Trump’s attack on the ICC is no worse than Biden’s support for genocide and impunity

Republican Party president Donald Trump has imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the arrest warrants it issued against his war criminal ally, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But it’s essential to remember that this is simply an extension of Democratic Party president Joe Biden’s own assault on international law. Because it’s high time that US voters, and the world, see through the Republican-Democrat duopoly’s electoral charade.

Biden set the ball rolling on destroying the international legal order

The US, as a member of the Genocide Convention, has an “obligation to prevent genocide (Article I) which, according to the ICJ, has an extraterritorial scope”. And over a year ago, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that it was “plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide”. So the US should have taken action. Because as UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese has explained:

In order not to violate the Genocide Convention, which contains an obligation to prevent genocide, member states need to comply with the obligation not to support a state that might be committing genocide… Even if genocide had not been committed yet, because there is a risk, there is an obligation to prevent.

Other experts have backed this idea up.

However, Biden presided over 15 months of genocide in Gaza, with little significant change after the ICJ’s ruling.

He and his regime violated the US’s obligations by denying and fuelling Israel’s genocide, while covering for the apartheid state’s leaders. He also rejected the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, despite it coming after the 2024 election, when the potential political cost of supporting it was much lower.

This was completely consistent with his administration’s approach of pretending to care about Palestinian people while simultaneously sending billions of dollars in military aid to the war criminals massacring them. It tried to protect its image, but essentially gave Israel a green light to commit genocide.

State department veteran Josh Paul left the Biden administration in 2023. And he has stressed that:

The Biden legacy over Gaza will be American complicity in genocide and American tearing down of the rules-based international order — or at least the first and most significant steps toward that

Trump has now openly advocated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and launched an all-out offensive on the international legal system. But his behaviour is simply consistent with the position of the USA’s plutocratic elite, albeit more shamelessly forthright.

After 15 months of supporting genocide. pic.twitter.com/mDYz5eRLvh

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 6, 2025

Trump is finishing the job

Responding to Trump’s ICC sanctions, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard warned the president was ‘endorsing’ Israel’s crimes and “embracing impunity”:

Today’s executive order is vindictive. It is aggressive. It is a brutal step that seeks to undermine and destroy what the international community has painstakingly constructed over decades, if not centuries: global rules that are applicable to everyone and aim to deliver justice for all. The sanctions constitute another betrayal of our common humanity.

For Francesca Albanese, Trump and Biden’s efforts show that the US has led the West into “embracing… a lawless world”. And this, she stressed, “is a situation in which everyone loses”.

Featured image via the Canary