Washington: The Trump administration withdrew from two obscure international accords that allowed Iran and Palestine to pursue legal action against it overseas, which were largely symbolic rebukes that were in line with the president’s dislike for global organisations seeking to influence US policy.

Early Wednesday, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the US was quitting a 1955 US-Iran friendship treaty. While largely irrelevant given the rancour between the two countries, that agreement served as the foundation for a ruling by the International Court of Justice that ordered the US to ease some sanctions against Tehran.

Soon after, National Security Adviser John Bolton said the US would leave an optional part of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that let countries settle disputes with each other in the same court. Last month, the Palestinians used that protocol to sue the US over Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem.

“The United States will not sit idly by as baseless politicised claims are brought against us,” Bolton said at the White House. Of the decision to leave the 1955 friendship treaty with Iran, Pompeo said: “This is a decision, frankly, that is 39 years overdue.”

Symbolic moves

The actions were almost entirely symbolic given that past US administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have long ignored International Court of Justice rulings, as the Trump administration was certain to do as well. The US stopped recognising the court’s compulsory jurisdiction in 1986.

But the decisions reflected a broader hostility toward international institutions that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration. In his speech to the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump delivered a broadside against multilateralism and said the US would never surrender its sovereignty to “an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy”.

Bolton has long railed against such institutions, particularly the International Criminal Court, even though the US isn’t a member and has no obligation to abide by its rulings. In September, he delivered a speech threatening sanctions against the court and its judges if it “comes after us, Israel or other US allies”.

At the White House briefing on Wednesday, Bolton also said the US would review all international agreements that could expose it to jurisdiction by the International Court of Justice.

Food, medicine

Wednesday’s moves came hours after the court made a ruling that sanctions being reimposed on Iran unfairly infringe on that country’s imports of medicine and food as well as spare parts needed for safe civil aviation. The court ordered the removal of “any impediments” on trade in those goods.

The US is seeking to choke off Iran’s economy with expansive sanctions against the country’s oil industry that take effect in November against anyone that does business with the Islamic Republic. Trump withdrew from the seven-nation Iran nuclear deal in May, a decision taken over the objections from the other countries in the accord.

Zarif reacts

The sanctions are aimed at bringing Iran back to the negotiating table to agree on a new, broader agreement with the US that would constrain not only its nuclear programme but also what the US calls its “malign activity” in the Middle East and its development of ballistic missiles.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who has been the focus of much of the administration’s ire in recent weeks, responded to Wednesday’s moves by calling the US an “outlaw regime.” The US frequently uses the same phrase in reference to Iran.

Pompeo again blamed Iran for his decision last week to evacuate the US consulate in Basra, Iraq. He said the US had “solid” intelligence that Iran is the “origin of the current threat to Americans in Iraq,” and suggested the country was lashing out at the US as a way to resist its campaign against the regime.

“Clearly they see our comprehensive pressure campaign as serious and as succeeding,” Pompeo said. “We must be prepared for them to continue their attempts to hit back.”