never merited. The constraints on powers great and small by international law are what the powers agreed to, not imposed. There are, indeed, many areas where the US (and others) self-constrains, but the ICC is one where the US (and others) do not, for reasons which you have not actually countered.
Nothing about an anarchic system is stable in the long run, and the first principle of the international arena is its anarchic manner. This is why the international system doesn't run on imposing restrictions such as the ICC by fiat- trying to do so triggers more violent resistance more easily.
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This implies that the ICC is such a system. This is, to put it mildly, in dispute.
To make my own position clear:
I don't. I am deeply skeptical of the ICC and equivalent bodies. I think that they are talking shops which restrict national sovereignty in ways that are tendentious and illegitimate.
Sounds spot on to me.
However, the US currently attempts to portray itself as an impartial keeper of the rules based order, whilst making every attempt to bias the rules in its favour and ignoring any rules it doesn't like, as with the ICC.
I would prefer it if someone like Donald Trump simply said clearly that America's interests come first and if you don't like that you need to be strong enough to stand up for yourself, so that the rest of us can stop slobbering over decades old pieces of paper and get a grip. Alternatively, I would like the US to reign itself in: to be as scrupulous about the sovereignty of other countries as it is about its own.
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