JOHN?

You had me at closing the office, big guy.

John Bolton, the hawkish US national security adviser, has threatened the international criminal court (ICC) with sanctions and made an excoriating attack on the institution in a speech in Washington.

Bolton pushed for sanctions over an ICC investigation into alleged American war crimes in Afghanistan. He also announced on Monday the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington because of its calls for an ICC inquiry into Israel.

He said the Trump administration would “fight back” and impose sanctions – even seeking to criminally prosecute ICC officials – if the court formally proceeded with opening an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by US military and intelligence staff during the war in Afghanistan or pursued any investigation into Israel or other US allies.

UPDATE: That's not all.

There are a lot of encouraging signs that under the Trump administration that this gravy train is ending. In the past eighteen months, the administration has green-lighted increasing the population density in some Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem has been recognized as the capital of Israel, the US has just cut some $300 million from the UNRWA–the UN agency that funds anti-Semitic propaganda and discourages Palestinian “refugees” from assimilating in their host nations–and, last week, our ambassador said he could not imagine a situation under which Israel would relinquish the Golan Heights, clearly implying that US recognition of Israel’s conquest of that area was being considered. Today, however, the hammer came down.

The Pallies, of course, are going bat-crap about all this, which means, for me anyway, that there is, in fact, such a thing as too much schadenfreude.