The Remarkable Collapse of Iran’s Powerful Alliances

For forty-five years, Tehran’s Shiite theocracy has heralded its political system as a model for all predominantly Muslim countries—and even beyond. “We should try hard to export our revolution,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared, in 1980, after ousting the last of several Iranian monarchies that had endured for two millennia. “We shall confront the world with our ideology.” It was the core of his government’s strategy to overtly and covertly build a network of allies—dubbed the Axis of Resistance—to serve as frontline buffers against Israel, its regional rival.

In 2004, I interviewed King Abdullah II, the Sunni leader of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty, who warned about an emerging “crescent” of Shiite powers that began in Iran and extended through Iraq, into Syria, and ended in Lebanon. The Middle East—dominated for centuries by Sunni monarchies, tribal sheikdoms, and autocracies—was being transformed by this Shiite arc, he told me. The rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites, who are a minority in the Muslim world, dates back to a dispute over political leadership after the Prophet Muhammad died, in the seventh century. It intensified after Iran’s Revolution.

The international story of this year may be the collapse of Iran’s alliances. In Syria, the sadistic Assad dynasty, in power for more than a half century, has been ousted by Sunni rebels. (The Assads are members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of early Shiite Islam.) As the rebels advanced on Damascus, Tehran abruptly pulled out its Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitary forces, which had been deployed to prop up President Bashar al-Assad. “Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian Army,” the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps told Iranian media. “Is it logical for the I.R.G.C. and Basij forces to take on full responsibility while Syria’s Army merely observes?” Several Iranian generals have been killed in Syria since 2014, the most recent one in November. Tehran also shuttered its Embassy and evacuated four thousand citizens on emergency flights.

The Iranians “certainly weren’t willing or able to come to Assad’s rescue,” John Kirby, the White House national-security communications adviser, told me. “And in the aftermath of his departure, it’s clear to us that they are reëvaluating—I think is the best way to put it—their presence in Syria.”

In Lebanon, the Shiite leader and military commanders of Hezbollah—the Iranian-backed party responsible for huge suicide bombings and the imprisonment of dozens of hostages spanning four decades—have been assassinated in Israeli air strikes. Hezbollah, too, withdrew its forces from Syria, and conceded that the rebel offensive there cut off routes to smuggle war matériel from Iran. In Gaza, Hamas, which has ruled the territory for eighteen years, has been decimated, and its leader killed. And in Yemen, the Houthi rebels, another Iranian ally, have been pounded in air strikes by a U.S.-led coalition in response to their attacks on ships in the Red Sea. (Houthis are Zaidi Muslims, another early Shiite offshoot, and have long been opposed by the Sunni monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.)

At home, far fewer Iranians seem interested in rallying around the regime’s triumphalist imperative to “confront the world.” “The average citizen is not unhappy about what has happened in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza,” Nasser Hadian, a political scientist in Tehran, told me. “Hawks think the resistance should continue. But the average citizen thinks it is over and is happy about it. The power of the Axis of Resistance has been tremendously diminished. Reformists think it’s no longer an important source of our deterrence.” Many Iranians fear that the Syrian upheaval will generate chaos—at a potential cost to them if Tehran continues to aid and abet its allies. “We will be in a mess,” Hadian added. “We should leave it. Let the Americans, Europeans, and regional countries deal with it.”

The Islamic Republic is increasingly consumed by domestic challenges. The oil-rich nation is suffering through chronic fuel and electricity shortages. Power cuts have led to repeated closures of schools, government offices, and banks. The country’s oil exports, crimped if not crippled by U.S. sanctions, have plummeted, falling twenty-five per cent short of Tehran’s official budgetary needs. After Assad left Syria, Iran’s currency sank to a record low; the exchange rate is almost eight hundred thousand rials to a dollar. (A month after the Revolution, in 1979, the rial traded at seventy-five to a dollar.) Since 2017, sporadic protests have challenged the theocracy over soaring prices of basic necessities, repression and imprisonment of dissidents, and women’s personal rights. The regime is weaker—on multiple fronts—than any time since Khomeini’s ambitious speech.

At the same time, the loss of regional partners has made Iranians feel more vulnerable. Debate is now intense both within the government and in the public sphere about whether the country should escalate work on its controversial nuclear program. Tehran claims the program is for alternative energy, but it already has an amount of enriched uranium that goes beyond “any credible civilian justification,” Britain, France, and Germany charged recently. Iran could produce more than a dozen nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence reported last month, although it will still need other sophisticated technology if it opts to do so. “I have had a hard time convincing students that the bomb will not enhance our security and will increase our vulnerability,” Hadian, who taught at the University of Tehran for decades, said. “They think we deserve it because we are a great global power—and a great power has nuclear weapons. That was true in the Shah’s time and will be the case in the future, too.”

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has noted that public statements from Iranian officials have changed in the past few months, amid strategic setbacks, and that this raises new questions about a shift in their official doctrine. “The thing about foreign policy and geopolitics is that, when good things happen, often bad things follow,” he said, this week, at the 92nd Street Y. “An adversary that has suffered blows that weaken it obviously presents—we could say, that’s a good-news story. But it also generates choices for that adversary that can be quite dangerous, and that’s something we have to remain extremely vigilant about as we go forward.”

Across the Middle East, the strategic landscape has been transformed this year by physical destruction, death, political vacuums, and poverty. Uncertainty pervades. “Certainly, 2025 will be a problematic year,” Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister, who is now a vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Amman, told me. “Syria should teach the Arab world two things. First, the Arab Spring is not over and won’t be over until the problems of the region—economic prosperity and political inclusion—are properly addressed. Second, those who live by the sword die by the sword. Stability cannot be maintained by brute force.”

Political dangers loom for Syria in the months ahead, and could affect its neighbors in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel. The rebel victory sounded the death knell for the Baath Party, which was founded in 1943, in Damascus, as a socialist movement meant to unify more than twenty Arab countries. Its slogan was “A single Arab nation with an eternal mission.” Branches reigned in Syria for sixty-one years and in Iraq for thirty-five, until Saddam Hussein was ousted, in 2003. The armies that propped up both Baathist regimes crumbled, in the end, with breathtaking speed.

A recent study, conducted by political scientists from Georgetown, the University of Virginia, and Emory, analyzed governments created by successful rebellions between 1900 and 2020. The paper concluded that authoritarian regimes founded by fractured rebel groups were usually short-lived, as armed rivals defected and staged new rebellions. The regimes that survived were generally founded by a single rebel group. Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011, involved several militias. Five parties have claimed territory since Assad fled. “What is so critical in Syria is that we see a credible and inclusive political process that brings together all of Syria, all communities in Syria,” the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, has stressed. “We need to make sure that state institutions do not collapse.”

The scale of destruction across the region this year has been horrific, and the death toll staggering. None of the local economies will be able to absorb the shocks anytime soon. According to World Bank estimates, seven out of ten people in Syria live in poverty. The economy has shrunk by eighty-five per cent during the civil war. Lebanon has incurred more than eight billion dollars in physical damages and economic losses. The economy in Gaza has contracted by ninety per cent; it will take until 2050 to get the G.D.P. back to prewar levels. The World Food Programme reported this month that the territory is headed toward famine.

Governments in the region and beyond have been struggling over what to do, whether individually or with one another. Within a week of Assad’s ouster, many reversed their policies. On December 14th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the U.S. had been in touch with Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist militia that led the offensive, and which is still on the U.S. terrorism list. “Syria has changed more in less than a week than in any week this last half century,” Blinken told reporters. Turkey reopened its Embassy in Damascus, more than a decade after it severed diplomatic ties as the civil war escalated. In Aqaba, the Jordanian port city, a hastily convened conference of U.S., U.N., European, and Middle Eastern officials declared that Syria had the opportunity to end decades of isolation. They committed to “supporting and working with” the Syrian people during their “unprecedented transition”—notably without Iran. ♦