The Axis of Resistance, what Iran calls its political project in the Arab world, is falling apart. After a brief but intense U.S.-backed war with Israel, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah agreed to disengage from the Palestinian issue and vacate southern Lebanon. Almost immediately afterwards, Syrian rebels launched a surprise offensive, bringing down the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, whose bloodsoaked rule Iran had invested so much blood and treasure into propping up.

The feeling in Washington is that the Axis of Resistance was really (in the words of the Carnegie Endowment’s senior editor, Michael Young) an “Axis of Misery,” built on “fragile, impoverished societies, only there to serve as cannon fodder for Iran.” Before getting too smug, however, it would behoove the chattering class to look in the mirror. U.S. power has established an Axis of Misery in the region no less predatory or tyrannical than the Iranian one. For all the comparisons between this week’s events and the Berlin Wall falling, victorious West Germany was not running torture prisons or bombing Polish territory. Now that Iran has been driven out of the Levant, it is an important question exactly what the U.S.-led alternative will look like.

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