President Donald Trump has given Iranian leaders until 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday to make a deal to stop or pause the war or else “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
The ominous threat from the president, roughly 12 hours before his latest deadline, is his most recent warning from the president to the leaders in Tehran, whom he has claimed recently were much more willing to negotiate than their slain predecessors.
If the deadline comes and goes without a deal or the president pushing the deadline back again, “very little is off limits,” Trump said Monday during a press conference. “We have a plan because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again.”
Until this point, the U.S. military had almost exclusively hit military targets, and Trump’s comments may represent a change in what the U.S. military is targeting in Iran. In a first, U.S. forces targeted the B1 bridge in Iran last week, which a Central Command official told the Washington Examiner was a “planned military supply route for sustaining Iran’s ballistic missile and attack drone force.”
Tools in the toolkit
Vice President JD Vance, who is currently in Hungary, said the Iranians “have got to know, we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use. The president of the United States can decide to use them and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.”
He did not specify what “tools” the president could authorize the use of, though the White House Rapid Response social media account disputed the speculation that it could mean that using a nuclear weapon is on the table.
The U.S. military used B-2 bombers to drop 30,000-pound GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs, also known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators, to destroy an underground compound belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps over the weekend. These are the largest non-nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal, and they are specifically designed to hit hardened underground facilities that are designed to avoid vulnerabilities from such aerial attacks. The U.S. Air Force used the bunker-buster bombs in Operation Midnight Hammer, targeting three of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025.
The U.S. also has in its arsenal the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, nicknamed the mother of all bombs or MOAB, which has a larger explosive payload than the GBU-57, though it does not have the bunker-buster bomb’s penetrating capabilities.
The president’s threats raise questions about the impact they could have on the Iranian civilian population if such escalation were to occur and whether it would be compliant with international law.
Civilian infrastructure
Civil infrastructure can be a legitimate military purpose, but the impact on civilians must be carefully reviewed and “expected not to be excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the strike,” two former military lawyers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham, wrote for Just Security in an article published on Monday.
Earlier in the conflict, War Secretary Pete Hegseth said the war would be fought with “no stupid rules of engagement” to constrain warfighters because “we fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” His belief that Washington has a history of constraining the hands of warfighters long predates the current conflict and his tenure, though it could become a defining part of the war.
With the clock ticking, and reports swirling that the Iranians had already cut off contact with the U.S., White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “The Iranian regime has until 8PM Eastern Time to meet the moment and make a deal with the United States. Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.” Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered an off-ramp on Tuesday afternoon, urging Trump to pause his deadline for two weeks in return for Iran opening up the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian officials have not shown publicly that they would be willing to negotiate an end to the war based on the Trump administration’s demands and have instead responded with threats of their own.
Iran may retaliate to the escalation on the part of the U.S. with its own escalation, and that is when the conflict could spiral out of control. Iran has launched ballistic missile and drone attacks across the region, targeting civilian infrastructure indiscriminately in several Gulf States.
While it has been degraded over the course of the war, Iran demonstrated its remaining capabilities when it shot down two U.S. aircraft last Friday. All of the airmen were rescued, though one airman, the pilot of an F-15, spent nearly 48 hours on his own deep inside Iranian territory, while both his U.S. compatriots and Iranian adversaries raced to locate him.
Iran still has “enough capability” even after nearly six weeks of constant U.S. and Israeli bombardment, “that they have the potential here to respond in a way, to cause significant damage by what they choose as their target set when they retaliate,” Kelly Grieco, an expert with the Stimson Center, told the Washington Examiner.
“So I would be really concerned that they’re going to do the same thing,” she added. “They’re going to go after power plants. They’re going to go after desalination plants and cause a lot of destruction to to Gulf States in particular.”
STRIKES ON IRAN’S POWER PLANTS WOULD DEAL SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO REGIONAL POWER GRIDS
Trump could be using this deadline to apply even more pressure on the Iranians to be more malleable on their terms for a deal. He has already delayed the deadline for a deal multiple times over the last two weeks, though he has also proven twice that he is willing to participate in a military conflict in the middle of negotiations — the current war and the 12-day war began amid negotiating efforts between the two sides.
Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and more than 300 U.S. troops have been injured over the course of the war, though the vast majority of the wounded suffered minor injuries and have returned to duty. Multiple U.S. bases have been targeted and damaged throughout the war as well.
