The world is on the edge again as the regime in Tehran ponders its response to the assassination of the Hamas leader on Iranian soil presumably by Israeli agents. There is an ever-present possibility that Tehran will retaliate in a way that will unleash a wider war. However, as more time passes, the risk of a ‘war spasm’ as a reaction recedes. In any case, due to geographical, technological, and a host of other factors, Tehran’s options are limited to the repertoire we are already familiar with.
One option is to push its proxies across the region to escalate against Israel. In pursuit of its ideological aim to destroy Israel and a more pragmatic geostrategic goal of becoming a major regional power, Iran has perfected the art of war by proxy. A legion of militant groups – from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shiah militias in Iraq to Houthis in Yemen – have been cultivated for decades by providing arms, missile and drone technologies, operational planning and technical expertise, training, intelligence, and financial support.
Hezbollah in particular has become a very potent actor in possession of over 100 000 missiles, drones and rockets, with which it can overwhelm Israeli air defences, as well as tens of thousands of seasoned fighters with experience from the war in Syria. If Israel were to neutralise this threat, we would see a repetition of previous wars, in which Lebanon would be devastated again, as Hezbollah is deeply entrenched in the societal, economic, and governing structures of this basically failed state.
War through proxies used to confer some significant advantages on Tehran. It allowed Iran to overcome the constraints of geography and thus threaten Israel’s territory while limiting the costs of extending its reach across the entire Middle East. It also offered a veneer of deniability of its direct involvement that, at least to some degree, shielded Iran from a direct retaliation by Israel. But the latter has no longer been the case for quite some time, as both the US and Israel started targeting senior Iranian operatives in precision strikes – so far on foreign soil. For example, the US took out the commander of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad in 2020; this year, Israel hit a diplomatic compound housing the Iranian military advisors in Damascus.
Tehran’s response to the Damascus episode provided a template for a new way of seeking to harm Israel – direct ballistic and cruise missile and long-range drone strikes from Iran itself rather than just from proxies. The attack of April 2024 heralded the removal of an important self-constraint in the Iranian strategy that upped the ante in the game of coercion and counter-coercion in the Middle East. If scaled up and extended in time, such attacks can indeed overstretch Israeli and allied resources and eventually begin causing significant damage and disruption to the functioning of the Israeli state and society.
But the Iranian actions in April failed to restore deterrence. Israel had no qualms about further prosecuting its campaign of assassinating its enemies, including on Iranian soil. And there are limits to how far Iran can go in this direct approach, as Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons will inevitably induce caution about the pain threshold beyond which Israel may decide enough is enough. As long as Iran is unable to threaten nuclear annihilation in response, falling back on the war through proxies prevails as the most appealing and best-developed option. Saving the regime’s lost face and signalling to its proxies that it remains a credible patron and protector by launching another – more powerful and sustained – wave of direct attacks on Israel as a reply to the Hamas leader’s assassination is hardly worth the damage that Israel could inflict on Iran.
This calculus will shift again if the mullahs of Tehran decide to make a final dash for the nuclear bomb which is, by now, within a short reach after the international measures to prevent that have failed. This will, in itself, cause Israel to respond in ways we have not yet witnessed, as the threat to the Jewish state will become truly existential. The world would wake up with the Middle East being strategically a very different place in such a scenario.
Of course, Tehran can consider some other possibilities, from launching a targeted assassination campaign against Israeli officials or sponsoring terrorist attacks against Israel-related targets worldwide to enacting the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has occasionally uttered this threat in the past (and developed missile speedboat capabilities to that effect) to choke off oil and LNG traffic from the Gulf states to the world markets and thus force various powers to heavily lean on Israel. But most of those options are either too difficult, too weak, or with too many risks and downsides. Especially if one compares them to what Iran has readily available at hand in the form of escalating its indirect war through proxies.
This is not to say that such an escalation is easy to handle or is not fraught with risks of a major inter-state war that sucks in various states – from Syria and Turkey to the Gulf states, not to mention the US and some European powers. Proxies still possess the mind of their own, while wars have the logic that pushes to the extremes. For us, it is important to understand that one of the main beneficiaries of the Middle East region falling off the cliff will be Russia. In such a scenario, Western attention and ability to assist Ukraine will be greatly diminished, the oil prices will go through the roof, and Moscow will gleefully stoke societal divisions over the West’s role in such a war. Caught off guard by the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk, Putin must be keen on the Middle East to sink into the quicksand of a wider war, even if that means fewer Shahed drones available to torment Ukraine.
This article was written for Äripäev. Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).