As an expert witness against the medicalization of punishment, I have spent a good portion of my career in courtrooms, explaining to juries and judges the precise boundary of what the law permits a person to do with someone else’s body. I thought about that work when I watched Mayor Zohran Mamdani, having pledged for over a year that New York City would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the strength of the International Criminal Court’s warrant, concede in July that his administration had “reviewed every avenue available under applicable law” and found none.

The city, he admitted, has no independent legal authority to execute the warrant. He now asks the federal government to do it instead. The retreat was quiet, but it should prompt a harder question than the one Mamdani himself just answered. The question is not whether the city could arrest Netanyahu, but why a mayor ever believed this was his call to make.

The United States and the Court: a settled estrangement

The United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute. President Clinton signed it in 2000 but never submitted it for ratification; the Bush administration “unsigned” it in 2002, citing the risk of politically motivated prosecutions of American personnel. That same year, Congress passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), nicknamed, half-jokingly, the “Hague Invasion Act,” for the provision authorizing the President to use “all means necessary” to free Americans held by the Court.

ASPA was not a one-time gesture. It is the standing architecture of a considered, bipartisan judgment that the........

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