Is the Iranian axis back from the dead?
The Iran War was a stalemate, but the peace is shaping up to reverse Israel’s momentum over the past two years.
That loyal and loving king did not come,
With the water he promised for the children of the Shrine,
Because he hit the enemy like thunder, but he did not come back!
- Persian ode for Ashura
At the end of 2024, things were looking good for the U.S.-Israeli-Arab power structure in the Middle East. Hezbollah, the pro-Iran militia in Lebanon and Israel’s most powerful military opponent, signed a one-sided ceasefire that would lead to its own disarmament and guarantee Israeli freedom of action inside Lebanon. Immediately after, a revolution swept through Syria and the new government quickly established its pro-U.S. intentions. The Israeli military was able to continue destroying Palestinian society in Gaza unchallenged.
It was enough that many journalists and academics, including myself, declared the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” dead. I coined the term “Axis of Submission” to describe the new, dominant order in the Middle East. (My prediction from only a few months before, that “Israel’s strategic situation on October 6, 2023 was as good as it gets,” seemed completely foolish.) The next year was another series of victories for the Axis of Submission: the starvation siege of Gaza, the U.N. Security Council resolution legitimizing Israel’s “Board of Peace” project, the first direct U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and a major uprising inside Iran with momentum in favor of the pro-Israel monarchist movement.
But the U.S. attempt to deal the final blow to Iran in February 2026 seems to have cocked up the whole thing. The Islamic Republic fought back with surprising determination and adaptability. The new Iranian revolution never materialized. Hezbollah rejoined the fight, as did Iraqi militias they had tapped out even before Hezbollah did. U.S. President Donald Trump gave up on his regime change goals, and signed a ceasefire that promised Iran more or less full normalization, as well as the protection of Lebanon. Arab states were lining up to cut side deals with the country that had promised to “kill the idea of Dubai.”
The conventional wisdom flipped, and the same voices that had been writing obituaries for the possibility of resistance were now yelling about U.S. surrender and humiliation. That reaction seems a little exaggerated. There will be no forced withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region at gunpoint, as in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Iran will have to trade some concessions to get the full benefits of the peace. It is a strange “surrender” indeed when the citizens of the defeated country barely notice what they’ve given up, and the victor has to negotiate for its own money or allow foreign inspectors onto its territory.
But the Axis of Submission has set its goals for domination so high that it experiences any stalemate as defeat. As I argued in Reason, the U.S. is used to either winning wars or continuing them until they are materially impossible to win, so a truce with another sovereign state is a strange and discomforting experience for U.S. elites. Israel today has an even more extreme attitude of entitlement to unceasingly attack its enemies. Opposition politician Naftali Bennett described with horror that the ceasefire forbids Israeli troops from shooting Lebanese who look at them with binoculars or unleashing a “massive fire envelope” on the surrounding villages every time a soldier needs to be evacuated.
It should be noted that the American public is far more level headed about cutting losses than their leaders. Contrary to politicians who are either delusionally claiming victory or catastrophizing about defeat, polling shows that most Americans assess the deal as favorable to Iran but better than continuing the war. Most of us did not feel any “threat” from Iran in our daily lives, other than people on TV yelling about wounded pride and exotic grievances. The war, however, has created material problems that every American feels directly. With gas prices falling at the end of the war, most of us are experiencing “capitulating to Iran” as an immediate improvement to living standards at no cost to our real physical security. And that may be exactly why elites are so panicked.
The architects of the Axis of Submission had quite keenly created political inertia in their favor. In the United States, hawkish elites had structured U.S. foreign policy such that war was easier than peace. While the Israeli and U.S. militaries were quietly integrated and the President’s unilateral power to make war was quietly expanded, a “sanctions wall” created a political cost to deescalation. Rather than hawks having to explain why they supported forever war, doves would have to explain why they wanted to give “pallets of cash” to designated terrorists.
More importantly, within the Middle East, the Axis of Submission states imposed a high price for resistance — and delivered that bill in a way such that people would blame their own leaders. “These are two Middle Easts: one Middle East whose priority is resistance and its results are famine, and another whose priority is peace and the results are success,” an Emirati propagandist infamously said during one of the worst moments of the siege of Gaza in mid-2024.
I would phrase that attitude slightly differently: “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?” The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation scheme in early 2025 made the tradeoff as explicit as possible. The entire food supply in Gaza would be physically controlled by Israel’s private army, and the only way Palestinians could resist that control would be by literally biting the hand that feeds.
The U.S. Treasury imposed less severe versions of the same tradeoff across the region. As one U.S. planner admitted, sanctions on Iran were designed to allow luxury imports at the expense of basic necessities, so that Iranians would blame their own leaders rather than foreign enemies for the siege. And sanctions relief for everyone was increasingly explicitly tied to submission to Israel. The U.S. forced post-revolutionary Sudan to join the Abraham Accords to end its economic isolation.
Meanwhile, the 2024 ceasefire conditioned Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on Lebanon satisfying Israeli security concerns. (The agreement was more equitable in theory, but the implementation quickly became lopsided, with Hezbollah and the Lebanese government unable or unwilling to assert themselves.) While Israeli drones aerially hunted the population of the south, Hezbollah’s domestic opponents could ask why the party was continuing to sacrifice Lebanese lives for “fighting a pseudo-academically inspired imperialism & colonialism.”
The end of the war with Iran completely reversed that dynamic. While Iran is demanding a new ceasefire formula with an unconditional end to attacks on Lebanon, proponents of the 2024 formula have to explain why they want to sacrifice Lebanese lives for an abstract fight against Iranian influence. So it goes in the capitals of Israel and Hezbollah’s patrons. Iranians used to ask why their country was sacrificing so much for little Lebanon. But now Americans are asking why their country is letting little Israel “sabotage” the peace.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Iran has shown that one way to beat U.S. sanctions is to fire hundreds of missiles and drones at critical infrastructure. The war had given Iran sufficient leverage to demand a ceasefire with up-front sanctions relief. Extorting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz also reversed the dynamic of sanctions. “Proponents of U.S. sanctions often liked to say that they were forcing international business to choose between Iranian markets and the U.S. dollar. With the tollbooth, Iran is presenting foreign countries with their own choice between U.S. support and petrochemical supply chains,” I wrote in Reason.
Rather than causing economic deprivation, resistance is now looking like the best path out of it. Compare the quick, unambiguous sanctions relief that came with the peace memorandum — and the promise of full economic normalization — to the attempts at negotiated surrender. Every time Iran or one of its allies offered a concession, the U.S. demanded more. The sanctions relief on offer was so narrow as to be useless. What broke that cycle was, again, demonstrating Iran’s willingness to kill the idea of Dubai.
Ironically, this situation is largely a result of the Axis of Submission’s own actions. As I wrote amidst the extreme triumphalism of December 2024, the Israeli (and, in hindsight, the American) “political elite seems pathologically incapable of consolidating wins.” Washington probably could have negotiated an Iranian surrender after the January 2026 uprising. There were hints that Iran was even willing to negotiate away its missiles, which essentially meant disarming the state. Alternatively, the U.S. could have let the Islamic Republic enter a terminal spiral of uprisings, which were already heating up again just before the war. But Trump took Iranian weakness as an invitation to administer a coup de grace, which gave Iran an opportunity to strike back directly.
Still, the April 2026 ceasefire with Iran was lopsided in Washington’s favor. In return for only a cessation of hostilities, Iran would immediately re-open Hormuz and then negotiate for future sanctions relief. While the U.S. could reverse the economic damage of the war, Iran would remain unable to begin reconstruction. Instead of taking advantage of that dynamic to either extract concessions or let Iran fester, the Trump administration flipped the table. The U.S. broke its commitment to a ceasefire in Lebanon, at which point Iran again showed off its leverage in Hormuz. Instead of deescalating at that point, the U.S. locked in the situation with a blockade of its own.
Now, where does the region stand? Iran has enough temporary sanctions relief to stabilize its economy in the short term, but not enough to begin reconstruction. Lebanon has relief from Israeli bombing and expulsions, but is still under partial Israeli occupation. As written, the peace deal will grant Iran full economic normalization in exchange for its now-useless nuclear program, and force a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon under circumstances yet to be negotiated. This momentum favors the Axis of Resistance, which is why the Axis of Submission will try to subvert it.
Iran has a long road to national reconciliation and recovery. Although economic meltdown was the obvious proximate cause of Iran’s many uprisings, Iranians’ grievances are not just “about the price of watermelons,” to borrow the Ayatollah Khomeini’s phrase. The crackdown in January 2026 killed thousands of civilians, a trauma that Iranians will not soon forget. The monarchist theory of change — begging the U.S. and Israel to bomb the country into freedom — is discredited. Opposition to the Islamic Republic is not.
Similarly, a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon will discredit the most aggressively supine pro-Israel minority, but not necessarily the Lebanese majority who want to disarm Hezbollah and enforce a state monopoly on force. Tying Lebanon to the U.S.-Iranian peace process will also restrain Hezbollah in important ways. Just as Israeli action will be restricted by peace in the Persian Gulf, so will Hezbollah’s freedom of action. And U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has hinted that, no matter what the peace memorandum says, he wants to tie the full benefits to Iranian concessions on the Axis.
There are also changes happening within the Axis of Submission. A bloc of “moderate” states (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt) is trying to push the U.S.-led order in a more conciliatory, stable direction, against Israel’s will. Of course, there is much kayfabe and “good cop, bad cop” involved. After all, all of these states fundamentally agree with keeping the U.S. military in, Iran out, popular revolutions down, and the Palestinian cause neutralized. They are protecting Israel from its own excesses.
But the kayfabe may inadvertently become real. Syria, now under Turkish-Saudi tutelage, is the one country that unambiguously saw more peace and freedom from the Axis of Resistance being defeated. Israel immediately attacked it anyway. That was what prompted my comments in 2024 about Israel’s inability to consolidate gains.
So it may go with U.S.-Israeli relations. The Trump administration’s performative annoyance with the Israeli cabinet is a well-worn routine at this point, but the terms of the peace memorandum are genuinely unacceptable to Israel, and popular American resentment for the cost of maintaining the Axis of Submission is moving into genuinely uncharted territory.
The fate of Gaza and Palestine as a whole has so far been unchanged by the war. Palestinians remain in a prison designed to eliminate their society. If anything, Israel has taken the opportunity to quietly encroach on the little livable space remaining in Gaza and prepare for another round of mass killing. The Board of Peace resolution, rather than internationalizing the Palestinian issue as promised, seems to have taken Gaza off the table and left it in the hands of vultures. (Iran was a consenting party to this process.) At best, the Palestinian issue is in stasis until a real dramatic shift in the regional balance of power.
The past six months show that this change may come suddenly and unexpectedly — and trying to predict it is a fool’s errand.