In a stark public challenge to the International Criminal Court (ICC) just months after it issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally announced the Trump administration’s deliberate campaign to dismantle the global judicial body “brick by brick”.
Rubio laid out the administration’s hardline stance in a candid opinion piece published in *The Wall Street Journal* on Monday, framing the ICC’s oversight of U.S. military and law enforcement activities as an unprecedented overstep of institutional authority that poses an existential threat to American national sovereignty. “The ICC’s interfering with American military and law enforcement operations isn’t just a grave overreach of its purported authorities. It would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation,” he wrote.
“Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC – brick by brick, if necessary,” Rubio added. He doubled down on this position in a pre-recorded monologue released to social media platform X the same day, arguing the court seeks to strip American citizens of their long-held legal right to be tried under domestic law by a jury of their peers. “But today powerful people in far away places want to take that away from us. 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,” he stated in the video.
Rubio further accused the ICC of actively waging a campaign against the U.S., noting that most American citizens have no familiarity with the court’s judges, prosecutors, or leadership — and that they “shouldn’t have to”. He emphasized that opposition to the court crosses U.S. party lines, a longstanding position dating back to the ICC’s founding in 2002, when the body was established to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes following mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Notably, Rubio avoided any direct reference to the 2024 arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who stand accused of crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, where the Gaza health ministry reports more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed since conflict resumed in October 2023. The court also issued arrest warrants for senior Hamas leaders over the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people; all Hamas leaders named in the warrants have since been assassinated by Israeli forces.
Rubio framed the administration’s campaign against the court through a nationalist lens, positioning the effort as a defense of state sovereignty against what he calls overreach by global institutions. “The U.S. is launching a diplomatic campaign with a simple message – sovereign states over globalism,” he said. Drawing a parallel to the American Revolution, he added: “Our forefathers fought a revolution against a foreign power transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences. Independence is our birthright. We don’t intend to trade it for rule by a self-appointed priesthood of ‘international law’.”
He reminded audiences of the ICC’s 2020 investigation into alleged war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, warning that the court could eventually extend its probes to U.S. Border Patrol agents and Marine Corps personnel. “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 claimed. In his X video, he pushed back against the court’s founding mandate, arguing that while it was billed as a tribunal to prosecute severe crimes when national courts are unable to act, it has become an unaccountable body of unelected officials with near-unlimited claims to power.
In reality, the ICC counts 125 member states, including all member nations of the European Union. Major global powers have historically opposed the court, largely to avoid submitting their own personnel to its jurisdiction. The U.S.’s primary geopolitical rivals, Russia and China, are not ICC members.
U.S. opposition to the court stretches back more than two decades: in 2002, then-President George W. Bush formally withdrew U.S. signature from the court’s founding Rome Statute and signed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), a law that restricted any U.S. cooperation with the ICC. The legislation even authorized the use of military force to rescue any U.S. personnel detained by the court, earning it the popular nickname the “Hague Invasion Act”. At the time, Washington also pressured dozens of countries around the world to sign bilateral immunity agreements barring them from surrendering U.S. citizens to the ICC.
Analysts view Rubio’s broadside as confirmation that the U.S. and its closest allies have launched a full diplomatic assault on the ICC specifically because of its efforts to hold Israeli leadership accountable for alleged war crimes in Gaza, a situation that the United Nations, leading human rights organizations, and prominent genocide scholars have formally designated as a genocide.
This campaign is not new: last year, former U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on ICC judges over their investigation into senior Israeli officials. According to previous reporting from Middle East Eye, these sanctions have severely impacted judges’ ability to travel, threatened their personal security and that of their families, and restricted their access to basic financial services. MEE has also exclusively reported on a parallel pressure campaign led by former UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who privately threatened ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan in April 2024 that the UK would defund and withdraw from the court if it moved forward with arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.
The U.S. did play a role in the ICC’s early founding: then-President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but the agreement was never sent to the U.S. Senate for ratification amid widespread bipartisan fears that the court would eventually prosecute U.S. military personnel and government officials for alleged war crimes in conflicts including Afghanistan and Iraq. Notably, the ICC has also issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes connected to the invasion of Ukraine.
Rubio closed his video monologue with a sharp warning to the ICC and its supporters: “This administration will not sit by as the ICC and its allies seek to threaten our people. If they believe they can deprive us of our sovereignty, we will teach them the full meaning of American resolve.”