Winston Churchill recalled that, during the Blitz, London endured nightly bombing in what he described as a “cruel, wanton, indiscriminate” effort by Adolf Hitler to crush the resolve of a formidable “island race.”
Churchill accurately captured the resilience and courage of the British people. Yet as one of the United Kingdom’s foremost leaders and historical writers, he risked presenting Britain’s wartime experience as uniquely resilient.
History shows otherwise. Strategic bombing, absent a sustained ground campaign, has rarely compelled political surrender. Britain’s endurance under attack was not an exception; it was part of a recurring pattern.
The conflict launched by Israel and the United States against Iran illustrates this point. Trita Parsee, a scholar at the Washington-based Quincy Institute, told the South China Morning Post that “it’s safe to say that the [Iranian] government’s internal position is stronger than it was six months ago.”
In Parsee’s view, Tehran’s survival alone represents a strategic victory. He argued that Iranians “have really survived an attack that almost no other country in the region would be able to survive.” He added that the country had been attacked by two nuclear-weapon states and had “essentially come out on top,” increasing both its deterrence against regional rivals and its leverage at home.
Despite this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have publicly claimed that air strikes could force Iran’s surrender and provoke an uprising against its government. In his latest escalation, Trump urged Iranians to revolt, asking, “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” Beyond its moral and legal implications, the assumption that bombing alone could trigger the regime’s collapse appears profoundly misguided.
