Al Jazeera’s analysis of Iran’s “axis of resistance” captures a network in deep but not terminal flux. Following the reverses of 2025 — which included the degradation of Hezbollah’s leadership cadre in Lebanon, sustained Israeli strikes on Iranian missile production facilities, and the US-Iran Versailles-adjacent diplomatic agreement that temporarily reduced direct confrontation — Tehran’s proxy network of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Iraqi Shia militia is attempting to reconstitute itself under conditions that are significantly more hostile than anything it has faced since the 1980s. Hezbollah’s fragile Lebanese ceasefire marks three months of uneasy calm in which neither side has formally acknowledged what both know: Hezbollah’s military capacity has been dramatically reduced, and the political settlement that allowed it to function as a state-within-a-state is under renegotiation. Meanwhile, US envoys continue talks in Doha with mediators but — pointedly — not with Iranians directly, a choreography that reflects the diplomatic state of play.
The received wisdom
The liberal-internationalist and realist-left reading of Iran’s axis of resistance has typically treated it as a rational strategic response to American and Israeli military dominance: a weaker power building asymmetric deterrence through proxies because it cannot compete conventionally. This reading has genuine merit. Iran’s decision after 2003 to develop Hezbollah into a precision-missile power was a sophisticated strategic investment that genuinely complicated Israeli and American military planning for twenty years. The axis was not a sponsorship of chaos for its own sake; it was a coherent deterrence architecture, even if its human costs fell disproportionately on Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, and Iraqi civilians.
In this framing, the events of 2025 are a temporary setback from which a resilient organisation will recover, as Hezbollah recovered after the 2006 war. The structural incentives that caused Iran to build the axis in the first place — a hostile neighbourhood, a conventional military incapable of projecting power, an existential fear of American-backed regime change — have not disappeared.
A different read
This framing, however strategically coherent, consistently understates the cost that the axis model imposes on the populations it claims to protect. Lebanon is the most instructive case. Hezbollah’s accumulation of 150,000-plus rockets over two decades was a feat of logistics and political organisation. It was also a choice to turn Lebanese civilian infrastructure — villages, towns, suburbs of Beirut — into a distributed munitions depot, accepting that any future conflict would be fought in those same spaces. The consequences, when the conflict came, were borne primarily by Lebanese civilians, not by Hezbollah commanders who had made the strategic decision.
The axis model is, at its core, a form of population-as-shield deterrence. This has been true of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, of Hamas in Gaza, and of Houthi missile sites in urban Yemeni areas. One can acknowledge the structural pressures that led Iran to build this architecture while still insisting that the human cost is not incidental but intrinsic to the model. The three months since Lebanon’s ceasefire have seen almost no progress on disarmament, suggesting that Hezbollah intends to rebuild capacity, not demobilise — which means the civilian deterrence logic remains in place.
The more interesting strategic question is whether Iran’s model is actually sustainable post-2025. The axis has relied on three things: Iranian financial and materiel support, freedom of movement along the Syria-Lebanon land corridor, and the political protection of host populations who saw the axis as preferable to the alternative. All three are under greater pressure than at any point since the 1980s. The Syria corridor is contested; Iranian financial capacity has been squeezed by sanctions and by the fiscal demands of the domestic economy; and Lebanese public opinion — never uniformly pro-Hezbollah — has shifted measurably after the destruction of the 2025 conflict.
Iran’s foreign minister’s observation that there has been “no progress” in Cuba-US negotiations is a reminder that Iran is not the only government attempting to negotiate from a position of weakened leverage. The pattern of authoritarian states that built deterrence on proxy violence finding themselves at the table is not accidental — it reflects a genuine shift in the risk calculus that the 2025 strikes imposed.
What the axis model has never been able to provide is governance — the actual delivery of services, security, and economic prospects to the populations it claims to champion. That failure, more than the military reverses, may be the axis’s deeper vulnerability.
What to watch
- Hezbollah rearming rate: Intelligence assessments of weapons transfers through Syria will be the clearest leading indicator of whether the ceasefire is a pause or a genuine reconfiguration.
- Lebanese government formation: Whether Beirut’s political class can produce a government capable of extending sovereignty to the south will determine whether the ceasefire has any lasting political content.
- Houthi Red Sea posture: The Yemeni front has been quieter since early 2026; any resumption of shipping attacks would signal that Tehran has decided escalation is once again preferable to negotiation.
- Doha talks trajectory: The US-Iran diplomatic channel operating through Qatari mediators has produced ambiguous signals; a formal meeting would be a significant de-escalatory step, while a breakdown would likely harden Tehran’s calculus on proxy rebuilding.
— J