Washington’s Selective Sovereignty

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY◊TRANSPARENCY ◊ INTEGRITYY◊ GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

EDITORIAL

Washington’s Selective Sovereignty

The Secretary of State’s campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court asks the world to accept a jurisdiction Washington polices for others but refuses for itself — a demand small states like Guyana should recognize immediately, because we have heard it before.

JULY 2026

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has published a declaration of war against the International Criminal Court, framing the institution as an assault on American sovereignty and pledging to “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.” The argument is dressed in the language of constitutional fidelity and revolutionary inheritance. Strip away the rhetoric, however, and what remains is a simpler proposition: the world’s most powerful state wants the benefits of an international accountability architecture — using it to legitimize sanctions, indictments and diplomatic pressure against Sudanese, Russian and other officials — while claiming permanent immunity from that same architecture for itself.

This is not a new argument, and it is not one that small, resource-dependent states like Guyana can afford to treat as a distant American squabble. The doctrine Washington is asserting — that a state may stand outside the very legal order it invokes against others, on the grounds that its own institutions are sufficient and its own conduct beyond meaningful external review — is the same doctrine that has, in various forms, justified extractive contracts written to Guyana’s disadvantage, oversight bodies stripped of teeth, and accountability mechanisms treated as optional once the powerful party has secured what it wanted.

THE CASE RUBIO DOES NOT MAKE

The Secretary’s op-ed is legally coherent on one narrow point: the United States never ratified the Rome Statute, and a state that has not consented to a treaty’s jurisdiction has a defensible claim to reject it. President Clinton declined to submit the treaty for Senate ratification; a bipartisan Senate majority subsequently passed legislation authorizing the president to use force, if necessary, to prevent the detention of American citizens by the Court. These are facts, not fabrications, and this news outlet does not dispute them.

What the Secretary’s argument omits is everything that complicates it. The United States has, across decades, selectively embraced international tribunals when they served its interests — Nuremberg, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ad hoc bodies convened with Washington’s blessing and often its funding. The objection, then, has never truly been to the principle of international criminal accountability. It has been to the application of that principle to Americans. Sovereignty, in this framing, is not a universal right claimed equally by all 125 ICC member states — it is a privilege reserved for the powerful, extended selectively to smaller states when their compliance is useful and withdrawn the moment scrutiny turns homeward.

A state that champions accountability for Khartoum and Moscow, while declaring itself permanently exempt from the same court, is not defending sovereignty. It is asserting a hierarchy.

COMPLEMENTARITY, NOT CONQUEST

It is also worth stating plainly what the Rome Statute actually requires, since the Secretary’s language of a court with “near-unlimited reach” obscures rather than clarifies. The ICC operates on a principle of complementarity: it may act only where a state is unwilling or genuinely unable to prosecute serious crimes through its own courts. This is not a tribunal seeking to supplant the American judicial system. It is a backstop designed for precisely the circumstance the Secretary insists could never occur — a state declining, for reasons of political convenience, to hold its own personnel to account.

Reasonable critics, including many who support the Court’s existence, have raised legitimate concerns about prosecutorial overreach — particularly the extension of jurisdiction over nationals of non-member states through the territorial acts of member states, as in the Afghanistan and Palestine matters. These are genuine questions of institutional design deserving serious reform debate. They are not, however, the same as the categorical claim Secretary Rubio advances: that any external review of American state conduct is inherently illegitimate. One is an argument about calibration. The other is an argument for exemption.

GUYANA’S STAKE IN THIS FIGHT

Readers of this publication will recognize the shape of this argument because they have watched Georgetown deploy versions of it domestically. When the Guyana Elections Commission’s composition is disputed, when the Auditor General’s findings on state contracts are met with silence rather than answers, when the Public Accounts Committee cannot achieve quorum, when a Commission of Inquiry into presidential landholding is demanded by senior counsel and ignored by the state — the underlying claim is identical to Washington’s. It is the claim that domestic institutions, controlled by domestic power, are sufficient unto themselves, and that external or independent scrutiny is an affront rather than a safeguard.

Small states do not have the luxury of asserting this doctrine and being believed. Guyana’s institutional credibility, its capacity to attract investment on fair terms, and its standing in CARICOM and before bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights all depend on accepting — not resisting — external accountability mechanisms as a complement to weak or captured domestic ones. Washington’s attempt to exempt itself from the very architecture it uses to discipline weaker states is not merely hypocritical. It is a preview of the argument every unaccountable power, in every jurisdiction, eventually makes: that scrutiny is for others.

WHERE THIS PUBLICATION STANDS

This news outlet takes no position on whether any specific American service member, officer or official has committed a prosecutable offense; that determination belongs to evidence and due process, not to editorial pages on either side of the debate. But the structural argument advanced in Secretary Rubio’s essay — that a state’s power should determine its exposure to accountability, rather than the reverse — is one this publication has spent years opposing in the Guyanese context, and we will not pretend it becomes principled simply because it is dressed in the language of American revolutionary inheritance.

The test of any accountability framework, international or domestic, is whether it applies to the powerful as readily as to the weak. Secretary Rubio’s campaign fails that test by design. Small states watching Washington’s brick-by-brick demolition of the ICC should understand precisely what is being modeled for them, and should decline the invitation to consider it sovereignty rather than what it is: the oldest argument the powerful have ever made against being watched.

— The Board