[Red State] Earlier today, the UN’s International Court of Justice ruled that some US sanctions were barred by a 1955 treaty that the US had signed with Shah of Iran. On its face, this seems rather bizarre as the entity with whom we made the treaty, the Shah, is dead. His family is in exile. And Iran is run by a vicious thugocracy with whom we’ve essentially been at war since 1979. But the ICJ has never been about justice, it has always been about making statements. The statement du jour is that Iranian oil is worth more than the lives of its citizens and that the ICJ would rather support a terror state than find in favor of the Trump administration.The administration wasted little time in responding. First was the soft-touch:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the United States is terminating the Treaty of Amity reached with Iran in pre-revolutionary days, calling it an "absolute absurdity" given the tensions between the two countries.
The impetus for the United States tearing up the treaty was a decision earlier Wednesday in the International Court of Justice, which ordered the Trump administration to lift some sanctions on Iran. The top U.N. court, which is in The Hague, does not have the power to enforce its decisions, which are usually ignored by the United States anyway.
"We ought to have pulled out of it decades ago," Pompeo said, calling it "39 years overdue" in a reference to the 1979 revolution in Iran. "Today marked a useful point with the decision that was made this morning from the ICJ. This marked a useful point for us to demonstrate the absolute absurdity of the Treaty of Amity between the United States and the Islamic Republic."
Later on, John Bolton took the stage for the White House press briefing:
