Last month, Donald Trump stood before the UN General Assembly and told the members of the International Criminal Court to resign at once, calling it “an evil group of people”. His administration has prepared sanctions against the entire court that would, according to the Wall Street Journal, bar most transactions with it after a six-to-seven-month wind-down.
It is tempting to file this as America leaving another room, after Paris, the UN Human Rights Council, the WHO, and 66 other international bodies. But the US never joined the ICC. You cannot walk out of a house you never lived in. This is not an exit but a demolition, and Washington says so. In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has promised to take the Court apart “brick by brick”. Nine of its 18 judges are already sanctioned.
Washington believes its case is not frivolous. The Court claims jurisdiction over nationals of states that never signed up to it, a question that has divided serious lawyers since 1998. Israel disputes that jurisdiction, and in 2025 the Court’s own appeals judges ordered its challenge reheard. The Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has stepped aside amid sexual misconduct allegations, which he denies. But Trump gave away the motive in an aside: the campaign was about “trying to defend Bibi”, after the Court’s 2024 warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Arguments about jurisdiction are for courtrooms. Sanctioning the judges who hear them is something else.
In 1970, the economist Albert Hirschman argued that members of a failing organisation have two choices: exit or voice. What tips the balance is loyalty and the cost of walking away. Both are now being tested.
Europe casts itself as the Court’s defender. Its record is awkward. When the Court issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin in 2023, the EU’s foreign policy chief declared “there can be no impunity”. When Mongolia let Putin visit, the Court found it in breach. Then came the Netanyahu warrant. France, citing a treaty clause on officials of non-member states, said he enjoyed immunities that “must be taken into consideration”. Friedrich Merz promised he could visit Germany “and leave again without being arrested”. Viktor Orbán hosted him in Budapest. And last Thursday, en route to New York, Netanyahu’s plane crossed Greek, Italian, and French airspace. Paris says the treaty imposes no obligations over overflights, and legally it may be right. Politically, the signal was hard to miss.
Each has a legal defence, and none equals sanctioning judges. But together they hand Washington its best argument: Europe already treats the Court as optional when a friend is in the dock. Every quiet exemption makes the American demand for a loud one look less outrageous. Rules that bend for friends are not rules; they are preferences. That is the Global South’s long-standing charge against the “rules-based order”, and Europe has done little to rebut it.
Hirschman warned that exit spreads when it is cheap. Five states have announced they are leaving the ICC in the past year. But the leavers, three Sahelian military governments that have turned towards Moscow, Chad, and a newly US-friendly Venezuela, were sceptics already, not converts. After Orbán lost power, Hungary rescinded its order to quit.
The greater danger is not a wave of exits but the weaponisation of the plumbing: the dollar, the cloud, the card networks. One sanctioned judge has already had her bank account closed in Slovenia. Whole-court sanctions would threaten its IT, insurance, and payroll.
Will Trump follow through? Probably, in part. But the long grace period is leverage, not a deadline, and the administration blinks under legal pressure. When an American ICC prosecutor sued, the Treasury licensed his work rather than defend its order in court. Expect the sanctions, then the carve-outs.
Where should Ireland stand? Ireland’s record is both its greatest asset and its biggest liability.
The asset is consistency. While other capitals reached for caveats, then-Taoiseach Simon Harris was asked whether Ireland would arrest Netanyahu. “Yes, absolutely,” he said. Few European leaders were so plain, and Netanyahu’s pilots appear to have taken him at his word: last week his plane steered south of Irish airspace.
The liability is that Washington hears “Gaza”, not “rule of law”, when Dublin speaks. Ireland moved to intervene in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Israel closed its Dublin embassy. After the Occupied Territories Bill became law in July, the US embassy warned Dublin not to push similar action in Europe, citing “nearly 1,000 US companies” here. Yet the government also kept services out of that bill, citing legal advice and ties to US multinationals.
So the smart play is to make the case about consistency, not Israel: the same warrant rules for Putin and Netanyahu and the same answer to American sanctions that Brussels gave in 2018, when it used its blocking statute to shield European firms over Iran. The statute forbids EU companies from complying with listed foreign sanctions. MEPs have demanded its use since 2025; the Commission has hedged. Last week the Netherlands, the Court’s host, asked Brussels to prepare it.
Dublin should let the Dutch carry the flag, use the EU chair to get the statute on the Council agenda before December, and secure European banking for the Court and those who work with it. And it should say, as often as it takes, that a rule Europe will not apply to its friends is one it cannot defend against its ally.
Hirschman observed that loyalty keeps members using their voice when exit is on offer. Irish foreign policy has long rested on the belief that small states are safest in a world run by rules rather than by size. Ireland cannot save that world alone. But for three more months it holds the chair. That is voice. It should use it.
