With each passing day, the body of evidence that Russian forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine grows. It’s clear the invasion has involved acts of brutality and outright murder that are not only immoral but illegal. The question, then, is what the civilized world is going to do about it.

The Biden administration’s answer seems to be that the United States should reverse its longstanding policy of opposition to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and let it take up the task of holding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime accountable. That would be a mistake: American policy has rightly held the ICC to be a typical example of an international organization that is fatally tainted by anti-American and anti-Israel bias. Since its inception, it has been painfully obvious that the ICC cannot be trusted to carry out any legal task fairly.

President Joe Biden’s anger about Russian depredations in Ukraine is shared by most Americans. But we mustn’t allow that anger to dictate a policy that is contrary to American interests. Given its history, it is inevitable that the ICC will use any US cooperation as a green light to engage in arbitrary prosecutions of Americans and continue the international community’s hateful campaign of delegitimization against Israel.

It should be equally clear that the administration’s interest in empowering the ICC has more to do with the Democratic Party’s irresponsible infatuation with multilateralism and world bodies like the United Nations than indignation about Russian misbehavior.

Russia is a nuclear power; it’s inconceivable it would suffer the sort of complete defeat that allowed international tribunals run by the victors to impose justice on the criminal regimes of Germany and Japan after World War II. Nor is it likely to end up in the position Serbia found itself at the end of the 1990s Balkan wars when it was forced to let its former leaders as well as Bosnian Serbs be tried in The Hague for their war crimes. Still, we must make some effort to bring Russian war criminals to justice. But the ICC is run by the same sort of biased bureaucrats that make up the United Nations.

The ICC’s ongoing attempt to prosecute Israel for defending its borders against Palestinian terrorists committed to the Jewish state’s destruction is akin to trying Ukrainians for defending themselves against Russia. The court’s actions are a symptom of the hate for the West and its democratic values that characterize an international human-rights community that has no business being tasked with defending those same ideas.

It’s for that good reason that Congress passed laws prohibiting the US government from funding or cooperating with the ICC. If given free rein as Biden and the Democrats seem to want, we’d be far more likely to see Americans put on trial for alleged crimes committed in Middle Eastern conflicts than Russians for what they’ve done in Ukraine.

Under former chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, the ICC opened up an investigation of alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. It treated the efforts of Americans and other NATO forces to defend the people of that country against the Taliban as morally equivalent to the atrocities committed by their Islamist foes. It was only President Donald Trump’s denunciation of the move and his imposition of sanctions on ICC personnel for their anti-American efforts, as well as their attempts to attack and stigmatize Israel, that got the court to back down and drop the probe.

In his first months in office, Biden dropped the sanctions on the ICC — and Bensouda’s successor has restarted its Afghanistan investigation. Now Biden is signaling that he remains resolved to strengthen multilateral institutions as an ideological imperative regardless of the damage to US interests.

What the world needs is to replace the ICC and the United Nations, not further empower them. Only bodies that are controlled by democracies — and not a club of tyrannies and authoritarian states that have no business judging or exercising authority over free nations — can deal justly with the Ukraine crisis.

One can share the outrage about Russia without buying into the shortsighted and multilateralist impulse to empower the ICC. Doing so weakens the United States and endangers Israel. If Biden heads down this road, it will do little to hurt Russian criminals and much to damage the West.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org.

Twitter: @jonathans_tobin