International Belarus Duterte
Belarus, Duterte, and Hormuz: The Geopolitical Pressures Reshaping Markets and Law
Belarus freed 25 prisoners under a deal brokered by Trump envoy John Coale, a personal injury attorney and long-standing Trump family friend, with Washington lifting sanctions on two Belarusian companies in return. The White House is pressing Alexander Lukashenko — who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and whose political survival since the 2020 crackdowns on pro-democracy protesters has depended on Russian support — to release hundreds of political prisoners in exchange for sanctions relief and gradual international rehabilitation. Coale's selection signals that the administration is routing this diplomacy through personal relationship channels rather than State Department infrastructure, a pattern that has characterized the administration's foreign policy approach broadly. Analysts are divided on whether Putin has quietly sanctioned the outreach or whether Lukashenko is testing the limits of his Kremlin relationship.
From Minsk to The Hague: Rodrigo Duterte made his first in-person appearance before the International Criminal Court this week, a genuinely significant moment in international law. Duterte, who served as Philippine president from 2016 to 2022, was arrested in 2025 and transferred to ICC custody on charges related to his administration's anti-drug campaign, which human rights groups estimate resulted in between 12,000 and 30,000 deaths, many of them extrajudicial killings. The case is historically notable because Duterte is a former head of government of a middle-income Southeast Asian democracy — not a figure from a collapsed state or a regime of the kind the court has typically prosecuted. The current Philippine government under Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has navigated the process with political delicacy, given that large portions of the Filipino public still view the drug war favorably. Duterte's defenders are expected to argue at The Hague that the ICC selectively prosecutes while Western leaders who authorized questionable military operations face no similar scrutiny.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis continues to squeeze global oil supply, with UBS warning in a note this week that markets are being complacent about the disruption. Roughly 14 million barrels per day — nearly 14 percent of global consumption of approximately 102 million barrels per day — are not flowing through the strait as they normally would. China has re-entered global oil markets as a direct consequence, having drawn down strategic reserves to their limit and now bidding up available supply outside the Hormuz corridor. The disruption is feeding directly into the inflation data the Federal Reserve watches most closely, creating an energy-driven price pressure that monetary policy is poorly suited to address.
How US Sanctions Left the International Criminal Court Without Health Insurance
The International Criminal Court lost its health insurance plan this week — not because of inadequate coverage, but because of American financial sanctions. The court's insurer, Axa, a major French firm with significant US business exposure, concluded that maintaining a contract with a sanctioned entity created regulatory risk it was unwilling to absorb. The ICC contract, which generated a finite amount of premium revenue, did not clear the risk threshold when Axa's compliance team weighed potential exposure to US regulatory action. The sanction achieved its goal without ever being directly applied to a French company.
This is a textbook illustration of how secondary sanctions operate in practice. Washington cannot order a French insurer to drop a client, but it can make the cost of retaining that client high enough that the firm reaches the same conclusion independently. Reuters reported this week, citing sources, that the administration has drawn up further sanctions that could further degrade the court's operational capacity. President Trump has publicly called the ICC 'evil' and 'a rogue institution,' urging other countries to withdraw, with the administration's stated grievances centering on ICC investigations involving US military personnel and Israeli officials — including an arrest warrant issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The US has never ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC, and prior administrations have maintained that distance in varying degrees. George W. Bush's administration unsigned a document Bill Clinton had signed; the Obama administration adopted a cooperative-but-not-member posture. What distinguishes the current approach is active operational degradation rather than mere non-participation. If ICC staff cannot obtain health coverage, move funds through normal banking channels, or travel freely, the court's ability to conduct investigations and trials degrades regardless of its formal legal authority.
The ICC was already operating with significant legitimacy challenges, having faced years of criticism for disproportionately prosecuting African defendants while cases involving Western-aligned actors moved slowly or stalled. American sanctions add a new layer of practical fragility. More broadly, the episode fits into a pattern — alongside US hollowing of WTO Appellate Body appointments and pressure on human rights monitoring bodies — of a superpower systematically reducing the institutional constraints on its own conduct. Governments in the Global South are watching closely, recalibrating whether international institutions provide genuine protection or whether that protection was always conditional on American approval.