The International Criminal Court is once again under attack from the United States. The reason behind the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the institution is simple: an insistence that they enjoy wholesale impunity. In numerous contexts, including the Caribbean, Venezuela, Palestine, Afghanistan, and El Salvador, there are credible allegations of international crimes committed by U.S. citizens. If the U.S. wasn’t exposed to accountability for its atrocities, it wouldn’t be seeking to destroy the Court. 

Now, will the ICC’s backers please stand up?

American aggression towards the ICC is nothing new. The U.S. has been seeking to subvert the work of the ICC since before the Court was even a fixture of the global arena. Since the bygone era of President George W. Bush, Republicans in particular have been obsessed with the Court and its operations. From John Bolton to Mike Pompeo to now Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Republican officials have been fixated with the ICC even though it has never actually issued a warrant for any American citizen. 

Ironically, the efforts of U.S. officials to condemn the ICC have bestowed prestige and legitimacy upon the institution. To those across the globe who believe that the ICC is feckless in the name of American imperial ambitions, tantrums from successive Republican administrations is a powerful antidote. In a nutshell, the greater Washington’s hysteria over the ICC, the more powerful and persuasive the Court appears to those who believe the U.S. is not above the law.

The disdain from political quarters and any commitment to undermine the institution is a feature, not a bug of international relations – and it always has been. Yet this time feels different. The sanctions against staff and threats to sanction the court as a whole as well as to dismantle the Court “brick by brick”, per Secretary Rubio, smacks of escalation and poses an existential threat to the ICC. 

The only thing that can save the Court is its members. If they fail to do so, it will not be Trump that kills the ICC, but their indifference.

The smattering of (primarily European and South American) expressions of support for the ICC is good. But it’s not enough. There are concrete actions that states can take to not only defend the Court but strengthen it.

First, members of the ICC should double down on cooperating with the Court. They should reiterate that they support every situation currently under investigation and that they will offer tangible cooperation in terms of evidence and any enforcing arrest warrants issued by the institution. If they have already done so, they should do it again.

Second, the Court’s backers should encourage more states to join the ICC. Lebanon, for example, has toyed with becoming an ICC member-state, which would give the Court jurisdiction over Israeli and Hezbollah crimes committed in the country. As it stands, Beirut has decided not to join the Court, but states could be clear that they support it doing so.

Third, states should offer additional financial backing to the ICC. Some say the Court’s budget is too big. For 2026, it was about $210 million – about 50% of the overall payroll of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2025 or one-fifth of the daily cost to Americans of the U.S. war in Iran – for a Court that is seeking to hold perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide accountable in Ukraine, Palestine and Darfur. Dollars speak louder than words. Offering additional and flexible funding to the ICC would be a to say: ‘this is our court, and we will do whatever necessary to ensure its operations have the resources they need.’

Fourth, states must properly protect ICC staff sanctioned by Trump. Last August, numerous judges at the Court were targeted with mafia-style sanctions for doing nothing more than their part impartially applying the law to hold atrocity perpetrators accountable. As a result, they can’t use banks, book hotels, or pay for a meal with their credit cards. The European Union and Canada each have laws on their books that could block the impact of U.S. sanctions on their judges. Yet inexplicably the EU has not invoked its Blocking Statute and Canada has refused to invoke the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, leaving their citizens working at the ICC left to twist in the wind. Additionally, and inexplicably, neither the EU nor Canada has backed the legal suit by some of the judges to challenge Trump’s sanctions in U.S. courts.

Trying to get the U.S. under Trump to stop attacking the ICC is like trying to nail pudding to the wall; it’s not going to happen. But that does not justify the dithering of its purported supporters. The U.S. assault against the Court is calculated to silence ICC supporters and isolate them from the institution. Why? Because Trump’s lackeys know their bluster cannot alone ruin the Court. To succeed, they need others to abandon the ICC. Instead, states should take the opportunity offered by these unprecedented times to back the ICC in unprecedented ways.

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A version of this post was first published in Al Jazeera.