Is Iran's “Axis of Resistance” collapsing under Israeli attacks?

Israeli airstrikes that have wiped out Hezbollah's leadership and left its internal security in tatters are a devastating blow to Iran's decades-long project of wielding power in the Middle East through proxies, former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts say.

Within weeks, Iran and its main proxy, Hezbollah, suffered catastrophic security failures. Israel sabotaged the group's communications, eliminated several senior figures and killed Hezbollah's powerful and influential longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who will not be easily replaced.

U.S. officials said Israeli airstrikes that continued Sunday killed most of Hezbollah's leadership and destroyed several weapons depots, inflicting unprecedented physical and psychological damage on the militia group.

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The Iranian regime viewed Hezbollah as the cornerstone of a strategy to outflank militarily superior opponents with armed proxies, funded and trained by Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Tehran dubbed the “Axis of Resistance.”

By equipping Hezbollah, along with other groups in Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, with an arsenal of rockets and missiles, Iran was aiming to steadily weaken Israel and the US, flexing its muscles and at the same time a direct To avoid confrontation he couldn't win.

But Iran's strategy underestimated how Israel would respond to the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and Hezbollah's subsequent cross-border rocket fire. Tehran also overestimated the strength of its proxy network, former intelligence officers and counterterrorism analysts said.

“Essentially their entire calculation is in smithereens,” said terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “For Israel, this is a stunning turnaround from the events of almost a year ago.”

Hoffman was referring to the October 7 Hamas attack that surprised Israeli intelligence services, killing 1,200 Israelis and leading to the taking of 250 people hostage. “Israeli intelligence has restored its aura of deterrence,” Hoffman said. “They took them after the October 7th debacle. lost.”

Israel turned its focus to Hezbollah after it inflicted heavy damage on Hamas in the Gaza Strip last year. Israeli military operations there are believed to have killed thousands of the group's fighters and destroyed large parts of its vast tunnel network.

However, Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar is believed to be alive and hiding in tunnels that Israeli forces have not yet captured. According to Palestinian health authorities, the Israeli government has also faced international condemnation for the high number of civilian casualties in its operations in Gaza, which have killed more than 42,000 Palestinians.

The Iranian proxy group that has avoided major damage since the Oct. 7 attack is the Houthi forces in Yemen. With support from Tehran, they continued to attack US military ships and merchant vessels in the Red Sea and fire rockets at Israel.

On Sunday, the Israeli military said dozens of its aircraft had bombed power plants in Yemen and a seaport in Hodeida in retaliation for a Houthi missile attack on Israel. The impact of these attacks remains unclear.

Despite Hezbollah being attacked relentlessly in recent days, Iran has proven unable – and perhaps unwilling – to protect its protégés in Lebanon. That could raise questions among some fighters in Iran's proxy groups about whether Tehran is a worthy patron, former intelligence and defense officials said.

Tehran's proxy network should serve as a deterrent against a direct Israeli attack on Iran itself, said Matthew Savill of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, a senior official in the British Ministry of Defense.

But Savill said recent events had exposed “the core weakness” of Iran’s proxy strategy. “While Iran will use its partners in self-defense,” he said, “the reverse is not true, and it is unlikely to go to war with Israel to save any of those partners.”

Glenn Corn, a former senior CIA officer, agreed. “Iran has not been able to do anything significant to support the proxies,” said Corn, now senior director for geopolitics and global threat assessment at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

Israel's ability to successfully attack Hezbollah's inner circle is the result of years of intelligence work since 2006, when Israel tried in vain to kill Nasrallah and permanently defeat the militia, Corn and other former intelligence officers said. The long-term intelligence work “is paying off,” Corn added. The successful Israeli operations have also presented Iran and Hezbollah with the difficult question: How and when can they retaliate without suffering further setbacks?

If Iran or Hezbollah decide now to fire a barrage of rockets into Israel, they risk massive retaliation from Israel and a full-scale war that Tehran is ill-equipped to win.

There is also a risk that Israeli and U.S. forces in the region will fire many of the missiles, as happened in April when Iran fired more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel with near-ineffective effect.

For a new Iranian president who says his administration is ready to revive nuclear diplomacy with the West, an escalating conflict with Israel would torpedo any chance of negotiations or sanctions relief needed to revive Iran's economy.

However, if Tehran chooses not to retaliate, Iran will appear weak and appear to be withdrawing from Israel. The country's 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “now finds himself in a dilemma of his own making,” analyst Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on social media.

“By not reacting decisively, he keeps losing face. If he reacts too strongly, he could lose his head,” Sadjadpour wrote, adding that “these humiliations will fuel discussions about succession in Tehran.”

Another option for Iran and Hezbollah would be to carry out terrorist attacks abroad, attacking more vulnerable soft targets linked to Israel and the United States around the world, former officials said.

“The only concern we should have is a return to the old terror game, to soft targets like embassies abroad, both in Israel and in the United States,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA official. “That would certainly be a much more plausible scenario.”

For Israel, replete with successes against Hezbollah, there is a danger that overconfidence could lead Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order a ground invasion of Lebanon, former officials said.

Previous Israeli military incursions into Lebanon, most recently in 2006, backfired, and the sight of Israeli troops on Lebanese soil could give a boost to Hezbollah's forces and cause, former intelligence officers said.

In Beirut, disarray within Hezbollah and the lack of a strong leader are likely to create a vacuum, Corn said. And it is unclear whether the Lebanese government will try to reassert itself after years of being dominated by Hezbollah.

“Who will fill this vacuum? Will it be the Lebanese state? Will it be ISIS? Will it be another group?” Mais asked. “A big question is whether the Lebanese armed forces are ready to intervene and take control of their country, which they have not been able to do so far because Hezbollah was the number one military and political force in Lebanon.”

Iran's first task will be to rebuild Hezbollah and its other proxies, said Norman Roule, who worked at the CIA for 34 years and oversaw intelligence on Iran.

Despite the severe damage, “the groups are surviving, and their influence on their respective regions has not diminished to the point where their survival is questionable,” Roule said. “Iran’s main goal will be to contribute to the survival and recovery of these groups.”

The Israeli campaign has removed a generation of Hezbollah's leadership as well as hundreds of key subordinates, added Roule, who now sits on the advisory board of United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit group that says it combats the threats posed by Iran. As long as Israeli attacks continue, Hezbollah's decision-making will be in disarray, but the militia remains a significant force.

“Dozens, if not hundreds, of lower to mid-level commanders remain,” Roule said, “along with thousands of often armed supporters.”