Introduction

On 8 October 2024, against the backdrop of Israel’s aggression,  beginning with its strike on Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus and escalating through illegal military operations in Lebanon and a genocidal war on Gaza – the US-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) published a visual package mapping Iran’s military, nuclear and economic infrastructure as potential targets for further Israeli strikes. The FDD presented these maps as an assessment of strategic facilities that Israel could target in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on 1 October, an attack that was itself a legitimate act of self-defence in response to Israel’s killing of IRGC commander Abbas Nilforoushan and its broader campaign of aggression against Iran. Five days earlier, FDD senior fellow Jonathan Conricus had already displayed what the organisation called its “detailed FDD maps of possible targets in Iran” on CNN. The immediate context was the renewed Israel aggression against Iran in October 2024, but the strategic logic embedded in the maps was not created in October.

 

In April, senior FDD figures had already argued for “deterrence by punishment” and had explicitly placed Iranian ports, oil and gas refineries, pipelines and other economic infrastructure within the range of Israeli targets. Brenda Shaffer, an FDD senior adviser, went further by suggesting that, if Israel chose to attack Iran’s oil infrastructure, it would probably wait until after the November US presidential election. Three years earlier, the same institution had published Brenda Shaffer’s Iran Is More Than Persia, a monograph that treated Iran’s border provinces, ethnic cleavages, resource-rich Khuzestan and the consequences of weakened central authority as strategic variables in any future regime crisis. The significance of the October maps therefore extends beyond the targets they identify: they raise the question of what happens when a policy environment already concerned with the political vulnerabilities of Iran’s territorial cohesion begins simultaneously to normalise the physical destruction of the national capacities upon which that cohesion depends (Shaffer, 2021; Suren-Pahlav, 2021).

 

This article argues that the relevant issue is not whether FDD secretly designed an Israeli war plan, but what kind of strategy its own published material was constructing. Once the destruction of refineries, ports, pipelines and other economic nodes is treated as an instrument of coercion, pressure on a regime begins to merge with the physical incapacitation of the country governed by it. The distinction between weakening the Islamic regime and weakening Iran itself is therefore not rhetorical. This is the central political question raised by two decades of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy towards Iran, now rendered in the cold cartography of the FDD maps: as if the groundwork had already been laid for Donald Trump’s return to the White House and for the fulfilment of Netanyahu’s long-standing ambition, not simply to weaken the Islamic regime, but to annihilate Iran.

 

 

1. The map is the argument

FDD’s published maps placed Iranian military, nuclear and economic infrastructure within a prospective Israeli target set. The accompanying text was more revealing than the title. FDD stated that the maps represented its assessment of the Islamic regime’s “key military, nuclear, economic, and other centers” and that these “could be possible targets” in retaliation for Iranian attacks on Israel (FDD, 2024c). The analytical problem begins with the word economic. Military installations belong to a coercive apparatus. Nuclear facilities may enter a separate strategic calculation. That category itself ranges from enrichment and research facilities to Bushehr, an operating civilian nuclear power station, where the foreseeable consequences of a successful attack raise a qualitatively different question of radiological risk [1]. Economic infrastructure, however, is embedded in the daily life of the state and society at the same time. Refineries produce the fuel on which civilian transport, agriculture, industry and distribution depend. Ports move food, machinery, medicine and commercial goods as well as state-controlled exports. Pipelines move energy through a national system that no regime, however authoritarian, consumes by itself. Once these assets are incorporated into a retaliatory target set, the object of coercion is no longer confined to the institutions that exercise political power. The material capacity of the country becomes part of the mechanism through which pressure is to be applied.

 

Yet, the maps did not first appear on 8 October. On 3 October, FDD senior fellow Jonathan Conricus appeared on CNN presenting what FDD itself described as “detailed FDD maps of possible targets in Iran”, ahead of an anticipated Israeli response to Iran’s 1 October missile attack (FDD, 2024b). The five-day gap is important because it establishes that 8 October was the date of formal publication, not the moment at which the target architecture was conceived. There is no public evidence establishing when the graphics were first prepared, and it would be unsound to invent such a date. The relevant question can be answered without speculation: were the categories represented on the maps improvised after 1 October, or had FDD already been constructing a doctrine in which Iran’s economic infrastructure was treated as a legitimate instrument of strategic punishment? The record from April answers that question more clearly than the October graphics themselves.

 

 

2. April: from retaliation to “deterrence by punishment”

The April confrontation provides the necessary context, but chronology matters only because it discloses continuity of strategic reasoning. Israel have struck the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus on 1 April, killing senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) personnel, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi (Suren-Pahlav, 2024a). Iran retaliated on 13–14 April with its first large-scale direct drone and missile attack from Iranian territory against Israel (Suren-Pahlav, 2024b). Israel then carried out a strike near Isfahan on 19 April, and both regimes acted in ways that appeared designed to prevent the exchange from becoming a sustained interstate war (Reuters, 2024a; Reuters, 2024b; Reuters, 2024c). The period therefore did not amount to the full-scale war that many feared, but it opened a direct interstate confrontation in which the question of what Israel should strike inside Iran became immediate.

 

FDD’s answer was not limited to the military systems used in Iran’s attack. On 15 April, FDD chief executive Mark Dubowitz and senior fellow Jacob Nagel argued that Israel should abandon what they characterised as “deterrence by denial” and adopt “deterrence by punishment”. They proposed attacks not only on drone and missile production and storage facilities, but also on Iranian ports, oil and gas refineries, pipelines and “other infrastructure that finance the regime” (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024). Two days later, an FDD briefing again listed Iranian ports and oil and gas infrastructure, including refineries and pipelines, among possible Israeli targets (FDD, 2024a). These are not stray references. They reveal the strategic logic of war that would later find concrete expression in the October maps, in which FDD rather shrewdly recodes Iran’s national economic assets as ‘regime infrastructure’, a rhetorical move that transforms the country’s productive capacity into a legitimate military target. Once that move is accepted, a large part of the national economy can be treated as an extension of the regime and therefore as an object of military coercion.

 

That conceptual move deserves far more scrutiny. Every government in the world, depends upon taxable economic activity, energy systems, ports, transport and communications. If the fact that a regime derives revenue from an asset is sufficient to transform that asset into “regime infrastructure”, the distinction between state power and national productive capacity becomes dangerously elastic. The Islamic regime controls Iran’s energy sector and benefits from it, but a nation of 90 million people also lives through and depends upon that same system. A refinery cannot be analytically separated into one set of pipes serving the regime and another serving society. The same facility that produces revenue for the regime produces fuel for the country. The same port that generates foreign-exchange revenues also serves as a lifeline for essential imports, including food and medicine. To target such infrastructure in order to impose political costs on the regime is therefore to make the functioning of the national economy part of the coercive instrument.

 

Therefore, the question that must be examined is whether the objective is merely to impose political and military costs on the Islamic regime, or whether something more expansive is at work: the weakening of Iran itself to the point of strategic paralysis and eventual destruction. To answer that question, one must look beyond the maps and examine the longer history of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy towards Iran, FDD’s prescriptions for coercion and military pressure, and the broader US–Israeli discourse directed at Iran as a country, rather than solely at the regime that governs it.

 

 

3. From Netanyahu's strategic preferences to Washington's Iran policy establishment

The significance of FDD's proposals cannot be understood by treating their authors as detached commentators entering a debate that began with Iran's April 2024 retaliation. As stated above, one of the authors of the 15 April article advocating ‘deterrence by punishment’, including attacks upon Iranian ports, refineries and pipelines, was Jacob Nagel, a former national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu and former acting head of Israel's National Security Council. His co-author was Mark Dubowitz, FDD's chief executive and a longstanding advocate of strengthening American coercive pressure upon Iran. Their political histories establish a connection between Israeli national-security policymaking and Washington's Iran policy establishment, within which similar strategic preferences were being articulated on both sides. The significance of that connection lies not in assuming that previous service under Netanyahu necessarily makes Nagel an instrument of the Israeli regime, but in recognising that the proposed expansion of military retaliation into Iran's economic infrastructure was being advanced by individuals already closely associated with the longstanding debate over the use of military force against Iran (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024a).

 

Netanyahu’s decades-long campaign to drag Washington into military confrontation with Iran has rested on one remarkably durable device: the Iranian nuclear bomb that is always imminent, yet somehow never arrives. For three decades, the deadline moved from years to months, from months to weeks and, once the appointed hour passed without the promised bomb, conveniently back to years again. This was no longer merely a succession of predictions that happened to be wrong; the endlessly receding deadline had become a political instrument in its own right. The Bush administration’s false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Tony Blair’s notorious fabrication of the “45 minutes” warning demonstrated how fear, certainty and intelligence could be marshalled to prepare the political ground for war. Netanyahu, however, rather shamelessly turned the deceptive technique into something almost permanent: every expired deadline produced not an admission of error, but another hoax deadline. The alleged bomb was always coming, the danger was always grave and existential, and military action was always urgent. The lie persisted; only the date changed:

 

• On 11 January 1995, speaking in the Knesset, Netanyahu declared that within “three to five years” Iran would become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce nuclear bombs (Knesset, 1995).

 

• Later that same year, apparently unwilling to waste a perfectly serviceable prophecy, Netanyahu repeated it: Iran was three to five years away from possessing the prerequisites for independent nuclear-weapons production (Netanyahu, 1995).

 

• On 10 July 1996, addressing a joint meeting of the US Congress, the countdown acquired greater urgency. Netanyahu called for international action to prevent Iran and Iraq from obtaining nuclear weapons, warning that “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close” and, shortly afterwards, that “time is running out” (US Congress, 1996).

 

• Time did indeed run out, though not in the way Netanyahu had predicted. Five years came and went and Iran did not build the bomb. On 12 September 2002, rather than account for the expired deadline, Netanyahu simply issued another warning. Testifying before the US House Committee on Government Reform, he claimed that Iraq, Iran and Libya were “racing to develop nuclear weapons” (US House of Representatives, 2002).

 

• Iran again declined to produce the bomb according to Netanyahu’s timetable. By 16 February 2009, during a meeting in Jerusalem with a US congressional delegation led by Senator Benjamin Cardin, the old three-to-five-year clock had been discarded for a new one. Netanyahu conceded that he did not know with certainty how close Iran was, but said that “our experts” assessed it to be probably one or two years away from nuclear-weapons capability. The US Embassy recorded the meeting in a cable dated 26 February (US Embassy Tel Aviv, 2009a).

 

• Nine months later, the countdown was reset yet again. On 16 November 2009, asked directly by another congressional delegation about the timetable for an Iranian nuclear weapon, Netanyahu said Iran already possessed the capability to make one bomb, or could wait and make several “in a year or two”. Conveniently, there also remained “a year or two” in which to stop it. The conversation was recorded in a US diplomatic cable issued on 23 December (US Embassy Tel Aviv, 2009b).

 

• By 16 September 2012, years had become months. Appearing on US television, Netanyahu announced that Iran was now only “six or seven months” from reaching the brink of being able to build a nuclear bomb and would, by roughly mid-2013, possess about 90 per cent of the enriched uranium required (Spetalnick and Williams, 2012).

 

• Eleven days later came the theatrical high point. On 27 September 2012, standing before the UN General Assembly with his now-famous cartoon bomb, Netanyahu declared that Iran would complete the intermediate stage of enrichment by spring or summer 2013. After that, he said, only “a few months, possibly a few weeks” would separate Iran from enough highly enriched uranium for its first bomb (Netanyahu, 2012).

 

• Spring arrived. Summer followed. The bomb did not. By 20 March 2013, Netanyahu had therefore returned to the more forgiving language of years. During a joint press conference with Barack Obama in Jerusalem, he said that if Iran actually decided to manufacture a nuclear weapon, it would take “about a year” (White House, 2013).

 

• Four months later, on 14 July 2013, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, the year-long clock contracted once more. Netanyahu claimed Iran was approaching his 250 kg threshold of 20%-enriched uranium and could move beyond it “within a few weeks” once it reached the critical mass (CBS News, 2013).

 

• Another year passed. No bomb appeared. On 3 March 2015, Netanyahu went before another joint meeting of Congress and returned once again to his preferred unit of political urgency: weeks. Iran, he warned, could produce fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal “in a matter of weeks” and could consequently be only weeks away from possessing enough enriched uranium for such an arsenal (Washington Post, 2015).

 

• Those weeks, too, came and went. Iran still did not produce Netanyahu’s repeatedly imminent bomb. Yet on 1 October 2015, before the UN General Assembly, he recycled essentially the same warning: Iran was “weeks away” from possessing sufficient fissile material for an entire arsenal (United Nations, 2015).

 

• Once again, the weeks expired but the prophecy survived. On 19 September 2017, Netanyahu simply stretched the clock back out. Addressing the UN, he warned that “in a few years” restrictions under the JCPOA would begin to disappear and that Iran would eventually be free to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, placing it on the threshold of a “massive arsenal” of nuclear weapons (Netanyahu, 2017).

 

By then, the mechanism had become almost self-parodying. Three to five years became one or two years; one or two years became six or seven months; months became weeks; weeks became a year; and when each deadline expired without producing the bomb that had supposedly made immediate action indispensable, Netanyahu did not abandon the warning. He abandoned the deadline. The clock was reset, the alarm sounded again, and Washington was once more told that time was running out.

 

Nor was this rhetoric confined to speeches about Iran. In September 2002, Netanyahu appeared before the US Congress and advocated removing Saddam Hussein, assuring legislators that taking out Saddam’s regime would have “enormous positive reverberations” across the region (US House of Representatives, 2002). The invasion that followed hardly vindicated that confidence. Yet Iran remained the larger prize in Netanyahu’s campaign for American military power in the region.

 

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Netanyahu again pressed towards military confrontation, seeking advance assurances that Washington would stand behind an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear programme and join the conflict should Iran retaliate. Obama declined to provide the commitment Netanyahu sought and subsequently pursued the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), concluded in July 2015. Netanyahu opposed the agreement, as did FDD's leadership, which argued that its restrictions on Iran's nuclear capabilities were insufficient and that stronger economic pressure was necessary. This was not merely a disagreement over the technical provisions of a nuclear accord. It concerned the means through which Iranian strategic capabilities were to be constrained and, more fundamentally, the extent to which Washington would accommodate Israeli demands for a more coercive approach towards Tehran. Obama pursued a negotiated framework involving nuclear restrictions, international monitoring and sanctions relief, while Netanyahu continued to regard the agreement as inadequate to Israel's security requirements. The dispute exposed a longstanding divergence over the role of diplomacy and military coercion in American policy towards Iran (PBS, 2016; Dubowitz, 2015).  The Iranian bomb therefore remained where it had proved most politically useful for years: perpetually just beyond the horizon, close enough to demand war, yet distant enough for the deadline to be reset when war did not come.The use of the hoax claim that Iran was perpetually on the verge of building a nuclear bomb was, however, only one layer of a broader, long-term Israeli strategy against Iran.

 

A confidential US diplomatic cable recording a 2007 meeting between Mossad director Meir Dagan and senior American officials is revealing because it sets out what Dagan himself described as Israel’s five-pillar approach. Alongside political pressure, sanctions, counter-proliferation and covert measures, Dagan identified regime change as a separate instrument and argued that more should be done to support Iranian student movements and ethnic groups, specifically naming Azeris, Kurds and Baluchs. More significantly, he urged Israel, the United States and like-minded states to pursue all five pillars simultaneously and argued that greater effort should be devoted to ‘develop[ing] the identities of [the so-called] ethnic minorities’ inside Iran (US Embassy Tel Aviv, 2007). The significance of this document lies not in treating every subsequent Israeli or American policy as the execution of a single immutable plan, but in establishing that the instrumentalisation of internal identity, economic pressure and regime-change strategy had already been conceived as mutually reinforcing instruments rather than as separate policy compartments.

 

This earlier record also complicates the language through which subsequent pressure on Iran was presented. If civil discontent and division weaken national cohesion, economic sanctions erode the economic foundations of the state, covert action strains its institutional capacity, and external actors simultaneously cultivate subnational political identities as potential instruments of fragmentation, the cumulative effect extends well beyond the removal of a particular political regime. What is increasingly at stake is the resilience of Iran as a state, irrespective of the political order governing it. This distinction becomes indispensable when, seventeen years later, economic infrastructure appears on FDD’s prospective target maps. Ports, pipelines and refineries sustain not merely the Islamic regime but the territorial state itself, whose cohesion and stability were already vulnerable to the earlier forms of pressure. Material weakening and political fragmentation need not have been conceived as a single operation for their effects to become mutually reinforcing.

 

Trump's arrival in the White House in January 2017 altered the American policy environment. On 8 May 2018, his administration unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and began reinstating sanctions lifted under the agreement. The decision established a substantial convergence between Trump's Iran policy and the longstanding objections advanced by Netanyahu and FDD's leadership, which had advocated stronger economic pressure on Iran. Yet this convergence did not automatically translate into a willingness to commit the United States to a sustained military campaign against Iran.

 

In June 2019, Trump cancelled planned retaliatory strikes against Iran following the downing of an American surveillance drone. His restraint, however, proved dangerously selective. On 3 January 2020, he authorised the assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, bringing Washington and Tehran into direct military confrontation and exposing the region to the risk of a wider war (US Department of Defense, 2020). Yet in November 2020, when presented with options for attacking Iran's principal nuclear facility at Natanz, Trump ultimately decided against proceeding (Reuters, 2020). The record therefore reveals a more complicated relationship between Trump's willingness to use American military power and Netanyahu's longstanding pursuit of a more confrontational policy towards Iran. Trump was prepared to abandon the nuclear agreement, intensify economic sanctions and authorise the assassination of a senior Iranian military commander, but stopped short of launching the sustained military campaign against Iran that Netanyahu had sought to secure from Washington. At the same time, his administration maintained substantial American military assistance to Israel, including continued support for its missile-defence capabilities (US Department of State, 2018).  The distinction was therefore not between military involvement and non-involvement, but between Washington's willingness to provide Israel with military support and its reluctance, on the occasions examined here, to undertake a wider offensive war against Iran itself.

 

Trump's arrival in the White House in January 2017 altered the American policy environment. On 8 May 2018, his administration unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and began reinstating sanctions lifted under the agreement. The decision established a substantial convergence between Trump's Iran policy and the longstanding objections advanced by Netanyahu and FDD's leadership, which had advocated stronger economic pressure on Iran. Yet the distinction between economic coercion and direct military intervention remained. In June 2019, Trump cancelled planned retaliatory strikes against Iran following the downing of an American surveillance drone. His restraint, however, proved dangerously selective. On 3 January 2020, he authorised the assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, bringing Washington and Tehran to the brink of a wider military confrontation. Yet, despite this escalation, Trump stopped short of launching a sustained military campaign against Iran. In November 2020, he considered options for attacking Iran’s principal nuclear facility but ultimately decided against proceeding. His first presidency therefore demonstrated that Trump’s willingness to abandon the nuclear agreement had not established an equivalent willingness to commit American military power to the sustained confrontation with Iran that Netanyahu had previously sought to secure from Washington (Dubowitz and Goldberg, 2018; Reuters, 2019; Reuters, 2020). However, this did not mean that Netanyahu had abandoned his ambition of war with Iran, as evidenced by FDD’s continued activities during the Trump presidency.

 

In 2020, Eldar Mamedov, writing for Responsible Statecraft, characterised FDD as having supplied a ‘roadmap’ for Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign while simultaneously promoting the political mobilisation of ethnic divisions inside Iran. His criticism centred particularly upon Brenda Shaffer, then already an FDD senior adviser, whose work treated Iranian Azerbaijan as a potential source of unrest and who, according to Mamedov’s account, had urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to incorporate ethnic-based opposition organisations into the wider maximum-pressure strategy (Mamedov, 2020). Whatever judgement one makes about Mamedov’s interpretation, the policy conjunction he identified is analytically important: economic strangulation was being discussed alongside the activation of internal political cleavages. Pressure upon the regime and pressure upon the cohesion of the state were no longer easily separable categories.

 

This distinction becomes critical when examining the subsequent development of FDD's policy proposals. The opposition to the JCPOA had concerned the adequacy of negotiated restrictions, sanctions relief and the broader question of how American economic and diplomatic power should be exercised against Iran. By April 2024, however, senior FDD figures were publicly advocating a punitive doctrine that extended beyond financial restrictions and diplomatic pressure to contemplate the physical destruction of Iranian ports, refineries, pipelines and other economic installations. This was not simply the continuation of the earlier dispute over the nuclear agreement through different means. It introduced an additional instrument of coercion whose consequences would extend beyond the governing establishment and into the national infrastructure inherited by any successor political entity. The relevant distinction is therefore not merely between diplomacy and military force, but between restricting the economic resources available to an authoritarian regime and physically disabling the productive and logistical capacity of the country itself. The former may constrain the regime's ability to exercise power; the latter can impose material consequences upon Iran that survive the removal of the political order against which the coercion was originally directed (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024a).

 

The political significance of this development becomes clearer when FDD’s proposals are examined against the backdrop of the approaching American presidential election. Israel’s April aggression against Iran, in violation of international law prohibiting attacks on diplomatic premises, and Iran’s subsequent response provided the immediate context for discussions of military retaliation. Yet the proposals advanced by Dubowitz and Nagel went considerably further, extending the range of potential targets beyond military installations to include the economic infrastructure upon which Iran’s national productive capacity depended.

 

By July, the same authors were again proposing that Israel should continue to act offensively against Iran, presenting a more confrontational military aggression as necessary to counter Iran's defensive capabilities (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024b). The significance of these publications lies in the development of a policy argument in which economic infrastructure had already entered the contemplated target set months before FDD formally published these maps. The maps therefore cannot be understood as a response to the immediate circumstances of Iran's missile attack on 1 October. They must be examined against the earlier articulation of a punitive military strategy and the political circumstances in which its implementation might become possible. This brings the American presidential election into the centre of the analysis, not because its outcome could be known in advance, but because the electoral timetable and the prospect of a change in Washington's approach towards Iran were already relevant to the consideration of military options (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024a; 2024b).

 

 

4. The election is already inside the strategic calculation

The most revealing April intervention came from Brenda Shaffer, FDD’s senior adviser for energy. Writing on 16 April, Shaffer argued that the direct Iran–Israel confrontation should be understood over “months, not days” and discussed the Israeli attack on Iran’s oil infrastructure. Her analysis then introduced the American electoral calendar into the military calculation. Because the Biden administration wanted sufficient oil on global markets during an election year, she wrote, “if Israel decides to attack Iran’s oil infrastructure, it will likely wait to do it until after the US November elections” (Shaffer, 2024).

 

Despite rumours that Israeli officials, pro-Israel lobbyists and US senators on Israel’s payroll are working to return Trump to the White House, and speculation that a re-elected Trump, driven by narcissism and desire for revenge, could play into Netanyahu’s hands, no hard evidence establishes that FDD knows who will win the election, that Israel has decided to strike Iranian oil facilities, or that FDD has access to an operational plan. Yet, the significance is narrower and harder to dismiss: by mid-April, the destruction of Iranian oil infrastructure was sufficiently normalised within this policy discussion that its politically convenient timing was being considered in relation to the American presidential election. Shaffer’s April 2024 intervention acquires a different significance when read against the work FDD had already published under her name. In 2021, FDD released ‘Iran Is More Than Persia: Ethnic Politics in the Islamic Republic’, ostensibly an examination of Iran’s linguistic diversity and the so-called ethnic composition. Yet Iran’s linguistic diversity does not amount to a mosaic of discrete ethnic nations [2]. This is the analytical premise that Shaffer’s monograph manufactures, and it is precisely this fabrication that makes her framing strategically useful to those who seek to recast Iran’s linguistic diversity as evidence of a multi-ethnic state, turning that manufactured distinction into a vulnerability to be exploited. The monograph identified Iran’s border provinces as potential centres of instability, described Khuzestan as the centre of Iranian oil production and home to major ports and transport routes, and argued that an ‘all-out regime crisis’ could enable revolts in several minority provinces to mount a significant challenge to the regime. More revealing still, it observed that federative and confederative structures can facilitate the disintegration of states because clear internal borders and local political institutions can acquire interests separate from the centre when central authority weakens. Its recommendations urged American institutions to instrumentalise Iran’s linguistic diversity by recasting it as ‘ethnic politics’, a framing also adopted by federalist and separatist groups, and specifically to assess the strategic vulnerability arising from the concentration of oil production, pipelines and ports in Khuzestan. In doing so, Shaffer falsifies the facts by portraying Khuzestan as a predominantly Arabic-speaking province, whereas Persian is the most widely spoken language, followed by Bakhtiari-Luri, whose speakers together constitute the province’s linguistic majority. This falsification serves to recast Khuzestan’s linguistic diversity as an ethnic division that could be exploited to weaken Iran’s territorial cohesion (Shaffer, 2021).

 

Iran, unlike Iraq and almost all other Middle Eastern states carved out and created by the British and French in the twentieth century, is a nation-state rooted in an ancient civilisation, with a continuous political and cultural history stretching back thousands of years. Its linguistic diversity cannot simply be recast as a collection of distinct ethnic identities whose political separation would necessarily weaken the Iranian state. Yet Shaffer's earlier treatment of that diversity as a potential strategic vulnerability was followed, in 2024, by her discussion of when Israel might find it politically convenient to strike the oil infrastructure upon which Iran's national economy depends. The significance of this development lies not in establishing that she abandoned one approach in favour of another, but in the relationship between the two: the political fragmentation of Iran and the physical destruction of its economic foundations could have mutually reinforcing consequences. This does not, by itself, establish the existence of a single institutional plan to partition Iran. It does, however, raise a more consequential question for the present inquiry: whether the political geography of Iranian fragmentation and the military geography of Iranian economic destruction can reasonably be treated as wholly unrelated bodies of thought. One identifies where central authority might fracture; the other identifies the physical capacities whose destruction could accelerate that fracture. The political question is what happens when both propositions are acted upon in the same historical crisis.

 

That chronology changes how the October maps should be read. Rather than introducing a new response to the events of 1 October, they gave visual form to categories of destruction that FDD figures had already advocated months earlier, turning an established strategic argument into a prospective target architecture.

 

 

5. Pressure on a regime or incapacitation of a country?

The central political question is what the strategy is designed to make hurt. FDD’s language presents economic targets through the political identity of the regime: ports, refineries and pipelines become relevant because they finance the Islamic regime. Yet the physical consequences of destroying them cannot be contained within the regime. The regime may lose revenue, but society loses capacity. This is where the distinction between coercive pressure and physical incapacitation becomes decisive. Sanctions can inflict severe civilian harm and should not be romanticised. Yet, by restricting financial transactions, access to resources and revenue, they can weaken the regime economically and compel it to reconsider its policies, including its relationship with the nation it governs. Should the regime change its behaviour in response to sanctions, or should the resulting economic pressure provoke a popular uprising leading to regime change, the effects of those sanctions may, at least in principle, be reversed by lifting the restrictions. But a destroyed refinery is not restored by changing policy. A demolished port does not reopen because a political system changes. Pipelines, terminals, grids and industrial plant are fixed capital. Their destruction survives the political decision that supposedly justified it.

 

The political consequence is therefore different in kind. If a regime is overthrown after years of sanctions, a successor can seek the removal of those sanctions and attempt to restore trade. If a regime is overthrown after its country’s productive and logistical infrastructure has been physically destroyed, the successor inherits the destruction. It inherits fuel shortages, damaged transport, reduced industrial output, disrupted imports, lost revenue and a reconstruction bill. This is why the cunning phrase “infrastructure that finances the regime” conceals more than it clarifies. The regime is temporary; the infrastructure is national. The Islamic regime can be replaced. Iran’s physical economy cannot be replaced by decree.

 

International humanitarian law does not resolve this political question merely by attaching the label “infrastructure” to a site. The customary rule of distinction requires parties to distinguish civilian objects from military objectives, and attacks may be directed only against military objectives (ICRC, n.d.). Some economic infrastructure can acquire a military character in particular circumstances, especially where it makes an effective contribution to military action, but the legal question turns on concrete function and anticipated military advantage, not on the general proposition that an asset produces revenue for an adversarial regime. Even dual-use objects require case-by-case assessment, proportionality, and precautions. FDD’s maps are not military orders and do not establish the legal status of any individual site, but they group economic nodes with military and nuclear targets without any such qualifications. That omission is not neutral analysis; it is the normalisation of targeting that would inflict maximum pain on the Iranian nation. What the maps do reveal is a strategic discourse in which economic nodes are already being grouped with military and nuclear installations as objects of possible retaliation. Politically, that is the point at which one must ask whether the intended pressure is still directed at rulers or increasingly at the material systems without which the ruled cannot function.

 

 

6. What the maps are actually establishing?

The wrong evidential test is whether FDD possessed formal command authority over Israeli target selection. Think tanks must be distinguished by the interests they serve, not merely by their claims of institutional independence. Whatever FDD claims about its independence, its role within the Israeli–Washington policy establishment is to advance and protect the strategic interests of the states it serves, regardless of the human cost. It requires no formal command authority to perform this function. Its political work is to define threats, construct strategic options in line with the expectations of the political establishment, legitimise state policies and normalise their consequences, however inhumane, before governments decide whether to act upon them. By October 2024, FDD had already performed that work publicly.

 

Dubowitz and Nagel had advanced ‘deterrence by punishment’ against Iranian ports, refineries and pipelines; Shaffer had placed a possible strike on oil infrastructure within the political timetable created by the American election; Conricus had carried FDD’s target maps onto CNN; and on 8 October the organisation formally published the same target architecture. The April advocacy and the October maps are not separate events. They form a documented sequence in which FDD first argued for attacking ports, refineries, and pipelines, then published a visual target package that included them. This is not an accident of drafting; it is a strategic choice to expand the category of acceptable destruction from military capability to national capacity. Taken in this sense, these maps should be read as a strategic road map for war, not an operational order containing flight paths, weapon allocations or attack times, but a political architecture identifying what might be struck, why its destruction should be regarded as strategically legitimate, and how the category of acceptable coercion could be expanded from military capability to national economic capacity (Dubowitz and Nagel, 2024a; Shaffer, 2024; FDD, 2024b; 2024c).

 

A strategic road map performs political work long before the first bomb is dropped. By placing prospective targets in the public domain, FDD turns hypothetical destruction into an available policy option, supplies it with a vocabulary of necessity and prepares public opinion to accept what would otherwise demand far greater scrutiny. Its maps do not merely identify what Israel might attack; they help establish the political justification for attacking it. Once ports, refineries, pipelines and other assets upon which millions of Iranians depend are presented as ‘regime infrastructure’, their destruction can be portrayed as a legitimate act of military coercion rather than an assault on the national economy and the civilian population it sustains. The distinction is not semantic. It determines how the consequences of an attack are understood, how civilian suffering is explained and whether the destruction of a country’s essential infrastructure can be presented as an unavoidable cost of confronting its government. The maps did not create the strategy; they gave its prospective destruction a geography, a political vocabulary and an appearance of legitimacy.

 

The same problem arises from FDD’s presentation of Iran’s military installations. By placing the IRGC emblem over military targets, the maps risk conflating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with Iran’s wider military establishment, obscuring the distinction between the regime’s ideological military apparatus and the country’s regular armed forces, including its army, navy and air force. These institutions do not cease to be national defence forces merely because they operate under the authority of the Islamic Republic. Yet the visual association of military installations with the IRGC makes it easier to portray their destruction as the dismantling of the regime’s coercive apparatus, rather than the degradation of Iran’s capacity to defend its territory (Suren-Pahlav, 2020). The consequences would extend far beyond the survival of the present political order. If Iran’s regular armed forces and border defences were destroyed or severely weakened, the country would be deprived of much of its ability to defend its sovereignty. In the event of a subsequent ground invasion, the absence of those forces could leave Iranian territory exposed to foreign military occupation, irrespective of whether the Islamic regime remained in power.

 

The comparison with Gaza raises a further question about the political consequences of such labelling. Where civilians and the infrastructure sustaining their lives are treated as indistinguishable from an armed organisation, the distinction between attacking that organisation and attacking the population disappears. The extensive destruction of Gaza and the murder of nearly 60,000 civilians, including 21,000 children, which the UN has recognised as genocide and war crimes committed by Israelis, demonstrate the human consequences that demand scrutiny when military justifications are extended to the civilian environment. The relevance to FDD’s maps lies in the same underlying strategy: once Iran’s national infrastructure and regular armed forces are visually and politically absorbed into the category of ‘regime assets’, their prospective destruction can be presented as a necessary operation against the Islamic regime, while the consequences for Iran and her people are pushed out of view.

 

The importance of FDD’s maps therefore lies not simply in the targets they identify, but in the political understanding they encourage before any attack takes place. A refinery becomes a regime asset, a national military installation becomes an IRGC target, and the destruction of capacities indispensable to the country’s survival becomes a legitimate means of weakening its rulers. The regime may be the declared target, but Iran itself would bear the destruction. That is the distinction the maps threaten to erase.

 

The distinction between stated intention and objective effect is not a defence; it is the basis for accountability. FDD need not explicitly advocate civilian suffering for its proposed strategy to produce precisely that outcome. Nor can the political labelling of national infrastructure as ‘regime assets’ absolve its proponents of responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of its destruction. The relevant test is not what FDD claims to intend, but what its proposed targets would mean for Iran and its people. That is why the April and October record warrants scrutiny: not merely for the military options FDD places in the public domain, but for the human and national consequences it seeks to legitimise.

 

 

7. The Other Map: Weakening the Centre and Politicising the Periphery

As stated above, the FDD’s target maps are not the only cartography relevant to this inquiry. Long before FDD began placing Iranian economic infrastructure within a prospective military target set, another strategic map of Iran had circulated through sections of the Israeli and Washington policy environment: Iran represented not principally as an integrated historical state, but as an assemblage of ethnic, linguistic and regional constituencies whose political identities might acquire strategic value if the authority of the centre weakened. Every multilingual state contains internal diversity. The political question begins when those differences cease to be matters of identity and representation and are instead treated as instruments through which pressure can be applied against the territorial state itself.

 

This possibility was being discussed at an official strategic level long before FDD published Brenda Shaffer’s work. A classified US diplomatic cable recording an August 2007 meeting between Mossad director Meir Dagan and senior American officials described what Dagan called Israel’s five-pillar strategy towards Iran. Alongside diplomatic pressure, sanctions, counter-proliferation and covert measures stood a fifth pillar: fragmentation of Iran. Dagan argued that more should be done to support Iranian student movements and peripheral provinces and Azeris, Kurds and Baluch speakers. The cable also recorded his assessment that inflation and tensions among Iranians created ‘unique opportunities’ inside Iran. The significance lies in Dagan’s implicit advocacy of Iran’s partition, without openly acknowledging it in the document. By treating economic vulnerability, covert pressure and the political mobilisation of fabricated internal identities as complementary instruments within the same strategic framework, he laid the groundwork for the fragmentation of the Iranian state (US Embassy Tel Aviv, 2007).

 

That distinction matters. Once a state’s linguistic diversity is recast as ethnic divisions to be exploited for strategic advantage, the objective ceases to be merely changing the behaviour of its regime and extends to weakening the cohesion of the state itself.

 

By 2017, this logic had surfaced in more explicit, though unofficial, Israeli commentary. Edy Cohen argued in an Arabic newspaper that Israel should support the separation of Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan, which he described as ‘Ahwaz’, and presented that territory as a potential internal front against Tehran (Cohen, 2017). Cohen relevance lies precisely in its political imagination. Khuzestan was not being discussed merely as an Iranian province whose population might oppose the Islamic regime, but as a resource-rich territory whose political detachment from Iran could itself serve a strategic purpose. The significance of oil, ports and territory had therefore already begun to converge within a strand of Israeli discussion years before those same categories of economic infrastructure appeared in FDD’s target architecture.

 

My concern with this process predates the present confrontation. In The Federalist Trap, I argued that imposing ethno-territorial federalism upon Iran would do considerably more than decentralise administration. It would convert linguistic difference into territorially bounded political identity, create political units capable of developing institutional interests distinct from the national centre, and provide the constitutional scaffolding through which a crisis of regime could become a crisis of sovereignty (Suren-Pahlav, 2013). My later examination of Bernard Lewis placed the same danger within a broader tradition of strategic thinking in which the fragmentation of large regional states could diminish their capacity to operate as independent geopolitical actors (Suren-Pahlav, 2018). Their approach to Iran has therefore been structural: transforming linguistic diversity into territorially defined political identities creates the conditions in which weakening central authority could threaten the territorial cohesion of the Iranian state, rather than merely bring about a change of regime.

 

I developed the material side of that argument more explicitly in 2020 in ‘Israel’s Strategic Doctrine and the Somalisation of Iran’. There I examined a scenario in which the degradation of Iran’s air and naval capacity was followed by attacks upon oil and gas infrastructure, refineries, energy systems, ports, transport corridors and industrial production. The political danger was not simply economic loss. Such destruction would diminish the state’s ability to integrate its territory economically, project authority administratively and defend it militarily. Prolonged material paralysis could then turn existing political tensions into struggles over authority, resources, patronage and territory. The relevance of that earlier analysis to the present article is chronological as well as conceptual: the argument that infrastructural destruction could become the bridge between regime weakening and state fragmentation preceded FDD’s October 2024 maps. It has not been reconstructed retrospectively from them (Suren-Pahlav, 2020).

 

By 2020, the connection between economic pressure and the strategic instrumentalisation of Iran’s linguistic diversity had also become the subject of criticism directed specifically at FDD. Writing in Responsible Statecraft, Eldar Mamedov accused the organisation of standing at the forefront of attempts to exploit ethnic divisions inside Iran while simultaneously providing an intellectual framework for the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure campaign. His particular criticism concerned Brenda Shaffer, whom he described as encouraging Washington to incorporate ethnically based opposition organisations into its wider pressure strategy and as treating Iranian Azerbaijan as a possible locus of anti-regime mobilisation (Mamedov, 2020). Mamedov’s article is an external critique and should be read as such, rather than as an FDD statement of institutional intent. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that concerns about the conjunction between maximum economic pressure and the political activation of ethnic identities were already being raised before FDD published Shaffer’s major study the following year.

 

That publication, ‘Iran Is More Than Persia: Ethnic Politics in the Islamic Republic’, provides the clearest institutional bridge between the political map and the military one. FDD’s foreword expressly rejects the proposition that the organisation seeks Iran’s fragmentation. Yet the substance of the study points in precisely the opposite direction. Shaffer identifies Iran’s border provinces as politically distinct from what she describes as ‘the Persian-dominated centre’; treats the so-called ethnic mobilisation as a variable affecting regime stability; describes Khuzestan as the centre of Iranian oil production and home to important ports and transport routes; argues that revolts in several provinces during an ‘all-out regime crisis’ could pose a substantial challenge to the central government; and specifically urges American policymakers to assess the vulnerability associated with the concentration of oil production, pipelines and ports in Khuzestan (Shaffer, 2021).

 

More revealing for the present inquiry is Shaffer’s treatment of Iran’s political structure. She presents the country’s unitary system as a source of central strength, while suggesting that federal or confederal arrangements could weaken that cohesion by creating territorially defined political units with their own institutions, office-holders and interests separate from those of the national centre. The study was therefore analysing the conditions under which manufactured ethnic mobilisation could become politically consequential during a crisis of central authority, while repeatedly drawing attention to the concentration of economically strategic assets in precisely those peripheral regions (Shaffer, 2021).

 

The crucial point is not that Shaffer’s monograph secretly ordered Iran’s partition. It is that, by 2021, FDD had published an extensive analysis of where the Iranian state might become politically and territorially vulnerable if the centre weakened. Three years later, the same institution is publishing maps of the economic and military capacities that could be physically destroyed in a confrontation with that centre. One body of work examined the conditions of political fracture; the other maps the material vulnerabilities through which such fracture could be intensified. To treat the two as wholly unrelated simply because they appear under different headings is to ignore the political consequences that connect them.

 

The argument became more explicit immediately before the April 2024 confrontation. In March, Israeli pseudo-academic Mordechai Kedar argued that the collapse of Iran into five or six new states would leave the world ‘better and safer’. Michael Rubin of the Middle East Forum rejected that proposal and warned that signalling an American or Israeli desire to balkanise Iran would alienate Iranians who might otherwise oppose the Islamic regime. Rubin’s intervention is important precisely because it came from within a policy milieu hardly sympathetic to Tehran. He recognised a distinction that interventionist politics repeatedly risks erasing: Iranians can despise their regime while remaining fiercely committed to the territorial integrity of their country (Rubin, 2024).

 

I addressed that exchange on 26 March 2024, less than a week before the Damascus strike that initiated the April confrontation. My concern was that proposals such as Kedar’s would allow the Islamic regime to collapse the distinction between opposition to itself and defence of Iran, thereby transforming foreign hostility to the regime into evidence of hostility towards the country. I also argued that the federalist remedy offered by some critics of explicit partition could reproduce part of the same danger by institutionalising territorial identities whose political consequences would become unpredictable during state crisis (Suren-Pahlav, 2024c). The relevance of that chronology is important. Concerns about the strategic politicisation of Iran’s linguistic and regional diversity were already being articulated before the April military escalation and more than six months before FDD formally published these target maps.

 

This brings the two maps together. The first is political: border provinces, the transformation of linguistic and regional diversity into territorially defined political identities, federal arrangements, resource-rich peripheral regions and the conditions under which central authority might fracture. The second is material: military and nuclear sites, civilian refineries, ports, pipelines and other economic nodes, all labelled as ‘regime assets’, whose destruction could reduce the state’s ability to defend, finance and administer itself.  Separately, each can be presented as a different form of policy analysis. Read together, however, they raise a question about strategic effect that cannot be dismissed by institutional disclaimers. If national defence is degraded, economic arteries are severed, ports and energy infrastructure are disabled and the central government consequently loses fiscal and administrative reach, the vulnerabilities previously identified in the political map cease to be theoretical. They become conditions that the military strategy itself may help to produce.

 

Although political history does not operate mechanically, and Iran’s national cohesion cannot be reduced to the assumptions of those who map it from abroad, this does not mean that bombardment cannot create a progression towards civil war and subsequent Balkanisation. The argument is therefore not merely structural; under certain conditions, it becomes almost deterministic. Destroying the capacities through which a government finances itself, moves goods, supplies energy, projects authority and defends its territory shifts power away from the centre. Encouraging subnational political identities to acquire autonomous territorial meaning shifts the balance from the opposite direction. Either strategy may fail in isolation. Their simultaneous operation, however, creates precisely the weakened political environment in which disputes that were once constitutional or cultural can become contests over territory, resources, armed power and foreign patronage.

 

That is the analytical conjunction FDD’s maps cannot escape. The issue is not whether one document secretly dictates another, nor whether every actor discussed here pursues an identical end. The more consequential question is why the same strategic logic keeps resurfacing across overlapping Israeli and Washington circles: weaken Iran’s centre, exploit its political vulnerabilities, manufacture ethnic divisions, empower peripheral autonomies and ultimately normalise the idea of carving new states out of Iran? The chronology reinforces that pattern: from Dagan’s 2007 strategy of concurrent pressure, through Shaffer’s analysis of internal vulnerabilities, to FDD’s 2024 advocacy of attacks on economic infrastructure, the same logic progressively moved from political theory to cartographic form.

 

This is where the distinction between targeting the regime and destroying the country and her people becomes decisive. A political regime can collapse while the territorial state survives, and any viable democratic transition depends upon enough of that state remaining intact for law, public services, borders, security and political authority to be transferred rather than dissolved. Once the means used to weaken the regime also destroy the capacities through which the state sustains itself, however, the political objective begins to change. The question is no longer merely who will govern Iran after the Islamic regime, but what kind of Iran will remain to be governed: a sovereign country capable of preserving its institutions and territorial integrity, or a materially shattered arena in which domestic factions and external powers compete over the vacuum left behind.

 

 

8. Why national incapacity matters beyond the immediate strike

A campaign that removes economic capacity does not end when the immediate political crisis ends. The political order that succeeds the Islamic regime, whenever and however that occurs, would inherit the same territory, the same ports, the same refineries, the same transport corridors and the same need to finance a functioning state. A strategy that systematically degrades those assets therefore changes the conditions of any future transition. A weakened regime and a weakened state are not the same objective. The former may create political opportunity; the latter can reduce the successor state’s ability to maintain services, exercise authority, finance reconstruction and resist dependence upon external patrons.

 

This does not mean that attacks on refineries or ports mechanically produce civil war, partition or foreign domination. Such outcomes depend upon many intervening variables and cannot be inferred from a target map. The political risk is nonetheless clear. The less economic, military and administrative capacity remains after a confrontation, the more difficult it becomes for any successor authority to preserve order and independent decision-making. An opposition that imagines that foreign force can destroy the coercive foundations of an authoritarian system without also altering the balance of power within the country after that destruction is treating regime change as though it occurred on an empty stage. It does not. The state that survives the regime, or fails to survive it, determines the political field on which every subsequent actor must operate.

 

This is why the distinction between sanctions and physical destruction is not a technicality. Both can be instruments of coercion; both can harm ordinary people. But only one physically removes productive capacity that a future political system will need. In strategic terms, sanctions seek to change behaviour by restricting access. Bombardment of economic infrastructure changes the country’s material inheritance. The former may be lifted by political agreement. The latter creates facts on the ground that outlast the politicians who ordered, supported or opposed the attack. Any doctrine that presents those two forms of pressure as interchangeable obscures the most important issue: who bears the cost after the regime against which the pressure was directed has gone.

 

That is why FDD’s target maps cannot be separated from the territorial question. A strategy that materially destroys civilian infrastructure at the core of any functioning nation must be judged not merely by the regime it claims to weaken, but by the country it leaves behind. The political question is no longer simply who will govern Iran after the Islamic regime, but whether there will remain a sovereign and functioning state capable of being governed at all. The regime may eventually be brought down by Iranians themselves, as no authoritarian order survives forever, but if the price imposed beforehand is national devastation, strategic vulnerability and Balkanisation, there may be little of Iran left to liberate. Iran would then risk joining Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria on the long list of nations destroyed by US and Israeli aggression in the name of regime change: its people murdered, its state dismantled, its society fractured, its sovereignty consumed and its resources pillaged by the very powers claiming to make the world a safer place.

 

 

9. From Vulnerability to Deterrence: The Strategic Response Iran Must Prepare

What emerges from the evidence above is not an abstract exercise in strategic speculation, but a warning placed openly in the public domain. FDD’s maps should therefore be treated not as hypothetical cartography, but as an indication of the scale and direction of a possible future war against Iran. The strategic logic embedded in those maps does not point towards a limited exchange of fire. It points towards the Somalisation of Iran in order to pave the way for the creation of Greater Israel (Suren-Pahlav, 2020). If such a campaign were launched, it would not be a limited confrontation. It would be a full scale war imposed upon Iran by Israel, with the active participation of the United States.

 

The historical record establishes that Israel does not possess the independent capacity to conduct a sustained military campaign against Iran at the scale implied by the FDD target architecture. The United States would be required to provide not merely diplomatic cover but concrete military enablers. This is the logical precondition of the strategy that FDD has placed in the public domain. The conclusion Iran must draw is therefore unavoidable. In any full scale war with Israel, Iran would in practice be at war with the United States. The distinction between Israeli operations and American support would collapse in the opening hours of the conflict. American aircraft carriers, destroyers, bombers, fighters, intelligence assets, satellite networks, command and control systems and logistical hubs across the region would all become part of the war effort against Iran.

 

This reality must shape Iran's strategic planning from today. If the FDD maps represent a genuine strategic road map for war, then Iran has both the right and the responsibility to prepare its own response. Deterrence is achieved by making the cost of aggression unmistakable. Iran must therefore prepare a comprehensive series of strategic maps of its own, identifying the full range of targets that would be struck in response to any attack upon its territory, its infrastructure or its people.

 

Those maps should not be limited to Israeli targets. They must include all United States military and economic assets in the region. Every air base, naval facility, port used by the United States Navy, forward operating location, logistics hub, command centre, radar installation, missile defence battery, intelligence gathering facility, aircraft carrier strike group within range and data centre must be identified and incorporated into Iran's contingency planning. The United States may choose to enter a war against Iran. It must understand that it cannot do so without exposing its own forces to direct and sustained retaliation.

 

Iran, should not wait for the first bomb to fall before preparing its response. They must prepare themselves from today.  The preparation of such maps is not an act of war. It is an act of self-defence. This is not a call for aggression but a call for clarity. The same strategy of deterrence by punishment that FDD advocates for Israel should be applied symmetrically. If Iranian ports and refineries are considered legitimate targets, then Israeli ports, refineries, water sanitation systems, technical and economic centres, ports and nuclear facilities, as well as all American bases and carriers, should be considered legitimate targets for retaliation.

 

The Iranian people should understand that the danger is real. The FDD maps are not the product of a fringe organisation. They are the product of an institution that has planned the destruction of Iran since the 1970s, beginning with the toppling of the Imperial government and the rise of the Islamic regime to power by the West and Israel (Suren-Pahlav, 2010). The Bernard Lewis Plan is not complete (Suren-Pahlav, 2018). They will not stop until Iran suffers the same fate as Iraq and Libya: balkanised, its national resources pillaged under the guise of liberation.

 

 

10. Conclusion

As of 10 October 2024, no one can know which targets Israel will ultimately choose, whether Washington will restrain the scope of retaliation, or whether the confrontation will again be contained. What can be established is that FDD’s maps did not emerge in an analytical vacuum. They gave cartographic form to a strategic argument already developed through earlier advocacy of ‘deterrence by punishment’, the inclusion of ports, refineries, pipelines and energy infrastructure within a prospective target set, and the treatment of Iran’s internal political and territorial vulnerabilities as matters of strategic consequence.

 

The central question is therefore not simply whether FDD seeks to ‘punish’ the Islamic regime, but what kind of Iran would remain if its prescriptions were implemented. A strategy directed at missiles and military systems degrades military capability. A strategy that destroys refineries, ports, pipelines, economic nodes and national defence capacity reaches far beyond the ruling establishment. The regime may be the declared political target, but Iran itself becomes the material medium through which punishment is delivered.

 

That distinction becomes still more consequential when the target architecture is placed beside the earlier treatment of Iran’s linguistic, regional and territorial vulnerabilities. One body of work identifies where central authority might fracture politically; another identifies the material capacities whose destruction could weaken that authority physically. Neither proves, by itself, the existence of a single concealed plan for partition. Taken together, however, they define a strategic logic in which weakening the Islamic regime, degrading the Iranian state and exploiting internal vulnerabilities become progressively harder to separate.

 

FDD’s maps should therefore not be read as politically innocent graphics. They are a public architecture of prospective destruction: identifying what may be struck, providing a vocabulary through which that destruction can be legitimised, and normalising national infrastructure as an instrument of coercion. Their significance lies not merely in whether Israel ultimately adopts every target they contain, but in the political boundary they erode between attacking a regime and incapacitating the country governed by it.

 

That boundary is ultimately the central question raised by this article. If the professed objective is to give Iranians a better political future, why must Iran’s own economic, military and territorial capacity first be weakened in order to produce it? And if the means chosen to remove an authoritarian regime leave behind a devastated, fragmented and strategically dependent country, at what point does ‘liberation’ cease to describe the end and become instead the language through which the destruction of the nation is justified?

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – One aspect of FDD’s maps requires particular caution. Its map of “Targets in Iran: Nuclear Installations” includes Bushehr, Iran’s operating civilian nuclear power plant, alongside enrichment, research and other nuclear facilities (FDD, 2024c). I am not a nuclear engineer, reactor-safety specialist or radiological-risk expert, and this article therefore does not attempt to estimate casualties or model the consequences of a military strike upon an operating nuclear power station. That judgement properly belongs to specialists in reactor safety, radiation protection, atmospheric dispersion and emergency planning. The absence of a casualty estimate should not, however, obscure the character of the risk. A military attack severe enough to damage reactor fuel, cooling systems, containment structures or associated spent-fuel facilities could create a radiological emergency whose consequences would not respect the political distinction between the Islamic regime and the Iranian population, nor necessarily the territorial borders of Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly warned in the context of armed conflict that nuclear power plants must not become objects of attack because a nuclear accident could have serious consequences for public health and the environment. The experience of Chernobyl remains the clearest historical warning: the destruction of a reactor core released radioactive material across national borders, contaminated large areas and resulted in the evacuation and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, with health, environmental, economic and social effects extending for decades (IAEA, 2006; WHO, 2005). Chernobyl was an accident, not an air strike, and Bushehr is a different reactor design; no responsible comparison should pretend that the consequences would be identical. Nor are Hiroshima and Nagasaki technically equivalent examples, since those cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons rather than by radiological releases from damaged civilian reactors. They nevertheless belong to the broader historical warning against treating nuclear technology as an ordinary battlefield object. Where an operating civilian nuclear power plant appears within a published map of “possible targets”, the burden of explaining the potential human consequences cannot end with the word nuclear. The question requires technical examination in its own right, and one that this article leaves deliberately to those qualified to undertake it.

 

2 – As I argued in ‘From Ethno-Nation to Multi-Ethnicity: The Fabricated Myth and Illusion of “Ethnic” and “Ethnicity” in Modern Iran’, Iran is best understood as a historically continuous ethno-nation, not a multi-ethnic state. The widespread contemporary use of “ethnic” and “ethnicity” to describe Iran’s linguistic, dialectal, religious, and provincial differentiation rests on a category error: it converts traditional variation within an integrated civilisational continuum into evidence of fabricated corporate ethnicity. The majority of Iranians, despite linguistic variation, share a common Iranian national identity, cultural memory, and longue durée cohesion (Suren-Pahlav, 1998).

 

 

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