Justice for Adversaries, Immunity for Allies: America’s War on International Justice
by Jared O. Bell
In 2017, I traveled to the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland as a visiting Erasmus professor from the International University of Sarajevo. While there, I toured Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp and site of mass murder.
The camp was vast. Its rooms carried the stale, musty smell of an old history book left in an attic. I had visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and would later visit Yad Vashem. Yet nothing haunted me more than walking through Majdanek, where gas chambers and other structures used in the systematic murder of prisoners remained in place.
At Majdanek, as at several other Nazi camps across Europe, the Nazis used Zyklon B to murder prisoners. Standing inside those rooms, history no longer felt abstract. It was physical. It surrounded you.
The horrors committed at Majdanek and across Nazi-occupied Europe made the need for accountability impossible to ignore. After the war, the United States and its allies established the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, advancing a revolutionary principle: government officials and military leaders could be held personally responsible for crimes committed in the name of the state.
Those principles later shaped the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and, eventually, the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court. The United States helped build this architecture of international justice.
Yet Washington’s commitment to it has always been conditional.
The hypocrisy lies here: The United States wants a system capable of delivering justice, but only so long as that system cannot hold the United States or its allies accountable. Washington embraces the language of war crimes when the accused are American adversaries. When the same standards are applied to American officials or allies such as Israel, international justice is suddenly described as illegitimate or an assault on sovereignty.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Successive administrations have resisted the Court’s authority while supporting it when its work aligned with American interests. The Bush administration allowed the Security Council to refer atrocities in Darfur to the ICC. The first Trump administration later sanctioned ICC officials after the Court authorized an investigation into alleged crimes in Afghanistan involving possible abuses by U.S. personnel.
President Joe Biden revoked those sanctions and supported accountability efforts against Russia in Ukraine. But his respect for the Court also proved conditional. When the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants for senior Israeli leaders over alleged crimes in Gaza, Biden called the move “outrageous.” Washington supported the Court when it pursued Vladimir Putin but condemned it when the same institution examined an American ally.
Donald Trump’s return brought a sharper escalation. In February 2025, he issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC. Then, on July 13, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an effort to dismantle the Court “brick by brick, if necessary.”
This is no longer mere skepticism. It is a campaign to weaken one of the central institutions created to hold perpetrators of grave international crimes accountable.
Rubio pointed to calls for American personnel to be investigated over U.S. strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats, revealing that his campaign is not only about defending sovereignty in the abstract. It is also about shielding American officials from possible scrutiny over operations that legal experts and human-rights groups have described as potentially unlawful. By March 2026, a Pentagon official said the United States had conducted 45 strikes and killed 157 alleged members or affiliates of drug organizations.
Human-rights organizations and legal experts have described the attacks as possible unlawful or extrajudicial killings. Suspected drug trafficking is a crime, but it does not automatically transform civilians into enemy combatants who may be killed without arrest or trial.
Similar questions surround American operations in Iran. On February 28, 2026, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. An Associated Press investigation concluded that the strike was carried out by the United States and killed at least 157 people, including 123 children.
It has not been publicly established that Rubio launched his campaign because of that strike or any other specific operation. But international-law experts argue that the administration appears to be acting preemptively to shield its military operations from outside scrutiny.
Rubio once supported the ICC’s role in pursuing Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Now, when similar principles might reach American officials or allied leaders, he portrays the Court as a threat that must be dismantled.
Washington does not oppose international justice in principle. It opposes international justice that it cannot control. It wants a Court capable of prosecuting Vladimir Putin, the Taliban, and America’s other adversaries, but not one capable of examining an American president, commander, or allied Israeli leader.
This retreat is especially dangerous because genocide and mass atrocities continue in Sudan, Gaza, Myanmar, Ukraine, and elsewhere. At precisely this moment, the international community should be protecting institutions that investigate atrocities, preserve evidence, prosecute perpetrators, and challenge impunity.
The ICC is imperfect. It depends on states to make arrests, moves too slowly, and has faced legitimate criticism. But destroying imperfect institutions does not produce better justice. It produces less justice.
For justice to be meaningful, it must be applied fairly and equally. Equality before the law is a principle the United States has promoted abroad for decades.
Washington cannot credibly demand accountability from its adversaries while seeking immunity for itself and its allies. A system of justice that bends according to the identity of the accused is not justice at all. It is power disguised as principle.
The lesson of Nuremberg was never that justice should apply only to the defeated. It was that no person, no government, and no nation should stand above the law.
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Jared O. Bell, PhD, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
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