The State Department has launched a campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court. The effort is welcome. The ICC is a clear and present danger to U.S. citizens and the American way of life.
On Monday, the State Department announced a “sweeping campaign” to dismantle the threat the ICC poses to national sovereignty.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the administration’s case, arguing that “the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states, and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”
That might sound overblown. It is not.
The ICC’s origins seemed innocuous. It was established in 2002 under the multilateral Rome Statute. Hans Corell, who was the United Nations legal counsel at the time, hailed its creation as “a page in the history of humankind being turned,” while Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary-general, celebrated it as a “triumph for the rule of law.”
In the years immediately preceding the ICC’s creation, the collapse of Yugoslavia had brought ethnic conflict and war back to Europe for the first time since World War II.
The ICC, some argued, could prosecute war criminals, deter atrocities, and preserve the liberal international order that appeared to have triumphed at the end of the Cold War. That was the idea, but it has not worked out that way.
Instead of pursuing the real war criminals, the ICC has transformed itself into just another anti-Western international institution, and a seriously dangerous one, and spent decades targeting the United States and its allies while working ceaselessly to erode American sovereignty. Some predicted that this would be the case. On May 6, 2002, the George W. Bush administration announced that the U.S. would not become a party to the Rome Statute.
In a letter to the United Nations, the administration cited “serious objections” including “the lack of checks and balances on powers of the Court’s prosecutors and judges; the dilution of the U.N. Security Council’s authority over criminal prosecutions; and the lack of any effective mechanism to prevent politicized prosecutions of American service members and officials.”
At the time, Sen. Ted Kennedy and other prominent Western liberals condemned Bush’s decision. But the former president’s concerns have proved prescient.
The ICC is a kangaroo court, its early pretensions undone by a catalog of alleged corruption, antisemitism, and anti-American bias. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was suspended in June following serious allegations of sexual misconduct involving a female aide. In May 2024, he announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gallant, who was the Israeli defense minister, accusing them of “war crimes.”
According to a formal legal complaint filed by Shurat HaDin, an Israeli legal-rights organization, Khan met with Qatari officials and received assurances that he would “be taken care of” if he indicted Israeli officials. In May 2026, Shurat HaDin called for a formal investigation and accused the emir of Qatar of violating Article 70(1)(d) of the Rome Statute by “impeding, intimidating, or corruptly influencing an official of the Court.”
The ICC has fixated on prosecuting the Jewish state, launching investigations and seeking indictments while ignoring murderous dictators such as former Syrian ruler Bashar Assad and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
The ICC defended its decision not to issue an arrest warrant for Assad, who murdered tens of thousands of his own countrymen, many with chemical weapons, on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction because Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute and the U.N. Security Council had not referred the matter to the court.
That defense is utterly hypocritical. Neither Israel nor the U.S. is a party to the Rome Statute either, yet that has not stopped the court from pursuing its sham indictments and investigations against them. It is not a genuine judicial body at all, but a political one, and dishonest and malignant at that.
As the State Department noted, the ICC “claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest.”
Americans agreed to none of this. As the State Department observed, “all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained” that the organization has no jurisdiction over Americans.
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Nonetheless, the ICC has refused to close the spurious investigations it launched into U.S. soldiers who fought terrorists in Afghanistan. In February 2025, the Trump administration announced sanctions against ICC officials for refusing to respect the sovereignty and rights of Americans.
In a world that often refuses to distinguish between good and evil, except to condemn the former and embrace the latter, the ICC is part of the problem. Abolishing it is part of the solution. We look forward to details about how Rubio intends to do this.