The ‘Axis of Resistance’ (Mihwar al-muqawama), a coalition of forces at which the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at the centre, was formed in the crucible of revolution, war and occupation, and has garnered global attention in the wake of the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood of October 7, 2023. Israeli politicians and New York Times columnists alike have favoured bestial metaphors of an Iranian octopus with tentacles strangling any hope for a ‘New Middle East’.[1][2] The ‘Axis,’ a coinage of recent vintage and only really popularised in the post-2003 era, emerged out of a complex and fraught history, the lineaments of which can be traced across past decades. It is frequently dated to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah, a foremost pillar of the Nixon Doctrine, and the rise of a clerical-led Islamic Republic in its stead. But this complex of varied political and social forces coalesced in response to episodes of both imperial overreach and colonial brutality, often in conjunction with the fracturing and hollowing out of sovereign states in the context of civil wars and great power rivalry traversing the region. As much as it was a formation that was consciously willed into action, the Resistance Axis can also be understood as the byproduct of the law of unintended consequences. Its coalescence in the midst of civil wars, fractured sovereignties, and social mobilisations of the disinherited has proven to be a source of resilience and acute fragility. The disparate formations that comprised this loose series of regional alliances did not straightforwardly stem from a shared sectarian or ethnic identity, but a common opposition to U.S. interventions and occupations, U.S. allies, surrogates and client states, as well as the ongoing depredations of Israeli settler colonialism.

Whether it be Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, or Ansarullah in Yemen, each political and social movement has a historical lineage of its own, and their relations to the Islamic Republic should be understood in terms of their historical specificity. The core of the Axis has historically comprised the Islamic Republic and Hizbullah, with the Syrian Arab Republic acting as a crucial land bridge between the two. But beyond this, cooperation among the ‘Axis’ at large had been both haphazard and intermittent and the different organisations nominally constituting this alliance have had multiple and competing agendas of their own, even if there was broad alignment in terms of their strategic objectives in West Asia. The grandiose promises of a ‘unity of fields’ and routinised cooperation stretching from the Levant to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula have been proven to be more a matter of theory than institutionalised practice.[3] Each node of this unequal and uneven series of alliances has its own set of local challenges as well as contradictions with which it needs to contend and navigate and there are often conflicting agendas at work. 

This essay provides a historical sketch of how this alliance of states, aspiring sovereigns and popular paramilitary forces and social movements, emerged over the course of four decades, how they proved adept at making a virtue out of necessity, trialling and testing various asymmetric strategics when confronted with far more powerful adversaries, the contradictions and disagreements between them, and ultimately the profound limits of this fragile complex of alliances. Moreover, it is an analysis which is admittedly centred on Iran or Irano-centric. I have little doubt that an equally powerful and distinct account might emerge if the vantage point of another actor in the equation was taken as its starting point. Still, bearing these shortcomings in mind, a serious reckoning with the historical lineages of these manifold political and social forces is crucial to understanding the deep ideological and transnational ties that have bound them together, as well as the more cynical and geopolitical manoeuvrings and marriages of convenience that have announced in major tensions and contention. Even while the Resistance Axis represents a significant ideological break with the secular nationalist and anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, it would be premature to understate the degree to which these different forces have both inherited and kept alight the torch of opposition to accommodation with an increasingly untenable, corrosive and crisis-plagued status quo. 

That said, the limits of an Iranian-led Axis should be clearly understood. The Islamic Republic’s commitment to the Palestinian question emerged from a long history of genuine and sustained—if contested—ideological and political solidarity, one that continues to be espoused, represented, and institutionalised across the Iranian state apparatus. However, following the effective containment of the Islamic Revolution by the late 1980s, if not earlier, Iran’s ruling elites increasingly abandoned the ‘corporatist’ and populist agenda ostensibly enshrined in the constitution. In its place emerged a set of neoliberal accumulation strategies, entrenched networks of political patronage, and a military-industrial complex deeply embedded in the country’s security doctrine. In this respect, at least, the Islamic Republic of the 2020s bears a striking resemblance to several Arab republican regimes of the 1980s and 1990s, where once-hegemonic orders unravelled in parallel with the disintegration of a populist social compact.[4] The combination of a U.S.-led containment strategy and sustained campaign of economic warfare—alongside authoritarian neoliberalism and widespread political and socio-economic discontent on the domestic front—has significantly blunted the Islamic Republic’s capacity to act in the name of grander visions that challenge the logic of the U.S.-dominated state system. In their place, a ruthless pragmatism has taken hold, in which domestic stability and political self-preservation override all other considerations. It also explains the decisive turn to Iranian nationalism by the country’s elites, in which regional partnerships and interventions must be sold to the public and packaged in the name of ensuring security at home and the furtherance of the national interest abroad. Finally, even while the Islamic Republic had built alliances with willing partners across the region, it had never proven able to build an alternative hegemonic order. This is because a fundamental condition of the Islamic Republic’s capacity to intervene in the first place has been one of civil conflict, fragmented political authority, and hollowed out state capacity, which it simply does not have the means or ability to reconstruct in its own image. At bottom, this essay is an attempt convey the still unresolved tensions at the heart the Islamic Republic’s regional policy and the place of Palestine therein.

Transnational Lineages of Solidarity  

The modern roots of Palestinian–Iranian solidarity and cooperation can be traced back at least to the early 1950s and, over the course of the twentieth century, encompassed a wide spectrum of political forces—from religious nationalists and Islamists to Marxist-Leninists of various stripes. In 1954, a young Iranian cleric by the name of Sayyid Mujtaba Mirlawhi, better known as Navvab-i Safavi, travelled to Jerusalem to attend an international Islamic congress. During his visit, the thirty-year old leader of the Fada’iyan-i Islam, met with the young King Husayn and gave the Sandhurst-trained monarch a spirited lecture on his obligation to liberate historic Palestine for the Muslim world.[5] From there, Navvab travelled to Egypt as a guest of the Muslim Brotherhood, where he delivered a fiery speech at the University of Cairo, after which he met the leaders of the recent Free Officers coup, Major General Mohamed Naguib and Egypt’s future president, the young and charismatic Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.[6] Palestine and its liberation from Zionist hands was a common thread running through all these encounters. Navvab had even vowed to raise an army of thousands to retake Jerusalem. This pledge ultimately went unfulfilled, and Navvab was executed by firing squad in December 1955 for his organisation’s involvement in a failed assassination attempt against the sitting Iranian prime minister, Husayn ‘Ala.

During the late 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of politicised clerics would closely follow the fortunes of anti-colonial movements across the Arab and Muslim world. Journals such as Maktab-i tashayu’ and Bi’sat enthusiastically discussed national liberation struggles in Algeria and the fallout of the Nakba in historic Palestine. In June 1964 a young clerical activist and future president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, published an article entitled ‘Israel and Palestine’ decrying the imperial machinations behind the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Rafsanjani outlined an ignominious record of Zionist and imperial perfidy, which he held squarely responsible for the displacement and ethnic cleansing of his Arab and Muslim brethren in Palestine.[7] On 3 June 1963, at the Fayziya seminary in Qum, a relatively unknown cleric and teacher of philosophy by the name of Sayyid Ruhollah Khomeini, chastised the Shah for his perceived proximity and dependence on the United States. But there was also another prominent target of the future revolutionary leader’s ire: 

In order for Israel to attain its objectives, the government of Iran has continually affronted us in accordance with goals and plans conceived in Israel… Don’t listen to Israel [Shah]; Israel can’t do anything for you. You miserable wretch, forty-five years of your life have passed; isn’t it time for you to think and reflect a little, to ponder about where all this is leading you, to learn a lesson from the experience of your father?[8]

De facto relations between the Pahlavi regime and the Israeli state also date back to the 1950s. Following the CIA–MI6-orchestrated coup of 1953, which overthrew the popular nationalist prime minister Muhammad Musaddiq, numerous historians and analysts have argued that both the CIA and Mossad played a central role in establishing and strengthening the Shah’s notorious security and intelligence agency, SAVAK (Sazman-i ittilaʿat va amniyat-i kishvar). The respected American diplomatic historian Mark J. Gasiorowski, drawing on interviews with former SAVAK operatives, has shown that cooperation between SAVAK and Mossad steadily deepened—eventually surpassing even SAVAK’s collaboration with the CIA in its scope and importance.[9] Fred Halliday in his seminal Iran: Dictatorship and Development published on the eve of the revolution also highlighted the importance of Iran-Israel ties under the Pahlavis. This consisted of extensive military training where ‘virtually every general officer in the Shah’s army has visited Israel’ and ranged from intelligence sharing to oil and agricultural development. Iran constituted a major oil supplier to Israel and after the 1967 war even financed the 162-mile pipeline from Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean.[10] The peak of military cooperation between Iran and Israel was reached in 1977 when the two countries concluded a secret agreement on technological cooperation. According to Gary Sick, who served on Carter’s National Security Council, under the agreement ‘Iran was to provide funding for a number of sensitive research-and-development projects in Israel, including development of a surface-to-surface missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead’. Iran continued to make payments to Israel for these projects until the Pahlavi regime’s collapse.[11] 

The Iranian left also had a complicated relationship to the Israeli state and socialist Zionism in particular. The Tudah Party of Iran founded in 1941 when Iran was under Soviet occupation, was at best ambivalent, if not implicitly following the line of its Soviet patron to the north in the aftermath of 1948.[12] Former prominent Tudah cadres turned anti-Stalinists such as Khalil Maliki of the League of Iranian Socialists even travelled to Israel, met with foreign minister Golda Meir and wrote admiringly of Israeli agriculture, the kibbutz, and socialist Zionism. They went so far as to praise Zionism’s many ‘achievements,’ recycling for their Iranian readership some of the most hackneyed myths around Zionist settlers having ‘made the desert bloom’.[13] 

Khomeini never directly gave his explicit approval to the conduct of armed struggle within Iran, but he did issue a fatwa permitting his followers to send alms to the Palestinian fida’iyin, a ruling that Marxist-Leninist groups enthusiastically latched on to and promoted in their own publications.[14] In 1970, a small group of Marxist-Leninist activists who sought to wage a war of national liberation against the Shah’s regime were arrested by the SAVAK as they sought to cross the border into neighbouring Iraq. They became known as the ‘Palestine Group’ on account of their intent and desire to receive training from the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the methods of armed struggle.[15] Their torture, perfunctory trial and sentencing drew international condemnation. Its most eloquent and outspoken representative Shukrullah Paknizhad’s defiant address before the court was even translated and reprinted in Les Temps Modernes. In the same year, ‘Ali Akbar Safa’i-Farahani, a founding member of the People’s Fada’i Guerrillas travelled to the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to acquire experience with arms and ammunition, and upon his return led the nascent organisation’s first guerrilla operation against a small garrison in the northern town of Siahkal in February 1971.[16] The mission in many ways turned out to be a bumbling failure but would achieve legendary status for puncturing the image of invincibility the Pahlavi regime wished to cultivate before its people and the world at large. A multitude of ideological, political, logistical and imaginative connections proliferated. George Habash, the charismatic leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, authored the preface to the English translation of Amir Parviz Puyan’s tract, ‘The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of Survival,’ a short and incisive text that had emerged as an essential part of the curriculum for many a budding revolutionary.[17]

Avowedly Muslim and Islamic formations also travelled to the Palestinian camps for advanced training in guerrilla warfare.[18] Among them was Turab (Sayyid Murtaza) Haqshinas, who as a young man had joined the seminary and spoke fluent Arabic, and published a weekly by the name of ‘Palestine News’ that translated articles and analysis from across the Arab world.[19] As a leading activist in the People’s Mujahidin, he built-up an elaborate and sprawling network traversing Baghdad, Beirut and Tripoli. Then, in 1975, the Mujahidin experienced a dramatic ideological shift: the majority of its members renounced Islam in favour of Marxism-Leninism, leading to a violent takeover and purge of the organisation.[20] Although abroad at the time, Haqshinas was among those who embraced this transformation. Following the revolution, he co-founded the Organization of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, known as Paykar. And from exile, he remained an active supporter of the Palestinian cause and maintained his proficiency in Arabic by translating the poetry and prose of Mahmud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani into Persian before his death in 2016.

Sayyid Yayha Rahim Safavi, a future commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was initially trained in Syria in everything from fashioning Molotov cocktails, to the use of dynamite and TNT, and how to shoot a Kalashnikov rifle.[21] During this formative period of his training, one of his major disappointments was the Fatah guerrillas’ indifference to daily prayers and, despite his heartfelt entreaties, their affinity for Marxism-Leninism. After fighting alongside Fatah during Israel’s first major invasion of Lebanon—Operation Litani—in March 1978, he returned to Iran to join the unfolding revolution and the swiftly escalating struggle for power.[22] After fighting and surviving the arduous Iran-Iraq War, Safavi continued to rapidly ascend the ranks until his appointment as the IRGC’s commander-in-chief in 1997. Until today he remains an influential military advisor to Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

The cause of Palestinian liberation and armed struggle against Zionist colonialism and its imperial patron, the United States, became a potent rallying point for a wide array of Iranian political and intellectual movements, ranging from Marxist-Leninists to religious nationalists and committed Islamists. For both Iranians and Palestinians, the struggle was seen as a shared resistance against common enemies: the Shah and Israel, both widely regarded as local extensions of American imperial power and instruments of its malign influence across the region. The Palestinian cause thus assumed an ecumenical and unifying character, bridging Iran’s otherwise ideologically diverse opposition forces, and offering them an important point of convergence amidst their more fundamental political and doctrinal disagreements. Prior to the revolution, such disagreements were largely subordinated to the overriding imperative of unity against the Shah’s regime, surfacing only intermittently in moments of acute crisis.

Revolutionary Iran 

Like revolutionary regimes before it, the Islamic Republic was formed in the crucible of its fight against internal and external enemies. The great Marxist historian, Arno Mayer’s analysis of the French and Russian revolutions in this respect is certainly germane: ‘While [revolutions] rallied converts and sympathizers in some quarters, they made sworn enemies and skeptics in others. There is no studying and understanding the former apart from the latter, since they were each other’s Nemesis. No less striking, and paradoxically, in no time the inherent universalism of the French and Russian revolutions, confronted with a hostile outside world, became coupled with nationalism, creating an intense and inevitable contradiction between their ecumenicalism and particularism’.[23] Profound ideological differences notwithstanding, a similar contradiction was readily apparent in the early years of the Islamic Republic. On the one hand, the revolutionary state sought to advance a project of pan-Islamic and revolutionary solidarity (ecumenical), while at the same time claiming to act as guardian and protector of the sovereign Shi’i-Iranian nation (particularistic). The more that regional and international powers moved to resist, discipline and quash the challenge posed by the Islamic Republic, the stronger the latter impulse became. This tension was enshrined in the new regime’s constitutional order which was inextricable from its institutionalisation in the territorial nation-state.  

On February 17, 1979, mere days after the fall of the ancien régime, Yasir Arafat made an impromptu visit to Tehran.[24]Declaring solidarity with Iran’s new revolutionary government under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, Arafat pledged joint efforts toward the liberation of Palestine, portraying their struggles as one and the same: 

When one comes to one’s own home, one does not need permission. Today is a day of major victory for Muslims as well as a day of victory for Palestine. When I approached Mehrabad airport, I felt as if I was landing in Jerusalem. The Iranian revolution proved that Islam and the Muslims will not bow to oppression. The pressure surrounding the Palestinian brothers was released with the Iranian revolution.[25] 

In a symbolic moment captured by cameras, Arafat unfurled the Palestinian flag over the ransacked Israeli mission, energizing a large crowd that chanted ‘Arafat, Khomeini!’ and ‘Viva Palestine!’ in support of both him and the elderly Imam. Iran’s revolutionary leadership gifted the Israeli mission to the PLO who opened the first Palestinian embassy in Tehran, where its stands on the appropriately named Palestine Street till this day. The footage sent a powerful message across the Arab world, sparking hopes of a new era of anti-colonial resistance in which Iran might lead the drive for the liberation of Jerusalem. This urgency was amplified by the Camp David Accords, through which President Anwar Sadat led Egypt—the former epicentre of pan-Arabism—into a separate peace with Israel, a decision whose consequences continue to reverberate today. Arafat’s wager was that Iran’s revolution might restore regional balance in the PLO’s favour and help offset the catastrophic blow dealt to the Palestinian cause by Egypt’s defection. In Arafat’s words: ‘The [Iranian] revolution has reversed the strategic balance in the Middle East against Israel and the United States. The Camp David document will be merely ink on paper following the basic changes brought by the Iranian revolution, both in the region and our Islamic nation and in world strategy.’[26] Tehran stopped oil shipments to Israel and cut diplomatic ties with Egypt. The PLO’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was off to a promising start. 

In January 1980, the Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, the same radical student group that had stormed the U.S. embassy on the 4 November 1979, organised a conference entitled the ‘Gathering of the International Liberation Movements’ at the Quds Hotel in Tehran. The conference marked a genuine attempt to strengthen ties with Third World liberation movements from around the globe and to bolster support for the revolutionary process still underway inside Iran. The eccentric and at times erratic cleric, Hujjat al-Islam Muhammad Muntaziri, urged Ayatollah Khomeini—by then the unrivaled leader of the revolution—to take concrete steps toward ‘consolidating the front of the downtrodden.’ Drawing on an impressive network of contacts he had cultivated over the previous decade, Muntaziri worked to bring together a broad and diverse array of forces in support of this vision.[27] But already at this early stage in the revolution, multiple political and ideological cleavages and power centres were coming into view. Not only between religious and more secular oriented forces, but within and among religious radicals and revolutionaries themselves. The high hopes that Arafat had invested in the Iranian Revolution would unravel faster than anyone might have anticipated. His efforts to mediate during the U.S. embassy hostage crisis after November 1979 were forcefully rebuffed by the revolutionary leadership in Iran, who saw it as a transparent attempt to ingratiate himself to the Americans.[28] Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran on 22 September 1980, Arafat tried to walk a fine line between the newly established Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s pan-Arabist Ba’th Party but faced a real risk of alienating both sides completely. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, ultimately possessing few options beyond siding with the self-styled champion of the Arab cause.  

With the onset of the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, Mahdi Bazargan’s Provisional Revolutionary Government resigned, intensifying the struggle over which political and social coalition would shape the emerging order. The National Democratic Front of Iran was forced into exile, and the once-feted dissident, Paknizhad—who had aligned himself with the People’s Mujahidin—was executed by the revolutionary authorities in December 1981. The People’s Fada’i Guerrillas fractured into Majority and Minority factions: the former opposing the new regime, the latter offering it critical support. The Tudeh Party of Iran, under the leadership of secretary-general Nur al-Din Kianuri, vocally supported the clerical-led order upon returning from two decades of exile in East Germany. Though briefly tolerated, the party performed poorly in the August 1979 elections for the constituent assembly tasked with drafting the constitution. By 1983, it too was marginalised, with much of its ageing leadership arrested and charged with espionage.[29]

Arguably, the most serious challenge to Iran’s clerical leadership came from the People’s Mujahidin, which had initially deferred to Khomeini’s authority. Tensions between the fledgling Revolutionary Guards and Mujahidin partisans quickly escalated into a violent confrontation, culminating in a brutal campaign of repression in June 1981. In its aftermath, the Mujahidin launched a series of devastating bombings and targeted assassinations against the Islamic Republic Party’s senior leadership, killing the president, the prime minister, and the head of the judiciary. In the same period, religious nationalists like Bazargan retreated from public life, and ‘Abulhasan Banisadr, the Islamic Republic’s first president and erstwhile commander of the armed forces, fled for his life after being impeached by a hostile IRP-dominated parliament. This period of intense revolutionary factional infighting and the inception of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 saw the steady shift of the cause of Palestinian liberation from a popular Third Worldist one encompassing Maoists, Stalinists, Islamists and liberation theologians to a more exclusivist Islamist state project. But even this characterisation would be to oversimplify how the commitment to pan-Islamic solidarity has developed and transformed over the decades and stood in productive tension to the exigencies of raison d’état and realpolitik.

From the U.S. Hostage Crisis to the Iran-Iraq War

Following the U.S. embassy hostage crisis – which lasted 444 days – and the Iraqi invasion of Iran in late September 1980, any prospect of détente between the American imperium and its former ‘gendarme of the Persian Gulf’ was indefinitely deferred. Iraqi forces swept through Iranian defences and captured the city of Khorramshahr. After two years of intense combat and staggering human losses, Iranian forces succeeded in expelling the Iraqi army from Iranian territory. It was then that Iran’s leadership made the fateful decision to carry the war into Iraq. According to Ali Akbar Muhtashamipur, a former ambassador to Syria and student of Khomeini, the Imam initially opposed extending the war beyond Iran’s borders, fearing it would prove politically unpalatable. In this telling, he was ultimately persuaded by his inner circle – chief among them the astute and calculating Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – that continuing the campaign was necessary to secure the revolution’s long-term survival.[30]

In his 1980 state of the union address, President Jimmy Carter, vowed the U.S. would use ‘any means necessary, including military force’ to protect its ‘vital interests’ in the Persian Gulf.[31] This was accompanied by what would soon emerge as a bipartisan consensus around the necessity to punish and ‘contain’ Iran by means of economic warfare. First came the ban on importing Iranian crude oil, numerous executive orders freezing Iranian government assets, restrictions on financial transactions and Iranian imports.[32] In January 1984, the Reagan administration designated Iran a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ which denied the country access to financial aid, dual-use technology and U.S. defence exports.[33]The Shah’s military had been heavily reliant on the United States and it was widely believed to be incapable of sustaining a war without its support.[34] In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, the Islamic Republic saw itself as embattled and in an existential struggle for survival, even as the revolutionary leadership availed itself of key opportunities to strengthen its position on the home front. 

The IRGC initially emerged from a network of militias loyal to Khomeini’s revolutionary leadership and was forged in the crucible of successive conflicts – first with internal and regional challengers to the nascent regime’s claims to sovereignty and its monopoly on violence, and later with external enemies. The first armed confrontations took place with ethno-nationalist, autonomist and separatist forces in northwestern Kurdistan province,[35] followed by the face-off with the armed and ideologically zealous, People’s Mujahidin led by Mas’ud Rajavi.[36] It was, however, the Iran-Iraq War, where the Guards’ mettle in competition with the Army was decisively tested. During the conflict with Iraq, the IRGC competed for resources and privileges at the expense of the Army that was forced to endure numerous purges as well as the inveterate distrust of the new revolutionary leadership, who continued to view it as an essentially Pahlavi loyalist institution. In the words of Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, ‘the IRGC viewed the Iraqi army as the nation’s external enemy and the Iranian army as their internal ‘opponent’.’[37] Fear of a Bonapartist challenger was amongst the great anxieties of the revolutionary clergy during these formative years in which the new order was paradoxically in an extremely parlous state, even as it fed off successive crises to neutralise potential rivals. The war with Iraq and its continuation was thus in many ways indispensable to the revolutionary order’s consolidation despite its egregious human cost.

Iran was increasingly isolated, and its military forces were desperate to match its far better equipped opponent. Western arms, ammunition and spare parts quickly dried up. Iran’s air force in some respects is still yet to recover from this legacy, and much of its fleet continues to date back to the pre-revolutionary period. Over the course of the eight-year war the United States, West Germany, France, and the Soviet Union all provided material or intelligence support to Saddam Hussein’s war effort. Amid the war, the new regime struggled to develop alternative supply chains, build indigenous capabilities, and replace its former Western arms suppliers. With its air force seriously degraded and its troops vulnerable to Iraqi air and missile attacks, Iranian leaders committed to reviving the ballistic missiles program. Iran was initially able to import a small number of Scud-B missiles from Libya, which it renamed the Shahab-1. But the Soviet Union ultimately intervened to prevent Tripoli sending further missiles to Tehran.[38] With few remaining options, Tehran turned to Pyongyang, which readily obliged by supplying the Islamic Republic with more advanced Scud missiles—thereby laying the groundwork for Iran’s missile programme, which has since developed in leaps and bounds despite years of punishing isolation and austerity. What began in the early 1980s as a partnership born of necessity evolved into a durable relationship that transcended a mere marriage of convenience between unlikely allies.[39] In the absence of a powerful air force or access to U.S. and European armaments, the Islamic Republic’s missiles program has emerged as a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic’s deterrence doctrine. It should therefore come as no surprise that both Washington and Tel Aviv have repeatedly sought to sanction and sabotage it, just as they have been eager to neutralise its efficacy as part of any future ‘diplomatic’ settlement.[40] Iran’s drone program also took shape in this difficult period, when sanctions and battlefield constraints pushed the Islamic Republic to find alternatives to conventional air power. By the mid-1980s, it was deploying its first domestically built UAVs, such as the Mohajer-1, for surveillance and artillery spotting. These early efforts laid the foundation for a broader strategy of investing in unmanned systems to compensate for conventional military shortfalls. Over time, Iran expanded its drone arsenal to include armed models like the Shahed-129 and loitering munitions such as the Shahed-136—systems now used to project power across the region and, more recently, supplied to allies including Russia. The program reflects a longstanding commitment to technological self-reliance and asymmetric warfare.[41] 

The aforementioned Islamic internationalist cleric, Muhammad Muntaziri – together with Sayyid Mahdi Hashimi, the brother of his brother-in-law – helped establish the Unit for Liberation Movements (Vahid-i nihzat-ha-yi azadibakhsh) under the umbrella of the IRGC. Muntaziri, the son of Ayatollah Husayn ‘Ali Muntaziri – who would later be named Khomeini’s heir-designate before falling out of favour in 1988 – had cultivated strong ties with both the PLO and Qaddafi’s Libya in the years leading up to the revolution. As we have seen , hewas sincerely committed to a vision of Islamic internationalism centred on exporting the revolution in solidarity with the dispossessed across the globe.[42] It was only in late 1986 that Iran’s Islamic internationalists were decisively sidelined by the more pragmatic forces coalescing around Rafsanjani. When the Lebanese newspaper al-Shira’, reportedly in coordination with Damascus, broke the story of U.S. National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane’s clandestine visit to Tehran—and the Reagan administration’s covert arms sales to Iran, facilitated by Israel – the revelation, now known as the Iran-Contra Affair, triggered a political reckoning.[43] The scandal provided a pretext for the arrest of Mahdi Hashimi, who was charged with counter-revolutionary subversion. He was executed in late September 1987.  

More than anything else the Iran-Contra Affair signified Iran’s desperate need for arms as the new Islamist regime saw itself locked in a struggle to sustain an increasingly debilitating and futile war effort.[44] The longer the war dragged on the less the IRGC could count upon ideologically zealous and patriotic youngsters to join their ranks. Morale was flagging in the face a better equipped enemy whose readiness to use chemical weapons against Iranian troops had only increased since their first deployment in 1983. The vast imbalance in casualties was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore—let alone justify—and ever fewer were willing to sacrifice themselves for the continuation of a war whose strategic objectives seemed neither clear nor attainable. The leaks that sparked the Iran-Contra debacle formed a fitting pretext to neutralise the revolutionary internationalists’ scope for independent action once and for all (as they increasingly came to be viewed as a nuisance), and ensure that major foreign policy decisions would henceforth remain in the hands of a tightly controlled set of core state institutions.[45] Consolidation was an ongoing process even if thermidor was still a few years away.

Israel’s Colonial Enterprise in Lebanon and the Origins of Hizbullah 

When the Israeli military under the command of Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982, he had assured prime minister Menachem Begin that it would take mere weeks to destroy the PLO and decisively uproot its ability to mount direct attacks on its northern frontier and install a client regime under Phalangist rule. Between 1968 and 1970, the fida’iyin had enjoyed deep popular support in Southern Lebanon and many young and politically active Lebanese southerners flocked to join its ranks.[46] The Lebanese National Movement, comprising radical Arab nationalists, progressive socialists, and communists, coupled a deep and abiding commitment  to Palestinian liberation and the revolutionary overthrow of Lebanon’s sectarian power sharing system.[47] But as Lebanon’s civil war drew on, relations between the Shi’a majority and the PLO had soured, and a sizeable minority had come to resent the conduct and presence of the fida’iyin and their allies in the Lebanese National Movement.[48] Some even laboured under the misapprehension that the Israelis might quickly dislodge the PLO and return whence they came.[49] To complicate matters further, between 31 May and 1 June  1976, President Hafiz al-Asad dispatched eight-thousand Syrian troops across the Syrian-Lebanese border with American and Israeli assent. This decisively suppressed the embattled national movement over which Asad sought to assert greater control, all in the name of the restoration of ‘order’ to a Lebanon.[50]

Pro-Khomeini Islamic revolutionaries such as Muhammad Muntaziri, Jalal al-Din Farsi, and the incoming Iranian ambassador to Syria, Sayyid Ali Akbar Muhtashamipur, tended to align more closely with forces prioritizing the Palestinian cause and armed struggle against Israel over the Amal Movement. Amal, the successor to the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumin), emerged in response to the deepening grievances and political marginalisation of Lebanon’s Shi’a population, seeking to secure their representation within the country’s confessional order. Its armed wing, Amal (Afwaj al-muqawama al-lubnaniyya)—an acronym that also means “hope” in Arabic—was founded by the charismatic, Iran-born cleric Sayyid Musa al-Sadr. Between 1973 and 1975, the organisation began to take shape, with key figures from the Freedom Movement of Iran (Nihzat-e azadi-ye Iran), most notably Mustafa Chamran, playing a foundational role.[51] The Amal Movement, however, was increasingly subject to harsh criticism, not only within Lebanon, but Tehran as well. This was in part because of its ties to the pro-Khomeini faction’s more ‘liberal’ political rivals who had manned Iran’s provisional revolutionary government until November 1979. But arguably of even greater importance was Amal’s increasingly strained relations with Fatah. When Amal first emerged, Fatah had provided military training to the fledging Shi’a militia, but by the early 1980s the tone had palpably shifted and relations between the two groups had deteriorated precipitously.[52]

By the time of Musa al-Sadr’s mysterious disappearance in March 1978 – almost certainly at the hands of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi – revolutionary fervour had already taken hold in Iran. Mustafa Chamran returned to join the unfolding revolution, eventually serving as chair of Iran’s Supreme Defence Council and later as Minister of Defence. By April 1982, tensions between Amal and the PLO had further deteriorated, culminating in open armed clashes. When Amal’s leader Nabih Berri agreed to participate in the Committee of National Salvation, the party’s deputy, Sayyid Husayn al-Musawi, broke away and returned to the Bekaa Valley to form a splinter faction: Islamic Amal.[53]  The new organisation denounced cooperation with Israel as ‘illegal’ and accused Amal’s leadership of ‘having adopted the Israeli, American and Kataeb positions as theirs’.[54] Many young militants who would subsequently go on to comprise Hizbullah’s future leadership, including Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi, Subhi al-Tufayli, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah (who had studied with al-Musawi in Najaf, Iraq as a young seminarian), and Na’im Qasim (Hizbullah’s current secretary-general), broke with Amal in this period. Crucially, despite ideological and religious cleavages, resistance to Israel’s occupation cut across secular and religious divides and leading personnel, the most prominent example of which was Imad Mughniyeh, who had at one time served in Fatah intelligence and was an erstwhile member of the PLO’s elite Force 17.[55]

Six days after the Israeli attack, the first contingent of approximately 1500 Revolutionary Guards arrived in Damascus on the evening of 11 June 1982. Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad was initially reluctant to allow Iranian revolutionary forces to cross into Lebanon. He was concerned that the presence of the IRGC would extend Tehran’s influence at Syria’s expense and potentially undermine his Shi’a ally, Amal. Following its intervention in the Lebanese civil war, Damascus had cultivated strong ties with the Amal Movement, which it viewed as a key partner in stabilising the country under Syrian patronage.[56] After much toeing and froing between Damascus and Tehran, a sizeable contingent of the Revolutionary Guards was ordered to return home. Rafsanjani and Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, had cannily persuaded the Imam that the Lebanese front was a distraction from the Islamic state’s far more existential challenge, namely the war with neighbouring Iraq.[57] Ultimately, a smaller deployment of Iranian personnel—assisted by clerics from the IRGC’s Cultural Unit—made their way to the Bekaa Valley to train thousands of Lebanese Shi’a volunteers who had mobilised to confront the Israeli occupation. The precise size of the deployment remains disputed. Yet rather than positioning itself at the forefront of the armed struggle against Israel, the Islamic Republic increasingly prioritised domestic messaging that linked regional resistance to its own revolutionary narrative. The slogan ‘the road to Jerusalem goes through Karbala soon gained prominence, signalling the regime’s emphasis on consolidating the revolution at home as a precondition for confronting Zionism abroad.

During the first half of the 1980s, the newly established Islamic Resistance in Lebanon would execute a series of unprecedented military and ‘martyrdom’ operations against Israeli and U.S. targets. One of the earliest such operations to be carried out targeted the headquarters of the Israeli troop command in Tyre, killing 76 and wounding 118.[58] By far the most spectacular and daring was the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on 23 October 1983, which killed 241 U.S. military personnel. The U.S. would never forgive the nascent and still inchoate Shi’a Islamic resistance with an obscure and unknown Islamic Jihad Organisation claiming responsibility for the operation. Less than two years later in February 1985, Hizbullah, the ‘Party of God’, officially announced its existence in an ‘Open Letter to the World’s Oppressed’. Following the U.S. marines’ withdrawal a coalition of resistance forces with Hizbullah at the helm waged a war of attrition against the Israeli army for the next decade and a half. When the Israelis finally withdrew in May 2000, it was widely seen as a towering and unprecedented achievement for an Arab army, let alone a popular, non-state paramilitary organisation. 

Six years later, in response to an attack on an Israeli patrol – with the explicit aim of capturing Israeli soldiers to facilitate the negotiated release of their comrades imprisoned in Israel – the Olmert government with a tacit green light from the George W. Bush administration launched a 33-day aerial bombing campaign killing 1,300 Lebanese and destroying tens of thousands of homes across the country as well as much of Beirut’s southern suburbs.[59] This approach would soon gain infamy as the ‘Dahiye doctrine’, brazenly invoked by Israeli politicians and military personnel alike as a promise of destruction and death for civilian populations that dare to put up resistance. Even with Israel’s unrelenting bombardment it never succeeded in bringing the missile attacks to a halt which reached a peak of 250 per day in the second week of August 2006.[60] Notwithstanding, the carnage and enormity of the destruction wrought on Lebanon, to the great chagrin of Israeli and American officials, Hizbullah not only survived, but emerged more defiant than ever. In subsequent years it not only retained but exponentially augmented its capacity to strike at Israel despite the IDF’s best efforts to extirpate the paramilitary force which had compelled its humiliating retreat only several years prior.  

There is no denying that Hizbullah’s relationship to the Islamic Republic is qualitatively different from that of other allies in the region. Not only does Hizbullah at least in theory pledge allegiance to the doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist, the constitutionally enshrined doctrine undergirding clerical supremacy in the Islamic Republic. Perhaps more importantly, many among its clerical and lay ranks share longstanding relationships that stretch back at least four decades. Some of these bonds were forged in the seminaries of Najaf and Qum; others emerged through intergenerational friendships and kinship ties, deepened over decades of shared struggle against Israel’s occupation. Mughniyeh’s family spent many years in Iran due to security concerns, and Nasrallah’s anticipated successor, Sayyid Hashim Safieddin—who was himself assassinated shortly after the secretary-general—further cemented ties with Tehran when his son married Zaynab Soleimani, the daughter of Qasim Soleimani, the former commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. This relationship reflects a depth and durability of alliance that stands in stark contrast to the more instrumental ties Iran has maintained with Hamas, or the marriage of convenience that once defined its relationship with the Syrian regime. 

Imperial Hubris in Iraq and Its Aftermath 

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq eliminated the Islamic Republic’s principal adversary. Yet even as Tehran gained from Saddam Hussein’s downfall, many within the Bush administration viewed the war as a prelude to regime change in Iran. Initially, Iran’s leadership was caught off guard—particularly given that its cooperation with the U.S. in ousting the Taliban had earned it little more than denunciation, culminating in Bush’s infamous designation of Iran as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ in his 2002 State of the Union address (a pejorative label to which the term ‘Axis of Resistance’ was a pointed retort). Still, Tehran moved swiftly to exploit the chaos unleashed by Paul Bremer’s catastrophic tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, during which Iraq descended into sectarian civil war. Iranian officials rapidly activated longstanding alliances with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its armed wing, the Badr Brigades—groups that had not only remained loyal to Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War, but had also fought alongside Iranian forces.[61] Comparable to Hizbullah, Badr senior personnel have strong personal ties and connections with Iranian elites going back decades. Tehran used its access and sprawling network to insinuate and extend its influence across Iraq, playing a careful game of wearing down the goliath occupying its neighbour next door. Despite having been established in 1988, it was only in the mid-2000s that the Quds Force, the IRGC’s extra-territorial operations unit, and its charismatic general, Qasim Soleimani, achieved widespread fame and notoriety, among friends and enemies alike. The latter’s reach across Iraq was extensive and in later years he would regularly be dispatched to mediate between disgruntled parties and convey Iran’s preferences to Iraqi politicians. It was a scenario that would have exceeded many of the Iranian soldiers’ wildest dreams only three decades prior when they stood on the front lines in a battle for survival against the then formidable Iraqi army.

As Nuri al-Maliki’s tenure as prime minister wore on, Iraq remained deeply polarised, and discontent spiralled in the face of his government’s heavy-handed tactics. Maliki was the leader of the Islamic Da’wa Party, whose founders included Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad-Baqir al-Sadr (brutally tortured and executed by the Iraqi Ba’th regime in April 1980), who in turn had taught several of the Lebanese clerics who would inspire the establishment of Hizbullah.[62] Maliki’s time in office saw mass protests in Sunni majority areas in response to real and perceived marginalisation. In April 2013, dozens of civilians were killed when the Iraqi Army’s 12^th Division raided a protest camp in Hawija. This event, among several others, further catalysed widespread anger at Maliki’s perceived anti-Sunni policies as the simmering crisis of legitimacy afflicting the Shi’i-dominated government in Baghdad reached a tipping point.[63]

In June 2014, the Salafi-jihadist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) launched a rapid offensive across the Syrian border into Iraq, plunging the country into an existential crisis. On June 10, ISIS captured Mosul—then Iraq’s second-largest city with a population of nearly two million—after Iraqi security forces collapsed in disarray. Shortly thereafter, ISIS declared the establishment of a so-called Islamic State and proclaimed a global caliphate. Among the most heinous atrocities committed during this period was the Camp Speicher massacre, where ISIS executed between 1,095 and 1,700 unarmed Iraqi air force cadets near Tikrit on June 12, 2014. The Maliki government had previously proposed its ambitions for a parallel paramilitary force, but it was a figure of far grander stature who ultimately gave impetus to its formation. Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, the most revered and emulated Shi’i cleric in the world issued a fatwaor legal ruling stating that it was incumbent on all Muslims to mobilise in defence of ‘their country and their people and their holy places’.[64] The ‘quietist’ cleric has tended to voice his opinion on domestic affairs only at the most sensitive of junctures and does not subscribe to Iran’s theocratic doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist.[65] But instead of joining the discredited Iraqi army, thousands enlisted in the militias that had sprouted up and evolved over the previous decade of civil conflict. Some took up the fight to defend the country out of patriotism, others in the face of a ‘takfiri’ enemy which vowed to cleanse Iraq once and for all of the ‘rawafid’ (a pejorative for Shi’a Muslims), and others still to defend the shrine cities of Karbala, Najaf, Samarra, and Kadhimiya.[66] The Kurdish Regional Government also called for urgent military assistance with Iranian forces the first to appear on the front lines alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga in their battle against ISIS.[67] Videos of Soleimani rallying forces across the country in defence of both the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional one in Erbil spread like wildfire across social media. For a moment, the U.S. and Iran appeared to be the same side and shared a common enemy. 

Since 2014, the Hashd al-Shaʿbi, or Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) – an agglomeration of various armed groups – have effectively embedded themselves within Iraq’s already fragile security apparatus, developing in parallel to the national army that had been dramatically disbanded by Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority under Order Number 2. This was not a situation created by the Islamic Republic, but rather a textbook example of Tehran capitalising on a propitious opportunity. In many ways, it exemplified Iran’s strategic modus operandi in the post-2003 regional order. The mass mobilisation triggered by the ISIS crisis allowed long-time Iranian allies such as Hadi al-ʿAmeri of the Badr Organisation and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis of Kataʾib Hizbullah to further consolidate their power across the Iraqi state. The Badr Organisation – one of the most formidable of these hybrid paramilitary actors – had already established de facto control over the Ministry of the Interior. As previously noted, its leadership enjoyed a deeply entrenched relationship with Tehran stretching back decades.[68]

In November 2016 the Iraqi parliament passed a law designating the PMU ‘an independent military formation as part of the Iraqi armed forces and linked to the Commander-in-Chief [the Prime Minister]’.[69] The PMU has also emerged as the recipient of considerable funds from the Iraqi state budget, over $1.6 billion in 2017, and is formally enshrined as part of Iraq’s armed forces and in theory accountable to the prime minister’s office.[70]  In the words of Fanar Haddad, ‘the destruction of the State in 2003 and the deliberate disbanding of the Iraqi security services vastly accelerated these processes, to the point that, today, hybridization is a structural feature of the State.’[71] In reality, the different forces comprising the PMU, from the Badr Organisation to influential militias such as Asa’ib ahl al-haqq (an offshoot of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army), Kata’ib Hizbullah and Harakat Hizbullah al-Nujaba, have exercised considerable as well as varying degrees of autonomy and are able to pursue policies that align closely to those of Iran and the Resistance Axis more broadly. 

In contrast to Lebanon’s Hizbullah—which has long enjoyed genuine popularity and a deeply rooted social support network—the Iran-aligned factions in Iraq command limited popular legitimacy beyond their core base of loyal partisans. The great political survivor of Iraqi politics, Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr—leader of the Sadrist movement and commander of its militia, the so-called ‘Peace Brigades’ (Saraya al-Salam)—continues to draw a large and organic following, particularly among Baghdad’s Shi’i working class and urban underclasses. At the best of times, Muqtada al-Sadr has displayed strategic ambivalence toward Tehran’s interference in Iraqi politics; at others, he has been sharply critical, casting himself as the embodiment of Shi’a-centric Iraqi nationalism. Yet he has also exercised restraint in his rhetoric and, on occasion, adopted language closely aligned with that of the Axis of Resistance—most notably when he called for a “million-man march” following the U.S. assassination of Qasim Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020.[72]

In recent years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has invested heavily in sustaining Iraq’s dysfunctional political status quo, viewing it as essential to preserving a modicum of stability. This arrangement, however, remains fragile – predicated on the alignment of Iran’s strategic interests with those of powerful allies within Iraq’s political establishment. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this was the violent suppression of the Tishreen movement between 2019 and 2021. Despite brutal repression, the movement ultimately forced the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi – a former socialist who had become a Khomeini devotee.

Thermidor and Realism in Tehran

In the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War, Sayyid Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani moved to marginalise the more radical wing of the pro-Khomeini Islamic left – figures who remained committed to exporting the revolution abroad and to pursuing populist, egalitarian policies at home. Muhammad Muntaziri was already long dead, killed alongside 72 leading members of the Islamic Republican Party when the People’s Mujahidin detonated a bomb at the party’s headquarters on 28 June 1981. Other prominent figures of the revolutionary left, including the aforementioned Ali Akbar Muhtashami, Khamenei’s younger brother Sayyid Hadi, and Sayyid Muhammad Musavi-Khuʾiniha – the spiritual mentor of the Student Followers of the Imam’s Line – were gradually sidelined and ultimately disqualified from running in the Assembly of Experts elections of October 1990.[73] According to one prominent historian, the post-Khomeini leadership sought to reconstitute the Islamic Republic as a ‘mercantile bourgeois republic.’[74] Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guards – having grown dramatically from their modest and improvised beginnings – were tasked with spearheading national reconstruction. The Iran–Iraq War had inflicted staggering losses, with estimates placing the cost to Iran at as much as $622 billion, roughly nine times the country’s gross national product at the time.[75] By the late 1980s, the Islamic Republic had firmly consolidated its grip on power. Khomeini had passed from the scene, and the transition to a new generation of leadership proceeded relatively smoothly. In view of the war’s enormous toll—still borne by the state in its care for veterans and victims of chemical warfare—Iran’s ruling elite resolved never to allow the country to be so vulnerable again.[76] With Khamenei now elevated to Guardian Jurist and Rafsanjani assuming the presidency, the two men worked closely to restore a measure of calm and stability after a decade of revolutionary upheaval, including initiating a gradual normalisation of ties with Gulf states that had once bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s war effort. 

In stark contrast to Ayatollah Khomeini who was often ready and willing to take the most radical course of action to advance his vision for the revolution, Khamenei has been a relatively cautious, albeit assiduous leader when it came to the conduct of foreign affairs. His basic distrust of the United States, grounded in hard earned experience, has proven to be a constant. But he has periodically demonstrated pragmatism and willingness to countenance diplomatic engagement when deemed necessary or advantageous to the regime’s interests. This was evident when Iran cooperated with the U.S. in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’.[77] In the course his thirty-five years of stewardship we observe longer and enduring histories of pan-Islamic solidarity steadily and systematically crafted in coordination with powerful segments of the Iranian military and security establishment to forge a doctrine that has engaged Israel in intermittent and indirect battles of attrition, while at the same time functioning as a deterrent against outright military assaults on Iranian territory from above all the United States. Iran’s defence budget has remained modest even by comparison with regional competitors a fraction of its size. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that Iran’s military budget for 2023 totalled a modest $10.3 billion compared to Israel’s $27.5 billion and Saudi Arabia’s $75.8 billion for the same year.[78]This fact coupled with the history of sanctions, embargoes and international isolation charted above, help explain why the Iranian state has historically placed considerable emphasis on less conventional and asymmetric forms of deterrence. 

Khamenei’s long-term strategy was not one of reckless confrontation, but rather of increasing the costs of the U.S. presence across the Levant and Persian Gulf in a carefully calibrated fashion to minimise the risks of all-out war. A longstanding source of concern have been major U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, including the U.S. Navy’s 5^thFleet in Bahrain, Dubai’s Jabal ‘Ali port which acts as the largest port for the U.S. Navy outside of the United States, and U.S. military’s Central Command in Qatar’s huge Al Udeid Air Base. And as we have seen, the urgency of raising the costs of the U.S. military presence and direct attack on Iran became even more pressing following the U.S. invasions and occupations of two neighbouring states in Iraq and Afghanistan. These real threats of American hard power figure in the Iranian leadership’s ultimate and long-term objective to drive the United States out of the region altogether, even while it has demonstrated its willingness to pursue de-escalatory measures and rapprochement with traditionally U.S.-aligned Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates when circumstances demanded it. 

This strategy has not been without significant costs or dissent on the home front, and Iran’s political class remains deeply divided. The debate is often framed as a confrontation between advocates of ‘diplomacy’ and proponents of the ‘battlefield’ (maydan), though this binary is largely artificial – deployed for domestic political polemics and factional score-settling. At its core, the disagreement concerns Iran’s posture toward Israel and the United States, and whether it is either feasible or desirable to abandon the long-standing policy of confrontation. Former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has come to symbolise the faction within the political elite that favours winding down the Islamic Republic’s support for its allies within the Axis of Resistance. A seasoned diplomat and staunch defender of the JCPOA, Zarif has remarked that many Iranians are ‘tired’ of their government being ‘more Catholic than the Pope’ on the question of Palestine, particularly given the heavy economic and political price the country has borne. In a leaked audio recording that sparked widespread controversy, Zarif criticised Qasim Soleimani for subordinating diplomacy to the priorities of the battlefield, arguing that Iran must shift course and pursue constructive engagement with the United States. His position reflects a broader sentiment captured in Iranian public opinion polls. At the same time, a powerful counter-current runs through regime institutions and its loyalist base – one that rejects any such accommodation on both ideological and strategic grounds.

Unsurprisingly, public opinion is highly polarised too, and the merits of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy are regularly debated in the columns of Iranian newspapers, inveterately hostile foreign-backed satellite TV stations, YouTube channels, and Persian-language social media. Intellectuals, pundits and loyalist critics regularly call for the Islamic Republic to abandon its support for the Resistance Axis and pursue détente and ‘normalisation’ with the United States, as a panacea for all the country’s woes. Polling has revealed Iranians’ complex and contradictory positions on the subject as well. Thus, according to a recent poll conducted by Stasis in September-October 2024, 68 percent of Iranians supported normalisation with the United States and 78 percent see their country’s poor economic fortunes as connected to Iran’s foreign policy. This is while at the same time 61 percent affirmed Iran’s support for the Resistance Axis and 69 percent strongly agreed that Iran’s presence in the region increased the country’s security.[79] Pressure for a fundamental change of register therefore not only comes from external powers, but from an influential coalition of political and class interests within the country itself.

The Syrian Civil War and Its Consequences

The Islamic Republic’s relationship to the Syrian Ba’thist state was always more of a relationship of convenience and mutual advantage than one of ideological and political convergence. The great Palestinian scholar, Hanna Batatu, went so far as to describe the alliance as an exemplary illustration of Hafiz al-Asad ‘practising sheer power politics’.[80] The Syrian Arab Republic’s support for Iran during the war with Iraq, the only Arab state to remain a steadfast ally throughout the conflict, was not out of any love or affection for the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary Shi’i Islamic credo. Rather, it emanated from a far more conventional geopolitical strategy to balance its powerful neighbour and fellow Ba’thist regime in Iraq. Matters were certainly not helped by a decade long and bitter feud between the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’th and charges of conspiracy after the dismal failure of unification talks.[81] 

By the early 1980s, the Syrian state under Hafiz al-Asad’s watchful eye was facing serious internal challenges, particularly from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in cities such as Hama, Homs, and Aleppo.[82] The regime responded with unprecedented ruthlessness, culminating in the Hama massacre of March 1982, in which between five and twenty-five thousand people are believed to have been killed.[83] Shortly thereafter, Iran and Syria signed a ten-year economic agreement, signalling the deepening of their strategic partnership. In return, the Syrian government shut down the Kirkuk–Banias oil pipeline, a move that severely hampered Iraq’s ability to finance its ongoing war against revolutionary Iran.[84] The decision was considered so consequential to Iran’s war effort that Khamenei, in his first public speech following the collapse of the Asad regime on 9 December 2024, cited it as a key reason for the Islamic Republic’s enduring commitment to defending its Syrian ally three decades later. 

We have already seen how following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Asad was reluctant to even permit the IRGC to cross the Syrian border into Lebanon for fear that it might lead Iran to extend its influence (at his expense). In 1989, Iran and Syria sought to mediate between Amal and Hizbullah. When the Syrian authorities threatened a potential rapprochement with its longstanding foe and fellow Ba’thists in Iraq, Iran conceded Syria the paramount position in Lebanon – a situation that would continue until February 2005 and the protests that ensued in the aftermath of the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Even so, clashes between Amal and Hizbullah only ended when Amal disarmed as a result of the Ta’if Agreement ratified by the Lebanese parliament on 5 November 1989. This too ended up constituting a necessary, if not sufficient condition for Hizbullah’s emergence as the most powerful non-state actor in Lebanon.  

Fast forward to 2013 by which time the Syrian popular uprising had morphed into a ferocious civil war engulfing much of the country, the balance of power between the Iran and Syria had significantly shifted. The Syrian regime called upon its allies in Iran, Hizbullah and Russia to aid and abet it in crushing the insurgency, while the U.S., UK, Turkey and the Gulf states supported a panoply of armed groups committed to its overthrow.[85] For both Iran and Hizbullah preservation of a friendly regime in Syria was viewed in existential terms. A major strategic motivation for Tehran’s intervention in the Syrian civil war was the logistical and military corridor to its most important non-state ally, Hizbullah. Syria had acted as an effective hinterland for Hizbullah operations and infrastructure that was indispensable to it emerging as the formidable paramilitary force it had become. Because of this role and function, Syria was often referred to as the ‘tent of the resistance’ (khaymah-yi muqavimat) in official Iranian circles. This arena would prove even more crucial if the paramilitary organisation ever aspired to wage a sustained and longer-term campaign against the Israeli state. 

In the eyes of Iran’s political and security elites, this was directly tied to the Islamic Republic’s capacity to project strategic depth (ʿumq-i istiratizhik) and safeguard its deterrence posture—a concept long embedded in the Islamic Republic’s strategic and diplomatic lexicon.[86] Iran’s relationship with Hizbullah via Syria allowed Iran to leverage its ally’s capacity to strike at northern Israel or further afield if the threat was especially acute. The reason that was most frequently trotted out in official discourse, however, was not the Axis or even the Israeli threat, but the threat posed by IS and ‘takfiri terrorism’. Iran’s intervention was sold to the Iranian public in nationalist terms and portrayed as vital to protecting the homeland. In those years, it was not uncommon to hear Iranian officials contend that ‘we must fight over there, or we’ll be fighting here’. These fears were compounded when Tehran witnessed a spate of IS attacks on Iran’s parliament and Khomeini’s mausoleum in June 2017 resulting in the death of seventeen civilians and over forty wounded. This was followed in August by the dramatic capture and beheading by IS of Muhsin Hujaji, a 25-year-old member of the IRGC, in southeastern Syria.[87] The video and still images of Hujaji being led to his certain death went viral on Iranian social media and were effectively amplified to buttress the Iranian state’s justifications for its involvement in a conflict some 1800 km away.  

Few today doubt that the immense political, economic and human cost of Hizbullah and Iran’s intervention in Syria. In 2006 Nasrallah had consistently topped polls of Arab public opinion, but from 2013 onwards the organisation was seen as having struck a Machiavellian bargain with a brutal and repressive regime whose commitment to the cause of Palestinian liberation was dubious and frequently instrumentalised. Both Hizbullah and the Islamic Republic were increasingly perceived as sectarian actors (just as the weaponisation of sectarianism by the Gulf states has its own sordid history),[88]committed to protecting their narrow geopolitical interests at the expense of millions of Syrians.[89] Moreover, the fact that when push came to shove the Islamic Republic was prepared to mobilise a cornucopia of Shi’a militias, the so-called ‘Defenders of the Haram’ (mudafi’an-i haram) from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan only compounded the indictment. It was these militias enjoying Russian air support that played a pivotal role in the ground offensive allowing the Syrian regime to retake Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in late 2016.[90] Thus, while many Lebanese from across the sectarian divide supported the case for the proactive defence of Lebanese territory against Salafi-Jihadi hyper-sectarian death squads such as IS, there was little denying that Hizbullah’s intervention went far beyond these more limited aims. For their critics and understandably many Syrians, Iran and Hizbullah had made an irredeemable pact with Mephistopheles for the purpose of geopolitical self-aggrandizement. 

Intra-Axis Tensions 

The civil war in Syria strained relations with another key actor in the Resistance Axis, namely, Hamas. Hamas, an anacronym for Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic, has its own distinct genealogy as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Gaza in 1946, two years before the Nakba and the State of Israel declared its independence. Hamas envisioned itself as advancing a history of resistance to Zionist and British colonialism going back to Shaykh ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, killed in a shootout with the British Mandate authorities in 1935, and after whom Hamas’s armed wing is named.[91] It was the eruption of the Palestinian intifada in December 1987 that provided the impetus for a movement predominantly dedicated to religious preaching and instruction, and undergirded by an extensive network of social welfare services in Gaza, to finally pivot and advocate for armed struggle against the occupation. From its outset Hamas was a Palestinian nationalist and anti-colonial project, as much as it was shaped in a religious mould.[92] 

The Islamic Republic institutionalised its ties with Palestinian Islamic factions still committed to armed resistance in 1990 with the formation of the Committee of Support for the Palestinian Islamic Revolution, and in May of that year, the Majles ratified the Law to Support the Islamic Revolution of the Palestinian People.[93] Tehran also convened a high profile conference between 14-22 October 1991 timed ahead of the Madrid conference which was attended by representatives of Hizbullah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – all of whom proceeded to denounce the Madrid process ‘for selling Palestine and Jerusalem’.[94] One of the more striking ironies of unintended consequence during this period unfolded in 1992, when Israeli authorities deported 415 Palestinians to South Lebanon—many of them affiliated with Hamas. A direct result of this policy was the unprecedented proximity it created between Palestinian and Lebanese militants. This physical closeness enabled the forging of new relationships and facilitated training in military hardware and tactics that had previously been either impractical or impossible.[95] 

Thereafter relations between the Islamic Republic and Hamas developed at a steady pace, but never had the same status or quality as its relations with Hizbullah. It was in the context of the Syrian uprisings and ensuing civil war that relations first with the Syrian regime and then the Islamic Republic became fraught. Until 2012 members of Hamas’s external leadership had settled in Damascus, which constituted an important hub to maintain contact and relations with Russian and European diplomats based in Syria.[96] Hamas’s Khaled Mesh’al’s contacts with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and his unsolicited suggestions to the Syrian leader that he pursue a path of meaningful reform were rebuffed, with relations eventually deteriorating to the point that Hamas leaders evacuated their offices in the Syrian capital altogether. Five months later during the summer of 2012, Iran was reported to have reduced the annual economic assistance it provided to the Palestinian organisation by half.[97]

Relations between the two arguably reached their nadir in the offensive and siege of the Syrian city of al-Qusayr, which acted as an essential supply route for Syrian rebels in Homs. In this fateful battle of May 2013, militants of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades clashed directly with Syrian regime forces and Hizbullah. This was as Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely regarded as a spiritual mentor of the Muslim Brotherhood denounced Hizbullah as the ‘Party of Satan’ and Iran as an ‘ally of Zionism’ from his base in Qatar.[98] It would take another four years and change of leadership for relations to recover. Mesh’al’s replacement by Ismail Haniyeh and the rise of such figures as Yahya al-Sinwar and Salih al-‘Aruri, both of whom possessed strong connections to the Qassam Brigades, appears to have been decisive to the rehabilitation of relations with the Islamic Republic. All of these individuals, which at the time of writing have been assassinated or killed by the Israeli military, saw the relationship to the Islamic Republic as indispensable to Hamas’s capacity to pose a genuine military threat to the Israeli occupation, a fact to which Sinwar had testified in public on more than one occasion.[99] 

Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—which, alongside Hamas, took part in Operation al-Aqsa Flood—maintained cordial relations with Tehran throughout the Syrian conflict, despite the intense polarisation and sectarian realignments it unleashed across the region. Its co-founder and first secretary-general, Fathi al-Shiqaqi—a physician born in the Rafah refugee camps—was deeply inspired by the Iranian Revolution and the decisive victory of its Islamist forces. He authored a booklet titled ‘Khomeini: Islamic Solution and Alternative,’ followed by a widely read article, ‘The Sunnis and the Shiites: A Fabricated and Regrettable Pandemonium,’ which challenged sectarian divisions and reflected PIJ’s ideological affinity with Iran’s revolutionary model.[100] In this instance, Al-Shiqaqi sought to combat divisive sectarian rhetoric and infighting, making the case that Twelver Shi’i Islam should be understood as a legitimate Islamic legal school on a par with Sunni ones. He passionately argued that it was Western colonialism that sought to sow the seeds of sectarian strife and divide the Islamic community and ‘besiege [the Iranian Revolution’s] tide and prevent its influence from reaching the Sunni areas.’[101] It was in this vein that al-Shiqaqi made the case of pan-Islamic unity to the end of defeating Western and Zionist colonialism. In 1988, the Israelis deported Al-Shiqaqi to Lebanon. After five years in Beirut, he established an office in the Palestinian refugee camps of Yarmuk on the outskirts of Damascus, and travelled frequently between Tehran, Khartoum, and Tripoli.[102] After his assassination in Malta by Israeli agents in 1995, he was succeeded by Ramadan Shalah and most recently Ziyad al-Nakhaleh, who established PIJ’s armed wing, the Quds Brigades. Both nurtured good relations with Tehran, and PIJ militants have a long history of attending Hizbullah training camps.[103]

Yemen’s Ansarullah 

Yemen’s Ansarullah, better known in the Western media as the Huthis, is a Zaydi revivalist movement founded by Husayn Badr al-Din al-Huthi in the 1990s. Over the decades of gruelling and protracted conflict, it has grown in power, size and sophistication. In 1992, al-Huthi, established the ‘Believing Youth’ (Shabab al-mu’min) movement in response to the rapid spread of Salafi proselytization in and around Sa’dah, viewing it as a proxy for Saudi encroachment and soft power penetration into northern Yemen. During these years, the Believing Youth tapped into deep-seated economic grievances and years of neglect, as well as discontent around their perceived political and religio-cultural marginalisation. Al-Huthi’s movement flourished and proved a great success in coalescing popular anger and resentment at several levels, posing an increasingly visible and vocal challenge to the Salih regime.  

The movement first cut its teeth militarily during the so-called ‘Sa’dah wars’ in a long-running confrontation with the Salih regime that unfolded between 2004 and 2010. This was when the Yemeni president was still a reliable ally of both the Saudis and the United States.[104] When the Arab Uprisings took Yemen by storm, the group had already amassed an impressive fighting force of around 100,000, and was able to play a prominent role in Salih’s overthrow in 2012.[105] In response, the Saudi monarchy and UAE attempted to prop up the ‘transitional’ puppet administration of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had served as vice president under Salih. They formed a military coalition with the resolute backing of the U.S. and the UK, igniting a protracted civil war against the Huthis. Western powers supplied arms, training and intelligence to the Saudi forces as they bombed Yemen’s residential neighbourhoods, medical facilities, schools and heritage sites, while imposing an air and naval blockade. The result was mass devastation, man-made famine and the spread of curable diseases. The UN estimates that the conflict had claimed 377,000 lives by 2021. Yet, in the face of this brutal onslaught from foreign and domestic adversaries, Ansarullah has remained resilient.[106] Roughly two-thirds of Yemen’s population now live in territory under its control, many of them in the capital city of Sana’a. Hadi was forced into exile along with much of his corrupt regime, while Riyadh was eventually forced to wind down its bombing campaign and pursue negotiations.

The Salih government and its successors have long exaggerated the level of foreign support for Ansarullah as a means of garnering additional aid and weapons from the West.[107] But the common description of the movement as ‘Iran’s proxy in the Arabian Peninsula’ defies credulity. While Ansarullah has indeed adopted anti-American and anti-Zionist motifs similar to that of the Islamic Republic, this is mostly a reflection of Yemenis’ longstanding support for the Palestinian cause, which dates back to before the Nakba—with even the absolutist Mutawakkilite dynasty rejecting the UN Partition Plan of 1947.[108] The Huthis are said to have received some training and material support from Iran, though the extent of this remains unclear. It seems likely that the Saudi-led war brought the two powers closer together, and we have seen evidence of deepening ties between Ansarullah and Hizbullah – the former viewing the latter as a potential model to emulate.[109] But there is no doubt that Ansarullah remains highly autonomous, thanks in part to its religious, social and tribal bases. When Iranian officials advised Ansarullah against taking the Yemeni capital in September 2014, for example, it flatly ignored them and proceeded regardless. The movement’s pragmatism was also on display when it forged a tactical alliance with its long-time antagonist, former President Salih in May 2015 two months after the inception of the Saudi-led war. This alliance only came to an end when Salih publicly announced his break with Ansarullah, in a deal spearheaded by the UAE with Saudi approval.[110] It was a betrayal for which Salih would pay with his life when he was swiftly assassinated on 4 December 2017.  

After October 7^th 

Over the past decade, Washington’s primary ambition in the Middle East has been to secure Israeli normalization with the absolutist monarchies of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia in particular. Imperial strategists believed this would create a favourable security settlement in the region, diminishing Iranian influence and bypassing the ‘Palestinian issue’. The populations of Gaza and the West Bank would be condemned to permanent siege, periodic bombings and apartheid rule, with any form of resistance effectively contained. The Hamas-led operation of October 7th—breaching the militarized borders of Gaza, killing several hundred Israeli civilians and 379 Israeli security personnel, and taking around 250 hostages—was a last-ditch attempt to reverse this process: scuppering the prospective Saudi-Israeli deal and revitalizing the Palestinian armed struggle. Ayatollah Khamenei was unusually prompt to deny Iran had any foreknowledge of the attack, probably cognisant that Netanyahu would try to pin the blame on Iran and enlist international support for a military campaign against it. Thus, as Israel’s war on Gaza got underway, Tehran pursued a measured strategy, hoping to avoid an escalation that would draw in the U.S. and regionalize the conflict, while also supporting several fronts against the Zionist state.

During the first weeks of fighting, Iraqi armed factions began to launch strikes on Israeli and U.S. targets. Throughout this period, the Islamic Republic appears to have acted as a force moderation and restraint, insisting at various points that their allies hold fire. Though the latter reportedly expressed their frustration at this more conservative stance, they generally appear to have followed Tehran’s advice – dialling down their activities before they provoked a major retaliation.[111]The militias have been less focused on Israel (for the obvious reason that the two countries do not share a border) and more on increasing their own stake and resources within the Iraqi political system, while building up pressure for a complete U.S. withdrawal.

On 17 November 2023, Ansarullah threw all caution to the wind and set about targeting Israeli shipping and supply chains which depend on access to the Suez Canal through the 26-kilometre-wide Bab al-Mandab Strait.[112] It used helicopters, drones and missiles to block the passage of the ships and force others to reroute. Hoping to pacify the movement, the Biden administration established a coalition of states to defend the vessels, but the notable absence of Saudi Arabia and the UAE made clear that this would be a dead letter. In the months that followed, the U.S., UK and Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes on Huthi targets, including a widely publicized Israeli attack on the port of Hodeida, but proved unable to curb Ansarullah’s campaign. By January 2024, it was reported that global shipping through the Red Sea was down 40 per cent, and the port of Eilat declared bankruptcy that July.[113] Pro-Palestinian rallies, banned in parts of Yemen under the control of the Western-backed Southern Transitional Council, continue to be held each week across Huthi controlled areas. This has been an effective means of bolstering Ansarullah’s claim to be Yemen’s only legitimate sovereign authority.

The Asad regime remained largely a passive observer during the war, unable to repel Israeli aerial attacks on its territory, though still playing its traditional role as a land corridor between Iran and Hizbullah. On 1 April 2024, Israel conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, killing Brigadier General Muhammad Riza Zahidi, the foremost commander of the Quds Force in the Levant as well as several other senior officers. It was hardly the first attack of its kind. In recent years, Israel has carried out hundreds of sorties on targets in Syria, including against alleged Iranian military sites. But this time Iran, having been hit on its sovereign territory, felt compelled to mount a direct response.[114]Two weeks later it launched Operation True Promise: a multi-layered swarm attack comprising drones, cruise missiles and a limited number of ballistic missiles, aimed at military targets within Israel. It gave advance warning of the operation to its neighbours and the Americans. With support from the U.S., UK, France and Jordan, Israeli authorities claimed to have shot down 99 per cent of all incoming projectiles (although that figure was later revised downwards). However, a handful of ballistic missiles struck the Nevatim airbase in the Negev, exposing the vulnerabilities of Israel’s much-feted air defence systems. Iran’s leadership declared the operation a success, believing it would re-establish the balance of deterrence, and that the two sides would revert to the modus operandi of indirect clashes and tit-for tat wars of attrition.

This assumption proved to be complacent. The Iranian leadership appeared to underestimate both Netanyahu’s readiness to escalate and Biden’s willingness to give him a free hand. When the Israelis assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 30 July, shortly after he had attended the inauguration of the newly elected president Mas’ud Pizishkian, the regime was caught off guard and unsure of its next moves. By ramping up the conflict, it risked provoking the US and European states to tilt the ledger even further in Israel’s favour. While Iranian political and military elites had long dealt with this power imbalance by forging alliances with popular mobilizations under conditions of civil conflict, so as to bog down and exhaust their opponents,  now this playbook no longer seemed applicable. Tehran had also been assured that a ceasefire was imminent and did not want to be blamed for derailing the negotiations. It decided to retreat from further hostilities for the time being.    

Smelling blood, the Netanyahu government then turned its attention to Lebanon. Since the outbreak of war, Hizbullah had launched perpetual strikes on IDF outposts on Israel’s border. It had limited the scale of these volleys in the hope of keeping the Israeli military diverted while avoiding all-out war. One year into the conflict, they had reportedly killed 72 in Israel, including 30 soldiers, and displaced a total of 60,000—with the Israeli government forced to establish a large buffer zone in the north.[115] Israel, in turn, had assassinated several of Hizbullah’s most senior military cadres including Fuad Shukr, a founder of the groups armed wing, and Ibrahim Aqil, commander-in-chief of its elite Radwan Force. It also planted explosives in pager devices purported to be linked to Hizbullah, killing 42, including two children, and injuring approximately 3,500, while illustrating Mossad’s capacity to infiltrate the organization’s communication networks and supply chains. 

On 27 September 2024, while Hizbullah was still reeling from these losses, Israel dropped 80 U.S.-made bunker-buster bombs on an apartment complex in southern Beirut, killing Secretary-General Nasrallah and the Iranian Brigadier General Abbas Nilfurushan along with 300 civilians. The Party of God lost decades of military expertise and strategic acumen, as well as a leader of international stature. Hopes that its latest confrontation with Israel would be a replay of 2006 were dashed. Israel subsequently used its airpower to launch an effective campaign of collective punishment, targeting Lebanon’s economic, medical and social infrastructure and leaving thousands of dead. Despite Tel Aviv’s maximalist war aims, it was predictably incapable of eradicating Hizbullah; the party had made preparations for a new generation of leaders to take the helm and remained capable of repelling Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory. But the scale of its losses forced it to sign a drastically one-sided ‘ceasefire’ deal in late November, halting its attacks and withdrawing its fighters to north of the Litani river. This was a decisive victory for Israel, which reportedly violated the agreement a hundred times during its first week with virtual impunity.  

The decimation of Hizbullah’s leadership prompted the Islamic Republic to mount another retaliatory strike against the Israelis, if only to retain its credibility and convince its allies across the Arab world that they had not been abandoned. Operation True Promise 2, launched on 1 October 2024, was quite unlike its previous iteration. Tehran gave little warning before firing approximately 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli military targets. As many as 40 projectiles achieved direct hits on the Nevatim airbase, while others struck the Tel Nof airbase, and one came within a short distance of Mossad’s Glilot headquarters. Addressing the nation from his underground bunker, Netanyahu promised a major retaliation, which finally came one month later.[116] Israel claimed that its counter-attack—the country’s first direct military assault on Iran, after years of assassinations, cyberwarfare operations and sabotage campaigns – struck a number of missile depots and air defence systems, plus an unspecified ‘component’ of Iran’s nuclear programme.[117] The Iranian authorities acknowledged some of this damage and reported that four Iranian soldiers were killed in the attack, but they generally sought to downplay the significance of the strike.[118] Iran’s leaders vowed a punishing response, but at the time of writing, the much-vaunted True Promise III, has yet to materialise. At present, the newly elected president, Mas’ud Pizishkian, and wider political class, clearly has little appetite for further escalation, and has since expressed his willingness to pursue diplomacy with the U.S. and EU.  

Even so, Trump’s return to ‘maximum pressure’ and erratic sabre-rattling led to a remarkable uptick in public discussion within Iran itself of the imperative to acquire a nuclear deterrent – a topic that had previously been taboo inside the country. On 1 November 2024, Kamal Kharrazi, a former foreign minister and trusted advisor to the Supreme Leader, stated that ‘if Iran faces an existential threat, it will revise its nuclear doctrine’, adding: ‘we have the capability to build a nuclear weapon’.[119] This appears to have been an opening gambit in a negotiation process. By now, it is well established that the Trump administration is internally divided: on one side, neoconservatives and Christian Zionists advocate for another catastrophic regional war; on the other, a vocal segment of the MAGA coalition has grown weary of two decades of costly and failed imperial interventions across West Asia. The U.S. Annual Threat Assessment, published in March 2025, confirmed that Iran’s leadership has not authorised any move toward developing a nuclear weapons program, despite persistent threats to bomb its enrichment facilities. The same report acknowledged that ‘Iranian investment in its military has been a key plank of its efforts to confront diverse threats and to deter and defend against an attack by the United States or Israel.’[120] This affirms that, behind the bombast, U.S. intelligence officials recognise Iran’s considerable conventional deterrent capability—one that could inflict serious damage on U.S. and Israeli targets in the event of a full-scale attack on its nuclear infrastructure. As The New York Times reported on 16 April, President Trump vetoed an Israeli strike on Iran – at least for the moment.[121]

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent decades lobbying successive U.S. administrations to carry out a military strike on Iran. Yet it is widely acknowledged that Israel lacks the capacity to execute a ‘successful’ attack on its own; any such operation would require the United States to take the lead – and even then, its chances of success remain uncertain. Moreover, even advocates of what is euphemistically called the ‘military option’ concede that such a strike would almost certainly spiral into a full-scale regime change war.[122] Whether Iran decides to accelerate its nuclear programme now hinges in large part on the outcome of the latest round of negotiations, headed up by Trump confidante and real estate developer Steve Witkoff.  Despite Trump’s central role in dismantling the original Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, there remains a real—if fragile—opportunity to reach a new diplomatic settlement and avert a wider regional conflict, which is by no means inevitable.

On 8 December 2024, the Asad dictatorship was toppled by a lightning ascendancy of Sunni Islamist militias led by Ha’yat al-Tahrir al-Sham. Its fall – after thirteen years of uprisings, repression, civil war, great power intervention and economic sanctions—marks a seismic shift. For Iran, Syria was strategically important as an Arab ally in an otherwise hostile arena which conjoined the Islamic Republic to Hizbullah: the hard core of the Resistance Axis. The loss of this connection will make it far more challenging for Hizbullah to engage in any kind of sustained campaign against the Israeli state. The group will maintain a significant military advantage over its political rivals in Lebanon. But whether it will be able to retain its status as a popular resistance movement, or be absorbed into the country’s debilitating confessional system, is now an open question and will entail a political and ideological struggle of its own. It is also possible that the U.S. and Israel will use this moment of weakness to further strangle the Party of God. The new regime in Damascus, meanwhile, is eager to cultivate political and economic ties with Turkey, Qatar and the West, and is now reported to have offered a series of unprecedented economic and political concessions to the Trump administration in order to stave off economic collapse.[123] Within 48 hours of Asad’s fall, the Israeli military advanced into the UN-monitored buffer zone established after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and launched up to 480 airstrikes against alleged Syrian military targets, effectively demilitarising the country for a generation. In parallel, Israel expanded its military footprint, occupying large portions of Quneitra governorate and establishing outposts on the strategically significant Jabal al-Shaykh (Mount Hermon), a site long valued for its topographical and surveillance advantages.

Prospects

This dramatic series of developments—Hizbullah and Hamas chastened, Iran weakened, Asad vanquished—has led many commentators to announce the ‘end of the Axis of the Resistance’. But the extent to which the Axis was ever a fully formed institutional structure has always been exaggerated by both its detractors and supporters. As I have tried to demonstrate, it was always a loose network of alliances which emerged haphazardly, in situations where the central state was ineffective or in disarray. At crucial moments, Tehran was able to build a complex and varied range of partnerships with committed actors, often motivated by a genuine sense of solidarity and a common set of enemies. But this must ultimately be seen as an Iranian state strategy to stave off imperial encroachment and its own survival, not the kind of pan-Islamic internationalist project for which the pro-Khomeini radicals had once hoped. 

Pizishkian has declared his new government to be one of ‘consensus’ (vifaq). But it is not yet clear whether his aim is to address the rising anger throughout Iran or simply smooth out divisions among the fractious and quarrelsome political class. Either way, conservative forces within the Majles are in no mood for compromise. They recently passed a draconian Hijab and Chastity Law, enforcing a range of social restrictions—including penalties for women who fail to observe Islamic dress codes—which were condemned by many senior clerics, fearing they would provoke a societal explosion akin to that of 2022-23. The Supreme National Security Council has since stepped in to ‘pause’ the implementation of the law. On the other side of the political spectrum, neoliberal ‘reformers’ are demanding a further reduction in state subsidies for fuel and other essentials: measures that are likely to spark unrest among the country’s poor. There is also the looming shadow of a succession crisis, as the 85-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei will soon pass from the scene, further destabilizing the country at a time of crisis. 

In this conjuncture, rife with uncertainty and speculation, Iran appears less capable than ever of coordinating transnational opposition to the U.S. and Israel. The Islamic Republic will continue to maintain influential allies in Iraq and Yemen, and new forms of resistance will undoubtedly emerge among populations that have already demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of imperial intervention, colonial brutality, and ethnic cleansing. Yet the prospect of a ‘unity of fields’ stretching across the region is increasingly remote, and was always bound to encounter its own structural limitations. Iran has built up a conventional arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones precisely for such a scenario – recall their origins during the Iran–Iraq War, when the Islamic Republic believed itself entirely alone and encircled by implacable enemies. This arsenal should not be underestimated and clearly factors into the strategic calculus of both the U.S. administration and the Gulf states. But those who have survived the latest Western-backed onslaught are now scattered and dispersed, and they will struggle to regroup amid ruinous conditions.