The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just announced his intention to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court “brick by brick.” Which raised some important questions. Like, what IS the ICC, actually? Where did it come from, and what power does it have? Why does the US want to dismantle it, and is that even possible? We sit down with Maria Elena Vignoli, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who calls herself a “constructive critic” of the Court. She walks us through the Court’s history, its mission, and its fragile future.

“The United States does not recognize the authority of international bureaucrats an ocean away who seek to upend America’s 250-year history of self-governance and impose an illegitimate legal order on our sovereign nation,” says State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott. “America’s sovereignty is and always will be non-negotiable. A wide range of options are available to ensure the ICC is completely and utterly incapable of threatening the U.S. and our people. No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans.”

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

Further reading:

State Department Launches Campaign to Dismantle International Criminal Court’s Threat to American Sovereignty

Why does the US want to ‘dismantle’ the international criminal court? By Kenneth Roth

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Martha Gimbel, economist and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, is a normal, cool person, but she has the same disease as me: she’s obsessed with the US debt. How much our government has borrowed. Like me, she thinks constantly about what the potential consequences of all that borrowing might be. So what happens when we’ve borrowed too much? How will we know if it’s happened? Is it already too much? How will my life change once we are beyond too much?

Further Reading

"Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt", The Atlantic

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The US dollar is completely dominant all around the world. It shows up in 90% of all foreign exchange transactions every day. Pretty much anywhere in the world, you can whip out a dollar and use it. Central banks around the globe hold dollars in reserve. And for the past few decades, US government officials have started to take advantage of that global dominance in a new way: using the dollar itself as a weapon of diplomacy, of economic warfare.

Edward Fishman was one such official. He worked at Treasury and the State Department as they were pioneering these novel tactics, and last year, he wrote a book about it, called “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.” In this week’s conversation, we go deep on peer-pressuring banks and sliding manila envelopes across tables, how abstract chokepoints stack up against physical ones, and what this new diplomatic strategy means for a world at war.

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

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