The Trump Administration Just Declared War on the International Criminal Court
Marco Rubio says the ICC threatens American sovereignty. Its 24-year record tells a very different story.
One of the first scoops I ever broke as a journalist concerned a quixotic effort by a George W. Bush administration official named John Bolton to punish American allies that were members of the International Criminal Court.
Bolton, then the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, sought so-called “bilateral immunity agreements” with countries that would prevent them from surrendering Americans to the ICC for prosecution. His focus included countries that received American military assistance. The administration presented them with an ultimatum: If they refused to sign these agreements, certain military aid they received from the United States could be suspended.
This was around 2004. And, as you may recall, the United States had invaded and occupied Iraq a year earlier. The Bush administration sought to present this as an international mission and assembled a “Coalition of the Willing” to participate in the war. This included, of course, the United Kingdom, but also several smaller European countries.
One of them was Latvia, which was both a member of the Coalition of the Willing and a party to the ICC. When presented with the ultimatum, Latvia rejected the idea of signing a one-off immunity agreement with the United States. This led to the rather awkward situation in which Latvia was deploying troops in support of America’s war in Iraq while simultaneously being threatened with the suspension of U.S. military aid.
For me, this was an early lesson in foreign policy: Officials and administrations with an ideological axe to grind can sometimes fixate on precisely the wrong things. But when it comes to the ICC, there is a strain of American foreign-policy thinking that regards the court as a lurking boogeyman, poised to seize American citizens and subject them to show trials in some international kangaroo court.
This brings me to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement today, delivered through a State Department press release, a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and a video address, that he is determined to “dismantle the court.” The ICC, he says, is “waging war against our country” and “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.”
The thing is, the ICC has been around for 24 years. It has a record. And nothing in that nearly quarter-century-long record supports the claim that it is hell-bent on going after Americans.
