Last week, on July 13, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “whole-of-government” campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court, vowing to take it apart “brick by brick” if necessary. The ICC is the world’s permanent international criminal tribunal. located in The Hague and joined by 125 member-states. It prosecutes genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity when a state is unable or unwilling to prosecute them itself.
The United States has long considered the court a threat to U.S. sovereignty because the court claims authority to prosecute American service members and officials, a category that encompasses border patrol agents, military personnel, and federal prosecutors. The Trump administration is taking that position one step further by moving to destroy the ICC.
This strange posture from the Trump White House is yet another example of how Rubio, now the stern-faced, standard-bearer of the conservative American movement and a favorite for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, is governing by demolition: a harsh rejection of the status quo and of traditional norms, reckless policy decisions, and political checks cashed for populist conservative applause rather than any real objective.
Rubio is an intelligent man, but he seems to either underestimate or disregard both the limited utility of these moves and the diplomatic risk the United States will bear for administrations to come.
Trump Attacks
Rubio’s announcement joins a nearly constant stream of Trump administration policies weaponizing delegated executive authorities to destroy international cooperation and reject anything resembling global governance. Just as the administration has barred entire nationalities from entry, revoked student visas to punish campus dissent, and denied UN delegations travel rights for positions it opposes, Rubio won’t dismantle the ICC itself—he can’t—but will deploy the same tools with full force: visa revocations, asset freezes, sanctions, and diplomatic isolation as categorical punishment for anyone who cooperates with The Hague.
During his first term, for instance, Donald Trump revoked the visa of ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and later sanctioned her and a senior member of her staff over the court’s Afghanistan investigation, an inquiry that put potential U.S. culpability on the table. Biden later lifted those sanctions. When Trump returned to the White House, he signed Executive Order 14203, declaring a national emergency and authorizing asset freezes and visa restrictions on anyone aiding ICC efforts to investigate or prosecute “protected persons,” meaning U.S. nationals and the citizens of allied non-member states. Prosecutor Karim Khan was designated right away.
The list expanded in June 2025 to judges tied to the Afghanistan investigation and the Netanyahu and Gallant arrest warrants , again on August 20, 2025 to two deputy prosecutors and two more judges, and again on December 18, 2025 to two further judges. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and three Palestinian human rights organizations —Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights—were designated as well. OFAC issued implementing regulations on July 1, 2025. Then, in June 2026, three sanctioned ICC judges sued the Trump administration in New York federal court. Roughly 30 days later came Rubio’s dismantlement announcement.
ICC Jurisdiction
The ICC was established by the Rome Statute, which entered into force in 2002. Jurisdiction attaches in one of three ways: conduct on the territory of a state party, conduct by a national of a state party, or a referral from the UN Security Council, as with Sudan and Libya. Non-member states are the exception to that rule. A country that never joins the Rome Statute escapes ICC jurisdiction over conduct inside its own borders, and the United States signed the treaty but never ratified it.
Many non-members have foreign policies that invite scrutiny: the United States, China, Russia, India, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran. U.S. opponents of the ICC oppose membership on the grounds that U.S. foreign policy could put the country in the crosshairs with the only upside being the altruistic promotion of democracy and signaling of cooperation.
As outrageous as this American position is, it is not surprising. After the United States formally withdrew its intention to join the court in 2002, Congress needed only months to pass the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, better known as The Hague Invasion Act. The statute authorizes the use of military force in The Hague, on the soil of an allied nation, to free any U.S. service member brought before the court.
What Rubio Can Do
The Trump administration could begin with restricting the travel of ICC personnel, which would require defying the UN Headquarters Agreement, a treaty ratified through the U.S. Senate that carries the force of law. The agreement obligates the United States not to impede officials traveling to UN headquarters in Manhattan. Certain ICC officials fall within its protections, and they may now face the same limits the administration has imposed on other members of the international community traveling under the agreement, from Mahmoud Abbas to senior officials in the Brazilian government.
The practice stretches all the way back to the ban on Yasser Arafat. Despite its force in domestic and international law, a violation amounts to a contractual breach, to be referred to a tribunal of three arbitrators: one named by the UN secretary general, one by the United States, and a third chosen jointly, or by the president of the International Court of Justice if the two sides deadlock.
The next escalation would be sanctioning the ICC itself as an organization, treating the court the way the Treasury Department treats a designated foreign bank or cartel. This step, which the administration is reportedly weighing , would cut the ICC off from the dollar system and make nearly any transaction with it sanctionable. The secondary effects of the existing designations show exactly how that would work. After Khan was sanctioned, Microsoft cancelled his official email address, forcing him onto a Swiss provider, and his bank accounts in the United Kingdom were frozen. American NGOs that once gathered evidence and located witnesses for the court stopped answering its emails. Staffers moved money out of American accounts for fear of seizure, and the court is now migrating its systems off Microsoft entirely. The executive order does the rest on its own: it extends travel bans to the families of the designated and threatens fines and prison for anyone providing them financial, material, or technological support, which puts a chill on the contractors, lawyers, service providers, and witnesses that any court depends on.
Washington can also squeeze the court through its member states. It can condition military aid, intelligence sharing, and security cooperation on rejecting the court’s authority, which is exactly the increased scrutiny the July 13 release promises for nations that rely on American assistance. It can dust off the Article 98 bilateral immunity agreements of the Bush years, under which roughly 100 countries pledged never to surrender Americans to The Hague. Congress can codify the whole apparatus; the House passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act in January 2025 before it stalled in the Senate, and a coordinated governmental campaign will surely take another run at it. At the Security Council, the United States can veto any new referral, push Article 16 deferrals for allies under investigation, and withhold the evidence-sharing that once fed the court’s Ukraine investigation.
None of this will dismantle the ICC. What Rubio can take apart, brick by brick, is U.S. credibility as a partner in international law and the confidence of allies in the rules-based order the United States helped to build. In so doing, Rubio is also undermining the credibility of the U.S. political system, which has accorded the president enormous power to sanction, to restrict travel, and to freeze assets. Every visa that Rubio revokes and every aid package that he conditions will erode U.S. legitimacy as a democratic actor at home and abroad.
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Rubio Vows to Dismantle the ICC Brick by Brick
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.