Iran Is Weaker Than It’s Been in Decades As Trump Returns to Power | Invesloan.com

• Iran’s military power and influence has been badly weakened in recent months.
• Clashes with Israel and the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria have left it reeling.
• Yet Iran retains the ability to hurt the US and its allies.

Last May, Iran’s then-president took a victory lap during the first visit by an Iranian leader to Syria since 2010.

Ebrahim Raisi praised key ally Bashar Assad for his “victory,” having beaten back rebel forces with Iranian and Russian help, and for defying sanctions to hold on to power.

Less than a year later, the picture looks much grimmer for Iran’s foreign influence, not just in Syria but across the wider region.

Assad was deposed after a lightning campaign by rebels in December, and Western officials on Tuesday told The Wall Street Journal that Syria had withdrawn most of its troops from the country that was once at the heart of its strategy to project power across the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Syria’s most powerful regional proxies, the Hamas militia in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have also been decimated in their clashes with Israel in the wake of the October 7, 2023, terror attacks.

Israel also inflicted serious damage on Iran’s air defenses in strikes last October.

As a result, President-elect Donald Trump looks set to face off against an Iran, a longtime US adversary, that’s weaker than it’s been in decades.

A weaker Iran

“Iran has had a number of setbacks in the last year,” Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, told BI.

“Its network of regional proxies is in shambles, with its most important — Hezbollah — the hardest hit. The billions of dollars that Iran invested in Syria over several decades went up in smoke,” he added.

In fact, “it is hard to point to a single trend that has been moving in their direction for months,” Alterman said.

For decades, Iran has pursued its core goals of damaging US influence, challenging Saudi Arabian power, and encircling Israel by building a network of militias and allies across the region.

These groups, which also include the Houthi militia in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq, were dubbed by Iran the “Axis of Resistance.”

But across the region, they’re on the back foot in the wake of attacks by Israel and its allies. Most recently, Israel and the US have struck Houthi targets in Yemen.

“Instead of surrounding Israel, Tehran probably feels surrounded by countries hostile to it,” Mathew Burrows, Counselor in the Executive Office at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC, told BI.

“Iran’s containment strategy against Israel is in tatters,” he added.

Troubles at home

Domestically, things are not much better.

Iran’s economy has been crippled by punishing international sanctions, not least those imposed by Trump in his first term in office as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign.

Sanctions were linked to Iran’s decision to turn off energy supplies across vast swaths of the country in December.

The value of Iran’s currency, the Riyal, has also plunged, and inflation is running at 30%.

Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, Iran faces a host of issues.

Its most powerful international allies, Russia and China, are unable or unwilling to help, said Stefan Wolff, a professor of international security at Birmingham University in the UK.

“Russia has a much-diminished stature in the region now,” he said.

Russia was considered a key backer of Assad, but stretched by its war in Ukraine, it seemed unable to help, beyond flying him and his family out of the country.

China, though it’s playing a more assertive role in the Middle East, also appears unwilling to get directly embroiled in Iran’s conflicts.

“Over a relatively short period, Iran’s losses have been substantial,” Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East Security at London’s RUSI think tank, told BI.

And now it has to contend with a new Trump administration.

The return of Trump

Trump imposed waves of sanctions on Iran during his first term in office.

He also ordered the assassination of Iranian military commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in 2020, and under the Abraham Accords sought to normalize ties between Israel and Gulf Arab states.

In his second term, Trump could seek to tighten his maximum pressure strategy by undermining Iranian influence in Iraq, where it controls a network of militias.

“With Hamas and Hezbollah downgraded, and the Houthi movement in Yemen under pressure, it makes sense that next in line will be Iraq,” said Ozcelik.

“This could empower Iraqi institutions and sovereignty in the face of exponentially expanding Iranian influence,” she added.

But while Iran may be down, it’s far from out.

Its allies, including the Houthi and Hezbollah, though weakened, will likely rebuild. Iran may also seek to stoke conflict to destabilize the new government in Syria, and it continues to have a sophisticated military and intelligence apparatus.

And, according to analysts, it retains the capacity to develop the most dangerous weapons of all — a nuclear bomb.

After the Obama administration’s nuclear deal was abandoned by Trump, Iran quietly began gearing up its nuclear program again, and some experts believe it could develop enough material for a weapon in a matter of months.

“Some analysts think Iran’s weakness will push it to accelerate efforts to develop a nuclear weapon to compensate, or at least to threaten doing so to improve Iran’s leverage in negotiations,” said Alterman.

“The only real weapon in the short term is the nuclear one,” said Burrows.

A major challenge for Trump will be figuring out how to stop it getting one.