Military intervention may be undertaken to weaken a hostile regime and strengthen the position of its opponents. This column argues that evidence from the 2026 US-Israeli strikes on Iran points to a different outcome: the strikes left total protest levels broadly unchanged but sharply reoriented mobilisation away from anti-government protest and toward pro-government activity. The findings suggest that overt foreign intervention can make sovereignty politically valuable to incumbent governments by making domestic opposition easier to portray as aligned with an external adversary.
In the aftermath of the 2026 US-Israeli strikes on Iran, how external military pressure reshapes domestic political mobilisation is an important question. Rather than affecting only the military balance, foreign intervention may also alter the political environment in which governments and opposition movements compete for support. Dell and Querubin (2016) show that intensive bombing in Vietnam increased insurgent activity and weakened local governance. Gehring (2022) suggests how external military threats can strengthen a shared political identity. These studies point to an important lesson: foreign intervention changes domestic political incentives as well as military capabilities. The domestic political consequences of intervention may differ substantially from its immediate strategic objectives.
Our new research on Iran studies an unusually stark version of this dilemma (Mehmood et al. 2026). The US-Israeli military campaign began in the middle of an already nationwide anti-government uprising in Iran, creating a rare opportunity to observe how foreign intervention reshapes domestic political mobilisation in real time. The central question is not simply whether bombing weakens the regime. The question is whether foreign attack changes the political meaning of dissent itself. When a strike reaches a locality already mobilised against the government, does opposition intensify, or does dissent become easier to portray as aligned with an external enemy, shifting mobilisation back toward the state?
With the government preoccupied by war, one might expect it to become more vulnerable to overthrow. But foreign intervention may instead increase support for the regime and make negotiated democratic transition less likely, particularly when intervention is unilateral rather than multilateral (Wantchekon and Nickerson 1999).
The aggregate chronology is striking. Anti-government protest rose through late 2025 and surged in January 2026. It then fell sharply during February, amid repression and an intensifying official narrative that portrayed the unrest as foreign-backed. After the US-Israeli strikes began on 28 February, pro-government rallies and demonstrations against the US and Israel spread across the country.
Figure 1 makes the compositional shift visible. Before the strikes, protest activity was overwhelmingly anti-government. Afterward, political mobilisation did not disappear, but its direction changed. Pro-government events became geographically widespread, including in counties that had seen little such activity before.
Figure 1 Iranian protests changed direction around the 2026 strikes
A) Protest over time
B) The geography of protest, before (left) and after (right) the strikes
The national time series alone should not be read causally. Anti-government protest was already declining before the first strikes, and nationwide political events could affect all counties simultaneously. The key empirical challenge is therefore to separate the effect of local strike exposure from the broader national trajectory.
We exploit the precise location and staggered timing of each county’s first exposure to a US or Israeli air strike and find that the main result of the strikes is a reorientation of political mobilisation rather than an increase in total protest: following a first local strike, anti-government protest declines while pro-government mobilisation rises. The event-study estimates show that this shift emerges after local strike exposure, while total protest changes little.
As complementary causal evidence, we exploit the month-to-month variation in wind conditions at US Air Force departure bases as an instrument for strike intensity and estimate its effects on the direction of political mobilisation. The US Air Force executes air operations only when surface winds are below an acceptable threshold. More favourable operating conditions thus predict greater strike intensity in counties with pre-campaign strategic targets. The resulting IV estimates show the same qualitative shift from anti-government toward pro-government mobilisation.
The point is that a stable aggregate protest count can conceal a major political transformation. If anti-government mobilization falls at the same time that pro-government mobilization rises, looking only at total protest would miss the outcome of important strategic relevance.
Figure 2 Local-strike exposure shifted mobilisation toward the government
A) Anti-government protests
B) Pro-government protests
Strategic sovereignty is the idea that sovereignty is not only a legal constraint on foreign intervention; it can also become a political resource for the government being targeted. Before foreign intervention, citizens may view protest as a domestic conflict over inflation, corruption, repression, or political rights. Once an outside power attacks the country and openly associates itself with political change, the incumbent can recast the opposition as aligned with an external adversary. The grievances need not disappear; what changes is the political meaning, and hence the perceived legitimacy, of joining collective action.
The decline in anti-government mobilisation may therefore also reflect a loss of agency: if political change appears increasingly driven by an outside military power rather than by protesters themselves, participation can feel less like autonomous domestic action and more like alignment with an external project. That may be demobilising even when underlying grievances persist, consistent with evidence that participation responds strategically to beliefs about the broader collective-action environment (Cantoni et al. 2019).
This logic also connects to work on national identity, war, and political narratives. Gehring (2022) shows that external threat can strengthen common identity, while Suesse (2023) emphasises how nationalist narratives can unite disparate constituencies. Related evidence from Russia shows that war can reshape domestic support: Gorbuntsova et al. (2026) find that escalations against Ukraine increased support for President Putin, especially in provinces with larger ethnic Russian populations. Strategic sovereignty highlights a distinct channel: when a foreign adversary visibly aligns itself with a domestic opposition, the incumbent may capture more of the legitimacy generated by the external threat.
The rhetoric around Iran is consistent with this explanation. We examine public statements by Iranian, Israeli, and US officials and find that US and Israeli leaders increasingly associated themselves with the protesters and political transition. Iranian officials, in turn, intensified claims that the opposition was foreign-backed and framed mobilisation around sovereignty and foreign interference. The Iranian regime did not invent this narrative after the strikes, but overt foreign involvement made the narrative easier to connect to observable events. Our evidence also weighs against simpler alternatives: arrests and state killings do not rise after local strikes, and the previous 2025 Israel-Iran war, without overt opposition alignment, produced no comparable reorientation of protest.
The results do not imply that military pressure can never weaken an authoritarian regime. We study domestic political mobilisation, not the full military, economic, or diplomatic consequences of the strikes. Nor do the findings imply that outside governments should ignore repression or accept an incumbent’s claim that dissent is foreign-made.
The narrower implication is strategic. Foreign governments cannot assume that support for domestic opposition and military pressure on the incumbent are politically separable. Visible foreign ownership of political change can alter who is able to claim national legitimacy. In some settings, an intervention that damages the regime’s material capacity may simultaneously improve its narrative position.
That creates a difficult trade-off for policymakers. Publicly embracing protesters can signal solidarity, but it can also make it easier for an incumbent to portray those protesters as instruments of a foreign power. Our evidence does not identify which alternative mix of diplomacy, economic pressure, humanitarian support, or political engagement would perform better. It does show that the domestic political consequences of foreign intervention should be treated as part of the policy objective, not as a secondary side effect.
The big lesson from Iran is not that external pressure always backfires. It is that military pressure can transform the political meaning of dissent. When foreign intervention arrives during a domestic contestation, the state may lose military assets while gaining something politically valuable: the ability to recast opposition to the government as opposition to the nation.
Source : VOXeu
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