“Further into lawlessness.”

Did the Trump regime just destroy the International Criminal Court?

The temple of Zeus. Attica. (A.Savin, cc by 3.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

25 JULY—I live in one of those postindustrial towns you find all over New England, and nothing happened here Friday, the day the International Criminal Court’s governing body voted at the U.N. Secretariat in New York, 102.7 miles away, to remove Karim Khan as the I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor. People mowed their lawns, shopped at the Big “Y” market, rode motorcycles up and down the streets, checked the mail, ordered pizza. Children swam in above-ground pools while parents took the sun in beach chairs.

The invisibility of our descent into barbarism—America’s descent, by extension the West’s altogether. This was my thought for the day yesterday, this what causes me to marvel.

How many of my neighbors know who Karim Khan is? How many know even what the I.C.C. is, what it does, and why what it does is important even to the mowers of lawns among us? How many understand that Khan’s dismissal as chief prosecutor, at the obvious behest of the Trump regime, is a frightening step—not the first but maybe the most consequential to date—toward a lawless world in which extremes of brutality and institutional violence are… choose your term… routinized, normalized, accepted as instruments of power?

I do not mean to recite abstractions or the preoccupations of a professional commentator. The world—the world of power and geopolitics—is distant as most of us look across our lawns and down our driveways: This is how it is meant to seem. But it draws very close as the late-phase imperium resists its decline in a state of ever more evident desperation. Ignorance is but the most pitiable defense against it, and there will be a price to pay for it.

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Karim Ahmad Khan trained as a barrister in Britain and is a recognized specialist in international law and human rights law. Crown prosecutor for England and Wales, legal officer attached to the Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and later Rwanda: Khan brought an impeccable record for integrity and legal expertise to his appointment at the I.C.C. in 2021. In May 2024, a year and some into the genocide in Gaza, Khan announced the Court would request arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli PM’s defense minister at the time, and various others.

The same month, a legal assistant in Khan’s office, identified only as “Sarah,” accused Khan of sexual misconduct—accusations that became public in October 2024. Khan has credibly denied all of these, but so did the subversions of the Zionists and the regime in Washington—Biden’s at the time—begin. I and others have written of this in some detail. A few of these pieces are here, here, and here.