For decades, Washington has viewed Iran primarily through centrifuges, missiles, proxy forces, and military deterrence. Those threats are real. But this framework obscures the Islamic Republic’s deepest vulnerability: its broken relationship with Iranian society. If U.S. policy is meant to reduce the danger posed by Tehran rather than merely destroy selected facilities, it must begin with the people the regime fears most—its own.
The Islamic Republic’s behavior reveals where it feels most exposed. During nationwide protests, authorities arrest organizers and journalists, restrict communications, and shut down the internet. These actions are not signs of a government confident in popular consent. They are the defensive measures of a state that knows citizens’ ability to communicate and organize threatens its survival.
The scholar of nonviolent resistance Gene Sharp argued that Iran’s economic crisis and public anger are not, by themselves, enough to produce political change. Citizens also need to communicate, build trust, and sustain collective action.
Hannah Arendt distinguished power, which depends on collective consent, from violence, which rulers use when genuine power is failing. That distinction clarifies Iran’s political reality. The expansion of prisons, surveillance, executions, and security forces should not be mistaken for durable strength. It demonstrates how much coercion the state now requires to govern a society it can no longer persuade.
The death penalty is central to this system of fear. Amnesty International recorded at least 2,159 executions in Iran in 2025, more than double the previous year’s figure. Amnesty has described Tehran’s use of executions as a means of crushing dissent, especially after military hostilities. Stopping executions is therefore not only a moral imperative. It would weaken one of the government’s most powerful instruments of political control.
Military strikes may destroy weapons or delay a nuclear program, but they cannot create democratic legitimacy inside Iran. They can also kill civilians, encourage nationalist mobilization, and give the authorities a wartime justification for imprisoning opponents as enemy collaborators. Amnesty documented this pattern following the 2025 escalation. A policy centered on bombing could unintentionally reinforce the repressive machinery it is supposed to weaken.
Washington needs a different center of gravity. It should make a moratorium on executions and the release of political prisoners central to diplomacy; help Iranians obtain secure, uncensored internet access; impose targeted sanctions on judges, prison officials, and commanders responsible for repression; and support independent media and peaceful civil-society networks. Broad measures that impoverish ordinary families while enriching black-market institutions tied to the state should give way to accountability aimed at the repressors themselves.
Iran’s history explains why political prisoners matter strategically. In 1988, after accepting a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War, the government secretly executed thousands of imprisoned dissidents. Amnesty International has described those killings as ongoing crimes against humanity. At a moment of national weakness, the state did not fear a foreign army alone; it feared organized opponents who might reconnect with a discontented society.
None of this means Washington should select Iran’s future leaders or pursue regime change through invasion. The objective should be to protect Iranians’ ability to determine their own political future. Supporting communications, independent civic organization, political prisoners, and accountability for state violence strengthens self-determination without placing American troops in another Middle Eastern war.
Congress and the administration should measure Iran policy accordingly: not only by uranium stockpiles or missiles destroyed, but also by whether political executions decline, prisoners are freed, communications remain open, and officials who order repression face consequences. Human rights are not a decorative addition to strategy. In Iran, they are part of the strategic contest itself.
The choice is not between accepting Tehran’s conduct and launching an endless war. There is a more effective and humane alternative: constrain the state’s ability to repress while expanding society’s ability to organize. The decisive contest over Iran’s future will not be settled in its skies. It will be decided in the relationship between a government that has lost legitimacy and a society increasingly unwilling to submit to it.
