In mid-July 2026, in a closed session of NATO’s thirty-two permanent representatives in Brussels, the American ambassador to the alliance asked the other members to help take apart the International Criminal Court. A paper circulated by the US mission left nothing to interpretation: Washington would systematically dismantle the court’s capabilities, and allies were firmly requested to begin withdrawing from the Rome Statute, to examine the supposed threat the tribunal posed to them, to publicly condemn its overreach, and to cut off material support immediately. The document closed with an instruction to end the charade of the ICC once and for all.
The ambassador’s own closing line, as three diplomats later described it, was a warning rather than an argument: Washington would be watching closely who stood with America. The episode, reported by Politico in September, is the alliance-level expression of a campaign that Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched over the summer and that has already reached the court’s personnel — as of August, nine of its eighteen judges, both deputy prosecutors, the former prosecutor, and a staff member had been placed under US sanctions, including the court’s president, a Japanese jurist, and a Senegalese trial lawyer working on Gaza. Every NATO member except the United States and Turkey is a party to the statute Washington now demands they abandon.
The stated rationale is sovereignty: no treaty, Washington argues, can create criminal jurisdiction over the nationals of a state that never consented to it. As a question of treaty law that is genuinely contested, and it has been the American position under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. But it is not an objection available to this claimant. The United States operates the most expansive extraterritorial legal regime on earth. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act it has prosecuted foreign companies for bribes paid by foreigners to foreigners, on jurisdictional hooks as slight as a dollar payment clearing through a New York bank; BNP Paribas paid close to nine billion dollars in 2014 over transactions lawful where they occurred.
The foreign direct product rule asserts American control over semiconductors fabricated anywhere in the world if US tools or intellectual property touched them, which is how Washington decides what a Dutch firm may sell to a Chinese one. Foreign nationals are removed from foreign-flagged vessels in international waters and tried in Florida under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act. In 1992 the Supreme Court held that a Mexican citizen abducted from Mexico could nonetheless be tried in an American courtroom; Manuel Noriega, a sitting head of state, was taken by invasion and convicted in Miami. The sanctions at issue are themselves an exercise of exactly the power being denounced — a Japanese judge and a Senegalese lawyer punished for judicial acts performed in the Netherlands under a treaty the United States never signed.
And when the defendants were Omar al-Bashir and Muammar Gaddafi, Washington was content to see the court reach the nationals of non-consenting states: it allowed the Darfur referral through the Security Council in 2005 and voted for the Libya referral in 2011, neither of those states being party to the Rome Statute. It will be said in reply that American jurisdiction at least claims a nexus — a dollar cleared, a server used, a victim harmed — where the court claims only territory, and that sanctions merely withdraw access to a market rather than impose a criminal penalty. Both distinctions are real and both are thin: the nexus is routinely nominal, and a designation that freezes a judge’s assets and bars the world’s banks from dealing with her is punitive in every sense that matters, with no court anywhere to hear her appeal.
What remains is not a principle but a preference, and the remedy chosen bears no relation even to that. A state worried about overreach can litigate, abstain, negotiate immunity arrangements, or simply stay outside, all of which the United States has done for a quarter-century. It cannot claim that the cure is the abolition of the institution for the 125 states that did consent. The demand is not that the court leave Americans alone; it is that the court cease to exist for Ugandans, Rohingya, Sudanese, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians as well.
The coercion of allies is a separate offence from the attack on the court, and in some ways the graver one. NATO is a mutual defence organisation; it has no competence over the Rome Statute, no collective position on international criminal law, and no business serving as a venue for one member to press thirty-one others to repudiate treaty obligations they entered freely. To convert the North Atlantic Council into a pressure chamber for an unrelated political objective is to treat the alliance as a debt-collection mechanism — a structure through which security guarantees can be exchanged for diplomatic obedience on matters having nothing to do with common defence.
The State Department reportedly reinforced the point by signalling heightened scrutiny of countries that continue to rely on American assistance while refusing to distance themselves from the court. Small and exposed members hear that clearly, and they are meant to. The instrument is not new: under the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act and the Nethercutt Amendment, Washington extracted bilateral immunity agreements from roughly a hundred states in the 2000s by threatening to withhold military and economic aid. What has changed is the target. Then the object was to place Americans beyond the court’s reach; now it is to remove the court. But an alliance whose cohesion is maintained by telling allies that their treaty commitments are being monitored has already begun to change from a coalition into a hierarchy, and hierarchies of that kind generate resentment far more reliably than loyalty.
The strategic incoherence is almost as striking as the legal one. The same Western governments now being asked to defund and delegitimise the ICC spent 2023 and 2024 invoking it as the central instrument of accountability against Russia — the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children was celebrated in Washington and European capitals alike as proof that aggression carries consequences. A court stripped of judges who can travel, of banks willing to process its payments, and of contributions from its largest funders does not become selectively unavailable to prosecute Israelis; it becomes unavailable, period. Europe is being asked to dismantle the only standing forum in which the Russian leadership has been formally charged, at a moment when the war that produced those charges is unresolved. Worse, the method being used — sanctioning sitting judges for the content of their rulings — is precisely the practice the West has spent decades condemning when Moscow, Beijing, or Caracas employ it. Whatever one thinks of the Gaza warrants, a doctrine that judicial decisions may be answered with financial penalties against the judges is a gift to every government that would like to do the same at home.
Europe’s response so far has been rhetorically firm and materially thin, and the gap between the two is where the campaign will be won or lost. The Commission and Council presidents have declared that they stand with the court; the Netherlands, as host state, has objected to each round of designations; Spain and others have issued statements about judicial independence. None of this addresses the actual mechanism of attrition, which is not political but operational: banks, insurers, software vendors, and payment processors with American exposure quietly withdraw from an institution whose leadership is on a sanctions list, and the court degrades from the inside without any government ever having voted to weaken it. The EU has a blocking statute capable of shielding European entities from the extraterritorial effect of these measures and has declined to activate it. Until that changes, expressions of unwavering support are a form of moral accounting rather than protection. The evidence that pressure can be resisted does exist — Hungary rescinded its withdrawal notification in May 2026, remaining inside the statute after a change of government — but so does the evidence that it works: Chad and Venezuela both moved to leave, and the court’s presidency was reduced to asking them to reconsider.