Trump’s Campaign Against the International Criminal Court is Working
It is not easy to find a policy of Donald Trump’s administration that: (1) is beneficial to the American-underwritten Western Alliance; (2) is not being pursued for blatantly corrupt personal reasons or with other offsetting downsides; and (3) is actually working. However, I have a candidate: the campaign against the International Criminal Court (ICC).
It will be remembered that, in November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over their response to the Iran/HAMAS pogrom on 7 October 2023. This action was dubious on its own terms, violating the ICC’s jurisdictional limitations and principle of complementarity, and then there is Karim Khan, the Prosecutor. Khan is currently on administrative leave because he is accused of sex crimes by two women, one of whom was harassed by Qatar-hired private intelligence teams, and a suspicion lingers that the warrants were rushed through as part of Khan’s effort to silence the victims or, if that failed, to sow the seeds of a defence narrative wherein he is the victim of a Jewish frame-up. But these procedural “irregularities” are the least of it.
There has been a lot of absurd legal verbiage dressing up the political warfare waged against Israel over the last two years. The ICC has pushed the logic the furthest. When one strips away the pretences of “international law”, what one finds is a situation where: “The ICC—a self-selecting cadre of ideologists that have not and could not obtain democratic legitimacy—has claimed the right to remove and imprison the leaders of the democracies if the ICC does not agree with their national security policies.”
This is clearly not a threat to the Jewish State alone, and some perceptive observers pointed out the inevitability of all this way back in 1998, when the ICC was established. The balance of power being what it is, the ICC was unlikely to attack the United States head-on at first, but Israel would do as a proxy, and once that precedent was in hand, the “Court” could move on to the main event. Indeed, the ICC has already shown its hand in this regard, initiating an “investigation” targeting America over her conduct in Afghanistan, which has since been partially walked back.
There is no “reform” that can fix the ICC. The ICC indictment of Russia’s tyrant, Vladimir Putin, has not hindered him in waging an eliminationist war against Ukraine, and Sudan’s former ruler Umar al-Bashir was able to continue his rampage in Darfur quite freely after his indictment. Yet an ICC indictment can prevent Israel’s Prime Minister attending the ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz. This is not aberrational. Such deformities are inherent to the “progressive development of international law” project, stewarded by the United Nations, that began at Nuremberg—a set of proceedings one step up from show trials, to which the ICC is the faithful heir.
The ideal would be to terminate the ICC. This cannot be done immediately, but an aggressive containment policy can set the stage for the ICC’s destruction over time. The starting point is deterring any further “Court” actions against the West, while working to paralyse the institution and erode it from within by imposing pressures that make life difficult for staff, incentivising departures and impeding recruitment. According to a report in The New York Times on Saturday, the Trump administration has achieved precisely this.
Since February 2025, the U.S. has imposed individual sanctions on eleven of the ICC’s top officials, eight judges and three prosecutors. “The penalties effectively cut the judges off from all American funds, goods and credit cards, and prohibit individuals and business in the United States from working with them”, the Times notes.
Those interviewed by the Times struck defiant notes. “We judges will be undeterred”, said Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza, a Peruvian judge who insists she works at the ICC because of her “mission to adjudicate on behalf of the most vulnerable victims”, rather than for anything so vulgar as money. But Ibáñez also noted plaintively, “We’re treated like pariahs, we are on a list with terrorists and drug dealers.” This dimension to the campaign against the ICC—the ideological assault on its prestige and legitimacy—is more difficult to intentionally direct than practical subversion, but it is encouraging that it is already being felt by the targets.
Kimberly Prost, a Canadian judge involved in the Afghan fishing expedition, likewise insisted, “We are not going to be intimidated”, while lamenting the “pervasive, negative impact on daily life” the U.S. sanctions had caused. “You lose immediate access to all the main credit cards that go through the SWIFT system, which is controlled by the U.S.,” Prost said. “My Amazon and Google accounts were closed. You cannot pay for your utilities, your subscriptions. You’re completely crippled when it comes to booking hotels, trains, flights. You can’t buy dollars because your name is flagged.” The sanctions “have had a psychological impact on all of us judges”, Prost added.
The Times concluded by discussing the “existential threat” posed to the ICC if U.S. imposes sanctions on the “Court” itself. The ICC is already racing to overhaul “its American-dominated tech and financial systems”, trying to back up data at different sites and shift its finance and communications systems to European platforms. The ICC transferred “its office software from Microsoft to an open-source platform developed by a German government-owned company” in September and is trying to move to service providers, banks, and insurers willing to retain ties if the institution is sanctioned by America. The results have been distinctly mixed, and it seems likely the ICC will have real trouble paying its 1,100 employees and receiving funds from its 125 donor governments if U.S. sanctions are imposed.
Some European Union States are trying to have the Brussels bureaucracy “invoke its ‘blocking statute,’ which would give member states the right to refuse to enforce American laws that conflicted with European legal rules”, according to the Times. “But experts say that protection might be limited”. These companies have large American interests they are unlikely to risk for the sake of a relationship with the ICC. Osvaldo Zavala Giler, a registrar leading the overhaul of ICC systems, told the Times flat-out that for all of his efforts, “the risk of an operational disruption continues to be real.”
Sanctioning the ICC should, therefore, be the next step for the U.S., and whoever is driving this campaign inside the Trump administration has adequate proof-of-concept to make their case. Even before the Times report, there were indications sanctions had deterred further warrants against Israeli officials, and as early as May 2025 sanctions had “made it increasingly difficult for the tribunal to conduct basic tasks”, leaving “ICC staffers to openly wonder whether the organization can survive the Trump administration”. Institutional sanctions increase the chances it cannot. Whatever the degree of Trump’s personal engagement on this issue, the President gets the blame for mistakes and credit for the successes. If the administration can destroy the ICC, it will have to be acknowledged—whatever else is said—that Trump’s legacy includes removing this dangerous threat to the Western Alliance.