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More from Opinion<\/p>\nTehran built the Axis to wage conflict without always bearing its direct costs. But armed outfits do not remain instruments forever. <\/p>\n
For more than four decades, Iran built its power in West Asia around a simple strategic calculation: its wars were better fought away from Iranian soil. Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force, Tehran armed, funded and cultivated a network stretching from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia militias in Iraq to the Houthis in Yemen and Palestinian armed factions.<\/p>\n
Syria under Bashar al-Assad provided the crucial territorial bridge connecting much of this architecture. Tehran called it the \u201cAxis of Resistance\u201d; its military doctrine spoke of \u201cforward defence\u201d and, increasingly, the \u201cunity of the fronts\u201d. The logic was brutally effective. Keep the battlefield away from Iran. Surround adversaries with multiple fronts. Raise the cost of confronting Tehran without requiring Iran itself to fight every war. These were not merely allies. Over four decades, Iran had effectively built battlefields across West Asia beyond its own borders.<\/p>\n
By 2026, however, much of this architecture had been battered. Hamas was severely weakened after the Gaza war. Israel had killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and much of the group\u2019s senior command. Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime, the geographical linchpin connecting Iran to Lebanon, collapsed in 2024. Then came something the entire doctrine of forward defence was supposed to prevent: war reached Iran itself. The direct conflict with Israel and the United States exposed the limits of fighting through distant fronts. On paper, the Axis of Resistance had not looked this vulnerable in decades. Yet weakness did not bring stability. The militias survived, their weapons survived, and so did their capacity to drag states back into conflict. Iran\u2019s regional network had been diminished. The wars it helped create had not.<\/p>\n
More from Opinion<\/p>\n
Lebanon illustrates the problem most starkly. Hezbollah, once the most formidable component of Iran\u2019s network, has suffered extraordinary losses since 2023. Nasrallah is dead, much of its senior leadership and missile infrastructure has been destroyed, and the group has emerged from successive confrontations with Israel considerably weaker. Yet weaker is not disarmed. When the Iran war erupted in 2026, Hezbollah again entered the conflict, helping plunge Lebanon into another devastating round of fighting that killed thousands and displaced more than a million people. A US-brokered framework in June sought to break this cycle by linking Israeli withdrawal from occupied areas of southern Lebanon to Hezbollah\u2019s disarmament. But Hezbollah\u2019s leader, Naim Qassem, rejected surrendering the group\u2019s weapons, particularly north of the Litani river. The guns had survived another ceasefire. So had the fundamental problem.<\/p>\n
At its heart, this is a crisis of sovereignty. The Lebanese government can negotiate with Israel, and the Lebanese army can deploy in the south, but neither can guarantee peace while another armed force retains an independent arsenal and the power to decide when that arsenal is used. Beirut has reported progress in the first phase of disarmament south of the Litani, but compelling Hezbollah to surrender its remaining weapons is another matter altogether. The group retains deep political and social roots within Lebanon\u2019s Shia community, while forcible disarmament could itself risk internal conflict. This is the trap Iran\u2019s proxy model helped create. Hezbollah\u2019s weapons were justified as necessary to defend Lebanon from Israel. Today, those same weapons have become one of the principal obstacles to a durable peace between them.<\/p>\n
Yemen demonstrates how far the consequences can travel. Since November 2023, the Iran-backed Houthis have launched more than a hundred attacks on commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, turning a local armed movement into a threat to one of the world\u2019s most important trade arteries. At the height of the crisis, container traffic through the Suez Canal collapsed, forcing shipping companies to divert around the Cape of Good Hope. Voyages became longer, fuel costs rose and supply chains thousands of kilometres from Yemen felt the impact. The Houthis paused attacks after the 2025 Gaza ceasefire, only to renew threats and strikes during the 2026 Iran war. This is asymmetric warfare at its most consequential: a militia controlling part of one of the Arab world\u2019s poorest countries acquired the ability to impose costs on the global economy.<\/p>\n
But the Houthis also expose a deeper weakness in treating the entire network simply as Iran\u2019s remote-controlled army. Tehran has armed, trained and supported the group, but the Houthis have developed their own domestic constituency, territorial ambitions and strategic calculations. Iran possesses influence, not necessarily an on-off switch. That distinction becomes more important as the Axis weakens and fragments. A ceasefire with Tehran does not automatically pacify the Red Sea if the Houthis conclude that confrontation serves their own interests. Indeed, the current lull in attacks has been described by analysts as conditional rather than permanent, while shipping through the corridor remains below its pre-crisis levels. Iran\u2019s proxy strategy was useful precisely because it gave local actors the capacity to fight without Iran fighting directly. The problem is that such capacity does not simply disappear when Tehran wants the fighting to stop.<\/p>\n
Iraq presents an even more complicated mutation of the model. There, the militias do not merely operate alongside a weak state; many have been absorbed into it. The Popular Mobilization Forces, created to fight ISIS in 2014 and later incorporated into Iraq\u2019s formal security apparatus, encompass dozens of armed groups, including powerful Iran-aligned factions such as Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Yet incorporation never fully established state control. Several factions retained separate command structures, political organisations and close relationships with Tehran. During the 2026 Iran war, militias again launched attacks on American facilities and targets in the Kurdistan region, placing Baghdad in the extraordinary position of being internationally responsible for a territory from which armed groups could conduct operations the government itself did not necessarily control. They wore the architecture of the state without always accepting its monopoly over force.<\/p>\n
Baghdad is now attempting to resolve that contradiction. Under mounting American pressure, the government has set a September deadline for armed groups to place their weapons under state control as the US-led anti-ISIS coalition withdraws. However, this raises another question: does changing an organisation\u2019s legal status actually dismantle its fighters, finances, political networks and command structures? A militia can be renamed. It can be reorganised. It can even be placed on a government payroll. None of that necessarily means the state has acquired control over its guns.<\/p>\n
This is the legacy of Iran\u2019s proxy strategy. Tehran built the Axis to wage conflict without always bearing its direct costs. But armed movements do not remain instruments forever. They acquire constituencies, money, weapons and ambitions of their own. Today, governments can sign ceasefires in Tehran, Beirut or Baghdad, yet groups outside their effective control can still decide when the next missile is fired. That is why agreements keep producing pauses rather than peace. Iran spent four decades exporting the battlefield beyond its borders. West Asia is now living with the battlefields it left behind.<\/p>\n
(The writer takes a special interest in history, culture, and geopolitics. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost\u2019s views.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tehran built the Axis to wage conflict without always bearing its direct costs. But armed outfits do not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[7355,100,708,34,32207,75549,1232,75550,69,480],"class_list":["post-277040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tehran","tag-axis-of-resistance","tag-hezbollah","tag-houthi","tag-iran","tag-iran-foreign-policy","tag-iran-proxy-strategy","tag-middle-east-security","tag-regional-militias","tag-tehran","tag-west-asia-conflict"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117208603011191202","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}