If the U.S. attack on the ICC succeeds, Lawrence Davidson says it will send the international community back to an era that brought on two world wars and killed over 60 million people.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressing a meeting at the Department of State in Washington, July 16, 2026. (State Department/ Freddie Everett)
By Lawrence Davidson
Between 60 and 68 million civilians are estimated to have been killed in World War I and World War II combined.
It may come as a shock, but these numbers alone, as atrocious as they certainly are, would not have pushed the victors to consider even moderate restrictions on the traditional right of their states to pursue “national interest.” It is that pursuit that justified those two horrendous wars. However, the Holocaust and the first use of atomic bombs, combined with wholesale slaughter of World War II, did act as motivation.
Hence, at the end of Second World War, there was an almost unanimous decision taken to rein in aggressive expressions of national sovereignty (free will?) through a “set of rules encouraging peaceful, predictable, and cooperative behavior among states that is consistent with liberal values and principles.” This approach was designed to discourage nation states from acting like the fascists and Nazis they had just defeated. This effort was to be realized through diplomatic (treaty arrangements) and institutional (the United Nations, international courts, etc.) means.
Genocide was outlawed. Other “crimes against humanity” were enumerated and also outlawed. For instance, apartheid was eventually (1966) declared such a crime. The modern era of decolonization was launched. The U.N. was established and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Finally, the Fourth Geneva Convention was signed (1949) to protect civilians caught in war zones. In other words, a real pathway was opened for the replacement of anarchy between states with international law.
As piecemeal as this effort was, it did help provide a period of relative well-being, particularly in the West. The two world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, avoided direct confrontation. Wars thereafter, while not lacking in viciousness, were small and often fought by proxies. Most countries now gave at least lip service to the importance of international law.
About Face
It took only 80 years — one “modern Western” lifetime — for this arrangement to fall apart. And the apparent causes of this slide backward are (1) the coming to power of leaders who are ambitious in ways dangerous to international peace. (2) Leaders either ignorant of or dismissive of the modern history of international relations — particularly that of the 20th century. (3) Their winning over large segments of the citizenry to traditional jealousies and resentments characteristic of nation state conflict.
Leaders oblivious to past mistakes now repeat those mistakes. Their supporters do not know this repetition is taking place, and so they do not object. Regardless, the consequences are going to be very bad. The alarm bells are already ringing — set off by a concerted effort to dismantle the rules-based international system that was put into place after World War II. As we will see, as imperfect as that system is, to abandon it as a goal is the equivalent of abandoning any solid foundation for civilization.
The initial target of this effort is the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the time of its founding, Kofi Annan, then U.N. Secretary General, noted that “in the prospect of an international criminal court lies the promise of universal justice.”
Annan speaking at the ceremony in Rome’s City Hall to begin signing the treaty establishing the ICC. (UN Photo)
Significantly, the origins of the ICC are found in the post Second World War determination to punish future acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. On Dec. 9th, 1948, the newly established United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It made genocide “a crime under international law.” Article 6 of the convention provides that anyone charged with genocide “shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction . . .”
That led to the eventual creation of the ICC (1998), permanently housed in the Netherlands at The Hague.
It is the Trump administration now in power in the United States that has decided to attack the ideal of universal justice and the ICC. The effort is being led by the State Department and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio. On July 13, Rubio announced that his department was “launching a campaign to dismantle the international criminal court,” because it was a “threat to American sovereignty.” It should be remembered that it was the assertion of the supremacy of national sovereignty in the form of alleged national interest that led to the First and Second World Wars.
The ICC
In practice, the ICC has drawn criticism for concentrating on the crimes of individuals and groups operating in small nations: Sudan, Libya, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Mali, Myanmar, etc. Such criticism was not enough to endanger either the ICC or the rules-based system incorporating the ideal of universal justice. Recently, however, this situation has changed. And it is Israel, the principal ally of the U.S., that has caused the change.
When the ICC was confronted with Israel’s behavior in Gaza, behavior judged to be genocide by all human rights organizations and most academic experts, it acted according to its charter and issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders involved in this mass murder. Immediately, what for decades had been a tolerable situation now became “an intolerable threat to U.S. …”
The U.S. government, Israel’s major ally and material supporter of its genocide, attacked the ICC with sanctions designed to diplomatically isolate it, economically punish its personnel, and ultimately destroy the organization.
The judgment was made in Washington that the ICC “threatened the sovereignty” of the U.S. and other major powers by seeking to apply a standard of accountability to their leaders and soldiers. “The ICC claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest.”
If the ICC judges could hold court for Israeli leaders, they could do so for the folks in Washington. Hence, Rubio’s full court press:
“The campaign will feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
There was the implication that the U.S. actions will not be limited to the ICC. Rubio “accused the global body of waging a legal war against the United States using the force of so-called international law.” [Emphasis added]
Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliver joint statements to the press in Jerusalem, Israel, February 16, 2025. (Freddie Everett/ State Department/ Public Domain)
It is international law itself that Rubio and his accomplices are ultimately after. Such an attack, if successful, would take the international community back to the lawless environment that brought on two world wars and killed over 60 million people.
The attempt to establish international law following World War II was the logical reaction to the anarchy that comes with the lack of accountability under law. The holocaust and use of atomic bombs were sufficient to call into question sovereignty’s claim of absolute state immunity. Regardless of the role of sovereignty in the history of nation state development, it is a concept that promoted repeated episodes of horror and war. When sovereignty was claimed by ethnic subgroups within multinational entities, it tore such states apart.
Given this history, the U.S. hostility to international law is the equivalent of advocating for chaos. Thus, unless one favors an environment best fit for criminals, Marco Rubio’s claim that “The ICC poses an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty”— a position that implies absolute immunity from the law — is a danger to civilization. This is because civilization is made possible by the settled environment provided by the rule of law.
Secretary of State Rubio and his cohort are almost certainly too poorly educated to understand the consequences of the positions they take on this issue. Certainly their boss, Donald Trump, knows nothing of it. Lacking the necessary historical knowledge, their consciousness is guided by the traditional system and its established assumptions. Citizens are, generally, no better educated and, as is also traditional, focused on their local lives.
This is the situation we are now in. If the trend toward chaos continues, the consequences will be broadly predictable. Those consequences are not pretty and when combined with other failures of our international state system, such as global warming, the probability of future catastrophe grows. The old Latin saying:
Memores acti prudentes futuri: “mindful of the past, aware of the future,” has gone the way of the Dodo and, with leaders like Marco Rubio, so may our way of life.
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest;America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Maybe I’m missing something. How can anyone claim that abandoning the ICC in the name of US sovereignty is legit while at the same time calling for Section 224 to be added to the NDAA to integrate US military with Israel’s military?
[Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data. ~Bill Freeman]
Que bono?
Well, which two countries in the world suffer megalomania of viewing themselves as God’s chosen people, and cant seem to stop attacking others and stealing land and resources?
There are only two countries. And they are so closely interlinked that this year they merged their war crminal militaries together….
About time the rest of the world’s ‘leaders’ – political and business – realised that they have one common enemy.
And that enemy is Donald Trump.
So enmeshed are national leaders to their fairly narrow stuck-in-the-mud views of world politics that they can only envisage two options; 1) sucking up to Trump and hoping that he doesn’t turn on them too; and 2) trying to distance themselves from his planet destroying proclivities.
What these supposedly intelligent men miss is that he’s a danger to them.
And more importantly, he’s even more dangerous to the citizens of the world and the biosphere.
Most people in most nations have a fairly derogatory view of the man.
When will/are national leaders going to catch up?
The problem is global capitalism. Any nation that attempts to act in the interests of its domestic population rather than stay on its knees in service to Western capitalist interests will find itself in the crosshairs of the US via its intelligence agencies and military to force the issue. The US is a gangster state which recognizes no laws that would restrain its ability to control the earth’s resources and labor. Israel is its rabid attack dog in the Middle East. It also respects no laws that would restrict its perceived privilege of treating other peoples as less than human.
It comes as no surprise that the US and Israel are merging their nations into one for the purpose of dominating the world through lawlessness and genocide. The ICC has sadly proven its inability to stand up to the bullying tactics of these criminal states.
? spot on ??
The correct word is ‘Chaos’, not ‘Anarchy’.
The word comes from the ancient Greek word anarchia, meaning “without a ruler” or “without leadership”, however, without a ruler/leader doesn’t mean without rules: the rules are set by the group, not by someone or a few at the top.
While in everyday language, it describes chaos, confusion, or lawlessness, for instance when a government loses control or collapses (Wikipedia), as a political ideal, it represents a society organised through voluntary cooperation and mutual aid rather than coercive government.
So anarchy is organised, not chaotic.
It seems like emanating from the US bipartisan ruling class (certainly pre-dating Trump) is an impulse towards “de-civilization”. Obviously a main driver is neoliberal/neo feudal capitalism’s push to break down society into tiny atomized pieces and individuals that can be better exploited and monetized. And obviously there is the US Empire’s twin hunger for an absolute global dictatorship, and fear of losing the hegemony it currently holds.
But there is also also a trickled down component in cultural consciousness, that no longer recognizes nor values cooperative structures, and instead sees only the selfish conflicts of individuals and their property, and by proxy corporations and nation states. The US Imperium had ideologically abandoned international law by 2002, but where the chickens first came home to roost was not unregulated AI pairing with unwanted mass surveillance and killer robot police (all of which are indicative of an abandonment of the public by centralized power), it was actually COVID.
Whatever complexities and contradictions existed, and still do exist, around this period it represents a watermark where stressful collective challenges could, and resolutely/belligerently would, no longer be met by a institutional impulse to rise to the occasion and improve conditions in terms of health care and social support. Instead the turn of elite narrative shapers was towards abandoning aspirations about public welfare or progress, and towards accepting dysfunction in order to preserve profit and individual lifestyle (esp of those who felt themselves to be less vulnerable). And the American public accepted this without question: Civilization and organized collective problem solving is too much of a burden, it’s time to start dismantling the concept, lowering expectations, and prioritizing only individual self-interest.
From there on, every impulse towards collective or planetary wellbeing has seemed flacid and dead, while the hunger of the vultures looking to tear everything down and pick every carcass has grown so emboldened as to see absolutely inevitable. It least in the US, and perhaps collective West, ideas about collective interest, universal principles, and shared humanity need to urgently be revisited lest they be forgotten.
We have clearly before us -in microcosm – the concentrated form and dynamic of the USA collective shadow. The Trump Administration with its three-extensions of the Supreme Court and the Business Party (with its Trump cult and the Corporate Democratic Establishment) and the War-Infotainment-oligarchic complex. Mr Steyer please sponsor a national art exhibition for artists to compete in portraying this shadow, and for the brave – its transformation. Sculpture, poetry,painting, craft, happenings, environmental depictions, dance, drama, music. Substantive remuneration for winners in each category. With winners’ works on a fully funded national tour entitled “Evolve or Forsake Gaia”