Israel’s war on Hizbullah and its strikes against Iran have left the leadership in Tehran in a strategic limbo. Weakened both by its inability to project power through its partners and by damages to its air defences, the leadership’s long-standing strategy, championed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), of fighting Israel below the threshold of war has lost credibility. That strategy has resulted in the destruction of Iran’s air defences, damage to its missile capability and a devastating blow to the capabilities of Hizbullah, the strategy’s keystone. The leadership must now face up to a renewed threat to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, its key state-level ally and protégé that it cannot afford to lose.However much revolutionary zeal and rhetoric it may be displaying, the parameters for Iranian strategy and ambitions will be constrained by new, and difficult, operational realities.Firstly, Israel’s ability to acquire and attack targets at pace and with accuracy, including individual leadership figures within Hizbullah and the IRGC, has effectively demonstrated that the IRGC’s battlespace is now transparent.Hamas eluded the Israel Defense Forces through its use of an extensive tunnel network. That may no longer be an option for Hizbullah as Israel learns the lessons of Gaza and postures for pre-emptive strikes against attempts by any of its adversaries to develop the required infrastructure. In addition to the heightened risk of leadership figures being targeted at will by Israel, Tehran must also contend with the logistical challenge of resupplying its network after Israel’s heavy disruption of routes through Syria.Secondly, Israel has created for itself a free-fire zone across the region. There have been no political constraints on Israel striking deep into the territory of sovereign states or employing lethal sabotage techniques, such as the weaponising of pagers . The United States’ influence has been patchy under President Joe Biden. While that administration held Israel back from striking nuclear and energy targets in Iran in October 2024, Israel defied its pleas for restraint in Gaza. It is highly unlikely that a Trump administration will introduce heavier constraints, if any. The international community, for its part, has been divided and impotent.Thirdly, Israel has lowered the threshold for massive retaliation. It has broken the de facto model of skirmishing within limits that it developed over decades of grey-zone warfare with both Hizbullah and Iran. Its tolerance for Iranian-backed groups and their presence on its perimeter is now far lower than Iran’s strategy requires. At the operational level, Israel’s high tempo of targeted attacks on IRGC and Hizbullah leadership across the region will make it difficult and highly risky for the IRGC to continue to rely on forward bases in the region.Reconstructing the network is not straightforward. Israel has made clear that Iranian attempts to rebuild Hizbullah and Hamas will meet with Israeli armed intervention. It will also be complicated for Tehran by the death of Hassan Nasrallah, who held together factions within Hizbullah and whose killing by Israel made clear the limitations on Tehran’s ability to protect its allies – a key determinant of its capacity to build and exploit its network. Even sponsoring a campaign of asymmetric, sub-threshold operations is no longer viable unless Tehran is prepared with each operation to risk massive and direct Israeli retaliation.Given the risks, Tehran could choose to temper its offensive use of the network as part of a strategy of de-escalation. Despite Tehran’s defiant rhetoric, since the Hamas-led 7 October attacks against Israel it has been seeking to defend both its reputation and its partners through calibrated and, it has claimed, proportionate responses. In the midst of the wider conflict, Iran elected a moderate, regime-sanctioned president, Masoud Pezeshkian. It has also respected the deal it struck with Saudi Arabia in March 2023. The Kingdom, along with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has reciprocated by calling for de-escalation between Israel and Iran.It is hard to predict how Donald Trump and his team would respond to Iranian de-escalation in his second term as president. Trump was the architect of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, but much has changed in the region in the intervening four years of the Biden administration. Militias in Iraq have moderated their appetite for attacking US bases in Iraq. In January 2024, Kataib Hizbullah made clear it was ceasing attacks on US targets out of respect for the Iraqi government and has since denied reports that it had resumed attacks. The US is running down its remaining military presence in Iraq and is limiting its power projection to time-bound operations against defined target sets, such as Ansarullah (the Houthis). Moreover, key regional players Saudi Arabia and the UAE share the same objective as Trump to end – rather than escalate – armed conflicts, including against Iran.But there are other, more pressing reasons for the Iranian leadership to want to de-escalate. They must manage the looming succession to Sayyid Ali Khamenei, the ageing supreme leader, in a manner that projects continuity and confidence. They must also manage simmering internal disaffection with their failure to deliver on economic and social agendas. The opposition’s vocal criticism of the leadership’s involvement in distant conflicts as a costly and wasteful distraction from domestic priorities found particular resonance among younger generations of Iranians, whose growing estrangement from the Islamic Revolution has caused the leadership concern.How Iran’s leadership emerges from its strategic limbo will influence much in the region; in particular, whether the newly minted ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel holds. The renewed need to protect Assad in Syria is an unwelcome complicating factor which may, this time around, meet with a de minimis response. Despite the depth of the relationship, Tehran did little to protect Hasan Nasrallah.As ever, Tehran’s calculations will be dominated by the strategic priority of ensuring the survival of the Revolution. A modulation from institutionalised revolutionary zeal to a more pragmatic posture would have its opponents in the IRGC, for whom such a policy would mean a reduction in their power and regional influence. But de-escalation will also have its advocates in Tehran, amongst whom are those who wish to avoid provoking a returning president Trump, and those in the region who feel a weakened regime should be dealt a coup de grâce.
