IRAN AND THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF FEAR

 

The bombings by the United States and Israel on targets in Iran since February 28, 2026, once again shake the international community with a mix of astonishment, anxiety, and historical déjà vu. Each explosion reignites the narrative of the “definitive breaking point,” as if a show of force were enough to precipitate the fall of the ayatollahs’ regime. However, accumulated experience since the 1980s indicates exactly the opposite: there has not been a single verifiable episode in which external bombing alone has produced a stable and democratic regime change in Tehran, even now that the attacks have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Since the consolidation of clerical power after the 1979 revolution and during the long war with Iraq (1979-1988), Iran’s political system has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for resilience. The power structure—anchored in dogmatic religious authority, the Revolutionary Guards, and a complex network of political control—has managed to turn every external aggression into an internal argument for cohesion. The external threat, far from automatically fracturing the regime, tends to reinforce its discourse of victimization and national resistance.

The bombings primarily produce shock and internal fear. It is the civilian population that bears the psychological and material cost of the confrontation, with disruptions to service supplies, mass displacements, deaths of innocents, and an economy that contracts even further under a set of sanctions and isolation. International shock does not translate into a roadmap for democratization. Quite the contrary. The logic of war displaces spaces for political deliberation and strengthens the most hardline sectors within the Iranian state apparatus, which portray any dissent as treason in times of war.

There is also a silent but profound erosion of international law. The reiteration of “preventive or punitive” military actions without solid multilateral consensus deteriorates the credibility of norms that, at least in theory, limit the unilateral use of force. The result is a more unstable world, where rules are subordinated to the correlation of power and where the precedent of violence legitimizes subsequent violence, expanding the global politics of fear. The promise of immediate security tends to progressively destroy the long-term global legal architecture.

In this scenario, figures like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu embody a politics of forceful gestures and maximalist rhetoric, with catastrophic consequences. Their narrative privileges the display of force as a signal of strategic determination. However, historical experience shows that military power technology does not equate to effective political transformation. The fall of an authoritarian regime (whether in Venezuela or Iran) is not decreed from the air: it requires internal fractures, articulated social coalitions, alternative legitimacy, and institutional conditions for transition. None of that is built with missiles.

The underlying problem is the confusion between punishment and change. Military punishment may satisfy domestic expectations or send dissuasive signals, but it does not, by itself, create a new, conducive, and balanced international political order. In the absence of a sustained diplomatic strategy—that combines pressure, incentives, and negotiation channels—isolated military action becomes a costly gesture: loss of time, financial resources, and, above all, sowing greater regional uncertainty.

Iran, with its complex civil society, educated youth, and internal tensions, is not a monolithic bloc. There are demands for openness, intermittent protests, and conflicts within the elite. But every time the external conflict escalates, those cracks tend to close under the logic of national survival. Recent history demonstrates that democratization does not thrive under systematic bombings (as happened in Cambodia during the Vietnam War); rather, it needs spaces of social autonomy, communication, and sustained internal pressure.

The ethical question in international law is unavoidable: what kind of global order is being built when violence constantly substitutes diplomacy? Force can destroy infrastructure; it cannot build legitimacy. It can eliminate military targets; it cannot sow democratic culture. Authentic political transformation is a slow, contradictory process, and almost always internal.

The bombings, therefore, are not a guarantee of the ayatollahs’ regime’s fall. They are, rather, the repetition of a strategy that has demonstrated its historical limits. Instead of bringing a democratic transition closer, they deepen fear, humiliate international law, and consolidate the most radical sectors. Political efficacy does not lie in the roar of the explosion, but in the complex engineering of negotiation, coherent multilateral pressure, and support for the social forces that, from within, aspire to real change. Everything else is noise, million-dollar expenses, and a dangerous illusion of control in an increasingly fragile world, expanding the global politics of fear. It is a useless regression to the beginnings of the 20th century.