Rubio’s Strong Case Against the ICC

National Review Online

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

In one of the first acts of Donald Trump’s second term, the president imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for, among other offenses, attempting to subject the U.S. and its allies to its jurisdiction with or without their consent.

 

The ICC didn’t take the hint. So, this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the U.S. would take things a step further. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal,” he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

Trump’s chief diplomat makes a sound case for the administration’s opposition to the ICC. He observed that one of the court’s prosecutors has called America’s activities in Afghanistan “war crimes,” to establish the predicate for the prosecution of U.S. soldiers and political officials. More than that, Rubio noted that the ICC’s prosecutors have attempted to thwart our deportations solely because these expulsions involve other nations, as any deportation program would. And when America’s elected officials complain about the court’s power grabs, Rubio observed, they, too, are accused of crimes.

 

“It is only a matter of time before the ICC begins making good on these threats,” Rubio wrote. The left-leaning European press scoffed at his worry that the ICC would seek to criminalize the domestic enforcement of U.S. immigration law — concocting “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” as The Guardian put it. But why is that so hard to believe? The ICC invents flimsy pretexts to justify its intervention into the affairs of nonmember states all the time.

 

Take Israel, for example. Because the ICC wanted to prosecute Israeli officials for the conduct of Jerusalem’s post–October 7 war on its terrorist enemies, it erected a dubious rationale to justify its intervention in that conflict. In ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s words, the court was engaged in the oversight of a war that was being conducted inside “the state of Palestine.” No internationally recognized legal entity goes by that name, of course. But pretending the Palestinians have a state justifies the ICC’s desire to prosecute Israelis on their behalf.

 

Khan, who was sanctioned by name by Trump in February 2025, just made up this legal fiction so that he could violate Israeli sovereignty. Why wouldn’t these same malleable standards be applied to the United States?

 

Trump’s Democratic predecessors, by the way, could look askance at the court. President Barack Obama did not seek the Senate’s consent to join the court. Indeed, he unilaterally declared that U.S. soldiers engaged in peacekeeping operations abroad operate “without risk of criminal prosecution or other assertion of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court.”

 

President Joe Biden lashed out at the court when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” he said in a statement. “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in 2024 that he was open to sanctions on the ICC.

 

The activist and academic left accused both presidents of hypocrisy — praising the ICC and using it to advance U.S. interests when it suited them, but undermining the court when it threatened U.S. sovereignty and that of its allies. Well, yeah. Welcome to the world of statecraft.

 

“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio concluded. “To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.” Indeed, no supranational entity should have a veto power over U.S. security priorities as defined by America’s elected leaders and, ultimately, its voters. Let the dismantling begin.