Donald Trump has never held great respect for international institutions. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. Rotten bureaucracies and self-interested elites need to be shaken up now and again. But occasionally his hostility does more harm than good.

The fresh sanctions that Trump levied on the “rogue” International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, which include a ban on US entities making transactions with the court, are of the latter sort.

The ICC itself has never sat well with the American idea of jurisprudence, which is why the US is not a member. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty creating the ICC in 2000, but the Senate never ratified it, and George W. Bush withdrew America’s signature in 2002. Congress went even further that year by passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which authorised the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to extract any member of the American forces who is delivered to the ICC for judgement.

So Trump’s opposition to the court is squarely within the mainstream of American law and practice. But unlike Bush, Trump is not working with Congress to protect American interests. Instead, he has invoked unilateral emergency powers to punish the ICC and American companies that do business with it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans”, and that sanctions would cripple the ICC’s “ability to operate against us”. But Congress had already acted to protect Americans from the court. And the authority that Trump invoked in taking this step, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), authorises the president to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with an “unusual and extraordinary threat” by a foreign entity to the “national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States”.

Is the ICC such a threat? If so, why now? What has changed? This week’s action builds on an earlier sanctions framework announced by the administration in February 2025, which cited the arrest warrant the ICC issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former minister of defence, Yoav Gallant. Israel is also not a signatory and so the ICC is indeed overreaching with this action, but none of this constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US. The warrants may be bad for Netanyahu, bad for Israel, and bad for the court’s reputation. But where is the threat to the US?

There are many federal laws that allow the president to declare various sorts of emergencies and take action accordingly. In the past, presidents have generally done so under conditions that many would recognise as legitimate — typically, by freezing the assets of terrorist organisations and rogue states. The ICC, whatever its faults, is neither of these things.

Trump used IEEPA powers to impose tariffs earlier in his second term, and these were struck down by the Supreme Court back in February. This latest action against the ICC may well be struck down too, after months or years of argument in court.

But Trump’s goal is something much wider. As with the tariffs, he uses the IEEPA as a threat, a way to apply extraordinary pressure, encourage opponents to come to the table, and strike a better deal between the US and whoever it is dealing with — in this case, the ICC. As Rubio summed it up: “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.”

This is one of the perils of seeking to run the government like a business. In business, Trump could scuttle agreements, withhold payments, and squeeze counterparties for better terms. But governments are meant to act in accordance with higher ideals than just maximising profit and advantage. Trump is right to resist the encroachment of the ICC upon states that never agreed to be governed by it, but defending American sovereignty abroad is no excuse for bypassing the limits on presidential power at home.