Marco Rubio stood up and announced the United States would dismantle the International Criminal Court “brick by brick.” Two weeks later, Venezuela and Chad walked out the door. Funny how that works. Funny how when the swamp wants something done, it gets done in a hurry, and nobody asks the people who actually live in those countries whether they wanted to stay.
Pete Hegseth, the man running the Pentagon, has been crisscrossing the globe telling every partner nation on every continent to “leave the ICC and resist its attempts to steal the sovereignty from your governments and courts.” Strong words from a government that has troops parked in over a hundred countries. Ask yourself who benefits when the only court that could theoretically hold those troops accountable gets dismantled. The answer is not you. The answer is never you.
Here is where it gets rich. American officials have been leaning on Lithuania, a country that signed the Rome Statute and actually used the ICC to go after Vladimir Putin for war crimes. Lithuania did the right thing. They joined the court, they invoked it against a genuine aggressor, and now Washington is whispering in their ear that the ICC question is “especially important” for countries hosting American troops. They have not directly told Lithuania to leave. They do not have to. When the guy with the army says your membership in a court is “especially important,” you hear the message. European diplomats in Washington are telling anyone who will listen that small countries can only survive this pressure if they stick together. Good luck with that. The last time small countries stuck together against Washington, they got tariffed into next Tuesday.
Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, laid out the logic plainly: the US has troops in over a hundred countries, and in a “changing geopolitical landscape” there is a risk those troops could face legal prosecution. So the solution is not to bring the troops home. The solution is not to stop deploying them to places they should not be. The solution is to kill the only court that might hold them to account. That is the swamp operating at peak efficiency. Protect the apparatus, expand the footprint, eliminate the oversight.
And then there is Benjamin Netanyahu. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, and Washington lost its collective mind. Both parties. This is the one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on: nobody gets to touch Netanyahu. The court that issued a warrant for Putin was fine when it was targeting a rival. The moment it touched an ally, it became a threat to civilization itself. The hypocrisy is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Chad’s withdrawal is the ugliest part. Chad is not under investigation. But Chad is the base for ICC investigators working the Darfur case, gathering evidence from nearly 900,000 refugees who fled across the border. Chad leaves the court, and that evidence pipeline dries up. The victims in those camps had no say in the decision. Nobody asked them. The powerful made a deal over their heads, and the evidence of what was done to them gets buried. Ask yourself who benefits when evidence of war crimes disappears.
The ICC is not some flawless institution. It is slow, selective, and has a track record of going after weak states while tiptoeing around strong ones. But the Trump administration is not reforming it. They are not fixing its flaws. They are burning it down because it had the audacity to issue a warrant for someone they like. And they are bullying small countries into helping them light the match.
The establishment does not fear lawlessness. It fears accountability. There is a difference, and it is the entire story.