Trump vowed over the weekend to bomb civilian power plants and bridges if Iran did not open the strait, a strategic chokepoint for global oil and gas shipments that the country has effectively blocked amid the ongoing war, by 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
TIME spoke with four legal experts about whether Trump’s threatened strikes would constitute war crimes, how such determinations are made under international law, and who could be held responsible.
Hathaway and Dannenbaum were among the co-authors of an open letter from international law experts raising concerns about war crimes in the Iran conflict. Koh was one of more than 100 experts who signed the letter.
Q: Trump has threatened to bomb Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, desalination plants, bridges. Can you explain what constitutes a war crime, and where those targets fall in that definition?
Koh: There are some things that are permitted by the laws of war, including killing combatants of the other side. But it doesn't extend to targeting civilians, torturing people and other kinds of acts. What's being proposed here is attacks on essential civilian infrastructure.
[Trump’s threats] seem to indicate targeting on the basis of the objects' contribution to the viability of a modern society. That would be a standard for targeting that is completely unrelated to any question of effective contribution to military action—the standard required by law …
Q: Could the Trump Administration legally justify bombing civilian infrastructure?
Goodman: The best argument that they could make is that power stations are not off limits. They are sometimes placed on no-strike lists, but that is a policy determination, that is not a legal determination, and especially if it is civilian infrastructure that … does have some part of its use for military purposes. If it's generating electricity and the electricity is going to a military site, for example, then this object becomes dual use. It's got a civilian characteristic, but it also has a military characteristic, and it makes it a legitimate target, because there is a military purpose to the target, and so it becomes targetable, would be the argument.
The problem for them is, at least what the President has articulated is going after every power station in the country. And the reason that he's given for it—it seems to have no nexus to a military purpose in the first place.
Q: Where do nuclear power plants fall in the mix?
Even when the object in question qualifies as a military objective, it can only be targeted if the collateral harm would be proportionate. For that, the question is balancing the military advantage with the expected civilian harm.
Q: Trump said that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Is there any international law that prohibits this kind of language?
So when the Secretary of Defense basically said that enemy forces would have no quarter—in other words, that U.S. forces would kill even people who had surrendered or were no longer in the fight. The war crime is not simply ordering one's troops to do that. It is making the statement, because the laws of war try to prohibit those kinds of statements from being made by military leaders. [Editor’s note: Hegseth pledged during a press briefing in mid-March that “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”]
Q: Under international law, is the U.S. responsible for the actions of Israel, say, if it had knowledge of an attack that was a war crime?
Q: What is the international body that makes these interpretations?
Then, ex-post, afterwards, evidence of the war crimes can be gathered by international prosecutors as well as domestic prosecutors, and used for either a prosecution at the International Criminal Court or, as in the case in Ukraine, there's a public prosecutor that's gathering evidence on hundreds of cases and bringing these cases against named individuals of the Russian military.
Koh: This goes back to the Nuremberg Trials. Before Nuremberg, everybody had an out. If you were the leader, Hitler, you would say, “I didn't know what my ground forces were doing.” And then if you were the person carrying out the order killing civilians, you would say, “I was just following orders.” And everybody got off. After Nuremberg, it was flipped so that everybody's responsible. You can't take just following orders as a defense, and someone who gives an order with knowledge that it’s going to be carried out a particular way has command responsibility.
Q: How could Trump be punished?
Honestly, I'm not holding my breath. I think that the chances of the President being subjected to criminal prosecution is pretty slim. What I'm concerned about right now is stopping him from doing worse than what he has already done. I think Congress absolutely has got to step in here … We've got three more years of this ahead of us and for the President to be able to carry out these illegal strikes here and be allowed to get away with it suggests that he might be permitted to do the same in other places.
Koh: You have to prove these things with both facts on the ground and with proof of intent.
When lots of civilians die, the chances are high that war crimes have occurred, but they still have to be proven on an incident-by-incident basis
Hathaway: The short answer is, Iran is legally obligated not to resort to the same tactics that President Trump is threatening. That said, what the President is doing is going to erode those legal protections. It's going to create the impression that maybe these rules don't apply anymore. It's going to be seen by some as licensing similar kinds of action, and I would not say that we should be terribly surprised if we see retaliatory strikes on electrical plants in the region, or on data centers or on other forms of civilian infrastructure in the area.
And more generally, I think we should be concerned about what this does to the protections for civilians in future wars, not just in this war. Once you erode these legal principles, once the United States, which has historically played a critical role as a leader in the international and global legal order, is throwing these rules out the window and deciding that they don't apply it will license many other states to feel that they too can ignore these rules. And so the United States is setting an example by which the world is measuring itself.
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