This article is published as part of the Perry World House workshop “U.S.-Iran Relations Under Trump 2.0: Lessons Learned and Likely Scenarios.”
Israel’s offensive against Iran and its allies has clearly taken a heavy toll on the ‘Axis of Resistance.’ Last fall’s decapitation of Hezbollah and decimation of its ranks reduced its ability to threaten northern Israel, at tremendous cost to Lebanese lives. The fall of the Asad regime in Syria cost Iran its only Arab state ally and severed the lifeline to Hezbollah. And two direct Iranian missile barrages did little significant damage inside of Israel. The United States has resumed bombing against the Houthis in Yemen. There is something of a consensus these days that Iran has been defanged and the Axis of Resistance broken, and that an unleashed Israel has successfully remade the Middle East by force. It’s what you hear not only in Washington but across the Middle East, and it’s become a standard starting point for most discussions of regional order and U.S. foreign policy. But is it right?
I would argue that the conventional wisdom about Iran’s strategic setback described above is right in the short run—but very questionable in the medium to long term, particularly as Israel and the United States do everything they can to create the conditions for a revival of Iranian political power. Iran has indeed suffered very real strategic setbacks at the hand of its enemies which can’t be easily repaired. The limited impact of its two missile barrages, and the willingness of U.S.-allied regimes such as Jordan to support Israel’s defenses despite Gaza, deflated its image at least. With a new leadership, reportedly demoralized membership, and a hostile broader political landscape, Hezbollah is struggling to rebuild its financial position, to say nothing of its arsenal. It will likely recover—it always has in the past, it is deeply rooted in Lebanese Shi’a society, and no other actor (including the Lebanese Armed Forces) has the capacity to impose its will on it even now. But in the short term, even as it rebuilds its position it is unlikely to be able to—or interested in—renewed war with Israel or even credibly threatening retaliation.
Syria’s collapse matters in a number of ways as well, not only because it cost Iran an ally and a supply route to Lebanon, but because of the message sent by the sudden Asad regime collapse. Iran invested a great deal in Asad’s survival, an investment which many economically struggling Iranians resented and publicly criticized in recent years. The collapse of regime military forces—in part because smothering sanctions had hollowed out the Syrian state, years of conflict had degraded the willingness of conscript soldiers to fight for the regime’s survival, and Israeli military strikes had suddenly shifted the balance of power by decimating Hezbollah and taking out Iranian assets across the country—had to send warning flags about Iran’s own stability. That Asad’s regime was replaced by a Salafi-jihadist Sunni insurgent group, very much of the type that Iran and its allies had been battling for decades in Iraq and Syria, posed a potential threat to Iran’s position in Iraq and even to Iran itself (a perspective evidently shared, for what it’s worth, by the Trump administration).
But there are limits. While Iran’s missile strikes on Israel did not produce the spectacular results many feared or hoped for, we don’t actually know to what extent Iran intentionally limited its attack as part of a controlled escalation strategy or whether it has the capability to do more if it chooses. That’s a similar analytical problem we’ve seen repeatedly in Iraq, where it’s hard to know whether attacks on U.S. bases are intentionally not killing American personnel or if it’s just been luck. Perceptions matter, and it’s clear that Iranian military threat to Israel has been substantially degraded in both American and Israeli eyes. But perceptions can change quickly—and analysts may be underestimating Iran’s ability and willingness to engage in innovative nonconventional attacks if it deems them necessary to restore deterrence.
And critically, while this often falls off the Israel-centric radar in these discussions, Iran has emphatically NOT lost its perceived and real capability to inflict grievous harm on the Gulf states, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The attacks, with plausible deniability but assumed to be on Iranian orders, on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil refineries in 2019 and on Abu Dhabi in January 2022—and the absence of any meaningful American response—are still front and center in Gulf minds. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have to assume that any Israeli or American war with Iran could result in an Iranian response that lays waste to their countries and their oil industry (and profoundly damages the global economy, if Trump still cares about that). That’s actually more likely if direct retaliation against Israel seems inadequate or ineffective. The Iran-Saudi reconciliation which China helped broker, and a reported new outreach by the UAE to Iran, are partial and minimal but likely reflect this strategic reality.
Nor has Israel (or the United States) been able to break the Houthi blockade on shipping or its periodic missile strikes. The Houthis quietly succeeded in dramatically slowing shipping through the Red Sea, harming not only Israel but also Egypt, and more recently escalated to direct missile strikes against Israel. While the Houthis paused the blockade because of the Gaza ceasefire (giving lie to the popular suggestion that the blockade wasn’t “really” about Gaza), but when the ceasefire seemingly inevitably ends they will likely resume attacks to deter shipping. A movement which survived and thrived during half a decade of systematic Saudi bombing is not likely to be badly damaged by occasional Israel or American strikes—even if those have damaging consequences for Yemeni civilians, like the attack on the Hodeida port or the FTO designation, that doesn’t much affect Houthi calculations. If anything, it gives them a convenient excuse for ongoing humanitarian and economic problems.
And Iran remains in a dominant position in Iraq both politically and militarily. That fault line could get hot very fast, especially if the Trump administrations sees Iraq militias as low hanging fruit to maintain the offensive against Iranian proxies— especially since Trump likely fondly recalls his ‘successful’ assassination of Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil. But those militias are both (mostly) aligned with Iran and organically connected to the Iraqi state, a situation which hasn’t been meaningfully changed even by the efforts of a pro-U.S. prime minister.
That paints an overall portrait of an Iranian regional posture which has suffered real setbacks but retains considerable strengths. It’s possible, as some have argued, that Iran may conclude based on the events of the last six months that the “resistance” game is no longer worth it, and decide to end its regional policies. But that seems unlikely. Decades of experience suggest that Iran’s leaders, including both the IRGC and the senior religious establishment, places great value on its regional power—and they seem unlikely to become less hawkish at a time the United States and Israel are openly musing about war.
Even more, Iran’s experience over the last several decades suggests that it is simply very good—much better than the United States—at navigating fractured states and turbulent political environments. Iran excels within the warscape, one might say, and everything Israel has done this past year has expanded the scope and intensity of that warscape. The United States is contributing to regional instability by not restraining Israel—on the contrary, continuing to rush unprecedented quantities of bombs and munitions to Israel while floating delusional ideas about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Washington is simultaneously unilaterally disarming in the “soft power” competition over the region’s future by suddenly pulling most of its economic and military aid to struggling states in the region. USAID was especially active in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen (and the West Bank)—the precise geographic arena in which the battle over Iran’s regional presence plays out. As the American retreat devastates those economies—hitting particularly hard in those sectors served by civil society, ostensibly the most pro-American segments of those communities—Iran and other local militia actors will have ample opportunity to fill the void.
And the strategic environment is rich with opportunities for a renewed resistance, as the Gaza ceasefire teeters on the brink and Israel expands into the West Bank. Put bluntly, Israel and the United States seem keen to do whatever they can to inflame and destabilize the Levant, without the slightest thought as to whether the resulting chaos will serve their interests. Whatever the extent of its recent military setbacks, Iran is going to find ample opportunity to rebuild its networks and to mobilize a new resistance axis if it chooses to do so. Resistance to the United States and Israel is a role in search of a hero, as Nasser once put it. Iran may be a tortured and problematic antihero, little loved by most of the regional public, but nobody else is currently stepping up (though I would actually expect a more popular new mobilization to center not around Iran but on resurgent Sunni jihadist insurgencies inspired by Syria and backed by Turkey). And the Trump administration’s decimation of all forms of American soft power—from USAID to international broadcasting—and lack of interest in the hard work of diplomacy have weakened America’s ability to rally regional support or carry out subtle interventions in support of anti-Iranian political forces in regional states.
None of this is to downplay the very real military and political setbacks which Iran and Hezbollah, in particular, have suffered over the last six months. But I’m old enough to have seen multiple rounds of “Iran is losing” discourse. There’s more behind it this time than usual, but there’s also a lot of reasons to suspect that the setbacks will be temporary. Perhaps that’s why the Iranian regime does not seem to be in a hurry to respond positively to Trump’s call for new negotiations, or worried about his threats of a massive bombing campaign should talks fail to produce results.
