(CNN) — US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday vowed to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court and urged other countries to join the effort as the Trump administration significantly escalates its campaign against the global institution.
Rubio accused the ICC of “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles,” but with “the force of so-called international law.”
The administration’s ire against the ICC goes back to President Donald Trump’s first term, when it targeted the ICC for seeking to investigate alleged war crimes committed by US forces in Afghanistan. The second Trump administration has imposed a slew of sanctions against ICC officials for their attempts to investigate the US and Israel.
However, the State Department-led, “whole-of-government campaign” to dismantle the ICC is a significant escalation, particularly as it seeks to pressure countries around the world to join and threatens potential cuts to US assistance for those who don’t.
“Nations that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance are likely to come under increased scrutiny,” a State Department official said Monday.
“Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” Rubio wrote in a separate piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. Those tools include possible travel bans, visa revocations, and increased sanctions, the State Department official said.
The official said that countries “that partner with US law enforcement, host a US military presence, or benefit from the broader US security umbrella are being called upon to reject the ICC’s purported authority to prosecute American officials and servicemen,” the official said.
“We will watch with interest which nations join ranks with us against this threat to Americans who are willing to risk their lives to protect others,” they noted.
Top officials, including the secretary, deputy secretary, and US ambassadors, “are calling countries as part of a campaign to diplomatically isolate the International Criminal Court and ensure it cannot target Americans,” the official said.
The calls are meant to persuade countries who are party to the ICC to withdraw from it “and cut off any financial support to the court,” they said.
CNN has reached out to the ICC for comment.
The administration is also calling on nations that are not parties to the court, like the United States, “to leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar action alongside us.”
In his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio accused the ICC of being “backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.”
Rubio rejected allegations by outside organizations that the administration’s deportations to El Salvador and its deadly boat strikes on alleged narco-terrorists had violated international law and rebuffed a call by one organization, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the US in Iran, but he claimed that such actions could risk investigation by the court.
Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, told CNN that Rubio mischaracterized DAWN’s “call to investigate all possible war crimes carried out in the war,” adding that it “begs the question: does Secretary Rubio believe US personnel should be investigated for war crimes in Iran?”
“History will judge governments on whether they defended the institutions designed to safeguard international law,” Shakir said. “It is not the ICC that Rubio is dismantling brick by brick—but the rules-based international order that grew out of the ashes of World War II.”
CNN’s Sana Noor Haq contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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