So said President Trump addressing the Iranian people in the early hours of Saturday morning, after the United States began what he described as “major combat operations” in Iran. The joint U.S.-Israeli operation—dubbed “Epic Fury” by the Pentagon—struck hundreds of targets across Iran, including the compound of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office, government ministries, and military facilities stretching from Tehran to the southern coast.   

It was, by any measure, an impressive display of military capability. It was also, if history is any guide, unlikely to produce the result Trump is promising. He vowed to destroy Iran’s military power and demanded that its security forces lay down their arms or “face certain death”—an effort to weaken not only the regime’s capabilities but its hold on power. The goal, in effect, is regime change. Yet the history of airpower gives little reason to believe that even the most sophisticated bombing campaign can deliver it.   

Airpower can destroy hardened facilities, degrade military capabilities, and kill commanders. What it cannot do is reorder domestic politics. Despite a century of promises to the contrary, it has never by itself toppled a government. The closest recent example that regime-change advocates might cite is Libya in 2011, but Libya proves the opposite point. What began as a UN-mandated “responsibility to protect” mission quietly evolved into the destruction of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Yet NATO airpower did not accomplish that alone. Indigenous rebel forces on the ground—organized, motivated, and militarily capable—exploited the pressure airpower created. Today, in Iran, there is no comparable force.   

History reinforces this lesson. When a government believes it is fighting for its survival, it does not capitulate. A study of thirty asymmetric interstate conflicts involving the United States from 1918 to 2003 shows that coercion most often failed when U.S. demands threated a weaker state’s survival, prompting resistance rather than capitulation. Regime change is the maximalist demand par excellence, and the Iranian government has every reason to believe its survival is at stake because Trump has said so explicitly. With everything to lose, they have no incentive to hold anything back.   

Tactical brilliance and strategic wisdom are different things. Suppressing Iran’s air defenses and killing senior officers, however skillfully executed, does not answer the central question: what political mechanism converts military punishment into regime change? The mechanism that regime-change advocates implicitly rely on is decapitation—the idea that striking leaders and the instruments of state power will weaken the regime enough that the population, seizing its moment, will revolt. The theory has a certain logic, but it has almost no historical support. What strategic bombing campaigns have reliably produced, across a century of evidence, is not rebellion but solidarity. Even when populations despise and fear their leaders, they have a powerful tendency, when bombs fall, to close ranks against the external aggressor.   

No matter how precise or devastating, air strikes alone cannot topple a government, and Iran in 2026 is likely to emerge battered but not broken—a costly example of American hubris and the limits of airpower.