The court sits in The Hague, the charming Dutch city, in soaring chambers within an eclectic 1913 brick palace in a campus of fountains and tidy gardens. It is a vestige of Wilsonian idealism, a burst of conscience and good intentions that opened the brackets on the twentieth century, just as another burst has closed them. It has no power of enforcement or credible threat of punishment for noncompliance. Its only leverage is moral gravitas. The court weighs in, and lets opprobrium or vindication fall where it may.
Many states ignore it when they wish.
The United States sharply restricted its conditions for accepting the court's jurisdiction after Reagan-era decisions against it in a dispute with Nicaragua. More on foreign correspondence in The Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Unbound. Ten years later, NATO is waging war against Yugoslavia. Atlantic articles from 1913 to 1995 help put the conflict in perspective. In 1937 the novelist Rebecca West traveled to the Balkans in search of a better understanding of that region's historical conflicts.