Trump Wants to Team Up With Putin — Against the ICC

One leader has an active arrest warrant for war crimes. The other just proposed they work together to dismantle the court that issued it.

What Actually Happened

President Donald Trump has suggested that the United States and Russia cooperate against the International Criminal Court — a proposal that goes beyond Washington's long-standing hostility toward the Hague-based tribunal and into territory that has few precedents in modern American diplomacy.

The backdrop matters enormously. In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the alleged forced deportation of Ukrainian children — a war crimes charge that has since made Putin a legal pariah in the 124 member states that have signed the Rome Statute. Any ICC member state is technically obligated to arrest him on arrival. The warrant has quietly constrained his travel ever since.

Trump's administration has already taken concrete action against the court. Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on ICC prosecutors and staff — a move that drew sharp condemnation from European allies. But suggesting a joint US-Russia front against the institution is a qualitative step further. It frames the world's only permanent international criminal court not as a flawed but reformable institution, but as a shared adversary to be neutralized.

Why Now — and What's Really Being Offered

Read in isolation, this looks like ideological consistency: Trump has always viewed the ICC as an infringement on national sovereignty. The US never ratified the Rome Statute; the Bush administration formally unsigned it in 2002.

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Read in context, though, the proposal looks more like a negotiating chip. Trump has staked considerable political capital on ending the Russia-Ukraine war quickly. Putin, for his part, has a concrete problem: the arrest warrant makes him untouchable in most of the democratic world. A US-led effort to defang the ICC — or at minimum delegitimize it — would remove one of the few remaining legal pressures on Moscow.

The implicit offer: help us wind down this war on terms we can both sell, and we'll help neutralize the court that's been following you around.

Whether that's shrewd transactional diplomacy or a dangerous erosion of post-WWII legal architecture depends entirely on which lens you use.

The Fault Lines This Exposes

Europe's reaction has been swift and pointed. Germany, France, and the Netherlands — all ICC members — reaffirmed their support for the court. The European Parliament had already passed a resolution calling US sanctions on ICC prosecutors an attack on international law. This latest development will deepen an already widening transatlantic rift.

For the Global South, the picture is more complicated. The ICC has faced persistent criticism — and not only from autocrats — for its disproportionate focus on African defendants. Of the court's 31 convicted individuals, the overwhelming majority are African. This has fueled a genuine debate about whether the ICC represents universal justice or selective Western enforcement. Trump's attacks don't exist in a vacuum; they land in a world where the court's credibility is already contested.

China is watching carefully. Beijing is not an ICC member and has faced international scrutiny over Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Every blow to the ICC's authority creates more room for China to operate outside international legal accountability — without Beijing having to lift a finger.

The clearest losers in this dynamic are the people ICC cases are actually about: civilian victims in active conflict zones. The court's deterrent value — however imperfect — rests on the credibility of the threat that atrocity will eventually be prosecuted. Undermine that credibility, and the calculus for commanders in the field shifts.