When President Trump declared yesterday that “They have not suffered enough yet,” he was not simply expressing frustration. He was “considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”
What did he mean?
Since US bombing resumed 12 days ago, American military operations have focused primarily on military targets: destroying radars, IRGC command facilities, drones, missiles, and launchers to reduce Iran’s military capacity to threaten the Strait of Hormuz and U.S. forces.
But Trump has also publicly discussed striking bridges and electrical power infrastructure—targets whose principal purpose is not military denial but massive civilian punishment – and hit several already.
If mass punishment becomes the next escalation of the war, the obvious place to understand its consequences is Tehran.
With roughly ten million residents, Tehran is Iran’s political capital, economic center, communications hub, and transportation nexus. If the objective is to impose visible national pain, nowhere else in Iran carries comparable political weight.
But, what happens to an entire modern city when the electricity that sustains it suddenly disappears?
For years I taught the strategy of coercive air campaigns to U.S. Air Force officers. One recurring exercise examined exactly this question in an unclassified setting: not how to destroy electrical systems, but what happens to a modern society after they are bombed. The purpose was never to advocate such attacks. It was to understand their strategic consequences.
For decades afterward, those lessons helped push electric-power targeting to the margins of American air strategy. Despite occasional exceptions, U.S. doctrine increasingly emphasized precision attacks against military forces rather than civilian infrastructure. President Trump’s recent comments suggest that this long-standing restraint may now be under reconsideration.
The humanitarian consequences are almost unimaginable.
The strategic consequences are even more important.
History strongly suggests that inflicting massive civilian suffering through electric power targeting rarely produces rapid political capitulation when governments believe their survival is at stake. Instead, punishment tends to deepen popular anger, strengthen elite resolve, and create overwhelming incentives for retaliation.
Turning off the lights is easy. Living with what comes next—for Iranians, Americans, Israelis, and the countries hosting U.S. forces across the region—is far harder.
In the following analysis, I walk through what the loss of electricity would actually mean—not in abstract military terms, but hour by hour, week by week, and month by month—for one of the largest cities in the Middle East.
Only then can we understand what President Trump’s words might really mean—and why making Iran “suffer enough” is unlikely to end the war and far more likely to transform it.