Trump administration starts campaign to "isolate" ICC for its "war" on U.S.
The Trump administration has launched a campaign against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The aim is to “diplomatically isolate” the Court to ensure that it “cannot target Americans,” a State Department official told Reuters. In a video message, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the ICC of “waging a war” against the United States.
“As we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets and missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law," Rubio said in his video message.
According ot him, the ICC was intended to prosecute only the gravest of crimes, but has turned into “something far more radical and extreme.” He said that the Trump administration would not allow the Court to threaten Americans.
The State Department official told Reuters that the Trump Administration was considering a range of options to pressure the ICC, including travel bans, more sanctions against the ICC and its employees, visa revocation, and putting diplomatic pressure on other nations to withdraw from the ICC.
In an official statement, the State Department, the American Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that no diplomatic option was “off limits in the campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans.”
This is not the first time the United States has threatened the ICC. Various leaders of the country, including Donald Trump and George W. Bush, have had an antagonistic attitude towards the Court since it launched an investigation in 2020 into possible American war crimes in Afghanistan.
In 2025, the Trump administration imposed various financial and travel-related sanctions on ICC judges and other Court staff. Last month, three ICC judges sued the American government, demanding that these “draconian” measures, purely intended to pressure the Court, be lifted.
According to Reuters, Trump backed these sanctions against ICC officials partly to head off any future attempts to hold him or his officials liable for American military actions abroad.
