View this email in your browser 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.

April 7, 2026

Countdown to War Crimes?

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Donald Trump posted to social media this morning. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” This followed Trump’s Easter Sunday message: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!”
 
Not for the first time, Trump has given Iran a 48-hour deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face attacks on electricity-generating power plants and bridges. That deadline expires at 8 p.m. ET tonight.
 
Three things could happen, Damian Paletta writes for The Wall Street Journal: Trump could do nothing; he could announce a diplomatic deal with Iran or progress toward one, which is what he did as the last deadline approached; or he could strike.
 
If Trump follows through, will he have committed a war crime? Yes, according to international-law experts.
 
For one thing, destroying a “whole civilization” almost exactly fits the definition of genocide under the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Trump has claimed that Iranians, who largely are thought to dislike the Islamic Republic regime, want the bombing to continue. The US president also is given to hyperbole. As serious as it is, the civilizational threat sounds like an exaggeration.
 
Even indiscriminately striking power plants and bridges, however, constitutes a war crime according to experts. Last week, when Trump also threatened to strike Iran’s water desalination plants, CNN’s Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler explained: “Targeting critical civilian infrastructure … could be considered a war crime. The Geneva Conventions and its protocols define objects indispensable to the survival of a civilian population as illegal military targets.” The White House and Pentagon have said the US only attacks lawful targets.
 
“Not, not at all, no, no I’m not,” Trump said Monday when asked if he was concerned that his threats constitute a war crime. “I hope I don’t have to do it.”
 
Experts disagree with Trump’s lack of concern. Retired US Air force Lt. Col Rachel VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School told the PBS News Hour that it is a war crime to purposefully strike infrastructure on which civilians rely. Trump is already committing a war crime by threatening to do so, as that sows terror among civilians, VanLandingham said. US troops ordered to carry out such attacks would be dealt a moral injury by Trump and should follow the law and their own consciences, VanLandingham urged. 
 
What if a power plant supplies electricity to Iranian civilians—but also to military assets? What if infrastructure is owned or was built by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Also, the US is not a party to the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions that spells out the requirement to protect an opponent’s “civilian population and civilian objects.” What about that?
 
Late last week, the Global Briefing talked with law-of-war expert and Stanford University law professor Tom Dannenbaum. His answer: those are not valid reasons. The US may not have signed on to this part of the Geneva Conventions, but international law functions like common law, with precedents building on each other. It all applies. Plus, the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual acknowledges the same civilian protections, Dannenbaum noted.
 
For a power plant to be a legitimate target, it must have a “tight connection” to the opponent’s military objectives and capacities, Dannenbaum said. If the plant is housing an Iranian military command center, that’s one thing. But if it’s supplying electricity to some military installations along with the Iranian population writ large, that isn’t a valid justification on its own for striking. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian commanders accused of ordering militarily unnecessary strikes on Ukrainian electric infrastructure, Dannenbaum pointed out.
 
In his Futura Doctrina newsletter, retired Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan considers whether such strikes would be ethical—and whether they would work. “The just war tradition requires not merely that targets be legally permissible but that means be proportionate to legitimate military ends and that civilian harm be minimized,” Ryan writes. “In short, the people who will suffer most from destroying Iran’s power grid have no capacity to open the Strait of Hormuz. Punishing a civilian population to change its government’s behaviour is collective punishment. … The Trump administration has failed to absorb perhaps the most important lesson from the Ukraine War: even supposedly weaker nations in a war have agency. They can demonstrate the will to resist foreign military aggression for years, or in Iran’s case for decades. … Even if Trump’s Easter threats are primarily a negotiating position, they are unlikely to succeed with Iran. Tehran has already rejected the US 15-point peace proposal and a proposed 45-day ceasefire. … Trump’s threats, if carried through, invite significant Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy infrastructure and regional shipping routes. His threats have already inflicted further damage on America’s strained alliances. And Trump’s statements, negotiating tactic or not, place American service members in the worst position any democratic military can face: the point at which their professional obligations may conflict with the orders of their civilian superiors.”

Watch Fareed’s Take

So far, Trump has achieved few of his desired results in Iran, and the geopolitical costs are mounting. On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed asked: Has any US military action ever racked up so many costs for so few gains?

An Odd Plot

Late last month in France, three teenagers and a 21-year-old were arrested on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack against what target in Paris?
 
a) The Eiffel Tower
b) The Louvre
c) The Iranian embassy
d) Bank of America’s offices

To see the answer, read to the end of this newsletter.

Big War Energy,

Big Energy War

The Iran war is causing an energy panic in Asia, which buys much of the oil and natural gas exported from the Gulf, and it could soon cause problems in Europe too, as the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Szymon Kardaś said last week on the group’s World in 30 Minutes podcast. As investor and Financial Times contributor Ruchir Sharma writes, this is dangerous for the world economy. “Never has the world entered a crisis of any kind with such high deficits and debt levels,” Sharma writes, “This burden will limit the ability of governments to cushion the impact of elevated energy prices.”
 
What will come of this disruption? In a Foreign Affairs essay, Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan argue the Iran war will cause countries around the world to re-shore their energy supplies, relying less on far-flung supply chains, to the extent a change is possible. We could see oil and gas output restricted, with “energy autarky” becoming the new model, they suggest.
 
It’s easy to see why. As Joseph J. Schatz writes for Politico Magazine, the US may lead the world in oil-and-gas production, but the war has shown the US economy is not totally insulated from far-away disruptions. Perhaps this will prompt many countries to get more serious about electrification and renewable energy, economist Patrice Geoffron writes in a Le Monde op-ed.
 
Regardless, the oil shock could be here to stay. In a Foreign Policy op-ed, Amir Handjani argues the war will end with Iran continuing to block passage through the Strait of Hormuz, charging a hefty toll on ships willing to pay it. “One of Iran’s demands may be achievable if structured correctly,” Handjani writes: “the right to operate the Strait of Hormuz as a tolled waterway, in formal partnership with Oman. This is not a fantasy. … The tollbooth that Iran has built as a response to the U.S.-Israeli attack could, with the right architecture, become the most consequential piece of postwar economic statecraft the Middle East has seen since Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized Suez in 1956. Tehran needs to decide whether it wants the satisfaction of having closed the Strait of Hormuz or the revenue from running it.”

News Quiz:

The Answer Is …

Question: Late last month in Paris, three teenagers and a 21-year-old were arrested on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack against what target? Answer: Bank of America’s offices.
 
One teenager was apprehended onsite in the early hours of March 28, attempting to plant a powerful homemade explosive outside the bank’s headquarters in the French capital, Le Monde’s Jérémie Pham-Lê reports. The other three people were arrested later.
 
Authorities have hypothesized that Iran may be involved, Pham-Lê writes: “On March 23, five days before the foiled attack, the head of security at the American bank J.P. Morgan, alerted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, reported to the French police threats that had been posted on a Telegram group by a small pro-Iranian group calling itself ‘Harakat Ashab Al-Yamin Al-Islamiya’ (HAYI), which can be translated as ‘the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right.’ … ‘This is not just a bank, but a hidden Zionist force,’ wrote the group … Everywhere HAYI is believed to have operated, investigators have observed the use of ‘proxies’: low-level operatives drawn from delinquency or traditional criminal circles, used to better conceal the identity of those giving the orders at the highest level and to create a buffer with foreign states. This would explain, in the context of the investigation into the attack targeting Bank of America in Paris, the discrepancy between the potentially devastating seriousness of the operation and the amateur profiles of the arrested perpetrators.”