International tribunals are not necessary to prosecute Americans who commit genocide, however. The Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 criminalizes the act of genocide “whether in time of peace or in time of war” under federal law. Unlike ordinary crimes, genocide is carried out “with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Notably, there is no statute of limitations to this offense, meaning that anyone who participates in the offense could face prosecution at any point for the rest of their life.
The 1987 law applies to anyone who kills, injures, permanently impairs or permanently impairs of those specific groups. One particularly provision that is relevant to Trump’s threats applies to any efforts to “subjec[t] the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.” Normally it might be difficult to prove a genocidal intent for a specific military strike. Trump’s threat to use U.S. military power to ensure that a “whole civilization will die tonight” removes that obstacle. He could only be clearer and less ambiguous if he wrote, “I will commit genocide tonight.”
Trump’s threats to target Iranian civilian infrastructure, if carried out, may already amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While the U.S. does not claim universal jurisdiction over acts of genocide, Trump’s potential actions would likely meet that threshold. The Justice Department’s Criminal Resource Manual, an internal tool for federal prosecutors, noted that the federal government has jurisdiction over genocide prosecutions if the offense is “committed within the United States” or when “the offender is a national of the United States.”
