On July 13 Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court. Calling the ICC “a global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited,” he charged the court with “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” As long as the court exists, he insisted, any number of Americans—“border patrol agents removing violent criminals from our country, American marines risking their lives to defend our homeland, prosecutors working to dismantle terrorist plots”—will risk “prosecution and even imprisonment for the so-called crime of defending their own country.” To that end, according to a State Department press release, the US government had resolved “to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
None of this rhetoric exactly came as a surprise. Trump has been consistently hostile to the ICC since his first term, when his administration imposed sanctions on court officials shortly after the ICC opened an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan by, among others, the US. Less than three weeks into his second term he reimposed sanctions on the court on the grounds that its actions were “directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest.” But the announcement of this latest campaign does raise a number of questions.
Why, for instance, escalate the attacks on the court just now? They do not seem to be related to the war in Iran. Like the United States, Iran is hostile to the ICC. Neither is among the 125 countries that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction by ratifying the treaty adopted in Rome in 1998 establishing it, which means that the ICC has no jurisdiction over any of the acts that have taken place there since the war began this past February.
Rather, the secretary’s decision to announce this campaign at this time seems likely to have been motivated, at least in part, by the forthcoming elections in Israel. One of the heads of government recently indicted by the ICC—in addition to Vladimir Putin of Russia and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines—is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant in November 2024 over the crimes Israel committed in Gaza after Hamas’s crimes of October 7, 2023. (The court also issued arrest warrants for Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was later confirmed to have been killed by the Israeli military.) When Trump sanctioned the ICC in February 2025, he explicitly cited the court’s “baseless arrest warrants” against Netanyahu and Gallant as a rationale. Now that Netanyahu faces a difficult campaign for reelection, degrading the ICC serves his interests all the more urgently. Most Israelis probably have a low regard for the ICC, which accepted Palestine’s membership more than a decade ago and has taken seriously its mandate to investigate violations there. But many are all the same likely to find it embarrassing to have their prime minister indicted.
Some aspects of Rubio’s proposed campaign against the ICC are, depending on how one reads them, either preposterous or cause for concern. Since the United States has not ratified the ICC treaty, the court has no jurisdiction over any domestic practices by the country’s police and border guards. The ICC could only establish jurisdiction over the United States if the US were to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or very grave war crimes in a country that has accepted the court’s jurisdiction. One can only hope that Rubio’s campaign is not a prelude to yet another US military conflict that could involve committing such crimes.
The ICC is, in some respects, a legacy of the United States’ own earlier efforts on behalf of human rights. At the end of World War II the US took the lead in establishing the tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo that judged German and Japanese war criminals. Though those courts had shortcomings, the verdict of history is that both of them—particularly the Nuremberg tribunal—helped restore a sense of justice in devastated regions and prevent anyone from rewriting history to explain away the extreme criminality that had taken place there. At the time there were proposals for a permanent global criminal court, but the developing cold war made it impossible to establish such a body. The adoption of the treaty to establish the ICC in 1998 followed the end of the cold war and the successes of tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda earlier in the 1990s, also established with the leadership of the United States.
At the same time, there is also a long history of American opposition to international human rights law. The Genocide Convention, for instance, was adopted by the United Nations without dissent in 1948 and quickly ratified by many other governments before it went into effect in 1951. The US, however, took until 1988 to adopt it, despite the efforts of advocates like Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who made some three thousand speeches in the Senate over a nearly twenty-year period calling for ratification. Some southern senators feared that the convention would be invoked against segregation; other American critics denounced it as a step in the direction of world government. When the US did ratify the convention, in what was known as the Proxmire Act, it did so at least in part because President Ronald Reagan found it politically convenient after he was criticized for a visit he paid to a German cemetery where S.S. officers were buried. Even then, the US insisted on a “reservation” stipulating that Article IX—which allows a party to the convention to go to the International Court of Justice to resolve disputes—could not be applied to the US without its consent.
In 1998, when the treaty establishing the ICC was adopted in Rome, the Clinton administration, which had helped draft the document, reverted to this tradition by opposing its adoption. The administration’s principal objection was that it wanted the UN Security Council to authorize prosecutions. This would have enabled any of the five permanent members—the US, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, or China—to veto any prosecution unilaterally. The United States would be able to shield Israel; Russia or China could protect North Korea; France could have blocked prosecution of Rwandan officials during the genocide there, and so on. That proposal would have nullified the work of the court.
In announcing a campaign to dismantle the ICC, Rubio is taking a major step beyond this traditional American hostility to international law. Previously the US has sought to bar institutions like the court from applying international law to its own behavior. Now, perhaps as a means of advancing Netanyahu’s interests, the Trump administration is trying to destroy an institution that protects human rights in the world at large. In an opinion piece for TheWall Street Journal, published to coincide with his announcement of the new campaign against the court, Rubio asserted that the United States, “working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause,” aims to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
Who are those allies? The rights-respecting democracies of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific with which the US is customarily allied make up almost all the countries that have supported the ICC by ratifying the treaty for its adoption. In contrast, the countries hostile to the ICC, in addition to Iran, include the world’s most repressive regimes—Russia, China, and such smaller powers as Belarus, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba. Is Rubio proposing a global realignment that would put the US in that bloc? Does he really want a Moscow-Beijing-Washington axis to be the arbiter of international policy on matters of law and justice?
The trial in the International Criminal Court of former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is scheduled to get underway this fall. While in power, Duterte presided over the summary executions of many thousands of Filipinos, most of them poor people, because they were suspected of using contraband drugs. It is a shame to see the United States try to destroy the ICC—the only global institution with a mandate to address such horrors—merely because those subject to its jurisdiction may be Americans or their friends.