The Trump administration’s assault on the ICC isn’t just about protecting Netanyahu from war crimes prosecution. It’s about preserving “imperial impunity” – Israel’s just “the smokescreen,” says Noura Erakat, professor of criminal justice and Africana studies at Rutgers University and human rights attorney. She traces Washington’s bipartisan refusal to ratify the Rome Statute to explain why the International Criminal Court has spent two decades indicting mostly African and Arab leaders. The 2024 warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant just show the court “between a rock and a hard place”: finally give up its legitimacy entirely, or face destruction by the US.

Now more than a dozen ICC judges, prosecutors, and the court’s president have been sanctioned, as Washington reportedly prepares sanctions against the entire institution, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling it an “intolerable threat” to US sovereignty. Can the court survive a war with Washington? Should it? And why do Global South states stay invested in a court that’s clearly stacked against them?

Plus: Erakat describes her arrest at a Palm Beach County budget hearing on their $1 billion-plus investment in Israel bonds; warns that Gaza’s Board of Peace could become a blueprint to replace the UN; and explains why she believes, even as public opinion on Palestine shifts, “there’s no way to be safe in this moment by hiding.”

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Can the United Nations be saved? Should it be? As world leaders and war criminals gather for the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, says that despite today’s gangster rule by the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the UN Charter still sets the standard for judging powerful states, making it “the most important treaty document that the world has ever had” – even with the institution built on it in shambles.

Prashad slams Secretary-General António Guterres’s failure to get “creative” to end the genocide in Gaza or to stand up to Trump on Iran, instead opening a free lane for the US president who has “put a loaded gun on the table and has threatened the world.” 

After the US denied visas to the Palestinians for a second year and heavily restricted Iran’s delegation, Prashad makes the case for moving the high-level UNGA out of the US: “New York doesn’t deserve it anymore,” he says, offering alternatives in Geneva or Nairobi. “Let’s move it to the Global South. Why not?”

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Chinese President Xi Jinping “holds all the cards” as he meets with Trump on Thursday, says Amanda Yee, host of BreakThrough News’ The China Report. She joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek to break down Xi’s first White House visit in 11 years. 

With Trump facing a massively unpopular war on Iran, surging inflation, growing resistance to ICE terror – and with US midterms weeks away – Washington wants quick deals it can sell as big wins. But Yee says Beijing is playing a longer game, with massive implications for the global future. Take AI: Washington’s Pax Silica forces allies to pick sides, while Beijing’s open model is available to all and centered on the Global South. Two systems, representing “the choice that’s in front of the world right now.”

Despite a stated pivot away from China as a military priority, Yee points to Latin America and Iran as proxy fronts where the Trump administration continues to target Beijing. Meanwhile the military encirclement of China continues, from US bases in South Korea, Okinawa and the Philippines, to Japan’s remilitarization and expanding war games like RIMPAC and Freedom Shield. 

But Yee says “the Cold War on China is a bipartisan affair.” From TikTok to Huawei to BYD, she traces the pattern of trumping up national security threats to mask efforts to protect US companies from competition. It’s all part of the same Red Scare targeting BT News, subpoenaed by the House Ways and Means Committee in an effort to paint anti-war voices as Chinese assets.

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Why is Pakistan’s military so afraid of Imran Khan? With Islamabad on lockdown and 35,000 additional troops deployed to stop the September 27 march in support of the imprisoned ex-prime minister. Junaid S. Ahmad, professor of religion and world politics and director of the Center for Study of Islam and Decoloniality, tells Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra the 2022 US-backed regime-change operation meant to neutralize the country’s most popular politician instead gave rise to a movement bigger than Khan himself: a new opposition coalition, TTAP, including the left-wing Awami Workers Party, as Khan’s PTI party has shattered the army’s legitimacy in Punjab.

Ahmad says Pakistan, under military rule in all but name, has become “nothing less than a police state.” Its only legitimacy, he says, comes from Washington and Rawalpindi, the home of the army’s headquarters. And with past demonstrations ending in massacres and the Shehbaz Sharif-Asim Munir regime telling hospitals to prepare for a “mass-casualty event,” Ahmad explains why this Sunday’s march has gone global, with solidarity protests planned from Washington to London to Kuala Lumpur, and why Khan refuses to call it off, even as his sisters and wife are jailed.

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