U.S. President Donald Trump points his finger towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they shake hands during a press conference after meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 29, 2025.
As consequences from the war on Iran continue to spin out, debates have raged about the legality of U.S. and Israeli actions. According to one renowned political scholar, the matter is straightforward: if President Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and their advisors ever faced a Nuremberg-style trial, they “would be hanged.”
Speaking on the podcast of former judge and longtime Fox contributor Andrew Napolitano, Professor John Mearsheimer — Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago — asserted that there was no legal basis for American and Israeli attacks on Iran.
“We didn’t even make any attempt to argue that the Iranians had done something militarily to precipitate our attack,” said Mearsheimer. “There’s no provocation here.”
He also pointed out that both governments have been assassinating world leaders, which is strictly forbidden under international law.
“Furthermore, there’s the Gaza genocide,” said Mearsheimer. “Here’s an apartheid state executing a genocide in Gaza, and we’re complicit in that genocide. If there were Nuremberg trials right where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors would be hanged.”
The Nuremberg trials were held in Allied countries at the conclusion of WWII. Over the course of roughly a year, German defendants were charged with a variety of war crimes, and as Mearsheimer notes, the German military and leadership were held accountable for committing genocide and waging a war of aggression, the latter of which was declared “the supreme international crime.”
Since launching his war on Iran at the end of February, Trump has been accused of committing or threatening to commit a range of war crimes. The latest came on Monday, when the president posted a threat to destroy Iranian “Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)” were his demands not met. The intentional destruction of civilian infrastructure is a war crime.
When asked about this threat, White House Press Secretary doubled down, saying Iran’s “best move is to make a deal, or else.”
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