The Trump administration plans to launch a major diplomatic offensive against the International Criminal Court, furthering the White House’s longtime battle against the international organization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Monday. The ICC poses a threat not just to American sovereignty, but to the American way of life, Rubio said, as he pledged to deploy American diplomatic power to sanction and target the body. 

“For 250 years, Americans have governed ourselves as a free and sovereign people,” Rubio said in a video, which was accompanied by an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He described America’s legal system as “the essential and indispensable feature of our form of government,” but cautioned that “powerful people in far away places want to take that away from us.” He warned of shadowy “unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited,” unless the U.S. acts quickly. 

"The ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country," Marco Rubio said in a State Department video about the administration's diplomatic offensive against the international organization.

"Not with bullets or missiles but with statutes and compacts and the force of… pic.twitter.com/j40vaZwwid

— Jewish Insider (@jewishinsider) July 13, 2026

The Trump administration pledged to undertake “a wide range of actions” to make sure that the ICC, seated in The Hague, Netherlands, “is incapable of threatening U.S. sovereignty or targeting Americans,” according to a State Department statement. 

Senior U.S. diplomats will follow Rubio’s lead, with public relations campaigns spotlighting the alleged abuses of the ICC and urging U.S. allies to withdraw from the body. 

The campaign appears to be rooted in concerns that the ICC will seek to prosecute American servicemembers. Such actions would not only be “a grave overreach of its purported authorities,” Rubio wrote in the op-ed, “It would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation.” Washington wants countries that partner with the U.S. military and American law enforcement, or that otherwise benefit from American security support, to push back on this purported ability of the court to prosecute American military officials.

“The ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts and the force of so-called international law,” Rubio said. 

The campaign is the latest effort in the Trump administration’s push against the ICC, which has been an ongoing focus of President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump first sanctioned the court just weeks into his second term, with a February 2025 executive order targeting ICC officials who investigate Americans and Israelis with financial sanctions and visa restrictions. Last December, the State Department sanctioned two ICC judges for their targeting of Israeli leaders. 

The U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that created the ICC; President Bill Clinton signed the statute but the Senate never ratified it. 

Rubio made clear on Monday that in the latest stage of this offensive, “no diplomatic option will be off-limits.” The U.S. is considering heightened scrutiny of countries that rely on American assistance while also supporting the ICC, and urging nations that — like the U.S. —  are not parties to the Rome Statute to join the American campaign against the body. Additional sanctions against the ICC and its personnel may follow.