A Weakened Iran Doesn’t Mean a More Peaceful Middle East
The rapid fall of the Assad regime in Syria coupled with Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and decimation of Hamas in Gaza have led to upbeat assessments in the West about the decline of Iran’s power and influence and the emergence of a more peaceful political order in the Middle East. However, while Iran’s regional clout has been eroded, that does not necessarily herald a more peaceful and stable regional security environment.
In fact, there is a high chance that the “new Middle East” will end up being even more volatile and unstable than the old one, in large part due to the weakening of Iran’s regional position. The near-collapse of Iran’s alliance system has left Tehran more exposed, which may drive it toward riskier and more destabilizing security strategies, while creating more room for miscalculation and reckless behavior by Iran’s regional adversaries. These two dynamics may combine to produce greater insecurity and instability in the Middle East in the coming months and years.
Syria’s future remains uncertain at this point and will depend on which of its many insurgent groups end up dominating the political scene in Damascus and whether they will collectively be able to form a stable and unified government. But for now and the foreseeable future, the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has removed a critical Iranian ally strategically located on Israel’s borders. In addition to augmenting Tehran’s military capabilities, the partnership with Syria provided a strategic land bridge between Iran and Hezbollah, the most formidable militant group within Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance network. As Hezbollah’s new Secretary-General Naeem Qassem acknowledged recently, the removal of the Assad regime has deprived the group of this critical supply route.
The significance of this development is amplified by its timing, as it comes at the most inopportune moment for both Iran and Hezbollah. The latter is badly in need of Iranian-supplied arms and other logistical supplies to rebuild its military power and organizational capabilities after its devastating war with Israel. This situation is further compounded by Israel’s decimation of Hamas’ military and organizational capacities in Gaza, in retaliation for the group’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Axis of Resistance historically enabled Iran to target its adversaries—mainly Israel and U.S. forces in the region—with some level of plausible deniability, allowing Tehran to avoid significant consequences for such attacks and direct involvement in any military conflicts they caused. This alliance system was also designed to allow Tehran to open multiple fronts against its adversaries and threaten their interests across the entire region through asymmetrical warfare in the event Iran did become directly involved in a conflict. This raised the anticipated costs of aggression against Iran, amplifying Tehran’s deterrence against its adversaries.
That alliance system has now been severely compromised. Hezbollah still maintains effective lethal power, but it is unlikely to regain its previous stature in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the Houthis and Iraqi paramilitary groups also remain largely operative, with the capacity to target Israeli and American interests in the region. But at the height of their power, Hezbollah and Hamas could rain down hundreds of short-range rockets on Israel in a given day, thereby disrupting normal life in Israeli cities, especially in border areas. By contrast, the Houthis and Iraqi paramilitary groups can only reach Israel with drones or ballistic missiles, which are more susceptible to interception and in short supply.
The weakening of Iran’s regional position due to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza makes for a more volatile and precarious regional security environment.
To compensate for the limitations now faced by its nonstate allies, Iran will have to rely more on its own conventional military capabilities and directly respond to military threats and challenges posed by its adversaries. This means that if tensions keep mounting between Iran and Israel, the region is likely to witness more of the direct missile exchange scenarios that played out between the two countries in April and October 2024.
But a defense strategy based on the threat and use of direct conventional missile attacks poses its own challenges for Tehran. The main downside is that it exposes Iran to direct retaliation and the risks of a sustained military conflict with Israel, while elevating the risk of U.S. involvement in the conflict on Israel’s side—not only in a defensive role as during last year’s exchanges, but also in an offensive role. Iran has demonstrated that it is capable of delivering effective missile strikes on Israel, with the capacity to penetrate Israel’s various advanced air-defense systems and the potential to cause heavy human casualties and economic damage should it choose to target Israel’s civilian population centers and civil infrastructure. But it has also proven to be highly vulnerable to Israel’s surgical counterattacks and sabotage operations. Furthermore, Iran’s relative conventional military weakness—especially its inferior air power and aging fighter fleet—makes a sustained and protracted military conflict with Israel, much less with the U.S., all the more challenging.
To overcome this dilemma, Iran may pursue two main strategies to deter military attacks by Israel and the U.S. or force them to deescalate should they initiate hostilities. First, Iran may up the ante by threatening to attack oil and gas infrastructures in the Persian Gulf and disrupt maritime shipping in the region, in the hopes of mobilizing de-escalation efforts by regional and global stakeholders, including oil- and gas-exporting Arab countries, as well as China, Japan, India and other major importers of Persian Gulf oil and gas. Iran has employed this gambit in the past and may resort to it more frequently in the future if tensions with Israel and the U.S. rise.
Technically, this strategy is feasible, as most of the oil and gas installations in potential target countries—including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain—are virtually a stone’s throw away from the Iranian coast and can be targeted with even short-range rockets. More distant targets, such as Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, can also be reached with cruise missiles and drones, as demonstrated by strikes on Saudi oil facilities in September 2019 that were widely attributed to Iran. However, this kind of “escalate to de-escalate” strategy would risk sparking a full-scale military conflict, as Iran would have more difficulty carrying out such attacks with plausible deniability. That means this scenario would become more credible and likely only if Iran’s own vital interests, such as its oil and gas facilities or its nuclear program, were endangered.
Second, Iran may threaten to weaponize its nuclear program or actually do so in order to achieve the ultimate deterrence. According to “latent nuclear deterrence” theory, the credible threat of nuclear breakout—which most observers believe Iran is currently capable of—may be sufficient to deter some actors from conflict escalation under certain circumstances. But if a potential challenger believes the opportunity for a successful preventive military attack exists, latent deterrence may not dissuade it from doubling down on confrontation. Given the risks involved in latent nuclear deterrence, Iran may decide to arm itself with nuclear weapons if it believes a strategic military attack by Israel or the U.S. is highly likely or enters a protracted military conflict with either of them, provided it can successfully assemble the weapons before detection or withstand military strikes seeking to prevent it from doing so.
As mentioned, Iran currently enjoys threshold nuclear status and is believed by some Western officials and many nuclear experts to be—and indeed itself claims to be—technically capable of building at least crude nuclear weapons in relatively short order. Besides possessing the technical wherewithal, various Iranian officials have also been issuing not-so-veiled warnings in recent years that Tehran may reconsider its nuclear doctrine and self-declared ban on producing nuclear weapons should Iran face existential threats.
Regardless of how justified these strategies may seem to Iran, they entail great risks and may fuel regional instability and exacerbate the security dilemma facing Iran and Israel.
On the other hand, Israel and the U.S. could be tempted to exploit the current weakness of Iran’s alliance system to score more tactical or strategic goals against Tehran and its allies. Possible measures could include conducting military strikes or covert sabotage operations against Iran’s nuclear sites, its military centers and installations, and its vital energy and power infrastructure; or fomenting and orchestrating political subversion, instability and disorder in Iran.
Much like Iran’s possible strategies discussed above, however, such an approach would be highly risky and destabilizing for the whole region, as Iran still retains formidable direct and indirect retaliatory military capabilities with which it could unleash a full-blown regional crisis. Furthermore, such measures would further feed into Iran’s insecurity and motivate it to more actively pursue nuclear weaponization and engage in military brinkmanship in the region.
The weakening of Iran’s regional position due to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza makes for a more volatile and precarious regional security environment. To avoid the above scenarios and safely navigate the region’s current perilous transition period, all parties concerned must exercise restraint and make genuine efforts toward regional de-escalation and confidence-building. The alternative is a “new Middle East” that looks a lot like the old one, but worse.
Abolghasem Bayyenat is currently a Farzaneh Family postdoctoral fellow in Iranian studies at the University of Oklahoma. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in nuclear security at Harvard University. He received his doctoral degree in political science from Syracuse University and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Iran’s nuclear policymaking.