Photo-illustrations by Alex Merto
Shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the United States Institute of Peace held an event in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Middle East’s delicate prospects. Panelists suggested ever more intricate ways to give regional peace a chance, until the neoconservative Michael Ledeen spoke out heretically. “You have heard the case for peace,” he said. “I rise to speak on behalf of war.” He said that the conflict, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and killed perhaps a million people, had been “a good war.” And he said that any “peace” between the United States and a government as malevolent as Iran’s would be a sham, and a prelude to more war. Peace is what happens “when one side imposes conditions on another,” Ledeen told me in 2013. He said it is not enough for both sides to stop fighting. One of them must lose. Ledeen died in May, well into his fifth decade of arguing against peace, or at least a sham peace, with Iran.
War had its chance just weeks later. On June 13, Israel assassinated high-ranking Iranian officials and neutralized Iranian air defenses. During the next 12 days, Israel and Iran traded missile strikes. About 1,000 Iranians and dozens of Israelis died. Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” its federation of militias and other allies, did not show up to fight. On June 22, the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear sites and declared the conflict over. The Trump administration said that the country’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” but no public evidence has confirmed that claim. Ledeen, if he were alive, would no doubt note that at the end of the war, Iran did not accept any cease-fire conditions. In fact, Iran’s official position is that it never accepted a cease-fire at all.
Now that talk of what happens after war is back, I rise to make the case for déjà vu. The region risks reverting to its default setting, which is peace that has characteristics of war, with Iran planning to attack its enemies but not actively doing so, and vice versa. “This is a regime on its last legs, but it could last like that for another 20 years,” Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told me. “They took a blow, but I see no signs that it’s ready to fall.” In the past, Iran has recovered from its tribulations by revising its strategy and finding novel ways to subvert the United States, Israel, and their interests. It should be expected to recover once more.
Even before the Axis of Resistance turned out to be an Axis of No-Shows, the Islamic Republic had suffered humiliating defeats: bombings and assassinations inside Iran itself; the decimation of Hezbollah, its most sophisticated proxy; the slow and bloody dismantling of another proxy, Hamas; the collapse of its main state ally, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. In December, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said that his country’s predicament reminded him of the absolute nadir of the Islamic Republic, which was the Iran-Iraq War. He noted for his audience members that few of them were alive—but he was—when Iraqi warplanes bombed Tehran.
“I was giving a speech at a factory near Tehran’s airport,” Khamenei reminisced, in an especially portentous installment of Imam Story Hour. “I saw an Iraqi plane descending, dropping its bombs on the airport and then flying away. We have witnessed these things.” He said the belief that these difficult moments were setbacks was mistaken. He spoke optimistically of Iran’s allies. “The Resistance Front is not a piece of hardware that can be broken, dismantled, or destroyed,” he said. “It doesn’t weaken under pressure; it also becomes stronger.”
Some of this was bluster. Khamenei could hardly have delivered a speech acknowledging that the double act of Great and Little Satan had won. But his rendition of the history of the Axis of Resistance—from its birth out of necessity, to its success, to its present adversities—is largely accurate. In the past year, I visited several countries where Iran has made inventive use of its limited resources. The trip was a survey of destruction and dismay. The Axis, which bought Iran 20 years of survival and “peace,” wrecked the places where it operated. This wreckage was intentional. Iran prefers weak allies over strong ones, and corrupt and corruptible governments over ones that respond to their citizens’ needs.
The purpose of Iran is Shiite theocracy, for its own sake and as a counterweight to democratic, secular, and Sunni governments allied with the United States in the region. Khamenei has made the argument to his own people that the Islamic Republic is an anti-fragile empire. It gets closer to its purpose and stronger when attacked and should therefore be patient and steadfast, focusing on surviving to learn from its failures. To Iran’s enemies, he has inadvertently made the opposite argument: that defeating Iran means vigorously prosecuting the war now, giving no chance for Iran to survive, and finally imposing a peace that will last.
The Axis of Resistance is a simple concept: a network of armed friends of Iran, spread across the region and on call to fight against Iran’s enemies. As of mid-2024, this network was a cordon around the country itself, a line of what Iran called “forward defense” that kept its enemies busy hundreds of miles away from Iran’s own border. Its main members were Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthi de facto government in Yemen, the Alawite government of Syria, and Hamas in Gaza. Iran, by far the world’s largest Shiite-majority country, encouraged these groups—mostly Shiite minorities—by scouting them, nurturing the most promising, and building trust and fellow feeling. Iran’s leaders and allies spoke of a “unity of the arenas.” Any attack against one could draw retribution by another, somewhere far away.
For years, members of the Axis armed themselves and conducted regular harassment operations—for example, rocket attacks against Israel and American bases in Iraq. Before Israel began a counterattack against Hezbollah in September 2024, this strategy was reckoned brilliant by Iran’s supporters and adversaries alike. A U.S. diplomat had told me the month before that “the Iranian strategy works to this day.” He said time was on Iran’s side. “I suspect we’ll be out of the region before they’re out of business.” One Lebanese Shiite politician told me that the United States and Israel should stop being such sore losers. “Don’t blame Iran,” he said. His voice was pitying and patient, like a peewee-soccer coach imparting a lesson of sportsmanship. “If we play, you lose the ball, and I shoot, I score, it’s your mistake,” he said. “Move on.”
Within a matter of months, the Axis line of defense had been broken. Only the Houthis remain more or less intact, and indeed resilient against Israeli and American retaliation.
Although the Axis is in shambles now, it was no failure. It dictated the terms of Middle East geopolitics for 20 years and allowed a poor, isolated nation, run by partisans of a small religious sect, to keep stronger and richer countries scrambling, spending billions of dollars just to maintain a status quo in which those countries were periodically peppered with rockets and drone attacks.
The strategy was thrust upon the Islamic Republic after others failed. Directly after its 1979 revolution, Iran busied itself with internal enemies. It labored mightily to suppress and, when convenient, murder those reluctant to support the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1980, when Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, seized oil fields on the Iranian border, under the assumption that Iran was too distracted to object, Iran saw an opportunity to pivot to fighting external enemies. Far from letting Iraq take its land, Iran fought back and recovered its territory within two years. Saddam sued for peace, but Iran rejected him and opted to turn the war into a death match. It lasted for the next six years. The United States and other Western powers were delighted to watch both countries suffer. Sunni monarchies propped up Iraq when it looked ready to collapse. The war prompted the most reptilian of Henry Kissinger’s quips: “It’s a pity,” he reportedly said, “they can’t both lose.”
But they did both lose, and badly. One would have to look back to Passchendaele, the Somme, or Stalingrad to find a similarly pointless churn of death at this scale. Iraq used chemical weapons and other outré methods of killing, such as putting electrified cables into bogs and zapping Iranian infantrymen as they waded through. (“We are frying them like eggplants,” an Iraqi officer told the Los Angeles Times in 1984.) Iran deployed human-wave attacks and recruited child soldiers as human minesweepers. In his book about the war, the scholar Efraim Karsh quotes an Iraqi officer who faced an Iranian human wave:
They chant “Allahu Akbar” and they keep coming, and we keep shooting, sweeping our 50 millimetre machine guns around like sickles. My men are eighteen, nineteen, just a few years older than these kids. I’ve seen them crying, and at times the officers have had to kick them back to their guns. Once we had Iranian kids on bikes cycling towards us, and my men all started laughing, and then these kids started lobbing their hand grenades and we stopped laughing and started shooting.
The war ended in 1988 without strategic gain for either side. Both were exhausted. Khomeini died in 1989. A 49-year-old minor cleric named Ali Khamenei succeeded him as leader of an Islamic Republic that was a mutilated shadow of its revolutionary self.
Virtually all of Iran’s recent military leaders, including the architect of the Axis of Resistance, General Qassem Soleimani, fought in the Iran-Iraq War and learned its main lesson: not to do that again. Big wars are catastrophic. After this miserable experience, Iran spent the 1990s and early 2000s like a sailor in port: wandering, getting in trouble, never quite mustering long-term planning or vision. Because it had an international reputation as mad, bad, and dangerous, it had little choice but to innovate. “The Iranians took a good, hard look at themselves,” a former U.S. intelligence official told me. “They said: We’ve got no technology. We have no friends. We don’t have money. They said, We need an unconventional approach.”
That approach originated in Lebanon. In 1982, several years into the Lebanese civil war, Israel invaded Lebanon to dismantle the Palestine Liberation Organization, then headquartered in Beirut. Iran trained and supported Hezbollah to counter Israel, the United States, and the Sunni and Christian Lebanese militias. No party in the war was blameless, but Hezbollah distinguished itself by outright rejecting norms of war and diplomacy. It took hostages and tortured them. It attacked embassies and civilians, inside and outside the country. It pioneered the use of suicide bombs. In 1983, a Hezbollah operative blew up 241 American soldiers and Marines in their barracks next to Beirut International Airport. The bomber is said to have been grinning as he sped past the checkpoint and crashed into the building.
Hezbollah was built to fight. In 1989, when all other Lebanese groups agreed to give up arms and become political entities, Hezbollah remained armed so that it could continue fighting Israel. Hezbollah persisted until Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000—a moment of celebration and vindication for Hezbollah, and for Iran, a sign that the Hezbollah model held promise elsewhere. Hezbollah took advantage of its win to dig tunnels and stockpile missiles for the sole purpose of attacking Israel. Iran now had a seasoned fighting force, assembled at minimal cost out of Arab Shiite volunteers, with nary an Iranian among them to be shot or electrocuted on the battlefield. When Hezbollah killed Americans and Israelis, it received little in the way of punishment or retribution. It drove out enemy invaders, and it held its own against Israel in a monthlong war in 2006. Later, when Syria looked ready to fall to Sunni jihadists, Hezbollah answered the call and crossed the border to terrorize the population and keep the Assad regime in power.
The Hezbollah model followed a three-step recipe: create a proxy; arm it to fight by any means necessary; wait for it to outlast the enemy. An alternative to creating a proxy is finding one. Because the Middle East is rife with hostility toward America as well as domestic governments, Iran found these friends easily. An Axis member could flourish as long as there was a vacuum of responsibility, where no competent government was present to discipline it. Acute chaos helped, allowing Iran to provide guns and training. Most but not all of the proxies were Shiite. Hamas, for example, is Sunni, and the Houthis of Yemen and Alawites of Syria practice forms of Shiism distinct from Iran’s. The phrase Axis of Resistance was coined by a Libyan journalist in 2002, as an alternative to the “Axis of Evil” tag applied by President George W. Bush to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea that same year. Soon, Iranians were using it themselves.
Just as Iran needed Israel’s occupation of Lebanon to cultivate Hezbollah, it needed the U.S. occupation of Iraq to fertilize and grow Axis partners there. Iran did not initially welcome the 2003 invasion. Its first response was to put its entire nuclear program on ice, almost certainly out of fear that it would be invaded next. The early months of the U.S. occupation of Iraq went well compared with the years that followed, in part because the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was then—and continues to be, at the age of 95—a sort of anti-Khomeini, at least in his attitude toward the role of religious scholars in politics. He prefers to influence politics from a distance rather than seize the state and rule directly. U.S. officials figured out how lucky they were that al-Sistani differed from Khomeini in this regard, and eventually they went to great lengths to seek his favor and refer to him by honorifics (“his Eminence,” “Sayyid”) they would not bother applying to other clerics.
Al-Sistani’s patience during the early months of the occupation kept Iraqi Shia from zealously fighting the Americans. Iraqi Sunnis were resisting but without great effect. The Americans’ success was frustrating to Iran’s high echelons. Finally, in 2004, they did something about it, by intervening the only way that seemed to work: by Lebanonizing the fight. Find a proxy; arm it; let it fight so you don’t have to. Iraq became proof that the model would work across the region, with Hezbollah serially midwifing the proxies that Iran sired.
By February 2004, two non-Iraqi figures were quietly turning Iraq’s Shia against the occupation and preparing them, militarily, to inflict pain on the Americans. The first was Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. The second was the most wanted Shiite jihadist in the world: Imad Mughniyeh, the military chief of Hezbollah. Both men would eventually die violently at the hands of the United States and Israel. But until then, they managed to undermine those enemies’ interests, at minimal cost.
Because Iraq’s al-Sistani would not militarize his followers, Iran went mullah shopping and found another more inclined to do so. That ornery cleric was Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a grand ayatollah assassinated almost certainly by Saddam’s order in 1999. The position of ayatollah is not hereditary: Clerics tend to be graybeards who have distinguished themselves through scholarship. Al-Sadr, who was 29 at the time of the invasion, instead distinguished himself through resistance.
He visited Iran for the first time in 2003 and met with Supreme Leader Khamenei. In the months after his return, he mobilized his followers into a militia, the Mahdi Army. By early 2004, the Mahdi Army was in an all-out war with the Americans in the streets of Najaf. The United States was better armed and trained. But the very fact that the battle was taking place was ominous for the U.S. and its allies, and al-Sadr cut a worrisome contrast to the American commanders. He was young and tubby. The American failure to neutralize this preachy butterball suggested serious limits to the occupying force’s control of the situation. At a press conference, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, announced that his objective in Najaf was “to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.” One could not help but notice, though, that al-Sadr delivered sermons before crowds, whereas Sanchez, during his press conference, appeared to be hiding in a bunker somewhere.
For the next few years, the Mahdi Army and the Iranians shared a goal: to bleed the American occupiers. Iraq had plenty of small arms and ammunition, which could kill Americans but would often plink harmlessly off their armored vehicles. As the occupation wore on, the Iraqis became proficient at building roadside bombs in basements, garages, and other insurgent test kitchens spread across Baghdad and Anbar. The Iranian contribution was leveraging the R&D from elsewhere in Iran’s area of operations—chiefly Lebanon—and multiplying the Iraqis’ lethality. The key Iranian ingredient was explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). Instead of blasting in all directions, like a primitive roadside bomb, an EFP directs and concentrates the force of its explosion. It forms a molten metal blob and fires it like a cannon. The United States estimates that at least 603 of the approximately 3,500 American soldiers killed in combat in Iraq were victims of Shiite militias. Many more were maimed, and almost all the carnage was the direct and intended result of Iran’s nascent Axis.
Success in Iraq gave Iran confidence to try the same model elsewhere. In Syria, it had a state partner, led by Assad, and when Assad’s grip began slipping in 2011, at the onset of the Syrian civil war, Iran at first sent its own soldiers—Iranians, in uniform—to help put down the Sunni and American-backed uprisings. But the real force deployed to keep Assad in place was Lebanese. Hezbollah, its hands relatively idle since 2000, showed up and crushed rebels. Iraqi Shiite militias, idle after the end of the American occupation there, appeared too, and, in tandem with Russian mercenaries, kept Syria in a grim stalemate. By 2018, Assad had control of Damascus and Aleppo, and the rebels were confined to a jihadist ministate in Idlib.
Emboldened, Iran began reviving or confecting proxy forces in yet more locations. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it found fellow Shia eager to overthrow Sunni monarchies. In Yemen, it found a remarkable, and remarkably weird, partner in the Houthis. The Houthis are led by a family of clerical megalomaniacs who have been prophesying apocalyptic war since the early 2000s. With Iran’s and Hezbollah’s assistance, they managed to kick out Yemen’s Saudi-backed government and get into a long-distance shooting war with the United States and Israel. The Houthis’ success is due in part to the rock-bottom price they place on human life (including their own), and in part to the sophisticated weaponry they have received from Iran. In late 2023, they fired anti-ship ballistic missiles at commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea. They were the first such missiles fired in anger in the history of the world.
By the mid-2010s, these proxies were connecting, networking, sharing plans and technical knowledge, and operating in sync. Iran had made its own army redundant, and assembled a more agile and creative alternative in its place. “Suddenly, they have this whole keyboard to play a tune, instead of just one or two notes,” the former U.S. intelligence official told me. The polyphony of proxy groups could now harmonize and syncopate so that the United States and its allies would always be offbeat.
The sentinels of conventional wisdom settled on the view that the Iraq invasion was one of the great own goals of American foreign policy, and that its beneficiary was Iran. “The Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine,” the New York Times editorial board declared in 2006.
Those fortunes were made and squandered rapidly—Iran went from bereft during the Iran-Iraq War, to unbeatable two decades later, to resoundingly beaten a little less than two decades after that. But the Axis was guaranteed to fail, and the signs of that failure were visible long before the Axis started wobbling. No country in the region has wobbled more vertiginously than Lebanon, and no country has had a longer history of Iran’s sustained attention. Those distinctions are not coincidental. In the summer of 2024, I met the historian Makram Rabah in his office at the American University of Beirut. He likened Hezbollah to “Iran’s strategic consultants—the proxies’ brain, the force that gets them running,” a jihadist McKinsey that multiplies the Iranian proxies’ power. He said Hezbollah’s brilliance in this endeavor came at the expense of its competence at any task that might make Lebanon a functional democratic state.
“Hezbollah is a parasite that kills its host,” Rabah told me. A group that exists only to fight, and prepare to fight, develops weaknesses and limitations, because it never learns to do anything else. That leaves it friendless, brittle, and uncreative—and, paradoxically, that leaves it vulnerable when fighting, too. Hezbollah, Rabah said, never sought conversion into a strong, durable political force, because it was never meant to be that. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, he said, the group had treated Lebanon as a base and traveled the region on a series of bloody adventures, while growing less interested in its home country. “Domestic politics became a nuisance for Hezbollah,” Rabah said. He compared Hezbollah unfavorably to its Shiite Lebanese cousin, Amal, which disarmed after the civil war and set to work learning the dark arts of politics: backroom dealing, parliamentary maneuvering, and plundering a system rife with old-fashioned corruption within an acceptable range. The Hezbollah members “who try to be politicians are all actually intelligence people or military people,” Rabah said. “They’re all Sparta, no Athens.”
“Other political parties have taken up arms in Lebanon because they wanted a better seat at the table,” he said. “But Hezbollah never cared about having a state of their own. Lebanon became a shell for them, something to protect them while they fought abroad.” Fighting abroad overextended Hezbollah. And because its soldiers used phones and posted images online, the Israelis were able to map out the whole group. Ultimately, they became a regional problem instead of a local one. “They grew into a beast that couldn’t be brought back into the barn,” Rabah said.
That Lebanon is a catastrophe is beyond dispute. Parts of Beirut seem to have been written off, after a series of disasters even a minimally competent government could have averted. In 2020, the Port of Beirut exploded when a 2,750-ton pile of ammonium nitrate caught fire in a warehouse. It normally takes a nuclear blast for a city to be so suddenly and awesomely ripped apart by a percussion wave. In downtown Beirut, one can still see windows blown out and buildings uninhabited. In 2019, Lebanese depositors discovered that their banking system had, in effect, just been kidding about those savings accounts. The money was gone. The Lebanese pound lost nearly all its value, and nowadays if you fly into Beirut, once a center of banking, it’s wise to strap foreign currency to your body, like a drug mule. The biggest advertising billboard I saw in downtown Beirut was for a service that will help you get a second passport.
What the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman once called the “Pottery Barn rule”—you break it, you own it—has an analogue in civil conflict: If you have the guns, you have the responsibility. And Hezbollah, as the most heavily armed and violent element of Lebanon’s menagerie of factions and sects, wanted the guns without the responsibility. With adventures to be had in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and patrons to please in Tehran, Hezbollah had little time left over (let alone inclination) to build up the country it purported to defend.
I spoke with Fouad Siniora, a former prime minister of Lebanon, who said that Iran’s backing of Hezbollah had unbalanced the country’s system, which was set up to make sure that all the largest sects—Christians, Sunnis, Shia, Druze—have power. But when one faction is supercharged by support from overseas, the balance is lost, and, with it, the ability to govern. “In a democracy, you have a majority that rules and an unmarginalized opposition that actually wants to get rid of the majority” by winning elections, he told me. What could never work, he said, is a system where the government coexists forever with a shadow entity lacking democratic intentions. He quoted the Quran, which says that only one God exists, because if there were multiple gods, all would be ruined. There can be only one government, one leader. That is true of a state, of a family, of a company, Siniora said. Or as his father used to say, two captains “will sink the ship.”
As a tool for threatening Israel, however, Hezbollah for almost a quarter century had no real rivals. It was Iran’s key instrument for deterrence and punishment: If you touch us, we will use Hezbollah to touch you. The end of that era came slowly, through the pathetic collapse of Syria and Lebanon as functioning states, and then quickly, when Israel began touching Hezbollah in unexpected places.
In September 2024, Israel blew up the group’s pagers, causing gruesome injuries as the devices detonated in Hezbollah operatives’ pockets. The Quran says that God is closer to a man than his jugular vein. The pager operation showed that Israel was only a few inches away from Hezbollah’s femoral artery. Devastating pinpoint strikes showed that Israel had near-complete knowledge of the group’s structure, whereabouts, and leadership. Israel then invaded and occupied southern Lebanon again. Its incursion ended with an agreement between Israel and the Lebanese government that was humiliating for Hezbollah and Lebanon. The Lebanese government affirmed that it would keep southern Lebanon free of military buildup by Hezbollah, and Israel reserved its right to defend itself. Because Israel had never conceived of its attacks on Hezbollah as a war of aggression in the first place, the assertion of this right amounted to a threat to return to Lebanon for further rounds of demolition. The deal was an embarrassment to Iran as well. Iran was supposed to defend its proxies, to reciprocate for their many years of fighting for Iran. Now Iran would not, or could not, protect them.
In parallel, Israel had begun dismantling Hamas. As of this writing, Israel has not finished doing so—and Hamas’s mere survival, after nearly two years of bombing and siege, is for the group’s stalwarts a victory in itself. But the ability to harass Israel and lob rockets at it in perpetuity has never been Iran’s main use of the group. Hamas’s real value to Iran is as a threat to the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank–based secular Arab autocracy seated in Ramallah, and by extension the secular Arab governments that are Iran’s other targets in the region.
If Hamas took over the West Bank (ejecting the Palestinian Authority, as it did in Gaza in 2007), it would establish a jihadist state on the border of Jordan, one of the closest regional allies of Israel and the United States. More than half the population of Jordan is of Palestinian descent, and the presence of Palestinian refugees is a persistent source of instability. A Hamas-controlled West Bank would threaten Jordan’s secular Sunni monarchy. The war in Gaza has not destroyed Hamas, but it has mortally wounded the version of Hamas that could have served this purpose for Iran. Hamas lives, but Hamas as a strategic asset for Iran is dead.
The last of the proxy defeats was preordained. Syria’s regime could not survive without Hezbollah. Syria was like a dialysis patient: guaranteed to die if left to its own resources, but kept alive through costly intervention. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Iranian soldiers arrived to save Assad. Hezbollah and Iraqi militias reinforced the government further, and Russian soldiers joined them in 2015. But when Israel began escalating its own strikes against targets in Syria, even the Iranians left. Last year, when an army of erstwhile Sunni jihadists marched on Damascus, each of these saviors had more important chores to take care of: Hezbollah was depleted from fighting Israel; Russia was fighting Ukraine; Iraq’s Shiite militias mostly preferred to stay home; and Iran itself was gun-shy after its recent losses there. Syria’s military lacked the will to defend its cities, and Damascus fell just 10 days after the offensive began.
These defeats happened faster than anyone predicted. But Iran’s model decayed even in places where Israel and the United States had not attacked for some time. The most ironic is Iraq, given that Iraq was, after Lebanon, the site of Iran’s greatest success. Iran had the chance to install a government that would mimic its own theocracy. Shiite parties dominate Iraq’s politics, and Iraqi politicians who spent years during Saddam’s rule living in Iran have led Iraqi Shiite parties and served as prime minister. By 2008, Americans were withdrawing, and combat deaths were subsiding to their lowest level since the start of the occupation. Iran seemed to have won, and whether the next game was electoral or military, most observers assumed that Qassem Soleimani and the Iranian government would decide who would end up in charge and what they would do.
To the surprise of many Shiite factions who thought they had Soleimani’s support, they were both right and wrong: Iran had raised them all, and now rather than seeing any one of them dominate, it preferred for them all to fight. The internecine squabbling was immediate. The Mahdi Army controlled large parts of Basra. In 2008, it came under attack—not only by the Americans but also by Iraq’s Shiite-led government. The Iraqi prime minister at the time, Nuri al-Maliki, was a Shiite sectarian with close ties to Iran, and many of his fellow Shia thought he could be relied on to listen to Iran’s wishes and find a way to avoid clashing with an Iranian proxy militia. But Iran did little to stop the fratricide. By custom, every subsequent Iraqi government has been Shiite-led. Many, including the present one, are beholden to Shiite militias with strong ties to Iran. The militias are powerful and, because of their control of smuggling and other criminal activity, profitable. They are also engaged in constant bickering over the spoils of illicit trade and corruption.
Not long ago, these militias’ tendency to bicker was mitigated by the deft orchestration of Soleimani. He had helped create and coordinate many of them, and sometimes played them off one another. After the United States killed him in a missile strike in 2020, the whole unruly gang of militias started pursuing their own interests. Many of the militias were incorporated into the Iraqi government in 2016, as the Popular Mobilization Forces. But rather than strengthen the Iraqi state, they have undermined it from within, by using their government privileges to streamline their corruption. “They use the PMF units to do things outside the government chain of command,” Hamdi Malik, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. In practice, PMF vehicles are exempt from investigation by any other Iraqi security services, as if they have diplomatic immunity from their own country’s police and customs agents. “They have total freedom of movement, and that’s why they can smuggle,” Malik added.
Baghdad, it must be said, is flourishing now. When I visited in August 2024, I was moved to see that city, which I had known only as a site of murder and oppression, beset by the comparatively venial sin of gentrification. I found freshly built shopping malls and cafés with the interchangeably chic aesthetic of Dubai or Miami, filled with men and women bearing all the signs of new wealth: makeup, tanklike SUVs, beach bodies. At a bakery, I bought a pastry that tasted awful, because it was gluten-free. Downtown, I ate a burger from a food truck and lingered over cold drinks, without wondering whether I should scram before someone decided to kidnap me and videotape my beheading.
On previous trips to Baghdad, I had wanted to visit Mutanabbi Street, a narrow lane of booksellers that terminates at one of the Arab world’s great remaining literary cafés. To stop there before would have been a risk—and indeed, in 2007, someone blew the whole place to bits, killing dozens. This time I browsed every bookstall, at leisure. The goods were odd. In English, I found copies of Assyrian histories, printed in England in the middle of the last century. In stock in Arabic were books by Margaret Atwood and Steve Harvey and Hitler. As a souvenir, I bought a recent translation of the Unabomber’s manifesto, and read it in the reopened literary café, over a hot tea.
Iraqis warned me that this new peace conceals rot. “It’s totally peaceful, and you can go anywhere,” Ali Mamouri, who advised Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi on strategic communications from 2020 to 2022, told me. But he said there is a “deep dark side.” The country’s large businesses, such as power companies, refineries, and financial institutions, still operate under the influence of the militias, he said. “You have to pay protection money to this or that militia.” I said that the protection seemed to be working, because the streets felt safe, and no one seemed afraid. “They get security,” he said. “But they mostly do not get the security from police, or from the government.” He said that the arrangement was going to be fatal for Iraq eventually, because the Mafias demanding protection money were a temporary measure, and they were at risk of descending into conflict in the streets. Iraq’s lasting prosperity demanded the building of a state.
I saw signs of that state-building. At an intersection in central Baghdad one morning, I noticed about 30 men dressed identically for what appeared to be a casting call for a Mesopotamian remake of Reservoir Dogs: cheap black suits, thin black ties, white shirts. They were, in fact, cadets—officers in training at the Ministry of Interior, a main organ of Iraqi state security.
But never far from the sites of state-building were signs of others undermining that same state. I thought of the ominous line from the poet Shelley: “I arise and unbuild it again.” In this case, the undermining agent occupied prime real estate just across from the Interior Ministry: an administrative headquarters for the PMF. It sprawled over a large block in central Baghdad. On the right, a state-building site; on the left, a site for unbuilding it, through the efforts of militias widely suspected of answering to another country’s government.
Within the PMF headquarters, the group’s leaders barely disguise the fact that their allegiances are split between Iraq and Iran. Photos of Khamenei and Soleimani are everywhere. The militias that make up the PMF have units that operate independently from the Iraqi state and are even more proudly sectarian and loyal to Iran. Some are listed by the Americans as terror groups. I spent an hour in a political office of one of the more extreme of these groups, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba. “Nujaba is quite simply the closest militia to Iran,” Malik said. “It is Iran’s military wing in Iraq. They get their commands directly from Tehran.” The friendly spokesperson, Hussein al-Musawi, compared his group’s fondness for Iran to the natural alliance, based on shared interests and values, between the United States and Israel. Look in the mirror, he said. “America and Israel have their alliance, and we have ours.” It was odd, though, that Iran had so many friends, and that even with such dominance, they could not come together to form a coherent government.
The reason for this incoherence, other Iraqis told me, is that incoherence has always been in Iran’s interest. If you were Khamenei, or Soleimani, and had spent your early life listening to Iraqi-bomber raids on Tehran, or reading reports of your countrymen being fried like eggplants by Iraqis, wouldn’t you be cautious about conjuring an Iraqi government as powerful as your own? Any tool that a Shiite government could build might become an American, Sunni, or Kurdish one, if power shifted. The safest course would be to force out the Americans, persecute the Sunnis, and then let the Shiite factions bicker forever. The most dangerous of all scenarios, for the Iranians, would be the rise of an Iraq with its own interests and means to pursue them at Iran’s expense. Iran built an Axis to serve Iran, but built it in such a shoddy and corrupt way that, in Iraq, it often prefers to serve only itself.
Just two years ago, it appeared that Iran had three guns pointed at Israel’s head. One was Hezbollah, with its much-vaunted rockets; another was Iraq, with battle-hardened militias ready to send drones and rockets, and possibly even fighters, through Syria; and the last was Yemen. When Israel decided to strike Iran, two of the guns didn’t fire. Hezbollah was caught by surprise and decimated in the first attack. Iraq’s militias were understandably concerned about facing the same quick denouement as Hezbollah. Only Yemen’s Houthis took their shot—multiple drones and missiles, aimed straight at Israeli population centers—but without partners, they were not enough to substantiate the threat that the Axis represented.
By 2025, the Axis was in disarray. Iran’s leaders still had their old distaste for direct confrontation. No direct confrontation and no indirect confrontation means no deterrence. Israel’s dominance in those other corners of the arena gave it the confidence to start June’s 12-day war, in which the last remaining Iranian strategic tool was its ballistic missiles. The war ended with a lopsided Israeli victory, and with Iran scrambling to find more ways to punish and deter Israel if hostilities resumed.
How long will Iran take to find an alternative to the Axis? When Iran was bereft before, finding another way forward took 15 years. Maybe it will never recover, and the Axis will turn out to be Iran’s last good strategic idea. Maybe the next idea will be much better than the Axis—a nuclear weapon produced with unprecedented stealth, say, or something more clever than my own small mind can contemplate. Michael Doran, of the Hudson Institute, suggested that one possible fate was that of Castro’s Cuba: Iran would swap its first generation of charismatic leaders for a military junta. “By some lights, the reign of the mullahs ended a long time ago, and it’s already an IRGC regime,” he told me, referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The ideology of the regime is evolving from revolutionary Shiism to Persian nationalism, he said. But that shift would not mean that enmity with the United States and Israel would evaporate. A diminished Iran, sapped of its charisma, would continue seeking ways to harass Israel and the United States. This behavior is a singular and consistent feature of the Islamic Republic. Even when the regime has looked more amenable to peace with the U.S., through deals and compromise, it has labored mightily for the opposite.
“The resistance is an inextricable part of the Islamic Republic’s identity,” Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. Khamenei has made feints and tactical adjustments. But the attempt to lead a revolutionary international movement against the United States and Israel, Sadjadpour said, is nonnegotiable. “Death to America, death to Israel, and hijab,” he told me, seem to be points of stubborn insistence, not subject to reassessment.
In 2015, the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran established unprecedented access to its nuclear sites, and strict but temporary limits on enrichment. It did nothing, though, to dull Iran’s enthusiasm for attacking the United States and Israel. In anticipation of a deal, and during the years the deal was in effect, Iran accelerated its support for the Axis. It used extra resources and latitude to become more aggressive. It intensified its support for Assad (having already prolonged a civil war); it strengthened its ties to the Houthis; it gave money and rockets to Hezbollah; it reportedly plotted and carried out terrorist attacks overseas. After the United States exited the nuclear deal, Iran allegedly tried to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, and the Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad.
Peace is not overrated. Many Iranians who hate their government nonetheless cheered the end of the war, and decried the senseless death of their countrymen at the hands of a faraway government whose concern for Iranian life was open to doubt. But not all peace is equal, and this strange, eventful history offers many reasons to suspect that the present peace with Iran will be a brief parenthesis in the long story of mutual enmity.
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini agreed to end the Iran-Iraq War, he likened the peace to drinking from a poisoned chalice. He did not—he could not—perform the elementary self-criticism that would have been involved in admitting that his decision to prolong the war and multiply its miseries was catastrophic. The peace at the end of the recent war with Israel is similarly marked by a lack of Iranian introspection or remorse.
Many Iranians wonder why their government spends so much money and effort on picking fights with Israel, the United States, and their allies, rather than on fixing its own corruption. I see no sign that the government itself wishes to reassess those priorities. Instead, it will do what it always does, which is look for bold new ways to pursue those priorities, with renewed vigor. The suffering of Iranians would be bad enough. But Iran’s determination to spread that suffering around to its friends and enemies alike makes it a uniquely awful neighbor, in peace as well as in war.
This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “The Neighbor From Hell.”
The post The Neighbor From Hell appeared first on The Atlantic.
