South Africa moved yesterday to begin withdrawing from the World Court (ICC), which would effectively destroy the institution.

Africans across the continent have been complaining for some time about The Court and serious threats to leave have come from such important countries as Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria.

If South Africa leaves it’s over and done.

I love the World Court and I’m in the American minority, again. All the European countries, Canada and almost all the African countries have signed on to The Court. Among the 70 or so countries that have refused to join The Court are the U.S., China and Israel.

To me the birth of The Court in 1998 was David conquering Goliath. For the first time in human history, there was an arbiter, a judge, with absolute power of law over the majority of countries in the world, including all of Europe.

Communists, capitalists, dictators, socialists, politicians and leaders of opposite stripes and convictions, they were all beholden to the court’s singularity: the only, and the ultimate adjudication of four grievous infractions of world order:

– crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.

Wow. Up yours Scalia.

It’s bound by the Security Council but has an irritating independence from it. It can develop prosecutions on its own, but so far prefers to “accept” cases transferred to it from sovereign nations or institutions like the UN.

Because the thresholds for evidence and of proof are so severe, far greater than in the United States or virtually any of its member states, the court has moved glacially, but it’s moved. It’s convicted perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, of the Blood Diamonds Wars and it’s in the thralls of trials about who caused the horrible Kenyan violence of 2007.

Hm. No cases in South America? Nothing from Asia? Currently there are 23 “cases” grouped into 9 “situations” being investigated by the World Court. They are all in Africa.

The drumbeat of imminent collapse until today was that the Court is prejudiced, perhaps racist. But with South Africa’s move today, that changed however subtly:

“There is a subculture in global politics that say some are equal but not equal to others, a ‘holy cow’ culture in which the US and other human rights violators are untouchable yet African nations are subjected to the rule of these ‘holy cows’,” writes South African businessman Bo Mbindwane in support of his country’s move to withdraw.

This, now, is the newer theme African proponents are making to leave the Court. No longer is it that the Court is racist, but that the creators of The Court — the U.S. principal among them — have refused to join and are therefore immune to its powers.

Yet America can still – and has – through its power on the Security Council referred cases to The Court, even though America cannot be prosecuted by The Court.

To me this is a much more powerful argument than that The Court is racist. The reason that Africa is exclusive to ICC prosecutions is in part because so many African countries were courageous joining. Other human rights violators like Mynamar, Syria and Laos didn’t join.

And that’s a terrible weakness of The Court: it can only go after its own, and its own are not necessarily the worst offenders.

Nascent institutions like this – even without the wholesale endorsement of all the world’s powers – may prosper when the world has a single focus on challenges likes 9/11 or the Great Recession.

Remove these overriding global horrors and space is created for more political introspection, and I think that’s what’s happening, now. Albeit that The Levant is an abject mess, worldwide the stresses of imminent hunger and economic collapse — or world war — are absent for the first time in nearly a generation.

In this qualitative and relative calm of finally surviving, the grievances of inequalities grow clearer, whether that be inequality of income, gender or … World Court jurisdiction. It’s no longer a matter of just grasping to survive, but demanding to be equal.

It’s not a done deal, yet. The call to leave The Court has come from the ANC not the government of South Africa, but as you can tell I fear this time the drumbeat means war.

One of South Africa’s most prominent businessmen has called on President Obama to align with Russia and Iran to end the Syrian conflict.

Kalim Rajab told Obama this weekend to “dance with the devil” and compared the current situation in Syria to that of World War II.

Rajib is Director of the New National Assurance Company, South Africa’s first entirely black owned insurer, and one of the country’s largest.

The refugee crisis caused by the Syrian conflict is troubling every part of the world. Immigration is an issue that caused a series of violent outbursts earlier this year in South Africa, where dozens were killed.

Like Germany, South Africa had an open-door immigration policy since the end of apartheid, and the country is the clear beacon of hope for many in sub-Saharan Africa.

But since the violence in May, South Africa has deported more than 15,000 people it considered “illegal immigrants,” although the country’s laws are unclear about exactly who is considered a refugee and who is an illegal migrant.

Every stable country in the world has some sort of migrant problem. Who would have thought only a year ago that one of the EU’s most troubled countries, Hungary, would become the focus of this problem?

Kenya has twice tried to close the massive nearly million-person refugee camp of Dadaab located on its border with troubled Somali. Only pressure from the U.S. and Britain has stopped them.

Social media has widened the opportunities for those who wish to flee an unstable place, and greatly increased their chances of making safe haven.

Rajib views the refugee crisis in a similar vein to the Nazi’s methodical and ever increasing assumption of territory in Europe prior to the outbreak of World War II.

“The irony of Churchill’s finest hour is that in opposing two ideologies he abhorred – Nazism and its twin, fascism – he had to temporarily reconcile himself with another ideology he abhorred – communism.

“How appalling it must have been to Churchill to find common cause with the butcher of the Ukraine,” Rajib concludes referencing Stalin and Obama’s need to discount Russia’s current occupation of Crimea in order to forge an alliance to if not end massively diminish the Syrian conflict.

I’m not so sure.

Isolationism has never had a good rap, and I’m not one to fully embrace it. But in this case I worry about anything that America might do.

It seems in my life time that we’ve never done the right thing in international conflicts and that all we’re capable of doing is escalating them.

So I disagree with Rajib, not because the alignment with Russia might not result in a better outcome than we currently have, but because such an alignment should occur first with Europe, not with the U.S.

We must defer. Deference to those who are actually feeling the problem far more than we are I feel is essential to any future policy we embrace. Europe is moving with the speed of a glacier, encumbered by a new global nature that morally is exciting and encouraging.

It’s a tricky time for Europe. There’s no need for America to muddy the waters.