The demise of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in an Israeli air strike has sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. While there is no love lost for Khamenei among regional leaders, any leadership vacuum in Iran in the midst of an Israeli-US war that does not seem to have an exit strategy is worrying, to say the least.
During his 37 years in power, Khamenei pursued a foreign policy defined by an ideologically driven confrontation with the majority of Iran’s neighbors — chief among them, the Gulf states. A cornerstone of this policy was forming, funding, and weaponizing proxy networks in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Gaza. These networks contributed to ideological polarization in the region, undermined state institutions, and featured terrorist acts targeting domestic opponents as well as Iran’s regional and extra-regional foes.
This “Axis of Resistance” was initially boosted by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein, Tehran’s chief enemy. But in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, the Axis began to wane.
In 2024, this era of Iranian power projection suffered two major setbacks with the loss of two of Iran’s regional partners: the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, who fell to Turkish-backed Sunni Muslim forces, and Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime secretary general, who was assassinated by Israel. Syria was the state anchor of the resistance axis, and Nasrallah was Tehran’s most trusted regional ally. During the 21 years in which Iranian officials claimed they were in control of four Arab capitals — Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana’a — relations between Tehran and Gulf countries seesawed between confrontation and containment, reaching their most tense moment in 2019 when Tehran attacked oil installations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal and reimposition of economic sanctions.
Since then, Gulf countries led by Saudi Arabia have pursued a rapprochement approach with Tehran with mixed results. Despite the March 2023 agreement brokered by Beijing between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which restored diplomatic relations, and Iran’s resumption of diplomatic ties with other GCC countries, including the United Arab Emirates, this strategy never translated into a sustainable detente. A long record of Gulf countries’ mistrust of Iranian expansionist objectives and Iranian mistrust of Gulf countries’ relations with Israel and the United States, along with Tehran’s continuing support of Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis, were obstacles too large to overcome easily. The rapprochement policy has now suffered a setback that is not going to be easily overcome.
Iran’s seemingly random targeting of U.S. bases, residential neighborhoods, ports, and civilian airports in the Gulf, in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli war, brought back to the fore all the fears that Arab countries – and Gulf states in particular – have harbored toward the Iranian regime and punctured the stability bubble these countries have long cultivated. In the short term, Gulf states hope to bring the hostilities to an end as quickly as possible and have been reluctant today to join the US-Israeli attacks. They might decide to join the war if the Iranian attacks on their territories continue. Like the rest of the Middle East, they are still trying to figure out what political order emerges in Iran in the aftermath of Khamenei’s death.
Political transitions, especially in highly centralized systems such as Iran’s, can create both risks and opportunities. The worst-case scenario for the Arab countries is a weakened, fragmented, and unstable Iran riven by internal power struggles among political and military elites. In such a scenario, Iran becomes an unpredictable player that is incentivized toward asymmetrical escalation with a large potential spillover of instability in its neighborhood. At the same time, a regime change scenario leading to a new political order in Iran carries opportunities for a diplomatic reset and confidence-building between Iran and its Arab neighbors. Most likely, Gulf countries will refrain from engaging in activities to try to shape the transition in Iran and will adopt a wait-and-see approach until a new leadership emerges and consolidates control over the country’s affairs.
The future of the proxy network, already in disarray before Khamenei’s death, is now directly tied to Iran’s internal transition. After an initial pause at the start of the war, these proxies have now entered the fray, raising the prospect of coordinated escalation by Tehran and its network. Hezbollah launched missiles and drones against northern Israel on March 2, dragging Lebanon into the conflict on Iran’s side. The Lebanese government declared Hezbollah’s actions illegal and called for the group’s disarmament, by force if necessary. In Iraq, a pro-Iranian Iraqi militia claimed responsibility for drone attacks targeting U.S. troops at Baghdad airport and a U.S. base in Erbil in the northern part of the country. Yemen’s Houthis announced that they would resume their attacks on Red Sea shipping and American military installations.
The best-case scenario for the network’s reconstitution is a hardline consolidation controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its allied factions. An IRGC-controlled political order would elevate the proxies on the regime’s strategic priority ladder and channel resources toward rebuilding them.
At the other end of the spectrum, a fragmented transition in which competing IRGC factions sponsor rival proxy groups would accelerate the network’s weakening and pose a formidable challenge to its reconstitution. Even under the best-case scenario, rebuilding this network is going to be quite challenging given the structural shifts that have eroded the foundations on which it was built — chief among them the loss of Syria as a land corridor with Lebanon, a logistical gap that no new political order in Tehran is likely to overcome.
After Khamenei: Regional Reckoning and the Future of Iran’s Proxy Networks
By Randa Slim
Middle East & North Africa
The demise of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in an Israeli air strike has sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. While there is no love lost for Khamenei among regional leaders, any leadership vacuum in Iran in the midst of an Israeli-US war that does not seem to have an exit strategy is worrying, to say the least.
During his 37 years in power, Khamenei pursued a foreign policy defined by an ideologically driven confrontation with the majority of Iran’s neighbors — chief among them, the Gulf states. A cornerstone of this policy was forming, funding, and weaponizing proxy networks in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Gaza. These networks contributed to ideological polarization in the region, undermined state institutions, and featured terrorist acts targeting domestic opponents as well as Iran’s regional and extra-regional foes.
This “Axis of Resistance” was initially boosted by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein, Tehran’s chief enemy. But in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, the Axis began to wane.
In 2024, this era of Iranian power projection suffered two major setbacks with the loss of two of Iran’s regional partners: the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, who fell to Turkish-backed Sunni Muslim forces, and Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime secretary general, who was assassinated by Israel. Syria was the state anchor of the resistance axis, and Nasrallah was Tehran’s most trusted regional ally. During the 21 years in which Iranian officials claimed they were in control of four Arab capitals — Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana’a — relations between Tehran and Gulf countries seesawed between confrontation and containment, reaching their most tense moment in 2019 when Tehran attacked oil installations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal and reimposition of economic sanctions.
Since then, Gulf countries led by Saudi Arabia have pursued a rapprochement approach with Tehran with mixed results. Despite the March 2023 agreement brokered by Beijing between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which restored diplomatic relations, and Iran’s resumption of diplomatic ties with other GCC countries, including the United Arab Emirates, this strategy never translated into a sustainable detente. A long record of Gulf countries’ mistrust of Iranian expansionist objectives and Iranian mistrust of Gulf countries’ relations with Israel and the United States, along with Tehran’s continuing support of Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis, were obstacles too large to overcome easily. The rapprochement policy has now suffered a setback that is not going to be easily overcome.
Iran’s seemingly random targeting of U.S. bases, residential neighborhoods, ports, and civilian airports in the Gulf, in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli war, brought back to the fore all the fears that Arab countries – and Gulf states in particular – have harbored toward the Iranian regime and punctured the stability bubble these countries have long cultivated. In the short term, Gulf states hope to bring the hostilities to an end as quickly as possible and have been reluctant today to join the US-Israeli attacks. They might decide to join the war if the Iranian attacks on their territories continue. Like the rest of the Middle East, they are still trying to figure out what political order emerges in Iran in the aftermath of Khamenei’s death.
Political transitions, especially in highly centralized systems such as Iran’s, can create both risks and opportunities. The worst-case scenario for the Arab countries is a weakened, fragmented, and unstable Iran riven by internal power struggles among political and military elites. In such a scenario, Iran becomes an unpredictable player that is incentivized toward asymmetrical escalation with a large potential spillover of instability in its neighborhood. At the same time, a regime change scenario leading to a new political order in Iran carries opportunities for a diplomatic reset and confidence-building between Iran and its Arab neighbors. Most likely, Gulf countries will refrain from engaging in activities to try to shape the transition in Iran and will adopt a wait-and-see approach until a new leadership emerges and consolidates control over the country’s affairs.
The future of the proxy network, already in disarray before Khamenei’s death, is now directly tied to Iran’s internal transition. After an initial pause at the start of the war, these proxies have now entered the fray, raising the prospect of coordinated escalation by Tehran and its network. Hezbollah launched missiles and drones against northern Israel on March 2, dragging Lebanon into the conflict on Iran’s side. The Lebanese government declared Hezbollah’s actions illegal and called for the group’s disarmament, by force if necessary. In Iraq, a pro-Iranian Iraqi militia claimed responsibility for drone attacks targeting U.S. troops at Baghdad airport and a U.S. base in Erbil in the northern part of the country. Yemen’s Houthis announced that they would resume their attacks on Red Sea shipping and American military installations.
The best-case scenario for the network’s reconstitution is a hardline consolidation controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its allied factions. An IRGC-controlled political order would elevate the proxies on the regime’s strategic priority ladder and channel resources toward rebuilding them.
At the other end of the spectrum, a fragmented transition in which competing IRGC factions sponsor rival proxy groups would accelerate the network’s weakening and pose a formidable challenge to its reconstitution. Even under the best-case scenario, rebuilding this network is going to be quite challenging given the structural shifts that have eroded the foundations on which it was built — chief among them the loss of Syria as a land corridor with Lebanon, a logistical gap that no new political order in Tehran is likely to overcome.
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