One month ago, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a sweeping campaign “to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to U.S. sovereignty.” Having previously demanded that the ICC’s judges and chief prosecutor drop cases that the U.S. government opposes, Rubio now promises simply to take the institution apart, “brick by brick, if necessary.”
Yet Rubio and his lieutenants essentially made that threat last year, holding over the Court the hammer of financial sanctions that would target not just the ICC’s senior officials – as the administration has been doing in tranches since February 2025 – but the institution as a whole. Putting the ICC itself on the Treasury Department’s financial blacklist could leave the Court unable to function by making it risky or even impossible for many banks, airlines, insurers, tech companies, and other vendors to work with it.
But Rubio’s recent announcements suggest the administration is still not quite ready to come through with that killing blow, preferring first to pin down more diplomatic support for the U.S. position. His campaign launch in July did repeat the threat of further sanctions in general terms, and indeed, the State Department last week announced it had targeted two more individual ICC officials, including the court’s presiding judge. But the campaign also includes a new and explicit focus on trying to persuade states to quit or condemn the ICC, as part of the administration “working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause.”
This new element of the U.S. attack on the ICC stands out because it is unnecessary as a practical matter. The United States can sanction the Court on its own, at any time, and make it extremely difficult for the ICC to keep operating. Yet Rubio’s appeal for multilateral backing hints at a concern somewhere within the administration about the political costs of taking such a step, and it presents states with a choice: offer the administration the diplomatic cover it seeks, or try to raise those political costs.
From our perspective, and that of the many survivors and advocates who turn to the Court for justice, that choice is an easy one. Whatever collection of states Rubio manages to assemble behind his appalling campaign, countries that understand the importance of accountability need to publicly challenge the U.S. narrative and offer a vocal and practical defense of the Court.
Rubio’s Misleading Campaign
The ICC is an imperfect institution, but its work matters. Thanks to the Court – and the victims and states who have supported it – Rodrigo Duterte, the alleged architect of widespread extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, will be standing trial this fall. Ukraine’s domestic authorities have a powerful ICC partner in prosecuting Russian war crimes on its territory. And last year, the ICC convicted a senior commander involved in Darfur’s brutal wars.
Rubio ignores these successes to make his case against the Court. He condemns the ICC as a threat to U.S. sovereignty, but he refuses to acknowledge that the Court’s jurisdiction comes from the sovereign decisions of more than 120 countries, which have agreed to allow the Court to investigate atrocities committed on their territory. To justify the extreme measures he has proposed, Rubio overstates and mischaracterizes the risks of U.S. legal exposure to the Court.
It is true that U.S. officials face some risk of legal exposure in foreign jurisdictions, whether it be in national or international courts. This is especially so when they commit or direct serious crimes, such as the ongoing systematic murder of civilians allegedly trafficking drugs at sea. But this would be true whether or not the ICC exists. In his anti-ICC campaign, Rubio is spotlighting exaggerated fears of ICC action against U.S. officials in situations where the Court’s jurisdiction does not exist (Iran), or is patchy at best (many of the U.S. boat strikes appear to be in international waters against vessels registered to no country), or where the ICC has signaled it will not pursue U.S. conduct (torture in Afghanistan).
As Rubio strains to play up the legal risks the ICC poses to the United States, he is silent on how the Trump administration has undermined the U.S. institutions and practices that help disarm outside legal scrutiny. The ICC must defer to genuine investigations at the national level, and Rubio insists that Americans charged with a crime “stand for judgment before a jury of our own peers,” not an international court. But the administration has eroded a wide range of government accountability bodies that would once have given some assurance that U.S. actions were being credibly reviewed for compliance with domestic and international law, and that allegations of atrocity crimes might be taken seriously. Rubio is in essence touting U.S. accountability systems at the same time the Trump administration is hollowing them out.
The only actual ICC activity underway that the administration opposes concerns Israel, and Rubio has omitted any reference to it from this campaign. The ICC’s Palestine investigation, which includes Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s response in Gaza, led to an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has been the main justification for the U.S. sanctions targeting the court.
In making his case now, Rubio notably says nothing about that warrant, perhaps wary that a vocal defense of official Israeli actions in Gaza could repel other states from joining the cause. In any event, President Donald Trump usefully clarified matters at a July Cabinet meeting when he interrupted Rubio’s explanation of the campaign to stress that it is aimed at “trying to defend Bibi and various other people.”
Accomplices Wanted…
What’s new in Rubio’s campaign is his stated plan to call on ICC member states “urging them to withdraw from the ICC,” and to ask fellow non-members “to leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar actions alongside us.” But Rubio does not say why peeling off ICC member states matters to an administration famously indifferent to global opinion.
There is no legal or practical way in which the Trump administration specifically needs the backing of other countries to attack the Court. Sanctioning the ICC using the U.S. financial sanctions statute would be a unilateral act, not one that has to be unlocked with a vote at the United Nations or elsewhere. Alternatively, for the Court to be financially weakened by withdrawals in a meaningful way, the departing member states would need to come from among the 10 donors that provide around 70 percent of its budget; but those countries, led by Japan, Germany, and France, remain strong backers of the court.
Each member-state withdrawal from the ICC does represent a blow to its goal of becoming a universal institution, as well as to the people who lose the Court’s potential protection. But if the administration is trying to reduce its exposure for potential crimes in the future, shrinking the Court’s jurisdiction one country at a time would be a slow and laborious approach to doing so. The Court will not lose jurisdiction over U.S. acts that took place in a departing ICC member state during the time that it was a member, nor any acts committed there in the year after the state begins the withdrawal procedure.
If convincing states to quit the ICC would pay only modest dividends in these tangible ways, one other benefit may simply be the political cover that would come with showing the United States is not acting alone. It is unclear which audience Rubio expects to care about this. His direct-to-camera video accompanying the campaign launch was addressed to a general American audience, but it focused more on tarring the ICC and hyping up the threat it presents than on any suggestion that a U.S. attack on it would enjoy support abroad.
U.S. technology companies and their customers abroad may also be an audience for the withdrawals campaign. Policies like U.S. sanctions have implications for whether those customers see U.S. companies as reliable service providers or, instead, ones whose services may be taken away at the unilateral whim of an erratic administration.
Previous ICC sanctions have already sent a powerful signal in the latter direction. After the U.S. government sanctioned the ICC’s chief prosecutor in February 2025, Microsoft reportedly canceled his email account to avoid liability for providing a service to a U.S.-sanctioned person. In response, the Court moved to reduce its reliance on the company’s services in favor of a European provider that would not cut off an ICC official under pressure. The Court was not the only customer that fled from U.S. business; the email incident prompted governments and legislators across Europe to step up efforts to find replacements for U.S. technology services in their own agencies and industries more generally.
The Trump administration is known to be focused on the commercial side effects of its national security policies, at least to the extent of offering superficial pushback to concerns that U.S. companies may raise. American diplomats around the world were instructed last month, for example, to fight the perception that the country’s artificial intelligence companies are selling services “that can be switched off overnight” by the U.S. government. This was prompted by an incident in June in which the Trump administration temporarily directed Anthropic to bar foreign users from accessing certain advanced AI models.
Sanctioning the Court as a whole would drive still more U.S. service providers away from the ICC, and is precisely the kind of action that would deepen the perception that using American technology makes one vulnerable to the administration’s impulses. Rubio’s effort to peel off ICC members, then, may be aimed at giving the superficial sense that those impulses are not actually unilateral, but rather supported by at least some minimal coalition. Whether this would really help mitigate the commercial backlash is unclear, but it would offer the companies a talking point and some degree of multilateral cover.
Anyone Will Do
How much political benefit Rubio’s withdrawals campaign ends up providing depends, of course, on who actually withdraws. There are presumably more to come, but the bedfellows that Rubio has attracted thus far are largely a disgraceful mix of military juntas and governments with good reason to fear investigation of their own atrocity crimes.
To date, only Burundi and the Philippines have ever quit the ICC, both because the ICC prosecutor had taken a formal step toward investigating atrocities linked to their governments. Other countries have discussed or initiated withdrawals in response to the investigation of Sudanese and Israeli officials, though these sympathy withdrawals were reversed before the one-year procedure ended, either because domestic courts reined in the withdrawing government or the government was defeated at the polls.
Trump, for his part, clearly understands that the campaign’s most natural supporters are dictatorships that dislike outside scrutiny. Trump reportedly asked China’s Xi Jinping at a summit meeting in May about “the United States joining forces with Russia and China to combat the [ICC].” It is not clear what came of this outreach, though of course Russia requires no prompting to blast the ICC, having threatened it with a hypersonic missile strike after President Vladimir Putin was charged with war crimes for Russia’s abduction of children in Ukraine.
The five announced supporters of the campaign cut a grim figure too, though that has not dampened the State Department’s enthusiasm for their decisions to quit the Court. A top U.S. diplomat praised Mali’s decision to initiate the withdrawal process, a step it took along with two other Russian-backed West African states – all of which are suspended from the African Union after military juntas overthrew their democratically elected governments.
The State Department similarly praised Venezuela for its withdrawal announcement, though this would seem to amount to praising Rubio himself, since he appears to be co-governing the country after the United States ousted dictator Nicolas Maduro in January and replaced him with his deputies, including the vice president and the former head of the brutal secret police. Chad’s government also announced its withdrawal, the only quitter of the five that had not already signaled an intent to leave the Court last year, before Rubio’s campaign kicked off.
A recent wave of Trump-friendly changes of government in Latin America probably creates other targets for Rubio, and might account for the timing of his campaign launch. In a U.N. Security Council meeting last month, a U.S. diplomat offered sympathy to “states, including some on this Council,” whose sovereignty the ICC allegedly infringed. This outreach was likely aimed at Colombia, whose post-conflict peace process was occasionally criticized or prodded by the ICC to ensure that perpetrators of atrocities would be held to account. Shortly afterwards, Abelardo de la Espriella, a Trump ally who has threatened to scrap the country’s transitional justice system, was sworn in as president. El Salvador, having bonded with the new Trump administration by making its domestic gulag available to receive unlawful U.S. deportations last year, seems another likely prospect.
Some of these governments may genuinely be of like mind with the Trump administration about the ICC. In other cases, observers should weigh whether the Trump administration’s new partners are really endorsing the substance of its cause or simply accommodating a U.S. demand. Rubio has clearly threatened to cut off U.S. assistance to countries to pressure them to support his campaign. A similar move famously backfired during the Bush administration, though some ICC member states may be particularly vulnerable to such threats, regardless of their views on the ICC.
Tellingly, withdrawing states so far have offered a critique of the ICC that is nearly the opposite of Rubio’s. A top Venezuelan official and the brother of the country’s acting president just months ago said the ICC “only serves the designs of American imperialism” and “harass[es] the countries the United States orders them to harass,” while the three West African states last fall called the Court “an instrument of neocolonial oppression in the hands of imperialism.” While the State Department criticized the ICC for failing to prosecute Maduro, Venezuela’s acting president insists the Court has been “instrumentalized to attack the Venezuelan state.” The Trump administration criticizes the ICC for focusing on “countries that have competent, independent judicial systems” (by which it means Israel and the U.S.), while Venezuela and Chad condemn it for focusing on the global south and Africa in particular. These states may be making “common cause,” but none of this provides a coherent endorsement of the ICC’s destruction.
For whatever reason, the Trump administration does not want to appear alone in attacking the ICC. But when the next U.S. blow against the Court comes, the responsibility for it will lie solely with the United States, whether or not Rubio by then has assembled around him a slightly less motley coalition of supporters than the current set of abusers.
Standing Up and Pushing Back
The administration wants a guarantee of impunity for itself that is as extensive abroad as what it has achieved at home, and apparently for Israeli officials too. If it cannot have that, it promises to destroy an institution that millions depend on for justice. Yet the administration’s pause before taking the ultimate steps it has been threatening suggests that it wants a greater veneer of legitimacy than brute strength alone can provide. Other countries should see this as an opportunity to push back against Rubio’s campaign and discourage his coalition from gaining traction.
ICC member states should remind the Trump administration that they, too, have sovereignty. They should make clear that neither the U.S. nor the Israeli case for destroying the Court holds up. They should deplore the administration for seeking out China’s support for their campaign and for playing up the endorsements of tinpot military regimes. They should ask their peers considering leaving the court if the coalition they are joining really reflects their national values and identity. And they should remind the public that the insecurity the Trump administration appears to feel about its legal exposure owes a great deal to its own lawlessness abroad and its destruction of accountability institutions at home, not to some threat that it is owed assistance in defeating.
More tangibly, ICC member states should act now to help the Court and its vendors prepare for the heavier sanctions that seem certain to come once Rubio lines up his pro-impunity posse. They should instruct banks and other private sector entities that are not U.S. companies, and thus not bound to comply with U.S. sanctions, not to do so, and provide them support that helps them try to do that. That includes issuing strong political statements about the illegitimacy of the sanctions. So-called blocking statutes and similar measures are no panacea against U.S. financial might, but activating them can at least discourage corporate overcompliance with U.S. measures and provide a stronger legal basis for refusing to cut off the Court.
Finally, they should make clear that the administration is harming the United States’ commercial and national interests. They should tell U.S. tech companies that the administration’s abuses of power are putting their ability to compete for business in these countries in ever-greater jeopardy, as it becomes untenable to rely on U.S. services in any politically sensitive context. The administration’s actions are incentivizing foreign governments to find ways to shield their territory and their economies from U.S. sanctions, rather than help amplify those sanctions as they have in the past.
The ICC is not a pile of bricks for Washington to take apart. It is an institution that offers rare hope for the survivors of war crimes and others who seek to break cycles of trauma, grievance, and conflict. Those who have created and relied on this institution must do their part to prevent vandals from tearing it down.
