Mamdani, Netanyahu, and the Limits of Municipal Power
As an expert witness against the medicalization of punishment, I have spent a good portion of my career in courtrooms, explaining to juries and judges the precise boundary of what the law permits a person to do with someone else’s body. I thought about that work when I watched Mayor Zohran Mamdani, having pledged for over a year that New York City would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the strength of the International Criminal Court’s warrant, concede in July that his administration had “reviewed every avenue available under applicable law” and found none.
The city, he admitted, has no independent legal authority to execute the warrant. He now asks the federal government to do it instead. The retreat was quiet, but it should prompt a harder question than the one Mamdani himself just answered. The question is not whether the city could arrest Netanyahu, but why a mayor ever believed this was his call to make.
The United States and the Court: a settled estrangement
The United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute. President Clinton signed it in 2000 but never submitted it for ratification; the Bush administration “unsigned” it in 2002, citing the risk of politically motivated prosecutions of American personnel. That same year, Congress passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), nicknamed, half-jokingly, the “Hague Invasion Act,” for the provision authorizing the President to use “all means necessary” to free Americans held by the Court.
ASPA was not a one-time gesture. It is the standing architecture of a considered, bipartisan judgment that the United States would not lend its institutions to the Court’s enforcement. This is a judgment reaffirmed as recently as last year, when the Trump administration sanctioned Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and other ICC officials over the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants. Mamdani’s pledge asked New York City to unilaterally abandon that judgment. No one elected him to make that call, because the call was never his to make.
What ASPA forbids
The statute is not ambiguous, and it does not stop at the water’s edge of federal agencies. Section 7423(b) bars any “agency or entity of any State or local government, including any court” from cooperating with an ICC request for cooperation. Section 7423(e) separately bars any state or local entity from providing “support” to the Court. Congress defined “support,” in Section 7432(12), to explicitly include “the arrest or detention of individuals.” An NYPD arrest of Netanyahu, executed on the strength of the ICC warrant, would not sit in some gray zone of the statute. It is, in fact, close to the paradigm case that ASPA was written to prevent. The one exception in the statute runs the other way: Section 7430 lets the President set aside the cooperation ban on a case-by-case basis under his own Article II authority. There is no comparable carve-out anywhere in the statute for a mayor. None was ever going to appear, because Congress was never contemplating one.
One voice, not thirty thousand
In 1936, the Supreme Court gave American foreign policy its guiding metaphor. In United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., Justice George Sutherland described the President as the “sole organ” of the nation in its dealings with other countries, not because the Constitution says so in those words, but because a country that speaks with a hundred voices on the world stage does not function as a country at all. The doctrine has been debated for 90 years, but its core intuition has held. Extradition, recognition of foreign courts, and the treatment of visiting heads of state cannot be run by referendum, borough by borough, mayor by mayor, without the United States dissolving into something no foreign government could reliably negotiate with. A mayor does not get a foreign policy.
Picture the alternative: a Miami city council deciding, on its own initiative, that it will honor a Russian extradition request for a dissident who fled to Florida, or a Texas sheriff independently arresting a foreign diplomat on the strength of a warrant issued by a court his own country has never joined. No one would call that law enforcement. They would call it a diplomatic incident conducted by amateurs. Mamdani’s pledge was that same incident, just aimed at a target more popular with his base. This was always a promise built for a campaign, not for governing.
None of this was hidden. ASPA has been on the books since 2002; Sutherland’s opinion is nearly a century old. What changed between the pledge and the retreat was not the law but a shift from campaigning to governing. “New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu” is a sentence built for a primary debate stage and a base that wanted to hear it. It costs a candidate nothing to say. It eventually costs Mayor Mamdani the credibility of having promised something he could never deliver. Mamdani’s own administration quietly confirmed the moment it mattered. It always was a warrant that was never as clean as the rhetoric implied.
Even taken on its own terms, the warrant Mamdani proposed to enforce is not the tidy instrument his campaign rhetoric suggested. Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan sought it while under a cloud: reporting by the Wall Street Journal suggested the warrant request came forward in the same window that internal allegations of his own sexual misconduct toward a subordinate were surfacing. These allegations were serious enough that Khan took a leave of absence in May 2025 and has not returned to lead the office since. A three-judge panel later found that the UN’s internal investigation did not establish misconduct, so the matter did not end in a formal finding against him. But the episode still left the Office of the Prosecutor without its lead prosecutor for the better part of a year, mid-litigation, under circumstances serious enough to trigger a UN inquiry in the first place.
A mayor lending New York City’s police power to a warrant issued under those conditions was not striking a blow for the credibility of international law. He was borrowing the city’s authority to prop up a process that has not finished accounting for its own irregularities. The ICC did not need New York’s help to be taken seriously, and New York could never give it. Mamdani spent over a year promising to be the one American official willing to enforce international law where the US Federal Government would not. He turned out to be exactly what Sutherland’s doctrine says every mayor is: not a diplomat, and not an exception.
