Rubio put the I.C.C. on notice with a video message and an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, and vowed to “systemically disable” it. The spur of Rubio’s ire may be the court’s ongoing war-crimes case against the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute that brought the court into being, in 2002, but Israel’s devastation of Gaza gives the court jurisdiction on the issue, since Palestine is a formal member. There’s an active I.C.C. warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest, which Mamdani, in a video posted on Tuesday evening, said that he wished to execute when the Israeli leader next comes to New York City, likely in September, but that he has no “legal authority” to do so independent of federal authorities. The Trump Administration attacked Mamdani for his stance. There are also campaigns from human-rights groups to get the court to consider war crimes against the United States for its strikes on alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and on civilian targets in Iran, though no formal investigations, let alone charges, seem imminent. There was an investigation, launched in 2020, into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, but the I.C.C. recently moved to “deprioritise” it. Generations of U.S. lawmakers have balked at allowing the I.C.C. jurisdiction over this country, but no official has embarked on such a sweeping attack on the institution as Rubio, who wants to expand existing anti-I.C.C. sanctions—which already include travel bans, asset freezes, and other restrictions on a number of I.C.C. personnel working on cases involving U.S. and Israeli nationals—and to pressure other nations to withdraw from the court altogether. Kenneth Roth, an American attorney and the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me that at stake could be the very principle of whether “governments control prosecution of crimes on their territory,” which he described as a basic element of justice. “The Trump Administration would have people believe that, if I commit a war crime in London, it somehow violates national sovereignty for Britain to allow the I.C.C. to prosecute me,” he said.
The targeting of the I.C.C. is part of the Trump Administration’s broader friction with major parts of the international system, which U.S. officials frequently argue is somehow rigged against American interests and beholden to “woke” agendas. It has pulled out of some United Nations treaties and agencies—including the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization—while it is more broadly championing budget cuts across the U.N. and the streamlining or paring down of affiliated agencies and international organizations, as well as efforts to supplant them with its own initiatives, such as Trump’s quixotic Board of Peace. But the campaign to break the I.C.C., Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “is a campaign of pure destruction, a coercive attempt to impose the United States’ will on the rest of the world.” Prominent U.S. allies, including the French President, Emmanuel Macron, have spoken in defense of the I.C.C., and it’s unclear how much traction Rubio’s offensive will gain. John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the George W. Bush Administration, sees the initiative “as a political message intended for a domestic audience.”
The same is true for the summit arranged by the State Department last week on the spectral menace of alleged far-left terrorist organizations. There, too, Rubio touted a campaign to “dismantle” his quarry—in this case, far-left activist networks that he sees as coördinating activities from Europe to the Americas. He suggested that “Antifa militants” are a graver threat than Islamist extremists, and summoned a history of left-wing violence primarily from the nineteen-seventies to make his argument. (Trump’s Justice Department, meanwhile, has quietly deleted a 2024 department study, which found far-right extremists were involved in far more ideologically motivated killings than their left-wing or Islamist counterparts.) Last year, the White House released a national-security memorandum about targeting “domestic terrorism,” which the American Civil Liberties Union described as “a fever dream of conspiracies” and “outright falsehoods” set up to target or suppress the work of myriad left-leaning activists, nonprofits, and their donors. Separately, the Trump Administration placed four European “Antifa” factions—two from Greece, one from Italy, and one from Germany—on its State Department foreign-terrorist-organizations list, a set of designations that left many European officials bemused, not least because of the lingering vagueness behind who or what even constitutes “Antifa.” At the conference, Rubio said that the left is “a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.”
Ishaan Tharoor
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