The doctrine arrived at 8:56 in the morning, by social media, with its own exchange rate: 'any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz... the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran' [1].
A policy announcement is not a checkable claim, and this page will not rate one. What can be set beside it is the legal record, which is not new. As early as April, legal experts warned through the Associated Press that US strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and bridges could violate the 1949 Geneva Conventions and potentially constitute war crimes [2]. Bridges and power plants are presumptively civilian objects under the laws of war; nothing in the president's formula distinguishes the military-use kind from the kind ten million residents of Tehran cross and draw power from daily [1][2].
The other side's ladder is visible too. Iran's negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf answered the pressure campaign with a counter-doctrine of his own: 'no one will sell oil in region if Iran cannot' [3]. An Iranian health-ministry official claims recent US strikes have killed 50 civilians and wounded 500 - a figure no independent party has verified, reported here as Iran's claim [2].
One structural fact about automatic doctrines deserves the last word: they hand the trigger to the adversary. Under the posted formula, any Iranian gunner who fires at a tanker decides that an American bomb falls on a bridge or power plant - the US response is pre-committed, the choice outsourced [1]. Whether that reads as deterrence or as an escalation machine running on the other side's worst impulses depends on the gunner - which is exactly the problem with writing your war policy as an if-then statement in a morning post [1][2].
