Donald Trump has signalled his intention to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, power stations and desalination plants, and that is a war crime under international law. The law is unambiguous: military gain does not justify targeting civilian populationsand the infrastruture they depend upon, and pre-announcing an attack does not reduce culpability. This is the reality of the Iran war that the world urgently needs to confront.
The United States has not signed up to the International Criminal Court, meaning Donald Trump faces no meaningful accountability. But what is equally disturbing is the UK’s role in all of this. Keir Starmer’s talk of de-escalation is hollow when his government remains deeply complicit in Trump’s plans. The proposed state visit by King Charles to the United States sends a message of political endorsement, not challenge. That is not diplomacy; that is complicity.
This, though, is not simply about Trump’s erratic behaviour or the latest Iran news. There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed.
Margaret Thatcher applied the same logic to UK communities in the 1980s, treating unemployment and social harm as acceptable costs of economic policy. Trump’s Iran policy is the modern expression of that same ideology, now directed at Iranian civilians on a far grander and more lethal scale. The mindset is identical; the human cost is simply larger.
The collapse of moral constraint we are witnessing in the US-Iran conflict is a systemic danger. Neoliberalism, combined with distorted justification, is overriding both international law and basic humanity, and the UK government is choosing alignment over accountability.