Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who you will recall was unanimously confirmed, presumably for his chill, statesmanlike, steady vibe, and foreign policy experience, lolsob is going to war against the International Criminal Court, saying he will dismantle it.
Cool cool cool, seems fine.
This is a bad war, but it’s also a weird war, because the United States is not a party to the Treaty of Rome and is therefore not a member nation of the ICC. Former President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Treaty in 2000, but it was never ratified, and then former President George W. Bush “unsigned” it.
So what’s so dastardly about the ICC that we have to “dismantle” it? Well, it creates an international tribunal that provides defendants with a panoply of due process rights when they are credibly accused of breaking international law. The horror!
Well, honestly, this is a horror for this administration. It’s impossible not to conclude that much of Rubio’s chest-beating here is because this administration is genuinely afraid—as they should be—that U.S officials responsible for ordering war crimes and murders they commit with impunity might end up before the ICC, whether we’ve signed the treaty or not. That’s because countries that are bound by the Rome Statute must cooperate with the ICC for requests for arrests, so an American could be arrested abroad and turned over to The Hague.
Sounds great. Let’s do it.
Rubio wants to frame the ICC as some sort of monster that does not respect the sovereignty of other nations. Indeed, his op-ed announcing his big dismantling initiative was chock full of some nice xenophobic buzzwords to that effect: “The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.“ He also declared this is an exercise in “sovereign states over globalism.”
Except that isn’t what the ICC is at all. It’s a court of last resort. It only has authority to pursue investigations and charges after a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute its own perpetrators.
Oh wait. That’s pretty much what the United States is doing. Or, well, not doing, really.
So how are we going to dismantle something that we aren’t even part of? The answer will not surprise you one bit. It’s the standard administration gambit of basically threatening other countries until they agree to let the United States dictate everything.
The administration has already sanctioned ICC personnel for the crime of investigating and issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To protect his buddy in war crimes, Trump declared a “national emergency” about how the ICC was “targeting America and our close ally Israel.”
But it’s not just sanctions. Rubio made clear that travel bans and visa revocations for any ICC personnel are on the table, as is pressuring other countries to withdraw from the Treaty of Rome.
In other words, it’s just business as usual. Throw out immigrants and other people here entirely legally, threaten other countries for having their own laws and views, and you just know tariffs are gonna make an appearance somewhere here.
Unsurprisingly, this has thus far not resulted in any diplomatic successes. Rather, the EU said the threat was “unacceptable,” and the UN said the ICC is a “critical cog” in the international justice system.
At root, Rubio and Trump’s vision of “sovereignty” is the very opposite of what they say it is. They don’t just want to protect the U.S. from interference by other countries as such, but rather to impose Trump’s views on terrorism, leftism, trans rights, murdering people in the Caribbean, tech restrictions, and so forth, on the rest of the world. And if they don’t agree, we’ll bring those countries to their knees. Yeah, that’s not what sovereignty is, pal.
Rubio also gave away the game by referring to “so-called international law,” because the stance of the United States these days is clearly that there is no international law we are obliged to follow, period.
So while Rubio says that the ICC is “an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty,” it’s actually that the United States is an intolerable threat to other countries and to the international order. A tangible, ongoing, deadly threat.
Rubio is a monster, but he’s no dummy, and the specter of Nuremberg-style trials for himself, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump, and so on, can’t be far from his mind. Hope it haunts him daily.
