Zohran Mamdani spent 18 months promising New Yorkers that he would arrest a foreign head of government.
On Tuesday night, he admitted that he cannot.
But it is hard to believe Mamdani did not know all along the promise was legally untenable. He made it anyway because its real purpose was not enforcement but delegitimization — to put Israel and the U.S.-led international order on the docket.
His administration reviewed every avenue available under applicable law and found no independent authority to enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The concession came by video, days after President Donald Trump had already foreclosed the question. Trump said Netanyahu would not be arrested in the United States “in any way, shape, or form” and argued that the men who led Iran into its present catastrophe are the ones who belong in custody.
The episode exposes more than a failed political promise. It reveals the worldview beneath Mamdani’s anti-Israel campaign: Third Worldism.
Emerging in the late 1950s, Third Worldism argues that poverty across Asia, Africa, and Latin America resulted primarily from an international order dominated by the industrialized West, not from the domestic policies or institutions of developing states.
Beyond weakening the West, Third Worldism elevates terrorist organizations into liberation movements — forces for good precisely because they defy the U.S.-led global order.
Israel occupies a central place within this worldview. The Jewish state is portrayed as a settler-colonial project sustained by American power, making the conflict a struggle between colonizer and colonized. Under that logic, Israel’s legitimacy is the primary target.
By the late 1990s — and decisively after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 — Third Worldist regimes and revolutionary movements had lost much of their military and diplomatic momentum. International institutions then assumed greater importance to the Third Worldists. The U.N. General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, the tribunals in The Hague, and the advocacy networks surrounding them provided new instruments for advancing the same political objectives through legal means. Israel has accumulated more condemnations at the Human Rights Council than the rest of the world’s states combined.
The irony is that the ideology behind the promise no longer reflects the foreign policy of many of the governments Mamdani claims to champion.
India illustrates the transformation. Once a leading architect of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World solidarity, India now counts Israel among its closest strategic partners in defense, intelligence, agriculture, cybersecurity and advanced technology. Cooperation rests on national interest, not revolutionary ideology.
The same evolution has occurred across much of the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords. Morocco followed in 2020 and expanded cooperation in defense, intelligence, agriculture and water technology. These governments concluded that technological cooperation, economic integration and security partnerships serve their populations more effectively than permanent ideological confrontation with the West.
The shift extends beyond relations with Israel. Across the region, governments have increasingly suppressed armed organizations operating outside state authority and prioritized sovereignty.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confronted the International Criminal Court. He has sanctioned ICC judges and prosecutors and blocked their U.S. assets. Mamdani’s mad campaign demonstrates why Rubio’s efforts deserve support.
International legal claims increasingly migrate into American politics through advocacy organizations, universities, municipal governments, and elected officials.
More importantly, Rubio’s ICC concern extends beyond the Netanyahu warrant itself.
First, the ICC asserts jurisdiction even over nationals of countries that declined to join it — the United States among them. That means the court believes it has authority over Americans and their allies absent any constitutional consent. This principle could be used to arrest American leaders when they visit other countries.
Second, the warrant establishes a standard for judging democratic governments at war against rules that override their own institutions. Israel maintains military courts, legal advisers and a Supreme Court. A tribunal that finds those insufficient will reach the same verdict on American ones. No doubt all this could be used to arrest Trump, Rubio, or any other prominent leader in the future.
Third, the court requires no American recognition to shape American politics. Advocacy networks, pension funds and city governments adopt its judgments as binding, and voluntary enforcement delivers the authority that formal jurisdiction withholds.
Mamdani lost the legal argument, but nothing in the political project depended on winning it. He rendered a supranational claim as a domestic obligation.
Rubio warned this month that the ICC’s claws could reach Americans through their own politics. Mamdani proved him right within the week.
Zineb Riboua is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
