# You Play Your Games - We Play Ours > [!map] Wiki map > [[wiki/International Criminal Court|International Criminal Court]] · [[wiki/Rome Statute|Rome Statute]] · [[wiki/Territorial Jurisdiction|Territorial Jurisdiction]] · [[wiki/Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction|Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction]] · [[wiki/Economic Statecraft|Economic Statecraft]] · [[wiki/Weaponized Interdependence|Weaponized Interdependence]] · [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|Practical Sovereignty]] That was [my reply](https://x.com/BryantMcGill/status/2108742229841908215) to the [[wiki/International Criminal Court|International Criminal Court]] this afternoon, posted under [[wiki/Tomoko Akane|Tomoko Akane]]'s video statement rejecting American sanctions: "You play your games @IntlCrimCourt - we play ours. "...we will end the ICC. ... [We will] dismantle the ICC, piece by piece." Here is what happened today. The United States [[wiki/Economic Statecraft|sanctioned]] the [[wiki/International Criminal Court|ICC]] as an institution — not individual officials this time, the Court itself, placed on [[wiki/Office of Foreign Assets Control|OFAC]]'s [[wiki/Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List|Specially Designated Nationals list]] under Executive Order 14203. Dollar clearing, banking rails, American [[wiki/Strategic Dependency|technology dependencies]]: withdrawn. General License 13 authorizes specified wind-down transactions until 12:01 a.m. EDT on April 7, 2027; separate General Licenses 14, 15, and 16 address telecommunications and enterprise software, pensions, and detainee-related transactions, respectively. Salaries and routine operations needed for the wind-down are permitted only inside that license's scope and period — outside it, banking, insurance, procurement, and other business with the SDN-listed Court is prohibited. [[wiki/Marco Rubio|Marco Rubio]]'s statement was undisguised: "Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC." Then the part that matters most, and that most coverage will underplay: "And we expect our allies, many of whom are part of the ICC, and that rely on American service members for their defense, to rein in this rogue court. If they do not, the United States will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC, piece by piece, until Americans are threatened no longer." That is the [[collections/US-Israel Leadership Alliance|alliance itself being invoked as the enforcement mechanism]] — the security umbrella is not separate from the sanctions, it is their second barrel. The 125 states parties are being told, in plain language, that the American defense guarantee and ICC membership are now in tension, and to choose. Hours earlier, the Nobel Committee awarded the [[wiki/Nobel Prize|Peace Prize]] to Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge — having pointedly passed over Trump, who has campaigned for the prize openly. The timing may be coincidence. It landed as message. [[wiki/Tomoko Akane|Akane]]'s statement calls the sanctions "an attack against sovereign States that have created the Court" and "an assault on the rule of law," insists the Court acts "only on the basis of the law and the evidence," and warns that "the Court cannot stand alone — its fate now rests also in the hands of the states that created it." Read that last sentence twice. It is the tell. A court claiming to stand above politics, declaring that its survival depends on political actors supplying resources and cover — that is not a refutation of the sanctions, it is a description of the dependency the sanctions exploit. The institution's claim to transcend politics is sustained entirely by politics. This is [[wiki/Invisible Dependency|host-indexed autonomy under pressure]]: the Court runs on [[wiki/Infrastructure as Power|substrates]] — financial rails, software ecosystems, personnel mobility, state cooperation — controlled by the very parties it claims [[wiki/Semantic Jurisdiction|jurisdiction]] over without their consent. The deeper collision is structural. The [[wiki/Rome Statute|Rome Statute]]'s 125 parties are the constitutive source the Court invokes. But the sanctions respond to the Court exercising authority over non-parties — the United States and Israel — whose consent was never given. The actual [[wiki/Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction|jurisdictional mechanism]] deserves examination rather than a slogan. Under Article 12(2)(a), the Court can claim jurisdiction over crimes allegedly committed on the territory of a state party even when the accused is a national of a non-party. That is the [[wiki/Territorial Jurisdiction|territorial-jurisdiction theory]], and its logic is not exotic: states routinely exercise criminal jurisdiction over foreign nationals for conduct on their territory. But the theory requires a territorial predicate capable of carrying the authority being asserted. In the Israeli proceedings, that predicate is Palestine — and now the conversation becomes considerably more interesting. The so-called [[wiki/State of Palestine|State of Palestine]] was proclaimed by the [[wiki/Palestine Liberation Organization|Palestine Liberation Organization]] in Algiers on November 15, 1988. A proclamation by the PLO is not, to my mind, the creation of a sovereign country. I have no interest in a roll call of governments that subsequently recognized it, or in being instructed to treat diplomatic recognition as though it materialized a functioning state. The PLO can declare whatever it likes. [[wiki/Declarative Sovereignty|Recognition can confer legal standing]], and Palestine did acquire UN non-member observer-state status in 2012 before acceding to the [[wiki/Rome Statute|Rome Statute]] in 2015; those are facts about the international institutional record, not proof of an independent Palestinian government exercising effective control over a settled territory with the capabilities of a [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|sovereign state]]. **A diplomatic fiction may be adequate for the diplomacy that created it. That does not oblige me to mistake it for the material thing.** In this dispute, Palestine is a contested statehood claim being used as a load-bearing jurisdictional foundation against a country that never joined the ICC. I am profoundly skeptical of the legitimacy of that construction, and I do not owe the PLO's declaration an ounce of reverence. Here is the extraordinary maneuver: the [[wiki/International Criminal Court|ICC]] did not settle the statehood question it needed the territory to carry. In its [February 5, 2021 ruling](https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-issues-its-decision-prosecutors-request-related-territorial), the majority said it was not constitutionally competent to decide Palestine's statehood for the international community or settle its borders. It nevertheless treated Palestine's accepted accession as sufficient to make it a state party **for the purposes of the [[wiki/Rome Statute|Rome Statute]]**, extending the Court's claimed [[wiki/Territorial Jurisdiction|territorial jurisdiction]] to Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The legal distinction is real: a state party's territory can ordinarily supply jurisdiction over a non-party's nationals under Article 12, and the ICC's ruling supplies its treaty-law basis for treating Palestine that way. My objection is to the political and juridical sleight of hand embedded in the premise. The Court admits it is not settling whether this is a state in the full international sense, then proceeds to make that disputed entity's treaty status the gateway to asserting criminal power over Israeli officials. **It can call Palestine a state for its own statutory purposes. It cannot make that [[wiki/Sovereignty by Adjudication|classification synonymous with effective sovereignty]] simply by pronouncing it from The Hague.** Even indulging that entire theory for the sake of argument, what exactly can this Court do with it? On November 21, 2024, the [[wiki/International Criminal Court|ICC]] issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant; in April 2025, its Appeals Chamber returned an Israeli jurisdictional challenge for further consideration. It can issue warrants, circulate demands, stage press conferences, and make travel diplomatically complicated. It cannot send its own police into Israel, seize Israeli officials, and drag them to The Hague. The [ICC itself acknowledges](https://www.icc-cpi.int/about/how-the-court-works) that arrests and surrender require cooperating states. A warrant may have real effects where a sovereign chooses to execute it, but the decisive force belongs to that sovereign, not the ICC. **The Court has a signature, a seal, and a theory. It does not have the [[wiki/Borrowed Capacity|independent coercive capacity]] to make Israel obey.** That is the reality behind the performance, and no recital of international recognition changes it. The whole structure is a [[wiki/Borrowed Capacity|cascade of borrowed capacities]]. The PLO proclaimed a state whose sovereignty remains profoundly contested; the ICC treated that state's treaty accession as a sufficient territorial jurisdictional predicate; the resulting warrants depend on still other states volunteering their police, airports, courts, and borders to enforce them. Each stage presents a legal or diplomatic designation as if it carried power inherently, while the actual power resides somewhere else. This is not an argument that the Court's legal acts have no consequences. It is an argument about **who actually possesses the means to produce those consequences**, and who is borrowing prestige and enforcement from the institutions and states around them. [[wiki/Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction|Treaty-delegated jurisdictional performance]] has now collided with non-consenting [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|sovereign capacity]]. Akane invokes the states that created the Court as the wellspring of legitimacy. Washington is demonstrating that the states sustaining the world's financial and security infrastructure may have a very different answer about whose commands prevail. The operational record does not rescue the "only law and evidence" claim. Afghanistan investigations that risked American personnel were deprioritized; the warrants against Israeli leadership proceeded. I will not litigate the underlying allegations here — that is someone else's argument, and I am sidestepping it deliberately. The point is structural, not substantive: a court that activates selectively is not doing law, it is doing politics in legal costume. The Hague complex functions as a [[wiki/Prestige Networks|legitimacy foundry]], converting narrative preferences into the aesthetic of law and then exporting the aesthetic as binding norm. So those words. They do not debate the Court's self-description; they decline the framing in which the Court's games are the only games being played. One side optimizes for narrative capture and the conversion of institutional prestige into constraint on enforcement-capable actors. The other optimizes for non-subsumption of core security functions and the [[wiki/Weaponized Interdependence|chokepoints]] — financial, technological — that make enforcement possible at all. Everyone involved understands the shape of this now. The annoyance is tedious and we've run out of patience. Few things could bring me as much joy as seeing the ICC get their metaphorical teeth kicked in. It is a deep delight to the blood to watch an institution that mistook prestige for power discover the difference. The Court has been offered the same choice for years: end the threats, or be ended. It chose, again, to perform. And let us be precise about what has already happened. We did not threaten sanctions — we deployed them. The Court is on the [[wiki/Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List|SDN list]], the designations are in force, and the financial exclusion is operating as I write this. What the ICC has is six months of wind-down: six months to avoid even rougher waters. End the threats, or be ended — the choice was issued, and the clock is already running. **We are dismantling the institution, piece by piece — through [[wiki/Economic Statecraft|sanctions already deployed]], [[wiki/Weaponized Interdependence|financial exclusion already in motion]], [[wiki/Strategic Dependency|technological denial]], diplomatic pressure, and the withdrawal of every dependency we have the power to withdraw.** This is no longer a dispute about whether we respect its pretensions. It is a question of whether the Court can survive the consequences of continuing to impose them on us. So now we play the game it wanted to play — the one where [[wiki/Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction|jurisdiction is not a declaration but a capacity]]. Performances end when the funding does. ## Related topics - [[collections/US-Israel Leadership Alliance|US-Israel Leadership Alliance]] - [[wiki/International Criminal Court|International Criminal Court]] - the treaty-created institution at the center of the dispute - [[wiki/Tomoko Akane|Tomoko Akane]] - the Court president whose statement the article answers - [[wiki/Rome Statute|Rome Statute]] - the treaty that constitutes the Court and supplies its jurisdictional framework - [[wiki/Territorial Jurisdiction|Territorial Jurisdiction]] - the Article 12 mechanism applied to conduct on a state party's territory - [[wiki/Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction|Treaty-Delegated Jurisdiction]] - lawful authority delegated through treaty rather than independently enforced power - [[wiki/Borrowed Capacity|Borrowed Capacity]] - institutional consequence produced through another actor's police, infrastructure, or leverage - [[wiki/State of Palestine|State of Palestine]] - the contested territorial predicate in the ICC proceedings discussed here - [[wiki/Palestine Liberation Organization|Palestine Liberation Organization]] - the organization that issued the 1988 declaration of statehood - [[wiki/Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List|Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List]] - OFAC's blocking list and the sanctions mechanism discussed here - [[wiki/Office of Foreign Assets Control|Office of Foreign Assets Control]] - [[wiki/Economic Statecraft|Economic Statecraft]] - [[wiki/Weaponized Interdependence|Weaponized Interdependence]] - [[wiki/Strategic Dependency|Strategic Dependency]] - [[wiki/Invisible Dependency|Invisible Dependency]] - [[wiki/Infrastructure as Power|Infrastructure as Power]] - [[wiki/Jurisdiction|Jurisdiction]] - [[wiki/Sovereignty by Adjudication|Sovereignty by Adjudication]] - [[wiki/Semantic Jurisdiction|Semantic Jurisdiction]] - [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|Practical Sovereignty]] - [[wiki/Prestige Networks|Prestige Networks]] - [[wiki/Marco Rubio|Marco Rubio]]