Globalists, America-detractors, and Israel-bashers are irate as Washington is waging a campaign to cut a Hague-based kangaroo court down to size. This is reaction to President Trump’s imposition yesterday of sanctions on four judges of the International Criminal Court. Critics act as if he and Secretary Rubio have turned their backs on the Magna Carta. Some urge the ICC to place Messrs. Trump and Rubio themselves in its dock.  

Two of the four sanctioned judges authorized an investigation into Americans who had fought against terrorists in Afghanistan. The other two rubber-stamped global arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The judges will now be banned from doing business in America or using the dollar in their transactions. The ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, was similarly sanctioned back in February.

“Attacks against judges for performance of their judicial functions run directly counter to respect for the rule of law and the equal protection of the law — values for which the U.S. has long stood,” the United Nations’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, wrote in a scathing statement. A former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, urges the ICC to try the Americans for “obstructing justice under Article 70 of the Rome Statute.”

That would be a stretch longer than the limousines that carry esteemed officials through the streets of the Dutch city that hosts the international venue. The Rome Statute is the reason the Hague judges raised America’s ire in the first place. America and Israel declined to ratify that treaty, which founded the ICC. Yet, the judges launched investigations and issued global arrest warrants on citizens of these non-member countries.

It is “meaningless to invoke it against a country that is in no way legally obliged to those provisions,” the executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, tells our Benny Avni. Indeed, Article 13b of the Rome Statute allows prosecuting non-members only if the UN Security Council, where America has a veto power, refers cases to it. Yet the ICC judges launched an investigation of alleged war crimes committed by Americans in the Afghanistan war.    

The ICC “did an end run” around its own rules, Mr. Neuer says. As the failed state of Afghanistan is its member, it reasoned, it has jurisdiction over crimes committed there. It also allowed “Palestine” to join the ICC so it could prosecute alleged war crimes in Gaza. Never mind that the Ramallah officials who “ratified” the Rome Statute and complained of alleged Israeli crimes can’t even get near the Hamas-dominated Strip.

Mr. Khan suddenly leaped to demand the arrest of Israeli officials just when a female underling complained that he had abused her sexually. “Any power can be corrupted, and the power of prosecution is very significant,” Mr. Neuer notes. Yet in democracies there are ways to curb abuse of these powers. Are ICC judges any different than, say, the Milwaukee judge arrested for obstructing justice by protecting a person wanted by ICE?

The ICC was modeled after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Instead of sticking to norms that have guided jurists in democracies for time immemorial, though, it has become a hotbed of global politics. Several countries have threatened to de-ratify the Rome Statute, claiming the court prosecutes only Africans. America and Israel became extra-legal targets, the rules be damned. Washington is right to seek a course correction.