By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Narrow Path to a New Middle East

The Iranian regime is on its back foot, more vulnerable internally and exposed abroad than at any point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent multipronged war on Iranian interests, Iran’s huge investments in its missile arsenal, its nuclear weapons program, and its network of regional proxy actors had sharply constrained the United States’ strategy toward the Middle East. Washington’s Iran-focused policy analysts remained divided on just what mix of tools would effectively deter Iranian aggression, but they generally agreed that if Tehran were pushed too hard, it would retain a menu of retaliatory options that risked full-scale war. Four successive U.S. presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump in his first term, and Joe Biden—all settled on using diplomacy and sanctions for deterrence and never authorized military strikes inside Iranian territory.

Israel’s operational successes have shattered those preconceptions—and opened a window of opportunity to finish dismantling Iran’s regional threat network and build a safer and more stable Middle East. Key leaders throughout Iran’s so-called axis of resistance have been killed, and tens of thousands of Iranian-backed fighters have been taken off the battlefield. Axis arsenals have been devastated, and Israel has degraded the Iranian military-industrial complex that once replenished them. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus in December, Tehran’s leaders lost a crucial ally who had helped them turn Syria into the transit hub they used to resupply its proxy militias with weapons, funds, and fighters. Its two ballistic missile attacks on Israel in 2024 were a failure that further degraded its deterrence as well as its affiliate groups’ morale, calling Tehran’s value as a patron into question.

The stage is set for a new political framework that can reform and strengthen the corrupt and weak bureaucracies that Iran fed on and replace compromised leaders susceptible to Iranian influence. Preventing Iran from recouping its destructive power in the Middle East cannot be left up to Israel, which lacks the resources, alliance structure, and decades of post-conflict experience to secure a new, more peaceful regional order. Nor can military force alone prevent Iranian retrenchment. Only a political process can achieve that, and the United States is best positioned to lead the way.

But the steps Trump has taken in the first months of his second term will only make it harder for Washington to seize this generational opportunity. Trump may believe that gutting the State Department’s diplomatic corps and foreign assistance staff, avoiding engagement with Syria’s new government, levying fresh sanctions against Iran, and escalating military strikes against Iranian proxies in Yemen focuses U.S. strategy and signals a return to the “maximum pressure” campaign he employed against Iran in his first term. But an approach that rests on just one foreign policy tool—military action—will not allow the United States to capitalize on Iran’s weakness.

An Iranian protesting his government, Tehran, February 2025

Instead, Trump should combine tough measures with creative diplomacy that goes beyond phoning heads of state and seeking high-visibility deals. The United States, Israel, and many Arab states now have a common goal to free the Middle East of Iran’s influence—a rare consensus. Washington needs to convene these stakeholders to devise a realistic blueprint for Gaza’s governance, security, and reconstruction. It must clearly articulate what long-term investments it will make in the Middle East’s security. And rather than freezing aid, it must lay out a clear strategy for stabilizing the region and responding to the needs of its people that makes more, not fewer, resources available to counteract the criminal syndicates that have sustained Iran’s influence for so long.

Without such a strategy, the Middle East will not be able to consolidate Israel’s impressive military gains against Iran. Tehran’s leaders are already moving to recoup their lost power: some analyses have suggested, for instance, that the Islamic Republic helped foment the sectarian violence that erupted in Syria in March. Although Tehran issued a blanket denial, it benefits from a weakened government in Damascus. A real chance has emerged to set the Middle East on a different path. But if the United States wastes its opportunity to lead, that chance may not come again for generations.

 

Knockout Punch

In the space of a year and a half, Israel brought many of Iran’s allies to their knees. Key Iranian-backed actors in the Middle East have lost their capacity to sustain serious counterinsurgency campaigns and dominate even weak Middle Eastern governments. By August 2024, the Israel Defense Forces announced that it had “dismantled” 22 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, killed over half its military commanders, and eliminated more than 17,000 rank-and-file fighters. The IDF has neutralized much of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure in Gaza and the facilities the terror group used to manufacture drones, rockets, and other munitions. Hamas’s willingness to agree to a phased cease-fire in January reflects its deterioration: its leaders know that the group’s survival is contingent on bringing Israel’s military operations to an end.

Meanwhile, the leadership corps of Hezbollah—Iran’s partner in Lebanon—has been decimated. Israeli airstrikes have destroyed over 70 percent of the group’s strategic long-range missiles, antiaircraft missiles, antiship missiles, and short-range rocket launchers. In an acknowledgment of Hezbollah’s enfeeblement, Tehran directed the group’s surviving leaders to agree to a cease-fire in November on terms favorable to Israel. Hezbollah was forced to de-link its own campaign against Israel from the war in Gaza, a huge blow to Iran’s efforts to encircle Israel in a ring of fire. And in February, Lebanon formed a new government that, for the first time in decades, sidelined Hezbollah-aligned politicians.

Iran failed to protect Assad, the only Middle Eastern head of state it could count as a strategic partner. After the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Iran invested an estimated $30 billion to $50 billion into bolstering Assad’s regime, deploying Iranian officers, directing foreign foot soldiers to Syria, and providing extensive logistical and operational support. In exchange, Assad allowed Iran to use his country to build its regional network, giving it control of warehouses and airports and permitting it to move money and materiel bound for Iranian proxies across Syrian territory and airspace. The mutually beneficial alliance between Tehran and Damascus ended abruptly in December, after an anti-Assad coalition led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) carried out a lightning march on Damascus, taking the capital without meeting serious resistance.

Finally, Tehran’s strategy of projecting power abroad to protect itself at home failed to deter Israel from striking its territory twice in 2024. Israel’s destruction of Iran’s strategic air defenses and its strikes on Iranian defense-industrial facilities left the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program exposed, and badly degraded its capacity to manufacture conventional weapons. Most important, Israel’s operations lowered the fear barrier about striking inside Iranian territory. In April 2024, Iran responded to Israel’s killing of two senior Iranian generals in Damascus with a missile and drone assault on Israeli territory. But a coordinated multilateral defense, led by the United States and comprising Israeli, Arab, and European military capacities, intercepted nearly all of Iran’s cruise missiles and drones before they even reached Israeli airspace. Then, last October, Israel, with U.S. help, effectively defended itself against a more concerted Iranian barrage of over 180 ballistic missiles. These events demonstrated that conventional attacks by Iran can be defeated and that neighboring countries can be persuaded to join a coordinated defense against Iranian aggression.

 

Ready Steady

Israel has significantly degraded Iran’s power through combat operations. But the phase of war that follows combat operations, which U.S. military doctrine calls “stabilization,” is just as important. To prevent further cycles of violence and to deny malign actors a chance to capitalize on postconflict confusion, stabilization involves reestablishing basic security that populations can trust, delivering vital services such as electricity and sanitation, halting postwar economic deterioration, and helping new governments reconstruct their societies. This phase of war—an inherently political one—cannot be waged by uniformed troops alone: they must be joined by diplomats, postconflict technical experts, local leaders, and civil society actors, even if some kinetic action continues.

The Middle East is ready for strategic stabilization. Already, new leaders in Beirut and Damascus are working to wrest their countries from Iran’s influence over their security and politics. In a direct challenge to Hezbollah, Lebanon’s recently inaugurated president, the former army chief Joseph Aoun, has publicly called for the disarmament of all armed groups that operate outside the authority of the state. He has given the Lebanese military a mandate to deploy to the country’s south and complete Hezbollah’s disarmament. The United Nations has been calling for such a disarmament since 2006. But only now, given Hezbollah’s operational degradation, Beirut’s new political will, and direct U.S. military oversight, does it have a chance of being accomplished.

In Syria, HTS’s leader, Ahmed al-Shara, is confronting illicit Iranian-affiliated arms- and drug-trade networks on the Lebanese border and has boldly accused Iran of fueling instability across the region. His interim government has convened a national dialogue to chart Syria’s future, inked integration agreements with other armed groups, and acted on U.S.-provided intelligence to foil plots by the Islamic State terrorist organization (also known as ISIS). Although U.S. officials worry about HTS’s past links to al-Qaeda, these early efforts by Shara reflect an inclination toward political inclusivity and security cooperation that, if cultivated, can constitute a bulwark against Iranian interference, which feeds on sectarian fissures and economic misery. The Lebanese and Syrian populations, recognizing that Iran’s chokehold has loosened, are starting to look to their governments rather than nonstate groups for help rebuilding their lives.

Syria's interim leader, Ahmed Al Shara, has also been meeting with the region's big players - Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Respectively, they represent the financial backbone and the military power of the region, so befrying them isn't the worst idea.

But without foreign assistance and engagement—and in the absence of any vision for inclusive political, economic, and social stabilization—suffering communities throughout the Middle East will be forced to rely on networks operating outside the apparatus of the state, including illicit ones, for their daily survival. This, in turn, will weaken their governments. Iranian leaders have noticed the new wave of nationalist leaders disinclined to take their direction, and they know that many ordinary people long to be liberated from the axis’s thuggery. But Iran fully intends to restore its regional influence: in a December speech disclosing Tehran’s plans to recruit new insurgents in Syria, the regime’s top-ranked general, Behrouz Esbati, declared that his country would succeed in gradually reactivating the deep “social layers” of influence that it developed while Assad held power.

Assad’s removal presents a generational opportunity to set Syria on a stable path, one in which it no longer serves as a base for Iran to pr­oject power. But no matter how much Shara wants to unwind a decade of Iranian influence, he cannot do it if he does not secure relief from U.S.-led sanctions. And without significant outside support conditioned on achieving realistic governance benchmarks, he cannot curb Syria’s humanitarian and economic crisis—instability that serves Iran’s interests.

Iran still has substantial footholds elsewhere, as well. Despite its degraded state, Hamas has given no indication that it has accepted defeat, and its leaders are not negotiating a future in which they relinquish governance of Gaza. Hamas currently benefits from resource scarcity, diverting humanitarian aid and exerting control over its distribution. It is asserting itself in Gaza’s governance vacuum, taking credit for a 2024 polio vaccination effort implemented by the UN with support from Israel and the United States. It is working with criminal networks to extort civilians and orchestrating elaborate hostage-release ceremonies to show off its persistent strength. Since October 7, the group is estimated to have recruited more than 10,000 new members, and its financiers know how to evade gaps in the U.S.-led sanctions regime, managing a global investment portfolio worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Israel’s leaders have resisted articulating any vision for non-Hamas Palestinian governance in Gaza, and the proposal that Arab states developed at a March summit in Cairo did not demand that Hamas disband.

Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah have left the group profoundly weakened. But Beirut’s new leaders have themselves inherited a weak, hollowed-out state. To fully dismantle Hezbollah, they need help. Shortly after Aoun’s inauguration in January, however, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars in security assistance to the Lebanese armed forces. Even before October 7, the United States (and many other international actors) did not provide support to Lebanon other than direct, local-level humanitarian aid, given Hezbollah’s capture of state institutions. Yet despite the sweeping change that has arrived in Beirut, Washington has not adjusted its approach to assistance. Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, has already indicated that he expects Beirut’s reform efforts to fail and rejected Aoun’s call to disarm. If the Lebanese government cannot quickly deliver economic relief and reconstruction assistance, Hezbollah may once again hijack the state by winning legislative seats in next year’s parliamentary elections. It is already working to rearm and refinance and to shore up its popular support, offering thousands of dollars in compensation to Lebanese people whose homes were destroyed during Israel’s campaign.

Houthi supporters protesting Israel's Gaza strategy, Sanaa, Yemen, March 2025

 

Lone Cowboy

To restore its power, Iran will also work to further institutionalize its influence in Iraq and Yemen. Politics in both Baghdad and Sanaa are still heavily influenced by Tehran, and Iranian-affiliated armed nonstate groups are using both countries to project power. As Hezbollah’s clout ebbed, the Yemen-based Houthis stepped in as Iran’s new insurance policy, tying their provocations to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Since October 7, they have improved their tactics and missile capabilities and developed a savvy public relations presence. They continue to rule Sanaa, printing money, collecting taxes, diverting humanitarian aid for their own purposes, and even securing $500 million from Saudi Arabia in December for budgetary support. Neither U.S.-led multilateral strikes on Houthi military targets nor Israeli attacks on port and energy infrastructure halted the Houthis’ assaults on maritime traffic in the Red Sea until the January cease-fire in Gaza was implemented. And the attacks decisively failed to create an opening for new Yemeni leadership or to cut off the weapons, training, and technical support Iran is funneling to Yemen.

Trump has reinstated the designation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, which his predecessor had lifted in 2021. This will not hurt Houthi leaders, who neither travel abroad nor maintain international bank accounts. It will, however, further weaken the devastated Yemeni economy and harm civilians already suffering from the effects of over a decade of civil war, creating opportunities for Iran to expand its power. In Iraq, U.S. and Israeli efforts to blunt Iran’s influence have been limited by Iraq’s role in hosting U.S. forces to fight ISIS. Anticipating U.S. and Israeli pressure, Iranian-backed militia groups are institutionalizing their interests in Baghdad, entrenching themselves in Iraq’s political system and co-opting state institutions to ensure the survival of Iran’s threat network. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has adopted some policies disadvantageous to Tehran, including blocking Iranian-backed fighters from traveling to Syria and expressing a willingness to keep hosting U.S. troops. But Washington has made no attempt to reward these efforts, instead freezing assistance to communities terrorized by ISIS and suspending programs that supported Iraq’s economic development. In March, the Trump administration also ended a sanctions waiver that had allowed Iraq to purchase electricity from Iran, a decision that will stress Iraq’s already fragile electric grid ahead of the hot summer months and make Sudani more vulnerable.

Most U.S. officials operate from the new conviction that because the Iranian regime is at peak vulnerability, now is the time to take an even harder line. Soon after Trump took office in January, he issued an executive order reinstating his “maximum pressure” campaign to end the regime’s nuclear threat, “curtail its ballistic missile program, and stop its support for terror groups.” He announced several new rounds of U.S. sanctions, including packages targeting Tehran’s drone program, its oil exports, and transnational criminal networks that amplify the reach of Iranian-sponsored terrorism. His administration also borrowed a page from the Israeli playbook to weaken Iran’s power projection by initiating a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, expanding the purview of previous, more limited U.S. strikes to target personnel, military infrastructure, and government buildings.

Sanctions and military strikes can be components of a successful strategy, but at this moment of opportunity, they cannot stand on their own. The United States needs a policy of multilateral engagement to present an affirmative vision for a Middle East free from Iran’s damaging influence. Washington’s lack of engagement is starkest in Syria, where Shara’s government is repeatedly and publicly expressing its wish to counter Iranian influence, fight transnational terrorism, and maintain a peaceful border with Israel. Recognizing the opportunity, Jordanian, Qatari, Saudi, and Turkish heads of state, as well as high-level European delegations, have already met with Damascus’s new leaders. But the United States remains mostly on the diplomatic sidelines. Some concern is reasonable; Shara is still untested. But he needs much more determined international support so that his rule is not challenged by spoilers. And he must be given a realistic set of performance benchmarks to motivate continued efforts to stabilize the country and relief from U.S. sanctions so a legitimate economy can reestablish itself.

Where the Trump administration is engaging, its unilateral and reactive approach risks undermining sustainable outcomes. Its chaotic improvisation on Gaza—veering from offers to “take ownership” of the territory while somehow relocating millions of civilian residents to initiating direct negotiations with Hamas—is a sharp break from the past year and a half of U.S. diplomacy, when U.S. officials prioritized creating a sustainable outcome for Gaza that reinforced Israel’s security, met the needs of Palestinian civilians, and consulted Israel’s Arab neighbors. That approach eventually yielded a multiweek cease-fire that allowed Israeli hostages to return and humanitarian aid to reach Gazans. The current approach, by contrast, is likely to yield policy paralysis amid a flurry of uncoordinated and unrealistic proposals, which will create fertile terrain for Hamas and Iran to reorganize.

 

Own Goal

When dealing with Iran itself, Trump declined to build international support before contacting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to open negotiations. In dismissing the need to consult with regional allies and partners, he is repeating a mistake Washington made when it arranged the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement: back then, a lack of consultation with Israel and the Arab capitals created significant tension and left the deal with fewer advocates when Trump moved to withdraw from it in 2019. Washington’s current Iran strategy appears oriented around the belief that a pressure strategy coordinated only with Israel can compel the regime in Tehran to end activities it deems necessary for its survival. But the United States cannot collapse Iran’s economy or even execute military strikes without wider support. It needs cooperation from China, the largest importer of Iranian oil, and from the Middle Eastern nations that host U.S. bases and forces. It needs the support of European capitals at the UN Security Council. And without a much broader international alignment on the most effective way to isolate Tehran, the regime will leverage its relationships with Beijing and Moscow to resist any U.S. efforts to extract meaningful concessions.

Washington needs to articulate exactly how it will provide sanctions relief to actors who stop sanctionable activities. Reconsidering sanctions on post-Assad Syria is most pressing, but the U.S. government should also formulate a path for meaningful economic relief for Iran itself—if Tehran takes the necessary steps to curtail its nuclear program and its efforts to destabilize other countries.

The United States must put resources and civilian expertise behind its regional strategy even as it encourages others to share the burden. Assistance and technical expertise provided by civilians is a core element of stabilization operations. The United States invested decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to build bureaucratic structures, a corps of practitioners, and expertise in establishing the kinds of pooled funding initiatives and smart assistance programs that allow countries to successfully transition out of conflict. These tools and skills will be crucial to consolidating gains against Iran: communities ravaged by violence want to rebuild, but their new leaders lack the necessary governance, technocratic, and economic expertise to address the unique challenges that post-conflict societies face. The Middle East’s regular militaries are ill-prepared to demobilize and reintegrate Iranian-backed groups.

But the United States’ wealth of experience in stabilization is now being squandered as Washington systematically defunds and dismantles its aid-focused workforce. The U.S. Agency for International Development—which Trump seems determined to raze—housed the Office of Transition Initiatives, a body designed to bridge gaps in development and humanitarian aid. The State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations—which is funded by the aid budget Trump is attempting to freeze—specializes in helping countries recover from damage done by armed nonstate actors and employs dedicated “stabilization advisers” ready to deploy to conflict zones.

The Trump administration plans to drastically reduce the State Department’s diplomatic corps at precisely the moment when diplomats should be taking on more responsibilities in the wake of the momentous military developments of 2024. It has frozen stabilization assistance to Iraq, Syria, and Yemen precisely when such help could do the most good. It temporarily halted military assistance to the Lebanese armed forces just as Lebanon’s government committed to disarming Hezbollah. It suspended security funding to the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, who have maintained their security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank to challenge Hamas’s power there. If the United States hopes to fully disassemble Iran’s regional network of influence, it must offer nonmilitary assistance while pressing others to share the burden. If it does not broaden its strategy, it will abandon the best tools it has to support the emergence of alternative players.

Finally, the United States needs to provide its regional partners clearer assurances about its own security commitments even as it asks its partners to continue the kind of multilateral security cooperation that proved so successful against Iran’s ballistic missile attacks. The United States significantly increased its military posture in the Middle East after October 7. That backbone of intelligence support, weaponry, and active participation in Israel’s defense helped Israel focus on targeting Iran’s threat network, dramatically altering the strategic landscape in the region. This foundation of military support will need to remain in place as the region turns its focus toward stabilization.

To maximize pressure on the Houthis, the United States should design a concrete assistance package that it is prepared to offer the Yemeni people should the Houthis relinquish control. It should actively involve partners in its military campaign to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and make clear that it is ready to support countries also threatened by Houthi aggression, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A pledge to maintain an elevated military posture for the medium term would also signal the United States’ resolve to Tehran and reassure other regional leaders on the frontlines in the fight against Iran. In Iraq and Syria, Washington should, for now, maintain troops on the ground and ensure it is signaling its support for the citizens of both countries. In Lebanon it will need to sustain the active oversight role the U.S. military has been playing in the effort to disarm Hezbollah and offer Beirut’s new leaders direct support if they take more steps toward reform.

Maintaining a military presence is an investment the United States must make as the Middle East transitions, new leaders shore up popular support, and new security arrangements emerge. It must also ease sanctions as Syria’s new leaders meet good-governance objectives, surge aid and technical assistance to vulnerable communities, and step up to convene local and international partners to delineate a concrete, realistic vision for a regional order free from Iranian domination. Tehran’s past efforts to destabilize the region’s governments, subjugate its people, challenge U.S. interests, and spread terror abroad only succeeded because they targeted under-governed, corrupt, and politically weak states. The central objective of a stabilization strategy must be to support the emergence of more responsive, transparent governments that retain their monopoly on the use of force, their capacity to deliver prosperity to their people, and their willingness to confront Iranian influence. Contrary to decades of conventional thinking, it turned out that an exceptional military campaign could significantly degrade Iran’s regional standing. Now, the United States must do its part to lead a similarly extraordinary civilian effort to make that change permanent.

 

 

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