President Donald Trump abruptly called off strikes on Iran, reportedly after a phone call from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. If true, history repeats. A 1983 phone call from Saudi King Fahd to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger caused President Ronald Reagan to call off airstrikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps suspects after the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. While Fahd then, as bin Salman now, feared repercussions on Saudi Arabia, the failure to respond only allowed terrorism to fester and grow.
The choice is binary: Either eradicate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the world once eliminated the Nazis or allow the most radical elements of the Iranian regime to regroup and rebuild.
Either eradicate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the world once eliminated the Nazis or allow the most radical elements of the Iranian regime to regroup and rebuild.
The losers in any such scenario are not only regional states that will face Iranian aggression, but also the Iranian people, who understand that, if the world allows Revolutionary Guard retrenchment, they can expect torture and mass execution.
Iranians had a preview of this on July 28, 2026, when Iranian officials publicly hanged two protesters whom they accused of killing a police officer, a charge their families deny. A few days later, authorities executed another protester in prison. Police were out in force to counter protesters at the public execution; they fired into the crowd and killed a young psychology student.
The lesson the regime has learned is that brutality wins. In 1979, Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dispatched Sadegh Khalkhali as a hanging judge to Iranian Kurdistan. While President Mohammad Khatami charmed American officials like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, executions skyrocketed as the regime signaled its calls for dialogue were for export only. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, security forces purposely aimed buckshot at women’s faces and eyes to permanently maim and blind them as a warning to others. Over two days in January 2026, security forces slaughtered up to 40,000 protesters and bystanders, visiting hospital emergency rooms to finish off the wounded.
If the world withdraws, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will believe it has a green light to purge society of all who resist its vision. Revolutionary justices often charge dissidents with “waging war against God,” a catch-all capital offense that, by its very definition, justifies slaughter of any scale.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its affiliates—the paramilitary Basij, Law Enforcement Forces, and foreign proxy groups imported for crowd control—have no compunction about using violence. The Iranian judiciary fabricates accusations of violence against security forces to justify murder.
If the Iranian people are going to achieve their freedom, they no longer can simply shout slogans at night. Nor should they assume that there is safety in passivity, since the regime cares more about making examples out of people than true justice. As the violence on January 8 and 9, 2026, showed, simply being on the sidewalk at the wrong time could be a death sentence.
If Iranians are to win, they must do what Trump has not: make ordinary Guardsmen and Basij fear for their lives.
It is time for the Iranian people to launch a low-level insurgency. There are loose weapons in Iran. When the Iran-Iraq War ended, there was no organized demobilization. Smugglers also traffic weaponry. Iranians know who serves in the Revolutionary Guard. Even when plainclothes Guardsmen attacked a student dormitory in July 1999, sparking nationwide protests, Iranians could identify the security forces by the engine capacity of their motorcycles. Every Guardsman walking the streets or on a weekend leave should know that that day could be his last. If Iranians are to win, they must do what Trump has not: make ordinary Guardsmen and Basij fear for their lives. If guns are unavailable, Iranians might use knives or Molotov cocktails. If they film the results, fear will spread. With time, Iranians might learn the art of the same magnet bombs used with great effect against the regime’s nuclear scientists.
Such an insurgency is distinct from the tactics that terrorists like the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MKO) embraced. Maryam Rajavi’s foot soldiers were always against the Iranian people. The MKO first fought alongside Khomeini in favor of the Islamic Revolution and, after Khomeini betrayed them, they shifted their allegiance to Saddam Hussein against the backdrop of the Iraqi invasion. Iranians hated the MKO for two reasons. First, when the MKO sought to assassinate regime officials, they did so with bombs and could not care less about collateral damage. Second, their dispute was over who the dictator would be, but they were as disdainful of democracy as Khomeini.
An Iranian insurgency would be different. It would attach a cost to being a Guardsman or Basiji. For those doing the job for a salary, it would transmit that salaries are irrelevant when the breadwinner is dead.
Nonviolence works only when regimes feel shame. What worked in British India will never work in North Korea or the Islamic Republic. There must be a cost to serving a regime. Targeting the apparatus of its repression is not murder but, rather, self-defense.
