The United States government is not a neutral arbiter of international law. It is a serial violator of it, and the evidence is not hidden. It is documented in Amnesty International reports, United Nations findings, and the testimony of its own officials. The American nation—through its government, its military, and its political class—is committing crimes against the world. The obsession with prosecuting one man, Donald Trump, while the state itself operates with impunity, is a deliberate distraction.
Accessory to Genocide in Gaza
Amnesty International has concluded that Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza constitute the crime of genocide, which is ongoing during the so-called ceasefire. The United States continues to provide billions of dollars in military funding and to transfer weapons at a rapid pace. By continuing to provide arms and other military support to Israel, the U.S. government risks complicity in serious violations of international law, including genocide. Amnesty analyzed fifteen Israeli airstrikes, many conducted with confirmed U.S.-origin arms, that wiped out entire families. At least 334 civilians, including 141 children, were killed, with hundreds wounded.
The United States has also actively intervened at the International Court of Justice to defend Israel against South Africa’s genocide case, filing a declaration stating that the allegations of genocide are “false” and urging the court to apply a strict legal threshold. Washington has gone beyond supplying weapons; it is using its legal weight to shield a genocide from judicial scrutiny. The U.S. and Germany alone have provided over 90 percent of Israel’s arms imports.
Bombing Schools in Iran
On February 28, 2026, the first day of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, a U.S. Tomahawk missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. The attack killed 168 people, including more than 100 children. Amnesty International’s research determined that U.S. authorities could—and should—have known it was a school building and failed to take feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm. This points to a shameful intelligence failure at best; at worst, it is a reckless and indiscriminate attack that constitutes a serious breach of international humanitarian law.
An independent international fact-finding mission found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians or damaged civilian objects”. Some 250 miles away, U.S. missiles fell on a residential area of Lamerd, killing 21 civilians, including five children. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has publicly admitted responsibility in either incident. The Human Rights Activists News Agency documented 1,701 civilian fatalities due to airstrikes and impact damage on hospitals, schools, universities, water desalination plants, power plants, and residential areas.
A Pattern of Global Crimes
The bombing of a school in Iran is not an aberration. It is part of a documented pattern. Since 2001, the United States has waged war in more than 80 countries, killing over 900,000 people, more than one-third of them civilians. U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have killed up to 1,551 civilians since 2004, including at least 204 children. In Yemen, the Pentagon has acknowledged that U.S. military operations killed 153 civilians and injured 243 others in 2025 alone.
The United States has also supported Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, which the UN has said involves war crimes, including the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Trump administration approved a $5 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, including 2,000-pound bombs that kill indiscriminately.
Beyond the Middle East, the CIA operated a global network of black sites where detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture—in facilities across Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The United States has carried out or attempted regime change operations in at least 72 countries between 1947 and 1989 alone, most of them covert. Economic sanctions on Iran have been denounced by Iranian officials as collective punishment targeting civilians, with one foreign ministry spokesman calling the intensification of economic pressure a “crime against humanity”.
The Distraction of Jack Smith and Donald Trump
Against this backdrop of state criminality, the American political and media class has focused enormous energy on one man: Donald Trump. On September 29, 2026, former Special Counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and declared: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation”. Smith defended his decision to prosecute Trump over attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents, stating he would make the same decision regardless of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat.
Smith’s statement is true as far as it goes. Trump did engage in serious crimes against the American nation. But the framing is the problem. The prosecution of one man, however justified, serves to individualize a systemic crisis. The crimes against the American nation—and against the world—are not the work of a single president. They are the work of a permanent national security state, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus, and a military-industrial complex that operates regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama expanded drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa. Joe Biden continued arms transfers to Israel as it committed genocide in Gaza. Donald Trump bombed a school in Iran. The American nation—not just its presidents—is responsible. The focus on Trump allows the political class to pretend that the system works, that justice is possible within it, and that the only problem is one aberrant leader. That is a lie.
The Crime Is the State
The United States is not a force for good in the world. It is the world’s largest arms dealer, its most prolific warmaker, and its most brazen violator of international law. It vetoes UN resolutions condemning its allies, shields genocidaires from the International Court of Justice, and bombs schools while claiming to uphold human rights. The American nation—through its government, its military, and its citizens who tolerate and enable these crimes—is committing crimes against the world.
Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump is not a distraction because Trump is innocent. It is a distraction because it individualizes guilt that belongs to a nation. The question is not whether Trump committed crimes against the American nation. The question is whether the American nation will ever be held accountable for its crimes against the world.