Iran Can’t Afford a Regional War

Leaders in Tehran can either seize the diplomatic opportunity—or face a potential threat to their own power.

By Alex Vatanka

As the Israel-Hamas war rages on, Iran’s role will continue to be a pivotal question. While Tehran no doubt feels vindicated in its model of armed campaign against Israel, it will likely not seek escalation by confronting Israel and the United States militarily. Instead, Iranian officials seem to consider the war as a moment to elevate Tehran’s image in the Islamic world—and in the global south generally.

In this sense, Iran is faced with an opportunity. During the last decade, the Iran-led so-called Axis of Resistance took a major hit in the Islamic world as Tehran rescued the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria from a popular uprising. Now, by capitalizing on the Palestinian cause, Tehran is looking to rehabilitate its image among Muslims globally.

What Iran wants now is not a regional war but rather to undercut Israel—and more importantly, the United States—on the diplomatic front. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been blunt in conveying two key messages: that the United States is complicit in Israel’s war against Hamas and that Islamic countries should cut ties with Israel. To this end, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, on visit to Turkey this week, called for a Muslim economic boycott of Israel. If Tehran manages to come out of this latest round of conflict diplomatically stronger, then the regime might even have a better chance at solving its key foreign-policy challenge: namely, a final resolution of the decades-long nuclear standoff with the West and the lifting of the hugely costly sanctions regime put on Iran as a result.

The reason why Iran is far less certain to act kinetically is not only to do with its doubts, still significant, regarding its military preparedness to confront Israel and the United States. It is also because the concept of the Axis of Resistance—and with it, Tehran’s regional game plan—is resented by the Iranian public. If leaders in Tehran overplay their hands in this latest regional war, they face a potential threat to domestic political balance of power. Khamenei and the bosses in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have no choice but to factor public opinion into their calculations as Iran decides its next move in the Israel-Hamas war.

At the heart of Iran’s role in this latest crisis in the Middle East is its patronage of the Axis of Resistance. This slogan refers to Iran’s proxy warfare strategy, which has evolved since the early years of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, of using regional nonstate militant groups to further the state’s aims. 

This project began with the Quds Force, the expeditionary branch of the IRGC. Under the leadership of Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force would in time become the command center of a multibranch regional web of militant groups. What would make the Quds Force stand out was its use of Shiite Islamist rallying cries, but it always kept the door open to Sunni Islamist militants such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. To appeal to the latter group and expand its power base, Tehran’s core message was one of urging a unified front to combat the U.S. presence in the Islamic world and for an armed campaign against Israel.

The official narrative in Tehran is that Washington’s decision to assassinate Suleimani in January 2020 was designed to decapitate Iran’s strategy of proxy warfare against the United States and Israel in the Middle East and that the Americans failed in this mission while Iran stayed the course. Tehran is, after all, still the éminence grise in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen even as Suleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, is hardly a spellbinding figure. But Iran’s Axis of Resistance model has faced its own limitations, both as a concept and as a practical remedy to everyday problems.

On a conceptual level, the Abraham Accords and the idea of integrating Israel into the regional fabric as a path to peace has been a serious test for Tehran since the accords were first struck in 2020. Meanwhile, the fact that those countries in Iran’s zone of influence are all suffering from one form of political or economic malady suggests that Tehran’s capacity to turn security turmoil into sustained stability is, at best, a case yet to be proved. Just ask Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, or Yemenis.

In the midst of this regional introspection, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Tehran’s fundamental stance has been hard to miss. Khamenei welcomed the attack, but he also strongly pressed the point that this was a Hamas operation and Iran had no involvement in it.

Given Tehran’s years of military and financial support for Hamas, Khamenei’s claim could at best be a half-truth: Iran had no direct hand in the Oct. 7 attack, as far as we know, but Tehran’s role as an enabler is beyond dispute. One just has to listen to Hamas’s repeated public thanks to Iran over the years.

For now, though, the Iranian regime is interested not in a military entanglement but scoring diplomatic points. Talk by Iranian officials of creating an “Islamic army” to confront Israel or an economic boycott of it are just catchy sound bites and nothing more. 

These are aimed at putting Tehran back in as a regional kingpin since its rescue of the Assad regime. The Iranians are elated that U.S. and Western support for Israel has gone down badly in the Islamic world and much of the global south. The Western stance is described as one-sided, which Tehran claims repudiates any future Western assertations about defending such novel ideals as human rights, rule of law, or a just international order. In this mission, Iran’s most important fellow travelers are China and Russia, which are equally excited about undermining Western powers in the Middle Eastern theater.

Khamenei has often predicted Israel’s end—as in 2015, when he pontificated that Israel will disappear in 25 years—but he has maintained that it will be at the hands of the Palestinians or the Israelis themselves, not Iranians. Besides, no one seriously thinks Israel is on the edge of collapse now. Is it any wonder that the 84-year-old Khamenei is not willing to risk the survival of his regime—which is at the cusp of a power transition—by taking a historic gamble and entering the war, even if it is unprecedented in terms of its magnitude? But while Khamenei’s basic choice is clear, there is still much trepidation in Tehran that hubris might get the better of him as the Israel-Hamas war endures. 

Both the so-called hard-liners and moderates in the regime welcome the Hamas attack as a major blow to Israel’s image of invincibility, but the moderates still fear that hard-liners can inadvertently drag the country to war. 

The Israeli press has reported that Qaani has spent much of his time in Beirut in the last three weeks consulting with Hezbollah leadership about the possibility of widening the war. Meanwhile, beside Hezbollah potshots from the north, Iran-backed Houthis have launched missile attacks on Israel from the south