Yesterday, Trump posted on Truth Social that "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran," giving Iran until April 6 to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants and bridges. The war is five weeks old, the Strait has been closed since early March, oil has been trading above $110 a barrel, and a U.S. F-15E was shot down two days ago. This is not Trump's first such ultimatum—he's made and postponed similar ones twice already.

1. Hit Them Where It Hurts (FDD, Tom Cotton)

The only way to end this war is to make the cost of continuing it unbearable.

Iran is losing the war—and still refusing to open the Strait. Admiral Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command says the U.S. has struck over 8,000 military targets and described the campaign as the largest elimination of a navy over a three-week period since World War II. But Iran is still blockading the world's most important oil chokepoint, costing the global economy roughly five million barrels a day. Mark Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have spent the war arguing that maximum pressure is the only language Tehran understands; an FDD analysis in late March warned the White House against settling for a truce plan that leaves the regime's coercive capacity intact.

The political establishment behind the war wants this to be the breaking point. Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has framed Iran's missile program as an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies. Seventy-four retired generals and admirals signed a public letter supporting the campaign and warning that Iran is determined to kill Americans. For this camp, the question isn't whether infrastructure strikes are harsh—it's whether any softer option has a prayer of reopening the Strait before the global economy tips into full stagflation.

Bombing every power plant in a country is collective punishment, full stop.

The legal case against these strikes is overwhelming and on the record. On April 2, more than 100 U.S.-based international law scholars—organized through Just Security and led by Yale's Oona A. Hathaway—signed a statement arguing that U.S. strikes on Iran violate the UN Charter and may constitute war crimes. They cited a reported strike on a primary school in Minab where at least 175 people were killed, most of them children, alongside attacks on hospitals, water facilities, and energy sites. Trump's threat to hit "all" power plants, in this view, is not a negotiating tactic—it's collective punishment, explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law.

Destroying the grid wouldn't just darken homes—it could melt down a nuclear plant. The ICRC President said in March that war on essential infrastructure is war on civilians. Greenpeace International warned that knocking out Iran's grid could force the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant onto backup diesel generators, raising the risk of a Fukushima-like meltdown. The legal standard under Article 54 of Additional Protocol I prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival, and the burden is on the attacker to prove each target makes an effective contribution to military operations. "Every power plant" fails that test on its face.

3. It Won't Even Work (Atlantic Council, Justin Logan, Trita Parsi, John Bolton)

Infrastructure strikes won't reopen the Strait. They'll just make everyone poorer and angrier.

The strategy is backwards—it punishes civilians without reopening the Strait. The Atlantic Council published a March dispatch arguing that Iran will retaliate by hitting Gulf Arab energy infrastructure and that infrastructure strikes are unlikely to break the blockade. Justin Logan of the CATO Institute has urged the White House to publicly abandon regime change talk and pivot to negotiations with realistic expectations. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute argues Trump chose an avoidable war over a good deal when Iran had offered major nuclear concessions; his colleagues Ben Freeman and William Hartung pegged the likely bill at trillions in their March paper.

Even hawks think the president is winging it. John Bolton—not exactly a dove—accused Trump of "a lack of strategic thinking" and of treating every decision as a new transaction. The practical worry shared across this camp: Iran has already warned that if U.S. strikes hit its power plants, Gulf regional infrastructure becomes a target to be destroyed permanently. Forty million people in the Gulf depend on desalinated water. Kuwaiti power and desalination facilities were already damaged by Iranian drones in late March. Escalation, in this view, doesn't just fail to reopen the Strait—it could take out half the Gulf's drinking water supply.

Where This Lands

Trump has threatened to bomb Iranian power plants twice before and postponed each time. The hawks will argue that Iran's continued blockade proves previous restraint failed and that only a visible strike changes the calculation. The law scholars will argue that the threat itself is already unlawful, and that execution would compound it with civilian deaths across hospitals, water systems, and possibly a nuclear facility. The restrainers will argue that whichever camp is right about the ethics, the strategy doesn't actually reopen the Strait—it just burns down more of the region and hardens Tehran's position. Where this lands depends on whether Trump follows through, and whether Iran's retaliation stays inside Iran or spreads to every desalination plant in the Gulf.

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