JERUSALEM — While the world braces for President Donald Trump’s decision on bombing Iran and the tectonic waves that could follow, here in the Middle East, the earthquake has already struck. Israel’s go-for-broke attacks on Iran launched just over a week ago — after decades of intense but largely covert conflict between the two powers — have dramatically shifted the strategic balance in a way that will probably prevail whether American bombers enter the fray or not, according to analysts in Israel, across the region and beyond.

Israel’s assault caps a string of upheavals that would have been inconceivable before the attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including the routing of three Iranian allies: Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

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Now, Israeli fighter jets are operating with impunity over the Iranian capital, Tehran, and Iran — perceived for years by not only Israel but many countries in the Arab Gulf region as the primary menace — has been exposed as a far hollower military force than many in the world believed. The decades-old status quo has been shattered, with Israel now ascendant as the Middle East’s unchallenged military power, Iran and its “axis of resistance” in disarray, and these two foes — for the first time — locked in direct combat.

“The region is fundamentally different now,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group in Washington. “The name of the game for decades was that Israel and Iran would engage through proxies and covert operations. That it has turned into an open conflict is something I really didn’t foresee.”

He and other analysts were quick to say that the outcome of this conflict is far from clear, and the reshuffling of the regional order is far from over.

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Iran is weakened but not defeated. Its nuclear enrichment program is damaged but not destroyed. Israel is pressing Trump to help deliver a decisive blow, and the president said Thursday he would decide whether to do so “within two weeks.”

Possible endgames, Vaez said, include the collapse of the Iranian regime, which by no means would assure the end of enmity; a military quagmire sucking in Israel and Iran, which could further destabilize the region; and, perhaps most feared, a determination by Iran that its survival requires the speedy development of a nuclear weapon.

A negotiated deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program or eliminate it is also still possible, should progress be made during Trump’s fortnight pause. If such an accord is reached, Israel would probably come under pressure from the White House to end the military campaign.

While this unfolding drama has yet to be resolved, the region has already been transformed in several essential ways, according to Middle East analysts.

Israel no longer faces the intense threats from just across its borders once posed by Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been reeling since their longtime leaders were killed and much of their fighting forces decimated by Israel. A much-diminished Hamas is still trying to put up a fight amid the devastation of the Gaza war, while Hezbollah is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to retaliate against Israel for its attacks on Iran.

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Syrian rebels have shaken off the tyranny of the Assad regime and with it, the influence of Iran and Russia, which had long dominated relations between Syria and the world. Both Syria and Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s political sway has receded, have at least a chance for renewal.

“The Levant has flipped,” said Paul Salem, former president of the Middle East Institute in Beirut. “Both Syria and Lebanon are on a new and hopefully promising trajectory.”

And Israel has rebounded from the devastating Oct. 7 attacks of 20 months ago. While Israeli hostages are still held by Hamas, and Israeli troops continue to wage a calamitous military campaign in Gaza, Israel is now in its strongest strategic position in decades, operating militarily beyond its borders in Lebanon, southern Syria and now over Iran.

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“We’ve never used the word unprecedented so often,” said Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Mansour likened the recent changes in the regional order, culminating in Israel’s attack on Iran, to some of the most consequential upheavals seen by the Middle East in the past half-century. These include the oil shocks of the 1970s, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the long Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“This will be one of those hugely impactful moments in the history books,” he said. “What emerges after this will not look like it was on Oct. 6. Israel’s attack on Iran cements that.”

Especially striking are the rapid deterioration of Iran’s strategic position and the collapse of its decades-long enterprise to project power across the region via a network of allied militant armies, including in Iraq and Yemen.

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“Iran was an imperial power that once boasted of controlling four Arab capitals: Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sanaa,” said Salem. “I mean, my God have they come down in the world?”

Iran spent decades organizing and funding militant groups, and developing missile and drone technologies to arm them. Israeli officials estimated, for example, that Hezbollah had more than 100,000 rockets stockpiled before Israel targeted them.

Governments in the region long feared the chaos Iran could unleash, and Tehran exploited these anxieties to further expand its sway. When missiles and drones launched from Iran sent fireballs over Saudi Arabian oil fields in 2019, Trump, in his first term, declined to retaliate despite pleas from several regional powers to act.

“Nobody thought they could do anything,” said Ksenia Svetlova, director of the Israel-based Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security. “We were accustomed for decades Iran trying to export Islamic revolution, overthrow governments and sponsor terror groups.” She said she had heard many people in Arab Gulf countries say they were looking for someone to take on the Iranians. “And that someone they meant was Israel,” Svetlova said.

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Israel has dealt a series of blows to Iran’s nuclear and military efforts in recent years, engaging in sabotage and assassinations. Then last year, for the first time, Iran and Israel began openly trading strikes, initially triggered by a fatal Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, and Israeli forces succeeded in knocking out key Iranian air defenses. Since the tensions erupted into full conflict this month, Israeli forces have killed senior military officials and nuclear scientists; targeted nuclear, military, industrial and other sites; and demonstrated an ability to carry out attacks from the air and through covert operations with little if any resistance.

“The most important change is Israel’s escalation dominance,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East envoy under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “It has something it’s never had before, the ability to control the pace and intensity of conflicts in ways that no one can match.”

Israelis are feeling bullish about their new status as the region’s unchallenged hegemon.

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“I don’t believe Israel has been in a such a strong strategic position since I’ve been here,” said Natan Sharansky, a former Israeli politician who came to Israel after being imprisoned as a dissident in the Soviet Union. “Suddenly all these challenges, especially the Iran challenge, can be faced on a different plane.”

How Israel wields this unrivaled power will determine much about the future of the region. A confident Israel, for instance, could strike agreements to wind down the hostilities in Gaza, address Palestinian demands and relieve tensions elsewhere along its borders.

But Miller said that the political pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces from the extremist right-wing members of his governing coalition makes it difficult for him to convert military might into ceasefires and peace treaties that could produce regional stability.

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A decision by Trump to order U.S. forces into action could also roil the Middle East further, even if an American military operation proves successful. The ultimate reverberations are hard to predict.

The events of the last year have upended many assumptions about the Axis of Resistance, the loosely defined network of Iran and its core partners. For as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran has sought to export revolution and project power in the Arab Middle East, surprisingly persistent debates have raged over core questions. Did Iran tightly command a network of proxies and dependents—or did it stand at the center of a loose network of like-minded groups and opportunistic fellow travelers? Did the almost-nuclear Axis of Resistance pose a strategic challenge to Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia—or was it a serious but limited military challenger capable of disrupting its enemies but not containing them? Were Iran and the Axis better than their competitors at urban warfare, more ideologically persuasive, and better at motivating allies and agents—or was their power overestimated by adversaries who read too much wider significance into the outcomes of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Lebanon–Israel war of 2006?

During the past year of regional warfare across the Middle East, Iran and its Axis of Resistance broke long-standing taboos that had limited escalation and avoided direct conflict between Iran and Israel. It turned out that Iran and its Axis partners had created a reputation that far exceeded their actual powers. Now, in the aftermath of a series of catastrophic defeats for the Axis of Resistance, their emboldened rivals—including Israel, the United States, and local competitors across the Middle East—risk a new mistake: dangerously underestimating the Iran-backed web of militias and hybrid actors.

This period of ongoing transformation is a time for questions and hypotheses rather than premature assessment. Iran’s regime, Hezbollah, and Hamas are substantially weakened—but no one can yet say for sure just how weakened. Key Axis of Resistance groups will continue to play a regional role, and in their local spheres of influence might even continue to dominate rivals. The question is not whether these groups can be completely sidelined—they cannot. It’s how much power they will wield.

This report tries to make sense of the new state of play. It marks a first step in a long reappraisal, which will continue as the Middle East’s ongoing wave of regional conflict moves toward its next equilibrium. A subsequent companion report, “The Axis of Resistance Returns to Its Local Roots,” will assess the main surviving Axis players that closely coordinate with Tehran, and their evolving strategies since October 7. This research into the Axis today challenges earlier assumptions—including the authors’ own—about the Axis’s capabilities. At the same time, it cautions against a simplistic wholesale dismissal of Iran and its partners. Before the United States or Israel declares Mission Accomplished, policymakers need to take a hard look at how entrenched and relevant the Axis of Resistance groups still remain.

Fresh analysis suggests some initial conclusions. The Axis had a limited regional reach, was unable to deter Israel—and cannot deter Israel now. At the same time, resistance militias retain substantial local firepower, which they can leverage for national or subnational power even with a diminished regional profile. Not all resistance actors are alike—some, like the Assad regime, appear gone forever, while others, like the Houthis of Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine, remain indisputably powerful in their domestic contexts. Finally, the season of untrammeled interstate competition, the revival of crude imperial mores, and the maximalism of Israel and its partners—intended to once and for all diffuse the challenge mounted by Iran’s alliance network—could actually trigger a revival of Axis ideology and grassroots power.

Military losses have transformed the Axis, revealed some of the exaggerations around its abilities, and significantly weakened its short-term potency. Yet the Axis retains economic and political might. For many policymakers who work on the Middle East, the events of the last year have made a mockery of the Axis—“a house of cards”—and proved its sponsor, Iran, to be a paper tiger. But in reality, it is far too soon to write the obituary for the Axis of Resistance.

A Bad Year for the Axis

There is little debate that 2024 was devastating for the Axis of Resistance.

Israel broke Hezbollah’s military capacity and eviscerated its leadership with a combination of technological superiority, remarkable intelligence penetration, and ruthlessness. Before the year was out, Israel had assassinated a who’s who of Axis leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, in Beirut, and Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Retaliatory strikes by Iran and the Houthis, from Yemen, cratered Israeli roads and rattled nerves, but did little significant damage. And finally, in December, Turkish-backed Islamist rebels in Syria deposed the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which, even as it had become something of a reputational liability for Iran, had remained a logistical linchpin for the Axis.

Still, after considerable reversals, the Axis commands tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of fighters spread across the entire Middle East. These groups still have significant weapons and means of financing, some of which are acquired through channels that analysts are only beginning to understand. They retain local constituencies and continue to operate as states within states. They maintain their links to Iran, which, within limits, still coordinates their activity and aid. Less tangibly, an ideological vibrancy of opposition to Israel and the United States continues to animate the Axis—even as the depth of commitment to that ideology varies among Axis groups.

The administrations of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu appear intent on bulldozing forward on their expansive Middle Eastern agendas while treating the Axis of Resistance as a broken alliance whose leftover parts might need to be mopped up here and there, but which no longer pose a real threat. The United States and Israel make these assumptions at their own peril—and at the risk of security and stability throughout the region.

Instead, policymakers should seek to stop the Axis groups from wreaking more havoc by focusing on three lines of analysis: the new threats posed by these groups; their deep popular support; and the failures of rights, governance, and security that continue to make Axis groups relevant in Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, and elsewhere. With the traditional military options of the Axis hobbled, it will, in all likelihood, look for ways to inflict economic pain (think Red Sea shipping), target less-fortified U.S. allies in the Gulf, and ramp up other types of asymmetric attacks.

Roots of “Resistance”

This report defines the Axis of Resistance as the Iran-led alliance of states and sub-state or hybrid actors in the Middle East. The Axis is an open alliance; the groups it comprises, including Iran, declare their membership and share a common political-military project of opposing Israel and the United States. Some alliance members share additional projects or ideologies, including millenarian Shia eschatology, armed struggle against Israel, a global gray economy designed to subvert Western sanctions and financial institutions, or the regional production of weapons systems (in particular, drones and long-range missiles).

Notwithstanding these bonds and similarities, however, the Axis of Resistance is, at heart, an informal network—more than a centralized alliance—and is not known to be bound by formal treaties or agreements. The exact modality of connection between Axis groups and Iran—including how much assistance these groups receive from Iran, and how much autonomy they enjoy—has been the subject of much debate for many years. Researchers have nearly reached a consensus, however, that while these groups must closely coordinate with Iran, they also have a great degree of independence, and are at least as beholden to their local constituencies as they are to Iranian backers.

The Axis of Resistance, after the fall of Assad, includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis (also known as Ansar Allah) in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, multiple Shia militias in Iraq, the Iranian state, and some Iranian sub-state or hybrid actors under the aegis of the Iranian state. Each of these groups established themselves for different reasons of local concern. Hamas is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1987 as a Sunni Islamist movement to represent the national interests of the Palestinian people; it has, of course, evolved into much more. Iran helped establish Hezbollah as a Shia Islamist militia in 1982 to resist the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon. The militant group succeeded in expelling Israeli occupiers in 2000, and has since grown into a much bigger entity, both entwined with the Lebanese state and functionally independent. In Yemen, the Houthis formed as a Shia Islamist movement in the 1990s to represent the country’s large and marginalized Shia minority. They later became a key player in Yemen’s ongoing civil war. Iraqi Shia Islamist affiliates like Kata’ib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba’ emerged during the American-led occupation after the 2003 invasion, but gained more power, popularity, and relevance by joining Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units in the fight against the Islamic State from 2014.

From these diverse local contexts, these groups converged on a few common transnational aims, without ever giving up their local concerns, and in the process gained the support of Tehran.

The term “Axis of Resistance” emerged in the 2000s, perhaps as an opportunistic reaction to President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” coinage. Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran invoked “resistance” and “Islamic resistance” from their founding days, and seem to have quickly and comfortably adopted the “axis” moniker to showcase the idea of Iranian power. Hezbollah foregrounded its resistance identity at least all the way back to its foundational public statement of ideology, the 1985 “Open Letter” published in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir. Over the decades, the group has lessened the public emphasis on jihad or the Islamic dimensions of its ideology, while consistently centering resistance against Israel and the United States. The Houthi foundational slogan, the sarkha doesn’t explicitly use the word “resistance,” but references the fight against Israel and the United States.

The Axis gained more currency as a concept throughout the Middle East after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. In that war, Lebanon endured a punishing Israeli air campaign, but Hezbollah emerged with a stronger hand, and Nasrallah became one of the most popular and trusted leaders in the Arab world.

The Axis of Resistance moniker was much more than a catchy nickname or unifying credo. The “unity of fronts” doctrine held that all Axis members should attack or hold fire together.

But the Axis of Resistance moniker was much more than a catchy nickname or unifying credo. From around the time that the term came into use, Iran also began treating its members as part of a common project against U.S. and Israeli goals in the Middle East, best encapsulated in the “unity of fronts” doctrine that Tehran promoted with all its partners. The upshot of this doctrine was that all Axis members should attack or hold fire together, increasing their leverage against Israel and the United States.

As the Axis of Resistance grew stronger and added more members in the last two decades, it gained an aura of near invincibility. Analysts frequently assumed that Axis members had additional tricks up their sleeves, and if Israeli military excesses went too far, the groups would respond with damaging counterattacks, reveal new weaponry, or ensnare an overly stretched Israeli military in their web. Media outlets affiliated with the Axis of Resistance and key leaders of these groups conveyed the impression that they possessed the capability to launch a sweeping, multipronged assault on Israel—where they could catch Israel off guard, undermine its military superiority, and drain its American-supplied resources. This ability, they argued, meant the Axis could balance Western powers despite its apparent disadvantage in conventional military strength. The network’s geographic spread—often referred to as the “Shia Crescent”—encircled Israel. The Axis presented access to Iranian-supplied weaponry, alongside burgeoning domestic production capabilities in certain regions, as a critical factor capable of sharply tipping the balance of power in their favor—a view supported by notable analysts.

The aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attacks proved that much of this aura was overblown. Analysts, including the authors of this report, have had to reevaluate their pre-Gaza-war assumptions about Axis capabilities.

The Underperforming Axis

The Hamas surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 upended the existing norms of conflict in the region. Hamas exposed profound vulnerabilities in Israeli security. The Palestinian group massacred Israeli citizens and took hostages at scale, triggering Israel and the United States to abandon any remaining restraints in their approach to war.

But as Israel laid waste to Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks, and then adventured beyond Israeli borders to fight other Axis groups, assassinate leaders at will, and directly strike Tehran, the Axis began to lose its sheen. Iran, it turned out, was not able to coordinate and control the Axis military capabilities—and many of the most vaunted deterrent capabilities versus Israel either collapsed under wartime pressure or had never existed. Internal fissures among Axis members proved a significant impediment to Iran’s supposed “unity of fronts.” A prime example of these fissures were the October 7 attacks themselves, which Hamas reportedly kept secret from Iran, in an apparent bid to draw the entire Axis into a defense of Hamas without prior agreement.

As the Gaza war unfolded, powerful forces like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Houthis, and even the ailing Assad regime in Syria ended up prioritizing their own national or domestic interests over Iran’s priorities or the Hamas–Israel war. And Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes against Israel had, at most, limited strategic impact.

Hezbollah, vaunted as Iran’s most capable and disciplined military partner, was also unable to check Israel’s military aims. The day after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Hezbollah entered the fray as part of the “unity of fronts” strategy, launching a rocket at Israeli positions at Shebaa farms, a portion of Lebanese territory that Israel has long occupied. Confident in its ability to set the rules of engagement and convinced that Israel, like itself, wanted to avoid spreading the Gaza war to Lebanon, Hezbollah miscalculated and severely underestimated Israel’s resolve.

The Lebanese group initially demanded a truce in exchange for a cessation of its attacks. However, backed into a corner, Hezbollah dropped that demand and agreed to the Hezbollah–Israel truce in November.

The fall of 2024 delivered blow after blow to the group. Israel infiltrated Hezbollah’s supply chain, booby-trapping thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, injuring thousands and debilitating its communication network. The Hezbollah position dramatically deteriorated following the assassination of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike on September 27. Just two days later, Israel assassinated his successor, Hashem Safieddine. Then, on October 1, Israeli forces crossed into southern Lebanon. Israel’s relentless airstrikes also decimated Hezbollah’s military infrastructure and obliterated much of its missile arsenal.

Hezbollah could not even effectively resist Israel’s ongoing campaign to destroy Lebanese infrastructure and depopulate border areas. Today, Hezbollah has been reduced to its weakest condition since the late 1980s. Israel has repeatedly reneged on the November ceasefire agreement, with no apparent consequence, and now says it will indefinitely occupy five hilltops in Lebanese territory.

Other Axis threats of mayhem turned out to be exaggerated. The Axis lacked both the infrastructure and the technological know-how to sustain a prolonged, multifront campaign against Israel. Rather than operating as a cohesive, coordinated force, the network seemed bound more by rhetoric. Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s threats to escalate to “much higher levels” and Kata’ib Hezbollah’s fiery denunciations of Israeli airstrikes as “treacherous” made headlines, but delivered little in the way of tangible results.

But while the Houthis have caused problems for Israel and its partners, and have disrupted global shipping, they have not reversed the region’s strategic balance of power. Though the Houthis occasionally launched surprise strikes that pierced Israel’s Iron Dome, these attacks were sporadic and lacked strategic impact. Instead, Iraqi and Yemeni groups relied on symbolic acts—drone strikes and joint operations—that felt more like political theatre than military might.

Iraq’s resistance factions threaten neither the Iraqi state nor U.S. reach. Syria’s dictatorial dynasty, which styled itself a jewel in the crown of the Axis and the indispensable cornerstone in Iran’s much ballyhooed and ultimately phantom “land bridge” and the Shia Crescent, evaporated in a single week in December.

A New Strategic Landscape

The cascade that began on October 7 continues, and is likely to surge well into the second Trump term. Opportunists from Washington to Ankara to Tel Aviv to Riyadh entertain hopes of remaking a regional order in their favor. Their military ventures might smack of overreach, and certainly involve new lows in ethnic cleansing and war crimes—but they also reflect a sea change in the regional balance of power and order of battle. The upheaval has particularly spotlighted the fragility of Iran’s military strategy.

Analysts thought that the Axis could not be fully dismantled, thanks to its horizontal structure. According to that thinking, the network would seamlessly replace killed leaders, ensuring continuity. But after the United States assassinated Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the Axis transitioned from a top-down, Iranian-driven hierarchy to a more horizontally integrated alliance. This shift was already underway before the assassination but gained momentum under the leadership of his successor, Esmail Qaani. Soleimani was the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, and had spent decades talent-spotting in the region, and cultivating personal relationships with every major Resistance leader. Perhaps the Axis never recovered the operational capacity that resided in those relationships. While Iran retained its role as the strategic architect, the new structure granted members greater autonomy and allowed them to forge independent ties with Tehran and one another.

Resistance leaders still seek, in their propaganda, to portray an ironclad alliance. But the Axis today is shaken—and shaky.

While Resistance leaders still seek, in their propaganda, to portray an ironclad alliance, the Axis today is shaken and shaky—a network still figuring out how to adapt. Israel’s campaign in Lebanon severely compromised Hezbollah’s military reach, disrupted the group’s command structure, neutralized Hezbollah’s supposed missile advantage, and almost certainly forced Tehran to rethink its total dependence on the Lebanese group to fight Israel. Hezbollah’s well-trained cadre of committed infantry fighters remains, but the balance of deterrence and threat has shifted in Israel’s favor. And Hezbollah’s collapse set the stage for the fall of Damascus—a critical hub for Iranian weapon transfers and coordination. Now, Syria is led by former members of the Sunni jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and from Iran’s perspective has flipped from being a linchpin in Tehran’s regional alliance structure to being a fiercely anti-Iran state.

Shifting Regional Cast of Characters

Regional dynamics since October 7 are transforming at a dizzying pace. The new state of play of the multiple overlapping power struggles in the Middle East is a radical departure from the past. Previous alliances persist, in broad strokes, but the relative strength of states and hybrid actors is quickly changing, and the fracturing of the Axis has left a power vacuum. Four major players—Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and the United States—are emerging as pivotal forces (for now) in a seismic regional realignment. This power shift is creating a high-stakes scramble for political and geostrategic gains.

Today’s Middle East features the Axis of Resistance in competition with another loose coalition that includes Saudi Arabia; the United Arab Emirates and their anti-Houthi proxies in Yemen; Israel; Jordan; Egypt; the Kurdish statelet in northeast Syria; and the United States. Other regional players are more fluid in their alliances. Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, the new leadership in Syria, and jihadist groups like the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda successor groups—none of these entities have fixed allegiances when it comes to the major regional competition.

The weak state system in the Middle East has encouraged a proliferation of powerful hybrid actors, which draw on state power but operate without many of the traditional constraints of states. This sprawling cast of characters has begun shifting with greater speed and more confusion than ever before, in reaction to Trump’s shattering of international norms—a process that has accelerated and become strikingly unpredictable since he began his second term. Trump is putatively an isolationist, and has entertained conflicting messages on Iran. On the one hand, he has professed a new openness to diplomacy. On the other hand, he has officially renewed the American “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran and seems just as capable of suddenly deciding he needs to crush Tehran. A decision to go to war against Iran, despite its risks, could gain consensus among more Republicans, particularly because the United States is now more closely aligned with Israel than ever before. The catalyst for an American intervention might be a decision by Israel, not Washington. U.S. intelligence agencies recently warned that Israel is likely to strike facilities that are crucial to Iran’s nuclear programs, and Israel has not given up on its broader goal of causing regime change. A retaliatory strike from Tehran could pull the United States into a conflagration it never intended to join.

The events of the last year have also upended the Levant, with unpredictable consequences. Hezbollah’s defeat opened the way for the first Lebanese government since 2008 that does not give veto power to Hezbollah. Hezbollah had also been a protector of the Assad regime, and the Lebanese group’s weakening paved the way for Assad’s surrendering of power to a relatively small group of rebels backed by Turkey. The state of flux in Syria and Iran’s actual and perceived weakness creates systemic instability. Prior to October 7, the perception of Iranian strength created some predictability, structure, and guardrails between Hezbollah and Israel, for example, as well as between the United States and Iraqi resistance factions. In other arenas, most notably Yemen and Syria, the perceived strength of Iran might have served to intensify rather than limit armed conflict. Today, Iran’s limitations invite new and renewed challenges from states and sub-state players who seek a chance to advance their own causes and interests.

New Risks and Opportunities

Even Middle Eastern powers that were not directly involved in conflict with the Axis or its enemies have experienced major changes in risks and opportunities in the last year. Turkey, for example, has emerged as the new dominant force in Syria. Ankara could now serve as a vital conduit, facilitating Moscow and Tehran’s efforts to reconnect with Damascus. Meanwhile, with Turkish allies in charge in Syria, Turkey’s dependence on both Iran and Russia has waned considerably. Yet Ankara is likely to navigate these waters with care, avoiding outright provocation of Russia and Iran. This carefulness may involve granting Iran’s allies limited room to maneuver—so long as Turkish economic interests remain firmly protected, especially its desire to monopolize regional energy transit routes bridging the Middle East and Europe.

For its part, Saudi Arabia could capitalize on its growing edge over Iran, boldly advancing its bid for regional leadership. Even if Riyadh works to sideline Tehran, it will likely also continue to play a calculated game—sticking to its recalibrated foreign policy, emerging from 2019 onwards, which aims to deepen economic and political ties with rival powers. The turning point for Saudi Arabia came that year, when the billions it had spent on U.S. weapons failed to prevent an attack on the Kingdom’s most critical oil sites—at the peak of Trump’s first maximum pressure campaign. (The Houthis claimed the attack, but Riyadh and Washington blamed Tehran. ) The biggest source of distress from this incident for Saudi Arabia was the lack of immediate U.S. support. But Riyadh also drew a more general conclusion: it could no longer rely on the United States as the guarantor of Gulf security. Hence, Saudi Arabia sought to contain regional conflicts by prioritizing negotiations with Tehran and its allies, to distance itself from U.S.–Iranian tensions that could forestall its economic ambitions.

Riyadh also drew a more general conclusion: it could no longer rely on the United States as the guarantor of Gulf security.

The Saudi strategy also extended to reestablishing diplomatic ties with Tehran, to reduce the risk of attacks on its economic interests if chaos spiraled out of control in the region.

Saudi Arabia, following this logic, is carefully maintaining communication channels with Iran and its allies, balancing diplomacy while relying on others—such as the United States and Israel—to adopt a more aggressive posture against Tehran and its influence network. Riyadh recognizes that, despite its setbacks, Iran is here to stay and its geographic proximity places the Kingdom at the most risk. By offering the carrot of dialogue while quietly allowing the stick wielded by its partners, the Kingdom can watch Tehran’s clout weaken over time without intervening. As one Saudi analyst aptly noted in an interview, this approach allows Riyadh to maintain plausible deniability while keeping its strategic ambitions firmly on track.

Saudi Arabia is also embracing its long-sought role as a mediator. The Kingdom hosted top American and Russian officials for talks on Ukraine, signalling a huge shift in global diplomacy. Its public float to mediate future Iran–U.S. negotiations over a new nuclear deal signals, to Trump, the Kingdom’s value as an ally and strategically sets up Saudi Arabia as the most influential force in the Middle East. Riyadh is striving for a diplomatic win in one of these files. In exchange, the Kingdom hopes that the United States will step up its security commitments since, at this point, any attacks on Saudi Arabia by Axis-aligned groups would have more severe global repercussions. While the Kingdom is unlikely to replace other key regional diplomatic heavyweights, like Qatar and Oman, Riyadh’s efforts to remain in Trump’s good grace may indeed push Tehran to the side. The maneuver has already sparked concern in Iran, as evidenced by media reports that the government is decrying more aggressive Saudi posturing in Lebanon and Syria.

For the Emirates, these shifts could present a long-awaited opportunity. Securing U.S. backing for an offensive in Hodeida, Yemen, to dislodge the Houthis from the Red Sea—a long-standing Emirati goal previously thwarted by earlier U.S. administrations—might now finally be within reach. At the same time, regional actors are already forging stronger ties with Syria’s new leadership while working to weaken Hezbollah’s political control in Lebanon.

The Limits of Resistance Ideology

Western policy narratives, reflected most clearly in statements by Israeli and U.S. leaders, sometimes oversimplify the Axis of Resistance as a tightly controlled alliance of Iranian proxies that fight in lockstep at Tehran’s orders, and share unifying ideologies—for the Shia members of the network, in wilayat al-faqih (the doctrine of absolute leadership by clerics), and, for all members, in a project of resisting Israel and the United States while seeking to liberate Palestine.

In reality, at fraught junctures, the alliance between Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas has often been strained, and the parties have sometimes even clashed. While its members share a deep animosity toward Israel and the United States—and share the overarching goal of driving them out of the region—recent events have shown that most are more concerned about domestic priorities and survival.

Take the example of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi Axis group that has a similar name to the famous Lebanese party but is a completely distinct entity with a mostly local agenda. As Israel broadened its assault on Gaza in the winter after the October 7 attacks, Kata’ib Hezbollah entered the fray on January 28, 2024 with a drone attack on an American outpost in Jordan called Tower 22, killing three U.S. soldiers. Yet after Iran subsequently pleaded with Kata’ib Hezbollah to call a ceasefire, the Iraqi faction quickly opted for restraint, avoiding further moves that might have spiraled into a costly confrontation.

Other Axis members were even less involved after October 7. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, despite owing his regime’s survival to Iranian and Hezbollah support, chose to stay completely on the sidelines of the conflict. Even after Israeli airstrikes in Damascus destroyed key Iranian assets in April 2024, Assad resisted Iranian calls for retaliation and focused instead on his diplomatic promises to the Emirates. Assad even reportedly facilitated Israeli strikes on Iranian targets inside Syria, apparently in a bid to limit Iranian leverage over his regime.

The individual domestic concerns of Axis groups, which more often than not surpassed the broader goals of the Axis, were most evident in Hezbollah’s decision to pursue a ceasefire deal with Israel. The move stemmed not from solidarity with the “Palestinian cause” but from a hard calculus of survival. The Lebanese group understood that prolonging the war could decimate its forces and alienate its local support base—a risk it couldn’t afford to take. This stark pragmatism shows the limits of the Axis’s unity, exposing a network that prioritizes self-preservation over ideological commitment when its survival is at stake.

Illicit financial networks have consolidated over time, affording the Axis groups a degree of financial autonomy.

However, while the Axis is less than an ironclad alliance, it is also more than a loose network of Iran-aligned groups. It relies on an intricate global web of financial systems to launder money, facilitate arms shipments, and sustain military operations across its ranks. While Israel, bolstered by U.S. support, has inflicted devastating blows to the Axis’s military capabilities, Axis financial and logistical networks remain largely intact. These groups operate within an extensive shadow financial network that was initially created by Iran, but which has since taken on a life of its own. The IRGC uses sophisticated strategies that involve transnational organized crime groups—exploiting diaspora networks—and setting up sham businesses to launder money and sidestep international sanctions. The Corps relies on hawala, an informal money trader system, to clandestinely circulate funds without being detected by authorities. Such illicit financial networks have consolidated over time, and have afforded the Axis groups a degree of financial autonomy to sustain operations even when direct Iranian support is limited. These networks will certainly survive the loss of Axis military capabilities, and could even provide the basis for a revised form of transnational influence for the Axis.

Overestimated but Still Important

A subsequent Century International report, “The Axis of Resistance Returns to Its Local Roots,” will examine in close detail the shifting capabilities and interests of the most powerful remaining Axis actors that still coordinate closely: the Iranian state, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

For as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran has sought to export revolution and project power in the Arab Middle East, surprisingly persistent debates have raged over core questions about the degree of Iran’s control over its allies and partners, their collective military power, and their ability to coordinate politically, ideologically, and tactically. Today, a clearer picture is emerging. Iran appears to stand at the center of a loose network of like-minded groups and opportunistic fellow travelers—not at the top of a hierarchical, tightly controlled alliance of proxies, allies and dependents. Despite Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal, its Axis did not prove a strategic match to Israel and the United States. It can disrupt regional competitors, but not contain or deter them. Previous battlefield successes—against U.S. forces in Iraq, Israeli forces in Lebanon, and Syrian revolutionaries—did not translate into regional capacity against Israel’s highly motivated and technologically advanced state military, which enjoyed untrammeled support from the United States.

Governments and analysts believed, prior to October 7, that Iran and its network possessed deterrent and strike capabilities that did not materialize. Further research might reveal the explanation for these overestimations of Axis power—whether the Axis lied to exaggerate its own power, or whether Israel penetrated and disrupted Axis capabilities that were real but too weakly defended.

Axis failures since October 7 should not obscure the capabilities it retains. The Axis maintains a flexible network for illicit finance, smuggling, and arms construction. Locally, Axis forces in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran retain determined fighters and considerable materiel. Axis forces couldn’t fight a coordinated regional war, but they can still exercise coercive power in their domestic arenas—and can still disrupt their more powerful adversaries using asymmetric spoiler tactics.

Israel’s ongoing campaign across the Middle East might soon veer into overreach. So too might the aspirations of local Axis opponents in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, all of which are trying to change the local balance of power and dominate Axis groups that were recently ascendant or untouchable. But these Axis groups, diminished though they may be on a regional level, still possess the power to repel or even dominate their local competitors. Similarly, constituencies of the failed Resistance project, like the remnants of the Assad regime, are contained right now, but will be able to contest power, or undermine their opponents, if they mobilize. The apparent defeat of the Axis could well be the prelude to a new phase of miscalculation and overreach that leads to another period of destabilizing conflict and state erosion in the Middle East.

This report is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.

Introduction and Strategic Context

The Islamic Republic of Iran is currently in its weakest and most isolated position since the founding of the regime in 1979, and it is struggling to preserve its regional network of proxies and non-state allies, whose activities undercut regional and global security. This so-called “Axis of Resistance”1 is part of Iran’s broader “forward defense”2 strategy designed to safeguard the regime at home and project power across the region by employing its own military, diplomatic, cyber, and propaganda tools as well as the capacities of the axis partners. For the past year, however, Tehran’s strategy has faced unprecedented pressure along multiple fronts and across various spheres

While the current situation raises the risks of regional escalation or miscalculation by a cornered Iran, it also offers a window of opportunity for the United States and its partners to redraw the geostrategic realities of the Middle East along more stable lines as well as push the Iranian regime to contain and roll back its disruptive actions. Seizing the moment will require a sober assessment of where the region stands as well as a deeper understanding of the political dynamics inside of Iran itself.

President Donald Trump now faces a much different Middle East in his second administration than the one he dealt with before,3 a region reshaped by more than a year of war as well as several years of shifting patterns of relationships between key regional powers, particularly Israel, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

The region is currently experiencing an upheaval that includes:

Inconclusive conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon;

Iran-backed militias like Hezbollah and Hamas seeing the worst losses in their history;

The fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the takeover of Syria by opposition forces, and the evacuation of Iranian military and diplomatic personnel 4 ;

Ongoing threats to international shipping in the Red Sea from the Houthis in Yemen; and

A reduced but once again growing threat from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

At the same time, the region continues to witness some countervailing trends:

Unprecedented moves toward greater economic diversification and integration with the wider global economy, particularly in areas such as the Gulf;

Long-standing partners like Saudi Arabia leading efforts to stabilize the region and reduce military confrontations through diplomacy with traditional foes like Iran;

Efforts by the same leading countries to promote greater regional integration and diversify relationships with global powers, like Russia and China; and

Increased military and security cooperation among a wider range of partners in the US Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operation.

The drivers of these trends mostly emanate from regional actors, rather than external forces like the United States, China, Europe, India, and Russia. Nevertheless, the US remains the most influential external actor, with multiple defense, diplomatic, and economic policy tools and an extensive network of relationships to shape dynamics, including on responding to Iran’s role in the region.

Iran remains the overriding strategic challenge and threat to US national security interests in the Middle East.5 In addition to its weakened regional position, Iran’s nuclear program has moved closer than ever to having the ability to produce a weapon.

During his first term, Trump’s foreign policy methods were unpredictable and unconventional. In the Middle East, the main outcome was the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.6 On Iran, Trump withdrew America from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)7 — a year into his administration and pursued a policy of “maximum pressure,” consisting of economic and diplomatic measures to coerce Tehran into curbing its nuclear program and limiting its malign regional influence. This approach did not achieve its intended outcomes.

Iran’s current predicament should prompt a major rethink of US policy on Iran, one that is bipartisan and seeks to tackle the various challenges posed by Tehran: its nuclear program, ballistic missiles, cyberthreats, and proxy networks. It should also put Iran’s future and the needs and aspirations of the Iranian people closer to the center of the policy deliberations and discussions in Washington.8

Trump now faces an important strategic choice on Iran policy: will he return to an updated version of “maximum pressure” and act as an unpredictable disruptor, or will he prioritize his penchant for deal-making and seek a quick pathway to a new nuclear deal with Iran? Recent evidence suggests he may be open to a different approach from his last term.

Since retaking office, Trump has stated that “hopefully, [the concerns over Iran’s nuclear facilities] can be worked out without having to worry about [Israel striking Iran’s nuclear sites],” and that “it would really be nice” if this could be resolved by means of an agreement.9 Trump’s meetings with high-level officials regarding Iran in his first few days of returning to office, as well as his hope that Iran will make a deal, seemingly demonstrates his interest in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue diplomatically.

In navigating this strategic choice, Trump should make use of a key asset and force multiplier in advancing a new Iran policy: America’s regional partners, whose security has been negatively impacted by Iran. This new approach should also encompass fragile theaters like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Palestine, whose governance has been further weakened by the infiltration and influence of Iran-backed non-state actors as part of Tehran’s “forward defense” strategy. The massive economic, social, and demographic challenges in those countries are exacerbated by poor leadership, weak governance, and endemic corruption, but Iran’s regional strategy has preyed upon these internal vulnerabilities for years.

This report analyzes three overarching dynamics:

The shifting strategic landscape across the Middle East in 2023-24;

The impact of these shifts on Iran and its Axis of Resistance; as well as

Iran’s current position and standing at home and in the region.

Those dynamics, in turn, inform the report’s three main strategic recommendations for the incoming administration:

Security: Step up US security and defense commitments and coordination with regional partners facing ongoing threats from Iran and its regional network, with a particular emphasis on deepening the process of regional security cooperation among America’s military partners themselves.

Diplomacy: Establish new diplomatic partnerships with key partners from across the Middle East to advance a more coordinated US policy that addresses key aspects of Iran’s policies and actions in the region and beyond.

Shaping Iran’s future: Utilize this regional network of partners to shape the calculus of the regime and create openings for the people of Iran as the country prepares for a leadership transition in the next few years.

In advancing a more comprehensive US policy approach on Iran, the Trump administration and figures in both parties of Congress should take a long-term approach and not expect immediate outcomes. The impact from a strategic policy shift may take years to achieve, and likely will stretch beyond the four years the Trump administration will have in a second term, because the threats and challenges posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran have taken deep root over decades.

In seeking to contain these threats, the United States should also work with partners in the region to shape strategic choices for Iran’s leaders and people — with a focus on creating new opportunities in the long term for the Iranian people to have more of a voice in how they are governed. In addition, Washington should seek to shape the broader Middle East landscape by working toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This issue is a key component of a more integrated, comprehensive Middle East strategy and directly linked to the challenges posed by Iran, as Tehran and its partners exploit the lack of a resolution to their own benefit. A separate Middle East Institute paper examines this dynamic. This report was shaped and informed by a team effort at the Middle East Institute to examine all aspects of the Iran challenges facing the next US administration in work that was produced throughout 2024.

In navigating this strategic choice, Trump should make use of a key asset and force multiplier in advancing a new Iran policy: America’s regional partners, whose security has been negatively impacted by Iran.

Iranians shout anti-Israel and anti-US slogans during a funeral for Abbas Nilforoushan, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 15, 2024. Photo by Morteza Nikoubazi/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

A Shifting Regional Landscape Undermines Iran’s Position, 2023-24

As President Trump returns to office, he faces a Middle East that is significantly different from the one he dealt with at the end of his first term in 2021. In the past two years, four key drivers have reshaped10 the landscape in ways that complicate Iran’s position:

Israel’s military efforts against Iran and its Axis of Resistance,

The surprise fall of the Assad regime and opposition takeover of Syria,

Iran’s evolving ties with Russia and China, and

The strategic repositioning of the Gulf states on Iran.

Israel Works to Restore a Semblance of Strategic Deterrence Against Iran

The Hamas attack11 on Oct. 7, 2023, brought an end to a period of intermittent and mostly covert conflict between Israel on the one hand and Iran and its network of partners on the other. Unlike direct conventional war, this campaign, which began after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, was distinguished mostly by indirect military actions, acts of terrorism, targeted assassinations, cyberwarfare, and airstrikes against proxy targets.12

In 2024, Israel and Iran crossed the threshold in two different instances of direct military strikes on each other’s territories, once in April13 and again in October.14 These attacks occurred in the context of a regional security landscape that had deteriorated sharply. Shortly after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, several of Iran’s regional partners, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and a number of militias operating in Syria and Iraq, began a multi-front war of attrition against Israel while its attention was focused on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Israel, along with support from the US and its allies, contained the impact of these attacks by Iran’s network of partners. The Biden administration and CENTCOM played a pivotal role in quietly forging regional military and security partnerships15 and in limiting the responses and the consequences of direct military exchanges between Iran and Israel, but this did little to deter the threats posed by Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other groups aligned with Iran.16

In the summer and fall of 2024, Israel conducted a dramatic series of strikes, most notably the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was in Tehran at the end of July.17 In September, Israel carried out successive pager and walkie-talkie attacks18 on Hezbollah personnel, stepped up its military operations in southern Lebanon, and killed many of the group’s senior commanders, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah19 In October, Israel announced that it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, another close partner of Iran, in a military strike in the Gaza Strip.20

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon,21 combined with more aggressive direct military action against Iran on its own territory and its partners in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, marked a substantial shift away from the security paradigm that had guided Israel’s actions for more than a decade and a half. It remains to be seen whether this movement from covert war to a more direct, confrontational approach amounts to an enduring change in tactics or whether Israel has a clear political endgame in mind.

A Syrian man waving the independence-era Syrian flag over central Umayyad Square in Damascus on Dec. 11, 2024. Photo by Bakr Al-Kasem/AFP via Getty Images.

The Surprise Fall of the Assad Regime and Opposition Takeover of Syria

The end of the Assad dictatorship in Syria (the “heart of the resistance”) was another setback for Iran, which lost a key ally it needed to support and arm Hezbollah in Lebanon and, in the process, the ability to project power in the region. The Assad regime in Syria has been Iran’s ally since 1979 and was a necessary bridge and partner in building and sustaining the Lebanese militant group. Tehran, as an example, provided Damascus with substantial military and financial support throughout the Syrian civil war to keep the Assad regime in power, in addition to funding and recruiting pro-regime militias.

The sudden downfall of Assad’s government not only disrupts Iran’s strategic foothold in the Levant, but also challenges its influence in the broader Middle East, demonstrating the limitations of its strategy to “unify and coordinate arenas,” which in and of itself created and exported instability in weak states. Now Iran, while potentially losing its strategic presence in Syria, will also lose its ability to resupply Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, as the group’s new leader has acknowledged.

This underscores the volatility of regional alliances but also the complexities Iran faces in navigating its foreign policy objectives amid a rapidly changing political landscape. It may become vital for Iran at this point to secure a role in shaping the future of Syria’s political landscape to prevent the emergence of an adversarial government and to preserve some degree of strategic influence in the region. Accordingly, Iran is likely to reposition, assess the landscape, secure investments in Iraq and Yemen, and eventually look for opportunities to double down on propping up allies in Lebanon and elsewhere while expanding its regional alliances with Russia and China to sustain its ambitions. It may, having re-evaluated its defense creed, become open to a new approach, including negotiation with regional powers and the Trump administration. Stronger relations with Gulf Arab states may offer the chance for greater regional stability.

Iran’s Evolving Ties with Russia and China

During the past five years, Iran’s relations with Russia and China have evolved significantly, shaped by geopolitical shifts, security cooperation, economic interests, and regional concerns. Both Russia and China have become increasingly important partners for Iran, particularly as the latter has faced heightened pressure from Western sanctions and growing isolation. But it would be a mistake to overstate how strongly and deeply Russia and China back Iran — these relationships represent tactical alliances of convenience rather than strategic partnerships grounded in shared worldviews and ideologies. As a result, there is ample space for the United States to drive wedges between Iran and these two countries.

Relations With Russia

During the past decade, cooperation between Russia and Iran has centered around Syria. Moscow and Tehran’s mutual inability to forestall the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in early December 2024 may prove to be a major turning point in their bilateral relationship going forward. But it is important to note that, until now, the two countries had also increased their military cooperation on several fronts unrelated to Syria: in particular, during the past two years, Iran has been sending drones and ballistic missiles to Russia to support the latter’s war against Ukraine.22

With the intensification of US sanctions on Iran, Russia has also become a more important economic partner. Moscow and Tehran have helped each other to bypass Western sanctions, particularly in sectors like oil and natural gas.23 Russia also provided Iran with access to certain technologies, including in the nuclear sector, as well as cooperation on energy and infrastructure projects, although much of the rhetoric has yet to be implemented. Nonetheless, trade between the two countries increased, with Russia becoming a major supplier of wheat to Iran.24 At the same time, as Russia came under increasing Western sanctions due to its aggression against Ukraine, Iranian experience with circumventing sanctions became ever more valuable to Moscow.

Russia remains a key player in Iran’s nuclear development, continuing its role in the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant,25 and is in talks about further nuclear cooperation, contingent on Tehran’s ability to find the necessary capital. Moscow has generally defended Tehran’s nuclear program in international forums, presenting it as peaceful, and continues to support Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy. The United States and the United Kingdom have raised concerns that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine.26

A man in Tehran holds a local newspaper reporting on the China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore ties on March, 11 2023. Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images.

Relations With China

In March 2021, Iran and China signed a 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership cooperation agreement,27 which lays out a roadmap for significantly deepening their political, economic, and security ties. The accord reportedly includes provisions for increased Chinese investment in Iranian infrastructure, energy, and industry, as well as broader collaboration in areas like technology, defense, and agriculture. Notwithstanding this agreed-upon framework for closer cooperation, much of what was pledged in the agreement has yet to be implemented by either side. But the tightening relationship has already borne some fruit on the international stage. In March 2023, China announced it had brokered a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to restart diplomatic ties after a rift that lasted more than seven years.28

China has been one of Iran’s most important trading partners, particularly in terms of energy.29 Despite US sanctions, China has continued to purchase Iranian oil (around 90-95% of its total), often through indirect channels, and has invested in energy infrastructure in Iran.30 Iran has received major Chinese financial infusions into sectors like energy, mining, and construction. In exchange, China has gained access to Iran’s oil and other resources at discounted rates.31

Iran and China have also discussed and pursued military cooperation, although this relationship is less prominent than their economic ties. There have been reports of Chinese weapons and technology being transferred to Iran,32 as well as joint military exercises in the Persian Gulf. Both countries share a common interest in challenging US military and political dominance around the globe, but particularly in the Middle East and Asia — an aim the two also share with Russia.

And like Russia, China has been instrumental in helping Iran mitigate the effects of Western sanctions, particularly those reimposed after the US withdrawal from the JCPOA. Iran has increasingly turned to both countries as critical partners in ensuring its survival in the face of economic and diplomatic pressure.

Strategic Repositioning of Gulf States: Hedging Relations with Iran and Global Powers

The Arab Gulf states have undertaken important tactical shifts of their own with Iran, and ties between key regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran are markedly different today compared to what they were like during the first Trump administration. A clear gap now exists between Israel’s dramatically stepped-up military campaign against Iran and its network of partners on the one hand and the Gulf states’ attempts to de-escalate tensions with Iran through direct diplomatic outreach on the other. The latter represents a pronounced backtracking from the more confrontational approach that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE used when they started their military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen in 2015.

The Arab Gulf states are not a monolith though — countries like Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait have had much different relations with Iran than Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Bahrain. For years, Oman has sought to bridge the divide between Iran and the US and has served as a quiet mediator and interlocutor. Qatar plays a similar role in its own way, seeking to deescalate tensions through diplomacy even as it houses the main US air base in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have had the most noteworthy shift in relations with Iran over the past two years. In 2013-18, their diplomatic relationship with the regime in Tehran was increasingly adversarial, even though they maintained economic and commercial ties. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were skeptical about the 2015 nuclear deal and the fact that it did not address Tehran’s destabilizing regional actions. Saudi Arabia later cut diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016, only restoring them seven years later, in March 2023, as part of the above-mentioned China-brokered deal.33

The Trump administration enters office at a time when the Middle East is in the midst of a major evolving and unpredictable transformation in the strategic landscape. The main outcome … is that Tehran finds itself in its weakest and most isolated position since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Following that much-publicized Saudi-Iranian handshake in Beijing, Riyadh doubled down on its efforts to secure a defense pact with the US, underscoring the kingdom’s apparent lack of confidence that its newly restored relations with Tehran would last. In the year and a half since Saudi Arabia and Iran’s rapprochement, most of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states — and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain especially — have been working in closer alignment to prevent a wider escalation between Iran and Israel. Several Arab Gulf governments were instrumental in preventing the direct military confrontations between Israel and Iran in April and October from spilling over, including by using their defensive military capabilities to help thwart much of Iran’s attacks against Israel.34

Nonetheless, the Gulf countries continue to hedge in their relations with Iran, particularly as the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has inflamed tensions across the region. This past fall, the GCC affirmed its neutrality35 in the event of direct war between Israel and Iran, and the primary signal from the Gulf these days is one of de-escalation with Iran.

The Gulf states’ hedging strategy is in part a product of their uncertainty over the regional strategic landscape and is driven by self-interest and self-preservation. But it is also borne out of the lessons learned from the actions of multiple US administrations over the past quarter century and concerns about America’s overall strategic reliability. The shift in US policy on Iran — from brokering the JCPOA to applying “maximum pressure” just three years later — resulted in a spike in threats and attacks against Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In turn, the US response to these threats did not meet the hopes and expectations of these two countries under either the Trump or Biden administrations.

In sum, the Trump administration enters office at a time when the Middle East is in the midst of a major evolving and unpredictable transformation in the strategic landscape. The main outcome of these developments is that Tehran finds itself in its weakest and most isolated position since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But Iran retains important capacities to create crises and influence the trajectory of the Middle East — its ability to serve as a disruptor across the region and world endures. Israel nonetheless appears poised to continue its assertive efforts to restore some sense of strategic deterrence against its adversaries in multiple arenas. The Gulf states remain focused on working to reform their economic and social systems, and, as a result, they want to avoid a wider regional war that could damage the gains they have achieved in recent years.

How This Shifting Regional Landscape Impacts Iran’s Axis of Resistance Partners

In the strategic landscape that is unfolding in the Middle East in early 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran has faced major losses among its network of partners. Iran has appeared to lack the will and capacity to offer support to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Assad regime in Syria as they all faced existential threats and challenges to their grip on power. In a short period of time, Iran witnessed the loss of an entire generation of commanders in its own al-Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the same time that Israel eliminated the top leaders of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas.

The current situation represents a marked departure from the strategic environment the Islamic Republic of Iran had helped create in the Middle East over the past four decades. Since its Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has built up its influence and control across many states in the region, in particular Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, by usurping, subverting, or repurposing the sovereignty of those areas.

One feature that should shape the calculus of the incoming Trump administration is this changed regional landscape. This section briefly analyzes the current state of affairs in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” network, with Iran facing major losses in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine but seeing some resilience in its support networks in Iraq and Yemen.

Syria: Loss of the Assad Regime

Syria has long served as Iran’s main Arab state partner. The collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, 2024, represents the greatest and most recent strategic blow suffered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.36

For years, Iran has used Syrian territory as a transit point for weapons shipments to Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Iran also positioned personnel from the external military and intelligence service of the IRGC inside of Syria and recruited fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries to support the Syrian regime in the country’s civil war. Iran-backed forces utilized Syria to make, store, and transport weapons that would be subsequently distributed to armed groups in the country and around the region.37 As a result, Syria became central to Israel’s strategy of cutting off Iranian supplies to Hezbollah and preventing the militant group from rearming; to achieve this, the Israeli military intensified strikes against ammunition warehouses and smuggling routes inside the country.

In late November 2024, an alliance of Turkish-backed rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham exploited weaknesses inside of the Assad regime, the strategic distraction of Russia, bogged down in a war of its own making in Ukraine, as well as the losses suffered by Hezbollah to launch a new offensive. The rebels quickly gained ground as the regime’s front lines collapsed, prompting Syrians across the country to rise up and leading, just days later, to Assad fleeing on Dec. 8.38 Iran evacuated many of its commanders and personnel from Syria in early December.39 But the uncertainty and fluidity of the situation on the ground as of mid-December makes it difficult to assess what Iran might do next in reaction to this major strategic setback.

A portrait of slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is displayed during a demonstration denouncing his killing held in the

Lebanese coastal city of Sidon on Aug. 2, 2024. Photo by Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images.

Lebanon: Devastating Blows to Hezbollah

Hezbollah has served as a central strategic partner for the Islamic Republic of Iran since the 1980s. Therefore, the losses Hezbollah has suffered in the past three months since Israel launched a stunning series of strikes against it, combined with the likely elimination of Assad’s Syria as a functioning supply corridor, removes a key force multiplier from Iran’s Axis of Resistance network.40

Hezbollah was one of Iran’s most successful investments, and Tehran spent decades cultivating it as an influential force and a successful challenger of Israel. Throughout this time, the group operated with impunity as a state within a state, wielding an extensive security apparatus and arms arsenal provided by Iran, and cultivating local support by running a parallel social welfare network. As a political party, it has insinuated itself into the Lebanese political system, infiltrating all agencies and state institutions, bolstered by a targeted and sophisticated disinformation campaign and multipronged media effort spearheaded by its media arm, Al-Manar TV. Beyond Lebanon, Hezbollah had also expanded its operations to Syria and helped train Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Yemen.

This past fall’s US-brokered cease-fire agreement in Lebanon requires the demilitarization of the area south of the Litani River and the disarming of Hezbollah.41 As in Syria, the current situation in Lebanon remains fluid and uncertain, but it is a new environment in which Hezbollah lacks the capacities and leadership it had before the start of this latest war.

Palestine: Major Degradation of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Iran has sought to exploit the Palestinian cause for its own gain for years, and it has used the lack of the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a means to expand its power and influence, often in opposition to neighbors in the Gulf and Arab states like Jordan and Egypt that have peace treaties with Israel. Tehran has provided extensive training, weapons, and funding to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions, helping these groups target Israel while allowing Tehran to maintain a degree of separation and deniability.42 Iran has also maintained a number of television and radio stations in the West Bank and Gaza, which play a part in destabilizing Palestinian politics.

The Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel could not have happened without involvement from Iran, training the group received in Lebanon and Syria, and the creation of a secret joint command center in Beirut.43 After more than a year of fighting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to completely eliminate Hamas is unrealized: though its military capabilities are much diminished, the militant group retains some operational capacity.

Iraq: Deep Embedding in Its Political Economy

Iran expanded its influence westward following the 2003 Iraq war, after the United States ended a policy of “dual containment” of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Iran. Iraq has become an essential security, trade, and political lifeline for Iran during the past two decades, and Tehran has pursued a multi-dimensional policy there, deploying hard, sharp, and soft power to shape and influence local developments.

Iran trains and finances Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs, or Hashd-al-Shaabi), an umbrella organization of some 60 Shi’a armed groups.44 Additionally, Iraq has served as a key market for Iran’s energy and goods and a source of spoils from kleptocratic corruption.45 Iraq’s Shi’a political elite have decades-long personal connections to Iran, enabling the latter to wield outsized leverage over Iraqi policymaking. The Iranian leadership exercises soft power vis-à-vis Iraq primarily through Shi’a religious ties and a large media presence. Nevertheless, Tehran’s sway is not absolute, and Iraq’s body public remains deeply divided about Iranian influence.

The regional impact of Iran’s non-state Iraqi proxies and their level of assistance to the wider Axis of Resistance network’s efforts have proven fairly modest to date. Though Iraqi militias have been active against Israel46 since Oct. 7, 2023, in support of Gaza, they reduced their attacks as of last November, fearing retaliation.47 Iran similarly made a resolute effort, following US retaliatory airstrikes, to curtail militias in Syria and Iraq that had been regularly attacking US bases and military targets, particularly during the post-Oct. 7 period. Finally, given Hezbollah’s dramatic weakening, pro-Iran Iraqi militias, under Tehran’s guidance, tried to fill the void to bolster the beleaguered Syrian army — to little effect.48

Supporters of Yemen’s Houthis gather with pictures of Hamas’ slain leader Yahya Sinwar during a rally held in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa on Oct. 18, 2024. Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS/AFP.

Yemen: Capacities to Threaten Red Sea Shipping, the Gulf States, and the Global Economy

Iran exploited the past decade of conflict inside of Yemen to create a partnership with the Houthis, a local Zaydi movement that controls the northwest of the country and its capital.49

Iran views its support for the Houthis as an opportunity to expand its influence in the Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandeb, a key global maritime chokepoint,50 and to keep Saudi Arabia and the UAE bogged down. Iran has provided the Houthis with arms and equipment, including ballistic missiles and drones,51 which have been used against Saudi and Emirati targets, such as petroleum facilities. Iran has furthermore supported the Houthi war effort by providing financial assistance and smuggling oil into the country. Hezbollah was reportedly active in Yemen before the Gaza war, providing political advice and military training to Houthi militias.52

After Oct. 7, the Houthis launched attacks on Red Sea shipping, disrupting international commerce on one of the world’s busiest waterways.53 They also launched missiles and drones at Israel, triggering retaliatory airstrikes with unclear consequences for their military capacities.54

Down but Not Out

The apparent removal of both Hamas and Hezbollah from the military balance in the Middle East and the fall of the Assad regime have eliminated much of Tehran’s leverage, leaving Iran with fewer ways to threaten Israel and deter it from taking offensive action. Nevertheless, Iran maintains willing partners in each of these five areas, particularly Iraq and Yemen. In the short run, Iran’s actions in the region and its nuclear program will dominate US policy choices. The longer-term challenges for US policy center around how to shape Iran’s calculus in the coming years and what can be done to plan for the competition for influence after wars and kinetic operations draw to a close in the region.

The Strategic Position of the Islamic Republic of Iran Abroad and at Home

The Islamic Republic of Iran is now at a pivotal crossroads. A brief glance at the regime’s current strategic ledger finds it facing more disadvantages as a result of its overall strategy:

Unprecedented damage to the Axis of Resistance network, undercutting its “forward defense” strategy;

Weakened defenses at home, as Iran’s security establishment appears to have been caught unaware, not only by Israeli strikes against its own personnel in places like Syria and attacks by the Islamic State inside of Iran during the past year, but also by successful Israeli surgical strikes against Iranian military targets and Israel’s ability to easily to take out Iranian air-defense systems; and

Continued challenges from the Iranian people at home, who suffer from economic difficulties, isolation, and extreme repression by the regime.

In the past few years, the Iranian regime has worked to build in ways that sought to reinforce its grip on power at home:

Stronger coordination and closer ties with global powers such as Russia and China that seek to challenge the international order;

Improved relationships across the Arab world by stepping up diplomatic contacts and selectively pulling back from targeting certain other Middle East countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as Iran became more focused on its direct confrontation with Israel; and

An image and propaganda boost among certain sectors of the Arab public after the Oct. 7 attacks and Israeli military actions, particularly against Palestinians in Gaza, created an opening for the Iranian regime to portray itself at the vanguard of resisting the Israeli occupation.

The negatives in this ledger vastly outweigh the positives for Iran’s strategic position in the world, region, and at home at this moment in time. Led by the aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran is facing an impending leadership transition as well as thorny strategic choices after absorbing great losses over the past year.

One overarching strategic question confronting the regime is whether it will double down on its nuclear program as it sees its regional strategy of “forward defense” through the Axis of Resistance come under intense pressure and begin to crumble. Tehran’s recent decision to accelerate its uranium enrichment to a level that is close to bomb grade has worried United Nations officials and other leaders, raising questions about Iran’s strategic intent and actions.55 Whatever decisions Iran makes about the future of its national security strategy, including the fate of its nuclear program, will take place in the rapidly changing regional and broader geostrategic environment described and analyzed in this report. This section of the report examines Iran’s regional and foreign policy approach more closely as well as looks at internal debates within Iran about its foreign policy and the broader legitimacy of the regime.

Pro-Iran Hezbollah militants hold flags during a funeral procession for five of their colleagues killed in clashes with the Turkish army in the Syrian province of Idlib, March 1, 2020. Photo by Marwan Naamani/picture alliance via Getty Images.

External Ties: The Strategic Dilemma in Iran’s Foreign Policy Approach

Tehran’s “forward defense” strategy — while not yet dead — is fast becoming a liability for Iran given the increasing determination of Israel and the US to hold it responsible for its proxies’ actions.

Tehran’s long-term investment in cultivating ties with Arab Islamists to turn Iran into a hub for anti-status quo militant groups fell short. While Tehran’s actions have made it into a leading political actor in some theaters, Iranian advances in these states have sharpened tensions with other Arab countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE.

Iran’s regional agenda has been shaped primarily by Khamenei’s office in conjunction with the IRGC leadership. The cost-benefit calculation of Tehran’s policy is still evolving based on events on the ground. But at this stage, it is reasonable to conclude that deteriorating economic conditions in Iran are turning the costs associated with Tehran’s interventionist Arab policies into a possibly fatal flaw in its strategy toward the Arab world.

That flaw is increasingly self-evident to at least some members of Iran’s leadership. So while the IRGC continues to employ bombastic anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric, it also wants to remain relevant after the 85-year-old Khamenei leaves the scene. Therefore, the IRGC has no choice but to make careful calculations about its actions both at home and abroad as the services’ bosses know that their job security depends on maintaining at least a degree of legitimacy inside Iran. In practice, this means less pan-Islamism and militant clericalism and more focus on improving the political and socio-economic situation at home.

Irrespective of this push in Tehran to reexamine its regional policies, for now nothing suggests that Iran is fundamentally rethinking them, and it remains to be seen if such calls will shape actions going forward. Khamenei’s top advisor, Ali Larijani, visited Damascus and Beirut in mid-November 2024 with a two-part message from his boss that Trump’s re-election is not a death sentence for the Axis of Resistance.56 Larijani reportedly aimed to reassure Assad and Hezbollah about Iran’s commitment to its Arab partners while also making the case for agreeing to a cease-fire in Lebanon, even if it meant accepting the effort led by US special envoy Amos Hochstein.

Nonetheless, the Iranian regime still must decide whether it is willing, in the long run, to reconstruct its regional agenda in ways that are more acceptable to the US and its Arab and Israeli partners. This sort of soul-searching is inevitable for a regime that is under huge domestic and foreign pressure to change course.57

For now, officials in Tehran are prioritizing preserving as much of the Axis of Resistance as possible versus fundamentally rethinking the model’s future. But the fact that the Iranian regime is essentially alone in confronting Israel and the United States may force a rethink in the coming months and years. Much fanfare about closer ties with Russia and China notwithstanding, the most Iran can hope for in the midst of its conflict with Israel is diplomatic expressions of support from Moscow and Beijing.58 Add to this mix the shifting regional diplomatic positions, particularly among Arab Gulf states, and there may be an emerging pathway for a regional approach by the United States that seeks to contain Iran’s negative actions but also aims to shape its current debate and future trajectory.

The Iranian regime still must decide whether it is willing, in the long run, to reconstruct its regional agenda in ways that are more acceptable to the US and its Arab and Israeli partners.

Iran’s Internal Divides and Emerging Political Legitimacy Questions

A number of domestic realities are also bound to shape the calculations of Iran’s senior leadership. Iranians have deep misgivings about Tehran’s regional interventions, and these foreign and domestic policy challenges are emerging while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is focused on his succession.59

Khamenei has dominated the political order since 1989, and his departure will be a hugely sensitive moment for the Islamic Republic. There are no signs that a consensus candidate has been selected, which suggests his passing could usher in a period of uncertainty for the regime in terms of leadership and the trajectory of its policies at home and abroad. This scenario offers an opportunity for various political factions in Tehran as well as foreign powers to attempt to steer Iran in different directions — either to stay on the so-called revolutionary course of the last 45 years or to make a change and focus on nation-building at home while seeking de-escalation with long-time foes abroad, such as Israel and the United States.

Though the Iranian regime has declared60 that it seeks regional solidarity and stability, in reality its ideological pronouncements and interventionist foreign policy contradict this. Those policies have led to such severe economic decline at home, impacting every aspect of people’s lives, that very few in Tehran deny that an easing of its international isolation is needed to revive the country’s prospects. For over four decades, Iran’s leadership has prioritized its Islamist ideology at the expense of the security and economic well-being of its people. Minimum concessions will not be enough to placate domestic detractors and foreign opponents; without major policy changes, the regime in Tehran will continue to be under the gun.

As Tehran weighs the choice of continued standoff against the United States versus the possible benefits of détente, the American question is probably the most sensitive and consequential issue shaping the future of the Islamic Republic. Khamenei’s deep suspicion of the US, his unwillingness to believe in the possibility of meaningful discussions with Washington, and his devotion to a regional Islamist agenda have been the guiding principles of his foreign policy.

As was the case in 2013-15, there is a chorus of voices, including that of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, pleading with Khamenei to accept the need for a new round of direct talks with the Americans.61 As domestic calls for open and direct negotiations with Washington have grown, the split between pragmatists and Khamenei’s supporters is increasingly evident, and disagreements over foreign policy, including what to do with the US and Iran’s regional ambitions, are at the heart of the divide. This puts the onus on Khamenei, who fears any serious compromise with Washington over its demand for a comprehensive Iranian pullback from the region will put his Islamist agenda at risk.

These debates about Iran’s foreign policy, including questions about the costs of its “forward defense” strategy and the economic difficulties resulting from sanctions and isolation, all add to an uncertain mix of domestic political factors that could inevitably shape the trajectory of Iran’s upcoming leadership transition when Supreme Leader Khamenei eventually passes from the scene.

The Iranian regime’s domestic vulnerabilities have continued to grow as it has doubled down on a risky regional and global strategy that has produced more economic hardship and isolation over the past decade. A new generation of Iranians has witnessed the economic and social transformations taking place across the Gulf, and a strong case could be made for a new regional pathway that seeks to shape and influence the trajectory of Iran’s future leadership and political transition in ways that can benefit the people of Iran and the broader region.

US Policy on Iran: Past, Present, Future US policy in the Middle East has suffered from a lack of strategic focus and attention deficit disorder, having shifted for the past quarter century from one frame to another: global war on terrorism, counterinsurgency, counterproliferation and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, very fleeting support for freedom during the Arab uprisings starting in 2011, and a return to a focus on counterterrorism during the anti-Islamic State campaign beginning in 2014. Iran has loomed large over the strategic landscape throughout this period, and the United States sought to respond by setting a strategic framework that included not only security and military steps but also diplomacy as well as economic incentives and coercive measures. Yet Washington’s strategic approach toward the Islamic Republic exhibited two main faults. First, for nearly two decades, stretching across four US administrations (George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump 1, and Biden), American policy on Iran has been primarily focused on constraining its nuclear program. One consequence of this narrow policy emphasis was that other issues were de-prioritized. Those blind spots included concerns expressed by US regional partners; Iran’s poor record on human rights, freedom, and basic governance; Iranian actions to destabilize the region; Tehran’s ongoing efforts to advance its political and ideological objectives in certain countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen; and Iran’s strategic re-alignment closer toward Russia and (to a lesser extent) China in a new global era of geopolitical competition. The second weakness was that the past four administrations’ Iran strategies sought to contain and engage Iran in international frameworks rather than with the involvement of regional partners. Middle East governments were too often not consulted on US Iran policy. The most important of these frameworks began with the formation of the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with Germany), in 2006, which helped produce the 2013 interim agreement and 2015 Iran nuclear deal.62 However, this arrangement ultimately only succeeded in producing a temporary de-escalation in the nuclear standoff and never properly addressed any of the other Iranian threats or concerns originating from the region. From October 2023 on, the Biden administration found itself seeking to contain the fallout from the wars and regional tensions emanating from the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s reactions. But it fell short of producing a major breakthrough that shifted the region’s strategic landscape, particularly on Iran.63 The main drivers of events in the Middle East have been the key regional powers: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and non-state actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Lebanese Army troops take part in a military parade marking the 78th anniversary of Lebanon’s Independence Day held at the Ministry of Defense in Yarzeh on the eastern outskirts of Beirut on Nov. 22, 2021. Photo by Fadel Itani/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Three Strategic Policy Recommendations for a Second Trump Administration’s Iran Policy

Iran’s current predicament should prompt a major rethink of US policy on Iran, one that is bipartisan and seeks to tackle the various challenges posed by Tehran, especially its nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and proxy networks. It should also put Iran’s future and the Iranian peoples’ needs and aspirations closer to the center of the policy deliberations and discussions in Washington.

In navigating the new regional landscape, Trump should make use of a key asset and force multiplier in advancing a new Iran policy: America’s regional partners, whose security has been negatively impacted by Iran. This new approach should also address fragile theaters like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Palestine, whose governance has been weakened because of the infiltration and influence of Iran-backed non-state actors as part of Tehran’s “forward defense” strategy.

Three overarching strategic recommendations should shape a second term Trump administration approach on Iran — all aimed at fostering partnerships with America’s friends facing challenges from Iran in the region:

1. Step up US security and defense commitments and coordination with regional partners facing ongoing threats from Iran, with a particular emphasis on deepening the process of regional security coordination among America’s military partners.

The US should capitalize on the losses that Iran has absorbed during the past year due to its overextension in the region. Israel will continue to defend itself and remain a threat to Iran’s regime, making the latter insecure; and other US partners, particularly Arab Gulf states, will likely continue to seek pathways of diplomacy. The Trump administration should utilize this interplay of a “good cop, bad cop” approach that blends the right mix of incentives and disincentives to shape Iran’s actions. This means maintaining America’s current troop presence in places like Syria and Iraq and working with partners to block Iran’s destabilizing actions.64

The Trump administration has already signaled that it is prioritizing issues closer to home, including an ambitious overhaul of the US federal government and a major initiative on illegal immigration.65 President Trump has also signaled a top priority in a new form of global economic engagement involving high tariffs against the likes of China, Europe, Canada, and Mexico. This set of priorities could mean that a second Trump term would need to rely even more heavily on security partners in the Middle East to address the emerging landscape and deal with continued threats posed by Iran and other actors like the Islamic State.

Step up US security and defense commitments and coordination with regional partners facing ongoing threats from Iran, with a particular emphasis on deepening the process of regional security coordination among America’s military partners.

On Iran, a stepped-up effort by the United States and its Middle East partners to block Iranian weapons shipments to its network of proxies and non-state allies, sever its logistic lines, and limit its cash flow will impede Iran’s ambitions and help regional actors restore stability to this turbulent region.

In addition, the US should actively engage in helping promote regional security, including improving the human security conditions across the failed and failing states contested by Iran, particularly in the five arenas of contestation outlined in section II of this report.

Lebanon: Strengthen the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), 66 which needs to take control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah, secure the border, and thwart the smuggling of weapons, by mobilizing a transformational and comprehensive aid package. 67 Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states can play an important role, in coordination with the US, in helping to overhaul the LAF’s capabilities to counter Iran’s remaining influence in Lebanon.

Iraq: Focus on helping Iraqis ensure Iran’s proxies do not solidify a permanent state within a state by bolstering meaningful institutions providing education, security, and economic prosperity. This would include US military assistance to loyal security units, financial assistance to strengthen the banking sector, and grants to Iraq’s higher education system. The goal would be to strengthen an Iraq that enjoys support from its diverse communities, a monopoly on force, and good relations with its regional neighbors and the West. 68

Syria: Maintain the current US troop presence in order to counter emerging threats from the Islamic State while avoiding getting caught in any future internal conflict that might draw regional and global actors into Syria again. If the United States can find a way to work with Syria’s new government, it should closely cooperate with regional partners to ensure that aid and assistance is disbursed in ways that minimize Tehran’s ability to reassert its influence.

The Palestinian Authority: Work with regional partners to strengthen the capacity of the Palestinian Authority security forces and prepare for the post-war situation in the Gaza Strip that creates a credible pathway to a two-state solution.

Yemen: Strengthen and expand the network of regional security partners working in Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational coalition aimed at securing the Red Sea from Houthi attacks.69 Bahrain is the only country in the region that is nominally part of these efforts, though other countries play a quiet role in security efforts, and it would be beneficial and send a strong signal to Iran if this coalition were broadened with more regional actors.

Iranians wave flags of Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (Hashd al-Shaabi), and the IRGC at a rally commemorating the Islamic Revolution in Azadi (Freedom) Square in Tehran on Feb. 11, 2020. Source: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images).

2. Establish a new diplomatic partnership with key regional partners from across the Middle East that seeks to advance a more coordinated US policy on Iran that addresses key aspects of Tehran’s policies. Given the likely diplomatic style of the Trump administration, which will be more characterized by free-wheeling and unpredictable moves, a traditional diplomatic contact group and sets of formal discussions about how to coordinate on Iran policy seem less likely. Nonetheless, an opportunity exists for the United States to have regular sets of conversations with regional partners — and a key focus of such high-level talks should be to establish a new modus vivendi with Iran that gets the regime to roll back its destabilizing regional and global actions.

These regional partnerships in the Middle East should be linked to relationships America has in Europe, which has deeper economic ties with Iran than the US and can play a stronger role in restricting Iranian weapons shipments to Ukraine and North Africa. Japan can play a more active part in helping address the sanctions-busting efforts by Iranian oil ghost fleets heading to China. In addition, India and Azerbaijan are positioning themselves to serve as critical nodes in transregional transit corridors involving Iran — thus, they would have to be part of any new “maximum pressure” campaign involving secondary sanctions.70 But the Middle East partners are most closely situated in trying to respond to key issues, as they live in the same neighborhood as Iran.

Iran’s nuclear program. A critical question that a regional partnership framework between the United States and key Arab countries should address is Iran’s nuclear program. The nuclear file is likely to dominate the early months of the second Trump administration, and it would be advantageous if the United States established an informal regional contact group to produce stronger diplomatic cohesion with important regional partners on what to do about Iran’s nuclear program. Given certain regional states’ repositioning on Iran in recent years and the growing economic ties between Iran and its neighbors, a return to “maximum pressure 2.0,” an effort centered on imposing mainly economic costs on Iran, may be more complicated to implement. In addition, if the United States and China are heading into a major economic war involving tariffs, trade, and technology in a second Trump term, as early indicators seem to suggest, this could produce negative externalities in the Middle East and some unexpected scenarios that would be best navigated in partnership with America’s regional friends. Furthermore, a second Trump term could produce new openings to resolve the nuclear issue that did not exist in the first term. Tehran managed to endure the “maximum pressure” campaign of the first Trump administration, but doing so came at a heavy cost. With Trump now back in the White House, Tehran is clearly attempting to preemptively block any further tightening of sanctions. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has urged the American president not to revive his “maximum pressure” campaign but rather to aim for “maximum wisdom” in dealing with Iran, 71 in which case Tehran could be expected to respond in kind to avoid conflict. Tehran knows that mere reassurances that it will not weaponize its nuclear program will not suffice, and there is a broader recognition of the need for compromise. As one political commentator put it, “the era of no war, no peace is over. It’s now the era of either war or peace.” 72 And time is of the essence. For the pro-negotiation voices in Tehran, the Republican control of all levers of power in Washington means that a deal with the Trump administration will be more likely to be adopted with broader institutional support than the ill-fated JCPOA.

Coordinated regional diplomacy on Iran’s regional actions. One shortcoming in the Iran approach adopted by US administrations for the past 25 years, including the first Trump term, was that it did not prioritize shaping Iran’s foreign policy and regional approach beyond some targeted kinetic measures. Now that Iran is in a strategically vulnerable position after experiencing major losses in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, the leadership in Tehran may have an interest in adapting its regional approach. To supplement the kinetic action undertaken by Israel and at times the US against Iran’s Axis of Resistance, Washington might pursue a conversation with key Middle Eastern allies on initiatives designed to constrain Iran’s regional adventurism and produce a strategic shift in its foreign policy approach. Such a shift is more likely to happen operating in close concert with America’s Arab partners, particularly the Gulf states. Trump’s return to the White House is widely seen in Tehran as an opportunity for renewed US-Iranian negotiations that could extend beyond the nuclear file. This openness is essentially a product of a number of geopolitical predicaments that Tehran is presently confronting.

Creating a more favorable strategic environment by building a bridge to a two-state solution on the Israeli-Palestinian front. A genuine American-led effort toward a two-state solution that is backed by US Arab allies will either (at best) give Tehran a reason to rethink its commitment to militarily confront Israel or (if opposed by Tehran) give Arab states reason to consider if Iran is sincere in seeking regional de-escalation.

Building a diplomatic and economic support network to address contested countries like Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. Beyond the military and security cooperation measures needed to strengthen the Middle East’s state system, a series of diplomatic and economic steps will be required once the dust settles from current conflicts and transitions occurring around the region, especially in those countries that are at the center of the struggle for influence with Iran. In President Trump’s first term, he caused a minor diplomatic incident of confusion in 2018 in claiming that Saudi Arabia had committed to spend the necessary money to rebuild Syria. 73 Saudi Arabia denied this claim, and no significant resources were dedicated to rebuilding the parts of Syria then controlled by the US-led international coalition. The scale of efforts to rebuild and strengthen governance and economic transformation in places like Syria and Lebanon are well beyond what the United States will be willing to contribute, and a team effort will be required.

Coordinating diplomatic moves with regional partners on Russia and China. In addition to these elements of diplomatic coordination on key aspects of Iran’s behavior in the region, the United States will need to work more closely with key Middle East partners that have relationships of their own with Russia and China. In this new geopolitical environment of complex multipolarity, a US president who prides himself on unpredictability and making unexpected moves will need to take some steps toward greater reassurance and coordination with key Middle East partners in the multi-level chess game of how to navigate Iran’s relationship with China and Russia. Specifically on this front, the Trump administration will need to coordinate with Middle Eastern partners on policies on two main fronts. First, Washington and regional governments must work together to disrupt the lines of support (economic, technical, military, and political, including on the international stage) that Iran receives from Russia and China that have sustained the regime and allowed it to carry out destabilizing regional activities. Second, they should align on policies that can discourage or punish Iran for cooperating with Russia and China on activities that break international law, meddle in foreign democratic campaigns, as well as support other malign regimes and non-state actors in the region and around the world. In other words, the United States needs to work with regional partners to pull Iran out of Russia’s and China’s orbits and provide the Iranian regime with more dependable intraregional integration alternatives that could incentivize a change in its behavior.

Trump’s return to the White House is widely seen in Tehran as an opportunity for renewed US-Iranian negotiations that could extend beyond the nuclear file. This openness is essentially a product of a number of geopolitical predicaments that Tehran is presently confronting.

3. Look for creative diplomatic pathways to work with regional partners to shape Iran’s future trajectory. Washington should utilize this regional network of partners to shape the calculus of the regime and create openings for the people of Iran as the country heads toward a leadership transition in the next few years.

The starting point for a more effective and comprehensive US policy on Iran is with Middle Eastern partners that often were not consulted closely enough by Washington in the past. The top-level priority right now is the urgent issue of ensuring regional security and avoiding a wider Middle East war as Israel tries to build up a stronger deterrence posture against Iran and its Axis of Resistance network. The second priority in fostering a stronger partnership framework is to help build a more effective collective response that will fund and create the new diplomatic and political conditions for stronger states less susceptible to Iran’s negative influence across the region. This is a multi-year effort.

But a third arena for US-Middle East cooperation on Iran is equally important: The United States and its Middle East partners should seek to shape Iran’s future transition by making moves today that impact Iran’s political economy, especially given that some of these Gulf states are critical trading partners with Iran and therefore hold real leverage. This means that countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, which maintain extensive economic and energy ties with Iran, adapt their approaches in anticipation of the coming leadership transition when Supreme Leader Khamenei passes from the scene. The Gulf states have spent the past decade building new economic and social models, and, in many ways, these have become a model for social and economic progress — if not models for full freedom and human rights — for the next generation in Iran. Now is the time for Arab Gulf states to act in unison and make clear to Tehran that de-escalation cannot come at the expense of their ties with Washington. This, in turn, could lead to a fresh attempt at a Gulf security dialogue. Iran might be forced to accept if it is serious about détente.

Iran’s future political leadership transition is very likely to be complicated and uncertain. But stepped-up engagement that seeks to leverage the current relationships Iran has in the region could help create new pathways and possibilities for the people of Iran to live in different economic and social conditions.

About the Authors

Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He was formerly a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), where he built the Center’s Middle East program and also worked on broader issues related to US national security. He has produced influential studies that have shaped important discussions around regional policy, often providing expert testimony to key congressional committees on his findings.

Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He was formerly a Senior Analyst at Jane’s Information Group in London. He is the author of two books: The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979 (2021) and Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence (2015). He is presently working on his third book, Grand Contest: The Rivalry of Iran, America and Israel in the Arab World.

Patricia Karam is the Vice President for Policy and Communications at the American Task Force on Lebanon (ATFL). Karam previously served as Senior Iran Policy Advisor at both the Middle East Institute and Freedom House, where she crafted strategies for promoting democracy and human rights in Iran.

Acknowledgements & Disclaimer

This report represents the independent analytical judgments of three scholars, based on their policy research and feedback from colleagues and peers.

The authors would like to thank colleagues and peers who took time to review a draft of this report and offer comments, including Ali Afshari, Zeina Al-Shaib, Shukriyah Bradost, Jason Brodsky, Nadareh Chamlou, Colby Connelly, Matthew Czekaj, Molly Donohue, Aria Fathy, Saied Golkar, Nimrod Goren, Thomas Halvorsen, Ross Harrison, Iulia Joja, Banafsheh Keynoush, Charles Lister, Arman Mahmoudian, Firas Maksad, Athena Masthoff, Nazee Moinian, Fadi Nicholas Nassar, Norman Roule, Mara Rudman, Maheen Safian, Paul Salem, Elliott Sanders, Susan Saxton, Randa Slim, Dana Stroul, Alistair Taylor, Gönül Tol, Joseph Votel, Marvin Weinbaum, Rebekah Wharton, Anthony Zinni, and Scott Zuke. The views included here are those of the authors and not the reviewers, but the authors benefited from their insights and feedback.

What Trump’s second administration will face in the region in 2025, compared to what he left in 2021

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Trump returns to a profoundly different Middle East

Paul Salem

Vice President for International Engagement

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Well, the Middle East that Donald Trump stepped out of in January 2021 is profoundly different to the one that he steps back into in January of 2025. Indeed, to underscore how fast the Middle East river flows, even in the last few days it underwent another profound change with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

In 2021, Israel and Iran appeared to be maintaining a long-term and seemingly stable balance of power and deterrence. This was broken in October of last year, when Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah — perhaps sensing a decline of unity and deterrence — launched attacks on Israel. The Israeli response, first in Gaza and then in Lebanon, reversed the expectations of Iran’s Axis of Resistance and has created an imbalance of power between Israel and Iran decidedly in the former’s favor. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime was both a partial consequence and a deepening of this new imbalance of power.

Like all imbalances, it has created risks as well as opportunities. The incoming Trump administration will have to grapple with both. The risks are that a military escalation by Israel against Iran might spiral out of control, with the latter responding with attacks on oil shipping and production facilities in the Gulf, triggering a global energy and economic crisis. Alternatively, or concurrently, Iran might decide to rebuild its lost deterrence by rushing to develop a nuclear weapon, which would also trigger a war with Israel — and the United States. The opportunity is that Iran’s acute vulnerability and maximum pressure on it, if it is combined with Trump-led maximum diplomacy, might finally push Tehran into acceding to what’s best for the region and I dare say for its own people: walking away from its aggressive “forward defense” strategy, which has been largely destroyed anyway, and normalizing its relations with the region and the world. Trump Nobel?

In the urgent first quarter of 2025, the new US administration is going to have to focus on how to maximize the opportunity while minimizing the risk stemming from the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Assad and his father before him cast a long and dark shadow over the Levant for the past half century; the regime’s collapse is a cause of intense and bittersweet celebration for Syrians but also an enormous chance for the region. Trump may have used ALL CAPS to say that the US has no interest in Syria, but that is simply not the case. A successful transition in Syria will consolidate Iran’s and Russia’s defeat and departure from the heart of the Middle East, offering Syrians an opportunity to build stability and economic development for themselves and allowing their regional neighbors to do the same. A failed transition in Syria, on the other hand, might usher that country into a decade or more of renewed civil war, in which Iran and perhaps Russia could find a way back in, in which America’s Kurdish allies might suffer greatly, and in which ISIS could make a major resurgence. The US — along with Turkey, the Europeans, and Arab countries — has a critical and fairly low-cost role to play in helping bring about a successful transition. The cost of failure will be much higher.

Finally, today’s Middle East has intensely shifted on the Arab-Palestinian issue compared to what Trump faced when he last left the White House. In 2020, his administration had concluded the Abraham Accords normalization deals between Israel and several Arab countries. Those agreements largely sidestepped the Palestinian issue. Israeli, American, and many Arab leaders had concluded, erroneously, that the question of Palestine was no longer central and that the Israeli-dominated status quo over the Palestinians was stable and here to stay — much like the erroneous miscalculation in the last few years by the same leaders that the Assad-dominated status quo in Syria would endure.

Today, the right-wing Netanyahu-led government has leveraged last year’s Hamas attacks to, first, utterly devastate the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants in a now one-sided war that is still ongoing 14 months later and, second, to ramp up the pressure on the civilian population of the West Bank. In the wider Arab and Muslim world, the devastation of the civilian population in Gaza has reignited popular opinion in support of the Palestinian right to self-determination in a way not seen for decades.

The Trump administration will be keen on adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords countries, but this will not be achieved when a triumphant Israeli right wing is looking forward to annexing most of the West Bank, maintaining a long-term occupation of Gaza, and effectively burying the Palestinian issue. As an Arab Gulf official recently shared with me, his country is eager to engage with Israel, but how can this be achieved if Israel is proposing no alternative besides the permanent subjugation of the Palestinians? This century-old conflict will be harder than the previous two to resolve.

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What a difference four years make in US politics and policy on the Middle East

Brian Katulis

Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy

When President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, he will find a Middle East landscape that is dramatically different from the one that existed when he left office in January 2021. The Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked a conflict that continues to this day and has spread to different corners of the region. During the past five months, Iran and many of its “Axis of Resistance” partners have suffered major setbacks in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and now Syria with the collapse of the Assad regime.

Trump is a leader who prides himself on making unexpected moves to gain leverage with foes and friends alike, making it difficult for balanced, clinical analysts and even members of his own team to forecast what he might do on any particular issue in the Middle East.

Given the rapidly changing circumstances in the region, one reasonable prediction is that the incoming Trump administration will likely prioritize the Middle East more in its opening months than the Biden administration did when it came into office in January 2021. The Biden administration faced a set of domestic policy challenges linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis in its early months, and it made the decision to prioritize Asia and Europe over the Middle East in its first year.

The Biden team eventually stepped up its engagement in the region in its second year, driven by higher oil and food prices resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and China’s increased diplomatic involvement in 2023. The second half of Biden’s term was dominated by responding to the Israel-Hamas war. The Biden team experienced the limits of its own diplomacy in the region, but it continued to engage in an approach that was mostly reactive to events and can be characterized overall as strategic drift. In its closing weeks, the Biden administration is working hard to build on the November cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah and produce some results, including a Gaza cease-fire and hostage release.

The increased operational tempo of the US military and diplomats in the waning days of Biden’s presidency will likely push the Middle East higher on the Trump team’s agenda than it had initially planned. Trump may also have an incentive to prioritize the Middle East more than the Biden team initially did because of his aspirations to expand the signature achievement of his first term, the 2020 Abraham Accords, to include Saudi Arabia and other countries. Trump may also see an opening to make some moves on the unfinished business related to Iran’s destabilizing role in the region and its nuclear program. These factors may explain why Trump announced early on appointments for some key Middle East policy making positions below the cabinet level slots.

One factor to watch in 2025 is how the Democratic Party positions itself on Middle East issues. In Trump’s first term, some voices on the extreme left in the Democratic Party adopted a polemical rather than pragmatic approach and engaged in neo-Orientalist tactics that used the people and countries of the Middle East as little more than props in America’s domestic social and political debates. These tactics did little to produce pathways for progress in the region. Similarly, the often-vociferous debates within the Democratic Party on issues like the Gaza war in 2023 and 2024 failed to build new coalitions to achieve outcomes — and in many ways may have pushed the party further toward the margins of power and influence.

What happens in the Middle East in 2025 will mostly be determined by the key powers within the region. The United States remains the most influential external power, and how the incoming Trump administration and the next Congress engage key regional partners the region will impact whether the Middle East turns away from war and conflict and toward greater peace, prosperity, and regional integration.

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Post-Assad Syria presents a more complex, nuanced, and urgent challenge to a second Trump administration

Charles Lister

Senior Fellow, Director of Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs

As Donald Trump returns to the White House in January 2025, the situation in Syria could not be more different. Despite having adopted a policy of minimal engagement for much of the past four years, and more recently having considered a possible easing of sanctions on Syria’s regime, the rule of Bashar al-Assad rapidly collapsed in December 2024. That dramatic new reality presents an entirely new set of policy challenges, which are a great deal more complex, nuanced, and urgent.

A political transition is currently underway in Damascus, run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — a group that remains a designated terrorist organization in the United States. Notwithstanding the significant complications that HTS’s role presents, the transition itself has been remarkably efficient, constructive and stabilizing — at least for now. After three days of face-to-face working consultations between Assad’s prior cabinet and the HTS-linked Salvation Government in Damascus, a formal handover has now taken place. Civil servants and public-sector workers are back at work, and Syria’s airports will soon be re-opened. Almost every government in the Middle East now has diplomatic communication with HTS and its transitional body, and Syria’s diplomatic missions are all still at work, having hoisted the green revolutionary flag. Even Assad’s hand-picked ambassador to the United Nations is now issuing formal letters to the UN Security Council under the new HTS-led authority.

The outgoing Biden administration looks to be establishing its own lines of communication with actors on the ground, in close coordination with regional allies, including Qatar and Turkey. Steps will be taken to begin pulling away the huge set of sanctions enforced against Assad’s regime, which should ease pressure on the economy and allow for foreign investment. Given HTS’s strong and years-long desire to be delisted, the US has considerable leverage to use to direct the transition underway to move in the right directions — ensuring that the new government slated for creation in March 2025 is credible, inclusive and non-sectarian.

The US also has an acute interest in sustaining the troop presence in northeast Syria, as ISIS is well placed to exploit new vacuums in central and eastern Syria. In doing so, the US faces additional challenges, with its Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) partners more isolated and vulnerable than ever before. While HTS and the SDF have come to a non-aggression pact, the latter group has faced significant escalation from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. US-mediated cease-fires have sought to calm SDF-SNA tensions, but the SDF is also losing the allegiance of Sunni communities in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, as the anti-regime revolutionary cause surges in popularity. An incoming Trump administration will have a tough challenge on its hands to manage the SDF’s fraying at the seams, while still prioritizing the fight against a resurgent ISIS.

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The Red Sea crisis demands a forward-thinking approach to solve the Yemen problem

Nadwa Al-Dawsari

Non-Resident Scholar

This year marks a decade of conflict in Yemen. While the dynamics have shifted considerably in the past three years, peace remains elusive. Yemen’s economy is in freefall, with two-thirds of the population requiring humanitarian assistance and 4.5 million Yemenis displaced.

In 2021, the Houthis escalated their offensive, making considerable territorial gains and advancing on Marib city — home to Yemen’s oil and natural gas infrastructure and the last stronghold of the Yemeni government in the north. They also increased their cross-border attacks in both number and frequency, with a 56% rise in combined drone and missile attacks that year. These events allowed the Houthis to dictate the terms of the war and marked a turning point in the conflict.

The relentless cross-border aggression compelled Saudi Arabia to reassess its involvement in Yemen, leading to the United Nations-sponsored cease-fire in April 2022. Saudi-Houthi talks, combined with the transfer of power from President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to an eight-member Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), were intended to pave the way for comprehensive political negotiations. Despite these efforts, peace has remained a distant goal.

The Houthis’ rise to power is, in part, a direct consequence of the international community’s response, which has been reactive, relying on containment strategies that have failed to deliver results. Diplomacy alone has been unable to hold the Houthis accountable for their violent actions, signalling weakness that the Houthis have exploited repeatedly to consolidate their control. Airstrikes by the United States and United Kingdom against Houthi targets, meant to deter their aggression, have also fallen short, and the group has continued to escalate its attacks.

The Houthis have consistently demonstrated an ability to use negotiations as a stalling mechanism and violence as a means to extract concessions from the Yemeni government, the Saudis, and the international community. This pattern, evident since the beginning of the war, has allowed the group to secure tactical advantages. The UN roadmap announced in December 2023 has been similarly undermined by the Houthis’ actions, including unprecedented attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and Israel. These acts invited retaliatory strikes by the US, the UK, and Israel, further complicating the conflict.

The Houthis’ attacks, branded as part of a “battle of Promised Conquest and Holy Jihad,” are ostensibly aimed at pressuring Israel over the Gaza war. In reality, they reflect the Houthis’ ambitions to assert themselves as a regional power. Internally, they have established a theocratic authoritarian regime marked by repression and systematic indoctrination. Stepping up their recruitment, the Houthis announced they have enlisted 370,000 new fighters and, in the summer of 2024 alone, 1.1 million children graduated from their ideological training camps. This underscores their commitment to militarizing society.

Externally, the Houthis are emerging as Iran’s most capable regional proxy, especially in light of the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the dramatic weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Their growing military capabilities, including advanced weapons supplied by Iran, enable them to threaten international shipping. They are also creating their own “Axis of Disruption,” forging alliances with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and ISIS. Additionally, an emerging collaboration with Russia, reportedly including recruitment of fighters for Ukraine and support for Red Sea attacks, further highlights their expanding global connections. This positions the Houthis not only as a local threat but as a destabilizing force across the broader region, undermining Western interests and exporting their revolutionary model.

The international community’s blindness to these realities has emboldened the Houthis since 2014 and continues to do so today, allowing them to reshape the regional landscape in line with their ideological ambitions. To navigate the complexities of the Yemen conflict, the international community, and now the incoming Trump administration, must learn from the mistakes of the past. The Houthis’ rise to power has been fuelled by reactive, short-term strategies that failed to address the group’s broader ambitions. This moment presents an opportunity for the United States to adopt a forward-thinking, strategic approach that prioritizes long-term solutions over crisis management.

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Iran must choose a path as Trump reenters the picture

Alex Vatanka

Director of Iran Program and Senior Fellow

In the four years since President Donald Trump left the White House, Iran’s international, regional, and domestic affairs have experienced a whirlwind of turbulence. Pressure on the Islamist regime is expected to increase if it continues to insist on dodging domestic policy reform and necessary compromises.

Setting aside the issue of who is to blame, Tehran has been unable to bring about the end of sanctions that have devastated its economy. Concepts touted by the regime, such as the “resistance economy” and “self-sufficiency,” proved largely to be only slogans. The best Tehran could achieve was an informal deal with Joe Biden’s White House: in exchange for refraining from weaponizing its nuclear program, Washington looked the other way as Iran sold its oil to China.

While Iran saw a major increase in oil exports between 2021 and 2024, positive spillover effects were elusive. Ever greater numbers of Iranians fell into poverty, more emigrated, and the general sense of hopelessness reached new depths. Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei struggled to dampen public anger.

In 2021, he engineered for the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi to become president. Khamenei’s hope was that full control of all levers of power (presidency and parliament) by the hardline faction would yield better governance. That did not happen, and instead Khamenei began to fear the predatory ways of the far-right. Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in 2024 was an opportunity for Khamenei to go in a new direction.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, his successor, speaks to the grievances of Iranians, but he has so far proven incapable of changing unpopular policies or initiating meaningful reform. For example, he vowed to fight against mandatory veiling for women and internet censorship but has been stopped at every turn by the rest of the regime. It is no wonder the average Iranian sees Pezeshkian as someone put in the presidential office to divert the public’s anger, not as a man who can bring about real change.

The silver bullet to counter sanctions and mitigate against economic protest was meant to be Khamenei’s “Look East” policy, which led to Tehran’s controversial backing of Russia’s war against Ukraine. But while Russia and China have given diplomatic support to Tehran in its conflict with Western powers, they have not been able to stop the fast decline of the Iranian economy, about which even the most senior officials openly warn of an impending cataclysm.

Meanwhile, Tehran’s regional fortunes have been in free-fall since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Israeli decision — backed by its Western allies — to confront Tehran’s regional partners, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, has put Iran in a bind as it navigates the fast-changing environment to its disadvantage. The challenge is plain: should leaders in Tehran focus on nation-building and delivering the basic needs of the Iranian people or stay the course and pursue the costly and permanent campaign against the United States and Israel?

Certainly, the “shadow war” between Iran and the Israeli-US alliance is no longer tenable. Tehran must decide to double-down or change course. It remains to be seen if the incoming Trump administration can find the necessary combination of pressure and incentives to force the leadership’s hand.

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On Israel-Palestine dire conditions, formidable challenges as Trump returns to office

Khaled Elgindy

Senior Fellow, Director of Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs

While dynamics on the Israeli-Palestinian front were already quite negative when Donald Trump left office four years ago, the reality today, on the eve of his return to the White House, is nothing short of catastrophic. The first half of Joe Biden’s presidency saw the West Bank explode into the deadliest violence in the region in 20 years as well as the election in Israel of the most extreme government in the country’s history. Moreover, since then, Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack marked the deadliest day in Israel’s history, while Israel’s shockingly disproportionate response has led to apocalyptic levels of death and destruction in Gaza, including some 45,000 killed, the vast majority of them civilians, 90 percent of its 2.3 million people uprooted, and most of its civilian infrastructure reduced to rubble. Meanwhile, Israeli restrictions on food, medicine, and other lifesaving aid have led to widespread starvation and disease as well as accusations that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Conditions are especially alarming in northern Gaza, which is being flattened and depopulated at this very moment. Meanwhile, internal Palestinian politics continue to be plagued by fragmentation, paralysis, and an acute leadership vacuum. If prospects for a negotiated two-state solution were already dim before Oct. 7, they are all but shattered today, even as the conditions are being laid for generations of instability, violence, and radicalization.

Looking ahead, the challenges both for and under a Trump administration will be formidable. Renewed cease-fire talks in Gaza after months of diplomatic stagnation, along with reports that Trump is eager to see the war concluded by the time he takes office next month, could finally bring an end to the horrific war in Gaza. Beyond a cease-fire, however, Trump is unlikely to invest significant bandwidth or political capital in the Palestinian issue. As a result, Israel will continue to have a free hand in both the West Bank and Gaza. At best, Trump will keep providing unlimited weapons as well as diplomatic support to Israel — but without the pretense of concern for civilian lives, US law, or international law that prevailed during the Biden administration. At worst, Trump could green light the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and formal annexation in the West Bank now being advocated by members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

There are three possible exceptions to this that create both opportunities and challenges. One wild card will be a potential Saudi-Israeli normalization deal. Although Trump is committed to expanding the Abraham Accords, whether it is possible to find a formula that satisfies both the Saudis’ need to show meaningful progress on the Palestinian front and Netanyahu’s need to maintain the support of his far-right, annexationist coalition partners seems highly questionable. The second relates to internal Palestinian politics. The likely departure of 89-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the coming years will create an opening for a more credible and representative leadership to emerge but could just as well lead to power struggles and chaos. Regardless, any unitary leadership, which will by definition require the consent and cooperation of all factions, including Hamas, would pose a direct challenge to the Israeli government and the Trump administration, neither of which is likely to tolerate any role for Hamas in Palestinian politics.

Finally, there is the new dimension of international justice. The unprecedented rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which already found that Israel’s occupation was unlawful and tantamount to apartheid as well as a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, could impose constraints on Israeli conduct where American and international diplomacy have failed. Trump and congressional Republicans have rejected these rulings and vowed to punish the ICC or any government that complies with its ruling, threatening the viability of these institutions and the very concept of a rules-based international system.

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Four years of political, diplomatic, and security transitions in Israel, but Oct. 7 overshadows it all

Nimrod Goren

Senior Fellow for Israeli Affairs

When Donald Trump enters the White House, his counterpart in Jerusalem will still be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the same Israeli leader Trump worked with during his first term. But other than that, since early 2021 and especially following the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, much has changed in Israeli politics, diplomacy, and security.

The trauma of Oct. 7 overshadows it all. It was a game-changing moment for Israel, in terms of suffering mass losses, shattering deep-rooted societal beliefs, and jeopardizing the sense of security. Oct. 7 still lives on in the Israeli mindset. This is likely to continue during Trump’s second term and to bring multiple domestic and regional ripple effects.

Over the last four years, Israel has experienced an uptick in democratic backsliding, highly impacted by Netanyahu’s handling of corruption charges against him. The judicial overhaul advanced by the current Israeli coalition since December 2022 is the decisive element. In the V-Dem 2024 global index, Israel was no longer ranked as a “liberal democracy” — for the first time in this index’s history.

In parallel, far-right extremism has been increasingly mainstreamed and legitimized. Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were on the fringe of Israeli politics a few years ago but are now in charge of powerful cabinet portfolios. Netanyahu’s political calculations led him to rely on far-right support. Extremism has a growing impact on Israeli political discourse, decision-making processes, and security realities. It is coupled with increased populism, including within Netanyahu’s own party, leading ministers to blame the security and legal establishments for Oct. 7 and for seeking to topple Netanyahu.

Many Israelis are appalled by these changes, and a majority seeks early elections. Unlike in early 2021, Israelis now have a political model of what a new order could look like. The “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021-2022 was the broadest coalition Israel has ever had in ideological terms and even included — for the first time — an Arab party. It prioritized national interests and good governance, and it managed to achieve progress on some key issues. Although short-lived, the Bennett-Lapid government made the previously abstract possibility of the day after Netanyahu vivid.

Some notable changes also took place in Israel’s foreign policy and security arenas. In early 2021, the Abraham Accords were still new, with their fate uncertain. Four years later, their resilience — even in the wake of the war in Gaza — has become clear. Formally engaging with Israel was a strategic decision for the Arab countries involved. It serves their interests and needs, remains intact, and holds potential for broader regional cooperation and normalization (including with Saudi Arabia) once the war ends. Moreover, Israel and Lebanon managed to reach two ad-hoc arrangements, in 2022 (the maritime border deal) and 2024 (the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire), which highlight the future potential of diplomacy in driving even further progress in this bilateral relationship.

The war in Gaza did, however, limit the scope and visibility of Israel-Arab cooperation; generate a crisis in Israel-Turkey relations after a lengthy process of rapprochement; and damage Israel’s global standing, leading to unprecedented legal procedures against it, widespread criticism, and an uptick in boycotts — especially in academia, culture, and sports. The war has also resulted in a renewed — and possibly long-term — Israeli military presence in the Gaza Strip, and to additional obstacles on the pathway toward an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution.

The most dramatic geopolitical change, which is currently taking shape and would have repercussions during Trump’s second term is the weakening of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance. Israel’s military achievements against Hamas and Hezbollah, attacks in Iran, and efforts to de-weaponize Syria following the toppling of Bashar al-Assad create an improved regional security landscape for Israel as a new administration prepares to re-enter the White House.

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Under Donald Trump, Washington can decisively defeat Hezbollah

Fadi Nicholas Nassar

US-Lebanon Fellow

The Levant is unrecognizable. Bashar al-Assad is gone, Hezbollah is decapitated, and Iran — once the looming shadow convinced of its inevitable rise — is in descent. What was once dismissed as wishful thinking by Washington’s foreign policy establishment is now unfolding before our eyes. Lebanon, long and needlessly surrendered to be inevitably lost to Hezbollah and Iran, stands at the threshold of a transformative moment — and Donald Trump is entering office with the unprecedented opportunity to redefine its future.

When Trump left office in early 2021, Lebanon was in disarray, yet, as always, there was enough hope to hold on. The country was in freefall, battered by an unprecedented financial collapse, yet the nationwide protest movement — despite setbacks from the pandemic — remained determined to reform Lebanon’s dysfunctional political system.

In the years that followed, hope would rise and fall. On Aug. 4, 2020, Beirut’s port was rocked by a devastating blast that obliterated the capital. The explosion embodied Lebanon’s dysfunction: Hezbollah had turned the country into a hub for Iran’s broader Axis of Resistance, while a corrupt political class, beholden to Hezbollah, bankrupted the state. Yet in an important lesson for policymakers often resigned to the inevitabilities of geopolitics, the aftermath revealed a willingness among the Lebanese to fight for a new future.

Judge Tarek Bitar’s push to investigate, with significant public backing despite Hezbollah’s intimidation, demonstrated that proponents of the state still existed within Lebanon’s institutions. But Hezbollah’s ability to obstruct the investigation underscored the difficulties of upholding the state when faced with a deeply illiberal opponent, armed and protected by a regional hegemon.

That coercive ability has been devastated by the Israel-Hezbollah war. Intelligence reports confirm significant weakening of its stockpiles, and its retreat from Syria will hinder efforts to regroup and rearm. However, the full extent of the damage, including the psychological blow from Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination, is still unfolding. Most striking, perhaps, is the overwhelming rejection by the Lebanese people of Hezbollah’s role in bringing this calamity upon them. The war has already cost the bankrupt country billions and displaced over a million people still reeling from its protracted economic crisis. This is not 2006. Hezbollah has not only lost the war — it has lost the Lebanese. The question that should be on the mind of the new administration is whether the militia will be allowed to retain the arms to continue to impose its control over Lebanon.

It would be a mistake for a new administration to consider either the rise or fall of Hezbollah as inevitable. The leadership in Washington will be faced with tough choices. But still, a battle against an Iranian adversary that can be won is an outcome that would benefit the Lebanese, the US, and the region. The first step is finally realizing Lebanon’s strategic importance: as the arena where Iran’s vision for the region will succeed or fail. Amidst the rapidly changing context that followed the Arab uprisings, Iran leveraged Hezbollah to sustain Assad’s brutal regime in Syria and engineer its regional network of armed actors. Hezbollah was more than the blueprint — it was the chief trainer that helped Iran build up its “unity of the fronts” strategy.

The way forward is clear: disarm Hezbollah. The alternative — allowing Hezbollah to remain armed and giving it time to regroup — will only condemn Lebanon and the region to further failure. Washington must rally its local and regional partners to reject consensus on Lebanon and instead focus on empowering strong Lebanese leaders committed to restoring the integrity of the state and reforming its broken political economy. The fight must be carried out by the Lebanese themselves — but Washington can at least ensure they take on that fight free from the threat of Hezbollah’s weapons. As a new administration revises its strategy for Iran, it must not compromise on Lebanon. By returning to a maximum pressure strategy, the US can force Iran to abandon its “forward defense” doctrine and concede Hezbollah’s disarmament. Only then can Lebanon be given a fighting chance to emerge as a functional state and reliable partner, instead of remaining Iran’s strategic hub — one that has so effectively disrupted the region’s security landscape that it has left behind a string of failed states. By pressing Iran to relinquish Hezbollah’s arms and empowering a new, credible Lebanese leadership to push out a discredited political class, Lebanon can transform from the platform for Iran’s malign regional agenda to a functioning, sovereign state that can rewrite its future and redefine its place in the region.

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The perils of neglecting a more unstable Red Sea region and Horn of Africa

Mirette F. Mabrouk

Senior Fellow and Founding Director of the Egypt and the Horn of Africa Program

A quick glance at the current turbulence in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa might lead observers to think that area was suddenly plunging into turmoil. Yemen’s Houthis are at the epicenter of this instability, as the Iran-backed militia has been attacking shipping along one of the world’s most essential maritime routes, ostensibly to protest the Israeli assault on Gaza. Conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia — all of which are undergoing vulnerable transitions of various sorts — are rippling out beyond their borders, creating an emboldened set of actors capable of challenging and posing a direct threat to Western interests. Those actors are themselves being supported by external players. These developments have not come about suddenly, however.

During President-elect Donald Trump’s previous term in office, Middle Eastern states, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Turkey, became increasingly involved in the Horn of Africa. With its arable lands and ports as well as its crucial position as a link between the Red Sea, the Indo-Pacific, and the Mediterranean, the region has always been hugely important for the Gulf states. Between 2000 and 2017, they poured $13 billion in investment into local countries as their involvement in, and competition over, the region dramatically accelerated. By the end of Trump’s first term, several things had become clear. Firstly, regional influence had split into two shifting but largely consistent camps: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt on the one hand, and Qatar and Turkey on the other. The second was that even though it effectively controls 12% of global trade, the region somehow failed to register as a US foreign policy priority, despite the presence of several core interests. Under President Trump, strategic competition with China and Russia were overwhelmingly the top foreign policy priorities. Consequently, external players continued to jockey for power in a region undergoing fragile transitions with increasingly high stakes.

Several years on, the situation has only become more complex. Sudan’s transition has disintegrated into a ruinous civil war that has killed over 60,000 people and precipitated the world’s largest displacement crisis.

An agreement between Ethiopia and Somaliland to lease a port in return for Ethiopia’s recognition of the breakaway republic enraged Somalia, which drew closer to Egypt and Eritrea, further stirring a pot that was already threatening to boil over.

The US has remained consistent in its absence. The Biden administration has not prioritized the crises in the Horn of Africa in particular in any meaningful manner; and while it is too soon to glean any realistic insights into how the Trump administration will proceed, it’s very unlikely that it will be more engaged. That would be a mistake. The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, which have crippled one of the world’s most crucial maritime routes, are a clear illustration of how an apparently localized issue can rapidly become a global problem. There needs to be a diplomatic strategy to ensure that the countries of the region do not simply become political footballs for competing outside powers. US assistance needs to be weighted toward inclusive growth and legitimate governance to buttress the vulnerabilities of poverty and conflict; and the direct connection between the region and global trade and security needs to be emphasized. There is no shortage of international interest in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa, and if the US does not take steps to ensure its core interests there, then it risks being displaced.

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Turkey on a better foreign policy footing as Trump returns to office

Gönül Tol

Director of Turkey Program and Senior Fellow, Black Sea Program

When Donald Trump left office in 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was struggling with a host of domestic and regional challenges. In 2019, his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had lost almost all of the country’s major cities in municipal elections and the Turkish economy was facing a number of problems. The Turkish lira had lost more than 40 percent of its value against the dollar and the country’s debt had been downgraded by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Trump’s decision to impose double tariffs on Turkish metal exports to put pressure on Ankara to release a jailed American clergyman had contributed to the country’s economic woes.

Erdoğan was facing problems on the foreign policy front as well. Chief among them was Turkey’s relations with the United States. Turkey had received the Russian S-400 missile-defense system in July 2019, straining ties with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partners, particularly the US. Washington was worried about the S-400s’ compatibility with NATO systems and the potential security risks it posed to the F-35 fighter jet program. Bilateral ties received a further blow when Washington decided to remove Turkey from the F-35 program and slapped sanctions on Ankara. Turkey’s military operation against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia — a key US ally in the fight against ISIS that Ankara considers a terrorist organization — complicated relations even more. At the time, Turkey was also trying to repair its fraught relations with Middle Eastern countries, badly damaged by its support for Islamists trying to topple regional autocrats.

As Trump prepares to return to the White House in January 2025, Ankara finds itself better positioned on the foreign policy front this time around. Turkey has normalized ties with former regional foes such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine turned Turkey into an important Western partner in efforts to mediate the conflict. There are still problems in Turkey-US ties but the countries have found common ground in places like the Black Sea and Africa. The ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria further strengthens Ankara’s hand on the foreign policy front as Western and Arab countries turn to Turkey to discuss the country’s post-Assad future.

Erdoğan still faces a challenging domestic environment, but Assad’s ouster could offer him opportunities there too. One of the biggest problems he faces at home is Turkey’s 3.6 million Syrian refugees. With Assad gone, many of them may return to Syria and he can tell his constituency that the problem has been solved.

This context may help Turkish-US ties under the second Trump presidency as well. One key factor that will affect how relations evolve is whether the incoming American president decides to withdraw troops from Syria. If he does, that will remove one of the thorniest issues in bilateral ties: US cooperation with the YPG. Ankara is then likely to strengthen its relations with the new US administration by committing to the fight against ISIS, curbing Iran’s influence, and playing an active role in ending the war in Ukraine.

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Geostrategic shifts have deepened divisions between Arab Gulf states and Israel, challenging assumptions for Trump II

Gerald M. Feierstein

Director, Arabian Peninsula Affairs Program, and Distinguished Sr. Fellow on US Diplomacy

The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s second administration will seek to follow the same Middle East playbook as during its first term, emphasizing support for Israel and its anti-Iran coalition with Gulf partners as well as anticipating that Gulf leaders will continue to demonstrate little regard for Palestinian interests while pursuing normalization agreements with Jerusalem. Dramatic shifts in conditions and the balance of power in the region may make that plan inoperable. The Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s military response have brought dramatic changes to the regional security environment but also increased Arab popular opposition to normalization with Israel, including in Saudi Arabia. Anger and frustration in the Arab world have frozen further expansion of the Abraham Accords, reduced the influence of the United States, and reignited Arab public support for the Palestinian cause. Meantime, with support from Iran, the Houthis have used their military position on northern Yemen’s Red Sea coast to demonstrate support for Hamas and the Palestinians, threatening international shipping in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb, and Gulf of Aden and menacing Israel itself with offensive weapons, making the group a leading source of regional as well as Yemeni internal tension and instability.

As the geopolitical sands have shifted, so, too have Gulf political alignments. Encouraged by expanding Russian and Chinese influence, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have engaged in a detente with Iran and are committed to reducing tensions in the Persian Gulf arena. The GCC members have welcomed visits by senior Iranian leaders in recent months, joining them in condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon and declaring that they will remain neutral in the event of future Israel-Iran confrontations. With the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and the significant debilitation of Hamas and Hezbollah, however, Iran is in a much weaker position than it has been in decades. Iran’s diminished power may provide Riyadh with new leverage to secure Tehran’s cooperation in ending the Yemeni civil war. Its efforts to resolve that conflict have been put on hold because of the Gaza war and the Houthi response in support of the Palestinians. In the absence of a resolution of the Gaza problem, the Saudis and their Gulf partners have tread carefully in challenging the Houthis. Their caution is motivated by concerns that a strong stance regarding the group’s maritime attacks would be deeply unpopular at home should it be perceived as supporting Israel and that it could trigger a renewal of Houthi attacks against the Saudis and the GCC states more broadly. Thus, the incoming Trump administration will need to balance between deepening divisions between Israel and the Gulf, whereas during the first term there was a general alignment among these key US partners.

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The incoming administration will encounter a stronger, more independent partner in Iraq

Robert S. Ford

Senior Fellow

In 2025, the United States-led coalition forces that help train and support Iraqi counter-terrorism units will withdraw a substantial portion of their troops, as agreed between the Iraqi government and the Biden administration in September. Some American forces will remain, including elements at an airport near Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, but those, too, likely will depart in 2026 unless the Iraqi government asks them to extend. Iraqi security forces, with coalition support, have grown stronger and more capable and now lead counter-terrorism efforts in Iraq. In December 2024, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq told the Security Council that Iraq was safer and more stable than it had been for the previous 10 years. Iraq has enjoyed success against the Islamic State, but Iran-backed Shi’a Islamist militias continue to operate in the country. Tehran will redouble efforts to sustain its influence in Iraq after setbacks in Lebanon and Syria. The militias might test American patience again with new harassing attacks, but there is no political appetite in Baghdad for a battle against remaining American forces in Iraq or Syria. Instead, Iraq hopes to build a positive relationship with the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

The Iraqi government seeks the role of a bridge between Iran and regional and international states and will gently assert more independence. Notably, Iraqi political parties, including the Shi’a Islamist parties in coalition in the government, were reluctant to see Iraq dragged into the last stage of the Syrian civil war, leaving the Iran-backed militias politically isolated and more hesitant to intervene in Syria. Baghdad will seek to further bolster relations with Gulf states and Jordan in 2025. It will also watch developments in Syria with great interest. There is fear among some communities in Iraq that Islamist terrorists could again cross into Iraq from Syria as occurred in 2014. The Iran-backed militias will exploit that fear to try to attract public support.

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani will be up for reelection in 2025. His government faces a wiretapping scandal, and his Shi’a Islamist political allies might desert him. The prime minister, however, has developed political ties to several important southern governors and elements of Iraq’s Kurdish and Sunni Arab communities. He might be able to establish himself independently from the Shi’a Islamist political coalition that brought him to power. Meanwhile, the Iraqi economy is in full rebuilding mode. An American business magazine in November said Iraq has about $400 billion in construction and investment projects underway or in planning. Climate change and drought represent major challenges for Iraq in the longer term and already post a serious threat to its economy and public health.

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North African and Sahel countries increasingly seek partnerships far beyond the US and Europe

Intissar Fakir

Senior Fellow and Director of Program on North Africa and the Sahel

The past four years revealed growing misalignment between Western interests and domestic priorities in North Africa and the Sahel. Unlike previous periods of global contestation, today’s environment features more diffuse power centers and more local agency. States are not choosing sides in a Cold War-like ideological contest — rather, they are building diverse partnerships based on practical considerations, often diverging from their historical relationships with the West. This is strategic autonomy in action, and it is as observable in North Africa as in other regions around the world.

North Africa’s transformation is clear. Tunisia under President Kais Saied — who has been quickly rolling back his country’s post-Arab Spring democratic gains in recent years, while reaching out to autocratic regimes around the world for economic and political support — directly challenges Western models, affecting Mediterranean stability and migration flows. Morocco has deepened its ties with Israel via the Abraham Accords while expanding military cooperation with Turkey, India, and China, building a web of partnerships that serve its regional ambition. Though still an ally of the West, Morocco demonstrates how regional states can pursue autonomous policies that, even when they occasionally align with US strategic goals, are on their own terms. Morocco is looking to leverage these multifaceted partnerships into international support on the issue of Western Sahara; indeed, Rabat’s position on the status of this territory has very gradually gained more acceptance, particularly since the first Trump administration’s recognition of its claims in 2020. Algeria, meanwhile, is looking to regain its regional clout after having settled its domestic transition. It is now also diversifying its foreign partnerships in an effort to maximize its geopolitical positioning. Given Algeria’s historical proximity to Russia and strong economic cooperation with China, such overtures paradoxically open the door to more engagement from European neighbors concerned about Moscow’s and Beijing’s growing influence on the southern side of the Mediterranean basin.

The divergence the Sahel has experienced between early 2021 and today is even starker. New military-led governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have rejected French forces, welcomed Russian military contractors, and formed the Alliance of Sahel States — a direct challenge to Western security frameworks. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates increasingly compete for influence in this region through defense agreements, while China is building long-term economic leverage through infrastructure and resource extractions, particularly in sectors critical for energy transition technologies.

These misalignments complicate the United States’ ability to secure its strategic interests. The Sahel’s security shift affects counterterrorism capabilities, creates greater openings for extremists, and challenges US military reach in the region. In North Arica, these shifting alignments impact crucial dynamics from Mediterranean security to trade and energy flows to migration controls. China’s growing commercial presence, particularly in critical minerals and technology infrastructure, could constrain future US economic and security cooperation options. Meanwhile Russia’s opportunistic military presence in several local countries, including Mali, Libya, and Niger, complicate regional security cooperation.

The key for US policy, and what the next administration will have to grapple with, is recognizing that while Washington cannot reverse this trend toward greater regional autonomy, it can protect core American and Western interests through focused engagements in areas of genuine mutual benefit. This means leveraging the United States’ unique advantages in technology, private-sector investment, and security cooperation — but doing so through frameworks that respect local sovereignty and domestic priorities while advancing specific US objectives.

Follow: @IntissarFakir

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Black Sea region in disarray as Trump returns to the scene

Iulia-Sabina Joja

Director, Black Sea Program

In the four years since President Donald Trump left office, the Black Sea region has transformed into one of the most insecure areas in the world. The legacy of the first Trump administration for Central and Eastern Europe is a positive one. From Ukraine to Romania, US military support under Trump, such as the delivery of Javelin anti-tank missiles for Ukraine, and his administration’s pushback against China in the context of great power competition, left this corner of Europe relatively stable and American commitments there unquestioned. But that temporary calm was shattered when Russia’s full-scale-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 catapulted the Black Sea region into the headlines. The brutality and extent of the Russian aggression devastated Ukraine in what has become the largest war in Europe since World War II. The war has sown turmoil far beyond the frontlines of southeastern Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainian refugees have fled to surrounding countries, while many, including thousands of children, were forcibly relocated inside the Russian Federation; at the same time, Russian military operations and its blockade of Ukrainian ports disrupted vital grain exports on which millions in developing countries across Asia and North Africa depend.

For nearly three years now, Ukrainian resistance has depended on the continued flow of financial and material support from its Western partners. But as the latter’s — often already aging — stockpiles have become drawn down, it has spurred these countries to invest more into their military-industrial capacities. Likewise, the Russian aggression has galvanized the buildup of military reinforcements along the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) eastern flank and elevated defense budgets across the alliance.

As another winter sets in, the only (potential) end in sight for the war is President-elect Trump’s promise to bring about a cease-fire. But this pledge entails its own risks for long-term peace and stability in the wider Black Sea region if the settlement is temporary or lacks concrete security guarantees for Ukraine that would enable it to sustainably rebuild.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has already had critical economic and political effects for the region. Inflation, particularly in the energy and agricultural sectors, and the severing of established trade flows — a direct consequence of the conflict itself as well as from the passage of sanctions in response — have generated growing political instability. In Bulgaria, the seventh round of elections in four years has not yet resulted in the formation of a government. In Romania, shocking presidential election results in early December catapulted an extreme-right candidate into first place in the first round, leading to the annulment of the vote by the country’s constitutional court, based on alleged evidence of foreign, presumably Russian, interference in the campaign. In the South Caucasus, the situation is just as volatile. Armenia and Azerbaijan have engaged in armed conflict over Karabakh twice, in 2020 and 2023; peace negotiations are ongoing but unlikely to reach any sort of resolution until well into 2025. In Georgia, accusations of rigged election results and pro-Russian laws enforced by the ruling Georgian Dream party resulted in the European Union freezing of the country’s integration process. This has sparked massive, continuous demonstrations over the past several weeks. Finally, direct Iranian and North Korean support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, along with tacit but crucial backing from China, are contributing to regional instability as well as raising concerns in Western capitals about the developing nature and scope of these powers’ cooperation in the Black Sea region and around the globe.

When Donald Trump returns to the White House, he will find the Black Sea region in disarray. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, patterns of cooperation with Iran, North Korea, and China, and spillover effects across the region ought to place it at the top of the administration’s foreign and security policy agenda.

Follow: @IuliJo

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Afghanistan and Pakistan now a vastly different landscape but unlikely to regain Washington’s close attention

Marvin G. Weinbaum

Director, Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies

The Afghanistan and Pakistan that a second Donald Trump administration will confront are vastly different from what existed when his first term ended in January 2021. At that point, President Ashraf Ghani and his government still had control of Kabul and provincial capitals, although the country was deep in the throes of a civil war in which insurgent Taliban forces were poised to make major gains. Under President Trump, the American military presence had been drawn down to only 2,500 troops and a peace deal negotiated with the Taliban in Doha was about to be signed. The centerpiece of that agreement was the departure of all American troops in a few short months. The document’s terms also all called upon the Taliban to negotiate with other Afghans on forming an ideologically and ethnically inclusive government and included a Taliban pledge that Afghan soil would be not used to export terrorism.

In Pakistan, a government headed by Prime Minister Imran Khan seemed comfortably in power four years ago, due in no small way to the backing of the military, which had aided in its ascent in the 2018 elections. The prime minister remained popular with the public, but he and his government faced increasing criticism as incompetent and ineffective at addressing the country’s mounting social and economic problems. The government was also dealing with a surge of terrorist activity from Pakistan’s own Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan and a stubborn, ethnically based insurgency in Balochistan. With the war dragging on in Afghanistan, American relations with Pakistan had cooled considerably during the Trump administration, and President Trump openly accused the country of having deceived the US in taking American funding but failing to crack down on the Afghan Taliban. Yet relations had improved by 2020 as the Pakistan military reportedly used its influence with the Taliban to facilitate the Doha agreement.

As Trump again assumes office, the American military presence in Afghanistan has been gone from the country for three and a-half years and the Taliban, following the collapse of the Ghani government, is firmly in control. The US is living with the stain of its hasty departure and has for the most part disengaged diplomatically from the country. Like the rest of the international community, Washington has refused to officially recognize the Kabul government but has not followed many countries in gradually granting the regime de facto recognition. Even so, a Trump administration will inherit what has been a more than $3 billion humanitarian aid program for Afghanistan that has also propped up its economy, while the American public remains deeply troubled over the Taliban’s human right rights practices, above all the treatment of girls and women.

Pakistan also looks strikingly different than it did four years ago. Imran Khan is in prison, having been ousted by opposition parties assisted in March 2023 by a military that had grown displeased by his often independent-minded domestic and foreign policies. The once close ties between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban have been replaced by a tense relationship over Kabul’s unwillingness to fully rein in the hosted Pakistani Taliban. The US relationship with the Islamabad government has normalized and some assistance programs have resumed, but their interests clash, especially over Pakistan’s increasing economic integration with China and its budding defense and economic ties to Russia.

Neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan appears likely to figure prominently on the foreign policy agenda of a second Trump administration. Despite current expectations in Kabul and Islamabad that the US might now break from President Joe Biden’s standoffish policies by directing greater attention to the two countries’ problems, the opposite seems more probable. With the incoming administration in Washington expected to be more transactional while weakening international ties and cutting funding commitments, only a major terrorist attack on the US or its Western allies traceable to Afghanistan or Pakistan might again bring them to center stage.

Follow: @mgweinbaum

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Photo by Bandar Algaloud / Saudi Kingdom Council / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

PARIS — France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy has been stripped of his Legion of Honor medal after being convicted last year of corruption and influence peddling while he was the country’s head of state, it was announced on Sunday. The decision was made via a decree released in the Journal Officiel that publishes the government’s major legal information. It comes in line with the rules of the Legion of Honor.

The conservative politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, has been at the heart of a series of legal cases since leaving office.

He was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling by both a Paris court in 2021 and an appeals court in 2023 for trying to bribe a magistrate in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.

He was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year, a verdict upheld by France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, in December.

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Earlier this year, Sarkozy stood trial over allegations he received millions of dollars from Libya for his successful presidential campaign in 2007. He denies the claims. Prosecutors requested a seven-year prison sentence . The verdict is expected in September.

Sarkozy becomes the second former head of state to be stripped of the Legion of Honor — France’s highest distinction — after Nazi collaborator Philippe Petain, who was convicted in 1945 for treason and conspiring with the enemy for his actions as leader of Vichy France from 1940-1944.

Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was stripped of his Legion of Honor award in the wake of widespread sexual misconduct allegations against him in 2017. Disgraced cyclist and former Tour de France star Lance Armstrong also had his French Legion of Honor award revoked.