The Global Review - Farid Novin

Justice Under Siege: Prime Minister Mark Carney's Defense of the International Criminal Court in an Age of Geopolitical Fragmentation

A Policy Analysis Prepared for the G20 Miami Summit, 2026

Canada, Middle-Power Statecraft, and the Future of International Law, Peace, and Order

Farid Novin

I. Introduction: Power, Law, and the Courage to Choose Sides

The history of international relations is, in large part, the history of humanity's recurring attempt to reconcile power with justice. Durable international orders have rarely rested on military or economic dominance alone. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which enshrined sovereign equality among states, to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which institutionalized great-power consultation after the Napoleonic Wars, periods of relative stability have depended on a working equilibrium between political realism and legal restraint. The twentieth century radicalized this equilibrium. The devastation of two world wars persuaded much of the international community that peace could not rest on shifting balances of power alone; it required mechanisms capable of holding individuals — including heads of state — personally accountable for crimes that offend the conscience of humanity. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals established that principle. The Rome Statute of 1998 and the International Criminal Court that followed in 2002 gave it permanent institutional form.

That institutional experiment now faces its most serious test since inception. On August 5, 2026, in Toronto, Prime Minister Mark Carney described Canada's support for the ICC as "unequivocal," stating that Canada backs the Court "with funding," "with personnel," "with our values" and "with our actions," and that it "provides an essential service in a world that is more dangerous, more divided." He made the statement three weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly vowed to dismantle the Court "brick by brick, if necessary," and one year after Washington sanctioned a Canadian ICC judge, Kimberly Prost, over her judicial role in authorizing the Court's investigation of American conduct in Afghanistan. Carney's reaffirmation was immediately shadowed by an uncomfortable fact, reported the same day by The Canadian Press: he did not explain why his government has never publicly criticized the sanctioning of a Canadian citizen serving as an international judge, sanctions severe enough to strip Judge Prost of ordinary access to credit cards, airlines and other multinational services.

This tension — full-throated institutional endorsement paired with public silence toward the ally applying the pressure — is the analytical heart of this paper. It is tempting to read Carney's statement simply as courage: a middle power publicly refusing to abandon an institution its own diplomats helped design, at a moment when the world's most powerful state is actively campaigning for its destruction. It is equally tempting to read Canada's accompanying silence as the oldest form of diplomatic prudence: protecting an indispensable continental relationship by declining unnecessary confrontation. Both readings capture something true. The purpose of this paper is not to resolve that tension rhetorically but to examine it analytically, using the tools of international law, comparative institutional history, political economy, and Bayesian reasoning under uncertainty — the same framework Canadian and allied policymakers must themselves apply when the costs of principle and the costs of alliance management pull in different directions.

This paper does not advocate unconditional support for, or categorical criticism of, the ICC, nor does it render a verdict on Ottawa's diplomatic choices. International institutions operate inside political environments defined by unequal power, competing interests, and contested sovereignty. Understanding the significance of Canada's position requires moving past applause or condemnation and toward an assessment of the strategic incentives states face, the real institutional strengths and weaknesses of international criminal justice, and the evolving architecture of global governance within which that justice must now operate — an architecture that, as later chapters show, will be on display at the very G20 summit this paper is prepared for, hosted in December 2026 by the same administration leading the campaign to dismantle the Court.

The central argument advanced here is that Carney's reaffirmation is best understood not as an isolated diplomatic gesture but as a case study in the evolving — and increasingly precarious — role of middle powers in preserving elements of the rules-based order during a period of acute fragmentation. Institutions such as the ICC derive their resilience less from universal consensus, which no longer exists, than from the sustained political and financial commitment of states that continue to treat predictable legal frameworks as public goods worth defending, even at diplomatic cost. Whether Canada's commitment rises fully to that standard, or stops short of it at the point of greatest friction, is itself part of the story this paper tells.

The analysis proceeds through fourteen parts. Part II traces the historical evolution of international criminal justice from the laws of war to the Rome Statute. Part III develops a six-lens theoretical framework — realist, liberal institutionalist, constructivist, English School, public-choice, and Bayesian. Part IV examines international law as economic and strategic infrastructure. Part V recounts Canada's history as an institutional entrepreneur among middle powers. Part VI presents the crucible of August 2026 in full: Carney's statement, the Prost sanctions, and the domestic criticism his government has faced for its restraint. Part VII dissects the American campaign against the Court in detail. Part VIII examines the paradox of the Miami G20 itself. Parts IX through XII assess Carney's broader foreign policy, middle-power strategy, the ICC's institutional weaknesses, and future scenarios through Bayesian analysis. Part XIII offers policy recommendations for the G20 and the wider international community, and Part XIV concludes.

II. The Long Arc: From the Laws of War to the Rome Statute

II.i. Before Law: The Age of Unrestrained Sovereignty

For most of recorded history, sovereign rulers possessed nearly unrestricted authority over the conduct of war. Victory conferred legitimacy; conquest was widely treated as sufficient justification for territorial acquisition and political domination. Ancient civilizations — Persian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Roman — developed customary restraints governing prisoners, emissaries, and unnecessary destruction, and religious traditions imposed moral limits: Islamic jurisprudence protected civilians and places of worship; Christian Just War theory, from Augustine to Aquinas, distinguished legitimate from illegitimate force. These traditions depended on voluntary compliance and reciprocity rather than enforceable law. No supranational authority could hold a ruler personally accountable.

II.ii. Codification Without Enforcement

Henri Dunant's account of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 produced the International Committee of the Red Cross and the First Geneva Convention of 1864. The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 extended the codification of the laws of armed conflict. These were genuine conceptual advances — states now acknowledged that war itself should be legally constrained — but enforcement remained almost entirely political, and the doctrine of absolute sovereignty remained largely intact.

II.iii. The Interwar Failure

The Treaty of Versailles proposed prosecuting Kaiser Wilhelm II for "a supreme offence against international morality"; the prosecution never occurred because the Netherlands granted him asylum, but the proposal itself was a genuine innovation. The League of Nations, despite real achievements in technical cooperation, could not prevent Japanese aggression in Manchuria, Italian aggression in Ethiopia, or German aggression across Europe. The lesson — that legal ideals without enforcement mechanisms and sustained major-power support cannot deter aggression — would shape the postwar architects profoundly, and it remains the central lesson bearing on the ICC's predicament in 2026.

II.iv. Nuremberg and Tokyo: The Birth of Individual Accountability

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg answered, for the first time with institutional force, whether individuals acting for sovereign states could bear criminal responsibility before an international tribunal. It established that individuals — not abstract states — commit crimes under international law; that official position provides no immunity; that "following orders" is not a complete defence; and that aggressive war is itself an international crime. The Tokyo Tribunal extended similar principles to the Pacific theatre while exposing an enduring difficulty that echoes today: political considerations — the treatment of Emperor Hirohito, in that instance — inevitably shape prosecutorial choices about who is, and is not, brought before international justice.

II.v. The Cold War Interruption and the Post-1991 Revival

Ideological confrontation between Washington and Moscow blocked any permanent international court for four decades, even as the Genocide Convention (1948), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 expanded the underlying legal architecture. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the calculus. Atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed roughly 800,000 lives in about one hundred days, led the UN Security Council to establish the ICTY (1993) and ICTR (1994) — ad hoc tribunals that proved international prosecution was institutionally feasible, even though each required separate authorization and addressed only a single conflict. Canadian jurist Louise Arbour served as Chief Prosecutor of both tribunals from 1996 to 1999, later becoming UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and, in 2026, Governor General-designate of Canada — a career arc that itself embodies the continuity between Canada's tribunal-era leadership and its contemporary ICC commitments.

II.vi. Rome: A Constitutional Moment

The Rome Statute, negotiated in 1998 and in force from July 1, 2002, created a permanent court with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and — under later amendment — the crime of aggression. Canadian diplomats played an outsized role in the negotiations, working with European, Latin American, and African delegations and civil society to secure an independent prosecutorial office bound by the principle of complementarity: the ICC acts only when national courts are genuinely unwilling or unable to prosecute. That principle sought to reconcile international accountability with sovereignty, and it remains the Court's defining constitutional feature.

II.vii. Structural Asymmetry

Since becoming operational, the ICC has investigated cases across multiple regions, issued arrest warrants against senior leaders, and shaped the development of international criminal jurisprudence. Yet 125 states have ratified the Rome Statute while several of the world's most powerful — the United States, China, Russia, and India — remain outside it entirely. This asymmetry, present since 2002, is no longer a background condition; as later chapters show, it has become the fault line along which the Court's survival is now being contested.

III. Theoretical Foundations: Six Lenses on Law and Power

III.i. Why Theory Matters More in 2026 Than in 2002

Scholars have long disagreed about what the ICC actually is: an achievement of postwar multilateralism, a legal aspiration destined to collide with sovereignty and power, or a socially constructed norm whose authority rests on collective acceptance rather than coercion. That disagreement is no longer academic. Whether Carney's statement reads as principled leadership, strategic statecraft, institutional hedging, or symbolic diplomacy depends on which theoretical lens one applies — and, this paper argues, a serious analysis needs all six.

III.ii. Classical Realism: Power Before Law

Realism — from Thucydides and Hobbes through Morgenthau, Waltz, and Mearsheimer — begins from the absence of a central sovereign authority above states. Within that anarchic system, institutions reflect underlying distributions of power far more than they constrain it. Realism predicts that powerful states will support international legal institutions only insofar as those institutions serve broader interests, and will resist legal constraints that meaningfully reduce their freedom of action. The 2026 American campaign against the ICC — explicit, well-resourced, and unapologetic — is close to a textbook realist case: a great power that concluded the Court's exercise of jurisdiction over its personnel and its ally's leadership was no longer tolerable, and moved to neutralize the institution rather than negotiate within it. Realism also predicts, with equal confidence, that a middle power dependent on that same great power for security and market access will calculate its public criticism carefully — which is precisely the caution Ottawa has so far displayed toward the Prost sanctions.

III.iii. Liberal Institutionalism: Law as a Public Good

Liberal institutionalism holds that international organizations reduce uncertainty, lower transaction costs, and produce mutually beneficial outcomes even among self-interested states. From this view, the ICC establishes predictable standards, strengthens deterrence, and reduces uncertainty about acceptable wartime conduct — functions whose value rises, rather than falls, in a more dangerous world, which is precisely the language Carney used in Toronto. Middle powers, lacking the coercive alternatives available to great powers, have structurally stronger incentives to invest in such institutions. Critics of this tradition note correctly that institutions cannot substitute for political will — a caution Canada's own conduct illustrates.

III.iv. Constructivism: Norms, Identity, and Socialization

Constructivists such as Alexander Wendt and Martha Finnemore argue that international politics is shaped by shared ideas and identities as much as by material capability. States increasingly regard certain conduct as illegitimate not because of sanction but because of internalized norms; the near-universal public condemnation of genocide today, compared with its historical tolerance, cannot be explained by military capability alone. On this reading, the ICC's deepest influence lies not in its conviction rate but in its gradual socialization of governments, militaries, and civil society toward stronger expectations of accountability — and Canada's identity as a founding architect of the Rome Statute gives its support a normative weight independent of immediate calculation, even as constructivists concede that such commitments weaken under severe security pressure.

III.v. The English School: International Society Amid Anarchy

Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, and Adam Watson argued that states form an "international society" bound by common rules and diplomatic practice even without world government. Order, on this view, depends on power, legitimacy, and shared rules together, and it rarely requires universal agreement — it survives when enough influential states continue to recognize an institution's legitimacy despite disagreement elsewhere. This is arguably the most realistic lens through which to view the ICC in 2026: a Court that will never again enjoy universal buy-in, but that may still function as a load-bearing member of international society if a sufficient coalition of states — Canada among them — continues to treat it as legitimate.

III.vi. Public Choice Theory: Incentives Inside Institutions and Governments

Public choice theory redirects attention from states as unitary actors to the incentives facing the individuals within governments and institutions: judges seeking independence, officials seeking organizational survival, ministers seeking electoral advantage. Canada's own record — a Prime Minister issuing an unequivocal statement of support while a Foreign Minister avoids direct criticism of an allied sanctions regime — is difficult to explain through pure principle or pure interest alone; it is more legible as the product of several actors within one government responding to different incentive structures simultaneously.

III.vii. Bayesian Institutional Analysis: Decision-Making Under Radical Uncertainty

Deterministic theories struggle with an environment this fluid. A Bayesian approach treats governmental support for institutions as continuously revisable: states hold prior beliefs about an institution's expected value, and update those beliefs as new evidence — judicial performance, geopolitical shifts, alliance costs — accumulates. Canada's posture in August 2026 fits this model closely: strong rhetorical commitment maintained even as the expected diplomatic cost of full-throated criticism of Washington is judged, for now, to outweigh the expected benefit. That calculation is neither fixed nor necessarily correct; it is a prior awaiting further evidence, which is precisely what a Bayesian scenario analysis in Part XII below is designed to model.

III.viii. Toward an Integrated Framework

No single tradition adequately captures Canada's position. Power constrains institutions, as realism insists; institutions still reduce uncertainty and produce cooperative gains, as liberal institutionalism insists; norms and identity shape what leaders find sayable and unsayable, as constructivism insists; order can survive partial rather than universal legitimacy, as the English School insists; incentives inside governments produce contradictions that pure interest or pure principle cannot explain, as public choice insists; and policy is an adaptive, evidence-updating process rather than a fixed doctrine, as Bayesian analysis insists. Canada's support for the ICC — full in word, more cautious in confrontation with its principal ally — is the product of all six forces operating simultaneously, not evidence that any single one has failed.

IV. International Law as Strategic and Economic Infrastructure

IV.i. Beyond Morality: Law as Economic Architecture

Public discussion of international law emphasizes its ethical foundations — justice, human rights, accountability. Equally important, and less appreciated, is its function as economic infrastructure. Like stable monetary systems, enforceable contracts, and independent central banks, predictable international legal rules reduce uncertainty, lower transaction costs, and encourage long-term planning by states and private actors alike. Canada's continued ICC support should be read partly in this register: the Court itself governs only the gravest crimes, but its existence reinforces a wider legal architecture in which highly integrated trading nations have an outsized stake.

IV.ii. The Economics of Predictability

Uncertainty behaves like an invisible tax on economic activity: investors delay, insurers raise premiums, governments hoard reserves. International law reduces these costs by increasing predictability — for commercial contracts directly, and for sovereign risk indirectly, since the probability of armed conflict, political violence, or mass atrocity affects borrowing costs, foreign investment, energy markets, and supply chains. The ICC occupies a modest but symbolically significant place within this larger ecosystem of institutions that collectively reduce systemic uncertainty.

IV.iii. A Classic Collective Action Problem

International legal order behaves like a public good: non-rival, difficult to exclude, and therefore chronically under-provided, because every state benefits from stable rules while not every state has equal incentive to help sustain them. Powerful states may conclude that unilateral action offers greater immediate advantage — precisely the calculation now driving American ICC policy — while middle and smaller powers, possessing fewer unilateral instruments, generally derive greater relative benefit from stable frameworks. Canada, as a trading nation deeply integrated into global markets, exemplifies the latter category, which gives its ICC posture a rational economic foundation independent of moral conviction.

IV.iv. Sovereign Risk and Institutional Credibility

Modern financial markets devote substantial resources to assessing sovereign risk, incorporating judicial independence, regulatory consistency, and respect for legal obligations into credit assessments. Institutional credibility is increasingly a component of national competitiveness; persistent disregard for international legal commitments carries reputational costs that compound over time, even where the causal relationship to any single financial metric is difficult to isolate.

IV.v. Selective Multilateralism and Network Effects

The post-Cold War expectation that globalization would steadily reduce geopolitical rivalry has proven only partly correct. Rather than universal participation, international cooperation increasingly proceeds through overlapping coalitions of committed states — a pattern this paper calls selective multilateralism, and one the ICC itself now exemplifies. Its authority derives not from universal membership, which it has never had, but from a substantial coalition willing to accept common obligations even as a rival coalition, led by the world's most powerful state, actively works to shrink that first coalition. From an economic perspective, this resembles a network good: participation generates increasing returns as more states cooperate, but the network can remain functional — diminished, not dead — without full universality.

IV.vi. Bayesian Political Economy: Law as Insurance

International legal institutions function much like insurance: they do not eliminate disaster but reduce its expected costs. The expected strategic value of supporting such an institution can be expressed formally as

E(V) = Σ Pᵢ × Bᵢ − Σ Qⱼ × Cⱼ

where Pᵢ is the probability of a given benefit (deterrence, legitimacy, reduced uncertainty), Bᵢ its magnitude, Qⱼ the probability of a given cost (diplomatic friction, compliance burden, alliance strain), and Cⱼ its magnitude. Governments maximize expected value, not certainty, and revise the underlying probabilities continuously as evidence accumulates — a Trump administration sanctions campaign is exactly the kind of new evidence such a model is built to absorb. Applied to Canada, this framework suggests that Carney's reaffirmation reflects an updated judgment that preserving the institution still generates higher expected long-term value than allowing its erosion — while the government's parallel reluctance to confront Washington over the Prost sanctions reflects a simultaneous judgment that the marginal cost of that specific confrontation currently exceeds its marginal benefit. Both judgments can be rational and still be in tension; that tension is not a flaw in the framework but exactly what it is designed to expose.

V. Canada as Architect: The Middle-Power Tradition from Pearson to Rome

V.i. The Origins of Middle-Power Diplomacy

Before 1939, Canada's foreign policy operated largely within the British imperial system, constrained by both constitutional limits and modest military capability. The Second World War transformed Canada's material position without erasing a structural reality Canadian policymakers understood clearly: Canada would never possess the demographic or military scale to compete directly with the great powers. The alternative strategic vision that emerged — institution-building rather than military dominance — shaped Canadian diplomacy for the subsequent eight decades.

V.ii. Pearson and the Institutionalization of Multilateralism

Lester B. Pearson's response to the 1956 Suez Crisis — proposing the first large-scale UN Emergency Force rather than aligning unconditionally with any combatant — established modern peacekeeping as a defining Canadian contribution and demonstrated that institutional innovation could create diplomatic space where direct confrontation threatened escalation. His Nobel Peace Prize reflected international recognition that middle powers could shape stability through means other than coercion, a philosophy that has guided Canadian policymakers ever since.

V.iii. From Ottawa to Rome

Canada's leadership in negotiating the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel landmines demonstrated that a coalition of committed states and civil society organizations, rather than unanimous great-power consent, could still generate binding international norms. That experience directly informed Canada's approach to the Rome Statute negotiations the following year, where Canadian diplomats helped construct the principle of complementarity and bridge differences among diverse regional coalitions. The Rome Statute stands among Canada's most significant achievements in post-Cold War multilateral diplomacy, and support for the resulting Court has remained a rare point of continuity across successive Canadian governments of differing political orientation — a continuity now being tested more severely than at any point since the Court's founding.

V.iv. A Structural Reality Restated for 2026

The twenty-first-century environment differs sharply from Pearson's era. Cyber conflict, artificial intelligence competition, disinformation, and economic coercion increasingly blur the line between domestic and international security, while relations among the United States, China, and Russia have grown more contested than at any point since the Cold War's end. Canada's contemporary foreign policy has consequently emphasized resilience, diversification, and strategic autonomy alongside its traditional multilateralism — a combination this paper examines in detail in Part IX, after first setting out, in full, the events that have made 2026 the most consequential test of that combination to date.

VI. The Crucible of August 2026: Carney's Reaffirmation and Its Limits

VI.i. What Carney Actually Said

At a press conference in Toronto on August 5, 2026, Prime Minister Carney told reporters: "Canada is a proud member of the International Criminal Court. We support it with funding, we support it with personnel, we support it with our values, we support it with our actions. And we will continue to do so." He added that the Court "provides an essential service in a world that is more dangerous, more divided," and, when asked about the sanctions against Judge Prost, said Ottawa "will provide support as needed" and that it "work[s] with our American colleagues on a variety of issues to work to achieve results," but that "our support for the ICC is unequivocal." These are not the words of a government contemplating withdrawal or quiet accommodation; they are a public, on-the-record commitment of funding, personnel, and diplomatic capital to an institution the government's most important ally is actively trying to dismantle. Read in isolation, this is precisely the kind of costly signal that liberal institutionalist and constructivist theory identify as meaningful — a statement that carries real diplomatic weight with Washington specifically because it is not costless to make.

VI.ii. What Carney Did Not Say

The same reporting that recorded Carney's reaffirmation recorded, in the same breath, what it omitted: an explanation of why his government has offered no public criticism of the sanctions imposed on a Canadian citizen and sitting ICC judge. Judge Kimberly Prost, born in Winnipeg, was sanctioned by the Trump administration in August 2025 for her judicial role in authorizing the Court's investigation into alleged conduct by American forces in Afghanistan — a case in which she exercised exactly the kind of independent judicial judgment the Rome Statute was designed to protect from political interference. The sanctions left her unable to use most credit cards or access services from companies such as Amazon and major airlines. France condemned the sanctions publicly and immediately. Ottawa did not. When Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand finally commented, a week after criticism began mounting from advocates, she expressed "utmost confidence" in Prost's impartiality but did not reference the sanctions at all — a carefully worded statement of support for the judge that stopped conspicuously short of criticizing the government that sanctioned her.

VI.iii. The Domestic Criticism

This restraint has not gone unchallenged inside Canada. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy stated publicly that the Carney government was "abandoning" the world court Canada helped found, and that its posture demonstrated conditional rather than genuine support for the rules-based order it regularly invokes. He further argued that Ottawa's refusal to push back publicly risked signalling to Canadian public servants that work which irritates Washington could carry personal consequences without government protection. Mark Kersten, a University of the Fraser Valley scholar specializing in the ICC, has called on Ottawa to invoke the blocking provisions of the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act — legislation that would bar Canadian financial institutions and businesses from enforcing the American sanctions against Prost on Canadian soil. The New Democratic Party has echoed this demand. As of Carney's August 5 statement, the government has not adopted it.

VI.iv. A Genuinely Difficult Position, Not a Simple One

It would be analytically lazy to treat this gap between rhetoric and confrontation as straightforward hypocrisy, and equally lazy to wave it away as immaterial. Canada's economic and security relationship with the United States is, by an enormous margin, its most consequential bilateral relationship; nearly every instrument available to Ottawa for protecting a sanctioned Canadian judge — a blocking statute, public condemnation of a sitting U.S. Secretary of State, coordinated retaliatory measures — carries costs that extend far beyond the ICC file into trade, defence, and continental security cooperation more broadly. Carney's own framing — "we work with our American colleagues... to achieve results" — is an explicit claim that quiet diplomacy will protect Prost more effectively than public confrontation. That claim may be correct; it has not yet been tested against a public alternative, since Ottawa has not tried one. What can be said with more confidence is that the gap between Canada's declared "unequivocal" institutional support and its calibrated silence on the one concrete instance where that support has been directly tested is itself the most precise available measure of how much the "unequivocal" commitment is actually worth in practice — and it is a gap the government has not yet been required to close.

VI.v. Reading the Courage Correctly

None of this negates what is genuinely notable about Carney's August 5 statement. Unlike a growing number of American allies quietly reducing their public association with the Court under State Department pressure, Carney chose, at a moment of maximum American displeasure with the institution, to reaffirm Canadian funding, personnel, and values commitments on the record and by name. That is a real diplomatic act with a real cost attached, even if it stopped short of the further step — direct criticism of the sanctions themselves — that critics such as Axworthy argue genuine courage would require. The more precise description of Carney's position, consistent with the Bayesian framework developed in Part III, is neither full courage nor mere symbolism: it is calibrated resistance, a government betting that sustained institutional commitment without direct confrontation is the policy most likely to preserve both the ICC relationship and the American relationship simultaneously — a bet this paper returns to, and tests against alternative strategies, in Part XII.

VII. The Anatomy of the American Campaign Against the Court

VII.i. From Irritant to Target

American friction with the ICC did not begin in 2026. It dates to the first Trump administration's response to the Court's 2020 authorization of an investigation into alleged war crimes by American and Afghan forces, as well as the Taliban, in Afghanistan — the same investigation whose judicial authorization would later trigger the sanctions against Judge Prost. What changed in the second Trump administration was scale, explicitness, and strategic intent: the goal shifted from resisting specific investigations to ending the institution itself.

VII.ii. The Netanyahu-Gallant Warrants as Catalyst

The ICC's November 2024 arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, issued over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to Israel's campaign in Gaza, drew scrutiny even from the Biden administration and became a rallying point for the Court's American critics. Then-Senator Lindsey Graham described the ICC as a "rogue and politically motivated organization" and threatened to sanction states cooperating with the warrants "into economic oblivion." Secretary Rubio has repeatedly linked the administration's ICC campaign directly to defending Israel from what he characterizes as illegitimate prosecution.

VII.iii. Escalating Sanctions

In 2025, the State Department sanctioned four ICC judges — Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda and Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza of Peru, for approving the Afghanistan investigation, and Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini Gansou of Benin and Beti Hohler of Slovenia, for authorizing the Netanyahu-Gallant warrants — followed shortly by sanctions on Canadian judge Kimberly Prost and additional jurists including Nicolas Guillou of France, Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji, and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal, tied to the Court's Gaza-related investigations. The Court itself responded that it "deplores" the measures, calling them "a clear attempt to undermine the independence of an international judicial institution," and pledged to continue its work "undeterred." UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk called for their "prompt reconsideration and withdrawal."

VII.iv. "Brick by Brick": The July 2026 Escalation

In July 2026, Secretary Rubio moved from sanctions to an explicit dismantlement campaign, announcing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and an accompanying State Department release that Washington would use "every tool at our government's disposal" — including travel bans, visa revocations, expanded sanctions, and direct diplomatic pressure on Rome Statute member states to withdraw — to "dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary." He accused the Court of "waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles" but through "the force of so-called international law," and framed the campaign's message to other governments as a choice between "sovereign states over globalism." State Department officials confirmed that countries relying on American security assistance or hosting American forces are being directly urged to reject the Court's claimed jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. Legal observers have noted the campaign's inherent limit: because the ICC is a treaty body, only its own member states can formally dissolve it, meaning Washington's stated objective exceeds what its own instruments can accomplish and the practical campaign is better understood as one of coercive isolation than of formal dismantlement.

VII.v. What the Campaign Reveals

Analyzed through the six-lens framework of Part III, the American campaign is close to a pure realist strategy: an unconstrained power concluding that an institution's exercise of jurisdiction over its citizens and closest ally is an unacceptable constraint, and choosing coercive isolation over negotiated reform. Its declared logic — sovereignty over "globalism" — explicitly rejects the liberal institutionalist premise that predictable international rules constitute a public good worth the marginal loss of unilateral freedom. Whether the campaign succeeds will depend heavily on how many of the Court's 125 states parties respond as Canada has — with rhetorical reaffirmation but calibrated caution — versus how many respond as France did toward the Prost sanctions, with direct public criticism, or, conversely, how many quietly begin to distance themselves as the diplomatic and economic pressure compounds.

VIII. The G20 Miami Paradox: Global Governance Staged Inside the Campaign Against It

VIII.i. A Summit Under New Management

The G20 summit for which this paper is prepared will convene on December 14–15, 2026, at the Trump National Doral resort in Miami, marking the first full U.S.-hosted G20 in nearly two decades and coinciding with the 250th anniversary of American independence. The choice of venue — a property owned by the summit's own host and chair — has drawn scrutiny in its own right, but the more consequential change is substantive rather than symbolic: the United States has stripped the G20's prior agenda entirely, replacing years of accumulated documentation with a narrowly economic program built around deregulation, energy, and technology, and has excluded South Africa from the 2026 gathering entirely, inviting Poland in its place after a dispute rooted partly in South Africa's hosting conduct the previous year.

VIII.ii. The Absence of Law From the Agenda

Where the G7 Évian and prior G20 presidencies gave meaningful space to rules-based-order themes, judicial cooperation, and multilateral legal architecture, the 2026 American presidency has deliberately narrowed the summit's scope to core economic questions, with no indication that international judicial institutions will feature on the formal agenda at all. This is not incidental. The same administration chairing the summit is simultaneously conducting the most sustained American campaign against an international court in the Court's history, using precisely the sovereignty-over-globalism language that its G20 economic agenda echoes in a different register.

VIII.iii. The Analytical Significance of the Paradox

This creates an unusual — and analytically important — situation for a paper of this kind. A G20-grade policy document defending ICC support is being prepared for a summit whose own chair is the leading state actor working to dismantle that same court. This is not a reason to soften the analysis; it is a reason to sharpen it. It means Canada's ICC position cannot be presented at Miami as an uncontroversial multilateral consensus item, the way it might have been at a differently hosted summit. It will instead be, whether raised formally or only in bilateral corridors, one of the more genuinely contested undercurrents of the gathering — a live test of whether a coalition of committed middle powers, meeting on the host's own terrain, can sustain institutional commitments the host itself is actively working to erode. Canada's delegation will not be presenting a paper into a vacuum; it will be presenting one, in effect, inside the campaign it describes.

VIII.iv. Implications for Canadian Diplomacy at Miami

This context sharpens rather than resolves the tension identified in Part VI. A Canadian delegation prepared to reaffirm ICC support in the G20 communiqué process, while declining direct criticism of the sanctions applied to a Canadian judge, will be negotiating that position inside the host country's own capital, at the host's own resort, under the gaze of the host's own diplomatic apparatus. Whether Ottawa uses the summit primarily to protect the bilateral relationship or to build the "coalition of institutional resilience" this paper recommends in Part XIII is likely to become clearer only once the summit itself has concluded — but the choice will be unusually visible, precisely because of where and by whom the summit is being hosted.

IX. Carney's Foreign Policy: Strategic Autonomy Between Washington and The Hague

IX.i. An Inherited Environment of Compounding Pressure

Prime Minister Carney inherited one of the most demanding international environments faced by any Canadian government since the Cold War's end — simultaneous pressure from geopolitical rivalry, trade tension, technological transformation, and, as the preceding parts have shown, direct friction with the United States over an institution Canada helped found. His government has argued that international legal institutions become more, not less, valuable precisely as geopolitical conditions deteriorate, since they preserve channels of cooperation and predictability even where broader political consensus weakens — a claim directly echoed in Carney's own language about the ICC providing "an essential service in a world that is more dangerous, more divided."

IX.ii. Strategic Autonomy, Precisely Defined

Strategic autonomy, as practiced by the Carney government, does not mean neutrality, and it does not mean disengagement from NATO, NORAD, or the American relationship. It means preserving sufficient policy independence to pursue Canadian interests — including support for institutions the United States actively opposes — without triggering rupture in the underlying alliance. The ICC file is the clearest current test of this doctrine: Canada differs from Washington in substance while attempting, through calibrated public messaging and continued security and economic cooperation, to avoid differing from Washington in relationship.

IX.iii. The Limits of Selective Divergence

Selective policy divergence has a long history in Canadian diplomacy — maintaining constructive bilateral relations with Washington while preserving independent positions on discrete international legal or diplomatic questions. What is different in 2026 is the directness of the confrontation: this is not a case of Canada and the United States quietly disagreeing about an abstract legal question, but of Washington actively sanctioning a Canadian citizen for performing her judicial duties, and Ottawa choosing continued quiet engagement over public defence. Whether this represents the successful application of a long-standing Canadian strategy, or a genuine erosion of it under unusually direct pressure, is a question this paper leaves open rather than resolved — precisely because, as Part VI argued, it has not yet been tested against an alternative Canadian response.

IX.iv. A Bayesian Reading of Carney's Statecraft

Viewed through the Bayesian lens developed in Part III, Carney's approach reflects continuous adaptation rather than fixed doctrine: institutions are evaluated by their expected future contribution rather than historical reputation alone, and policy is revised as evidence accumulates. This framework neither romanticizes nor dismisses the government's caution. It simply insists that the caution be treated as a hypothesis under test, not a settled conclusion — one that new evidence, including how Prost's own New York court challenge to her sanctions unfolds, and how the Miami summit itself proceeds, will continue to update.

X. Middle Powers and the Future of the Rules-Based Order

X.i. The Structural Case for Middle-Power Leadership

Middle powers lack the coercive capacity of great powers but often possess advanced economies, diplomatic credibility, technical expertise, and coalition-building capacity that great powers, paradoxically, sometimes lack the patience or trust to deploy. Their influence runs through networks rather than dominance, and network power becomes disproportionately valuable precisely when a formerly dominant coalition — in this case, the American-anchored postwar order — begins actively fragmenting.

X.ii. The Coalition Model as the Realistic Future of ICC Support

The near-term future of international cooperation is unlikely to resemble the early post-Cold War model of near-universal consensus. Governance will instead depend on coalitions of committed states across specific domains — climate, technology, maritime security, humanitarian law, and, centrally, legal cooperation. The ICC already exemplifies this model more than most observers acknowledge: its effectiveness has always depended on a coalition of committed states rather than universal participation, and the practical question for 2026 and beyond is not whether that coalition can become universal — it cannot — but whether it can hold together, or even grow, under direct external pressure to dissolve.

X.iii. Canada's Choice Within the Coalition Model

Canada's continued financial and personnel support gives it real standing within that coalition; its caution on the Prost sanctions is, from this angle, best read not as a betrayal of the coalition but as a test of how much confrontation the coalition's members are individually willing to absorb to hold the line collectively. Other coalition members — France, most visibly — have absorbed more of that cost publicly than Canada has to date. Whether Ottawa moves toward the French model, continues its current calibrated posture, or drifts toward quieter accommodation will materially affect whether the coalition holds.

X.iv. Institutional Investment as Strategic Asset

Historically, Canada, Australia, the Nordic states, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and several European partners have consistently invested political capital in multilateral institutions, deriving influence from institutional entrepreneurship rather than military scale. Canada's participation in peacekeeping, arms control, humanitarian initiatives, and the Rome Statute negotiations reflects this tradition; sustaining ICC support during active American pressure is best understood as this tradition's most severe contemporary test, not a departure from it.

XI. Critical Evaluation: Institutional Limits, Selectivity, and Paths to Reform

XI.i. The Necessity of Honest Institutional Criticism

A serious assessment of the ICC cannot rest on celebrating its aspirations or defending its achievements alone. The Court's legitimacy depends on its capacity to confront criticism and adapt, and several criticisms deserve full weight rather than diplomatic minimization.

XI.ii. The Sovereignty Critique

Critics argue that international criminal jurisdiction transfers meaningful authority away from sovereign states, and realist scholars emphasize that institutions attempting to constrain powerful governments will generate resistance — a prediction 2026 has confirmed in the most direct terms available. Supporters respond that sovereignty has never been absolute, and that the modern conception of sovereignty increasingly includes responsibility for the protection of fundamental human dignity. Both positions are defensible; the current American campaign represents the sovereignty critique pressed to its most uncompromising form.

XI.iii. The Enforcement Problem, Restated

The Court's dependence on state cooperation for arrest, evidence, and protection of investigators is not a design flaw so much as the price of its founding compromise; it also makes the Court structurally vulnerable to exactly the kind of coercive campaign now underway, since a sufficiently determined and resourced state can degrade cooperation without ever formally leaving the treaty regime.

XI.iv. The Selectivity Critique, Sharpened by 2026

Long-standing accusations that international justice falls disproportionately on weaker states have gained new texture: the sanctions campaign itself has focused specifically on judges who ruled against American and Israeli interests, which critics of the campaign argue is itself a demonstration of selective application of pressure rather than evidence that the Court's own jurisprudence is selective. Both claims can be evaluated on their own evidentiary terms, and this paper does not adjudicate between them; it notes only that the 2026 sanctions have made the selectivity debate concrete rather than abstract for the first time in the Court's history.

XI.v. Judicial Independence Under Direct Pressure

Maintaining judicial independence has always required balancing insulation from politics against the diplomatic engagement institutions need to function. Direct sanctions against sitting judges test that balance more severely than any prior episode in the Court's existence, and the outcome of that test — whether the Court's jurisprudence changes in response, or whether, as the Court itself has stated, it continues "undeterred" — will shape assessments of its independence for a generation.

XI.vi. Reform Rather Than Abandonment

None of these criticisms compel institutional abandonment; comparable criticisms have accompanied the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO throughout their histories, all of which evolved through criticism rather than collapsing under it. Priorities for ICC reform include faster investigative and judicial timelines, expanded digital and forensic evidence capacity, and greater transparency around prosecutorial discretion — improvements that would strengthen the Court's position in exactly the areas its current critics target, whether or not those critics are acting in good faith.

XII. Bayesian Scenario Analysis: The Future of the Court and Canada's Strategic Choices

XII.i. Four Scenarios for the Court

Scenario	Name	Description & Probability
Scenario A	Institutional Consolidation	Probability rises if member states deepen cooperation, judicial credibility improves, and enforcement mechanisms strengthen despite external pressure. Outcome: the Court emerges from the current campaign as a stronger, more resilient institution, its coalition tested and confirmed.
Scenario B	Managed Survival	Probability currently appears highest. Geopolitical division persists, member states continue funding and staffing the Court while offering only calibrated public defence — closer to the Canadian posture than the French one — and the Court survives with real but constrained enforcement capacity.
Scenario C	Institutional Decline	Probability rises if member-state cooperation weakens under sustained American pressure, additional states quietly reduce engagement rather than risk sanctions or lost security cooperation, and the Court remains formally intact but practically marginalized.
Scenario D	Fracture and Realignment	A less-examined possibility worth naming explicitly given 2026's developments: the coalition of committed states splits visibly between those willing to publicly confront Washington (the French model) and those pursuing calibrated accommodation (the current Canadian model), producing a two-tier system of support that itself weakens the Court's claim to uniform legitimacy among its own members.

XII.ii. Applying the Framework to Canada's Own Choice

The same Bayesian logic applies directly to Ottawa's decision calculus regarding the blocking-statute option advocated by Kersten and the NDP. The expected value of invoking it depends on the probability that it meaningfully protects Prost and deters further sanctions against Canadian officials (a benefit), weighed against the probability and magnitude of retaliatory economic or security costs from Washington (the countervailing risk). This paper does not resolve that calculation on Ottawa's behalf; it observes only that the calculation is being made, implicitly, by inaction, and that a Bayesian government committed to genuine adaptive learning should be prepared to revisit it explicitly as new evidence — a ruling in Prost's New York case, further sanctions, or shifts in the Miami summit's tenor — arrives.

XII.iii. The Core Proposition Restated

A rational state supports international institutions when the expected long-term benefits of institutional stability exceed the expected costs of participation — and revises that judgment as circumstances change. Carney's August 2026 statement reflects a judgment that preserving the ICC still clears that bar. Whether Canada's judgment about the specific costs of defending Judge Prost publicly will look, in retrospect, equally well-calibrated is a question this paper leaves to future evidence rather than present certainty.

XIII. Policy Recommendations for the G20 and the International Community

XIII.i. Reform, Not Abandonment

G20 members should support constructive ICC reform — faster judicial timelines, stronger investigative and digital-forensic capacity, and greater procedural transparency — rather than allowing the current pressure campaign to produce institutional erosion by default.

XIII.ii. Build an Explicit Coalition of Institutional Resilience

Given that universal consensus is no longer achievable, the G20 — even meeting under a chair actively opposed to the Court — should not prevent a subset of committed members from formally coordinating support for judicial independence, protection of sanctioned officials, and continued funding, outside the formal summit agenda if necessary.

XIII.iii. Adopt Concrete Protections for Sanctioned International Officials

States parties should develop model blocking-statute frameworks — building on instruments such as Canada's own Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act — that protect their nationals serving as international judges or prosecutors from third-country sanctions applied specifically for the performance of judicial duties, whether or not any individual government chooses to invoke them immediately.

XIII.iv. Integrate Institutional Stability Into Economic Risk Analysis

G20 financial institutions should treat the erosion of international legal predictability as a material input to sovereign and geopolitical risk assessment, not a secondary consideration, given the direct economic-infrastructure functions described in Part IV.

XIII.v. Support Middle-Power Leadership Explicitly

The G20 should recognize, in whatever informal or bilateral channels remain available given the 2026 agenda's narrowing, that global governance requires more than great-power agreement, and that middle powers such as Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the Nordic states provide diplomatic innovation and institutional legitimacy the current moment badly needs.

XIII.vi. Protect Judicial Independence as a Distinct Principle From Institutional Loyalty

The international community should oppose political intimidation of judges and legal officials as a matter of principle distinct from any state's specific institutional loyalty to the ICC — a distinction that allows even states with legitimate criticisms of the Court's jurisprudence to oppose the sanctioning of individual judges for performing their duties.

XIII.vii. Apply Bayesian Governance Explicitly

Institutions and the states that support them should adopt an explicit, evidence-updating approach to governance: establishing initial assumptions, monitoring new information — including the outcome of Prost's legal challenge and the tenor of the Miami summit itself — and revising strategy accordingly, rather than defaulting to either ideological rigidity or unexamined caution.

XIV. Conclusion: The Courage to Preserve Order

The International Criminal Court represents one of the most ambitious institutional achievements of the postwar era: the proposition that political power, however substantial, should not exist entirely beyond legal accountability. That proposition has never been under more direct and explicit challenge than it is in 2026, as the government of the Court's most powerful non-member state works openly to dismantle it "brick by brick."

Prime Minister Mark Carney's reaffirmation of Canadian support, delivered in Toronto on August 5, 2026, is a genuine act of institutional commitment at a moment when quieter accommodation was clearly available. It deserves to be recognized as such. It also deserves to be examined with the same rigor this paper has applied throughout — which means recognizing candidly that the reaffirmation stopped short of direct criticism of the sanctions applied to a Canadian judge, and that domestic critics with serious standing on this file, including a former Canadian Foreign Minister, have argued the government's posture falls short of the "unequivocal" standard it claims for itself.

Both things are true simultaneously, and a Bayesian, evidence-based approach to statecraft — the same approach this paper has argued Canadian and international policymakers should apply to the Court's institutional future — requires holding both truths at once rather than collapsing them into a simpler story of either courage or caution. The future of the rules-based order will not be determined by declarations alone, from Carney or anyone else. It will be determined by whether the coalition of states still willing to fund, staff, and defend institutions like the ICC can hold together under direct, well-resourced pressure to dissolve — and by whether that defence, when tested at the point of greatest cost, extends as far as the language used to describe it.

The question facing Canada, the G20, and the wider international community meeting in Miami this December is therefore not simply whether they support the International Criminal Court in principle. It is whether that support will be extended to the specific individuals — a Winnipeg-born judge among them — who bear its practical costs, and whether the coalition sustaining international justice proves resilient enough to survive the most serious test yet directed against it.

Sources and Verification Note

This paper integrates verified reporting current through August 5, 2026, including: The Canadian Press ("Carney says Canada backs ICC but stays mum on Trump-sanctioned Canadian judge," Aug. 5, 2026, carried by CP24, the Globe and Mail, and regional outlets); CBC News and the Globe and Mail on Minister Anita Anand's September 2025 statement regarding Judge Prost; CNN, The Hill, JURIST, and U.S. Department of State releases (July 2026) on Secretary Rubio's dismantlement campaign; BBC News and Yahoo/AP reporting on the 2025 sanctions against ICC judges;  the G20 Research Group (University of Toronto) on the 2026 G20 Miami summit logistics and agenda; Carnegie Endowment and the Council on Foreign Relations on the summit's narrowed thematic scope; and standard institutional histories of the Rome Statute, the ICTY/ICTR, and Louise Arbour's tribunal record.