Fear of a Just Planet
As Trump and his loyalists double down on their threats to the International Criminal Court in The Hague it's important to ask why they would do that
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“If you are a potential war criminal, international tribunals are a tricky thing: you never know who or when they are going to indict.”—Vesna Pusić, Croatian sociologist and politician
Walking toward the International Criminal Court building in The Hague in mid-July, a feeling of great clarity came over me.
At the ICC, war crimes and crimes against humanity are documented, investigated, and warrants for the arrests of world leaders and perpetrators are then issued.
For this reason, I felt a great need to visit the ICC. My only goal was to take original photos for my own archives, and I never imagined that I would be invited inside for a tour.
Justice just keeps on happening.
An arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin has been issued. An arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu has been issued. Rodrigo Duterte is in The Hague awaiting a November 30 trial, charged with crimes against humanity in his so-called war on drugs, which parallels Trump’s boat killings in the Caribbean.
It is also important to note that the ICC opened an investigation into “crimes against humanity” by the government of Belarus led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko. The ICC prosecutor’s office said the probe was launched over alleged crimes that began after Belarus’s 2020 presidential election, including politically motivated deportations carried out as state policy.
And that is why Trump and his loyalists are escalating their attacks on the ICC.
World leaders committing genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression can be arrested, indicted, prosecuted, and convicted.
Facts
The ICC was established in 2002 by an international treaty, the Rome Statute. 125 states are parties, including 20 from Eastern Europe and 25 from Western Europe, with jurisdiction over “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.”
As of mid 2026, the ICC has 13 open investigations, issued 66 arrest warrants, brought 34 cases before the Court, and has seven people in custody, with 33 suspects at large. The ICC’s budget for 2026 is €196,852,900.
Notably, the US, Russia, and China are not members of the ICC, which does not give their leaders immunity from prosecution.
“Acting in an official capacity as a head of state, member of government or parliament or as an elected representative or public official in no way exempts a person from prosecution or criminal responsibility.'“—ICC fact sheet
Since 2025, when I first began documenting Trump’s attacks on the ICC, the threats have escalated.
What began last year by targeting specific ICC judges with “deplatforming sanctions,” where judges were treated like criminals, has expanded to threats to destroy the Court “brick by brick,” a term used by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
As if to create a prebuttal for likely future arrest warrants, Rubio wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:
“We have lunatics and crazies involved in the ICC that are talking about charging members of the US military, maybe even the president or a future president.”
In a video posted on X, Rubio conjured fear of a just planet: “If we stand idle, all of them will be at the mercy of foreign judges, thousands of miles away – facing the constant risk of prosecution and even imprisonment.”
Rubio is spearheading a pressure campaign by the State Department to pressure ICC member nations to withdraw support for the Court, threatening sanctions, travel bans, financial debanking, and visa cancellations to those who refuse.
It’s such bullying behavior and the reason seems clear. US citizens and Congress may be slow to act on the torrent of Trump’s domestic crimes and illegal self-enriching, but his regime has already committed verifiable war crimes in his boat killings.
Clearly, Trump has signaled he’d like to keep committing more war crimes on countries that are covered by the ICC, Greenland, for example.
With my review of author Keir Giles’ book American Overthrow fresh in my mind, I am continually haunted by one line in particular:
“US has decisively stepped away from aspiring to be a force for good, that stands apart from autocracies and dictatorships, and instead of confronting the Russian model of statecraft now seeks to emulate it.”
Keir does a meticulous job documenting all the ways Trump and his loyalists are destroying America, but none of that will matter if they don’t get to international law first.
Along with its threats to the ICC, the US has already cut funding to dozens of international organizations and closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Leaving the Paris Agreement, a treaty on climate change, is another step in weakening international collaboration.
The ICC has been a target of Trump’s second term since the very beginning, when he issued an executive order that placed sanctions on the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as his two deputies and six judges. He claimed it was retaliation for their investigations into Israel’s actions in Palestine. But it was also clear that Duterte, who Trump congratulated for his mass killings, is in detention for crimes that mirror Trump’s own.
Trump then expanded sanctions against the ICC, including targeting the UN’s special liaison on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, and multiple Palestinian human rights groups who have been collecting evidence of war crimes.
While Venezuela notified the ICC of its withdrawal after the US threat — according to a source within the ICC, that will not stop on “ongoing investigation” — Australia went the opposite direction, reaffirming its support of the ICC and international law.
In my report on a new Special Tribunal forming in The Hague to prosecute Putin’s regimes for crimes against humanity in Ukraine — now backed by dozens of nations — I noted:
Among the judges presiding over the Duterte trial is Nicolas Guillou, who is one of the 11 judges and prosecutors at the ICC who were sanctioned under Trump’s State Department, treated like the criminals and terrorists they prosecute.
It is clear that autocrats are attempting to do away with anything that could interfere with their power.
As the Guardian reported last week:
“Four prominent US human rights organizations have accused the Trump administration of using its ‘crippling’ sanctions regime against the international criminal court (ICC) to undermine global efforts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court on Tuesday, the groups – the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute – argued that the administration’s targeting of the ICC, as well as of groups and individuals affiliated with it or assisting its work, amounts to a ‘blatantly illegal attack on international justice’, the groups said.”
And that of course is quite right: this is an illegal attack on international justice, by a criminal regime that posts evidence of its war crimes on social media.
Additionally, the evidence of the Trump regime’s criminality in the first 18 months of his second term has been gathered up in American Overthrow.
I have already sent a copy to the ICC, hoping to speed up the investigations that Rubio appears to be so worried about.
When I visited the ICC in July, I wasn’t able to take photos inside the Court and its museum, so I memorized the following quotes — the first one you see upon entrance to the museum, which shows the work done to bring criminals who commit genocide and war crimes to justice. The second quote, you can find outside one of the ICC’s courtrooms:
“Toward a More Just World”
“This Cause Is the Cause of All Humanity.”
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