Wars often produce new doctrines. Some emerge slowly from the deliberations of strategists and military planners. Others appear suddenly, revealed not through careful theory but through the blunt language of officials explaining what they intend to do next.
In the escalating US-Israeli war on Iran, a troubling new logic has begun to surface in public statements from Washington and Tel Aviv: the bombing will continue until the Iranian population rises against its government. The message is brutal: revolt or endure the destruction.
What emerges from these statements is not merely wartime rhetoric but something more unsettling: the articulation, sometimes explicit, sometimes implied, of a doctrine in which the suffering produced by external military force is meant to catalyse internal political revolt.
The logic is simple. Bomb the country, degrade its capacity, increase the strain on society, and the population will eventually rise against the rulers responsible for their misery. Many great powers have hoped that such pressure might provoke unrest in rival states. What is different today is the striking openness with which this strategy is being expressed.
The most explicit articulation of this logic came from Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz, who announced this week that the joint American-Israeli campaign against Iran would continue “without any time limit” and would strike targets across the country “day after day, target after target”.
The reason he gave for the continuation of the campaign was even more revealing. The strikes, he said, would continue “in order to allow the Iranian people to rise up, act, and remove this regime.” Ultimately, he added, “that is something that depends on them.”
It is difficult to recall a more chilling formulation of modern warfare. The bombs will fall; the destruction will accumulate; and somewhere inside that escalating pressure cooker a society of 90 million people is expected to overthrow its own government.
This emerging approach can be described as the Bomb-and-Revolt Doctrine. Its internal reasoning is stark: military force is not only meant to weaken the regime but to transform the civilian population itself into the instrument of regime change. The population becomes the lever. The war becomes the pressure applied to it.
To understand how this idea has emerged, one must first look at the military reality on the ground. The war that began with American and Israeli strikes on 28 February has already become one of the largest aerial campaigns in recent years in the Middle East. Thousands of targets have been hit across Iran, including missile systems, command centres, intelligence facilities, air-defence networks, civilian facilities, fuel depots, and infrastructure.
In recent days, the conflict has escalated further. The United States launched a massive bombing raid on Kharg island, Iran’s critical oil-export hub in the Gulf. More than 90 sites were reportedly struck in what Washington described as a “large-scale precision strike”. The attacks demonstrated the scale of the military pressure now being applied.
Yet, even as these strikes have intensified, the war has revealed the limits of American and Israeli power. Iran has retaliated asymmetrically, targeting US military bases in the region, the infrastructure that supports them, and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, while threatening to disrupt the global energy system if the bombardment continues.
Several commercial vessels have already been attacked or damaged in this narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.
The consequences for the global economy have been immediate. Shipping traffic through the strait has declined sharply, insurance costs have soared, and oil prices have surged. In effect, Iran has chosen the one pressure point that even the most powerful militaries cannot easily control: the arteries of global trade.
This is the strategic predicament now confronting Washington and Tel Aviv. Air power can devastate infrastructure and military installations, but it cannot easily reopen sea lanes or neutralise every asymmetric retaliation. Nor can it impose political transformation inside a country the size of Iran, with its vast geography and deeply entrenched political system.
Faced with this reality, the United States has begun searching for allies willing to shoulder the burden of protecting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. US President Donald Trump has appealed to multiple governments to join a naval coalition tasked with escorting commercial vessels through the waterway.
The response has been strikingly lukewarm. Several countries that depend heavily on Gulf energy shipments have shown little enthusiasm for entering a widening war. Asian allies such as Japan and South Korea have indicated they have no plans to deploy ships to the proposed coalition. Britain, Germany, and France have signalled that they will not participate in maritime convoys in the Strait of Hormuz.
Within NATO the reaction has also been cautious. Trump has warned US allies that failure to help secure the strait could have serious consequences. This hesitation reflects a quiet recognition spreading through diplomatic circles that the war may have been far easier to start than to end.
Against this backdrop, the rhetoric directed at the Iranian population begins to make strategic sense. If external military pressure cannot produce decisive victory, perhaps internal political collapse can achieve the same result. The bombing weakens the regime, the suffering spreads, and the population eventually rises in revolt.
At least, that is the theory.
One hears echoes of this logic not only in Katz’s statements but also in the speeches of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has addressed the Iranian people directly several times and urged them to seize what he described as a historic opportunity – a “once-in-a-generation” moment – to overthrow their leadership.
Likewise, Trump has framed the war as an event that could lead to the collapse of the Iranian regime.
Trump’s rhetoric has at times pushed this logic even further. In remarks that shocked many observers, he suggested that the United States could continue bombing Iran “just for fun”, while also declaring that he felt “honoured” to have ordered the killing of Iranian leaders.
Such statements may be dismissed as rhetorical bravado, but they reinforce the impression that the war is being conducted with a startling casualness about its human consequences.
In the Bomb-and-Revolt Doctrine hinted at by these statements, civilians are no longer merely victims of war. They become strategic instruments within it. Their suffering becomes the pressure intended to produce political transformation.
“Consider the situation from the perspective of an ordinary Iranian citizen,” said Nahid, an Iranian publisher living in northern Tehran, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly.
“On one side are the immediate concerns of survival such as protecting family members, securing food and safety, and maintaining daily life in the midst of war. On the other side are foreign powers dropping bombs while urging civilians to overthrow the government if they want the destruction to stop.”
“It is not a choice. It is a trap.”
The moral problems here are enormous. If taken seriously as a doctrine, it implies that civilian societies can be leveraged as instruments of political engineering through sustained external force.
“The public is placed in an impossible position,” Nahid said. “Revolt against the authorities and risk chaos or even civil war or endure the continuation of bombardment from abroad. In either case, civilians become the hinge on which the strategy turns.”
Historically, major powers have sometimes hoped that war would trigger uprisings inside enemy states, but they rarely articulated the expectation so bluntly. Even during conflicts where regime change was openly pursued, leaders tended to frame the outcome as liberation achieved after victory, not as a choice civilians had to make under the shadow of ongoing attack.
What makes the current rhetoric so unsettling is the suggestion that the bombing itself is meant to produce the political uprising.
From the perspective of international norms, the principle implied in this war edges towards a dangerous precedent. If a powerful state concludes that sustained bombardment can legitimately be justified as a catalyst for domestic revolution in another country, the door opens to a form of strategic coercion that bypasses traditional prohibitions on targeting civilian societies.
The state does not claim to target civilians directly; instead, it claims to target the regime while simultaneously urging civilians to overthrow it in order to end their suffering. That is the conceptual sleight of hand. Responsibility for ending the violence shifts from those conducting the war to the population living beneath it.
In recent days, residents of Tehran have described scenes of devastation across the capital. Infrastructure and civilian facilities have been hit repeatedly, including residential buildings, roads, ambulances, hospitals, desalination plants, and even museums.
Since the onset of the war, the human toll in Iran has climbed past 1,300 lives lost, the vast majority of them civilians, with more than 7,000 others wounded.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has documented 18 attacks on healthcare facilities across the country, a grim tally that includes the deaths of eight medical personnel and injuries to dozens more. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that the war has forced between 600,000 and one million Iranian households to flee their homes, amounting to up to 3.2 million people temporarily displaced within the country.
Most of those displaced are leaving Tehran and other major urban centres, heading towards northern provinces and rural areas in search of safety. The number of displaced people is expected to continue rising as hostilities intensify. Many families are fleeing amid increasing insecurity and restricted access to essential services.
An English literature professor at a university in Tehran, believes the targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be understood solely in military terms. In her view, it reflects a broader political calculation by Washington and Tel Aviv to deepen public anger inside Iran.
“Perhaps they have concluded that the chances of overthrowing the regime through an immediate popular uprising are low,” she said. “Instead, they appear to be pursuing systematic destruction that could create the conditions for widespread anti-government protests after the war, when the economic situation inevitably deteriorates.”
Whether that strategy proves effective is another question. The ongoing escalation, the hesitant response of the Western allies, and the resilience of Iran’s asymmetric tactics all suggest that the war may be entering a long and unpredictable phase.
In that sense the rhetoric directed at the Iranian population may reveal something deeper than ideological conviction. It may also reflect frustration. When conventional military power fails to produce quick political results, the temptation grows to look for shortcuts.
Encouraging or coercing domestic revolt becomes one such shortcut. But shortcuts in war rarely lead where their architects expect. They often open darker pathways instead. Moreover, once articulated, doctrines rarely remain confined to a single conflict. Powerful states observe and learn from one another.
If the Bomb-and-Revolt Doctrine takes hold, it will not remain confined to this war. And the next population told to choose between rebellion and destruction may discover just how little choice that really is.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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