This post was co-authored with Lee Feinstein, founding dean of Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies.

In 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama released a statement underscoring a commitment to prevent crimes against humanity. He declared that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” Soon after, he established the ambitiously named Atrocity Prevention Board, a group of U.S. officials convened by the National Security Council that includes representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury, as well as from the U.S. Agency for International Aid (USAID), the intelligence community, and other groups. The board meets monthly to assess the risks of atrocities and to strategize on how to mitigate them.

Since then, Obama’s commitment to atrocity prevention has come into question, especially because of U.S. inaction in Syria—even though the purpose of the Atrocity Prevention Board was never to deal with major unfolding crises such as the one in Syria but, rather, to assess longer-term risks and devise “upstream” preventive measures.

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Perhaps it was the prospect of a trip out of Kampala, Uganda, to the World Cup games in South Africa that put delegates to the International Criminal Court Review Conference in a magnanimous mood last June. Whatever the reason, years of acrimony and dissension melted into agreement. The consensus would have been remarkable even if the conference’s agenda had been banal. In fact, it was not. At hand was the issue of the ICC’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression — a subject so fraught that the delegates who originally negotiated the creation of the ICC in 1998 were only able to do so after deferring this issue until now, 12 years later.

The first noteworthy element of the conference was the presence of U.S. officials. The United States signed, but never ratified, the 1998 Rome Statute that created the court, and it has no vote in the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties (ASP). Like other nonparties, though, it has always been eligible to attend meetings as an observer. But Washington has largely kept the ICC at arm’s length since the Bush administration decided to withdraw the U.S. signature in May 2002, shortly before the court became operational. The administration feared that, once functional, the court would be a threat to U.S. sovereignty and put U.S. officials and military personnel at risk of prosecution in the course of their duties. Continue reading →