Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the Trump administration’s new effort to isolate the International Criminal Court, accusing it of undermining U.S. sovereignty.
President Donald Trump has had a negative view of the ICC since his first term and has intensified efforts to strip it of authority in his second term. Rubio outlined the latest effort to cripple the body on Monday in a video address, beginning with a painting of the organization as a malicious force in the world. He warned that “powerful people in faraway places” were trying to wrestle control of U.S. citizens’ lives.
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“They believe that they should be in charge of your laws, of your country, your life, and they don’t care whether or not you agree,” Rubio said.
“As we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law,” he added later.
The current operations of the ICC go well beyond its originally promised mandate of a backstop that only prosecutes the most severe crimes in places where law and order have broken down, Rubio said. Instead, it has transformed into something far more “radical and extreme.”
“It’s a global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited. The danger of this global court has only continued to grow,” Rubio said. “Today, it threatens every aspect of our political and legal system. Border patrol agents removing violent criminals from our country, American Marines risking their lives to defend our homeland, prosecutors working to dismantle terrorist plots to attack and kill Americans.
“If we stand idle, all of them would be at the mercy of foreign judges thousands of miles away, facing the constant risk of prosecution and even imprisonment for the so-called crime of defending their own country. The American people never agreed to any of this, and they never will.
“We fought a revolution against a foreign power transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses. Independence is our birthright. We will never let foreign bureaucrats take that away from us.”
The secretary of state elaborated on how the United States would go about this in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. He said the U.S. would undertake a diplomatic campaign to find common cause with allies.
“The US is launching a diplomatic campaign with a simple message — sovereign states over globalism,” Rubio wrote. “Those who benefit from American security must not stand idly by while those who provide that security are targeted.”
He said the U.S. and its partners would use all methods at their disposal to “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the State Department for comment.
A State Department official told Reuters that a variety of options against the ICC are being reviewed, including travel bans, visa revocations, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure on other countries to withdraw from the organization.
U.S. frustration with the ICC peaked in 2024, after the court indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Members of the ICC are required by the court to arrest and extradite anyone wanted by the court who sets foot on its territory.
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The Trump administration has previously run into opposition over its effort to isolate the ICC. In May, it was forced to withdraw sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, after a U.S. court intervened.
She was sanctioned over comments viewed as inflammatory, and for the sending of “threatening letters” to dozens of global businesses and groups, including American companies, making “extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives.”
