Well aware of the “significant flaws” in the 1998 Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court, President Bill Clinton refused to submit it to the Senate for ratification. Despite his concerns, on December 31, 2000 — the final day the treaty was open for signature — he joined more than 130 other world leaders in signing it.
At the time, a State Department news release declared:
We do so to reaffirm our strong support for international accountability and for bringing to justice perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. We do so as well because we wish to remain engaged in making the ICC an instrument of impartial and effective justice in the years to come.
The news release was clear: until the Treaty was ratified by the Senate, the ICC had no “jurisdiction over U.S. personnel.”
It stated:
The United States should have the chance to observe and assess the functioning of the Court, over time, before choosing to become subject to its jurisdiction. Given these concerns, I will not, and do not recommend that my successor, successor, submit the Treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.
In May 2002, President George W. Bush informed the United Nations that the U.S. did not intend to become a party to the Rome Statute, and did not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. He effectively unsigned the document.
Despite these actions, Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, warned in an October 2025 op-ed that the ICC might find “a jurisdictional hook” to prosecute President Donald Trump after he leaves office for actions his administration has taken in or against ICC member states.
He cautioned that the ICC might target the Trump administration over its strikes on narcoterrorist drug boats, its deportations to ICC member nations such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, and Trump’s proposal to allow Gazans to leave their devastated territory, which a former ICC judge had declared illegal.
“Mr. Trump’s adversaries caught him by surprise with their lawfare campaign during and after his first term,” Kontorovich wrote. “With the ICC, he has a chance to strike pre-emptively.”
He emphasized that, by taking a far “more aggressive approach” to the ICC while still in office, Trump can avoid becoming a target of its lawfare after leaving office.
Among Kontorovich’s recommendations:
The administration should demand that regional allies like El Salvador and Guatemala quit the court, joining pro-American countries like Hungary, which recently became the first European Union member state to do so. The president should also expand sanctions to target the entire institution and all its employees, whether they work in the office of the prosecutor or the IT desk. The administration is reportedly considering such measures.
Well, it looks like Kontorovich’s warning went from his lips to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s ears. In a Monday morning op-ed, titled “Why We’re Dismantling the ICC,” Rubio confirmed that “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.”
He argued that the ICC has assumed powers it does not possess:
Most of us would struggle to imagine a world in which U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.But that is what the International Criminal Court now claims the power to do.
“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.,” Rubio wrote. Although the U.S. had repeatedly refused to ratify the Rome Statute, he said that “Americans found themselves in the crosshairs anyway” and offered some examples:
In 2020 the ICC launched an investigation into what chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of Gambia described as “war crimes by members of the United States armed forces” in Afghanistan, declaring that the U.S. government hadn’t prosecuted enough American soldiers to satisfy the court. In effect, Ms. Bensouda was anointing herself the final judge of U.S. military policy and the entire U.S. justice system.
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In March, the Washington-based Democracy for the Arab World Now urged the Iranian regime to request an ICC investigation of “apparent war crimes” committed by American personnel. [Did they forget that Iran had killed roughly 40,000 of its own citizens just two months earlier?]
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When 12 U.S. senators wrote to the ICC prosecutor about their concerns, the prosecutor’s office accused them of crimes. When Mr. Trump imposed sanctions against ICC personnel, a former head of Human Rights Watch said that “all 125 ICC member states would have a legal duty to arrest him were he to show up.”
Rubio continued, “This is America. Our forefathers fought a revolution against a foreign power, ‘transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.’ Independence is our birthright. We don’t intend to trade it for rule by a self-appointed priesthood of ‘international law.'” He added, “America never agreed to a world tribunal that can override our own courts and the Constitution.”
If Kontorovich’s warning proved prescient, Rubio’s op-ed makes clear the administration has no intention of allowing history to repeat itself. Instead of reacting to future ICC investigations after Trump leaves office, the administration is attempting to eliminate the conditions that could make such prosecutions possible — expanding sanctions, pressuring friendly governments to abandon the court, and stripping the ICC of the international legitimacy and cooperation it would need to pursue American officials.
Trump’s years of being targeted have taught him an important lesson: don’t wait until your opponents weaponize an institution against you — neutralize the threat while you still can.
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