What planners missed is something political scientists have documented again and again: when a country is attacked from outside, its people tend to rally behind the state.
When President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greenlit a campaign aimed at Iran’s nuclear programme, its military leadership and its command structure, the goal was obvious: hurt the regime badly enough that its own citizens might finish the job. He actually said so in a televised address on 28 February this year: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for a generation.” In other words, the plan was to weaken the Islamic Republic from the outside, and the cracks already showing on the inside would do the rest. However, here’s an uncomfortable thought for anyone who cheered Trump and Netanyahu’s decision to bomb Iran. The people who came out ahead aren’t the Iranian people; the winners are the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of Iran’s armed forces, now ruling the country. Trump’s decision didn’t work out as planned, and if you look at how regimes under siege actually behave, it’s not surprising that it didn’t. The logic behind the war had a certain appeal. Decapitate the leadership, wreck the military infrastructure, and show ordinary Iranians, in the most visible way possible, that their government is weak and can’t protect them. Surely, once people see that the emperor has no clothes, they turn on him. It’s a theory that has failed almost everywhere it’s been tried, and Iran turned out to be no exception. What planners missed is something political scientists have documented again and again: when a country is attacked from outside, its people tend to rally behind the state. Even a state they can’t stand. Nationalism doesn’t ask you to like your government; it just asks you to defend your country.
Those are different feelings, and in a crisis, the second one usually wins. This is what makes Trump’s decision and timing so painful. Iran, before the war, was not a regime riding high. It was a government under real strain. Iran’s failing economy had worn down ordinary people’s patience, and corruption was so widespread that even loyalists complained about it. There had been years of street protests against the leadership, including the brave “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which put the regime’s legitimacy on trial in front of the whole world. Significantly, Iran’s younger generation had become increasingly detached from the clerical establishment that ran the country. None of that was going away on its own. It represented slow, grinding, genuine pressure, the kind that over years actually does topple governments or force them to change. This was the path the country was on, and there was a real possibility of producing a different Iran. The war didn’t accelerate that process; it stalled it. In fact, it handed the regime a gift. Once foreign bombs started falling, something predictable happened: people’s priorities shifted. Frustration with corruption and mismanagement didn’t vanish; it was simply pushed down the list, and defending the homeland moved to the top. That’s not a uniquely Iranian reaction; it’s just what nations tend to do. In this case, Trump’s decision to bomb, handed the Islamic Republic exactly the story it had been telling for decades, now with fresh evidence attached: “We told you. The Americans want regime change, and the Israelis want to erase us as a power in the region. Anyone at home criticising us, whether they mean to be or not, is doing the enemy’s work for them.”
That narrative used to sound paranoid to a lot of Iranians. Now it sounds like a description of current events, and that’s an enormous gift to hand to a government that survives on exactly this kind of justification. War doesn’t just change public mood; it changes institutional power. The IRGC, the intelligence services, and Iran’s internal security apparatus all came out of this with more authority, not less. In reality, the IRGC is now running the country. Emergency conditions are the perfect cover for surveillance, arrests, and information control that would have triggered outrage in peacetime but can now be waved through as wartime necessity. In other words, the very people the West hoped would be humiliated by the war are the ones using it to tighten their grip. Perhaps the saddest part of this is what the war has likely cost Iran internally. There were real signs, such as cracks in religious legitimacy, frustration bubbling up among the young, and even divisions inside the political establishment itself, that Iran was drifting slowly but genuinely towards internal transformation. War has a way of freezing that kind of change. When national survival feels like it’s on the line, reform gets shelved. It’s hard to argue for loosening the state’s grip on power when the state is telling you, with some clear justification, that outside enemies are trying to destroy the country. None of this, of course, is to say that the military campaign failed on its own terms. Real damage was done to Iran’s military capacity and to its leadership. More than fifty members of Iran’s senior political, military and intelligence leadership have been killed since the war started in late February, including its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and Defence Minister. This level of attrition is extraordinary. Modern wars have often seen the deaths of senior generals, but the simultaneous loss of so many top commanders and intelligence chiefs is highly unusual. Iran has replaced many of these figures, but analysts generally agree that the new leadership has less experience and has become more heavily dominated by hardline IRGC figures. Tactically, the operation accomplished a lot, but tactics and strategy are not the same thing.
Destroying assets and killing officials is a tactical outcome. Producing a more moderate Iran, or nudging the country towards regime change, is a strategic one. The first happened; the second didn’t, and there’s a real argument that the first made the second harder to achieve, not easier. To be clear, this argument isn’t beyond question. The regime’s newfound strength could prove temporary. The economic toll of the war may erode public patience again once the initial rally around-the-flag moment fades. And there’s no way to run the experiment twice: nobody can prove for certain what Iran would look like today if the war had never happened. Counterfactuals are, by nature, unprovable. But the pattern here isn’t new, and it isn’t unique to Iran. Attacking an authoritarian government from outside tends to strengthen it before it weakens it, especially when that government can plausibly cast itself as the last line of defence for national sovereignty. That’s precisely the story the Islamic Republic can now tell, and for the moment, a lot of Iranians are inclined to believe it. So, when you ask who won this round, it’s worth considering an answer nobody in Washington or Jerusalem wanted to hear: the IRGC did. Not because they’re stronger militarily; they’re not. But because the one thing that was quietly working against them, patient internal change, just got put on hold. And they are so grateful to Donald Trump for that.
*John Dobson is a former British diplomat who has also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
