The US Department of Justice told the International Criminal Court, in writing, that it will not cooperate with any investigation, inquiry, summons, or proceeding, and that it rejects the court's jurisdiction over Americans anywhere on earth. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the letter to ICC President Tomoko Akane and called the court "increasingly lawless and illegitimate." Reuters reported it on July 2. The scope is total: no extradition, no transfer, and active opposition to any other country that tries to help.
Read past the theatre and almost none of this is new. The United States never joined the Rome Statute. It signed under Clinton in 2000 and unsigned under Bush in 2002. That same year Congress passed the American Servicemembers' Protection Act, which forbids cooperation with the ICC and authorizes the president to use "all means necessary" to spring any American held on an ICC warrant. People call it the Hague Invasion Act for a reason. So the position that the ICC has no reach over US nationals has been federal law for more than two decades, under presidents of both parties.
What changed is the packaging and the pressure. In February 2025 the president signed Executive Order 14203, imposing visa bans and financial penalties on anyone who helps the ICC investigate Americans or American allies. Over the following months the sanctions widened to at least eleven ICC officials, including nine judges and the chief prosecutor Karim Khan. In August 2025 the State Department designated four more judges by name: Kimberly Prost of Canada, Nicolas Guillou of France, Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji, and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal. Sanctioning individual judges of an international court is a serious act. The letter is the capstone on that campaign, not the start of it.
The trigger is not a mystery, even if the letter never says it out loud. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged crimes in Gaza. There is also the dormant probe into alleged US conduct in Afghanistan. The sovereignty language is the wrapper. The contents are these two files.
The legal argument is thinner than it sounds
The DOJ case rests on a clean line: a treaty cannot bind a country that never signed it, the US never signed, therefore the court has no authority over Americans. As a description of treaty consent that is correct. As a description of how the ICC actually claims jurisdiction it misses the point entirely.
The court's theory is territorial, not based on nationality. When someone commits genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity on the soil of a member state, that member state can delegate its own long-standing power to prosecute those crimes to the ICC. NYU's Jennifer Trahan put it plainly: the US position is old, but the Rome Statute provides otherwise when nationals of a non-member state commit such crimes on the territory of a state party. Alex Whiting at Harvard called the administration's argument neither novel nor compelling. The everyday version of this is simple. An American who commits a crime in France answers to French courts. Nobody thinks France needs American permission first. Member states have merely pooled a slice of that ordinary authority.
The ICC also does not go first. It is a court of last resort under a principle called complementarity, stepping in only when national authorities will not or cannot provide accountability. That inconvenient design is why "we have our own justice system" is not the trump card Washington presents it as.
The tell is what the same government celebrates
Here is the part that dissolves the sovereignty story. The Biden administration lifted the first-term Trump sanctions in 2021 and then welcomed the ICC's indictment of Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, even while objecting to the court's Israel investigation. Congress passed legislation letting the US assist the ICC on Russian war crimes. Same court. Same statute. Same jurisdictional theory the US now calls illegitimate. When the defendant was Russian, the court was an instrument of justice. When the defendant is an ally, the court is lawless.
That is not a legal distinction. It is a power distinction. The principle being defended is not sovereignty in the abstract. It is the right of the United States and its friends to be exempt from the rules it is happy to see applied to its enemies. A court you can aim at adversaries but never have aimed back at you is not a court. It is a weapon with a nice logo.
None of this makes the ICC a saintly institution. Blanche points to selective enforcement and internal misconduct allegations, and the court's record on Africa versus everywhere else is a genuine grievance that African states have raised for years. India, China, and Indonesia also stayed out of the Rome Statute, for their own reasons about sovereignty and Western agenda-setting. Skepticism of who staffs and steers these bodies is fair. But the honest version of that critique would apply the same standard to the Putin warrant and the Netanyahu warrant. Washington does the opposite, and that opposite is the whole argument.
One thing I could not confirm from the reporting is whether Judge Akane or the court issued any formal reply to the letter. Treat any claim of an ICC response as unverified until the court says so itself. What is verified is enough: a superpower sanctioning individual judges by name and instructing the world not to cooperate, while it keeps the same court on retainer for the cases it likes.