Donald Trump has a new formula for the Iran war: every time Tehran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will destroy an Iranian bridge or a power plant.
“Next week it gets really bad for them,” the president said in a Fox News interview that aired Tuesday night. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
The policy was refined Wednesday. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio clarified that the White House is now operating on a one-for-one basis, one civilian infrastructure site per ship attack. Rubio accused Iran of not being serious about negotiations.
The system has the cold logic of a trade tariff, except the payment is in reinforced concrete and electrical grids. Trump is treating things that keep civilian populations alive, bridges that connect cities, power plants that run hospitals and water pumps, as line items in a retaliation ledger.
The legal problem
The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, responded to Trump’s earlier threat in April by stating the obvious: under international law, deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. The 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on sites considered essential for civilians. Bridges and power plants are textbook examples of protected objects.
Trump’s answer, effectively, is that the rules do not apply when the other side is attacking commercial shipping. That argument would carry more weight if it were directed at the Iranian military. It is directed at bridges and power stations.
What Iran says
An Iranian official responded by saying Tehran would retaliate by sparking power outages in countries that host US troops. If threats are an auction, that is the counterbid: you take out our grid, we take out the grid in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan. The escalation is symmetrical in language but not in geography, Iran is talking about hitting US allies’ civilian infrastructure, not the American mainland.
Escalation in practice
The talk comes amid real military action. On Tuesday night, US forces carried out a seven-hour wave of strikes on Iranian positions near the Strait of Hormuz. Centcom said it hit “dozens” of military targets. Tehran responded by firing missiles and drones at US targets in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Kuwait’s military said it was “engaging hostile drone attacks,” and Bahrain activated air raid sirens.
The exchange has become routine, strikes, counterstrikes, statements, more strikes. What Trump’s new infrastructure formula does is remove the ceiling. The previous escalation ladder went from commercial shipping to naval targets to coastal batteries. The new one adds the civilian grid, which is effectively infinite. Iran has hundreds of bridges and dozens of power plants. The US can destroy them one at a time, every time a ship is attacked, and neither side will run out of targets before the other runs out of patience.
What is being said and what is being done
“Next week it gets really bad for them” implies it is not that bad yet. But Iran has already been bombed for 11 consecutive nights. Air defenses are active over Tehran, Tabriz, Chabahar, Konarak, and Bushehr. An American soldier was killed in Iraq two days ago. The cost of the war has reached $37.5 billion. The question is not whether “next week” will be worse. It is what kind of worse.