The Soleimani Gambit

Meanwhile, the Houthis have been rising in prominence within a network of Middle Eastern militant groups that calls itself the Axis of Resistance—in reference to their opposition against the United States, Israel, and their regional allies, soon to be joined in the Red Sea by a European Union flotilla.

The Axis includes the Houthis in Yemen, several militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and, not least, Hamas. What do these groups have in common? They’re all armed and funded by Iran.

And yet Iran’s connections to the Hamas attacks on October 7 that triggered the war in Gaza remain murky. It’s unclear how much Iran’s leadership knew about them ahead of time. After Iranian proxy fighters in Iraq launched a drone strike in Jordan on January 28, killing three U.S. soldiers, Tehran sent senior officials to order the proxies to stop. And while Iran keeps supplying its confederates in the region with missiles, drones, and intelligence tools to escalate the conflict in Gaza, it also continues calling for a ceasefire.

How do all these seemingly contradictory moves make sense?

Vali Nasr is a professor of Middle East studies and international affairs at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, and the author of seven books on the Middle East and Islam. As Nasr sees it, Iran is anxious for a ceasefire to stop Israel from damaging Hamas any further—and Iran’s proxy attacks on Israel and its allies are intended as pressure to achieve that end.

But overall, the Islamic Republic is emboldened, seeing itself as gaining power and status from the circumstances of the war. Not only has the conflict shown Israel to be less secure than it long seemed, but global public opinion has considerably turned against Israel and the U.S., while relations between their leaders have cooled. Across the region and around the world, Nasr says, the war has returned the Palestinian issue to the public agenda, in ways that will demand significant Western attention and investment for years. Which the Iranian regime believes will mean less capacity to confront it—and more of a need to work with it—if the U.S. and its allies hope to calm the Middle East.

The Iranians and their allies in the Axis immediately thought they’d made a massive strategic gain. October 7 destroyed Israel’s aura of invincibility in the region; it diminished Israel and enhanced the Axis of Resistance overnight. With this one attack, Hamas completely changed the conversation in the Middle East.

The U.S. had been working to create a regional order based on normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, building a stable, pro-American corridor from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. That priority was suddenly replaced by one that had been mostly forgotten: the situation of the Palestinians.

Iran’s and its allies’ most urgent desire at the moment is to consolidate this strategic gain. They don’t want Hamas to fold quickly or for Israel to succeed quickly in Gaza. They want to see the new dynamic created by October 7 to become the new reality of the Middle East. And the way the war has unfolded is accomplishing that.

Bluhm: How so?

Nasr: Hamas reset the strategic landscape in the Middle East—in a way that shows the Axis of Resistance’s ability to upend the region altogether.

It won’t be possible to reverse this new dynamic anytime soon: The Axis is empowered, the Palestinian issue is back on the table, and Israel has been strategically weakened.

“The Axis believes its tactics are working. They believe they’re the reason why President Biden is pushing Netanyahu toward a ceasefire. They think Biden’s previously full support for Israel has eroded on account of two things: one, images from Gaza, which are affecting American and global public opinion—and which are potentially affecting his re-election; and two, his desire to avoid a wider regional war. They’ve also been working to help the Palestinians through social media. They’re very prolific there, where videos on TikTok and Instagram have been especially important tools for them.”

“Iran’s relationship with Axis groups is like the United States’ relationship with allied forces around the world: Tehran gives these groups technology and training; both sides share certain strategic objectives; and they can rely on one another. But it can’t just pick up the phone and order them around. Iran and other Axis members also share a strategic vision. They might disagree about tactics—as they might about, say, what to do on Lebanon’s border with Israel right now. But they share a view of the U.S. and Israel as a common enemy, and they share an interest in undermining U.S. influence in the region and the wider world.”

“The Iranians don’t want a war against the United States or one that consumes the wider region. But they also know the U.S. doesn’t want these things, either. So who wants them less? Iran’s calculation is the Americans want it less than they do. There’s a method to Iran’s escalation. They’re calibrating it to avoid a larger war, while trying to force the United States to accept that if it doesn’t want that larger war, it has to end this one in Gaza. And Iran believes the method is working. They see it as creating a breach between the U.S. and Israel—and forcing a change in the one’s position toward the other.”

History Begins Again

And yet, Krastev says, these changes are driving Europeans in conflicting directions: With some favoring greater integration of their content, others are turning to the idea of strengthening their individual nation-states instead—a tension that will shape European life in the coming years.

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