Is that legal? Trump threatens bridges, power plants and a ‘whole civilization’
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"There’s nothing in the military’s 1,200-page Law of War Manual about whether it’s legal to end a civilization, perhaps because nobody could have imagined an American president would make such an apocalyptic threat.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning, referencing his 8 p.m. deadline for Iran to cry “Uncle” to the US and open the Strait of Hormuz.
Ever the reality TV showman, Trump timed his deadline for Iran to prime-time TV hours in the US. Never one to let international law get in the way, he is flirting with ordering the US military to commit war crimes by undertaking civilizational erasure.
Maybe those words are bombast or a “madman theory” negotiating tactic – nobody knows exactly what he’ll do. Maybe they are the obvious result of a president being told by the Supreme Court he has immunity from all law for his official acts as president.
Trump is largely immune from US laws. What about the military?
The same immunity may not exist for everyone under his command. Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt that members of the military have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.
“If you’re asked to target civilians, if you’re asked to kill women and children, you’re asked to kill noncombatants, you’re asked to bomb a school, you’re asked to bomb a civilian power plant, that would be a war crime,” Crow said. Service members, he said, have independent obligations to follow the law of armed conflict.
There is bipartisan concern. Right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, for instance, said officials in the administration should say no if Trump orders the killing of civilians.
Wasn’t this war launched to guard against mass destruction?
The US launched the war, along with Israel, for the stated reason of making sure Iran never obtained nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Now Trump sounds prepared to unleash mass destruction, although he has not talked publicly about using nuclear weapons.
What he has talked about is plunging Iran’s 90 million citizens into darkness by destroying their power plants and restricting their movement by destroying their bridges.
“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” he said in the social media post, which offers Iran a binary choice of negotiating with the US or facing some kind of extinction.
As of this writing, Iran has answered by reportedly encouraging civilians to shield power plants and bridges with their bodies.
Trump, somewhat ironically given his stated disdain for international law, told NBC News that civilian shields would violate the laws of war.
“Totally illegal,” Trump told NBC Tuesday. “They’re not allowed to do that.”
International outrage and ‘war crimes’ warnings
Trump’s threats to go after power plants have already drawn international condemnation and warnings.
“I urgently call on parties to spare civilians and civilian objects in all military operations,” said International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric in a published statement. “It is their obligation under international humanitarian law.”
“Canada expects all parties in this conflict, in any conflict, to respect international laws,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters Tuesday.
More than 100 US legal experts signed onto a statement saying that the entire war, launched preemptively, violated the UN’s charter, and that targeting energy infrastructure “could entail war crimes.”
Another international law expert, Ryan Goodman of New York University’s School of Law, was much more pointed.
“This isn’t legal analysis. It’s idiocy,” Goodman wrote on X, sharing a Wall Street Journal report with the headline: “Top Aides Advise Trump Blasting Iran’s Infrastructure Is Fair Game.”
Goodman, who is also a top editor at the website Just Security, took issue with the idea cited in the story that power plants are legitimate targets because they could foment unrest that could topple Iran’s regime.
Power plants have been targeted before
Others argue there is plenty of room for the targeting of power plants and bridges and that the US has done so before.
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, pointed out on X that the US has targeted power plants before.
“The notion that international law prohibits attacking bridges or power stations in war is ludicrous, and the U.S. and its allies did so extensively in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and even the 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia, which left most of Serbia without electricity,” Kontorovich wrote.
That Yugoslavia example was actually a NATO operation, according to CNN’s report at the time. The air campaign included the US military, which struck a Serbian coal plant as it sought to drive the Serbian army out of Kosovo. The United Nations did not authorize the air campaign, but it did authorize a subsequent ground peacekeeping force. Trump and Israel launched their war without input from either NATO or the UN.
The Trump administration disdains international law
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who goes by his Trump-bestowed secondary title secretary of war, has said the war with Iran would be conducted without “stupid rules of engagement.”
The military’s manual on the law of war does talk about targeting bridges and power plants, and it makes clear that both can be targeted at certain times.
When is it OK to target power plants and bridges?
There is a two-part test for determining whether a country’s infrastructure is a legitimate military target.
First, according to the US war manual, the target must make an effective contribution to the enemy’s military; second, destroying it must offer a distinct military advantage.
But there is another issue, as the international law experts worried about the US committing war crimes point out — that of “proportionality.”
“The proportionality principle prohibits attacks expected to cause incidental civilian harm that would be excessive in relation to the military advantage,” they wrote.
This is Trump’s message to the world
Certainly, destroying a large portion of the power plants in a country twice the size of Texas would cause civilian harm. Control of power, on the other hand, has become a tool of the US government; an embargo on Cuba has largely turned off the power on that island after the US decapitated Venezuela’s government and put new restrictions on its oil exports to Cuba earlier this year. The administration hopes the harm will force Cuba into submission.
“The kind of mass force that the president is threatening (on Iran) … every bridge, every railway station, don’t seem to qualify as legitimate military targets,” Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said on CNN News Central on Tuesday.
But the threats convey something else important, he said.
“What it says to the world is something that the world has already understood, which is the United States has strayed from many of the norms and principles by which we like to believe that we live,” Cook said.
For Americans who heretofore viewed the US as the country that upheld international law, their conception of American civilization is also up for review."
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