Donald Trump is threatening to bomb Iran’s power plants in order to send that country “back to the stone ages,” as he has put it. Trump’s tendency to wrap sociopathic expressions of sadism and bloodlust in such cartoonish language has unleashed a lot of parsing of his intentions: Surely it’s just designed to bluff Iran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps he’s hyperbolically describing a more limited bombing plan. Or maybe he’s just venting.
But instead of sifting through clues to Trump’s “real” designs, let’s take him at his word, and ask a more basic question: What would actually happen on the ground in Iran if Trump did bomb its power plants? How bad an atrocity would this be? According to experts on war, energy, and foreign affairs that I interviewed, the answer is: much, much worse than you might think.
Trump’s threat has grown more unhinged over time. On Sunday, he rage-posted that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day,” adding: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” He then declared that Iran’s deadline to do his bidding will be eight o’clock on Tuesday night. In a subsequent interview, Trump snarled that Iran will “lose every power plant” in “the whole country.” Trump followed up early Tuesday with his most vile tirade yet, warning that if he doesn’t get his way, “a whole civilization will die.”
The specific vow to target “every” plant is critical. Because this (along with the threat of civilizational erasure) inescapably means bombing many plants that power the daily lives of Iran’s 93 million people, it leaves little doubt that Trump is threatening to violate international laws that prohibit the targeting of civilian-oriented infrastructure, as opposed to civilian sites used by the military.
“We’ve never had a U.S. president so proudly promise to commit war crimes,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. As Murphy noted, thousands would probably die in just the initial bombing of all of Iran’s power plants and bridges, which Trump is also threatening to destroy.
Over time, though, this could get even worse, and here we need to grasp a key distinction. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, an expert on the use of force to realize political ends, notes that Trump has the choice of either bombing “transformers” at big plants or targeting their “generating hulls,” which are more central to their operation. The former, Pape says, would knock out power for several weeks (transformers can be repaired comparatively quickly), while the latter would disable power for six months or more (replacing hulls takes much longer).
That’s why an easy-to-miss nuance in Trump’s language is so alarming. On Monday, Trump said that his intent is to ensure that “every power plant in Iran will be out of business” and “never to be used again.”
That last clause suggests that Trump may have been briefed on the hull-destroying option—and may opt for it. To be clear, disabling power for several weeks would be bad enough. But doing it longer-term would constitute an unthinkable catastrophe. For six months at the very least, most Iranians would be without “everything that electricity depends on—the hospitals, the water, the refrigeration of food,” Pape says.
“Systematically destroying the generation hulls in the 10 largest electric power plants would almost surely lead to a major humanitarian disaster for tens of millions of ordinary Iranians,” Pape, author of a Substack called Escalation Trap, told me.
Put another way, knocking out Iran’s electricity in this fashion would do nothing less than disable the “support mechanisms of modern life,” Jeff Colgan, an expert on energy and foreign policy at Brown University, told me. “The consequences are going to be horrible for the people there.”
As it happens, we have a very recent—and very vivid—example of what this looks like. Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, points to Israel’s blockade against fuel entering Gaza, and the resulting shutdown of electric power there, which helped drive the health system toward collapse. Konyndyk cited the horrifying humanitarian crisis that ensued and noted that Trump’s threatened bombings could unleash a similar crisis in Iran—on a much larger scale.
“Electricity is the lifeblood that makes a modern society function,” Konyndyk told me, adding that bombing Iranian power plants that “support critical civilian services” could be tantamount to “destroying the conditions of life.”
At this point, it should be obvious that Trump’s threat isn’t primarily directed at the Iranian regime. It’s actually a threat to make life horrifically unlivable for everyday Iranians, with no reason to think this will pressure the regime itself. “Throughout history, this kind of bombing has never led people to oppose their government and only led to more fury against the air power attacker,” Pape told me, adding that Trump is threatening “a moral disaster for no strategic gain.”
Colgan, meanwhile, likened the situation to other specific times the United States has acted to starve countries of energy—such as Cuba. He pointed out that this has “historically” ended up “bolstering” regimes in power.
There’s an even darker element to all this. Even if we allow that threatening to plunge millions of Iranian civilians into “hell” would pressure the regime—which it probably won’t—it’s beyond heinous to use mass civilian suffering as leverage to begin with. Yet Trump isn’t just admitting to this tactic. He’s positively flaunting it.
“He’s not hiding that his design is to inflict maximum casualties and pain on civilians as a mechanism to try to topple the regime,” Murphy told me. What Trump wants for Iran, Murphy said, is for “people to die because they can’t access hospitals and can’t access clean water.”
Yet this is drenched in folly. As Murphy put it, if the United States is “openly and proudly targeting civilians,” they will “blame the people who are doing the bombing”—that is, us. “The consequences will be to push the people closer to the only entity protecting the people, which is the existing regime,” Murphy said.
Are military officials really prepared to carry out such orders? Edward Wong of The New York Times asked the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command if they would deliberately target civilian sites, and got no answer.
That’s unnerving in the extreme. Indeed, all of this should galvanize Democrats to get more vocal in warning U.S military personnel that Trump may be giving them a fresh round of illegal orders any day now.
As it is, Trump’s bombings of suspected drug-runners in the Caribbean are probably also war crimes. Congress has done nothing in response. Do you think that maybe—just maybe—this dereliction emboldened Trump to now threaten war crimes on a much vaster scale?
Also recall that when six Democratic lawmakers cut a video reminding military officials that they are not obliged to carry out illegal orders, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried (thus far unsuccessfully) to punish and prosecute them. Trump and his accomplices don’t want Democrats to tell service members the truth about their illegal orders. Democrats should do more of it.
“This is a really perilous moment,” Murphy told me. “If he is prepared to give an order to strike thousands of bridges and power plants, which will result in thousands of innocent Iranians dying, everybody in that chain of command has to think hard about whether they want to be part of the execution of that order.”
