Rubio Just Sanctioned the President of the International Criminal Court — and Promised to Dismantle It Brick by Brick
Rubio Sanctions the ICC’s President — Turning the ‘Brick by Brick’ Pledge Into Policy
The new penalties against Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye are real, sweeping and personally costly. But the strongest case for what Washington is doing requires separating U.S. sovereignty arguments from claims the public record does not support.
The rhetoric is no longer the most important part
For more than a month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been describing the International Criminal Court as a threat that the Trump administration intends to dismantle.
On Tuesday, Washington added another concrete piece to that campaign.
The State Department designated ICC President Tomoko Akane of Japan and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal under Executive Order 14203, the sanctions order President Donald Trump issued in February 2025.
Rubio said the two officials had directly participated in ICC efforts to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute people whose governments had not consented to the court’s jurisdiction.
His description of the institution was characteristically blunt: he called the ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court” that had exceeded its mandate.
That language will dominate the political debate.
The sanctions themselves may matter more.
They do not merely communicate disapproval. They are designed to make ordinary financial and professional life involving the United States far more difficult for the designated officials.
What the sanctions actually do
Executive Order 14203 gives the administration unusually broad tools against people it determines have participated in prohibited ICC activity.
Property and interests in property belonging to a designated person are blocked if they are in the United States, come into the United States, or come into the possession or control of a U.S. person.
The order also prohibits U.S. persons from providing funds, goods or services to sanctioned individuals, or receiving funds, goods or services from them, unless a license or other legal exception applies.
That reaches much further than a hypothetical American bank account.
Modern international payments routinely pass through U.S.-linked banks, companies, payment systems and correspondent networks. A designation can therefore create compliance problems even for transactions that begin outside the United States.
The order also suspends unrestricted entry into the United States for people meeting its sanctions criteria and can apply entry restrictions to immediate family members and other ICC employees or agents.
So it would be imprecise to describe Tuesday’s action as merely symbolic.
At the same time, saying that every bank account, investment or piece of real estate Akane or Seye owns anywhere in the world has automatically been confiscated would also be wrong.
The U.S. order blocks property within its jurisdiction and transactions involving U.S. persons; it does not itself transfer title to every asset the two officials may own globally.
The ‘brick by brick’ phrase came from Rubio himself
One claim circulating around the new sanctions deserves an easy correction.
The phrase about dismantling the ICC “brick by brick” was not a hostile foreign-news framing that the State Department reluctantly adopted.
It was Rubio’s own language.
On July 13, he announced a wider campaign to isolate and weaken the court and wrote that the administration would use all available government tools and work with allies to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.”
The State Department simultaneously described a whole-of-government effort to systematically disable what it views as the court’s ability to target Americans.
That distinction matters because the current escalation is not something journalists inferred from a handful of unrelated sanctions.
The administration publicly announced dismantlement as a policy objective.
Tuesday’s designations are one instrument being used to pursue that objective.
The 65-delegation claim mixes together two different Rubio campaigns
Another detail in the political retelling is more consequential.
Rubio did address a State Department gathering attended by roughly 65 foreign delegations in July.
But that ministerial was about what the administration calls the resurgence of political terrorism, particularly far-left extremist violence.
It was not the meeting at which 65 governments were collectively warned to defund and withdraw from the ICC.
The anti-ICC diplomatic campaign is real.
State Department officials have said U.S. ambassadors and senior officials are pressing governments to reject the court’s authority, reconsider financial support and, in the case of member states, consider leaving the Rome Statute.
Those diplomatic contacts should be reported as such.
They should not be merged with an unrelated 65-delegation counterterrorism summit simply because both events involved Rubio and occurred in the same month.
Washington’s sovereignty argument is powerful — but the jurisdiction question is more complicated
The central U.S. objection is straightforward.
The United States never became a party to the Rome Statute, and Israel is not a party either.
Washington argues that an international tribunal should not be able to prosecute nationals of a sovereign country that never accepted the treaty.
Trump’s executive order builds directly on that principle and defines protected persons to include U.S. personnel and officials of certain allied non-member countries unless their governments consent.
Rubio has connected that objection to the American founding, invoking the Declaration of Independence’s complaint about colonists being transported overseas to face trial for “pretended offenses.”
As political rhetoric, the analogy is clear.
As a statement of current international law, it is not the whole argument.
The ICC does not claim that non-member states themselves become parties to the Rome Statute against their will.
Its legal position is that individuals from non-member states can fall under ICC jurisdiction when alleged Rome Statute crimes occur on the territory of a state that has accepted the court’s jurisdiction, or when the U.N. Security Council refers a situation.
That is the theory behind the Palestine investigation: Palestine is treated by the ICC as a State Party, and the court says territorial jurisdiction can therefore extend to alleged crimes committed there regardless of the accused person’s nationality.
The United States and Israel vigorously dispute important aspects of that reasoning and reject the court’s authority over Israeli officials.
So the accurate description is not that the ICC has no legal theory for reaching nationals of non-member states.
It is that the United States rejects that theory as an unacceptable intrusion on sovereignty.
An ICC warrant is not automatically enforceable in an American courtroom
The same distinction applies to arrest warrants.
The United States has no Rome Statute treaty obligation to execute an ICC warrant.
An ICC arrest warrant does not function inside the United States like a federal arrest warrant issued by an American judge.
U.S. law also contains statutory restrictions on cooperation with the court, and foreign leaders visiting the United Nations can raise separate immunity questions.
That makes the statement that an ICC warrant has no automatic domestic enforcement mechanism in the United States substantially correct.
But that is different from saying the ICC itself lacks any asserted international jurisdiction over a non-member national.
The first question is about what U.S. police and courts are legally required or permitted to do.
The second is about the scope of the Rome Statute and the court’s own jurisdiction.
Conflating them makes the sovereignty debate sound simpler than it is.
The Mamdani episode is a useful real-world example
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently tested that boundary in public.
Mamdani had campaigned on the idea of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu came to New York while subject to an ICC warrant.
In July, he said his administration was in an “active conversation” with the city’s legal department over whether the NYPD had authority to act.
After the legal review, Mamdani acknowledged that New York City did not have independent authority to execute the ICC warrant.
He then urged the federal government to join the ICC and pursue the warrant itself.
That sequence is important because it corrects another exaggerated version of the story.
Mamdani’s City Hall did explore the legal question.
But the public record reviewed here does not show that the State Department had to step in and stop an imminent NYPD arrest operation.
The city’s own legal analysis concluded that it lacked the power.
The Democratic socialist position is real, but it should be described accurately
Rubio’s clash with the ICC has also become part of a larger domestic ideological fight.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s 2026 national program explicitly says the organization supports the ICC’s mandate to prosecute war crimes and calls for an end to immunity for U.S. war criminals.
The same program calls for prosecuting U.S. and Israeli leaders it holds responsible for the war in Gaza.
That is a significant and controversial position.
But the program text reviewed for this article does not explicitly say, in those words, that the United States must ratify the Rome Statute and become an ICC member.
Other prominent figures on the left have gone further.
Rep. Ilhan Omar introduced a resolution in July urging the United States to join the court.
Mamdani, after concluding New York could not execute the Netanyahu warrant, also called on the federal government to join the ICC.
Those are direct, documented calls for U.S. membership.
They are stronger evidence than attributing the exact same demand to every line of the DSA platform.
The Abdul El-Sayed claim goes beyond his documented remarks
A similar caution is necessary with Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
El-Sayed has repeatedly said that he believes in international law, especially when arguing that U.S. military assistance should be conditioned on the conduct of foreign governments.
He has criticized American support for Israel and described international law as a standard that should be applied consistently.
Those statements are politically relevant.
They are not the same as a documented proposal that international law should supersede the U.S. Constitution or automatically override federal statutes in American courts.
I found no reliable public source supporting that stronger characterization.
Opponents can fairly challenge El-Sayed on what international institutions he believes the United States should support and how he would apply international-law principles to foreign policy.
They should not convert a general statement of belief in international law into a legal doctrine he has not actually articulated.
The ICC’s internal crisis is worse than ‘its prosecutor is under investigation’
The court’s defenders also have to confront a serious credibility problem inside the institution itself.
Karim Khan, until recently the ICC’s chief prosecutor, faced allegations of sexual misconduct involving a junior lawyer.
He denied wrongdoing.
But the matter has already moved beyond the stage of a pending investigation.
The ICC’s governing process found serious misconduct, and on July 24 the Assembly of States Parties voted to remove Khan from office.
That was an unprecedented blow to the court’s leadership.
Khan has contested the allegations and the process, but describing him today merely as a chief prosecutor who is “under investigation” is outdated.
The ICC is now searching for a new prosecutor while simultaneously fighting U.S. sanctions and dealing with member-state withdrawals.
Those internal problems do not establish that every ICC case is illegitimate.
They do make Rubio’s political attack easier to sell.
The withdrawal wave is real. Causation is harder.
The Trump administration says it expects countries to join its campaign by ending funding and participation in the court.
There is real movement on that front.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger began the formal one-year withdrawal process in early July.
Venezuela formally notified the United Nations later in July that it was withdrawing.
Chad then became the fifth country in a short period to begin leaving the ICC.
That is a meaningful institutional problem for a court whose authority depends heavily on cooperation from its member states.
But attributing every withdrawal directly to Rubio’s diplomatic pressure would be too simple.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger had already announced an intention to leave and accused the court of neocolonial bias.
Venezuela had its own confrontation with an ICC investigation into alleged crimes against humanity by its former government.
Chad likewise cited what it considered the court’s uneven effectiveness and excessive focus on Africa.
U.S. pressure is now part of the environment and reporting indicates Washington has actively encouraged withdrawals.
It is not the only reason member states are leaving.
The latest sanctions expand an already extraordinary list
Akane and Seye are not the first ICC officials hit by the Trump administration.
By the court’s count following the latest action, the United States has sanctioned nine of its 18 judges, both deputy prosecutors, former prosecutor Karim Khan and another prosecution-office staff member.
That breadth matters because sanctions on judges and prosecutors can affect more than the targeted individuals.
Banks, technology providers, travel companies, law firms and other businesses have compliance departments that often respond conservatively to U.S. sanctions risk.
Human-rights organizations challenging the policy in federal court say the rules have already chilled collaboration with sanctioned ICC personnel and groups.
The administration sees that deterrent effect as leverage.
Critics see it as punishment for legal advocacy and judicial work.
That disagreement is now being litigated in U.S. courts.
The backlash is coming from American allies as well as the ICC
The international response shows the cost of Washington’s strategy.
Japan, whose national Tomoko Akane now leads the sanctions list, called the U.S. move “very unfortunate” and reiterated support for the ICC.
The Netherlands, which hosts the court in The Hague, has also objected.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed serious concern.
The ICC said the designations undermine the rule of law and threaten the independence of judges and prosecutors.
These reactions do not force Washington to reverse course.
They do demonstrate that the anti-ICC campaign is not simply the United States confronting an isolated court bureaucracy.
Many of America’s treaty allies are Rome Statute members and continue to defend the institution.
The administration is therefore asking friendly governments to choose between their commitment to the ICC and a U.S. effort to deprive the court of money, personnel and diplomatic legitimacy.
The most important argument is not whether the ICC is flawless
The court is plainly not flawless.
Its chief prosecutor was removed for misconduct.
Its record of prosecutions has been criticized as slow and uneven.
Several member states accuse it of regional bias.
It depends on governments to arrest suspects and has no police force of its own.
And its attempt to reach nationals of non-member states has produced a genuine legal and sovereignty dispute.
But those facts do not automatically prove that an international court may never exercise territorial jurisdiction over a foreign national accused of committing a crime on the territory of a member state.
That is the legal point the administration’s strongest rhetoric tends to skip.
Likewise, critics of Rubio cannot simply answer every sovereignty objection by saying that the ICC is enforcing international law.
The United States never ratified the Rome Statute, Congress has enacted laws limiting cooperation, and no American government has accepted a general ICC power over U.S. personnel.
The conflict is therefore not imaginary.
It is a dispute over where national sovereignty ends and delegated international criminal jurisdiction begins.
‘Brick by brick’ is now more than a slogan
The clearest thing about Tuesday’s sanctions is that the Trump administration is doing exactly what Rubio said it intended to do.
It is using financial sanctions.
It is restricting travel.
It is pressuring member states.
It is trying to reduce the court’s funding, cooperation and political legitimacy.
And it is signaling that additional designations are possible.
That is a systematic campaign, not an isolated response to one arrest warrant.
Whether it succeeds in actually dismantling the ICC is a different question.
The court still has 125 States Parties, active cases and strong support from many governments, including close U.S. allies.
At the same time, it is facing leadership turmoil, litigation, a growing sanctions list and five recent withdrawal processes.
Those pressures are real.
So are the corrections that keep the story honest: the 65-delegation summit was not an ICC withdrawal conference; Karim Khan has already been removed; Mamdani’s city concluded it lacked arrest authority on its own; DSA’s program supports the ICC mandate but does not use the exact membership language attributed to it; and El-Sayed has not publicly proposed making international law superior to the Constitution.
The administration does not need those exaggerations to make its case.
The policy itself is already extraordinary enough.
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Rubio said the ICC would be taken apart brick by brick.
With the court’s president now personally sanctioned, Washington has made clear that the phrase is not merely rhetorical.
