The Order That May Come on Tuesday

When a president telegraphs war crimes, his generals face a choice the law has already made for them.

Photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho on Unsplash

Easter Sunday is supposed to be about resurrection and hope. What Donald Trump resurrected this morning was not hope, but a question that has shadowed American democracy since Nuremberg: what happens when a commander-in-chief orders his military to commit a war crime?

At 8:03 a.m., while much of the country was preparing for church, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Strip away the gratuitous profanity and sarcasm and what you are left with is a president publicly announcing, in advance, his intention to destroy civilian electrical infrastructure and bridges in order to coerce a country into political compliance. He is not, in this framing, describing a military objective: he is describing collective punishment.

And collective punishment, under international humanitarian law, is a war crime.

This is not a fringe legal interpretation. Just last week, over 100 legal scholars signed a letter stating that the threatened strikes would violate prohibitions on attacking “objects indispensable to the survival of civilians.” Milena Sterio, a professor of international law at Cleveland State University, told PolitiFact that bombing civilian power infrastructure of this kind “would give rise to a war crime.” The relevant provisions of international humanitarian law carry the status of customary law, “binding on all states,” she added. That includes the US, regardless of which treaties Washington has or has not ratified.

Amnesty International has gone further, warning that such strikes would “plunge an entire country into darkness” and “potentially deprive its people of their human rights to life, water, food, healthcare.” These are not hyperbolic projections, they are what happens when you bomb a country’s power grid.

We know this because we have watched it happen in Ukraine, and have condemned Russia for doing it.

The legal gray area — and there is one, worth acknowledging — involves what international law calls “dual-use” objects. Power plants and bridges that serve military purposes can, under certain readings of the law of armed conflict, qualify as legitimate targets. The U.S. has invoked this doctrine before, most notably during the 1991 Gulf War.

But the dual-use argument requires a military rationale, applied case by case, weighed against civilian harm. What Trump is describing is categorically different. In the Axios interview he gave shortly after posting, he was asked whether he worried about harming innocent Iranian civilians. His answer — that Iranian civilians who oppose the regime would probably welcome such strikes — is not a legal justification. It is a rationalization, and not even a particularly coherent one. It is precisely the kind of reasoning that international tribunals were designed to reject.

Which brings us to Tuesday. And to two men: Air Force General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of CENTCOM. These are Trump’s handpicked officers — their predecessors were swept out in the great Hegseth purge that has sent more than a dozen generals and admirals into premature retirement. They are, by all accounts, loyal men. The question is whether they are loyal to the president or to the law. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, those are not always the same thing.

The UCMJ is explicit. Under Article 92, only lawful orders must be obeyed. The Manual for Courts-Martial states that the presumption of lawfulness “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”

The Nuremberg Principles — incorporated into U.S. military doctrine and into the conscience of every officer who has sat through a law of armed conflict briefing — established that “just following orders” is not a defense. Lieutenant William Calley found this out the hard way after My Lai. His court-martial conviction stands as the most severe rebuke the American military has ever delivered to the proposition that obedience excuses atrocity.

Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate, now a law professor at Southwestern Law School, has noted that a service member is legally required to refuse only orders that are “patently” unlawful. The word “patently” is a high bar, deliberately set to preserve military discipline. But an order to bomb a country’s civilian electrical grid — announced publicly, in advance, as a tool of economic coercion — is about as patent as it gets. The president himself has said the power plants have been “purposefully” spared until now. That is not dual-use targeting.

There is a pattern here that compounds the concern. This is not the first time Trump has issued this threat. He set a deadline on March 21, then extended it after claiming “productive conversations” with Iran. He extended it again on March 26. He threatened again on March 30, this time adding desalination plants and oil fields to the target list.

Each extension has been granted not because Trump has retreated from the order, but because diplomacy has briefly flickered. The threat itself has never been withdrawn. General Caine and Admiral Cooper have been standing ready to execute it for weeks.

That readiness is, in itself, a kind of answer to the question of whether America’s purged and reconstituted military leadership will say no. The more urgent question, then, is what happens if they say yes. The ICRC president has already warned that attacking essential civilian infrastructure in the current conflict “risks reaching a point of no return.” Iran’s military command has threatened reciprocal strikes on energy infrastructure across the Gulf, including in countries hosting American troops. The escalatory mathematics of Power Plant Day, if it comes, are not difficult to calculate.

Trump told Axios on Sunday that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.” He has set Tuesday as the day. The negotiations, run through Pakistani, Egyptian and Turkish mediators, remain alive but fragile. A deal may yet be struck. Trump has blinked before.

But the moral and legal reckoning does not depend on whether Tuesday brings bombs or another extension. The reckoning is already here. A president has announced, in the clearest possible terms, his willingness to commit what legal scholars, the United Nations Secretary-General, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross have all described, with varying degrees of diplomatic hedging, as a war crime. His military commanders have been preparing to carry it out.

The question of whether they must carry it out has already been answered by the law. The harder question — the one that will define the reputation of every officer in the chain of command when history renders its judgment — is whether the men with the authority to say no will find the courage to say it.

At Nuremberg, the tribunal declared that following orders does not relieve a soldier of responsibility “provided a moral choice was in fact possible.” On Tuesday, if the order comes, a moral choice will be possible. It will be an extraordinarily costly one to make.