Will Trump wipe out ‘a whole civilization’?
-- from the Washington Post. By Amber Phillips Tuesday 4/7/2026
President Donald Trump’s threat to eliminate an entire civilization Tuesday night in Iran is troubling U.S. military experts, who say it’s hard to figure out what he will do.
The president is stating that the U.S. military is okay with potential violations of international law to win conflict, said Rosa Brooks, a national security expert at the Georgetown University Law Center.
“Apparently, Trump wants his administration to go down in history as the first government of the 21st century to openly embrace the idea of committing war crimes,” she said. “Not that other states haven’t committed war crimes so far this century, but at least they seem to grasp that they’re not supposed to boast about it.”
Voicing the threat meets the “very definition of terrorism,” human rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer told my Washington Post colleagues, which is: “ to seek to achieve political ends through violence or threats of violence directed at civilians.”
So what happens next? A few things to watch for, experts say.
Is the U.S. going to commit war crimes?
The threat Trump made to destroy Iran and its people isn’t entirely new territory for him. Both he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have supported strikes against alleged drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela that critics have said were likely crimes against U.S. law and against humanity.
Killing an entire civilization certainly constitutes war crimes. But there’s a debate among military experts about whether Trump’s earlier threat to bomb Iran’s bridges and power plants back to “the Stone Age” constitutes war crimes.
“International humanitarian law protects from attacking objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, so if implemented, the attacks Trump threatens could constitute war crimes,” Harold Hongju Koh, a legal adviser in the Obama administration and now a professor at Yale Law School, told my Post colleagues.
You can argue that bridges and energy infrastructure are used by the military, said Mark Cancian, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who emphasized this is a determination best made by military lawyers.
Someone has to back down
The U.S. military has set back Iran’s nuclear program significantly, destroyed its ability to make high-powered missiles and decimated Iran’s navy and air force. Overnight, the U.S. began striking Kharg Island, the core of Iran’s oil economy, and appeared to use one of the largest nonnuclear bombs in U.S. arsenal, The Post reports.
Yet Iran keeps fighting, and Trump keeps upping the threat.
“You can hear the frustration in his statements,” Cancian said of Trump. “He keeps saying ‘We’ve won — we’ve destroyed our armed forces, we’ve bombed them every day. Why won’t they give up?’ Well, they’re pretty tough. They think they are literally on a mission from God.”
There’s always the possibility Trump backs down. Earlier in the conflict, Trump cited what he said were positive negotiations with Iran to delay an ultimatum to bomb the country. But the two countries are so far apart on their demands (the U.S. wants Iran to give up its nuclear power; Iran wants to keep that intact and wants reparations for the war) that outside experts would be skeptical if talks actually progressed in a meaningful way.
Iran has frozen what talks were happening after Trump’s threat.
The 25th Amendment is not in play
Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the NAACP have called for Trump’s removal through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
Amber Phillips
By Amber Phillips
President Donald Trump’s threat to eliminate an entire civilization Tuesday night in Iran is troubling U.S. military experts, who say it’s hard to figure out what he will do.
The president is stating that the U.S. military is okay with potential violations of international law to win conflict, said Rosa Brooks, a national security expert at the Georgetown University Law Center.
“Apparently, Trump wants his administration to go down in history as the first government of the 21st century to openly embrace the idea of committing war crimes,” she said. “Not that other states haven’t committed war crimes so far this century, but at least they seem to grasp that they’re not supposed to boast about it.”
Voicing the threat meets the “very definition of terrorism,” human rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer told my Washington Post colleagues, which is: “ to seek to achieve political ends through violence or threats of violence directed at civilians.”
So what happens next? A few things to watch for, experts say.
Is the U.S. going to commit war crimes?
The threat Trump made to destroy Iran and its people isn’t entirely new territory for him. Both he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have supported strikes against alleged drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela that critics have said were likely crimes against U.S. law and against humanity.
Killing an entire civilization certainly constitutes war crimes. But there’s a debate among military experts about whether Trump’s earlier threat to bomb Iran’s bridges and power plants back to “the Stone Age” constitutes war crimes.
“International humanitarian law protects from attacking objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, so if implemented, the attacks Trump threatens could constitute war crimes,” Harold Hongju Koh, a legal adviser in the Obama administration and now a professor at Yale Law School, told my Post colleagues.
You can argue that bridges and energy infrastructure are used by the military, said Mark Cancian, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who emphasized this is a determination best made by military lawyers.
Someone has to back down
The U.S. military has set back Iran’s nuclear program significantly, destroyed its ability to make high-powered missiles and decimated Iran’s navy and air force. Overnight, the U.S. began striking Kharg Island, the core of Iran’s oil economy, and appeared to use one of the largest nonnuclear bombs in U.S. arsenal, The Post reports.
Yet Iran keeps fighting, and Trump keeps upping the threat.
“You can hear the frustration in his statements,” Cancian said of Trump. “He keeps saying ‘We’ve won — we’ve destroyed our armed forces, we’ve bombed them every day. Why won’t they give up?’ Well, they’re pretty tough. They think they are literally on a mission from God.”
There’s always the possibility Trump backs down. Earlier in the conflict, Trump cited what he said were positive negotiations with Iran to delay an ultimatum to bomb the country. But the two countries are so far apart on their demands (the U.S. wants Iran to give up its nuclear power; Iran wants to keep that intact and wants reparations for the war) that outside experts would be skeptical if talks actually progressed in a meaningful way.
Iran has frozen what talks were happening after Trump’s threat.
The 25th Amendment is not in play
Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the NAACP have called for Trump’s removal through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
“This is evil and madness,” Greene said on social media.
Invoking that would require the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to agree that Trump is unfit for office, and remove him.
It’s a long shot. The 25th Amendment has been raised off and on since Trump first inhabited the White House a decade ago. As I wrote almost a decade ago, there’s a very high bar on what can be used to pull the trigger on this amendment, because it has a drastic effect: overturning the will of the people and the results of an election.
It was never taken seriously then and now, as Trump has a much more supportive Cabinet. His defense secretary has overstated how well the conflict with Iran is going and effusively praised Trump. Vice President JD Vance backed up Trump on Tuesday, saying: “They’ve got to know we’ve got tools in our tool kit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”
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