Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) accused President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of attacking the International Criminal Court to shield themselves from accountability for alleged war crimes committed during the Iran war, hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a sweeping campaign to “systematically disable” the global tribunal.
“Donald Trump is attacking the court that prosecutes war criminals because he and Pete Hegseth are war criminals,” Markey wrote on X.
Rubio announced Monday that the United States would use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to dismantle the ICC, “brick by brick, if necessary,” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and State Department press release that called the court an “unaccountable global arbiter” and accused it of “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.”
What Rubio Announced
The State Department announced a “whole-of-government response” to the ICC, including travel bans, visa revocations and increased sanctions against court officials and affiliated organizations. It also warned countries that “partner with U.S. law enforcement, host a U.S. military presence, or benefit from the broader U.S. security umbrella” that they were “being called upon to reject the ICC’s purported authority to prosecute American officials and servicemen.”
Rubio also made calls to top diplomats in other countries in the days before the announcement, urging them to withdraw from the court and cut off financial support to it, a U.S. official told CNN. The administration threatened “increased scrutiny” of nations that refused to reject the ICC’s authority while relying on U.S. assistance. “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, per The Hill.
The ICC was established by the 1998 Rome Statute and began operations in 2002 to investigate and prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. 125 countries have signed and ratified the Rome Statute. The United States signed the treaty under President Clinton but never ratified it, meaning American citizens are not directly subject to ICC jurisdiction under the court’s own rules — though the court has maintained that it can investigate alleged abuses by U.S. nationals in countries that are ICC members, as it has done in the Afghanistan investigation since 2020.
The War Crimes Allegations Markey Is Pointing To
Markey’s accusation was not made in a vacuum. More than 100 international law experts — including professors from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Columbia — signed an open letter published in Just Security in April warning that U.S. strikes on Iran “clearly violated the United Nations Charter prohibition on the use of force” and raised “serious concerns about violations of international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.”
The letter specifically cited Hegseth’s statements that rules of engagement interfere with “fighting to win” and his March 13 declaration that there would be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” — language the experts said likely violates both international law and the U.S. military’s own law of war manual, and may constitute a violation of the U.S. War Crimes statute at 18 U.S.C. § 2441.
When a reporter asked Hegseth directly whether U.S. strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure — bridges, power plants, water desalination facilities — would constitute war crimes, he called it “precisely the kind of disingenuous question that I’m used to from the media” and declined to rule out civilian infrastructure strikes.
A bipartisan group of Democratic senators including Elizabeth Warren sent a formal letter to Hegseth in April citing more than 1,700 confirmed civilian deaths in Iran, attacks on more than 20 schools and a dozen health care facilities, and a U.S. missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab that killed 175 children — an attack the Pentagon’s own preliminary inquiry found the U.S. was responsible for, according to the official Warren Senate letter. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said there were “reasonable grounds to think” that U.S. and Iranian strikes on energy infrastructure “might constitute a war crime.”
Hegseth’s Dismantling of Civilian Harm Protections
The Just Security letter also specifically cited Hegseth’s dismantling of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation infrastructure as a source of concern. Under his direction, the Defense Department abolished “civilian environment teams” and other mechanisms designed to limit civilian casualties, removed senior military lawyers without publicly citing misconduct, replaced the Army, Navy and Air Force judge advocates general, and produced a 2026 National Defense Strategy that omits references to civilian protection and international law entirely, per the experts’ letter.
The DoD’s own law of war manual prohibits declaring “no quarter” to enemy forces. CENTCOM spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins said in response to the civilian harm allegations that “U.S. forces do not target civilians,” and cited Iran’s more than 300 attacks on civilian locations in neighboring countries as a point of comparison.
What the ICC Can Actually Do to Americans
In practice, the ICC’s ability to prosecute U.S. officials is extremely limited. The court has no police force and could only arrest Americans if member states carry out the arrests on its behalf. More than 100 countries have signed bilateral agreements with the U.S. promising not to surrender Americans to the court. The court’s own rules also say that any local investigation or prosecution — including in a U.S. court — would strip the ICC of jurisdiction over alleged American crimes, according to the New York Times coverage Markey was responding to.
Critics said the sweeping nature of Rubio’s announced campaign nonetheless represented a dangerous escalation. “When the world’s most powerful country aims to dismantle the world’s only permanent international court, it sends the message that the powerful are above the law,” said Raed Jarrar of Democracy for the Arab World Now. Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former ICC prosecutor, told the Times, “If the U.S. turns against the court in its entirety, it’s really distancing itself from principles that our most important allies hold dear.” And Jarrar added a pointed counterpoint to Rubio’s framing: “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.”