Brick by brick

Now Trump is wanting to kill off the International Criminal Court. Well of course he is, being an international criminal.

Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down USAID and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Nato may survive on paper, but Trump has made clear that he has little interest in coming to the aid of any ally that is attacked. The Board of Peace is clearly an attempt to sideline the United Nations.

But the state department’s announcement last week that it wishes to dismantle the international criminal court “brick by brick” could be Trump’s most frightening move of all.

I missed the State Department’s announcement of that. How appalling.

It is now official US policy to destroy the ICC, and the administration is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so.

Nations that do not fall into line will be punished. The state department has promised “increased scrutiny of nations that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”, particularly targeting those countries that “enjoy the benefits of the US security umbrella”. That will include the UK, a country that contributes just over £15m a year to the ICC, making it the fourth largest donor after Japan, Germany and France.

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The state department campaign also includes working with other nations that are not part of the ICC, suggesting that the US could ally itself with Russia and China.

Make no mistake, this is an existential crisis not just for the ICC but the very idea of international justice. The most powerful nation on Earth and the supposed leader of the democratic west is aligning itself with dictators and autocrats to prevent those accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes from ever facing justice.

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The question now is what the “rest of the west” will do in response to Trump’s attacks. The court’s biggest donors need to stay strong and not give in to intimidation. It will be an early test for Ed Miliband, who said upon his appointment as foreign secretary on Monday that “we face a time of greater instability and threat to international law … than at any time since the second world war”.

The ICC’s imperfections undoubtedly make it a harder institution to defend. Those weaknesses can be magnified and targeted, making the court’s natural defenders reluctant to man the barricades.

Yet that is exactly what needs to happen. Even when it is badly run or cases are poorly constructed, the ICC’s very existence can have an impact. Netanyahu and Putin will for ever be referred to as men indicted for war crimes. Their worlds have shrunk thanks to the threat of arrest. The Philippines’ former president, Rodrigo Duterte, is on trial, accused of crimes against humanity during his “war on drugs”.

This is why Trump is so determined to shut it down, argues Luis Moreno Ocampo, the court’s first chief prosecutor. “Trump knows he could be a target after he leaves office,” he told me. “The ICC is a huge obstacle for him.”

He doesn’t need to worry about that. He’s not going to live long enough.