Noah Rothman writes for National Review about insightful comments from the US secretary of state.
The Guardian probably didn’t set out to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s point when it critiqued the secretary of state’s searing condemnation of the International Criminal Court, but it did.
The progressive venue scoffed at Rubio’s invocation of “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” which Trump’s chief diplomat warned the ICC “now claims the power to do.”
“The ICC is not claiming jurisdiction over conduct in the United States,” Human Rights Watch’s onetime executive director Kenneth Roth explained. Rubio not only misstated the court’s role, but he’s also “dressing up his quest for impunity for American war crimes,” Roth added. “Trump wants to be able to commit war crimes on the territory of countries that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction — that’s what this is about.”
But CBP and ICE do, on occasion, operate on foreign soil in investigative, screening, security roles. And the ICC does claim the authority to prosecute alleged violations of human rights and war crimes conducted inside the territory of member states, even when the accused is a non-member. That’s one of the foremost reasons why the United States did not ratify the Rome Statute that established the ICC in the first place — because it was foreseeable that someone, somewhere would try to prosecute Americans for lawfully executing orders designed to preserve its security and that of its allies.
That’s exactly what has happened, as Rubio himself explained:
“Americans found themselves in the crosshairs anyway: In 2020 the ICC launched an investigation into what chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of Gambia described as ‘war crimes by members of the United States armed forces’ in Afghanistan, declaring that the U.S. government hadn’t prosecuted enough American soldiers to satisfy the court.” …
For this, and many other valid reasons, the U.S. will use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to “dismantle the ICC,” Rubio declared, “brick by brick, if necessary.”
