The United States escalated its war with the International Criminal Court on Friday, placing the tribunal itself — not just its judges and prosecutors — on the Treasury Department's sanctions blacklist for the first time in the court's 24-year history.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the move Oct. 9, saying the State Department would "ban transactions" with what he called "this rogue court." The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control simultaneously added the institution to its Specially Designated Nationals list, freezing any ICC property reachable by U.S. jurisdiction and barring Americans from doing business with the court without special authorization.

"Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC," Rubio said.

A court, not just its officers

The designation builds on an executive order President Trump signed in February 2025 that has already put 17 individuals connected to the court under sanction, including former chief prosecutor Karim Khan. In August, the administration sanctioned ICC President Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, prompting the court to call the move a "flagrant attack" on judicial independence. Friday's order goes further, treating the court as a blacklisted entity in its own right rather than sanctioning the people who run it one by one.

Treasury did carve out some breathing room: four general licenses give the court a 180-day window to keep paying staff pensions, maintain phone and software service, and handle matters tied to ICC detainees — time the State Department says is meant for member countries to reach a "diplomatic and legal resolution," according to NPR's reporting on the designation. If no resolution comes, the clock resets to a harder freeze.

Washington's grievance is long-running, but the immediate trigger was the ICC's arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over the Gaza campaign, layered on top of older U.S. anger at the court's now-shelved inquiry into American troops in Afghanistan. Neither the United States nor Israel has ever ratified the Rome Statute that created the court, and Rubio leaned on that fact directly.

Allies push back

ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan condemned the sanctions as an attempt to undermine an independent judicial institution, but insisted the court's investigations and prosecutions would continue regardless. Foreign ministers from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom — all longtime ICC backers — issued a joint statement saying they "regret and strongly disagree" with the move.

Rubio was unmoved. "America never joined the court," he said. "We don't need it. And we don't want it."

How hard the entity-wide designation actually bites remains to be seen. The court has spent months quietly lining up banking and software providers outside U.S. reach, after reports surfaced last year that Washington was drafting plans to blacklist it wholesale. Whether those workarounds survive a 180-day countdown — and whether the ICC's 125 member states mount any unified response — will be the next test of a standoff that has been building since Trump's first weeks back in office.