Visiting Boucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian war atrocities are most evident, the United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, today said he was “glad” that the International Criminal Court is apprised of the situation and that its prosecutor’s office was already in Boucha.

He then called on Moscow to cooperate with the ICC’s investigation.

Mr. Guterres’s appeal to the Kremlin to cooperate with an investigation of possible Russian crimes in a trial venue Russia doesn’t recognize is more than merely unrealistic; it puts the horse before the cart. 

Grand projects like war crime trials or reconstruction of war-ravaged economies are impossible to achieve before a war is won. As even King Lear’s fool foresaw, first thing’s first: “May not,” he asked in Shakespeare’s play, “an ass know when the cart draws the horse?”

Imagine asking Hermann Goering while World War II was still raging to cooperate with yet-to-be named Nuremberg trials prosecutors. When the Nuremberg trials did take place, Goering and other accused Nazis refused to recognize their jurisdiction. Yet the prosecution became a blueprint for all future tribunals trying war crimes. 

Nuremberg’s success was only possible because the trials took place after America and its allies defeated the Nazis on the battlefield. Today, in contrast, the talk of prosecuting war crimes is louder than expressions of a will to win the Ukraine war. 

Meanwhile Russia is not even a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court as a venue to try war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ukraine isn’t an ICC member, either, but it has authorized the court’s prosecutors to gather evidence of war crimes in its territory. 

America is another top world power that does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. While President Clinton signed the Rome Statute, he never presented it as a treaty for Senate ratification. Knowing it would never fly with American voters, none of Mr. Clinton’s White House successors tried their luck with ICC ratification.

President Trump even imposed sanctions on ICC officials and denied them American entry visas. Soon after President Biden assumed office, though, he  rescinded Mr. Trump’s sanctions — and then started cheerleading for the ICC.

“The United States is supporting a range of international investigations into atrocities in Ukraine,” an American ambassador at large for global criminal justice, Beth Van Schaack, told an informal meeting of the UN Security Council yesterday.

America supports war crimes investigations “conducted by the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,” Ms. Van Schaack said. Washington specifically “welcomes the opening of the investigation by the ICC into atrocity crimes committed in Ukraine, and we intend to engage with all stakeholders to achieve our common objectives in ensuring justice.”

Even as Mr. Biden presses for premature trials in a hapless court America would not join, he has initially been slow to fulfill Ukraine’s requests for arms it deems necessary to battle the invading Russian army.

Arms deliveries are now accelerated, but America still denies Kyiv such weapons as fighter jets. Mr. Biden blocked a delivery of MiG 29 planes that Poland was willing to transfer to Ukraine via the American base at Ramstein, Germany. 

Mr. Biden is also yet to call for a victory in a war he said was a “test for democracies.” Secretary of Defense Austin remarked last week that as Ukrainians believe they can win, so does America. Yet, asked if America’s goals include victory, the White House press secretary, Jennifer Psaki, told reporters today that it is “for the Ukraianians to decide.” 

Contrast such ambivalence with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s approach to World War II. 

“With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God,” FDR said while requesting war authorization from Congress following Pearl Harbor. 

After the war, America launched a major investment in the economies of war-ravaged Europe — but again, no one would dream of a Marshall Plan prior to defeating Hitler. 

Yet the House of Representatives yesterday passed, in a decisive 417-8 vote, legislation dubbed the “Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act.” It would use proceeds from confiscated yachts and other assets seized from Russian oligarchs to rebuild the post-war Ukrainian economy. 

Prosecuting war criminals and reconstructing the economies of allies were important goals, successfully pursued by allies in the aftermath of WWII. Yet, even Shaspeare’s ass knows that seeking those goals before a war is won is a reversal of the order of things.