At Camp David on July 31, Donald Trump said plainly what Washington’s fight with the International Criminal Court is now about. The US government's campaign to weaken the court, he said, was meant to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “various other people,” not himself. Marco Rubio added that five countries had announced plans to leave the ICC since the administration began its latest push against it. That makes the dispute larger than one court or one case. The real question is what the United States gives up when it treats an institution as useful against an adversary but intolerable when it reaches an ally.

Military strength, economic weight, and alliances matter, of course, but they are not the whole story of great-power influence. For decades, the United States also benefited from helping write the rules and from being able to say that those rules reflected something more than American preference. The postwar legal and institutional order became part of US power itself. It helped Washington isolate rivals, keep allies together, and present its policies as defenses of a wider system. That is why the current approach carries a cost that is easy to miss. In protecting allies from legal pressure today, Washington may be spending some of the credibility it will need tomorrow.

The contrast with Russia is especially hard to explain away. During Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington backed accountability efforts over Russian crimes in Ukraine, and Congress loosened restrictions on U.S. assistance to the ICC for its Ukraine investigation. The tone changed once the court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024. Trump’s 2025 executive order authorized sanctions connected to ICC actions against the United States and Israel. Since then, the administration has broadened the pressure to include travel restrictions, more sanctions, and diplomatic pressure on governments that continue to support the court.

There is a serious legal argument on the American side, and the article does not depend on pretending otherwise. The United States never joined the Rome Statute; Israel did not either. US officials have long objected to the prosecution of nationals of non-member states without their governments’ consent. The ICC answers that it has territorial jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Those are competing legal positions. But there is still a difference between challenging a court’s jurisdiction and punishing its officials while urging other countries to abandon it. One contests a ruling. The other can end up weakening the institution that produced it.

That is where the damage to American credibility begins. A legal order does not have to be perfectly consistent to matter, but it cannot survive for long if its most powerful defenders appear to want one standard for opponents and another for friends. After the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants, Josep Borrell, then the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the decisions were binding on EU member states. Outside the West, the contradiction is even harder to ignore. Washington asks governments to uphold sovereignty, accountability, and international rules in one crisis, then attacks an institution applying those rules in another. That does not erase U.S. power, but it makes American appeals less persuasive.

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