The latest war between Israel and Hamas is the biggest conflagration in the Middle East today, but sparks and fires are emerging across the region. Each provides ample opportunity to launch a wider war. The common thread is Iran. This means the key to preventing escalation lies in Iran as well.
Iran, a Shia Muslim state, arms, trains and supports a network of militant groups across the region. While most tensions there historically fall along the Sunni-Shia religious divide, Iran’s “axis of resistance” includes groups on both sides.
Right now, Iran is stirring up trouble on a half-dozen fronts. It’s a major supporter of Hamas, the Sunni Muslim militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7. It bankrolls Hezbollah, which threatens Israel from the north. In the Red Sea, the Yemen-based and Iran-backed Houthis endanger global shipping. And in just the past two weeks, Iran has attacked targets in Pakistan, Syria and Iraq.
The United States would love to detach itself from the Middle East’s problems, but Iran is making that impossible.
Israel remains the main front of Iran’s aggression. Though the United States assessed that Iran was not likely involved in planning the Oct. 7 attack, Iran’s long-standing support certainly facilitated Hamas’ actions then and its continued ability to fight in Gaza now.
The most likely trigger for widening the war is Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim militant group, has frequently skirmished with Israel’s military. Hezbollah stepped up attacks after Oct. 7, in solidarity with Hamas, which led Israel to respond in kind. Fighting on the border continues to intensify.
Hezbollah was created by Iran in the 1980s specifically to oppose Israel. It’s well armed, boasts tens of thousands of fighters and generally does Iran’s bidding, for better or for worse. If Iran wants to keep this border from catching fire, it can.
Another high-risk flashpoint is the Red Sea, where the Houthis, a Shia militant group that controls most of Yemen, have been attacking ships for months, disrupting commerce and leading major shipping companies to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. The Houthis claim they will continue targeting ships linked to Israel and its allies until Israel ends its war in Gaza.
The United States and the United Kingdom scaled up their response to striking Houthi targets inside Yemen. But the Houthis didn’t succumb to nearly a decade of Saudi Arabia’s pummeling during Yemen’s civil war, so it’s unlikely an air campaign will deter them. Unless the United States is planning a ground invasion — improbable under any circumstances and more so in an election year. It will need a different approach to liberate this critical shipping chokepoint.
More unexpected were the Iranian airstrikes on a Sunni militant group in southwestern Pakistan on Jan. 16. Iran claimed it hit a base of the insurgent group Jaish al-Adl, which Tehran claims has launched deadly attacks inside Iran. Pakistan insists the attack was unprovoked, ousted Iran’s ambassador and then struck Baluch insurgent training camps in southeastern Iran in retaliation.
The presence of militant groups on each side of this border has long been a source of tension, but the two countries have had mostly friendly relations, and these high-profile attacks were unprecedented. In a measure of good news, Tehran and Islamabad quickly agreed to de-escalate the situation.
But within 24 hours, Iran also launched missiles into Syria and Iraq. In Iraq, Tehran claimed it hit Israeli intelligence assets, and in Syria, it targeted the Islamic State. These are very different missions against very different foes, and Iran taking direct action rather than relying on proxies and plausible deniability was a clear departure from the norm.
Iranian-backed militants in Iraq have stepped up attacks on U.S. personnel and positions too, leading the United States to conduct significant airstrikes in response, in yet another sign of violence on the rise.
Most signs suggest that Iran, like the West, wants to prevent the conflict in Gaza from becoming a regionwide war. With an elderly supreme leader fighting for his legacy, major terrorist attacks on its territory and dust still settling from Iran’s biggest public uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, this regime is not eager to stumble into a fight.
But Iran is clearly feeling the need to project power, and the risk of miscalculation or mistake gets higher by the day. Iran’s nonstate actors have less to lose, which makes them more unpredictable.
This isn’t great news for America’s own interest in keeping the war contained. Our ability to shape Iran’s behavior with diplomatic or economic levers died when we left the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, leaving us only military tools to lean on, which are risky at best and could drag us into direct conflict with Iran.
Iran’s proxies have all tied their recent actions to the latest war between Israel and Hamas, so the best path America still has to rein in Iran is where we still hold sway: Israel. We have the leverage to do so, by conditioning our generous military assistance, but do we have the will?
So far, politics say no. But if the alternative risks war with Iran, I hope we’ll reconsider.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
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