How Iran Became Strikeable
The structural fractures that made today's strikes possible were visible three years ago.
As bombs fall on Tehran tonight, the dominant framing is already hardening: this is about Iran’s nuclear program, about enriched uranium stockpiles crossing red lines, and about a regime that refused to negotiate.
That framing is incomplete, and dangerously so.
In 2023, I conducted an anticipatory risk analysis on Iran mapping the structural fractures that could push the country toward crisis within a one-to-five-year horizon. The analysis did not center on uranium centrifuges. It centered on something quieter and more consequential: what happens when a regime’s survival logic collides with the economic, social, and geopolitical conditions that make survival impossible.
Three years later, the scenarios I modeled are converging. That convergence is what made today’s strikes possible, and understanding it matters enormously for what comes next.
What the fractures looked like in 2023
The Iran I analyzed in 2023 was not a country on the brink of nuclear breakout. It was a country experiencing a perfect storm of fragility across every domain at once.
Social dissatisfaction had crossed a threshold. Previous waves of unrest - 2009, 2017, 2019, 2022, had been driven by specific grievances: elections, fuel prices, a young woman killed for her hijab. By 2023, the dissatisfaction was different. It cut across class, ethnicity, and generation. There was a pervasive sense of hopelessness, an echoed sentiment of “nothing to look forward to.” Iranian society had become more secular than the state that governed it: by 2023, clerics themselves acknowledged that two-thirds of the country’s mosques had closed, with active attendance estimated in the low single digits, yet the regime was doubling down on ideological enforcement, deploying AI-powered surveillance cameras to police hijab compliance while preparing legislation with prison sentences of up to ten years for violations.
What Western analysis consistently misses is the depth of the identity wound beneath these grievances. Iran is not a failed state or a nuclear crisis. It is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, and its people carry that inheritance. Many Iranians see themselves as heirs to a cosmopolitan, pre-revolutionary culture that was forcibly overwritten, and the regime’s sale of heritage sites to fund its own survival is experienced not as fiscal policy but as the erasure of who they are. The protests are about bread and fuel, yes, but they are also about a population that remembers what their country was and cannot accept what it has been made to become. What they are not is a unified call for any single alternative. Iranians inside the country are demanding economic relief, civil rights, and an end to clerical control - grievances that blend economic rage with identity grief but do not resolve into a coherent political program. The diaspora pushes harder toward regime change, with competing visions from monarchists to opposition councils, but those voices do not speak for the streets of Isfahan or Tabriz. This is not a vulnerability to be exploited by external actors. It is a fracture within a fracture, and any analysis that treats it merely as a “regime-change window” has understood nothing.
The economy was the worst it had been since the Iran-Iraq war. Currency exchange rates were opaque and manipulated across multiple tiers. Government subsidies on bread, oil, and fuel were the last buffer between the population and crisis, and they were eroding. Sanctions had become a narrative tool - used by the state to justify the status quo while benefiting a narrow elite. China invested more in Saudi Arabia than in Iran. Russia was fully occupied with its own war. The regime’s planning horizon had shrunk to one to two years, focused entirely on survival.
Geopolitically, Iran was pivoting eastward, forging deeper ties with Russia, China, and emerging multilateral frameworks. The JCPOA was functionally dead, European engagement nonexistent, and the proxy networks across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen that had long constituted Iran’s asymmetric deterrence were already showing signs of strain.
I mapped four scenarios along this trajectory:
dissent suppressed through surveillance and social fragmentation;
economic collapse triggered by subsidy failure and mega-inflation;
a full pivot east that would deepen institutional ties with Russia and China without delivering the economic relief the country needed; and,
in the longer term, regime collapse precipitated by the absence of a credible successor to the Supreme Leader.
The critical finding was that these were not discrete alternatives. They were interconnected stages of a single compounding process, each one accelerating the conditions for the next.
What happened between 2023 and today
Every axis accelerated, but the regime adapted.
The economic collapse materialized almost exactly as modeled. By late 2025, food and fuel inflation exceeded 300%. The rial continued its freefall. The regime began selling national assets, including culturally significant heritage sites, to fund basic fiscal operations, which citizens experienced as the erasure of Iranian identity itself. Tehran Times painted 2025 as a resilience triumph - claiming GDP growth, citing shadow fleet oil revenues and yuan-backed deals worth $14 billion annually, but the numbers masked a widening split between IRGC-linked elites profiting from sanctions arbitrage and a population unable to afford bread. The “Crimson Winter” protests that erupted in December 2025 were the largest since 1979, spreading across more than 100 cities. They were met with extraordinary violence: record executions, the longest internet blackout on record, and reports of foreign mercenaries deployed alongside security forces. Credible estimates indicate thousands were killed, though the true number remains contested and may never be known. The regime survived by brutalizing, externalizing blame onto the United States while tightening internal control.
The eastward pivot formalized rapidly over the same period. Iran signed a twenty-year strategic partnership with Russia in January 2025, followed by a trilateral pact with China and Russia in late January 2026, while deepening its role across BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union. On paper, this looked like a country building an alternative architecture for survival. In practice, none of it delivered economic relief. The pivot yielded diplomatic optics and symbolic sovereignty while the fiscal hole widened, precisely the gap the 2023 analysis identified.
Meanwhile, the regional buffer that had long insulated Iran from direct confrontation was collapsing. Hamas had been severely degraded in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Hezbollah lost key leadership in successive Israeli operations. The Assad regime in Syria fell in late 2024, severing Iran’s land bridge to Lebanon and eliminating the logistics corridor that had sustained its proxy network for decades. By early 2026, the asymmetric deterrence architecture that Iran had spent forty years building was weaker than at any point in its history. Arab states, exhausted by years of Houthi disruption in the Red Sea and proxy spillover across their borders, were quietly shifting from studied neutrality toward tacit alignment with Washington. Iran found itself in an impossible position: more embedded in non-Western institutional architecture than ever before, yet more militarily exposed than at any point since the revolution.
And throughout January and February 2026, while Geneva talks were nominally proceeding in good faith, the United States was assembling the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the Iraq War. Two carrier strike groups moved into position. F-35s deployed to Jordan. Patriot batteries spread across the Gulf. AWACS aircraft staged from Diego Garcia. Non-Western media tracked every movement in real time, and Oman’s foreign minister publicly warned that the buildup was undermining the very diplomacy it claimed to support. This was a signal broadcast in the open, and every government in the region understood what it meant. Once the hardware was in place, the cost of not using it rose with every passing day.
The pattern deserves to be named plainly, because it is not new. Sanctions compress an economy until the population destabilizes. Protests are encouraged from the outside and framed as evidence of regime illegitimacy. A military buildup proceeds in parallel with diplomatic engagement, ensuring that the buildup is already irreversible by the time talks are allowed to fail. When they do fail, as the terms were designed to ensure, the strikes arrive with the appearance of reluctant last resort rather than the premeditated sequence they were. The Iraq War followed this grammar. So did Libya. What distinguishes Iran in 2026 is not the playbook but the convergence of domestic fragility, proxy degradation, and regional acquiescence that made the playbook viable at a scale it had not previously achieved.
Why this matters for understanding today’s strikes
The dominant narrative frames the U.S.-Israeli operation as a response to Iran’s nuclear program, and that layer is real. Iran’s 60%-enriched stockpile surged past 440 kilograms by mid-2025, the JCPOA is gone, IAEA access has been curtailed, and three rounds of talks collapsed without agreement. But the nuclear file is the stated rationale, and not the structural explanation. Iran has been in the nuclear latency zone for years, and what changed is not breakout proximity. What changed is the convergence of conditions that made striking Iran appear low-risk and high-reward to Washington and Tel Aviv, and importantly what those strikes are meant to enable.
When Israel struck Iran in June 2025, I argued that the nuclear crisis narrative was a smokescreen - that the real target was Iran’s accelerating integration into BRICS+ trade corridors, alternative financial systems, and the China-Russia backed infrastructure designed to bypass Western economic leverage. Eight months later, the pattern has scaled. The February 2026 operation is the same logic at higher intensity, aimed not just at degrading Iran’s capacity but at forcing a regional redesign.
The broader U.S. endgame is Abraham Accords 2.0: an expanded U.S.-Israel-Gulf security-economic architecture that brings Saudi Arabia into formal normalization with Israel. Whether this represents a fully coordinated strategy or the convergence of overlapping interests across Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh, the direction is clear: that architecture requires Iran to be neutralized, either through capitulation or collapse, so that Gulf states feel safe enough to sign on. The strikes are the enabling condition.
The Geneva timeline makes this explicit. The third round of indirect talks concluded on February 26 without agreement. Washington demanded permanent zero enrichment, strict missile limits, and an end to proxy support. Iran floated consortium/stock abroad limits - capping enrichment, placing stockpiles abroad under consortium arrangements. The gap was unbridgeable. Two days later, with carriers already positioned and Gulf airspace quietly opened, the bombs fell. This was the final phase of a coercive sequence that began with the January buildup, ran through the performance of diplomacy, and ended in ordnance.
What converged, then, was not a single trigger but an entire structural alignment.
A regime that had adapted to internal crisis through repression and narrative control found that adaptation could sustain power but could not generate the economic relief its population desperately needed.
A proxy network that had once guaranteed any strike on Iran would trigger simultaneous retaliation across Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and the Red Sea - making direct confrontation prohibitively costly, had been degraded to the point where it could no longer deliver that threat.
Iran's eastward pivot: the trilateral pact, BRICS+ membership, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, looked formidable on paper but had delivered no economic relief, no military protection, and no leverage at the negotiating table.
The Arab states that had spent years absorbing the costs of Houthi shipping disruptions, Iraqi militia spillover, and Hezbollah's destabilizing presence were quietly enabling the very military action they condemned in public statements.
And behind all of it, a U.S. military buildup that telegraphed intent in plain sight while diplomacy provided the thinnest of covers.
This was not a crisis that spiraled beyond anyone’s control. It was a sequence that every actor in the region watched unfold, and that many quietly helped to build.
What anticipatory intelligence is for
In 2023, the fractures were visible. Whether off-ramps ever existed in any meaningful sense is a harder question, and an honest analysis has to sit with the discomfort of that. The West had no appetite for the kind of engagement that might have altered the trajectory. Europe’s post-JCPOA relationship with Iran was, as my 2023 analysis noted, functionally nonexistent, and when European powers did re-engage after the June 2025 strikes, it was driven by Hormuz oil panic and energy security, not by any genuine investment in Iranian economic stabilization or civilian welfare. The United States under both administrations pursued maximum pressure, treating Iranian suffering as strategic leverage rather than a problem to be solved.
And Khamenei, for his part, had spent decades defining any Western engagement as the work of arrogant powers seeking to dismantle the Islamic Republic from within, a conviction the JCPOA’s collapse only deepened.
Theoretical off-ramps existed on paper: separating the civilian nuclear question from the weapons question, offering economic channels outside the sanctions binary, investing in the stabilization that Iranian citizens were demanding in the streets. But there was no political will on one side and no ideological permission on the other.
What the intervening three years did was confirm what was already probable - that diplomatic neglect, ideological rigidity, and the progressive militarization of every remaining point of leverage would close whatever narrow windows might have existed, until the only actors with options were the ones holding missiles.
What comes next is deeply uncertain, though the early signals carry their own clarity. Iran’s retaliation is already hitting Israeli territory and U.S. bases across the Gulf. Reports suggest Khamenei may have been targeted, with conflicting claims about his status - Israeli assessments indicate he was hit, while Iran’s foreign minister insists he is alive in a secure location. If leadership continuity has been disrupted, it activates the succession crisis the 2023 analysis flagged as a pathway to regime collapse with no clear alternative.
The regional response is fractured in revealing ways. Gulf states are condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on their soil far more loudly than the U.S.-Israeli strikes that provoked them, a pattern of quiet enabling that effectively tilts the region toward Washington even as governments call publicly for de-escalation. Russia and China have offered rhetorical condemnation and nothing more: no military surge, no defense activation under the trilateral pact, no material support of any kind. Iranian state media frames the strikes as a Zionist-American plot to derail the eastward pivot, but the eastward partners themselves are delivering exactly what the 2023 analysis predicted: diplomatic optics without operational backing.
The proxy response tells a similar story of fragmentation. Houthi drone launches toward the Red Sea and Iraqi militia probes against U.S. bases suggest distributed, asymmetric harassment rather than coordinated retaliation. Hezbollah, notably, has offered only rhetoric, with the majority of its senior and mid-level leadership eliminated over the past year and a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, it has degraded capacity for the kind of barrage that once constituted Iran’s most credible regional threat. The network is acting semi-autonomously rather than as a coordinated axis, which raises the possibility that these strikes will fracture Iran’s deterrence architecture faster than they unify it.
The question the next 72 hours will answer is whether this escalation follows previous patterns, i.e., tit-for-tat strikes followed by off-ramps, or whether the explicit regime-change framing breaks that pattern entirely.When the U.S. administration tells Iranians to "take over your government" while its bombs are still falling on their country, that is not coercive diplomacy. It is an open incitement to regime change delivered under air cover, a direct violation of the UN Charter's prohibition on interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and a precedent that every non-Western capital will note and remember.
Today is a reminder of what anticipatory work exists to do. Fractures do not announce themselves with sirens. They accumulate quietly: in currency markets, in emptying mosques, in the gap between a regime’s ideology and its population’s lived reality, until the moment when they become someone else’s opportunity.
The work is to see them early enough that opportunity does not have to mean ordnance.
RAKSHA's forthcoming report, "Geopolitical Fractures 2026: How the Next Shock Propagates," maps the structural fault lines most likely to produce the next crisis, and the intervention windows that remain. Sign up to receive it at launch.