Khamenei Loses Everything

By Eliot A. Cohen

Sunday, December 08, 2024

 

When Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel on October 7, 2023, he intended to deal a decisive blow against a powerful nation-state—and he succeeded. But the state his attack has devastated turned out not to be Israel, but Iran, his key sponsor.

 

It is a persistent folly of progressive thought to believe that wars do not achieve meaningful political consequences. The past 15 months in the Middle East suggest otherwise. After suffering terribly on October 7, Israel has pulverized Hamas, ending the threat it posed as an organized military force. The challenge it now faces in Gaza is a humanitarian and administrative crisis, not a security one. Israel has likewise shattered Hezbollah in Lebanon, forcing it to accept a cease-fire after losing not only thousands of foot soldiers but much of its middle management and senior leadership. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s brutal but botched war of conquest in Ukraine has undermined his other strategic goals. In Syria, Russia’s one solid foothold in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine has leached away Russian forces, depriving it of the ability to influence events.

 

All of this set the stage for the dramatic events of the past two weeks, as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni fundamentalist militia, spearheaded the seizure of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus and brought about the overthrow and collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Neither Tehran nor Moscow could do anything about it.

 

The biggest loser in all of this—after Assad, his family, his cronies, and possibly his Alawite sect—is Iran. Decades of patient work assembling proxy movements throughout the Middle East, specifically but not exclusively focused on Israel, have collapsed. Hamas was never a cat’s paw of Tehran, but it received weapons and training from Iran, and coordinated with Hezbollah, a far more formidable force, and one much more tightly aligned with, if not always entirely controlled by, Iran. Hezbollah had helped turn the tide of battle that had flowed against the Assad regime from 2012 onwards. It kept a force of 5,000 to 10,000 men in Syria at the height of its commitment, but they were not alone. Iran organized and trained thousands more in dozens of militias, including a Syrian Hezbollah, and various Shiite groups from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. All of them are now on the run.

 

Iran is a strong state, in the sense that its people are deeply rooted in a shared history and culture, but it has a relatively weak military. It has invested heavily in proxy warfare with notable success, including against the United States in Iraq. But with the defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah, and with the collapse of the Assad regime, Iran has suffered irrecoverable losses. It no longer has a land route to Lebanon; it has lost its most disciplined, well-armed, and effective proxies; and it failed in its two attempts to attack Israel directly while losing its main air defenses in a retaliatory strike.

 

Russia, too, has suffered a major loss. The Russian installations at the port of Tartus and at Hmeimim air base were built over decades; it is hard to imagine that Russia will continue to operate from them. It has attempted to secure naval access to the port of Tobruk, in Libya, but has yet to develop the infrastructure there that it once had in Syria. Russia, like Iran, has been humiliated by its client’s collapse, and it, too, now faces an enduring hostility from a Syrian population that it helped suppress, with a savagery that foreshadowed its behavior in Ukraine.

 

If there is a winner here it is Turkey, which has supported, although not entirely controlled, HTS—its own proxy force, the Syrian National Army, has spent more time attacking Kurdish militias in Syria’s east than fighting Assad. Still, Syria’s various groups, including the victorious HTS, know that Turkey will be the dominant external power. The victory of HTS not only presents Turkey with an opportunity to return 3 million Syrian refugees from Turkish camps but also extends Turkish influence along neo-Ottoman lines. It will be interesting to see whether Turkey takes the momentum of this victory to attack Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq or to secure a stronger hold on Libya, where it backs the official government. In Libya, too, Turkey has pitted itself against an overextended Russia, which supports the rebellious warlord Khalifa Haftar.

 

Israel, although wary both of fundamentalists on its border and of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, can nonetheless be pleased at the isolation of Hezbollah and Russia’s eviction from the Levant. It has some reason to think that the rival Syrian factions will be focused on one another and their nation’s internal problems, and that they will have little appetite for attacking a state that proved considerably stronger and more resilient than it appeared on October 8. Israel, in any case, has a long history of establishing relationships with various ethnic and religious groups in Syria and Lebanon, which effectively no longer exist as states.

 

As for the United States, it was irrelevant to most but not all of this drama. Its Kurdish allies in the east of Syria, backed by fewer than 1,000 U.S. Special Forces personnel, played a small role in this war, but continue to play a much larger one in the containment of the remnants of the Islamic State.

 

All of this presents an amazing, and amazingly complicated, set of political circumstances. But even as the fog of war hangs over Syria’s shattered cities—we still do not know, for example, whether Bashar al-Assad got away—some things are clear.

 

The first is that deeply unpopular authoritarian regimes tend to be far more fragile than they look. Few saw the sudden collapse of the Assad regime coming. Other authoritarian states, including Iran itself, may now become more tractable in dealing with foreign powers, and more paranoid internally.

 

The ubiquity of surprise in war is a lesson learned and relearned every few years, as is the centrality of the intangibles—organization, planning, the will to fight, leadership—in assessing military power. Had one studied the latest International Institute of Strategic Studies’ “Military Balance” entry on Syria, for example, one would not have guessed that a militia it estimated at 10,000 members would overthrow a military of 130,000, backed by thousands of auxiliaries from Hezbollah and other militias, as well as 4,000 Russian troops. But so it happened.

 

Although wars may eliminate one set of problems or strategic circumstances, they usually create a new set. In this case, Iran has lost several of its claws, but others remain. After suffering a series of heavy defeats, the regime has to be terrified—not least because, according to a recent federal indictment, it also plotted to assassinate President-Elect Donald Trump. That may cause it to seek to accommodate the United States, and there are already some hints to that effect. At the same time, Iran’s strategic exposure and vulnerability give it strong incentives to acquire nuclear weapons.

 

Finally, the United States has again been frustrated in its long-standing desire, which dates back to the Obama administration, to leave the Middle East. The Biden administration’s calls for a cease-fire in Syria were pointless and ineffectual. Along with its failure to anticipate the collapse of our Afghan allies in 2021, and its inability to do more in Ukraine than provide enough weapons to prevent Kyiv’s defeat, it shows what happens when strategic thought withers into good intentions and wishful thinking.

 

On Saturday, Trump himself weighed in on these events. “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT,” he wrote. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But that call to stay out of Syria ignores our military presence there, and offers no answer to the question of what to do about our Kurdish allies and their thousands of ISIS prisoners. But the incoming administration also faces a much bigger problem: If Iran does indeed choose to sprint for nuclear weapons, Trump’s White House will have to decide whether to call in the heavy bombers and forestall that move, which would trigger a landslide of nuclear proliferation well beyond the Persian Gulf. And it might face that decision very early on.

 

To paraphrase a famous aphorism, we may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in us. The events of the past weeks may yet lead Trump to conclude that this is really not the best time to begin a witch hunt for wokesters in the U.S. military. And, if he is confirmed as secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth may yet learn that female pilots can drop bombs with the best of them.