The ICC Deserves ‘Dismantling’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

 

The Guardian probably didn’t set out to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s point when it critiqued the secretary of state’s searing condemnation of the International Criminal Court, but it did.

 

The progressive venue scoffed at Rubio’s invocation of “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” which Trump’s chief diplomat warned the ICC “now claims the power to do.”

 

“The ICC is not claiming jurisdiction over conduct in the United States,” Human Rights Watch’s onetime executive director Kenneth Roth explained. Rubio not only misstated the court’s role, but he’s also “dressing up his quest for impunity for American war crimes,” Roth added. “Trump wants to be able to commit war crimes on the territory of countries that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction — that’s what this is about.”

 

But CBP and ICE do, on occasion, operate on foreign soil in investigative, screening, security roles. And the ICC does claim the authority to prosecute alleged violations of human rights and war crimes conducted inside the territory of member states, even when the accused is a non-member. That’s one of the foremost reasons why the United States did not ratify the Rome Statute that established the ICC in the first place — because it was foreseeable that someone, somewhere would try to prosecute Americans for lawfully executing orders designed to preserve its security and that of its allies.

 

That’s exactly what has happened, as Rubio himself explained:

 

Americans found themselves in the crosshairs anyway: In 2020 the ICC launched an investigation into what chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of Gambia described as “war crimes by members of the United States armed forces” in Afghanistan, declaring that the U.S. government hadn’t prosecuted enough American soldiers to satisfy the court. In effect, Ms. Bensouda was anointing herself the final judge of U.S. military policy and the entire U.S. justice system.

 

For this, and many other valid reasons, the U.S. will use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to “dismantle the ICC,” Rubio declared, “brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

The reality is that the ICC has never strictly observed its jurisdictional limitations. Indeed, its members are more inclined to test their parameters and invent fantastical alternative realities that justify their meddlesome impulses.

 

Take, for example, “the situation in the State of Palestine.” That’s how the ICC opened its report announcing its intention to seek warrants for the arrest of government officials within the “territory of Israel.” These linguistic fictions were necessary for the court to fabricate the existence of an “international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine.” That was the necessary pretext to legitimize the ICC’s efforts to intervene in Israel’s post-10/7 war on Hamas’s behalf, after all.

 

That useful fairy tale was spearheaded by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. He was specifically named in an annex to Trump’s 2025 executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC, and events have subsequently proven the White House’s wisdom. In June, the U.K. Bar Standards Board suspended Khan after a two-year investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct involving a female aide. That preliminary suspension was upheld this week in advance of disciplinary proceedings. As it debates whether to remove Khan from office, the ICC’s Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties determined that Khan’s denials were “devoid of credibility.” Indeed, Khan’s credibility is a depreciating asset across the board.

 

The ICC, an arm of the United Nations, benefited from the Biden administration’s reflexive deference to international talk shops. Biden’s successor withdrew that toleration. From the outset, Trump 2.0 took aim at the UN’s most corrupt bodies — including the U.N. Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and UNWRA. The administration’s turn against the ICC is neither a departure from the Trump administration’s approach to the UN nor inconsistent with U.S. policy under Trump’s predecessors.

 

Trump’s 2025 executive order sanctioning the ICC for the “dangerous precedent” it set under Khan accused him and his agency of “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.”

 

That statement is entirely consistent with the rationale that has led presidents from both parties over the last quarter century to refuse to observe, much less seek the Senate’s approval for, the Rome Statute.

 

“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio wrote. “To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.” Not only that, but it would be to surrender American sovereignty to a supranational body that is corruptly managed, morally blinkered, and power-hungry. The European left seems to think that is a controversial position for the Trump administration to take. It’s unlikely that most Americans would agree.