On September 22, 2026, during the 81st United Nations (UN) General High-Level Week, U.S. President Donald Trump’s call from the podium for all member states to immediately withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) constitutes the clearest manifestation that the structural crisis of the international system has reached an irreversible threshold. By describing the ICC as a “rogue institution” and a “malicious group of people” and declaring that the Court has no jurisdiction over American soldiers or U.S. allies, Trump has dealt an ontological blow to the claim of universality underlying international law. It would be misleading to interpret this situation as a temporary diplomatic crisis. Rather, it represents the dismantling, by the very “constitutive hegemonic power” that built it, of the liberal international order constructed in the aftermath of World War II. Supported by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledge to dismantle the Court, this new American doctrine constitutes the most significant discursive evidence that international law no longer functions as a global mechanism of balance. International law has effectively become a tolerated simulation, sustained only insofar as it remains compatible with Washington’s interests.[i]
From the perspective of Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), Trump’s aggressive and destructive rhetoric should not be viewed as a random populist outburst, but rather as the institutionalized form of zero-sum diplomacy and narcissistic political rhetoric. Trump’s foreign-policy vision codes international agreements and multilateral institutions as parasitic structures that constrain American sovereignty. In this context, the ICC is not perceived as an impartial actor responsible for administering justice; instead, it is sharply divided into an oppositional category. The ICC is framed as an anti-American apparatus challenging American exceptionalism. The leader’s interpretation of the world through a Derridean binary opposition between “us” and “them” leads him to perceive investigations into American soldiers or Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes not as legal procedures, but as existential threats directly targeting U.S. national security. This discourse reproduces, as a demonstration of power in domestic politics, a neorealist “law of the jungle” in which power is superior to law.[ii]
The legal and practical foundations of this discursive construction were laid with Executive Order 14203, signed by Trump on February 6, 2025.[iii] This executive order was designed as a direct retaliation against the arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza. By imposing visa restrictions and financial sanctions on ICC officials and employees, as well as on individuals and institutions supporting them, the document represents a strategy of legal warfare aimed at paralyzing the enforcement mechanisms of international law. The decision by a nation-state to place an independent international judicial body tasked with investigating war crimes on a sanctions list by declaring a national emergency constitutes one of the most dramatic examples of how sovereignty can be transformed into a weapon against universal human-rights norms.[iv]
Approaching the existing international system through Foucault’s equation of power and knowledge, we can see that law is not an independent sphere concerned solely with the pursuit of justice, but an apparatus of hegemonic power relations. Since World War II, international law has been used as a biopolitical mechanism to discipline the Global South, regulate crises in postcolonial geographies, and legitimize interventions by Western powers. Trump’s attack on the ICC represents a systemic crisis triggered by the barrel of this mechanism being turned, for the first time, toward the hegemonic alliance that established it—the U.S.-Israel axis. In Foucauldian terms, the moment the ICC dared to produce a conception of truth outside the hegemon, it was discursively isolated by the hegemon itself through its designation as criminal and illegitimate.
In this context, an examination of the statements made by Trump and Rubio reveals an explicit attempt to legitimize power through the manipulation of language. Describing the ICC’s actions as “illegitimate” and “baseless” and characterizing the institution as “rogue” does not constitute a legitimate or judicial critique. At the discursive level, it represents a strategy of securitization. Within Wodak’s framework of strategies of othering, the Court, which is tasked with administering justice, is marginalized as an anti-American institution, thereby coding attacks against it in the eyes of the American public as legitimate—even patriotic—acts of self-defense. Discourse has replaced reality: through a discursive intervention, those who judge have been repositioned as the judged, while alleged war criminals have been transformed into victimized statesmen. The system presented for years as a rules-based international order has, in reality, become nothing more than an emptied-out hyperreality. Rather than defending the existence of universal justice, the ICC was supported by the West in order to create the illusion that such justice existed. Once the ICC stepped outside the simulation and attempted to exercise genuine jurisdiction by targeting Israeli leaders in the context of Gaza, the illusion underlying the system collapsed. Trump’s actions have stripped away the mask of a justice that, according to this critique, had never truly existed within the existing international-relations order, exposing the pure and unrestrained power at the system’s core.
The consequences of this hegemonic fragmentation for the Asia-Pacific and Chinese foreign policy constitute the principal axis that will determine the future of the international system. As the United States withdraws from or renders international institutions ineffective one by one—the World Health Organization (WHO), the Paris Climate Agreement, and now the ICC—it is creating a unique strategic vacuum for China to assume a leadership role in global governance. Chinese diplomacy has long characterized the U.S. discourse on a rules-based order as “Western hypocrisy” and has been constructing a new form of “multilateralism” through platforms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS+. Trump’s attack on the ICC amounts to the United States itself providing evidence, through its own actions, for China’s argument to Global South countries that “Western-centered institutions cannot be trusted.” China is likely to use this discursive victory to strengthen its own normative infrastructure and Asia-centered security architecture.
The Global South’s response to this crisis marks a critical rupture in the structural transformation of international law. While African, Latin American, and Asian countries have for years maintained criticisms of the ICC for its perceived focus on prosecuting leaders from African countries, the Court’s attempt to act against a Western leader for the first time—and its subsequent attempt to be dismantled by the leader of the West himself—is being recorded as a historical example of a double standard. This situation is eroding the postcolonial world’s confidence in international law and accelerating the transition toward multipolarity. Global South states will no longer seek justice primarily through institutions centered in The Hague or New York. Instead, they will seek it through the regional alliances that China has long sought to construct and through pragmatic, non-asymmetrical relationships with emerging centers of power.
In the context of global security, the disabling of the ICC by Trump or the withdrawal of member states from the Court constitutes a discourse that demonstrates the return of an anarchic system. The world order in which the security dilemma had previously been mitigated, at least to some extent, through international norms, treaties, and deterrent institutions is giving way to a Hobbesian state of nature in which no rule is effectively binding. When a culture of impunity replaces deterrence, the use of military force in interstate disputes ceases to be an exception and becomes a fundamental instrument of foreign policy. The paralysis of the UN Security Council through the use of veto power, combined with the dismantling of independent judicial bodies such as the ICC, carries the potential to initiate an international dark age in which war crimes and aggression generate no diplomatic costs. The United States’ rejection of universal jurisdiction in order to protect its own interests provides other revisionist powers with a precedent that may be invoked to legitimize their own potential violations within their respective spheres of influence.
This normative vacuum is being filled by the strategic initiatives of Chinese foreign policy, which has been constructing a new architecture of global governance for some time. In opposition to the West’s prescriptive and conditional export of democracy and human rights, Beijing has established a new diplomatic language centered on respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs. Global South states will seek to define their new position within the system through the regional alliances that China has long sought to construct through the SCO, BRICS+, and the Global Development Initiative (GDI), as well as through pragmatic, non-asymmetrical relationships with emerging centers of power. The model offered by China represents a vision of South-South cooperation framed not by a hierarchical superior-subordinate relationship but by a “win-win” discourse, coordinating economic development with political independence.
In conclusion, the international order in the emerging era is evolving away from a universal illusion in which a single hegemon establishes and violates the rules toward a multipolar realism shaped by different regional centers of power around their own interests and norms. The Global South is increasingly moving beyond its passive status as a rule-taker and is becoming a proactive bloc integrated with new diplomatic and economic centers of gravity centered on the Asia-Pacific. As the exposure of law as a simulation serving the interests of the powerful becomes increasingly apparent, the postcolonial world will have to construct its security on the rational foundations of Asia’s emerging and mutually balancing multilateral mechanisms.
[i] “Trump yönetiminin UCM’ye yönelik kapsamlı yaptırımlar uygulamaya hazırlandığı öne sürüldü”, Anadolu Ajansı, https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/dunya/trump-yonetiminin-ucmye-yonelik-kapsamli-yaptirimlar-uygulamaya-hazirlandigi-one-suruldu/4063001, (Date Accessed: 22.09.2026); “Trump administration prepares sanctions against International Criminal Court, sources say”, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-administration-prepares-sanction-international-criminal-court-wsj-reports-2026-09-20/, (Date Accessed: 22.09.2026).
[ii] “UNGA: Trump Calls For All Countries To Quit ICC”, Channel’s, https://www.channelstv.com/2026/09/22/trump-at-un-calls-for-all-countries-to-quit-icc/, (Date Accessed: 22.09.2026).
[iii] “ABD’den, UCM’nin çalışmalarına katkı yaptıkları gerekçesiyle üç STK’ya yaptırım”, Anadolu Ajansı, https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/ayrimcilikhatti/ayrimcilik/abdden-ucmnin-calismalarina-katki-yaptiklari-gerekcesiyle-uc-stkya-yaptirim/1827018, (Date Accessed: 22.09.2026).
[iv] “IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT”, White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/imposing-sanctions-on-the-international-criminal-court/, (Date Accessed: 22.09.2026).
