As the year 2024 makes way for 2025, there is a very gentle hint of optimism in the Western media with respect to the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East that is becoming increasingly difficult to miss.

When 2024 began, the prospect was quite gloomy – the Gaza conflict that began with the outrage against Israel by Harakat al-Muqawwamah al-Islamiyyah, known by its popular acronym, HAMAS, which had drawn in the Hizballah and the Houthis; by summer, Israel and Iran came closer to war than ever before, which resulted in both countries striking at each other twice. By the time the year ended, however, Israel seemed to have fared better in this landscape than any other country. 

As 2025 dawns, HAMAS’s capability to endure on the battlefield appears to have been severely impaired with much of its leadership being eliminated. The Hizballah, for its part, has been pummelled, its logistics for combat dismantled and its entire top brass either eliminated or severely impaired. 

With both its proxies, HAMAS and Hizballah severely weakened, the ability of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose the kind of geo-political threat that had come to characterise Tehran lately stands much diminished. If that needed any demonstration, the rapid and completely unanticipated collapse of the Ba‘athist regime of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 should have satisfied the most cynical observer of the substance behind the claim. 

Israel, on the other hand, is on a roll! As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked, Tel Aviv is just beginning to get started, now pummelling away at the Houthis. The more optimistic observers in Europe, and more so in America, seem to be persuading themselves that the diminishing strength of Iran and her proxies might finally help the Middle Eastern neighbourhood stabilise for the first time since the Arab Spring. 

The year 2025, they hope, will turn out to be a marvellous one.

The case for Annus Mirabilis

The reasons for such optimism are aplenty. Ever since the Hizballah battled Israel to a veritable draw in 2006, and the Shi‘i militias in Iraq began to challenge the US-backed government in Baghdad, Iran had dramatically increased its investment in proxies in the region, including HAMAS.

The destabilisation of Iran’s key ally in the region, the Ba‘athist regime in Damascus at the time of the Arab Spring, and Iran’s deployment of its proxies, especially Hizballah, in defence of her ally, constituted the immediate background in which Tehran upgraded its tactics of using proxies into a veritable strategy. Tehran had, with Russian support, not only saved the Assad regime but also played a pivotal role in defeating Da‘esh (Islamic State) in both Syria and Iraq. 

In the process, it put together what Tehran called a Mehvar-e Moqawwamat (Axis of Resistance), supplying proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, and increasingly the Houthis in Yemen.  

By 2017, the supposed architect of that strategy, Qassem Soleimani went on to boast about the existence of a land bridge which allowed him to have his breakfast in Tehran, lunch in Baghdad, and dinner in Damascus (and maybe even breakfast the next morning in Beirut) without having to change his vehicle. The Islamic Republic was casting a shadow in the region’s strategic landscape greater than at any other time in living memory.

In the space of the last one year, Israel seems to have changed that strategic landscape dramatically. 

For quite some time, Israeli defence policy had been operating on the assumption that none of its neighbours had the military capability to violate its airspace. Iran’s tit-for-tat strike in April 2024 seems to have shaken Israel out of its complacency.

In the retaliation that followed, Israel carried out air strikes deep into Iranian territory and targeted assassinations of top leadership of the HAMAS (including Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Yahya Sinwar in Gaza) and Hizballah (including Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut). Israel has also been routinely taking out military installations of the Assad regime in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen during the year, in addition to the ground incursion into Lebanon. 

The severely debilitating attacks on Hizballah, moreover, had the wider repercussion of weakening the Assad regime terminally and paving the ground for a rejuvenation of the Syrian opposition. The Hayat al-Tahrir al-Sham rapidly overran Aleppo, Homs and Hama before charging into Damascus, making the rump Assad regime crumble within weeks.

In its turn, the regime change in Damascus has lost Iran – the territorial conduit that it had used hitherto in equipping the Hizballah. Hence, observers in the West seem to think that even if Iran would want to re-arm and equip the Hizballah back to combat readiness, it would be extremely difficult to do so evading Israeli and Western surveillance. 

Tehran would, hence, now be much less of a nuisance than it has been in the recent past.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025, western observers believe, the strategic advantage provided by this weakening of Iran could be seized upon. Trump, it is hoped, will push for the final icing on the Abraham Accords cake, getting Riyadh to establish normal diplomatic ties with Israel. With Tel Aviv and Riyadh closing ranks, Iran would have a regional front of its neighbourhood foes arraigned against her, and her allies lost (Assad) or weakened (Hizballah and HAMAS).

It is hoped that over and above the recently demonstrated superiority of Israeli firepower, this hostile alignment might persuade Tehran back to the negotiating table, and maybe even pave the way for an agreement much more strict than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015. If Washington’s recently opened back-channel talks with the new regime in Damascus come to a successful conclusion, Tehran’s isolation would be even more complete, and this might coerce Tehran to come to such an arrangement.

Strategic weakening aside, there is reason to believe that Tehran itself might be looking to resume nuclear talks. Iran’s strategy of using militias of the neighbourhood as the cat’s paw of her foreign policy was the domain of the paramilitary outfit Islamic Republic Guards Corps (IRGC), which is part of the hard-line establishment of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC had grudgingly agreed to the nuclear deal, then negotiated by reformist President Hassan Rouhani, in return for a free hand in the neighbourhood. 

When the JCPOA collapsed, reformists lost power to the hard-line candidate Ebrahim Raisi, giving the IRGC a virtual free run in the neighbourhood. This dream run was badly rattled by the hijab protests of 2023. While the protests themselves were ruthlessly suppressed, the regime became genuinely vulnerable to internal disturbance – so much so that when the Gaza conflict began to show possibilities of regional escalation, Tehran appeared reluctant to be sucked in, despite indulging in its usual sabre-rattling. 

The death of President Ebrahim Raisi allowed the seething public discontent to be heard while also carrying the wild card reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian to the presidency. Since coming to office, Pezeshkian has distinguished himself by strengthening the pragmatist lobby, asking for restraint even after the assassinations of Haniyeh and Nasrallah.

This restraint is widely believed to have cost Tehran its standing among the militias aligned to it, thereby weakening the IRGC, and strengthening Pezeshkian who wants to regain control of the country’s neighbourhood policy. It is believed that Hizballah’s consent to the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was partly owing to Tehran’s support of the same, which also coincided with the resumption of talks with Britain, France and Germany in the same week. 

The collapse of the Assad regime constitutes a further blow to the IRGC, and Tehran’s silence on that matter embodies a divided house, which, in fact, works in favour of Pezeshkian. If the Trump Administration plans a return to the nuclear talks, and Tehran is persuaded to agree to more stringent conditions on its nuclear and missile programmes, as well as its neighbourhood policy, that would (ironically) strengthen the reformist presidency against the IRGC and the hard-line establishment. 

The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei may even be tempted to accept such a sacrifice for the time being to prevent any existential challenge to the Islamic dispensation itself from within.

… and that for Annus Horriblis

Such optimism, however, loses sight of quite a few variables that need to be factored in.

For starters, Iran had revived its pre-revolutionary nuclear programme after the discovery of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programme during the Gulf War of 1991. However, the political establishment in Tehran was divided right through, until April 2024. The hard-liners wanted a nuclear weapons capability as the ultimate insurance against attempts at regime change from outside. The reformists, on the other hand, have vouched for reaching the nuclear threshold but not crossing it, lest it is charged with infringement of its commitments under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). 

While the reformist Presidents (Muhammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani) slowed the nuclear programme down, the hard-line Presidents (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Ebrahim Raisi) had accelerated it. When Tehran put its nuclear policy on hold after the JCPOA, the strategic use of proxy militias was to increase Tehran’s security quotient in lieu of its nuclear programme. 

Successful Israeli attacks on Iranian soil in April and October 2024 had left that policy in tatters.

At the last assessment a few months ago, it was said that Iran was less than a month away from enriching uranium to weapon-grade, and only a few months away from attaining delivery capability. If the nuclear talks break down (or do not take off at all), and Israel (flushed with success elsewhere) carries out further strikes against Iran, Tehran might cross the nuclear Rubicon if it believes it is being boxed into a corner. 

Hence, to assume that Iran has been irretrievably weakened could prove to be as fallacious as similar assumptions about Israel vis-à-vis Hizballah in 2006.  

Secondly, there is a changed strategic landscape in Lebanon. Hizballah’s sectarianism has often been identified as the chief factor in Lebanon’s dysfunctional character. In fact, it was more symptomatic of Lebanese dysfunctionality rather than its cause. Lebanon owed its economic revival after the civil war (1975-89) to the bankrolling by Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.

However, the model of consociational democracy applied in Lebanon gave each of its seventeen religious sects a share of the institutional pie, making sectarianism a necessary component in Lebanese politics, leaving the country’s economy beholden to political considerations.

Thus, once Saudi money began to dry up after the death of Rafik Hariri (Riyadh’s point-man in Beirut), the Lebanese economy began a process of decline, which accelerated after the Arab Spring. By 2020, Lebanon’s economy lay in ruins, and the country was virtually a failed state, which threw into sharp relief the combat capabilities of Hizballah as a major factor of instability. 

With the Hizballah being severely undermined, it is now possible to detect a note of optimism in some Israeli circles. There is talk of empowering the political adversaries of Hizballah, especially the Christian groups, so as to prevent its resurgence by strengthening the political effectiveness of the country’s institutions.

However, there is little clarity on who is to finance the revival of the Lebanese economy. Israel does not have that kind of financial heft; Saudi Arabia and UAE together may have that kind of heft but have not shown any such indication. However, the US Congress that would come into office alongside the Trump Administration appears to be least inclined in that direction. Thus, Lebanon is certain to remain unstable in the medium run and invite foreign intervention on a smaller scale (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Turkey, Qatar and maybe Iran yet again, and possibly even Syria).

Third, there is the Syrian quagmire. Once the jubilation over the fall of Assad (and Tehran’s loss of strategic depth) dies down, attention would begin to be devoted to rebuilding the rump state, which is certain to be trickier than toppling Assad. 

The Ba‘athist regime has historically drawn its support from the religious minorities (‘Alawite Shi‘i, Christians, Armenians) and some secular Arab Sunnis based around Damascus. The opposition to the regime over the years has rallied around Arab Sunnis who had been progressively marginalised in Syrian public life and have now taken power. 

However, while some of these Sunnis are Muslim traditionalists, others are deeply conservative Islamists, such as Muhammad al-Sharaa and his ex-al Qaeda associates, many of them having been routinely persecuted by the secular Ba‘athist regime. Internally, the challenge would be to weave a political fabric that can hold together the minority-dominated coastal regions of the north-west (Alawite Latakia), west and south-west (including Damascus), the traditional Sunni-dominated north, south and east (Idlib, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Deir al-Zour) and the Kurdish dominated north-east.

Having had no history of representative politics since its creation a century ago, cross-sectarian political bridge-building after almost fifty years of segmented existence, though, requires a kind of political sagacity that may prove difficult to muster. 

Additionally, even if the state were to cohere around its Arab core, the thorny question of the Kurds is bound to pose a difficult challenge. If Turkey takes any direct interest in keeping the Kurds subdued to prevent irredentism from spilling over into her own Kurdish-dominated southeastern provinces, the new regime, which has enjoyed the backing of Ankara so far, would be left with either denying Turkey a free hand (and lose control over a part of the country) or lose a potential patron. 

The other possibility of Iran backing the Syrian Kurds, as it has done in Iraq, in a bid to retain some leverage in Syria. should not also be dismissed out of hand. Either way, the task is cut out for the new regime in Damascus.

The other factor of course is that whenever the Syrian state feels strong enough, for geo-economic reasons it has always tried to pursue the idea of Greater Syria – a territorial ambition involving the acquisition of Lebanon, which was historically a part of Ottoman Syria. Since 1967, all Syrian governments have tried to retake the Golan Heights, which remains under Israeli occupation. Considering that Ahmed al-Sharaa comes from a family displaced from the Golan, it would not be far-fetched to presume such an agenda could always come back, especially in a bid to galvanise the Arab core in the name of Israeli treatment of their Arab brethren in Palestine.

Tel Aviv is fully aware of this possibility and has already started to carry out air strikes against Syrian military positions in the south. Thus, to think that the regional problems associated with Syria would all have gone with the Assad regime is to altogether misunderstand the nature of the problem historically posed by Damascus.

Finally, to return to the nub of the present round of disturbances in the region – Israel and the Palestine Question. 

Despite having scored several military successes and tactical triumphs against HAMAS, Hizballah and even Iran, Israel has not moved even an inch closer to any settlement of the Palestine question. In a fit of blind fury triggered by the outrage of 7 October 2023, the Israeli society has resorted to what can be called ‘genocide in self-defence’.

However, it is difficult to see how seven million Jewish Israelis can either drive out or kill five million Palestinians (in the West Bank and Gaza) without terminally compromising its relationship with two million Arab Israelis even within the scope of the ethnocracy (rule of one demographic group over another) it has now become. Even if Israel emerges militarily triumphant in its neighbourhood, the country is sitting today on a powder keg.

A large section of the Israeli establishment is fully aware of this issue and is waiting for things to die down a bit before they can remove the principal obstacle to peace – the combative Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. However, the hard-right and settler lobbies that support Bibi in a severely fragmented Israeli political landscape would ensure that the policies that Bibi has been blamed for are pushed even more vigorously by others. If Israel does not see another round of Arab-Jewish conflict soon, it is virtually certain to be consumed by intra-Israeli political tussle over the nature of the Jewish state. No easy solution seems to be in the offing!

The external ramifications of this crisis in the heart of the Middle East are quite potent. Israeli diplomatic offensive in the form of the Abraham Accords was quietly welcomed by many Arab states (especially those in the Gulf), disturbed by the subversive ascendancy of Iran in the regional political landscape.

The Iranian rapprochement with Riyadh had taken some of the urgency away. The weakening of the Iranian Axis of Resistance having cut Tehran down to size, has reduced the potency of the threat it poses. In this background, even if the Gulf States wanted to come close to Tel Aviv, the utter disregard that Israel has shown for Palestinian lives since October 2023 has made any accord with Israel a very hard sell.

Thus, Riyadh has made it very clear that a two-state solution must be brought back to the table, a position which finds no takers in Israel.  Hence, even if a ceasefire were actually to come through around the time of Trump’s return to the White House, short of a massive reconstruction of Gaza being undertaken and (even more unlikely) Israel agreeing to relent on the two-state solution, it is not likely to hold for very long.

Hence, if you were thinking that the situation in the Middle East seems to be looking up, you might have to think again.