New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has apparently spent the last few weeks ordering the City’s Law Department, the largest municipal law office in the country with over 760 attorneys, to chew on a question any first year associate could have answered before lunch (even without AI): could New York City actually arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under the ICC’s warrant if he shows up in New York City. On July 21, Mayor Mamdani posted a video conceding the obvious: No. But for good measure he added that Netanyahu “is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.” Glad we got that straightened out.
Presumably the Law Department spent equal time working through whether the City could, in addition to not welcoming the war criminals, actually act against the rest of the ICC’s most wanted. Like Omar al-Bashir, wanted for genocide in Darfur since 2009. Or Joseph Kony, wanted since 2005 for mass abduction, sexual enslavement, and forced conscription of child soldiers in Uganda. Or someone who also visits the UN General Assembly every few years: Vladimir Putin, wanted since 2023 for deporting Ukrainian children. And don’t forget about Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s supreme leader, wanted since 2025 for gender persecution of Afghan women and girls. Not a word. Mamdani’s Law Department was interested in Israel, and Israel only.
That’s a pity. Kony is the one closest to home for Mamdani. Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, the country Kony terrorized for two decades: mass abductions of children, forced conscription of boy soldiers, sexual slavery of abducted girls, and mutilations used as a terror tactic, conduct grave enough that Kony became the subject of the ICC’s first-ever arrest warrant, issued in 2005. Kony is still at large. I have never once heard the mayor mention him. There might be a reason for that. Mamdani’s own father, Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia professor, argued in a 2012 Al Jazeera piece that the ICC’s warrant for Kony was the wrong call because it stopped the sides from actually solving the conflict and was an example of an international tribunal meddling in local affairs. The elder Mamdani’s conclusion, in his own words, was that Kony’s war was “a Ugandan problem calling for a Ugandan political solution,” not a matter for international prosecution. Funny how sometimes we like the ICC, and sometimes we don’t. Perhaps we actually don’t really care much about the ICC. Perhaps we just use it to advance our political agenda. How enlightened.
I know that the younger Mamdani is not his father, but he has never extended Netanyahu’s warrant the same nuance his own father extended to Kony’s, a conflict both Mamdanis presumably know more about since it’s closer to home in the same way that many Jewish (and Palestinian) New Yorkers have a much more nuanced view of what is happening in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The question of whether an ICC process actually helps the people it claims to protect, or just entrenches the war and is used as political fodder to score cheap points for the global media. His father asked that question about northern Uganda. Mamdani has never asked about Gaza.
The elder Mamdani is an academic, and academics deal in nuance even if they really have an agenda they are trying to push. The younger Mamdani, on the other hand, is a politician and, these days, successful politicians peddle outrage and distraction. Apparently two of our most successful politicians are trying to use a conflict in the Middle East to distract us all from their failure to actually make the lives of the people who elected them better. I will admit that Mamdani is actually better than Trump at the art of distraction, in part because he is much smarter. But, as explained below, they are just two sides of the same coin.
It’s also a pity that Mayor Mamdani did not talk about the actual law, which is genuinely interesting and it explains why New York’s 35,000 police department is not generally engaged in the hunt for war criminals abroad or, for that matter, domestic criminals who committed crimes outside New York: New York doesn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes outside of the five boroughs and deploying our police department to investigate crimes and catch criminals who can’t be prosecuted is a waste of everyone’s time. It’s pretty obvious, but it’s nice that some lawyer prepared an opinion explaining that to our erstwhile Mayor.
The second legal reason why the NYPD can’t arrest war criminals is because there was no crime: The United States never ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC and, therefore, that treaty does not have the force of law, unlike treaties the U.S. actually ratified. The third legal reason is that it’s actually illegal under federal law for the city to prosecute alleged war criminals: the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act bars state and local cooperation with the ICC absent a presidential waiver, and none has been given. The reasoning on that prohibition is sound and rooted in reciprocity. The United States has hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops stationed abroad and we don’t want governments who host our troops to start arresting them as “war criminals” under any other country’s, or international, law. Fourth, I don’t think this is actually written anywhere, but it’s long been acknowledged that sitting heads of state carry personal immunity from foreign domestic courts. And, finally, this one is super local: the UN Headquarters Agreement bars local police from even obstructing a member state’s UN representative traveling to and from UN grounds. While I am sure that most U.N. members would look the other way if Netanyahu got arrested, if you hauled off Putin, the U.N. would probably relocate itself to Moscow. Stack those doctrines together and the answer was never in doubt. Spending real legal department hours confirming it is bad lawyering for the lawyers that did not shoot it down on the initial go (or perhaps even promoted it for brownie points), or good theater.
Which gets to the real waste. New York has an actual list of things Mamdani was elected to fix: affordability, transit, housing, safety. None of it required a legal opinion about a foreign head of state’s UN travel plans. You could argue a mayor can walk and chew gum, speak out on Netanyahu and still run the city. Fine, except NYC has zero enforcement power here, so this isn’t multitasking. It’s spending scarce legal resources on a question with a preordained answer, chasing an outcome the city cannot deliver either way, good idea or not, and this was not a good idea.
Trump and Mamdani are just different sides of the same coin. Trump let a genuinely good, bipartisan housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, become law this month without even signing it, because he was too busy relitigating the SAVE Act and picking a fight with Iran. Housing got a little easier for Americans this summer and almost nobody noticed, because the President made sure the news cycle was about voter IDs instead. Mamdani doesn’t even have a housing win to bury. He has no legislative accomplishment of that scale yet at all, and he is spending his political capital on a foreign policy question his own office admits he has no power over. Trump and Mamdani, once again, turn out to be more alike than either would like to admit: showmanship over substance, a foreign fixation standing in for an actual result. And the same Democratic Socialists and other progressive groups who are shouting at the top of their lungs that Trump’s Middle East obsessions distract from dealing with the affordability crisis at home have been remarkably quiet about their own Mayor doing exactly that. I actually agree more with the socialists than the far right in this country, but I applaud the far right for calling Trump out on his weird foreign fixation. Shame on the left for not doing the same. If foreign policy theater is bad when Trump does it, it’s bad when Mamdani does it too.
So what’s really going on here? Why is Trump engaged in a war in the Middle East that no one wants, and why is Mamdani talking about arresting a foreign leader when he clearly does not have the power to do it? This is about what happens when ideologies rule. They thrive on divisive issues that affect very few actual people but seem to outrage many many more. The plight of the Palestinians is heartbreaking but has zero impact on the life of 99% of New Yorkers. Trans people using bathrooms affects almost no one, but it’s one of the first things someone on the right talks about to discredit the left. Ideologies use this to distract from their really bad solutions to actual problems. Remember free buses? I forgot and so did Mayor Mamdani. Why? Because it was a really bad solution to making our mass transit system more efficient and accessible. So let’s talk about Israel instead.
Keep thinking, keep building (yes, I know this is part of Anthropic’s new marketing campaign: for the record, I used it first),
Jesse
Hi, and welcome to my newsletter! I’m Jesse Strauss, Your Fractional General Counsel. I’m a lawyer with a private practice based in New York City, helping clients in the United States and globally with their U.S. legal needs. My expertise spans various areas, including raising funding rounds, employment issues, negotiating master service agreements, intellectual property, compliance, legal process management, and dispute resolution. My focus is on founding and nurturing great companies from seed to exit. Discover more at YFGC.AI and book a complimentary 30-minute consultation. You can also follow me on Threads @lawyerjesse1977, on BlueSky @lawyerjesse.bsky.social, subscribe to my Substack here, and follow me on LinkedIn here.
Originally published at Fractionally Yours, Jesse's Substack.