By Sune Engel Rasmussen
A U.S. aircraft carrier is steaming its way to the Persian Gulf after officials say President Trump asked his aides for a range of options to help Iranian protesters overthrow a regime that has long been a thorn in Washington's side. Thousands of people have been killed as the government in Tehran attempts to regain control in one of the bloodiest crackdowns in years.
If Trump ultimately decides to intervene, whatever he does will have unpredictable consequences -- and some options might not do much at all.
A limited strike against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's main security force, is unlikely to decide the outcome of the popular uprising, analysts, lawmakers and former administration officials say. A key consideration is that the opposition mostly consists of disparate groups of unarmed civilians.
"As long as the protesters are not heavily armed and ready to organize as a guerrilla, how will bombing the Revolutionary Guard help them?" said Rasmus Christian Elling, associate professor and Iran expert at the University of Copenhagen.
"Best case, it will briefly halt the repression," he said. "But a complete neutralization of the repression apparatus will likely require thousands of strikes over a long period."
There are nonmilitary options to put pressure on the theocratic leadership, including cyberattacks on military and civilian institutions, more sanctions on the country's oil sector and boosting antiregime messaging online.
Analysts say improving Iranians' access to the internet would help protesters, for example by providing Starlink terminals or free VPNs. Last year, the Trump administration slashed U.S. funding for organizations working on internet freedom issues in Iran.
The U.S. could also offer to remove sanctions that have crushed the Iranian economy, if moderate military and political leaders remove Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his circle of clerics from the government and promise elections for a secular state, said Jack A. Goldstone, an expert on revolutions and social change at George Mason University.
"Even members of the Revolutionary Guard who have benefited greatly from a privileged role in the economy may decide to desert the regime if the economy is crashing," he said.
The protests erupted in late December over the worsening economic hardship facing ordinary Iranians. People poured into the streets to demand regime change. Security forces responded fiercely and imposed a near-total communications blackout. Human-rights activists say more than 4,500 protesters have been killed.
Trump initially said " help is on the way" and urged Iranians to keep protesting, but later said Tehran had stopped killing protesters, removing the reason he had given for threatening military force. U.S. officials say Trump will monitor the situation, leaving the door open for a strike.
Ultimately, there is little foreign powers can do to fundamentally shape the outcome of popular uprisings, analysts say.
"I do not think foreign help can shift the needle that much. This is about the balance of power on the ground," said Peyman Jafari, an expert on Iranian social movements at William & Mary university in Williamsburg, VA.
He cautioned that an attack could rally millions in defense of the Islamic Republic, which despite its unpopularity still has supporters. In the 2024 election more than 13 million people voted for the most hard-line candidate on the ballot.
"You will see an ideological activation of that group," Jafari said.
A military strike could push Iranian authorities to intensify their suppression of protesters. The government already accuses demonstrators of being foreign agents and terrorists, charges that can carry the death penalty. The state still has unused levers that a military strike could trigger, such as martial law, mass executions and rolling tanks into the streets.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution succeeded in toppling the U.S.-backed shah without foreign intervention, due to the unification of three key power centers in Iranian society: the people, the clergy and traders in the bazar, a coalition that took years to coalesce.
That hasn't happened this time. Some signs that the uprising could be moving into a next phase might include demonstrations in broad daylight rather than at night, signaling emboldened protesters, and workers going on strike to cripple some of the main industries, particularly oil.
Successful revolutions also require divisions and defections in the security establishment, which also hasn't happened yet in Iran.
Moreover, history suggests that foreign support has rarely been the determining factor in helping popular revolts topple autocratic leaders. And when it has, the long-term outcome has been mixed.
A weekslong NATO bombing campaign helped a popular revolt against Serbian rule in Kosovo in 1999, but upholding the peace required the deployment of thousands of international peacekeepers for years.
NATO airstrikes in Libya in 2011 granted civilians some protection from Moammar Gadhafi's forces and provided momentum to protests that led to his fall. But it also contributed to protracted violence and instability that continues today.
These experiences suggest Trump's preferred playbook for using American military force -- striking quickly and then pulling back, like with the bombing of Iran's nuclear sites last year or the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro -- won't work in Iran, analysts suggest.
A raid like the one that targeted Maduro in his Caracas residence would be far-fetched in Iran, a much larger country with defenses built to protect Khamenei, including a Revolutionary Guard unit known as Vali-ye Amr, which counts several thousand forces.
Nor is Khamenei a bureaucrat who can simply be replaced with one more amenable to U.S. interests. The Islamic Republic is based on the idea that the supreme leader is the representative of God on Earth, the pope-like leader of millions of Shiite Muslims across the world. Capturing or killing Khamenei could trigger not just a fierce response from Iran, but a regional upheaval.
That makes a targeted strike against some of the regime's security forces a more likely option if Trump takes action.
Some groups are now pushing for exactly that. United Against Nuclear Iran, a U.S.-based advocacy group, on Monday presented the White House with a nearly 100-page intelligence report focused on a security body called the Tharallah Headquarters, which UANI calls the most critical cog in the Revolutionary Guard's suppression of domestic unrest. The report listed some 50 targets the U.S. could hit, drawing on documents it says were obtained from Revolutionary Guard headquarters.
Trump's former national-security adviser, John Bolton, said Trump would need to hit the Revolutionary Guard's bases, its volunteer militia known as the Basij, its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs and its navy, "and that is just to get started."
"Let's see if we can help the opposition," said Bolton, now a critic of Trump, on NewsNation. "A one-and-done strike isn't necessarily going to do that."
Even a targeted strike can escalate the situation in unpredictable ways.
"I think it has a huge potential to open up a Pandora's box inside of Iran, where the opposition rises up momentarily, but the regime still has a lot of power," said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Iran team chief at the Pentagon during the Obama administration now at advocacy group J Street. "And that is called civil war."
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 22, 2026 06:39 ET (11:39 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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