Sanction the ICC Into Submission — and Watch Impunity Collapse With It
Washington's coming sanctions on the ICC as an institution are the correct and overdue response to a court that invented jurisdiction it was never granted.
The International Criminal Court built its 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on a foundation of invented jurisdiction. Neither Israel nor the United States is party to the Rome Statute. Neither country has ever consented to the court's authority. That legal fact alone should have closed the file. Instead, the ICC pressed forward — and now it is about to learn that financial consequences are real even when legal ones are disputed.
Reports this week confirm that the Trump administration is preparing to sanction the ICC as an institution, not merely its individual judges and prosecutors. The proposed measures would prohibit most transactions with the court after a grace period of six to seven months, effectively severing it from the US dollar system. Banks, which routinely over-comply with sanctions to protect their own access to American finance, would treat the ICC as untouchable. The experts calling this a "doomsday scenario" for the court are right — and that is precisely the point.
This escalation did not come from nowhere. President Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 declaring a national emergency, blocking the assets of ICC officials, and suspending their entry into the United States. The order was grounded in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the American Servicemembers' Protection Act of 2002 — real statutes, not improvised weapons. Washington then sanctioned more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court's president, Tomoko Akane, and former chief prosecutor Karim Khan. The court kept coming. So now the institution itself goes on the list.
The ICC's defenders will call this an attack on international justice. I call it the correct application of financial pressure against an institution that chose political theatre over legal legitimacy. In my work at Shurat HaDin, I have spent years arguing in U.S. federal courts that money is the decisive lever — that you make terrorism, and the structures that enable it, too expensive to sustain. The same logic applies here. A court that manufactures jurisdiction to pursue democracies must be made to feel the cost.
The Europeans wringing their hands about the EU Blocking Statute should ask themselves a harder question: why did they allow an unaccountable tribunal to pursue allies, accumulate political capital from those prosecutions, and only now scramble for cover? Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been explicit — the court will be dismantled "brick by brick" if it does not retreat from its overreach. That is not a threat; it is a schedule.
The court has investigations in Darfur, Libya, Myanmar and Ukraine. Those can continue under a reformed institution with actual jurisdiction. What cannot continue is a regime that treats a democratic ally's elected leaders as equivalent targets to war criminals from states that have consented to prosecution. The ICC made that choice. Washington is now pricing it accordingly.