Legal Fight Club: Trump Could Face War Crimes Charges After Viral Post

Katie Phang and Gabor Rona break down the legality of how the U.S. president is waging war in the Middle East.

Cardozo and Columbia law professor Gabor Rona joined Katie Phang Tuesday on Legal Fight Club, a YouTube show hosted by The Contrarian’s co-founder Norm Eisen and attorney and Katie Phang, a lawyer and legal analyst, to talk about President Trump’s handling of the war in Iran. Legal Fight Club brings viewers inside the legal and political fight to uphold democratic ideals amid the Trump administration’s tilt toward autocracy.

Rona, an expert on questions of international law and human rights, is a co-author of the letter signed by 100 U.S.-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners expressing profound concern about serious violations of international law and alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel, and Iran in the present armed conflict in the Middle East.

Below is their conversation, lightly edited for length.

Katie Phang: One of the most important things we’re seeing unravel overseas in this illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran is the prospect of war crimes and violations of international law being committed in real time, before our own eyes.

Professor, we have seen a bombing of an elementary school in Minab. We just saw the bombing of the B-1 Bridge, connecting Tehran to the Caspian Sea. We have now heard threats from the U.S. president to bomb Iran into the Stone Ages. Couple that with repeated threats to bomb power plants, desalination plants, nuclear plants, and other infrastructure of Iran. And then the piece de resistance that none of us could have ignored, on the holiest of days for those of us who observe Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted a horrific Truth Social post, which basically says that Tuesday will be “Power Plant Day and Bridge Day.” And if Iran doesn’t open the “fuckin’ strait,” they’ll be “living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah.”

Have we witnessed a war crime? Are we going to witness war crimes? What is going on here?

Professor Gabor Rona: Where can we begin? There’s so much that’s horrendous about what’s piling up from the Trump administration. I have to say — and this is starting outside the field of my expertise, which is international law — that the worst part of that statement from President Trump was “Praise be to Allah.” That was designed to do nothing but stick it to a significant portion of the world’s population in a way that can only create animosity and further inflame passions between races, religions, cultures.

But the other aspects do touch upon international law. And forgive me for starting a little academically, but I’m going to go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the 18th century.

Katie: Make us smarter. Go ahead.

Rona: Rousseau presented us with the foundational limitations of what war is for. In his social contract, he wrote that the only purpose of hostilities in war is to defeat the enemy forces. Out of that philosophical underpinning grew some very specific and important elements of the law of armed conflict that, a century later and up to now, have been reflected in the Geneva Conventions — principles of distinction between combatants and civilians, between military objectives and civilian objects. Even if you’re targeting a military objective, it’s unlawful to do so if you’re going to be causing more civilian harm than gaining military benefit.

There are laws concerning the prohibition of terrorism. It’s prohibited under international law to engage in attacks whose primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population. So to the extent that “‘bombing them back to the Stone Age” or “Bridge Day” have very little potential military advantage to the U.S. goal (if there is a legitimate goal), it can reasonably be concluded that the United States is threatening and conducting attacks against civilian infrastructure. That is terrorism. It’s quite obvious that the primary purpose of these attacks is to spread terror among the civilian population, because it is about the destruction of infrastructure that is indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.

There are many ways to come at the question of: Is this against the law? All lead to one single conclusion: If Trump goes through with these military plans, the U.S. will be engaged in wholesale war crimes.

Katie: Who is supposed to be the gatekeeper, if this is international law? We hear people like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth saying to hell with the rules of engagement. We’ve heard Trump say he doesn’t have to abide by any laws or rules when it comes to this. Is there anyone who is supposed to be gatekeeping the United States from committing these offenses?

Rona: That is perhaps the most fundamental question that people ask about international law of armed conflict. If there’s no police force, and no single judicial mechanism, then is it really worth calling this “law”? There are enforcement mechanisms, there are gatekeepers, but they don’t work anywhere near the same way that domestic law works.

It would be a mistake to judge international law mechanisms according to our experience with domestic law. When nations create and obey international law, they do so largely because it’s in their mutual interest. So from a law of war perspective, I agree to a rule prohibiting targeting your civilian population because you agree to the same rule that prohibits you from targeting my civilian population.

It’s the reciprocity that prevents violations. That is at the heart of how international law prohibitions work (rather than any punitive aspects). However, as Louis Henkin, who wrote the book on international human rights law for the United States, famously said, “most states obey most international law most of the time.”

They do so not because of enforcement, but because it’s in their mutual interest. These days, there appears to be a winnowing of respect for international law. It’s coming from the United States; it’s coming from Russia. It is now also coming from Iran. But most states still obey most international law most of the time.

But, yes, there are gatekeepers. There’s an International Criminal Court, and there’s a Security Council (which has been famously impotent recently, but technically has authority over these matters). Most importantly, every country in the world has the capacity to prosecute war crimes. The U.S. has a war crimes law. And anyone who obeys illegal orders — for example, to target civilian infrastructure in Iran — should be aware that they may not be at risk of prosecution with this administration, but hopefully this administration isn’t going to last forever.

There may well be opportunities and impetus in future administrations to prosecute these war crimes, which have no statute of limitations. In addition to that, by virtue of the state’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, other countries exercise universal jurisdiction over war crimes. So American military personnel involved in targeting civilian infrastructure better be damn careful that they don’t travel to a long list of other countries where they might be at risk of arrest and prosecution. As a recent example, a number of Israeli soldiers were detained in Belgium and put under investigation for war crimes in connection with Israeli operations in Gaza, pursuant to Belgium’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions (to which every country in the world is party). So the risk applies to Americans that travel to just about any place in the world. These are the kind of gatekeeper and enforcement mechanisms that have the potential of having some teeth.

Katie: You’re teaching a class on Contemporary Problems in International Humanitarian Law. How much have the recent developments under Trump 2.0 — especially vis a vis the way that we’re handling things internationally — required you to reframe or change the way that you’ve approached teaching our future lawyers? Because we’ve gone beyond just a textbook conversation. We’re actually seeing this happen in real time and in real life.

Rona: I’ve been doing this course for 15-plus years at Columbia. For the most part, I’ve always used historical examples of either compliance or violation that are written into my syllabus. This semester, I’ve virtually had to throw my syllabus out. And though I should be through about 80 percent of my preordained syllabus, I’m nowhere near that, because every day there’s something that comes up that demands attention. It would be educational malpractice not to talk about these atrocities in class.

So on the one hand, the semester has been much more fragmented. On the other hand, students are grappling with real-time problems in connection with the fundamental principles that the course is designed to teach them. I hope that by having to deal with what comes out in the newspapers every day, they’re getting a much more visceral education about this area of international law, rather than a merely academic one. And I hope that hits deeper in the gut than if we’re talking about, say, what happened 150 years ago on a battlefield in Europe.

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