President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) after the Hague-based court targeted Israeli and American officials and their allies, according to a White House official.

The administration official cited that the order will "implement financial and visa sanctions on individuals and their family members who assist in ICC investigations of U.S. citizens or allies."

The court has had a long-running investigation against the US over alleged troop war crimes committed in Afghanistan. During the first Trump administration, initial retaliatory sanctions were imposed on the ICC in 2020.

And more recently the ICC has issued an arrest warrant last year for Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who just visited the White House and met with Trump this week.

The new executive order is clearly timed on the immediate heels of the Trump meeting with Netanyahu, who is unable to travel to many European states and other countries for fear of arrest.

The Trump-signed order states that "The ICC was designed to be a court of last resort" and that "Both the United States and Israel maintain robust judiciary systems and should never be subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC."

Biden had actually reversed Trump's 2020 sanctions in order to back ICC investigations into Russian war crimes in Ukraine; however, Trump reversed Biden's ending of the sanctions on his first day back in office.

Washington has had a shaky relationship with the ICC going back to the Bush years. Republicans railed against the idea that top US officials could be tried.

Of course, the US has backed ICC convictions when it comes to trying and convicting tin-pot banana republic dictators and warlords, or Serbian war criminals. The Hague has recently come under scrutiny for seeming to only bringing war criminals in the third world, such as in Africa, to justice. 

Meanwhile...

However, it just so happens that Western leaders, troops, and officials always seem to conveniently "evade" justice - even for things like the Iraq War, where torture by allied forces of local Iraqis was later shown to be rampant.