There is a particular kind of irony in watching the United States sanction the one permanent institution on Earth built to do what Nuremberg did only once: hold the powerful accountable for atrocity. The Trump administration's new sanctions regime against the International Criminal Court, explicitly aimed at helping to "dismantle" the institution, arrived with almost theatrical timing: hours after former ICC judge Navi Pillay was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. ICC President Tomoko Akane called the move "an attack against sovereign states." European governments, Canada, Japan and the United Nations rallied, uneasily, to the court's defense.

Commentators are calling this a crisis for international justice. It is that. But it is not new. It is, in fact, the oldest story in modern American foreign policy: a superpower that helped author the rules of the post-war order, then walks away from them the instant those rules threaten to bind its own conduct, or that of its allies.

A Court Built for Everyone Except the Powerful

The ICC was established in 2002 under the Rome Statute as the first permanent tribunal with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. It was designed, explicitly, to complement national courts, to step in only when states are "unwilling or unable" to prosecute their own. The United States never ratified the Rome Statute. Neither did China, Russia, India or Israel. From the beginning, the court's authority rested on a fiction that the most powerful states would eventually accept its jurisdiction in spirit even if not in law. That fiction finally broke in November 2024, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare during the Gaza war. It was the first warrant ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed democracy. Washington's sanctions followed, and have since escalated into what observers call a "sweeping" campaign branding the court "rogue."

The current administration frames this as a defense of sovereignty. But the history of American engagement with international legal institutions tells a more consistent, less flattering story: sovereignty is invoked selectively, as a shield precisely when judgment turns inward.

The Nicaragua Precedent

Washington has been here before, almost beat for beat. In 1984, Nicaragua sued the United States at the International Court of Justice over the CIA's mining of its harbors. The court ruled in Nicaragua's favor and ordered compensation. The United States simply refused to pay and continued funding the Contras seeking to topple Nicaragua's elected government. The Security Council could not enforce the ruling because the US held a veto. The Organization of American States passed a resolution condemning a separate American action, the 1989 invasion of Panama, by a vote of 20 to 1. The lone dissenting vote was the United States itself.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this pattern repeated with numbing regularity: American intervention in Nicaraguan elections in both 1989 and 2001, support for the suppression of left-wing movements across Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and the 1999 bombing of Serbia without Security Council authorization. In 1985 the US stood alone against a UN resolution on safeguarding human rights. None of this makes the United States uniquely villainous among great powers; it makes it entirely ordinary. But it does mean the ICC sanctions are not a break from precedent. They are precedent, repeating with a new target.

The Gulf War Lesson: Rules Apply Downward, Not Upward

The contrast with how the international order treats weaker states is instructive. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the United States assembled a coalition of more than 600,000 troops from over 30 nations and, under a UN deadline, launched Operation Desert Storm, expelling Iraqi forces within four days at a cost of up to 90,000 Iraqi lives against fewer than 400 allied casualties. The machinery of collective security worked with terrifying efficiency because the target was a weak, isolated state with no great-power patron and no veto.

Contrast that with Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The League of Nations, the ICC's spiritual ancestor, proposed sanctions, then deliberately excluded oil, the one commodity that might have actually stopped the Italian war machine, from the list. Abyssinia fell by April 1936. The League's authority never recovered; Mussolini was pushed into Hitler's arms, and the collective security experiment that was supposed to prevent a second world war collapsed within three years. The lesson historians have drawn ever since is blunt: international institutions survive only as long as powerful states find it convenient to let them.

Apartheid: The Slow, Grinding Counter-Example

Yet history also offers a counter-precedent, one that should give the ICC's defenders some genuine hope. International pressure on apartheid South Africa was, for decades, similarly hollow. The 1962 UN economic boycott was toothless because the US, Britain, France and West Germany kept trading with Pretoria. Harold Macmillan's 1960 "wind of change" speech and South Africa's 1961 departure from the Commonwealth signaled moral isolation without material consequence. It took until 1986, a full quarter-century later, for the Commonwealth to impose real sanctions, and even then Thatcher's Britain opted out. It took the US Congress literally overriding President Reagan's veto to impose American sanctions. Desmond Tutu's 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, much like Pillay's this year, arrived as a form of moral pressure years before formal state power caught up with it. Apartheid did eventually fall, but on a timeline measured in decades, powered less by institutions than by accumulated economic and moral exhaustion.

What Makes This Moment Different

There is a reason the ICC crisis feels graver than past American defiance of international courts. The Nicaragua case and the Panama vote involved the ICJ, a body that settles disputes between states and has no enforcement teeth of its own, by design. The ICC is different: it prosecutes individuals, including sitting heads of government, and depends entirely on member states' voluntary cooperation to make arrests, since it has no police force. Sanctioning the court itself, freezing assets, restricting staff travel, is a qualitatively more aggressive act than simply ignoring a judgment, as Washington did to Nicaragua. It is an attempt not to evade accountability in a single case but to cripple the institution's capacity to function at all, against anyone, including the dictators and warlords it has successfully prosecuted with American blessing in Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

That is why the coalition defending the court, the EU, Canada, Japan, the UN itself, matters. It suggests something the League of Nations never had in 1935: a critical mass of mid-sized democracies willing to treat the institution's survival as a collective interest independent of any single great power's approval. Whether that coalition has staying power, the way Congress eventually outlasted Reagan on apartheid sanctions, or whether it folds the way the League folded over Abyssinian oil, is the open question of the next several years.

The Honest Position

None of this requires pretending the ICC is beyond criticism, or that its November 2024 warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant were self-evidently correct. Reasonable people disagree about the court's evidentiary standards, its selective docket, and whether prosecuting a democracy's elected leadership mid-war serves justice or merely spectacle. But the honest critique of the ICC is not the one Washington is making. A court that only ever indicts the leaders of weak, friendless states, as the League's failure in Abyssinia and the Gulf War's success in Kuwait both illustrate in different ways, is not a court of law. It is an instrument of power dressed in legal language. The entire, fragile point of the Rome Statute was to build something different: a body that might, however imperfectly, apply the same standard to a prime minister that it applies to a warlord.

Dismantling that experiment because it finally reached that far is not a defense of sovereignty. It is the oldest move in the book, the one Stalin suspected the West of making when it withheld news of the atomic bomb in 1945, the one Nicaragua experienced when the ICJ's ruling went unenforced, the one Mussolini exploited when oil sanctions were quietly struck from the list. Power, confronted with a rule it does not like, rarely abolishes the rule outright. It simply makes sure the rule cannot reach it. What is unusual this time is not the move itself, but that it arrives at a moment when enough other democracies have decided the rule matters more than the power.