President Trump’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization escalated days of bellicose rhetoric in which he has made what appear to be self-incriminating statements about an intent to commit war crimes if the Iranian government does not submit to his demands.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, adding: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
For days, Mr. Trump had vowed to order the U.S. military to systematically destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran if its government did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. The laws of war forbid the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure as a means of coercing a government.
While it can sometimes be lawful to attack a specific civilian object if it offered a military advantage, an order to indiscriminately destroy all of a country’s bridges and power plants would be illegal and place military commanders in an untenable position, said Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior legal adviser on law-of-war issues and now teaches at Texas Tech Law School.
“I think this is the ultimate stress test not just for the JAG corps but even more so for the commanders with stars on their shoulders,” he said, referring to judge advocates general. “This is the moment where their oath necessitates them having the moral courage and the professional honor to say, ‘I’ve looked at this, I’ve done the analysis, I’m leaning forward in the foxhole, but this is not a lawful target.’”
In a statement, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, did not directly respond to questions about whether Mr. Trump would be committing war crimes. She instead recited human rights abuses by the Iranian government and said “the Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing.”
“The president will always stand with innocent civilians while annihilating the terrorists responsible for threatening our country and the entire world with a nuclear weapon,” she said. “Greater destruction can be avoided if the regime understands the seriousness of this moment and makes a deal with the United States.”
The United States has portrayed Russia’s targeting of civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine as a war crime. In 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ordered the U.S. government to share evidence with the International Criminal Court that included intelligence about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure.
In January, Mr. Trump’s own ambassador to the United Nations condemned “Russia’s continuing and intensifying attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities and other civil infrastructure.”
Asked on Monday whether he was concerned what he was threatening amounted to a war crime, Mr. Trump delivered an unequivocal response: “No, I’m not.”
Some top aides to Mr. Trump have reportedly offered rationales that he could lawfully deem as military targets all of Iran’s bridges and power plants. During the 2024 election cycle, Mr. Trump’s team openly promised to hire only lawyers who would approve as lawful whatever he wanted.
But if there was any room left for reasonable ambiguity, Mr. Trump further reduced it early Tuesday, threatening that if the Iranian government did not concede and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he would have the U.S. military annihilate Iran’s whole civilization.
For war crimes, as with most criminal offenses, establishing subjective intent matters. For example, if a combatant intends to hit a legitimate military objective but kills a civilian bystander by mistake or as incidental collateral damage, that is generally not a war crime. But it is unlawful to intentionally target a civilian or civilian object that has no military value, or when the harm to civilians is disproportionate to the military advantage gained.
In a ruling in January 2024 concerning allegations by South Africa that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the International Court of Justice looked to threatening and dehumanizing public statements by senior Israeli officials as evidence of the intent behind Israeli actions.
The court, in finding a plausible basis to conclude that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention and issuing provisional orders to protect civilians, cited statements by officials like Yoav Gallant, then Israel’s defense minister. In October 2023, he announced that “no electricity, no food, no fuel” would enter Gaza and told Israeli troops that he had “released all restraints” because they were “fighting human animals.”
On Monday, asked how striking Iran’s bridges and power plants would not be a war crime, Mr. Trump cited the deaths of tens of thousands of protesters at the hands of the Iranian government. He added: “They kill protesters. They’re animals. And we have to stop them and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
Harold Hongju Koh, a former top State Department lawyer in the Obama and Biden administrations who teaches international law at Yale Law School, said it was also a war crime to make threats for the purpose of terrorizing a civilian population. The move, he added, also undercuts the United States’ stated hope that Iranians will rise up against the government.
Accountability could be difficult. As a matter of domestic law, the Supreme Court has granted Mr. Trump presumptive immunity from prosecution for official actions, and he could issue blanket pardons to subordinates before leaving office. If his appointees at the Justice Department have produced secret memos approving systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure, it would be difficult later to prosecute officials who relied on them, even if a future administration rescinds them as wrong.
As a matter of international law, the United States and Iran are not parties to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the main forum for prosecuting people who committed war crimes. The International Court of Justice, which is also at The Hague, adjudicates whether countries have broken laws, issues orders and relies on the United Nations Security Council — where the United States has veto power — to enforce them.
Still, Professor Koh noted that court systems in some European countries have asserted universal jurisdiction for prosecuting war crimes, which could make it risky for American officials who are accused of committing them to travel abroad.
Mr. Trump has not been alone in his aggressive messages about the war in Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly boasted of having the military push boundaries of lethality, saying that he dialed down the rules of engagement — targeting limits meant to reduce risks of mistakes and civilian casualties — to a minimum.
Such statements came under heightened scrutiny after preliminary evidence showed the United States most likely bombed an elementary school in the opening hours of the war — killing about 175 civilians, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
Parrying queries about the matter, Mr. Hegseth has insisted that the U.S. military does not deliberately target civilians. His rebuttal evades the question of how strict or lax the rules and practices are in his Pentagon for identifying and verifying the nature of targets.
Even so, Mr. Trump’s subsequent threats to destroy civilian infrastructure and eradicate Iran’s civilization are incompatible with Mr. Hegseth’s talking point.
Mr. Hegseth has also said the United States military will grant “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” in the Iran war. Granting quarter means accepting enemies’ offers to surrender and taking them prisoner, rather than slaughtering them. Under the Hague Convention, it is a war crime for a military leader to declare that no quarter will be given in combat, a move the Pentagon’s law-of-war manual also says is “forbidden.”
“This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed,” the manual says. “Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.”
Even before the Iran war, tensions have been building over whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have given the military illegal orders to attack civilians or civilian objects.
Last fall, the administration directed the military to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, a policy a broad range of experts in laws governing the use of force have called illegal and murder. The military is not allowed to target civilians who pose no imminent threat of violence, and being suspected of a crime does not forfeit civilian status. But a Trump-appointed lawyer, in a secret memo, asserted that the policy was lawful based on accepting Mr. Trump’s claim that the nation is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and gangs.
In November, six Democratic lawmakers who are military or intelligence community veterans released a video reminding service members that they are obligated not to follow illegal orders.
The message enraged Mr. Trump, who accused the Democrats of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Mr. Hegseth tried to punish one, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, by reducing his rank or opening a court-martial proceeding, but a federal judge has blocked him from doing so. Jeanine Pirro, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, tried to indict the lawmakers under a statute that forbids interfering with the loyalty, morale or discipline of the armed forces, but a grand jury rejected the charges.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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