Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has drawn the correct line: Iran is not the Islamic Republic. That premise should guide the targeting doctrine. The regime’s true infrastructure lies in the supreme leader’s power structure, the Revolutionary Guards, the intelligence apparatus, the missile and drone network, the censorship machine, the prison system, and the financial channels that sustain repression at home and aggression abroad. The US and Israel should organize accordingly.
The Islamic Republic should be met with decisive force. A regime that has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, destabilized the region for decades, and built its survival around repression, proxy warfare, and ideological coercion should be dismantled. But force is measured by whether it is applied against the right targets in service of the right end state. That end state is the emergence of a stable, governable, free, and democratic Iran aligned with a new regional order.
The issue is one of discipline. The question is whether destroying a given asset advances regime collapse or enlarges the wreckage that must be governed the day after. The target set should therefore be harder, not softer: leadership nodes, IRGC command structures, missile and drone production and launch infrastructure, surveillance and intelligence headquarters, internal repression systems, cyber infrastructure tied to regime control, revenue channels tied directly to coercive power, and nuclear weaponization infrastructure where applicable.
The Islamic Republic is a centralized coercive system. Its control depends on command coherence – the ability of the center to direct the IRGC, the Basij, the Intelligence Ministry, and the provincial security apparatus as a single instrument. Sever those linkages, and the periphery cannot cohere. The regime does not fall because it runs out of electricity. It falls because it can no longer coordinate repression.
The distinction is concrete. An IRGC provincial command center is a regime node; destroying it degrades the system’s ability to hold territory and suppress dissent. A civilian power plant is national infrastructure; destroying it darkens hospitals, closes factories, displaces workers, and hands the regime a propaganda tool.
One strike accelerates collapse. The other complicates everything that follows it. Broad destruction of civilian energy and industrial capacity would create a vacuum, with predictable consequences: smuggling networks, predatory militias, emergency dependency, informal power centers, and opportunities for remnants of the old order to reconstitute themselves under new labels.
This matters even more through the lens of the day after. A growing body of economic and strategic planning points to more than $1 trillion in long-term investment opportunities across energy, water, transport, logistics, housing, telecommunications, advanced industry, and national reconstruction.
The next Iran is a modernization platform whose success can realign the region economically and politically. Every unnecessary strike converts a future productive asset into a future liability, expands the reconstruction burden, delays institutional recovery, and reduces the speed with which a post-regime government can establish legitimacy through performance. A transition built on functioning infrastructure moves quickly. A transition built on widespread physical collapse starts in scarcity, improvisation, and fragility.
The Islamic Republic wants the outside world to erase the distinction between Iran and the regime. It wants pressure on the ruling apparatus to look like a war on the nation. Washington and Jerusalem should make clear, in doctrine and practice, that the target is the regime’s coercive core and not the national base of the new Iran that must emerge after it.
Help end the Islamic Republic, but do not help it destroy Iran on the way out. The focus belongs on the organs of repression, the assets of terror, and the regime’s war-making capacity, while preserving, wherever possible, the infrastructure a free Iran will need to govern, rebuild, attract investment, and anchor a new regional order.
The writer is an energy and industrial policy expert focused on Iran. Follow him on X: @Aidin_FreeIran