President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
The clock is ticking on Trump’s latest ultimatum to Iran’s leaders, who he has said must open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. ET or face a campaign of U.S. war crimes. The president, facing strategic defeat in Iran, is responding by using the threat of devastation to try to compel the Iranian regime to give him what he wants.
“If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,” he said in a Monday interview.
The president added in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran’s regime does not submit.
Trump has repeatedly reset such timelines — but there’s no question that if he does finally give the order, his defense secretary will execute it with relish. And his Fox Cabinet is currently champing at the bit for him to launch the attacks.
But if Iran does not submit and the U.S. military does destroy its power plants, what will the next target set be if the regime still cannot be compelled to give in?
Secretary of War Crimes
Hegseth’s distinguishing characteristic in his prior role as weekend host of Fox’s morning show was his delight in the prospect of American service members engaging in brutality.
Indeed, Trump’s ultimatum seems cribbed from a strategy Hegseth urged him to undertake in January 2020, after the U.S. military assassinated Iranian Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. military facilities in the region.
“I happen to believe that we can't kick the can down the road any longer in trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,” Hegseth said on the January 8, 2020, edition of Fox & Friends. “What better time than now to say, we're starting the clock, you've got a week, you've got X amount of time before we start taking out your energy production facilities? We take out key infrastructure. We take out your missile sites. We take out nuclear developments. … We take out port facilities.”
“Iran has been in endless war with us for 40 years,” he explained. “Either we put up and shut up now and stop it, or we kind of wait, go back to the table, and let them dither while they attempt to continue to develop the capabilities to do precisely what they said they want to do. So either we — we're honest about the nature of this regime, or I think we miss a moment.”
Hegseth repeatedly called during this period for the U.S. military to target Iran’s civilian infrastructure, specifically highlighting its “oil refineries,” “oil infrastructure,” “some ports,” “energy production facilities,” “political sites,” and “cultural sites.”
At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper acted as a brake on Trump’s bloodthirsty impulses. After the president floated attacking Iranian cultural sites, Esper publicly ruled out such strikes, which he explicitly described as violations of the “laws of armed conflict.”
But Hegseth notoriously does not believe such laws bind the U.S. military. Beyond his calls for attacking civilian energy and cultural sites, both unambiguous war crimes, he has championed U.S. service members accused or convicted of unlawful killings of civilians and enemy combatants. Indeed, during a 2019 Fox appearance, Hegseth said of a soldier charged with murdering a captured Afghan man who was allegedly a Taliban bombmaker, “If he committed premeditated murder … then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” He added: “Put us all in jail.”
Hegseth also questioned whether the U.S. military should adhere to the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of wounded combatants, prisoners of war, and civilians, in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.
“Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” Hegseth wrote. “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?”
“Makes me wonder, in 2024 — if you want to win — how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict?” he continued. “Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance.”
In office, Hegseth has followed through on this contempt for the laws of war. He “has fired and reassigned uniformed lawyers and dismantled many of the offices set up to prevent the targeting of civilians and related sites,” focused his public statements on the need for “lethality,” and carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes, as The New York Times reported. And he’s remade the top ranks of the military, replacing senior leaders who won’t get with his program.
Now Trump is putting a new campaign of war crimes on the table, while repeatedly saying he is unconcerned with whether strikes on Iran’s power plants are illegal. And Hegseth, rather than trying to limit Trump’s options as Esper did, is publicly warning Iran’s leaders to “choose wisely, because this president does not play around."
The Fox Cabinet is all-in for war crimes
Trump often makes or calibrates his decisions based on the advice he receives in real time from his loyal propagandists at Fox. That Fox-Trump feedback loop played a key role in his decision to launch strikes on Iran in the first place, and ever since, many of his biggest supporters at the network have been urging him to respond to the war’s strategic failure with further escalation.
The Fox Cabinet, like the official one, could choose to act as a restraint on the president’s most psychotic plans. But the network’s stars seem fully bought in on the proposed attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure.
“Tick tock,” Fox host and Trump operative Sean Hannity began Monday’s monologue. “In 23 hours, that will determine the fate of Iran's rogue regime. By this time tomorrow, the deadline will be over. They can hand over all of their nuclear material, open the Strait of Hormuz, and make a deal that will allow for their survival, or they will be bombed into oblivion.”
After airing comments from Trump about the plan, Hannity warned Iran’s leaders to “think carefully because President Trump has proven again and again he does not make empty threats.”
“That should be more than obvious to all of them by now,” he continued. “And I'm actually hoping and praying, cautiously, even optimistic that this remaining fourth or fifth tier of leadership chooses the negotiated settlement and Iran's infrastructure for its people can remain in place.”
Fox host Jesse Watters also defended the proposed strikes on Monday night.
“These targets are selected as humanely as possible, considering dual use systems and the law of proportionality,” he said. “But the goal of war is to win. We aren't hitting their water, hospitals, or hotels. That's what Iran is doing to our allies.”
“Remember, these aren't civilian power plants,” he added. “The Guard runs them and gets dibs on the power, so hitting that type of target hurts the military and their ability to fight back.”
“He talked about the power energy plants being targets, the rail stations as well,” Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones said Tuesday in response to Trump’s “whole civilization” threat. “He does not want death and destruction but the deadline is the deadline, and it doesn't seem like he is going to move it.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
