The Decline of the Iranian Empire

By Elliott Abrams

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

The story of the Middle East in the last year might be summed up by the word “poof.” That is, after a decade in which Iran’s expanding power and influence seemed irreversible, they were in fact reversed by Israel — with last-minute help from American B-2 bombers. What’s left is a much weakened Hezbollah (Iran’s key proxy), Syria free of Assad (a Russian and Iranian ally), and an Iran without air defenses or an advanced nuclear-weapons program.

 

This change was the product of three attacks: Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s direct missile and drone attacks in April and October 2024. The Hamas attack caught Israel by surprise because its security elite thought there was a modus vivendi with the terror group: as long as it could rule Gaza, with Qatari money flowing in, Hamas was satisfied. It was viewed almost as a status quo power, bought off and no longer serious about its murderous ideology. October 7 taught the Israelis to stop psychoanalyzing their enemies, to look at those enemies’ capabilities, and to assume that whatever capabilities exist will eventually be used to kill Jews.

 

Iran’s direct attack on Israel on April 13, 2024, changed what had been the rules of the game. Prior to that, Iran attacked Israel solely via proxies, and Israel struck Iran through assassinations and cyberattacks. For the Islamic Republic, this move turned out to be a huge error. As the Middle East scholar Robert Satloff put it, “Shifting to direct interstate attack represents a major strategic blunder for Iran, exposing its national assets and citizens to external attack for the first time since the Iran-Iraq War.”

 

The direct Israeli attacks on Iran opened the path to an American attack as well, something that had not happened since the Reagan administration. Since then, a series of presidents has tried to negotiate with Iran and avoid confrontation despite Iran’s hand in killing Americans in terrorist attacks and during the Iraq War. President Trump’s bombing of Iran, as H. R. McMaster has written, “reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity — and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. ‘De-escalation’ was never a path to peace — it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.”

 

These developments change important calculations by many states. Iran and all other friends of Russia and China have seen that, at least in the Middle East, those two powers are paper tigers. Everyone has seen the apparent superiority of American to Russian military hardware. China, whose own military is completely untested, has seen that American military power is not theoretical but can be used flawlessly. The Gulf Arab states have seen that Iran is much weaker than they thought, so that, while compromises with that big and malevolent neighbor may still be needed, they need not be as painful as previously feared. By restoring its reputation for military and intelligence excellence, both badly damaged by the 10/7 Hamas attacks, Israel has made itself an appealing partner for potential Abraham Accords participants.

 

In the Middle East, there is a new balance of power that shifts against Iran. It still has its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, but they are much weaker, and the Houthis in Yemen must wonder how they will fare as Iranian power recedes. Iraq, not a proxy but in some sense a colony of Iran, will become even more important to the ayatollahs. Iraq’s development toward democracy and stability would be far advanced by now were it not for 20 years of Iranian intervention. Shiite militias might still exist but would be far less powerful without external support from Tehran. In Baghdad, Iranian officials literally sit in some ministries to guarantee that Iraq allows itself to be used to help Iran escape U.S. sanctions. Logically, Iran will now try to tighten its control over Iraq even further — something the United States and the Gulf Arab nations should push hard against. Many Iraqis — no matter their politics or attitude toward the United States — will want to resist Iran out of sheer nationalism.

 

The Trump administration has two great opportunities in the Levant, in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon has the chance to recapture its sovereignty if leaders have the guts to act against Palestinian terrorist groups and against domestic Hezbollah terrorists. The first should be easy (because most Lebanese resent the Palestinian presence) — unless Hezbollah tries to stop Lebanese army action against armed Palestinian groups (including Hamas) under the theory that they’ll be the next target. All the more reason, then, for the United States to back the Lebanese government and Lebanese Armed Forces by demanding that the state must have a monopoly of force in the country. Aid to Lebanon should be conditioned on its continuing, forceful action against Hezbollah to disarm the terror group and make the government sovereign for the first time in decades.

 

Those efforts will be much helped by Syria’s refusal to allow, and active attempts to block, resupply of Hezbollah by Iran. President Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the ex-terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his lifting of sanctions on Syria were a calculated risk that thus far appears to be paying off. There is a lot of work ahead on Syrian-Jordanian, Syrian-Israeli, and Syrian-Turkish relations. Moreover, Syria’s internal problems are deep — as the violence against civilians and clashes among the Syrian army, Druze forces, and Bedouin militias in July showed all too clearly. Those clashes prompted Israeli intervention, and it’s easy to predict further Turkish moves against Kurdish groups. Holding Syria together, guarding its borders, and preventing internal violence will be a great challenge for Sharaa, but he will certainly try: Syria, with its battered economy, needs aid from the West and the Gulf. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem for the new Syrian leader: he won’t get the aid if he appears to be failing, but he will fail without the aid. There is at least a chance now, as President Trump grasped, to turn Syria — its links with Iran broken and those with Russia at least weakened — back into a normal country. So we should continue trying, working with Sharaa and potential donors to see the experiment through.

 

But that work requires attention and manpower in Washington. The latest developments on that front are both dismaying: the departure of Steve Witkoff’s deputy, Morgan Ortagus, who was handling Lebanon with a deft combination of charm and intense pressure, and the administration’s inability to get its nominee for assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Joel Rayburn, to a confirmation vote in the Senate. Nothing is assured in either Lebanon or Syria, and U.S. inattention is a formula for drift, a reassertion of Hezbollah influence in the former, and a failed or terrorist state in the latter.

 

Meanwhile, Israel’s dazzling success against Iran does not end the Gaza war or bring the hostages home. It does weaken Hamas’s great sponsor, and with U.S. help that may mean a hostage deal is possible. The Iran success may give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greater political wiggle room for such a deal, as his comments during his July visit to Washington suggested. And there is a potential reward beyond the main prize of freeing the hostages: Ending the Gaza war, and with it Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock scenes of bloodshed, would quiet Arab public opinion and allow Arab governments to think again about tightening their ties with Israel and perhaps joining the Abraham Accords. Even if they do not — even if, for example, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman decides that more time must pass before he could risk normalization — interim steps are possible, such as allowing more trade, sports competitions, and public meetings of diplomats.

 

Nor does Israel’s success against Iran end the Islamic Republic’s threats to the United States and the West. It remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism, and its just-proven conventional military weakness could lead it to rely more heavily on terrorism to advance its interests. U.S. officials are wise to intensify the hunt for Iranian agents inside the country, and European governments especially should follow — given the record of Iranian terrorist attacks in Europe. Iran continues as well to hold foreigners hostage with trumped-up accusations of crime. And as its attack on the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar showed, Iran retains plenty of short-range missiles capable of hitting the Gulf Arab states and the U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain.

 

But Iran remains dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and “Death to Israel” is still the regime’s central slogan. It is the only case of one U.N. member stating flatly that it wants to kill off another (or perhaps one of two cases, if we count Vladimir Putin’s comments on Ukraine). Iran is more than 75 times larger than Israel, with nine times the population, so it will remain a dangerous threat as long as the Islamic Republic regime rules the country.

 

Israel therefore cannot permit Iran’s reconstitution of its nuclear-weapons program. Nor should the United States do so, for the very reasons we struck the Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz nuclear sites: an Iranian nuclear weapon would be an unacceptable danger to our partner Israel, would strike a death blow to the nonproliferation efforts we have made since World War II, and when combined with a rebuilt ballistic-missile program would make Iran a threat to the United States as well. One nuclear North Korea is one too many.

 

So what can be done to stop it?

 

First and most simply, both Israel and the United States should reiterate that Iran will never be permitted to get a nuclear weapon. Both should make it clear that the attacks in June will be repeated as many times as is necessary to stop the Iranian program. The message to the government and people of Iran must be that all expenditures on that program are a waste, destined sooner or later to end up as dust and debris. Trump will be in office for three and half more years, which is plenty of time to strike Iran again. The success of the recent strike, the lack of any serious political blowback against the president, and the mockery that critics like Tucker Carlson made of themselves should teach Iran that Trump can and will do it again if need be.

 

Second, there should be no relaxation of sanctions on Iran unless and until it abandons its nuclear program and permits International Atomic Energy Agency inspections that prove it. The IAEA’s May 2025 report on the Iranian program was honest and insightful — and therefore damning. The IAEA under Director General Rafael Grossi does not play politics as it did during the Iraq War under his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei. The United States should vigorously defend the IAEA’s role in Iran and demand that it get full access. In early July, Iran suspended all cooperation with the IAEA, and the Western response should be tougher sanctions.

 

The key step in restoring IAEA access and blocking sanctions relief is to get the three European nations that joined the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 to invoke “snapback,” the mechanism of reimposing sanctions. Because the United States left that Obama-era agreement in 2018, we can’t do it — but Britain, France, and Germany can. Under the JCPOA, there can be no vetoes by Russia and China; all the old international sanctions return. Iran’s innumerable violations of the JCPOA demand snapback anyway, but it will now serve another purpose. Iran should be told that these heavy sanctions can be lifted — but only if it abandons its nuclear-weapons program and permits the IAEA to do its job. An added benefit of the snapback of U.N. sanctions: they also cover Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

 

During the first few months after President Trump’s victory in November, a lot was heard both about “pivoting to Asia” and paying less attention to the Middle East (the view of officials like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby) and about the views of the many isolationists from groups such as Defense Priorities and the Quincy Institute who were hired for important positions at State, Defense, and the White House and in the intelligence community. This is a real concern, and both Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seem to be members of this group.

 

But as the debris of Fordow shows, President Trump is not one of them. This was already evident during his Gulf trip in May. Critics may say our relations with the Gulf countries are too transactional, but the president seemed to be thinking of deep and long-term financial, commercial, and scientific relationships. Maybe he does see the governments of Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia as family offices with lots of cash to invest, but that was and will be enough to shut down the advisers who think of the Middle East as the land of “forever wars.” Trump sees it as the land of forever investments, and sees in Israel an ally worth backing. As in his January 2020 strike taking out Iran’s most powerful military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, Trump is proving that he can use U.S. military power without being drawn into endless conflicts.

 

And that is critical for our friends and our enemies in the Middle East, and for enemies elsewhere — Russia and China — to see. Unexpectedly, the Middle East turned into the place that proves Trump isn’t at all an isolationist and actually is willing to stay involved, back U.S. allies, and use U.S. power. The barbarians of Hamas and the mullahs in Tehran had something very different in mind when they started their major attacks on Israel in 2023, but their actions and the Israeli and American reactions have proved that the United States and its allies remain the dominant powers in the Middle East.