Tehran Warns ‘Israel & US Bases Fair Game’ as Washington Mulls Strikes During 2-Week-Old Iran Uprising

Iranian leaders have threatened U.S. assets before—most notably after Qasem Soleimani’s killing on 3 Jan 2020—but the last full shutdown of domestic communications paired with explicit regional retaliation threats recalls the Shah’s 1978–79 blackout tactics that ultimately failed to stem revolution. Long-term, this episode sits at the junction of two trends: (1) Iran’s cyclical, currency-driven protest waves (1999, 2009, 2019) growing progressively more radical and coordinated, and (2) external actors—especially the U.S. and Israel—periodically flirting with direct intervention yet rarely pulling the trigger since the 1953 CIA-backed coup showed how blowback can outlive short-term gains. Whether Trump’s saber-rattling becomes the first U.S. strike on Iran proper since Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 will shape Gulf security architecture for decades; but if history is guide, outside pressure can unify Iran’s fractious elite and redirect popular anger, meaning that the real century-scale significance may lie less in airstrikes and more in whether these protests, despite the blackout, coalesce into a sustained anti-theocratic movement capable of surviving without foreign rescue.