Steven Simon & Adam Weinstein
Foreign Policy / August 1, 2024
Uneasy alliances are being tested by Israeli strikes.
Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran signal that no leader within Iran’s “axis of resistance” is beyond reach. But what exactly is this alliance, how tight is Iran’s grip, and what are the stakes for the region and the United States if Israel goes to all-out war with it?
The “axis of resistance” refers to a longstanding and evolving coalition of states and groups, originally fostered in the 1950s by Arab nationalist regimes like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which used proxies to challenge Western and Israeli influence in the Middle East. Today Iran leads the axis, fostering and supporting groups like Hezbollah and various Shiite militias across the region.
In a recent panel organized by the Quincy Institute, a speaker with long experience in Iraq and a contact point there for American diplomats, recalled a U.S. official asking her what exactly the “axis of resistance” was resisting? The answer is the United States and all its works, because they share a view of the United States as opposed to them and all their works. Resistance is driven by a mutually reinforcing set of ideological and geostrategic imperatives.
The revolutionary regime in Iran, for example, remembers Washington as Britain’s partner-in-crime in staging the coup that brought the Shah to power in 1953 and, among other things, helping Saddam Hussein try to throttle the revolution in its crib in the 1980s, and imposing severe economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic ever since. The U.S. has also been a steadfast supporter of Israel, which for ideological and more recently strategic reasons, Tehran seeks to weaken, and if possible, destroy. Since 1979, and especially following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran has been the uneasy leader of the axis of resistance, expanding its influence in regional conflicts, including in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—but its allies are troublesome ones.
Many states see alliances as power-maximizing mechanisms, and Iran is no exception. This is true even of powerful countries like the United States. Iran, unlike the U.S., is stuck with regional allies that don’t qualify as states and are easy prey for their enemies. They are also allies prone to “chain ganging,” that is dragging their patron into potential wars it doesn’t want to fight, through actions like Kataib Hezbollah’s January attack on Tower 22 that killed three U.S. soldiers, the Houthi drone strike on central Tel Aviv in July, and Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, which Tehran claimed it was not informed about. Iran has expended a great deal of effort to keep its axis of resistance from starting things it can’t finish.
The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, resent the United States because it supported both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in their joint effort to block a Houthi drive to seize control of the Yemeni state. This grievance was compounded by U.S. support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Although Houthi attacks against international shipping might have been encouraged by Iran, which has stocked Houthi stockpiles over the years on the grounds that any enemy of the al-Saud was a friend of Tehran’s, the Houthis were sufficiently motivated to act. “Curse on the Jews” has long been a feature of their rhetoric and an official slogan.
As an Iranian proxy, the Houthis’ success in choking off shipping lanes in the Red Sea has not been terribly useful. Iran is trying to reduce its isolation and hurt Israel—appearing to be the mastermind of capers to impose increased cost on global shipping does not advance either goal.
Houthis are enjoying the domestic and regional high of resistance against world powers, however, and will continue to do so as long as the war in Gaza grinds on. In effect, the Houthis have found a way to sanction the international community, ineffective as it may be. What the Houthis lack in financial muscle, they make up for with Yemen’s geography. Resistance in the Red Sea has also proved a helpful distraction from discontents at home over economic hardship and a good recruitment tool for boosting the ranks. They have even resisted various Saudi inducements to stop firing. But the war in Gaza will not grind on forever and countries paying the price for Houthi shenanigans will begin to push back.
Lebanese Hezbollah is the elder brother within the axis of resistance. As a political party it is embedded in a broader political structure that has cannibalized the Lebanese state and, for that matter, Lebanese society by maintaining an armed wing more powerful than the Lebanese military, paralyzing the country’s political processes, exploiting Lebanon’s economic issues like the fuel crisis to boost its popularity, and entangling Lebanon in regional conflicts ranging from Syria’s civil war to tensions with Israel. This in turn provides ample political cover for the group’s control of southern Lebanon and its presence along the Blue Line which serves as a provisional border between Israel and Lebanon. It also constrains Hezbollah’s freedom of action.
Unlike Iran, Hezbollah is deployed right on Israel’s border. Iran has therefore invested billions of dollars in keeping the group supplied with a wide range of missiles and rockets, while working closely with Hezbollah’s intelligence apparatus. The strategic dimension of the relationship lies in the presumed deterrent effect of a full-scale Hezbollah missile and rocket attack against Israel on any plans Israelis might have to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or leadership.
Until last weekend deterrence seemed to be mutual. Tensions escalated on Saturday when Israel reported a Hezbollah missile strike on the Golan Heights that killed 12 children and teenagers, prompting an Israeli response on Tuesday with an airstrike on a building in Beirut, targeting Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander they hold responsible. This was followed with the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a highly securitized area of Tehran.
The threshold for Hezbollah’s use of its vast missile inventory is correspondingly high. The problem for Israel, Hezbollah and their respective patrons is that no one really knows where the threshold lies. A full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah would devastate Lebanon and northern Israel, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths while most likely failing to destroy Hezbollah.
While Lebanese Hezbollah remains a significant force on Israel’s border, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and operating in Syria pose a different but equally concerning threat due to their proximity to U.S. troops. The idea that they can somehow be dismantled or sidelined ignores how deeply entrenched these groups are in Iraq and how their rise was intertwined with U.S. intervention in the first place. The three most problematic groups for U.S. interests in Iraq are Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Harakat al-Nujaba.
Kataib Hezbollah was founded during the brutal civil war in Iraq in the mid-2000s, as was Asaib Ahl al-Haq. The latter was created as a breakaway from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which at the time was the most feared Shiite militant group in Iraq for Washington. Harakat al-Nujaba was formed later in 2013 by Akram Abbas al-Kabi, who himself had deep roots in the Sadrist movement and Mahdi Army.
It was the U.S. intervention in 2003 that helped create a groundswell of anti-U.S. Shiite militancy primarily channeled through Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which eventually led to the formation of even more militant groups with closer ties to Iran. Ironically, al-Sadr is now viewed by some in Washington circles as a maverick—uncontrollable by any party, including Iran. Others think of him as an Iraqi patriot.
From a U.S. perspective, dismantling these groups would amount to going to war against Iraq, since they are so deeply rooted in Iraqi society and politics. The Trump administration saw Iraq as an enemy because in its view, Baghdad had sold out to Iran and the government’s tolerance of militias aligned with Iran was evidence of its defection. The Obama and Biden administrations took a different view, which did not disregard the hazard posed by these militias but understood that as part of Iraqi society there was no easy way to uproot them.
Sanctions on the other hand made it impossible to communicate with them. The middle course of working around them within the U.S.-Iraqi relationship was therefore the only feasible option. The Iran-aligned militias in Iraq recently rebranded as the so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq in response to the war in Gaza. These groups have demonstrated a boldness that puts U.S. troops at risk, as demonstrated by Kataib Hezbollah’s drone attack on Tower 22 in Jordan, which killed three U.S. soldiers.
Washington can temporarily restore deterrence against these types of attacks through targeted strikes on leaders and facilities, as it did after the attack on Tower 22. There are Shiite elites and Iraqi stakeholders who do not want their country caught in the crossfire of escalating U.S.-Iran tensions. But this deterrence is often restored temporarily, and these militias have already begun targeting U.S. troops again after roughly six months of calm.
Hamas, meanwhile, is a tragic example of an ally that exposes its patrons to great dangers by starting fights it can’t win. Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Dief have evidently confused themselves with Vietnamese revolutionary leaders Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Giáp. The North Vietnamese population in 1968 was 18 million, dwarfing the population in South Vietnam. It had powerful, if problematic friends. It was also immune from invasion, if not intensive aerial bombardment. It had supply routes carved out in neighboring states and for years commanded an insurgency in U.S. controlled territory. North Vietnam was a sovereign state with impressive administrative capacity and ability to mobilize its resources. And it was able to impose just enough pain on the U.S. to destabilize American politics and undermine support for the war.
Under those conditions, North Vietnam’s readiness to tolerate unimaginable levels of violence directed at its civilian population to weaken U.S. domestic and international support for Washington’s war and destroy its reputation made gruesome sense. Yet this is Sinwar’s strategy vis-a-vis Israel, in his own words. Gaza, however, is not a sovereign state, Hamas never developed any administrative capacity except in the internal security sphere, has no powerful friends, no strategic depth at all and ten per cent of North Vietnam’s population at the time of the Vietnam War. Gaza’s population of just over 2 million is also a fraction of Israel’s 9 million. The regime in Tehran must be tearing its hair out.
Lastly, there is poor Syria, the only state to enjoy ex officio status as a member of the Axis of Resistance. With friends like this, though, who needs enemies? The real power player in Syria is Russia, which does not want to see its client, Bashar al-Assad, be devoured by a war with Israel triggered by Iran’s seeming reflexive efforts to establish a second front against Israel in the Golan or further fortify Lebanese Hezbollah.
The strategic implications of the axis of resistance for the United States seem limited. If geopolitics were poker, you really would not want to be dealt Iran’s hand. But there are dangers, principally on the Lebanese-Israeli border, which could spin out of control.
Washington is aware of these risks and, not incidentally, White House envoy Amos Hochstein is regularly commuting between Washington and Beirut and, interestingly, Baalbek in the care of Hezbollah. But it seems increasingly unclear where Israel’s leadership understands the risks of starting something it cannot finish.
If Israel or any member of Iran’s axis of resistance crosses one another’s opaque thresholds, the region could plunge into a catastrophic war with tens of thousands of people dead. The Biden administration must bluntly remind Israel that promises of restraint lack credibility after the devastation in Gaza, and work with countries that have influence over Tehran to urge restraint on all sides.
Steven Simon is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the professor of practice in Middle Eastern studies at the Jackson School of International Relations, University of Washington. He is the author of Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East
Adam Weinstein is deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute
