On March 22, President Donald Trump posted a threat on Truth Social. Unless Iran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, the United States would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.”
Iran responded that all U.S. energy infrastructure in the region would be targeted in return. Trump extended the deadline twice — first to March 26, then to April 6. In his first formal address to the nation on April 1, day 33 of the war, he made it explicit: “If there is no deal, we are going to hit every one of their electric generating plants very hard, and probably simultaneously.” He added that the United States would “bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.”
What follows from this threat is not a military confrontation between two governments. It is a sentence of death and deprivation for tens of millions of civilians across an entire region.
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The electrical grid is not a military asset. It is the foundational infrastructure of modern society — the platform on which water, medicine, food, communications and economic function all depend. Destroy it, and everything built on top of it collapses. Not for a government. For every civilian in its reach.
What destroying a power grid actually means
Water treatment plants run on electricity. Hospitals run on it. Dialysis machines, ventilators, and operating rooms run on it. Food refrigeration runs on it. In arid regions, desalination plants supplying drinking water to millions run on it. When the grid fails, these systems do not slow down. They stop.
The cascade is fast. Within hours of a major grid collapse, hospitals exhaust backup generator fuel, water pressure drops, food spoils and communications degrade. Within days, waterborne disease begins, refrigerated medicine is lost and patients dependent on powered medical equipment die.
Germany’s Office of Technology Assessment conducted a formal study on extended blackouts and found that sustained grid collapse leads to societal breakdown within two weeks: water systems irreparably contaminated, communications gone, backup fuel exhausted. This is not a forecast. It is a documented sequence.
I know this from direct experience. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, I directed all infrastructure security research and development for North American utilities at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The finding that shaped everything we did was this: The electrical grid is the single point of failure for modern society. Every other critical infrastructure — water, communications, finance, transportation, emergency response — depends on it. Destroy it deliberately and at scale, and the cascade is impossible. It is a certainty.
Iran has a population of about 93 million people. Trump has now added desalination plants to his target list. These are not combatants. They are patients, children, farmers and workers who had no role in closing the Strait of Hormuz and no capacity to reopen it.
The escalation would not be contained in Iran
Iran’s stated response — targeting U.S. energy infrastructure across the region — is not a bluff. Iran has already demonstrated the capability to strike Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. base nearly 4,000 kilometers away, with ballistic missiles. An exchange of strikes on generation assets would not be contained.
The Gulf region’s infrastructure is densely interconnected and exposed. Iran’s largest gas field has been struck. Qatar’s LNG facility — the world’s largest — was hit in March. The UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait depend on electrically powered desalination plants for the majority of their drinking water. Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure sits in the same threat envelope.
Both sides have now declared energy infrastructure a legitimate target. A broadening exchange does not produce a military resolution. It produces a regional humanitarian catastrophe whose effects spread through energy markets, supply chains and refugee flows far beyond the conflict zone.
The International Monetary Fund warned on March 30 that the war is already driving higher prices and slower growth worldwide. The IEA chief has stated that more than 40 energy assets in the Middle East have been “severely damaged.” Brent crude has been above $100 per barrel since the war began, and Bank of America projects it will remain there through the end of the year.
Destroying Iran’s generation capacity would not resolve the Strait of Hormuz. It would compound a global energy crisis that is already measurable in household budgets from Minneapolis to Manila.
What the historical record shows
We have already run this experiment.
In Syria, the war destroyed more than 70% of the country’s power generation capacity. The result was not military victory or defeat. It was 14.6 million civilians requiring humanitarian assistance — hospitals running on generators until the diesel ran out, a generation of children without reliable water or schooling and direct losses in the electrical sector estimated at $40 billion. The suffering did not fall on the regime. It fell on the population.
In Yemen, strikes on energy infrastructure crippled hospitals and water pumping stations. Documented civilian deaths from the cascading collapse of essential services exceeded battlefield casualties. The connection between infrastructure destruction and civilian mortality is not a theory. It is an established record.
In Iraq, the Gulf War’s targeting of the electrical grid was subsequently challenged by Human Rights Watch on proportionality grounds. By 2003, coalition forces explicitly modified their tactics to avoid repeating those harms. That institutional memory is now being set aside.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian officials for precisely this conduct in Ukraine — targeting civilian energy infrastructure as a tool of coercion. The legal principle does not change based on which government issues the order.
The law is clear
U.N. Security Council Resolution 2573, adopted unanimously — 15-0 — condemned attacks against critical civilian infrastructure as flagrant violations of international humanitarian law. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies extensive destruction of civilian property not justified by military necessity, carried out wantonly, as a grave breach.
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Collective punishment of civilians for the acts of their government is explicitly prohibited under the same body of law. Amnesty International has described Trump’s threat as “a threat to commit war crimes.” Legal scholars cited by PBS, Al Jazeera, and the Geneva Conventions themselves agree: The bar for targeting civilian power infrastructure is extraordinarily high, and threatening to obliterate it simultaneously and completely to coerce a government does not meet it.
The United States voted for all of it.
The 93 million civilians who would lose power did not close the Strait of Hormuz. They cannot reopen it. The threat to simultaneously destroy every electric generating plant in a country of 93 million people — and possibly every desalination plant — to pressure a government to open a waterway is not a close legal question. It is not a military objective that meets the proportionality test. It is collective punishment, stated in plain language on social media and repeated from the Cross Hall of the White House.
This must stop.
Massoud Amin is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota and the founding architect of the modern smart grid. An Iranian-born American, he directed all infrastructure security research and development for North American utilities after the Sept. 11 tragedies, and has studied critical infrastructure resilience for nearly 40 years. He is the author of “Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power” (Calumet Editions, forthcoming April 2026).
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