By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Israel-Hamas war—and the possibility that it may explode into a wider conflagration—has upended the determined efforts of three U.S. presidents to pivot American resources and focus away from the Middle East. Immediately after Hamas’s October 7 attack, U.S. President Joe Biden moved quickly to support Israel, a critical American ally, and deter the expansion of hostilities. But as of this writing, the conflict has become a hellish impasse. The security imperatives driving the war command wide support among the Israeli public, yet months of intense Israeli operations have failed to eliminate Hamas, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. And as the crisis expands, so, too, have the United States’ engagements in the Middle East. In the months after October 7, Washington delivered aid shipments to besieged Gazans, launched military operations to protect maritime transit, worked to contain the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, strove to degrade the capabilities of other disruptive militias from Iraq to Yemen, and pursued ambitious diplomatic initiatives to foster the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Reengaging with the Middle East presents risks for Biden, especially as he campaigns for reelection against his predecessor, Donald Trump, whose critiques of the human and economic costs of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resonated with voters and boosted his 2016 presidential campaign. In a Quinnipiac poll conducted three weeks after Hamas’s attack, an overwhelming 84 percent of Americans expressed concern that the United States could be drawn into direct military involvement in the Middle East conflict, and only one in five respondents to a February 2024 Pew survey agreed that the United States should make a “major” diplomatic push to end the Israel-Hamas war. But the risks posed by timidity are even greater. One regional actor particularly benefits from Washington’s hesitation or disengagement: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The quagmire in the Middle East presents an opportunity for a breakthrough in a four-decade strategy by Tehran to debilitate one of its foremost regional adversaries, Israel—and to humiliate the United States and drastically diminish its influence in the region.

Iran’s Islamic regime aimed to inspire copycat religious uprisings after its own 1979 revolution, and to many observers, it may appear to have failed. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Washington and elsewhere has often held that Iran has become contained, even isolated. But this was never true. Instead, Tehran developed a calculated strategy to empower proxy militias and to influence operations in its neighborhood while maintaining plausible deniability—a scheme whose canniness was vindicated by the devastating scope of Hamas’s assault and subsequent attacks by Iranian-affiliated militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

The post–October 7 strategic landscape in the Middle East is one that was largely created by Iran and that plays to its strengths. Tehran sees opportunity in chaos. Iranian leaders are exploiting and escalating the war in Gaza to elevate their regime’s stature, weaken and delegitimize Israel, undermine U.S. interests, and further shape the regional order in their favor. The truth is that the Islamic Republic is now in a better position than ever to dominate the Middle East, including by attaining the ability to disrupt shipping at multiple critical chokepoints.

Left unchecked, the dramatic expansion of Iran’s influence would have a catastrophic impact on Israel, the wider region, and the global economy. To disrupt this amplification of Iranian power, Biden urgently needs to articulate and then implement a clear strategy to protect Palestinian civilians from bearing the brunt of Israel’s military operations, counter Iran’s corrosive war-by-proxy strategy, and blunt the capabilities of Tehran’s accomplices. Achieving these goals will require a tricky set of moves by Washington, and Americans are weary of the military, economic, and human toll of their country’s commitments in the Middle East. But no world power other than the United States has the military and diplomatic capacity to frustrate Iran’s most destructive ambitions by managing the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hamas and containing its most devastating long-term consequences.

 

Chaos Theory

Since Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, Iran has served as the group’s primary patron. Tehran proffered money, material, and other support that made the October 7 attack possible, including military technologies, intelligence, and as much as $300 million per year in financial assistance. It provided drones and rockets as well as infrastructure and training to help Hamas build its own weapons—weapons Hamas used to continue striking Israel for several months after the initial attack.

After October 7, Iranian-backed militias also quickly ramped up hostile activities targeting Israeli and U.S. forces in the region. These assaults have caused well over a hundred casualties among U.S. service members. The Houthis, the Iranian-backed armed group ruling much of Yemen’s population—have attacked ships sailing in the Red Sea, causing transit through the Suez Canal to fall by 50 percent in the first two months of 2024. According to Congressional testimony in March by General Michael Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, the escalation in strikes by Iran’s allies and subsequent U.S. military responses have emboldened terrorist organizations not aligned with Tehran, prompting an uptick in attacks by groups such as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Iran also made explicit moves to raise its diplomatic profile in the wake of October 7. Days after Hamas’s attack, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke directly by phone for the first time with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and in November, he participated in a regional summit in Riyadh. Other Iranian officials, such as Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, have ricocheted around the region and beyond, seeking to position their country as a trusted mediator even as the regime maintains its support for Hamas.

None of these developments are merely the result of Iran’s glimpsing new openings in turmoil and making opportunistic, impulsive moves. They are the product of a time-tested playbook. From the inception of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s leadership has harbored expansive ambitions. Since 1979, the country has viewed chaos and volatility, whether at home or nearby, as an opportunity to advance its interests and influence. Even Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran worked to the fledgling theocracy’s advantage by rallying internal support for the new order in Tehran, providing the occasion to build a strong domestic defense industry, and enabling the regime to survive its infancy.

Tehran has used successive conflagrations in its neighborhood to strengthen its position. Historically, some of the most valuable openings have come as a result of missteps by Washington and its partners in the region, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That conflict, which brought 150,000 U.S. troops to Iran’s doorstep, quickly broke in Tehran’s favor. Iraqi President  Saddam Hussein, the Iranian leadership’s most existential threat, was deposed, and his regime was replaced by a weak state led by disaffected Shiites with existing ties to Tehran. Iran made the most of other moments of regional chaos in the years that followed. Beginning in 2013, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) worked with its primary surrogate, Hezbollah, to mobilize brigades of Afghan and Pakistani Shiites into a larger transnational Shiite militia to defend Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime in Syria. Tehran eventually built an effective partnership with Russia during the Syrian civil war, which expanded into a broader strategic cooperation after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

A key component of Iran’s strategy in its neighborhood has been the cultivation of an “axis of resistance,” a loose network of regional militias with discrete organizational structures, overlapping interests, and ties to Iran’s security and religious establishments. The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, maintained that exporting the revolution was necessary for its survival, arguing that if the theocracy remained “in an enclosed environment” it would “definitely face defeat.” Determined to spark a wider wave of Islamist-led upheavals against secular monarchies and republics in the Middle East, Khomeini and his acolytes developed an infrastructure dedicated to toppling the status quo across the Muslim world. During the Islamic Republic’s initial two decades in power, its leaders worked with proxy groups in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere to help incite a 1981 coup attempt in Bahrain, the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Kuwait, a 1985 assassination attempt against Kuwait’s emir, incendiary anti-Saudi and anti-American rallies during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and other subversive actions against its neighbors.

The revolutionary wave Khomeini hoped for never materialized. Although Iranian leaders’ expectations for a wide-scale revolt against the existing regional order were disappointing, they would find their aspirations validated by the emergence of sympathetic militant groups that sought the revolutionary state’s patronage. And the Islamic Republic’s early investments yielded a valuable asset that has served as a model for its later efforts: Hezbollah. After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Iran’s fledgling IRGC began training and coordinating Hezbollah, an incipient Shiite armed group. Iran’s assistance immediately made Hezbollah more potent: the group mounted a series of devastating suicide bombings of French and U.S. government facilities in 1983 and 1984 in Lebanon, as well as kidnappings, hijackings, and violence further afield, such as the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina in 1994 and the suicide bombing of a bus in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists in 2012.

Through its political wing, Hezbollah insinuated itself deep into the Lebanese government, installing members in the parliament and the cabinet. This political role did not temper the group’s reliance on violence: several Hezbollah members were convicted in the 2005 assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Despite Israeli and U.S. efforts to eliminate the militia, it maintains tens of thousands of active fighters, and with Tehran’s help, has amassed an arsenal of some 150,000 mostly short- and medium-range rockets and missiles, as well as drones and antitank, antiaircraft, and antiship artillery. Tehran continues to provide Hezbollah with $700 million to $1 billion per year in support, and the group remains the paramount social, political, and military actor in Lebanon.

Hezbollah has proved extraordinarily useful to Iran. Its head, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, is one of the few regional power players who openly pay homage to Iran’s supreme leader as their organizations’ spiritual guide, although Hezbollah no longer espouses its early objective of establishing an Islamic state in  Lebanon. Hezbollah’s role in driving Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, completed in 2000, earned the group brief regional acclaim and enduring domestic legitimacy, and its global reach continues to amplify Tehran’s leverage. Since the early 1990s, it has played a vital role in funneling funds, training, and arms from Iran to a variety of other groups, including but hardly limited to Hamas.

 

The Long Game

With its cultivation of Hezbollah as a template, Iran then invested an enormous amount of effort and resources in cultivating militant groups across the Middle East. The support it has given to Palestinian militant groups, especially Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, paid tremendous dividends over subsequent decades, as did its aid to Shiite opponents of Saddam in Iraq. These relationships provided the springboard for Iranian influence at key turning points for regional stability. In the 1990s, PIJ terrorist attacks disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and nudged Israeli politics rightward. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Tehran’s patronage of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Dawa Party, both significant Shiite factions, positioned Iran as the most influential player in Iraq’s contentious postwar polity.

The Syrian civil war elevated Hezbollah’s status to the jewel in the crown of the Iranian proxy network. Working closely with the IRGC, Hezbollah trained and coordinated the wider network of Iranian-backed Shiite militias that flooded into Syria from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen. Iran has proved remarkably flexible and pragmatic in developing this network, enabling it to align itself with partners and surrogates on multiple continents. Sometimes, Tehran uses umbrella groups and joint operation rooms to coordinate diverse factions, and at other times intentionally fragments existing groups to maintain its influence over them. Iran’s money and materiel have long been a central dimension of its relationships with individual militias. Increasingly, however, Tehran not only transfers finished weaponry but also the means for its proxy groups to manufacture and modify weapons independently.

Iran’s national security establishment sees investing in asymmetric warfare as an economical means of gaining leverage against more powerful adversaries, especially the United States. Iran’s influence over militias has been boosted by the elimination of most of its radical competitors in the Middle East. After deep-pocketed dictators such as Saddam and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi were removed from power, the Islamic Republic became one of the few regional players possessing the interest and the resources to back armed militias.

In many respects, the relationship between Iran and its proxies reflects shared preferences for autonomy and self-interest. The evolutionary nature of Iranian investments in its clients has worked to its advantage, enabling the security establishment to sustain partnerships of enduring value that can withstand disruptions. For example, even as Hamas distanced itself from Iran for several years after the eruption of the Syrian civil war, Iran continued to provide the group with residual funding, and in time the relationship rebounded.

 

Arc Of Triumph

In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Tehran sought to more fully establish itself as a power broker in a region in turmoil. Israel waged a determined campaign to blunt Iranian influence by “mowing the lawn,” or routinely striking Iranian positions in Syria to disrupt the Islamic Republic’s attempt to develop a land bridge to supply Hezbollah and its wider network of surrogates. This campaign scored a number of tactical successes, yet it does not seem to have had a meaningful deterrent impact on Iran and its proxies.

The United States, meanwhile, was seeking to deepen its relationship with alternative power centers and foster new alignments to counter Tehran. From President Bill Clinton’s “dual containment” (which sought to isolate both Iran and Iraq while advancing Arab-Israeli peacemaking) to President George W. Bush’s “forward strategy for freedom” (which focused on advancing democratization in the Middle East and beyond), Washington has repeatedly invested in schemes intended to excise Iranian-backed violent extremism from the Middle East, to little effect. In a November 2023 speech, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, reflected on these efforts, sneering that Washington had “failed completely in trying to create a ‘New Middle East.’” He went on: “Yes, the region’s geopolitical map is undergoing a fundamental transformation, but not to the benefit of the United States. It is to the benefit of the resistance front. Yes, West Asia’s geopolitical map has changed—but it has changed in favor of the resistance.”

Since October 7, Iran’s leaders have exulted in Israelis’ terror and grief and exploited the immense suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to further elevate their status as power brokers. The war has provided an opening for the Islamic Republic to resume a formal role in pan-Muslim and cross-regional consultations. As they often do, Iranian leaders have coupled active diplomacy with a show of force intended to test America’s resolve.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah, Tehran, March 2024.

Attacks by Iran’s surrogate militias pose a devilishly complex challenge for Washington and the world. From October 2023 through mid-February 2024, attacks by Iranian-backed proxies resulted in at least 186 casualties among U.S. troops serving in the Middle East. These included 130 traumatic brain injuries, the loss of three army reservists in Jordan, and the deaths of two navy SEALs on a mission to interdict illicit Iranian weapons off the coast of Somalia.

Before October 7, the Biden administration had invested considerable time, energy, and political capital in a plan to help normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a deal would have represented a huge breakthrough for both governments and the wider region by opening up new economic opportunities and, over time, helping marginalize the influence of malign actors, including Tehran and its proxies. Biden’s effort to achieve an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal was the most recent component of a long American campaign to strengthen cooperation between self-described moderate regional actors. The normalization talks built on the success of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates and opened unprecedented opportunities for bilateral trade, military cooperation, and people-to-people engagement. The opening with Riyadh would have boosted this trend, putting Iran on the back foot even as it strove to secure its own rapprochement with Riyadh.

The case for establishing full diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia remains compelling. But the Israel-Hamas war added staggering complexities to what was already going to be a historically ambitious undertaking. For many Israelis in and outside of government, Hamas’s horrific attack only reinforced the conviction that Palestinian sovereignty presents an unacceptable security threat. Israel’s subsequent operations in Gaza, however, triggered new Saudi demands for a meaningful effort to redress Palestinian suffering. And the U.S. contribution to the proposed rapprochement—security commitments to Saudi Arabia and investments in the kingdom’s civil nuclear infrastructure—requires buy-in from American lawmakers that has become harder to secure amid concerns that an escalation of the Israel-Hamas war could draw U.S. forces directly into another Middle East conflict.

The combination of rhetoric, diplomacy, and terrorism that Iran has deftly employed since October 7 advances some of its most long-standing ideological and strategic priorities. Like Hamas, Iran’s leadership clamors for Israel’s destruction and for the triumph of the Islamic world over what it sees as a West in decline. Its views are not opportunistic or transient; anti-Americanism and antipathy toward Israel are ingrained in the Islamic Republic’s bedrock. But the monumental scale of destruction in Gaza has breathed new life into Tehran’s anti-Western and anti-Israeli invective. This rhetoric now holds fresh appeal for regional audiences who were otherwise unsympathetic toward a Shiite theocracy and gives Iran a convenient opportunity to shame its Sunni Arab rivals. Tehran sees regional assertiveness as a chance to align itself yet more closely with Russia and China, too. Those countries’ interests are, for the most part, served by keeping Washington mired in a crisis in the Middle East that damages its reputation and bleeds its military capacity. Notably, China, Iran, and Russia launched a small joint naval drill, the fourth of its kind in the past five years, in the Gulf of Oman in early March.

 

Fight Risk

From Tehran’s perspective, the Israel-Hamas war is only accelerating a shift in the power balance away from U.S. hegemony and toward a new regional order that benefits the Islamic Republic. Ten days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, warned that a ground invasion of Gaza could “open the gates of hell”—that is, trigger an overwhelming response directed not just at Israel but also at American interests and assets in the region. Still, for Iran’s pugnacious revolutionaries, regime survival trumps every other priority, so their approach from October to March was guided by careful targeting. After the Biden administration dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean in October, Iran and its allies took pains to avoid a precipitous escalation. Hezbollah deftly calibrated its attacks on Israel’s north, seemingly to avoid drawing Israel into a hotter fight that could erode Hezbollah’s ability to deter an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Biden’s rapid deployment of U.S. military assets to the region, together with his diplomatic overtures in Lebanon and other key regional actors, helped avert the wider war that Hamas may have hoped to precipitate. A series of U.S. strikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen degraded those groups’ capabilities and signaled to Tehran’s partners that they would pay a price for continued aggression against Americans. Yet the risk of American miscalculations and overconfidence will creep up over time. Iran’s militias have a long record of tenacity and adaptability, and the weapons at their disposal are relatively plentiful and inexpensive, especially compared with the costs of the American strikes to eliminate them.

Over the decades, Iran and its proxies have developed keen instincts for calibrating risk. Now, having gauged the waning American interest in the Middle East, Iranian leaders see an advantage to be gained by gambling. With their attacks, they seek to provoke the United States to make mistakes that give Tehran and its allies an advantage—mistakes similar to the ones Washington made two decades ago, when it invaded Iraq, or in 2018, when Trump withdrew from President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. A miscalculation by any of the actors involved, including Iran itself, could ignite a much wider and more intense conflict across the Middle East, causing profound damage to regional stability and the global economy.

To counter Iran’s ambitions, the Biden administration must work with Israel and regional allies to further erode Hamas’s ability to launch another shocking attack against Israeli civilians while ensuring that humanitarian assistance reaches desperate Palestinian civilians and outlining a path to a postwar future that ensures peace and stability for both Israelis and Palestinians. As of late March 2024, Washington was continuing to press for an agreement that would require Hezbollah to pull its elite forces back from Lebanon’s border with Israel, facilitating the return of thousands of Israeli civilians whose homes have come under bombardment by Hezbollah rockets since October 7. Achieving such an agreement is critical to prevent a wider conflict, and Washington must press hard for it, leveraging the obvious interests of all parties involved to forestall escalation. In 2022, the United States had success in negotiating a maritime border deal between Israel and Lebanon to permit gas exploration, which suggests there are other opportunities for pragmatic compromise.

The Biden administration has already begun to take a more forceful role in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tragically, these efforts may prove to be too little and too late to forestall famine. A famine in Gaza would constitute both a strategic and a moral failure for the United States as well as for Israel, and Biden must not repeat the errors that have allowed the specter of such a cataclysm to grip the region. Any truly successful effort to put a stop to the threat from Hamas—which, in turn, would curb Iran’s ability to inflict violence on Israel—will require mitigating the devastating fallout for Palestinian civilians.

Working with nongovernmental organizations and partner governments, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development must rush assistance to Palestinian civilian authorities independent of Hamas and other Iranian-backed militias—including aid to ensure they have the resources to undertake a reconstruction effort in Gaza when the armed conflict stops. After the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, Iran’s rapid delivery of aid enabled Hezbollah to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and outmaneuver the Lebanese government by providing instantaneous compensation and rebuilding programs. The United States must not allow Tehran or its proxies a similar opening after the war in Gaza ends.

Compounding the challenge for Washington is the reality that Iran has accelerated the development of its nuclear program since Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. It is vital for American officials to cultivate a sense of realism. The grand strategic play to align Saudi Arabia and Israel may yet come to pass. Normalizing Israeli-Saudi relations is an appealing way to undergird peace and stability in the region and to counter Iran’s malign influence in the long term, but accomplishing it requires complicated political scaffolding that has yet to be fully designed, much less erected. Achieving that normalization requires more effective short- and medium-term game plans to provide governance and security in Gaza, open the way for leadership transitions in both the Palestinian territories and in Israel, and contain the pressures that a variety of actors, especially Iran, are exerting to expand conflict in the Middle East. These must be Washington’s priorities over the next year.

In a sense, Iran now has the default advantage over the United States because it does not actually have to achieve anything material in the near term. Chaos itself will constitute a victory. By contrast, the bar for U.S. success is high. Like it or not, however, the United States remains an indispensable player in the region despite its dubious record over the past several decades. Standing by its allies—and safeguarding access to oil that remains vital to the world economy—with a delicate balance of support and restraint requires commitment. Several U.S. presidents hoped to downsize America’s role in the Middle East on the cheap—in Biden’s case, to focus on China’s challenge and Russia’s growing threat. But Hamas and Iran have drawn the United States back in.

 

 

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