The Commentariat's Guide to War Crimes
How to Get Every Claim Wrong on Live Television
On 9 April 2026, a Republican strategist named Adolfo Franco appeared on TRT World Today and, in under two minutes, made three claims about war crimes that were each independently wrong. He did this calmly, confidently, and without challenge. None of what he said was original. These are the same arguments that circulate endlessly on X, repeated by people who will never read the Geneva Conventions but are absolutely certain they know what constitutes a war crime. Franco just happened to say all three of them in one sitting.
Franco is not a random pundit. He holds a Juris Doctor from Creighton University. He served as Assistant Administrator for Latin America at USAID from 2002 to 2007 — one of the longest tenures in that role under the Bush administration. He was a foreign policy advisor on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and a surrogate for Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 campaigns. He served as chief counsel to the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee.¹ This is a man with legal training, government experience, and a professional obligation to know what international humanitarian law actually says.
He either does not know, or he does not care. Neither option is comforting.
President Trump had issued a series of public threats targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure — bridges, power plants, electrical grids, desalination facilities — ahead of a deadline demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.² On 7 April 2026, he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”³ The interviewer asked a fair question: do these threats constitute war crimes? Franco’s answer was a masterclass in confident wrongness. He made three claims:
One: you cannot commit a war crime by threatening to do something — only by doing it.
Two: the real war criminals are the Iranians, who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states.
Three: if threatening infrastructure is a war crime, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all war criminals.
Each of these claims is wrong, misleading, or both. And each maps onto a broader pattern — the way international law gets selectively invoked, selectively dismissed, and selectively explained depending on who is doing what to whom.
This article takes Franco’s claims one at a time. Not because he matters — he is one of hundreds of commentators making identical arguments across cable news and social media — but because his segment is a near-perfect specimen. Every evasion, every deflection, every confident falsehood that circulates in the public conversation about war crimes is present in ninety seconds of live television. If you can see through Franco, you can see through all of them.
“You don’t commit a war crime unless you do something”
Franco’s first claim is the foundation on which the rest of his argument sits. It sounds intuitive. You cannot be guilty of a crime you did not commit. In domestic criminal law, there is a version of this that holds — you generally cannot be convicted of murder for thinking about murder. But international humanitarian law is not domestic criminal law, and the distinction matters in ways Franco either does not understand or chose not to mention.
The United Nations Charter — which the United States signed on 26 June 1945 and ratified through the Senate, making it binding domestic law — addresses this directly. Article 2(4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”⁴
Read that again. The threat or use of force. Not the use of force alone. The drafters of the Charter did not accidentally include the word “threat.” They included it because they understood — in 1945, in the wreckage of a war that killed tens of millions — that the threat of force against another state is itself a violation of international law. It does not require follow-through. It does not require a bomb to land. The threat is the violation.
This is not an obscure academic reading. The UN Security Council’s own repertoire confirms that Article 2(4) “prohibits the threat or use of force” and has been cited in dozens of resolutions addressing situations where states threatened the territorial integrity or political independence of others.⁵ The International Court of Justice has confirmed that the prohibition in Article 2(4) is not limited by weapon type or method of delivery — it applies to any threat or use of force, whether nuclear or conventional.⁶
Then there is Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977. Article 51(2) states: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.”⁷
Again: threats of violence. Not acts alone. The law explicitly prohibits threatening violence against civilian populations when the primary purpose is to terrorise them. When a sitting president goes on social media and announces that he will destroy every bridge and power plant in a country of ninety million people — that is not a negotiating posture. It is a threat of violence against a civilian population. The text of Article 51(2) was written to cover exactly this.
Now, a fair objection: the United States never ratified Additional Protocol I. The Reagan administration rejected it in 1987, primarily due to Pentagon objections about the prohibition on reprisals and concerns about its application to national liberation movements.⁸ This is true, and it should be stated honestly. But it does not end the analysis. The US State Department has itself acknowledged that key provisions of Additional Protocol I — including Articles 51 and 52 on the protection of civilians — reflect customary international law.⁹ Customary international law is formed when a practice becomes so widespread and consistent among states that it is recognised as legally binding — regardless of whether any individual state has signed a specific treaty codifying it. The prohibition on targeting civilians and on using threats of violence to terrorise civilian populations has achieved that status. The United States cannot opt out of it by declining to ratify the document that wrote it down.
The Rome Statute adds another layer. Article 25(3)(b) establishes individual criminal responsibility for anyone who “orders, solicits or induces” the commission of a crime within the Court’s jurisdiction.¹⁰ Article 8(2)(b)(i) defines as a war crime “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.”¹¹ A public order or inducement to attack civilian infrastructure — issued by the person with the authority to give that order — does not require the attack to succeed for criminal responsibility to attach.
Franco may respond that the United States does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That is also true. But non-recognition of a court does not change the underlying law. The United States does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction over American personnel — but it has enthusiastically supported ICC arrest warrants when they target adversaries. The law is either law or it is not. You do not get to choose which parts apply to you based on whether you like the court that enforces them.
There is a final dimension Franco’s framing erases entirely: the distinction between a private citizen’s angry words and a head of state’s public declaration of intent. When an anonymous account on social media posts angry rhetoric about bombing another country, that is objectionable but carries no operational weight. When the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth publicly identifies specific categories of civilian infrastructure he intends to destroy — bridges, power plants, desalination facilities — and then declares that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” that is a credible threat backed by operational capacity. The legal character of the statement changes categorically. Franco collapses this distinction as though it does not exist. It is the most important distinction in the analysis.
“What about Iran?”
Having failed to address the legal question he was asked, Franco pivots. The real war criminals, he insists, are the Iranians — who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states. “My god,” he says, “they’ve been hitting Oman and Azerbaijan, not to mention all of the other Gulf states, who of course have nothing to do with this conflict. They’ve hit civilian structures as targets. And no one talks about war crimes that I’ve heard of. For Iranian leaders.”
Set aside for a moment whether Franco’s factual claims about Iranian strikes are accurate. Even if every word is true — even if Iran has struck civilian infrastructure in Oman, Azerbaijan, and every other Gulf state — it does not answer the question he was asked. The question was whether Trump’s threats constitute war crimes. Franco’s answer is: but Iran did bad things too.
This is not a legal argument. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre with a Latin name and a long history of being rejected by every international court that has ever considered it.
It is called tu quoque — “you too.” The argument that if your adversary has committed the same crime, you cannot be held accountable for committing it yourself. It has an intuitive appeal. It sounds like fairness. It is not.
The tu quoque defence was invoked at Nuremberg. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German Navy, argued that he should not be convicted of unrestricted submarine warfare because the United States Navy had conducted identical operations in the Pacific.¹² Admiral Chester Nimitz provided testimony confirming that American submarines had indeed waged unrestricted warfare against Japan from the day after Pearl Harbor. The tribunal did not acquit Dönitz — but it declined to impose a sentence on the submarine warfare charges, creating what scholars have described as one of the most ambiguous moments in the tribunal’s legacy.¹³
The subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals were less ambiguous. In the High Command case, the tribunal stated: “Under general principles of law, an accused does not exculpate himself from a crime by showing that another has committed a similar crime, either before or after the commission of the crime by the accused.”¹⁴ In the Einsatzgruppen and Hostage cases, defendants argued that they could not be convicted of crimes against humanity because Allied bombings had also killed civilians. The tribunals rejected both arguments.¹⁵
Half a century later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia closed the door entirely. In the Kupreškić case, the Trial Chamber ruled that tu quoque “has no place in contemporary international humanitarian law.” The defining characteristic of modern IHL, the Chamber stated, is “the obligation to uphold key tenets of this body of law regardless of the conduct of enemy combatants.” The obligations are absolute and non-derogable.¹⁶
That word — regardless — is doing the heavy lifting. It means that even if Iran has committed every violation Franco alleges, it does not create a legal permission slip for identical conduct by the United States. It does not reduce Trump’s legal exposure by a single degree. It does not make the threats less threatening or the law less applicable. The conduct of one party to a conflict does not modify the obligations of the other.
Franco knows this — or should. He is a lawyer. Tu quoque is not an obscure doctrine. It is one of the most well-established principles in international criminal law, precisely because it has been raised so often and rejected so consistently. If Franco were making this argument in a courtroom, the judge would not need to look it up. The judge would tell him to sit down.
Now — and this is important — none of this means that Iranian strikes on civilian infrastructure are acceptable or should be ignored. If Iran has struck civilian targets in Oman, Azerbaijan, or any other Gulf state, those strikes should be investigated, documented, and — where the evidence supports it — prosecuted. Franco’s underlying factual claim may be legitimate. But he is not making it as a standalone argument for accountability. He is making it as a shield — deploying Iranian conduct to deflect scrutiny from American threats. That is not a call for consistent application of international law. It is the opposite. It is an argument that the law should apply to them and not to us.
The distinction between “Iran should also be held accountable” and “Iran’s conduct means we cannot be held accountable” is the difference between a legal argument and a talking point. Franco is making the talking point.
“Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower are terrible war criminals”
Franco’s third move is his most revealing. If threatening to hit infrastructure is a war crime, he argues, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all terrible war criminals. The implication is that this conclusion is self-evidently absurd — that no reasonable person would call the architects of Allied victory war criminals — and therefore the premise must be wrong.
The problem is that Franco is half-right. And the half he is right about destroys his own argument.
The Allied strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in a single raid — more immediate deaths than either atomic bomb.¹⁷ The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed approximately 25,000 civilians in a city of limited strategic value.¹⁸ Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.¹⁹
Would these acts face prosecution under modern international humanitarian law? The honest answer is: almost certainly yes. The indiscriminate firebombing of civilian population centres, the deliberate destruction of cities with no meaningful military objective, the use of weapons whose effects could not be limited to military targets — each of these would constitute a grave breach under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute.
Franco presents this as a reductio ad absurdum. If the law says Roosevelt is a war criminal, the law must be wrong. But that is not what the history shows. What the history shows is that the international community looked at what Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, and Eisenhower did — looked at the firebombings, the area bombings, the nuclear attacks on civilian cities — and decided to build an entire legal architecture to make sure it never happened again.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drafted in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.²⁰ The Nuremberg Principles were confirmed by the UN General Assembly in 1950.²¹ Additional Protocol I, with its explicit protections for civilian populations and its prohibition on indiscriminate attacks, was adopted in 1977.²² The Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over war crimes, was adopted in 1998.²³ Every one of these instruments exists because of what happened between 1939 and 1945. They are not abstract exercises in legal theory. They are direct responses to specific conduct by specific leaders — including the leaders Franco names.
Franco’s argument amounts to this: because the men who committed these acts were never prosecuted, the acts themselves must be legal. That is not how law works. The absence of prosecution does not create a legal precedent for legality. It creates an injustice — one the international community spent the next half-century trying to correct through the development of the very legal frameworks Franco is now dismissing.
There is a deeper irony Franco appears not to notice. The Nuremberg Tribunal — the same tribunal that tried the defeated Nazi leadership — declared that to initiate a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”²⁴ The tribunal was created by the same Allied leaders Franco cites. They built the system. They established the principle that leaders can be held personally accountable for violations of international law. Franco is invoking the architects of international criminal accountability as evidence that international criminal accountability does not apply.
He is using the men who built the house to argue that the house does not exist.
The temporal dimension matters too. Franco is applying pre-Geneva Convention conduct as a standard for post-Geneva Convention legality. The law in 1945 was different from the law in 2026. That is not a weakness of the legal system — it is the point of the legal system. Laws evolve in response to the horrors they failed to prevent. The fact that strategic bombing was not prosecuted in 1945 does not make threatening it legal in 2026, any more than the fact that slavery was legal in 1820 makes it legal today. Franco’s argument requires you to believe that international law froze in 1945 and nothing adopted since then counts. It is an argument that could only be made by someone who either has not read the Geneva Conventions or is hoping you have not.
The selectivity problem
Franco’s three claims share a common thread. Each one treats international law as something that applies to other people — other countries, other leaders, other conflicts. None of them engages with the possibility that the same legal standards might apply to the United States. This is not an oversight. It is the defining feature of how the United States engages with international humanitarian law — and it has been for decades. The pattern is so consistent it barely qualifies as hypocrisy any more. It is closer to a doctrine.
Consider the timeline. In 2022 and 2023, the United States government accused Russia of committing war crimes for launching missiles and drones at Ukrainian power plants, electrical substations, and heating infrastructure.²⁵ The argument was clear and correct: deliberately targeting civilian energy infrastructure to deprive a population of heating and power, with no proportionate military advantage, constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law. The State Department said so. The Pentagon said so. The President said so.
In April 2026, the President of the United States threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran. He declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” He was asked whether he was concerned about committing war crimes. He said he was “not at all.”²⁶
This is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a question of legal nuance or the complexities of dual-use infrastructure. It is the same conduct — threatening or executing the destruction of civilian energy and transport infrastructure — described by the same government in opposite legal terms depending on who is doing it.
When Russia does it to Ukraine, it is a war crime. When the United States threatens to do it to Iran, it is leverage.
The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, stated publicly that attacks targeting civilian and energy infrastructure could constitute a war crime.²⁷ The UN Secretary-General’s spokesman said he was “deeply troubled” by the threats, stating that no military objective justified targeting civilian infrastructure.²⁸ Iran’s representative at the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, described the threats as “incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide.”²⁹ Representative Jim McGovern called them “a genocidal threat to commit war crimes.”³⁰
These are not fringe voices. They are the French Foreign Minister, the United Nations, a senior member of Congress, and the representative of the targeted state. The international response to Trump’s threats was immediate, specific, and grounded in the same legal frameworks the United States itself invokes when the roles are reversed.
Franco mentions none of this. He does not address the Russia comparison. He does not acknowledge that his own government has described identical conduct as criminal when perpetrated by an adversary. He does not engage with the legal frameworks at all — because engaging with them would require him to explain why the law applies in one direction and not the other. And that explanation does not exist.
This is the deeper problem the article is about. It is not really about Adolfo Franco. It is about a political culture that has learned to treat international law as a costume — something you put on when it makes you look righteous and take off when it becomes inconvenient. The Geneva Conventions are sacred when Russia violates them. They are irrelevant when the United States does. The ICC is a beacon of accountability when it issues warrants for African and Russian leaders. It is an illegitimate overreach when it turns its attention to American or Israeli personnel.
The people on X repeating Franco’s arguments are not inventing this selectivity. They are absorbing it — from cable news, from social media, from commentators who say what Franco said and never get challenged on it. Every time a credentialed commentator dismisses the legal question, waves away the treaty obligations, and pivots to “but what about the other side,” the message is reinforced: the law is a tool, not a standard. It applies to our enemies. It does not apply to us.
A culture that no longer believes in the law is doomed to repeat the darkest moments in human history.
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials. Photograph by Raymond D'Addario, United States Army Signal Corps. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Endnotes
¹ Adolfo Franco biographical details: Al Jazeera contributor profile, aljazeera.com/author/adolfo-franco; Prabook, prabook.com/web/adolfo.franco/329562; LegiStorm, legistorm.com/person/bio/59052/Adolfo_A_Franco.html.
² Trump threats against Iranian civilian infrastructure reported across multiple outlets, including NBC News, PBS, and the Washington Post, 7–8 April 2026.
³ Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, 7 April 2026, 8:06 AM.
⁴ Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945, Article 2(4).
⁵ UN Security Council Repertoire, “Article 2(4) — Prohibition of threat or use of force in international relations,” main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/content/purposes-and-principles-un-chapter-i-un-charter.
⁶ International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 8 July 1996.
⁷ Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977, Article 51(2).
⁸ Reagan administration rejection of Additional Protocol I: National Security Archive, “Humanitarian Law of War: The U.S.-NATO Review of Additional Protocol I, 1978–1986,” 21 September 2023.
⁹ Michael Matheson, Deputy Legal Adviser, US State Department, remarks at Red Cross–American University workshop, 1987. Matheson stated: “We support the principle that the civilian population as such, as well as individual citizens, not be the object of acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among them.”
¹⁰ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, Article 25(3)(b).
¹¹ Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(i).
¹² Admiral Karl Dönitz defence at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946. See also “Trial of K Doenitz,” Judgement, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1 October 1946, 1 IMT 171, at 310–15.
¹³ Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, interrogatory testimony submitted to the International Military Tribunal on behalf of the defence, 1946. The tribunal declined to impose a sentence on the unrestricted submarine warfare charges. See Nicole A. Heise, “Deciding Not to Decide: Nuremberg and the Ambiguous History of the Tu Quoque Defense,” 2009.
¹⁴ “Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb et al” (High Command Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, XI TWC, at 481.
¹⁵ “Trial of Otto Ohlendorf et al” (Einsatzgruppen Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, IV TWC, at 467; “Trial of Wilhelm List et al” (Hostage Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948.
¹⁶ Prosecutor v. Kupreškić et al., Judgement, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-95-16-T, 14 January 2000, paras. 511, 515.
¹⁷ Firebombing of Tokyo, 9–10 March 1945 (Operation Meetinghouse). The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated approximately 88,000 killed; the Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed; other estimates range up to 100,000 or higher. See Britannica, “Bombing of Tokyo”; Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999).
¹⁸ Bombing of Dresden, 13–15 February 1945. The Dresden Historians’ Commission, established by the Dresden city council in 2004, published its findings in 2010 and concluded that between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed. See “Official report: Dresden bombing killed 25,000,” The Local (Germany), 17 March 2010.
¹⁹ Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945). The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates 90,000–166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 deaths in Nagasaki within the first two to four months. Combined range: 150,000–246,000. See Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), rerf.or.jp; International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings.
²⁰ Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, ratified by the United States on 2 August 1955.
²¹ UN General Assembly Resolution 95(I), “Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal,” 11 December 1946; “Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal,” formulated by the International Law Commission, 1950.
²² Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977.
²³ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, entered into force 1 July 2002.
²⁴ Nuremberg Tribunal, Judgment, 1 October 1946.
²⁵ US State Department, “Russia’s Attacks on Ukraine’s Energy Infrastructure,” press statement, 23 November 2022; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, remarks on Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, multiple occasions 2022–2023; US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, statement to the UN Security Council condemning Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as war crimes, 23 November 2022.
²⁶ Trump stated he was “not at all” concerned about committing war crimes. Reported in NBC News, Washington Post, and PBS, 7 April 2026.
²⁷ French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.
²⁸ Spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.
²⁹ Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s representative at the United Nations, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.
³⁰ Representative Jim McGovern, statement posted on X, reported in NBC News, 7 April 2026.