President Donald Trump spent Monday fending off questions about whether his threat to bomb “every” bridge and power plant in Iran would amount to war crimes. He rejected the premise, arguing that Iran’s leaders were “animals” who needed to be stopped. On Tuesday morning, he doubled down.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Such seemingly unrestrained statements have alarmed legal experts and former military officials, who argue that the president’s threat to conduct broad attacks on civilian infrastructure — “very little is off-limits,” he said Monday — could undermine America’s aims in Iran and create legal jeopardy for military leadership.
“I’m concerned that the president’s bombast is putting the operational commanders in a very difficult position,” said Geoffrey Corn, who served as a top law-of-war expert at the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004-2005. “They know that you cannot just draw a circle around the country and say every element of the electrical grid is now a lawful target.”
Jameel Jaffer, a longtime human rights lawyer and lecturer at Columbia University, said Trump’s latest threat to extinguish a “whole civilization” meets the “very definition of terrorism — to seek to achieve political ends through violence or threats of violence directed at civilians.”
He noted that the Pentagon’s own law-of-war manual clearly prohibits threats of violence whose primary purpose is to spread terror among civilians. “Military personnel,” Jaffer said, “have an obligation not to carry out orders they know to be unlawful.”
Until now, the United States largely has been hitting military targets in Iran such as ammunition depots, ballistic missile manufacturing facilities, mobile launchers and naval ships. But Trump has threatened that, as of Tuesday 8 p.m., he will order the military to target clearly civilian facilities and do so indiscriminately, rather than weigh whether each is a valid military target whose destruction would not cause undue civilian harm.
“International humanitarian law protects from attack objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, so if implemented, the attacks Trump threatens could constitute war crimes,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a former State Department legal adviser in the Obama administration and now the Sterling professor of international law at Yale Law School.
International humanitarian law, also known as the law of war or armed conflict, is a set of rules that place limits on how countries fight. They have been developed through various treaties and agreements since 1864, when the first Geneva Convention was adopted.
In the U.S., decisions on which targets to hit are traditionally made at the combatant command level — U.S. Central Command in this case — with lawyers advising on whether a target is valid under the law of armed conflict, said Michael W. Meier, a former Army law-of-war adviser. “In a normal administration, these decisions are made at that level, not the presidential level,” he said.
Trump’s threats come amid a general loosening of legal guardrails by the administration since it has taken office. Officials have fired the top uniformed legal officers known as judge advocates general and repeatedly circumvented traditional routes for military legal advice.
The Pentagon referred a request for comment to the White House. The White House declined to answer specific questions, but in a statement spokesperson Anna Kelly said that Trump would always “always stand with innocent civilians while annihilating the terrorists responsible for threatening our country and the entire world with a nuclear weapon.”
“The Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing,” Kelly said. “Greater destruction can be avoided if the regime understands the seriousness of this moment and makes a deal with the United States.”
Trump regularly evinces little regard for norms like human rights or the rules of law. “I don’t need international law,” he told the New York Times in January — 11 months after his administration placed sanctions on global bodies including the International Criminal Court.
Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has long supported U.S. military members accused or convicted of war crimes. He has claimed that the U.S. would take its “gloves off” in military conflict and show “no quarter” to its enemies, alarming some legal experts.
Both Trump and Hegseth have supported strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean that critics have said were likely breaches of U.S. law and potentially crimes against humanity for which U.S. officials and service members could face charges in foreign courts and international tribunals.
Experts say that indiscriminately targeting civilian infrastructure, even if it may be used for some military purpose, such as a power plant that supplies electricity to a military base, risks the U.S. carrying out the very type of attacks that harm innocents.
Trump’s comments were “blatant expressions that he is willing to turn the United States into a rogue State like Iran and Russia,” two former military lawyers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham, wrote for Just Security in an article published on Monday.
Power plants and bridges “can certainly be lawful targets” if they are serving a military purpose — so-called “dual use” infrastructure, said Todd Huntley, director of the national security law program at Georgetown University and a former military lawyer supporting Special Operations.
But the impact on civilians must be carefully considered and “expected not to be excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the strike,” Donovan and VanLandingham wrote.
“Blowing up bridges to force the enemy to the negotiating table does not offer a definite military advantage,” Huntley said.
Some analysts say that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the primary military and intelligence force that essentially controls Iran’s regime, is so deeply intertwined with the broader economy that it makes distinctions between military and civilian targets harder to gauge.
But a careful evaluation of targets, their military value and the potential harm to civilians, is still needed, these analysts say.
“No matter how much the regime has hidden missiles in tunnels of transported weapons over bridges or via airports, it is incumbent upon the Trump administration to make its case legally and rationally about every single target,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C. think tank that favors military action against Iran.
Trump has escalated his threats against civilian sites in Iran in recent days amid his growing frustration that Tehran has been unwilling to agree to a deal to end a war that is now in its fifth week, despite taking enormous damage to military sites and seeing much of its political leadership assassinated.
Trump has given Iran the 8 p.m. deadline to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas passes.
If it does not, Trump vowed that by midnight, every bridge would be “decimated,” every power plant would be “out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.”
The U.S. has largely avoided directly targeting civilian infrastructure since it and Israel jointly started a war against Iran on Feb. 28. But an analysis by human rights groups released last monthestimated that at least 1,400 civilians have been killed so far in strikes near schools, hospitals and other nonmilitary infrastructure.
Any forbearance may be fading. The U.S. last week struck the unfinished B1 bridge in Karaj, Iran, causing it to partially collapse, according to local media. Trump appeared to revel in the strike, posting a video of it to social media and writing “much more to follow!”
In response Iran alleged that the U.S. is already committing war crimes — even as the Iranian military targets civilian sites, including hotels and residential buildings, across the Middle East.
“To threaten a country with attacks on its energy and industrial infrastructure at various intervals … constitutes a war crime under international humanitarian law,” said Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, according to a report in Fars News.
More than 100 legal experts, in a letter released last week, said that by unilaterally going to war the Trump administration was in “clear violation of the United Nations Charter” and that “potential war crimes” had already been committed.
Trump, in remarks Monday, suggested he understood the lasting impact of the attacks he was threatening.
“Do I want to destroy their infrastructure? No. It will take them 100 years to rebuild,” he said, adding that the only way Iran would be able to rebuild would be “to utilize the genius of the United States of America.”
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