Americans are generous, they are selfish, they are everything that everyone else is everywhere in the world. Neither the Great Society nor the Great Satan, it is a nation of ordinary people, utterly human in their strengths and their failings. So there should be nothing surprising about U.S. recalcitrance in Rome. Of course, the United States acted according to its perceived national interests. Of course, the United States speaks the language of human rights and acts in the language of power.
Every nation operates by double standards.
Every nation violates its own values, while condemning others for doing the same. Still, the sight of the United States so jealously guarding its sovereignty is a spectacle verging on the absurd in an age when the United States is not only securely sovereign within its spacious borders but also dominant far beyond. The war crimes treaty was approved over U.S. objections. But the United States, of all nations, has no need to worry. It of all countries has no need to fear that anyone might step on its toes and not because it could never possibly be guilty of war crimes, but because power and wealth still speak loudly even if history has ended.