The words were some of the most shocking ever issued by a modern-day US president. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Donald Trump wrote early on Tuesday. Two days earlier, he had warned in an expletive-laden post that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day . . . in Iran,” if Tehran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Those threats were not fulfilled, and the White House argued that the US president’s “tough rhetoric” achieved its purpose: coercing Iran into a ceasefire “deal” — though that deal delivered neither the president’s main stated war aims nor even, with any certainty of durability, his immediate goal of allowing shipping through the strait.
Yet Iranian civilian infrastructure, including gas, petrochemical and steel plants, as well as research institutes and universities and its biggest bridge were already bombed during the US-Israeli war; Iran too retaliated by hitting civilian infrastructure across the Gulf. Together with his calls for mass strikes on infrastructure that would amount to war crimes, the president has done grave harm to the decades-long quest to enforce rules of war, and to America’s moral standing in the world.