Donald Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted. Quite apart from this warped sense of justice – that it is only for other people – the president’s limited view of the court’s powers was rejected in the treaty establishing the court and repudiated by the Joe Biden administration and even the Republican party. But that didn’t stop Trump.

The US government traditionally has had no problem with two of the three ways that the court can obtain jurisdiction because it could control them. Washington is fine with the court prosecuting citizens of states that are members of the court because it has no intention of joining them. And it accepts that the United Nations security council can confer jurisdiction because it can exercise its veto to block prosecutions it doesn’t like.

But the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, allows a third route to jurisdiction. The court can investigate or prosecute crimes that occur on the territory of a member state, even if the perpetrator is the citizen of a non-member state. That was why Trump in his first term objected to an ICC preliminary examination in Afghanistan (and imposed sanctions – freezing assets and limiting travel – on the chief prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, and one of her deputies) because the investigation might have implicated CIA torturers in that country under George W Bush. Trump in his new executive order alludes to the prosecutor’s actions in Afghanistan, but it is a non-issue because the current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made clear that those past crimes are not his

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