Since the first months of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the Islamic regime has declared war on embassies and diplomatic missions. Just two weeks after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran, armed guerillas attacked the U.S. embassy, breached its walls, and briefly took a Marine hostage. In hindsight, it was a dry run for the regime-sanctioned attack less than nine months later. The Islamic Republic’s seizure of fifty-two American diplomats for 444 days was a national humiliation that destroyed President Jimmy Carter’s hopes for a second term.
Iran and its militias have targeted U.S. diplomatic properties repeatedly.
Nor was the Islamic Republic done. In 1983, Islamic Republic-directed proxies attacked both the U.S. embassies in Beirut and Kuwait City. The 9/11 Commission Report found that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah had provided expertise and training to the Al Qaeda operatives who, in 1998, bombed the U.S. embassies in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi.
Iran and its militias have targeted U.S. diplomatic properties repeatedly. On December 31, 2019, and January 1, 2020, a militia-directed mob breached the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, smashing windows and setting one building alight. Twenty-five days later, a militia-fired rocket struck a cafeteria at the embassy. In December 2023, militias hit the embassy with mortars. This month alone, Iran or the Kata’ib Hezbollah and Badr Corps militias it sponsors have fired rockets, drones, and missiles at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
Embassy attacks are an Iranian brand. The Islamic Republic has elsewhere attacked or threatened Israeli, Saudi, German, French, British, and Danish embassies. Clearly, diplomatic demarches protesting the abuse of diplomatic property does not work.
With attacks on the U.S. embassy increasingly in frequency, President Donald Trump should embrace a new tack. If Iran or its proxies attack a U.S. embassy, the United States should within twenty-four hours destroy the Iranian embassy in that country.
But could such action be legal? Customary law, of course, would discourage an embassy strike under normal circumstance. The sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Dutch political theorist and legal scholar Hugo Grotius developed the concept of extraterritoriality, treating embassies as if they were the soil of the home country as a way for them to remain aloof from local laws. Great Britain’s Diplomatic Privileges Act of 1708 granted broad diplomatic immunity. The 1815 Congress of Vienna normalized diplomatic ranks and priority.
The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations declares, “The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.” The United States, however, is not the “receiving state” in such a case; Iraq is.
Humanitarian law offers clues. Many activists and journalists get the Geneva Conventions wrong, for example. They are not universally applicable; full application of their protections depends on all parties upholding responsibilities they outline. If a military force hides among civilians, does not wear uniforms, and eschews the laws of war, they forfeit protections under the Geneva Conventions.
Destroying the Iranian embassy in Baghdad might appear provocative and lawless, but it is the opposite.
By extension, if Iran refuses to uphold the sanctity of others’ embassies, then those whose rights Iran or its agents violated do not need to uphold protections directed toward Iran. As such, President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth should make clear: The Iranian embassy in Baghdad will be destroyed, alongside anyone who might be inside it after a reasonable period to evacuate.
The Iraqi government might denounce such a move, but it was Baghdad’s refusal to uphold its protections that makes such escalation necessary. Prime Minister Muhammad Shi’a al-Sudani’s recent embrace of those militias attacking the United States make him, not the United States, guilty of violating the Vienna Convention because it is his government failing to protect diplomatic property.
Destroying the Iranian embassy in Baghdad might appear provocative and lawless, but it is the opposite. By demonstrating deterrence against those who have deliberately attacked embassies, Trump would demonstrate both the cost accrued for such attacks and reinforce that accountability will rest on state sponsors, rather than allow a proxy loophole to enable plausible deniability or endanger lives.
