In the quagmire that’s the Middle East, going from air power to people power

During the first 40 days of the current Iran war, something strategically significant happened. Israel did not confine its strikes to missiles, launchers, military installations and command centers. It also reportedly struck another pillar of the Islamic Republic’s survival: the domestic architecture of fear.

Drone attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Basij militia checkpoints and street-level security positions carried significance far beyond their tactical effect. These were not merely coordinates on a military map, but instruments of internal coercion through which the state monitors neighborhoods, identifies dissenters, intimidates citizens and suppresses collective action.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has survived not simply because of its missiles, drones, proxies or ideological military establishment, but because it built a formidable system that makes resistance extraordinarily costly. The IRGC, the Basij, intelligence agencies, detention centers, checkpoints, surveillance networks, revolutionary courts and communications blackouts constitute the machinery through which the state has sought to separate Iranians from political power. When that machinery itself becomes vulnerable, something fundamental changes: the apparatus designed to make citizens afraid begins, for the first time, to experience fear itself.

This matters because Iran’s central problem is no longer a shortage of courage. Iranians have demonstrated courage repeatedly and at extraordinary personal cost. The strategic question is whether the next national uprising can unfold with the regime’s capacity for mass repression weakened, its agents unable to assume impunity, citizens able to communicate and organize and a credible political framework in place to prevent revolutionary momentum from dissolving into chaos.

This is where air power, people power and political leadership intersect.

The Iranian uprising that began in late December 2025 and surged in January 2026 illustrated both the possibilities and the dangers of domestic unrest. What began with economic grievances rapidly became explicitly political. As demonstrations spread, symbols of Iran’s pre-1979 national identity—the Lion and Sun flag, the royal Pahlavi family’s name and slogans rejecting the Islamic Republic—became increasingly visible.

The most consequential moment came when Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called for coordinated nationwide action on Jan. 8. Reports described a broad, simultaneous response in Tehran and other cities. The precise scale remains difficult to establish independently because of censorship and communications restrictions; still, the political significance of coordinated mobilization doesn’t depend on a single disputed number.

Millions can reject a government, its ideology, corruption, repression and economic failures, but anger alone does not produce political transition. Collective action requires organization and, at decisive moments, a political focal point capable of transforming dispersed anger into coordinated action.

The response to Pahlavi’s call therefore deserves serious attention; not because it settles Iran’s future constitutional system, but because it demonstrates his capacity to function as an important political focal point within the opposition to the Islamic Republic.

That distinction is essential. Pahlavi’s political significance does not mean every Iranian is a monarchist, nor does it predetermine whether a future Iran will be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. That choice belongs exclusively to Iranians through a free democratic process.

The immediate question is whether a country of roughly 90 million people will have a credible national framework capable of preventing the collapse of the Islamic Republic from becoming the collapse of the Iranian state.

Revolutions do not end when a government falls. Someone must keep ministries functioning, maintain essential services, secure energy and transportation infrastructure, preserve public order, communicate with military and civil service personnel, prevent territorial fragmentation and establish a legitimate mechanism through which citizens can determine the next political order.

These issues cannot wait until the morning after a regime collapses. The difference between political transition and national catastrophe often depends on the preparation made before the decisive moment arrives.

The regime’s violence against protesters makes that preparation even more urgent. Accounts of the January crackdown described killings on an enormous scale, although a definitive death toll is difficult to establish. The broader pattern, however, is clear: The Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to employ severe violence to preserve itself.

That reality should force a reassessment in Washington, Jerusalem and European capitals. After citizens have faced gunfire, imprisonment, torture, surveillance and communications blackouts, telling them simply to return to the streets and show more courage is neither a moral answer nor a strategy. Courage is not the missing ingredient in Iran. The balance of coercive power is.

Yet the opposite response—indiscriminately arming opposition factions—carries dangers of its own. Weapons without discipline, unified command, political legitimacy and a national objective can transform civic resistance into militia competition, fracturing a national movement into struggles for armed supremacy.

Iran must not repeat the trajectories of Syria or Libya, where state breakdown and competing armed centers produced prolonged instability. Foreign governments must not confuse organizational capacity with popular legitimacy. An opposition organization does not represent Iranians merely because it has money, weapons, cadres or access to foreign governments.

The objective should be to strengthen the political and organizational capacity of the national movement emerging from Iranian society. Here, Prince Reza Pahlavi’s strategic relevance is less about dynasty than political architecture. He has an identifiable constituency, international recognition, demonstrated resonance with segments of the protest movement and a framework in which Iranians ultimately determine their political system.

No intelligence service can manufacture genuine political legitimacy, and no air force can deliver it. It must ultimately be demonstrated by citizens willing to respond, organize and participate. At the same time, political recognition without institutional preparation is insufficient. Iranian democratic forces need serious plans for continuity of government, public safety and the transition to democracy.

International support for such preparation does not mean selecting Iran’s next ruler or imposing a monarchy. Its purpose is the opposite: to create conditions under which Iranians can make their own decisions without watching their country disintegrate.

This is why strikes against the regime’s street-level coercive infrastructure matter beyond their immediate military value. A checkpoint is where authoritarian power becomes tangible: where a phone may be searched, a vehicle stopped, a protester identified and a neighborhood reminded that it is being watched.

For decades, the regime’s message has been simple: We see you. We can reach you. We are untouchable. When the infrastructure of fear becomes vulnerable, the psychology begins to reverse. The men enforcing intimidation discover that they, too, can be seen and reached. Citizens realize that the regime is not the invulnerable structure it has spent decades pretending to be.

However, air power cannot organize a general strike. Drones cannot manufacture political legitimacy. Foreign militaries cannot write Iran’s constitution. Those responsibilities belong to Iranians.

External powers can, however, alter the environment in which Iranians confront the state: preserving communications during internet shutdowns, increasing accountability for officials responsible for atrocities, encouraging defections rather than institutional destruction, protecting critical civilian infrastructure and supporting preparation for a democratic transition. The objective should not be indiscriminate violence, but reducing the regime’s capacity to direct violence against its own population while preserving the foundations of the Iranian state.

That is the missing strategy. The Islamic Republic has spent nearly half a century constructing an architecture of fear designed to keep political power beyond the reach of the Iranian people. Recent uprisings demonstrated their willingness to challenge that architecture. The war demonstrated that parts of the machinery defending it may be more vulnerable than Tehran wants Iranians or the outside world to believe. Those realities now define the strategic question surrounding Iran’s future.

Air power can weaken the machinery of repression. People power can fill the streets and challenge political authority. But neither alone determines what follows. The decisive third element is a credible political architecture capable of transforming rupture into transition while preserving the country and leaving Iran’s constitutional future to its citizens.

Without it, pressure from above and resistance from below could end in a vacuum. With it, Iran’s next historic opening could become something fundamentally different from the uprisings that preceded it: not merely another challenge to the Islamic Republic, but the beginning of an Iranian-led democratic transition.