From Nuremberg to The Hague, the postwar order promised a universal standard of justice. In practice, it has delivered something else: a system that shields the powerful and their allies, and reserves prosecution for poorer, weaker countries. The same states that helped draft the rules have worked just as hard to ensure that those rules almost never apply to their own leaders. This selective enforcement is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The case brought last year by South Africa at