Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” post Hezbollah and Hamas Setbacks: Debate of Direct confrontation and Deterrence through proxy

Abstract

The Islamic Republic has been relying on a mix of proxy threats on multiple levels rather than direct military ones for four decades, and it has been cultivating a “Axis of Resistance” of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other more-or-less coordinated militias in Iraq and Syria under the auspices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Suds Force (IRGC-QF). This architecture had to withstand the harshest series of blows in its history, from the beheading of Hezbollah's top leadership, to the assassination of successive Hamas chiefs, to the fall of the Assad regime, to at the end of the day the joint US-Israeli strike (Operation Epic Fury/Operation Roaring Lion) in February 2026 that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of top officials, leading to an unprecedented leadership crisis. This article examines whether these repeated failures have rendered deterrence by proxy strategically irrelevant, positioning Tehran towards direct confrontation risk, or if the network's decentralized, 'cellular' structure means it can be degraded at different points, but still fulfill its basic strategic role. The structured-focused comparison, by individual nodes, over the five nodes, and across five network types including the 2026 war, reveals that the axis is more successful with respect to organizational survival than its success with respect to strategic deterrence: individual nodes are able to regenerate leadership and rearm, while the aggregate ability to impose costs on Israel and the US without provoking direct retaliation against the Iranian homeland has been broken. What’s left is not an end of the axis, but a shift in its character from a more centralized, less locally based collection of insurgent and political actors to one that is less controllable from the center and more locally based, with Iran now having a qualitative increase of risk from direct war. The analysis is informed by about 50 sources, including peer-reviewed sources in the literature on proxy warfare and deterrence theory, think-tank and open-source intelligence reporting, and primary government and UN documentation.

Keywords: Iran, Axis of Resistance, Hezbollah, Hamas, Proxy Warfare, Deterrence, IRGC, Operation Epic Fury, Forward Defense, Middle East Security