Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. threats to Iranian civilian infrastructure, White House support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and war crimes allegations against Australia’s most decorated living soldier.

‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’

Who will blink first? U.S. President Donald Trump has given Tehran until 8 p.m. EDT on Tuesday to reach a cease-fire deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else face devastating U.S. strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. threats to Iranian civilian infrastructure, White House support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and war crimes allegations against Australia’s most decorated living soldier.

‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’

Who will blink first? U.S. President Donald Trump has given Tehran until 8 p.m. EDT on Tuesday to reach a cease-fire deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else face devastating U.S. strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. “I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will.”

Trump has been ramping up his threats for several days. In an expletive-laden post on Sunday, he vowed to destroy every power plant and bridge in Iran—a move that legal experts and foreign governments warn could amount to war crimes. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate protections under the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the United Nations Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles.

Still, many saw his comments about killing Iran’s entire civilization as reaching a new, even more alarming level of menace. Trump’s warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal is not reached is “comparable to genocide,” said Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Tuesday. More than a dozen congressional Democrats have called for either impeaching Trump or invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office over his Iran threats.

Yet the White House maintains that such attacks are justified. “Iran hides military hardware in hospitals, in schools, in civilian neighborhoods for propaganda purposes in the most sick and despicable way,” Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.

That same day, U.S. forces struck........

© Foreign Policy