Iran has built a security doctrine on shifting battles outside its borders, encircling adversaries with proxies and avoiding direct confrontation whenever possible. The test of this strategy is whether it can translate clout into security and sustainable gains at a reasonable cost. Yet from Syria to Yemen, Iran’s influence has entailed staggering losses, while its gains have successively crumbled, turning tools of deterrence into drivers of isolation and attrition.
Iran is adept at manufacturing crises, yet incapable of transforming them into domestic security, prosperity or stable influence. Over the decades, its strategy has entailed major costs, while failing to achieve its intended objectives. Since the start of the war with Israel and the U.S., it has compounded its blunders with self-defeating moves that have further damaged its regional standing and placed durable security ever further out of reach.
For a start, the Islamic Republic’s attempts to dominate the Levant have little economic logic. Iran relies heavily on hydrocarbon exports to Asia and to its neighbors. There is no wave of Iranian industrial goods waiting at a Mediterranean port to flood European markets. Even if Tehran sought an energy pipeline to the Syrian coast, this would require long-term stability, massive investment and sanctions relief. Yet instead of secure trade routes, Iran has built armed movements and weapons corridors.
Furthermore, Iran already has direct maritime access via its extensive Indian Ocean coastline. Yet it turned the Strait of Hormuz—vital for its own imports and exports—into a weapon that backfired on its own economy, sparking a naval blockade, slashing oil exports and disrupting imports. It has devoted considerable political energy to disputes over the name of the Gulf, yet has failed to establish a regional order capable of guaranteeing its security or freedom of navigation. It is difficult to see the strategic logic in pursuing Mediterranean access through Syria while failing to secure the maritime routes on which Iran’s own economy depends.
Open Battleground in the Levant
From 2011, Iran threw its full weight behind the Assad regime, yet paid a heavy price in human, military and financial resources. It tarnished its image among many Arabs and Muslims by siding with a regime that besieged, bombed and displaced its people. Syria became an arena for the Israeli air force, which repeatedly targeted Iranian assets and commanders, leaving Tehran unable to protect what it had built. In December 2024, the regime that Iran had paid so heavily to protect collapsed. Tehran had bet on an individual and a regime rather than building ties with the Syrian public. Consequently, it lost both.
Since 2003, Tehran has viewed Iraq as its greatest asset. This was not secured by Iranian power alone; it was the U.S. that toppled Iran’s adversary Saddam Hussein, who had survived an eight-year war without letting Iran achieve its objective. The disintegration of the Iraqi state and military and the subsequent restructuring of its political system opened the door for Iran and its allies, who participated in ground combat alongside the U.S. forces against the Islamic State group (ISIS), benefiting from American air cover and Iraq’s need for mass mobilization. After ISIS was defeated, pro-Iran factions transformed their military capital into political influence.
Iran also capitalized on Iraq’s energy needs, trade imbalances, and fuel and currency smuggling networks. Washington did not close these avenues. Rather, Iran built influence within a system created by the U.S., operating within financial and security limitations that Washington could have tightened at any time. Washington neither supported Iran’s adversaries nor remained neutral—not due to incapacity, but through deliberate, reversible political choice.
Tehran has long regarded Lebanon as its most successful sphere of influence, cultivated for decades by arming and empowering Hezbollah. Securing the group’s supply lines was its main aim in the Syrian war, where it dragged in Hezbollah and distracted it from its mission of battling Israel. After Assad was toppled and critical supply routes severed, Iran’s military and security infrastructure was exposed; Israel destroyed much of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and assassinated senior cadres, while Hezbollah’s retaliation yielded little compared with the cost to Lebanon. That cost was not borne by Hezbollah alone. The war emptied the very communities that formed its base in the South and Beirut’s Dahiyeh, destroying whole villages and livelihoods. The constituency that Iran had cultivated for its project came to pay the steepest price.
Hezbollah is not solely responsible for Lebanon’s economic woes; a corrupt financial and political establishment did much to precipitate the collapse of 2019. Yet the group’s dominance and the state’s alignment with Iran deepened Lebanon’s isolation and eroded vital ties to Gulf states, which withdrew their ambassadors. Saudi Arabia suspended imports from Lebanon for years, while tourism, investment and aid all declined when Lebanon most needed them.
Ironically, what Iran presented as a front against normalization with Israel might actually drive Lebanon into a deal with Israel—or even a path toward peace or normalization, driven by a desire to shield the Lebanese state from regional power struggles and prevent others from using its territory to settle scores. Ending the state of hostility and disarming Hezbollah are now topics of official discourse and U.S.-sponsored agreements. The very project that championed preventing Israel from imposing its terms has left Lebanon to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal and the future of Hezbollah’s arsenal from a position of extreme weakness.
Unintended Consequences in the Gulf
Tehran entered the U.S.-Israeli war with significant diplomatic capital with the Gulf states. It had restored relations with Riyadh in 2023; Qatar served as a channel for de-escalation; the UAE as a commercial and financial gateway; Oman as an international mediator; Kuwait offered a discreet space for dialogue; and social and religious ties persisted with Bahrain despite political disagreements.
Yet as the conflict expanded, Iran bombarded Gulf nations, not distinguishing between adversaries, dialogue partners and mediators. It targeted energy, civilian and commercial facilities across the GCC and in Jordan, disregarding neutrality, mediation efforts and prior relationships.
The consequences ran directly against Iran’s interests. In September 2025, an Israeli strike on Hamas leaders in Doha, followed by Iranian attacks on Qatari energy facilities in 2026, all intensified the need for stronger security guarantees. The UAE and Bahrain had normalized ties with Israel as early as 2020, driven by factors including concerns over Iran. Subsequent Iranian attacks only reinforced this security-focused rationale. Longtime mediator Oman was targeted and threatened amidst the Strait of Hormuz crisis; Kuwait initiated talks to expand defense cooperation with Pakistan; Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement with Pakistan and Türkiye.
Iran could have leveraged its Gulf ties as an off-ramp, alleviating the blockade and opening channels for negotiation. Instead, it retaliated against its entire neighborhood, squandering that hard-won trust. It united states that had previously held differing assessments of the Iranian threat, driving them into new defensive alliances. This is not a policy of deterrence; it is a strategic blunder that shut the last open doors in Iran’s face.
This pattern is repeating in Yemen. Tehran sought to leverage the Houthis to control the Bab al-Mandab Strait at little cost. Yet Houthi attacks on shipping have transformed the Red Sea into an arena of international conflict, prompting Saudi Arabia to create a 14-nation maritime coalition and revive regional support for Yemen’s internationally recognized government. The Houthis now face intense isolation and military pressure. What Iran had intended as a bargaining chip is internationalizing the conflict.
This track record has yielded Iran zero tangible gains. Iran has demonstrated a vast capacity for manufacturing crises, yet it has failed to translate what it sees as a strategy into legitimate influence or lasting gains. It has conflated the proliferation of proxies and the expansion of state power with the disruption and control of corridors. Miscalculations are not an incidental feature of Iranian strategy: they are the strategy.
