Trump Administration Vows To Dismantle The World's War Crimes Court, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Someone, Somewhere, Was Still Prosecuting War Crimes

WASHINGTON. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that the United States would move to dismantle the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal charged with prosecuting genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, resolving a long-standing concern that such conduct was still being investigated by anyone at all.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Why We're Dismantling the ICC," Rubio pledged that the administration would use every diplomatic tool available to take the court apart "brick by brick, if necessary," a demolition timeline officials described as flexible. The campaign, he wrote, carries "a simple message: sovereign states over globalism," a principle the administration has been applying selectively to the sovereign states it happens to like.

According to a State Department official, the tools in question include travel bans, visa revocations, and expanded sanctions aimed not merely at the court's prosecutors but at its entire workforce, down to the employees who staff its IT desk. Administration lawyers reportedly concluded that the surest way to stop an institution from documenting atrocities was to first ensure its help-desk technicians could not renew a visa or fly to a conference in Orlando.

Rubio accused the court of "waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles" but with "the force of so-called international law," a weapon he noted the United States had gone to considerable lengths to remain outside the range of. The United States has never joined the ICC, a fact the administration cited as evidence both that the court held no authority over Americans and that it urgently needed to be destroyed.

The announcement arrived as the court's own judges sued over earlier U.S. sanctions, and as the tribunal continued to weigh matters including outstanding arrest warrants for the leaders of Russia and Israel, allies whom the administration has spent the year assuring that accountability remains a foreign concept. Supporters praised the effort as a landmark defense of sovereignty, while noting that the sovereignty in question belonged chiefly to heads of state.

At press time, Rubio had clarified that the campaign was not an attack on justice but a defense of it, provided justice agreed in advance never to examine the United States or anyone it considered a friend.