The Rome statute, a treaty that went into effect in 2002, established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in order to bring accountability even to high officials of governments who flaunt international law by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of July 14, 2026, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the American high representative on foreign policy and diplomacy, announced the intent of the Trump administration to stop at nothing less than dismantling the ICC, the U.S. had not ratified the treaty and thus was not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. However, Americans on the soil of countries that had ratified the treaty could be arrested there and sent to the ICC in the Hague if charged with having violated international law abroad. Back on U.S. territory, any such culprits would be beyond the reach of the ICC and any of the governments that were obliged by treaty to make arrests on their respective soils to implement warrants issued by the ICC. I contend that U.S. sovereignty was neither diminished or threatened by the existence of the court and the governments obliged to implement the warrants. In fact, the Trump administration may have been acting as a proxy for a foreign regime, two high government officials (at least) had been charged by the ICC and yet were still flaunting their immunity in Israel and the United States. Protecting the accused in another country of such horrendous crimes as a holocaustic genocide and falsely claiming that the ICC was an existential threat to American sovereignty as Rubio claimed on social media are not in the best interests of the U.S. even just in terms of reputational (and political) capital in international relations. Political expediency geared to protecting culprits of such a severe crime is at the very least short-sighted. In steering a large ship, a captain should look beyond the bow, as per the fateful example of the Titanic in 1912 attests. Enlightened self-interest goes a long way, whereas a narrow, contractual self-interest is apt to be hit head-on at some point. In July of 2026, the E.U. warned the world of the reckless American steering, but like a drunk driver, full of hubris liquor, the warning would go unheeded in the Hobbesian ideological belief that there is no such thing as international law in the state of nature. The bigger picture considers whether international law itself would survive the collapse of the post-World-War-II world order, which includes the ICC as well as the enforcement-impotent United Nations even concerning its own rulings and votes! Such self-inflicted impotence evinces Nietzsche’s conception of weakness, which is epitomized by celibate priests who yet seek to dominate even the strong. Netanyahu and Putin could easily flaunt the U.N. and be confident in remaining untouched by the ICC and even the feckless governments that were obliged to enforce the court’s arrest warrants. The global order was backsliding ironically as progress in technology was revolutionizing daily life in the twenty-first century.
In a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2026, “Rubio vowed to ‘dismantle’ the court, claiming it posed ‘an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.”[1] He viewed the court and its supporters in other governments to be, as he put it, “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts and the force of so-called international law.”[2] In other words, the court, he claimed, was hardly neutral, as it was very partisan in being anti-American and was determined to eviscerate U.S. sovereignty from the face of the Earth.
Perhaps New York City Mayor Mamdani’s recent threat that he would have the Israeli security minister Ben-Gvir arrested and sent to the ICC in the event of the Israeli official stepping foot on NYC soil, and the related political-monetary power in Washington, D.C. of the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) had something to do with motivating the Trump Administration to launch its full-blown attack on the ICC, for the claim that the ICC had or even could impinge on U.S. sovereignty even though the United States had not ratified the Rome statute and thus was not subject to the court is wholly without validity or merit. Accordingly, Rubio’s claim that the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system” can be dismissed as propaganda intended to protect top Israeli officials from being held accountable for having ordered a genocide in Gaza even though the occupation itself violated international law, if there actually was such a thing.
To be sure, the American high representative for foreign policy was no idiot. A clue to his rationale, albeit flawed, lies in the U.S. State Department’s statement that the U.S. Government would “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”[3] The key lies in the targeting of American servicemen or officials. Because “Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans,” the ICC’s claim to having “the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest” is invalid.[4] The key here is operating on behalf of, for such language alludes to Americans operating abroad, and thus possibly in countries that were subject to the ICC at the time and thus were obligated by the Rome statute to make arrests on their own soil to implement outstanding ICC warrants. The particular nationality of a foreigner in one of those countries does not matter on whether one can be arrested there; the reach of a foreigner’s home government does not extend so to exempt citizens from arrest; for that would be in violation of another country’s sovereignty. Neither is the more subjective “national interest” of the U.S. sovereign in other countries, which are not even subject to U.S. law.
Rubio is simply incorrect in asserting that ICC-based arrests in countries treatied to the Rome statute threaten “every aspect of our political and legal system” even though the ICC at the time did have jurisdiction over Americans who were (operating) in such other countries (excluding being physically inside a U.S. embassy, which is considered U.S. territory). Because the U.S. had not ratified the treaty, anyone on American soil could not be touched either by the ICC itself or any of the governments obliged to implement ICC warrants on their own respective territories, so the American political and legal system were not in danger of being torpedoed by the court.
In fact, the State Department’s statement’s threat to increase scrutiny of countries “that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”—meaning that such assistance would be terminatedcan—can be interpreted as a lack of respect or even recognition of the national sovereignty of other countries; at the very least, the U.S. Government was announcing its intent to manipulate other governments even though they were treaty-bound to recognize and enforce ICC arrest-warrants.[5] The sordid nature of the motivation of the Trump administration may go even deeper than encroachment, which was not exactly a new tactic with respect to pressuring and even threatening other governments to do the bidding of the U.S. Government.
Kenneth Roth, formerly with Human Rights Watch, wrote at the time that the Trump administration wanted “to be able to commit war crimes with impunity even on the territory of governments that have joined the International Criminal Court.”[6] Given the support of Israel amid its genocide in Gaza, allies being able to commit even crimes against humanity, which go beyond war crimes, can be added, at least as a possible motivation. Roth, however, saw in Rubio’s position a “quest for impunity for American war crimes abroad” using national sovereignty as a subterfuge to hide his true intent.[7] Ironically, according to Roth, Rubio was ignoring “the sovereign right of other nations to invoke the ICC for crimes committed on their territory.”[8] Not only is American sovereignty unperturbed by ICC arrests made in other countries, as they are not subject to U.S. sovereignty or even American “national interests,” but also those countries are well within their national sovereignty to arrest foreigners on their soil even on warrants issued by the ICC, provided that the country had ratified the Rome statute.
Imagine the Japanese government protesting to the U.S. Government regarding the arrest of a Japanese citizen in New York City who has just unsuccessfully set off a means by which thousands of people would be killed. Certainly Japan would not even attempt to claim that the arrest violates Japan’s sovereignty, because New York (and U.S.) sovereignty, not that of Japan, apply in New York City. The American federal system, like that of the E.U., had governmental sovereignty at both the federal and state levels, with direct effect of both rather than just through the state governments. The claim that Japanese sovereignty trumps either in New York City could not seriously be considered as credible by anyone, and yet Rubio’s piece and the State Department’s statement were taken seriously enough by the E.U. for it to issue a warning against the position against the ICC in Washington. The adage, the emperor is not wearing any clothes, seems to apply well here, and yet high governmental position itself seems to come with the assumption of being fully clothed.
So much for the American case for dismantling the ICC. Hardly noticeable in Rubio’s op-ed in the newspaper, but perhaps the most important part of the piece, is his reference to “so-called international law.”[9] Did you catch that in the quote above? If not, you missed the larger, and much more significant claim by the U.S. Secretary of State that international law is, at best, a misnomer without any actual referent. Overlooking the truly significant in being captivated instead with a political “dog-fight” may be a human proclivity that is hard-wired in our nature, but we also have the ability to reason and reflect, and even to pick out the truly significant even amid sensationalism that titillates our emotions. If I am right, very few people indeed picked up on Rubio’s ideological position on international law itself. He was indicating by the inclusion of “so-called” that nothing that can be called law exists beyond the sovereignty of a country.
Relatedly, Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that rights, except that of self-preservation, are conditional on there being a sovereign power. Arguably, Russia’s Putin in Ukraine, Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza (and even the settlers in the West Bank), and even America’s Trump (and Israel’s Netanyahu) tossing bombs into Iran evinces a refusal to recognize the validity of international law. What counts is national power in political realism; not even international norms can or should get in the way of governments single-handedly advancing the strategic interests of their respective countries. This is tantamount to a return to Hobbes’ state of nature, internationally.
In a world in which governments have and have exclusive control over nuclear weapons, nature can indeed be nasty, brutish, and short. Furthermore, the lack of any respected international “requirements” to limit carbon emissions could also be expected to push the planet beyond even the inhabitable zone of humans, as the 2021 film, Silent Night, suggests. More immediately, however, draught, flooding, heatwaves, and even sub-optimal food production (and thus starvation, as in Africa) could be expected as governments continued to ignore the voluntary targets set in the Paris Accords even as the species’ global population continued to increase at an annual rate estimated by the UN of roughly 0.8% to 0.9% when the population stood (in July, 2026) at approximately 8.3 billion. Just a century before, that figure was estimated to be between 1.75 billion and 1.93 billion. The exponential growth rate itself may suggest that humanity was out of control with respect to its population on Earth, given its natural resources and ecosystems. According to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a maximizing, schizogenic, variable can pierce the equilibrium, homoeostatic, steady-state of an ecosystem, and even the Earth’s atmosphere itself. Our species had become such a variable amid the economic engine of commercial revolution, which gave rise to climate change, as industry greatly expanded during the twentieth century. Even so, the Paris Accords were voluntary, given the value (and priority) put on national sovereignty.
An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, interestingly known both as a political economist (whereas Adam Smith had been known as moral philosopher!) and Christian clergyman, predicts dire consequences from a species failing to restrain its own population growth but being hemmed in by nature through starvation, war, and disease. Indeed, the Romantic period of intellectual history in the 1800s would see nature portrayed even in Turner’s paintings as having the last word over the classics steeped in reason and human intentionality.
Therefore, both with respect to nuclear war and climate change, both of have their basis at a time when national sovereignty was still absolute and nationalism was so in vogue, especially in Europe, international relations in the twenty-first century could not afford to be based on and confined to the sovereignty of individual countries. Rubio’s political stance on the very existence of international law even as a concept is therefore dangerous, and at the very least is not in line with the sapiens in homo sapiens, for sapiens, sapientis is the form of the Latin adjective, wise. Dismantling the ICC, and thus giving impunity a free hand in war crimes and crimes against humanity, is a move in the direction of Hobbes’ state of nature, in which everyone lives in fear of being killed.
Perhaps in a Hegelian-modified way of looking at the broad expanse of human freedom and responsibility through history, our species is perhaps hardwired, or habituated, to taking a step back after having taken a step forward, before being willing to take yet another step forward. Putin, Netanyahu, and even Trump can be viewed as representing a step back, in aggressive fear, but this too shall perhaps pass, hopefully before humanity obliterates or exterminates itself. But lest we rest too assured that a new, stronger, and thus better enforced international order of institutions arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the fire being set by the Trump administration, a well as those set by Russia’s Putin in Ukraine and Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza and even the West Bank (by refusing to hold violent settlers accountable), Kant’s claim that world peace would only be possible, but not probably, were a world federation, presumably with enough governmental sovereignty of its own, albeit with checks and balances to obviate tyranny, to enforce its laws on governments that have abused their national sovereignty that has been retained. A world federation wherein all sovereignty resides in the national governments, a non-plena federation in the Latin of Althusius’s early seventeenth-century theory of federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire, would be an exercise in futility and thus not worth even attempting, as already demonstrated for the world by the conduct over many decades since World War II of the veto-wielding powers on the UN Security Council at the expense of the very credibility of that international organization. Indeed, the decimated credibility played right into Rubio’s coded allusion to international law being not worthy of the label. Therefore, what might a real global order look like, once the full step back has run its course?
