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I recall exactly one case in which a US citizen was arrested by the US government and sent to be imprisoned by an unrelated third party country without due process. That was under Trump II.
The ICCs mandate is rather narrow, mostly involving war crimes and crimes against humanity. While I am sure that there are some wokes who would dream of sending every Republican to the Hague, the SCOTUS will very much not let them, nor would the ICC convict them of anything.
The steelman version is that at the end of his administration, Trump (or Vance) give Hegseth a full pardon for any conduct he did while in office, thereby making it impossible to try him for the conduct he had ordered during subsequent administrations. Sending him to the Hague would bypass that pardon. (Of course, arresting him while bypassing the US court system would be tricky. I mean, the SCOTUS has already established that the next Democratic president will not have to answer criminal charges for any official conduct, but if a president orders a US citizen kidnapped and sent to the Netherlands he might as well order him kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter.)
However, I do not believe that this is likely to happen. No resident of the White House wants to normalize criminal investigations into official conduct of administrations, for reasons which are plenty apparent. Nor were the Democrats historically very much against what might be considered war crimes, so far.
That's just a fancy way to say "losing wars while being on the side the EU doesn't support". Progressives will tell you that disagreeing with a woman is a crime against humanity so the definition is worthless.
The fact the ICC draws most of its legitimacy from Nuremberg (which was, basically, to legitimize killing off a bunch of German elites) remains relevant; that's where the temptation and cultural pull to use the ICC for "anti-Nazi" purposes come from.
Conveniently, all of their opponents are Nazis.
I already outlined a way this can (and indeed, does) happen. For everyone else, there's your standard black-bagging- foreign intelligence services, if they want to stay on the US' good side, can launder the US' unlawful requests just like they do now with SIGINT.
Yes, it's obviously a degradation to sovereignty, but if you only care about sovereignty in the supranational sense (again, so you can avoid passing politically-costly laws- immigration being the easiest example) why would that concern you?
What legions will they send to stop them?
This seems an odd point of view. If the purpose was to legitimize killing German elites, then at 55% success rate they did not do a very good job of it.
The subsequent trials were even less effective at eliminating Germans:
About 212 people executed (in the West) is a tiny number compared to the number of people murdered by the Nazis. Even when just considering the Shoah, we get around one death sentence per 25k victims. The real number of people who were guilty of the crime of genocide (and thus should be punished like a common murderer) was obviously orders of magnitude higher. I maintain that hanging all the about 22k members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (unless they could prove how they had been working against the regime, like Gerstein) for starters would have resulted in a much better approximation of justice.
Edit: fixed formatting bug.
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