On 30 September 2023, Joe Biden’s US national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke at a literary festival in New York, where he discussed the prospects for democracy around the world. He observed that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades”. A week later, Hamas attacked Israel, unleashing a shattering conflict whose consequences are still unfolding across the region and proving Sullivan’s sanguine assessment wildly wrong.
The 15 months since have seen the destruction of much of the Gaza Strip and large swathes of southern Lebanon, as the Israeli military has vowed to destroy Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s capabilities – assassinating the militant groups’ top leaders and killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process. The war has left Iran’s “axis of resistance” across the region in ruins and exposed the weakness of the theocratic regime in Tehran, which has since been magnified by the collapse of the Assad dynasty in neighbouring Syria.
Iran and its proxies, most notably Hezbollah, had intervened to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s regime after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, backed by overwhelming Russian airpower after Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale military intervention in 2015. But with Iran and Hezbollah weakened, and Russia focused on Ukraine, Syrian rebel groups some of which are backed by Turkey, saw a window of opportunity to challenge Assad and launched an extraordinary offensive, seizing the cities of Aleppo, Hama, and Homs in a matter of days before taking control of the capital, Damascus, on 8 December as the Syrian dictator fled into exile in Russia.
The fall of Assad is a major setback for Tehran, which had relied on Syria as a land bridge to funnel supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon, previously viewed as the crown jewel in Iran’s strategy of “forward defence” against Israel. Russia stands to lose too from the collapse of its longtime client, which has imperilled its access to valuable military bases within Syria. Beyond the crucial issue of Syria’s domestic stability in the coming months as rival groups and regional powers vie for control of the country’s new government and access to its natural resources, the immediate question is how Iran and Israel will respond.
With little prospect of sanctions relief or a new nuclear deal from the incoming Trump administration, which looks likely to feature committed anti-Iran hawks such as Marco Rubio in senior national security roles, Tehran could decide that the only way to ensure its security is to accelerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Equally, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose trial on corruption charges resumed in Tel Aviv in December, might assess that Trump’s return and Tehran’s apparent weakness provides the best opportunity in decades to deal a crushing blow to Iran and fundamentally reshape the region’s geopolitics.
During his last term in office, Donald Trump attempted, unsuccessfully, to withdraw the roughly 900 US troops in northeastern Syria, where they have been deployed since 2014 alongside Syrian Kurdish forces as part of an operation to counter Islamic State militants. He dismissed Syria at the time as little more than “death and sand” and has reiterated on social media since Assad’s fall that the US should not get involved. “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT,” Trump wrote on 7 December. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT.”
Yet Trump is also returning to the White House vowing to bring “lasting peace” to the Middle East. In an interview to mark his designation as Time magazine’s Person of the Year, the President-elect claimed that there were “some very productive things happening” in the Middle East, which he described as “an easier problem to handle” than the war in Ukraine. “The Middle East is going to get solved,” Trump confidently predicted to the Time journalist. Of all the possible predictions for the year ahead, this seems the least likely to come true.
[See also: Could Trump secure a peace deal with Iran?]
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