Washington has never looked kindly on the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court, but refused to submit it to the Senate; the Bush administration withdrew that signature in 2002 and pushed through legislation restricting cooperation with the court. What is happening now is different in kind. Refusing to join an institution is one thing; sanctioning its sitting judges and prosecutors is another. This is state sovereignty asserting itself, reminding international organizations who really makes the rules and where the limits of international law lie.

On Aug. 18, Washington added the court’s president, Tomoko Akane, and a senior trial lawyer, Abdoulaye Seye, to its sanctions list. This was the first time the United States had sanctioned a sitting president of an international court. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC "corrupt and fatally politicized” and vowed to press on until the court could no longer threaten U.S. sovereignty. He had already put the goal plainly in July, promising to dismantle the court "brick by brick.”

With Akane and Seye added, the list now covers nine of the court’s 18 judges, both deputy prosecutors, former chief prosecutor Karim Khan, three Palestinian human rights organizations, and U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Last month the State Department went further, promising more sanctions and visa restrictions while pressing states parties to cut funding for the court and withdraw from it.

The formal designations are only the first layer. The second is quieter and does more damage. Banks, technology companies and other private actors tied to U.S. markets and infrastructure extend the sanctions far beyond their text. Unable to gauge their own exposure, many cut ties without waiting to be told.

A report published by the Coalition for the ICC in April documented the result. Designated organizations lost access to their bank accounts, could not pay staff and watched much of their funding disappear within weeks. Judge Nicolas Guillou, himself designated, has pointed to a deeper kind of damage, namely the decisions that are never made because no one wants to be named next.

Unraveling of int'l legal order

All of this raises a larger question. Is international law facing an existential crisis? International institutions have plainly weakened in recent years, and states attach less weight to rules they once invoked as a matter of course. Yet today’s breakdown should not be mistaken for the decay of an otherwise sound system. International law has always had serious structural flaws. The post-1945 order and the unipolar liberal moment of the 1990s promised that law and democracy would govern relations between states and not only within them.

Time and again the promise proved illusory, honored in earnest only where it served American and Western European power. Unlawful occupations and foreign interventions had already exposed the contradiction. What made it impossible to ignore was open Western backing for Israel even after a U.N. commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The sanctions now aimed at the ICC and U.N. bodies complete the picture. International law cannot protect even the institutions built in its name.

The reason is not hard to find. What separates law from aspiration is that it binds and can be enforced, and enforcement depends on a sovereign power standing behind it. Above states, no such sovereign exists, and institutions ultimately depend on the very states they are meant to bind. What actually curtailed the sovereign right to use force after 1945 was not the text of the U.N. Charter but the will of the states that had won the war.

In the end, the application of international law rests on a political commitment by governments to respect its rules and its institutions, and that commitment is now visibly weakening. Anyone who has treated international law as though it carried the same practical force as domestic law now has to reckon with the difference.

The problem goes beyond mere non-enforcement. International law is invoked less often, carries less weight as a source of legitimacy and is increasingly pushed to the margins. Even when great powers broke the rules, they still spoke the language of law; the gap between rhetoric and conduct was plain enough, but legal justification still counted for something. Now even the rhetoric is disappearing. What is now in question is not merely the application of international law but its continued existence as a functioning legal order.

What comes after the crisis

Balakrishnan Rajagopal of MIT traces the problem to the system’s foundations. Writing in Verfassungsblog, he argues that international law has long served on a de facto agenda that favors great powers and shields their privileges, and that its practice was shaped from the outset to protect the states that built the order. Its top-down construction compounds the matter. A system designed by elites and resting on thin social legitimacy is easy for those same elites to discard once it becomes inconvenient. What international law needs, on this account, is to become law that people demand from below rather than law that states hand down from above. Nothing short of that demand will lift it out of its structural crisis.

None of this makes international law dispensable. Trade, scientific cooperation and political stability all require common rules, and there is a moral duty to defend peremptory norms (jus cogens) such as the prohibitions of genocide, slavery and torture. But that defense should not turn into shadowboxing.

An authority above sovereign states, one capable of binding them against their will and compelling compliance, is not on the horizon. The sooner we make our peace with that, the sooner we can think seriously about other ways of confronting the injustices and human rights violations that the fiction of a functioning global legal order no longer conceals. Otherwise, we remain trapped in a loop of ritual condemnation and interminable bureaucratic process.

There is reason to hope that today’s disorder will eventually settle into new balances of power and a measure of stability, and that the ordinary advantages of regulating relations between states will bring international rules and institutions back into view.