by Richard M. Balzano
The Trump administration’s recent assault on the International Criminal Court (ICC) may be an abominable disgrace, but there’s no reason to panic—this is an American tradition. Washington has been treating international law like an inconvenient parking regulation for decades. The only novelty is how openly we’re admitting it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced that “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans,” explaining that Washington would “ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us.” Rubio declared that Americans “are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC,” and he warned our allies to fall in line on this issue. Rubio postured with no irony or understanding of how threatening actually works, that “[e]ither the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC,” and that the United States would “continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC piece by piece until Americans are threatened no longer.” Apparently, the gravest threat confronting Washington is accountability.
ICC President Tomoko Akane responded that the sanctions constituted “an attack against sovereign states that have created the Court, …against the international legal order,” and “an attack on the victims of mass atrocities.” The court’s objection and Washington’s objectives are identical: judges and prosecutors cannot effectively enforce international law when powerful governments punish them for doing their jobs. Akane insisted the ICC would continue “undeterred with the firm resolve that justice must prevail.”
The ICC prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. It is distinct from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which adjudicates disputes between states. The United States has never joined the ICC and has also walked away from the ICJ’s authority when that institution tried to hold the U.S. accountable. Different courts, same position: we are above the law.
But before Democrats work themselves into another partisan frenzy over the Trump administration’s hostility, perhaps they should recall that the Biden administration was hardly enthusiastic about international justice when the ICC turned its attention to Gaza. The posturing towards the ICC began when Biden denounced the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, making clear that the U.S. would not fulfill its obligations to arrest said war criminals.
The Trump regime carried the torch on this issue. In July 2025, Rubio sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who had accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and supported international criminal accountability for Israeli officials. Apparently, investigating genocide is now a punishable offense, while committing it remains a matter of American foreign-policy discretion.
Shirking international law predates Biden. During one of Reagan’s many illegal foreign-policy forays in Latin America, particularly the illegal war in Nicaragua, where we illegally supported the subversive, torturing, terrorist Contra insurgents whom Reagan equated with the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers, the same illegal conflict in which Reagan illegally sold weapons to Iran to fight Iraq (to whom we also sold weapons), illegally channeled the proceeds through Israel to finance the Contras, and illegally allowed Contra-affiliated Nicaraguan expatriates to smuggle cocaine into the United States, ostensibly helping launch the crack epidemic—yeah, that war—well, we also illegally mined Nicaraguan harbors. Nicaragua took us to the ICJ and, in an unexpected plot twist for Western hegemony, won. In response, we quit the ICJ. Because, with precisely the same exceptionalist arrogance on display today, Washington insisted that any court capable of ruling against the United States must necessarily be illegitimate. After all, we’re the good guys.
America’s hostility toward international accountability goes deeper still. We shunned the broader human-rights framework embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, largely in part because Senator John Bricker’s congressional “Brickerites” resisted international institutions that could potentially impose on American foreign and domestic policy, and because we didn’t share the same conception of human rights as the rest of the world. Social rights were appalling to defenders of America’s racial hierarchy, economic rights sounded suspiciously like socialism; political rights were perfectly acceptable, provided the political outcomes remained within the permissible boundaries.
Instead, we embraced what political scientist David Forsythe described as Dullesism, named for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: the convenient proposition that confronting the Soviet Union and communism—and, by extension, preserving Western-dominated capitalism—was itself the ultimate manifestation of human rights. A few million dead Koreans and Vietnamese, along with the victims of American-trained torturers throughout Latin America and Asia, might disagree. Our sanctions regimes have likewise inflicted collective punishment on civilian populations while Washington lectures the world about humanitarian principles. American innocence picks up the moral tab every time.
Congress couldn’t even bring itself to approve the Genocide Convention until the mid-to-late 1980s. One suspects Israel’s most generously compensated congressional cheerleaders would happily reconsider that decision today.
So yes, sanctioning the ICC is a disgraceful assault on international justice, but treating it as an unprecedented Trumpian outrage misses the larger, bipartisan history of American contempt for international law. For decades, the U.S. has promoted a supposedly rules-based international order while reserving the right to violate those rules ad libitum. The Global South has pointed out this double standard for generations: international law was something imposed upon weaker nations, while the West congratulated itself on its moral superiority and exempted itself from accountability. Trump has revealed the illusion of moral superiority and is dispensing with even the pretense. The people who spent decades insisting that the emperor had no clothes have finally been vindicated—and the emperor is now sanctioning the tailor. You know you’re a rogue state when legal accountability is the greatest threat to your national security.
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Richard M. Balzano is a historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.