The Big Problem With Iran’s Strategy in the Middle East: It Works
No doubt about it: The Israel-Hamas War has radically altered the trajectory of the Middle East’s politics and injected a level of volatility into developments not seen in decades. The conflict marks not only a new phase in a century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinians, but one more chapter in Iran’s 45-year shadow war against the United States, Israel, and their allies in the region.
Over the long course of the shadow war Tehran’s objectives and its strategy for reaching them have been remarkably consistent. Its chief foreign policy goals since the formation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 have been forcing the United States out of the region and preventing Israel from normalizing relations with its neighbors by inciting chaos, violence, and deep-seated resentments. A leading scholar of the U.S.-Iran conflict, Suzanne Moloney of the Brookings Institution, points out that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in power since 1989, “has never wavered in his feverish antagonism toward Israel and the United States. He and those around him are profoundly convinced of American immorality, greed, and wickedness; they revile Israel and clamor for its destruction, as part of the ultimate triumph of Islamic world over what they see as a declining West and an illegitimate ‘Zionist entity.’”
Tehran’s primary method for pursuing these ends is a unique protracted war strategy that combines political mobilization, coercive diplomacy, and information warfare with offensive military operations conducted by a formidable array of proxy forces—most of them composed of Shia militia groups—which Iran calls the Axis of Resistance.