The flaw in Soleimani’s plan seems to be that he assumed that religious and ideological loyalties would win out over local self-interest. By Michael Rubin, Middle East ForumIran’s strategy for gaining hegemony in the Middle East consists of three main components: the nuclear project, the ballistic missile program, and the maintenance of a network of proxy political-military organizations as a tool of policy across the region.The first two elements of this strategy have been significantly diminished, though not destroyed, in the last 12 days of fighting between Iran and Israel.The third component, the proxies, remained largely outside of the arena over the last two weeks.But close observation of the behavior of Iran’s proxy political-military organizations both over the last two weeks and the last 20 months of conflict indicates a need to revise some of the commonly held assumptions about these groups and their role in Iran’s effort to project power.Iran’s use of proxies dates back to the first days of the Islamic Republic. Names little known in the West, such as Mustafa Chamran and Mohammed Montazeri, were the first pioneers of the idea of expanding the Islamic Revolution, from which the proxy strategy emerged.Iran’s first stumbling efforts at proxy warfare took place not in the Levant but in Bahrain, in 1981.The formation of Lebanese Hezbollah in 1982, and that organization’s subsequent insurgency against Israel, formed the prototype and model for Iranian proxy warfare.It was under the leadership of the late Qassem Soleimani, from 1998, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Quds Force turned revolutionary and proxy warfare into a key tool of power projection for Tehran.The essential idea behind Soleimani’s strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: Iran would establish organizations combining political and military capacity in foreign states, or would locate existing movements of this type.Tehran would then build the strength of these organizations militarily, financially, and politically, transforming them into instruments for the building of Iranian influence in the area in question.In the useful phrasing of one Lebanese analyst, Soleimani’s idea was to insert a kind of Iranian-controlled “deep state” into the body of an existing state.The intention was that this deep state would eventually become better armed and better organized than the state itself, while remaining under the control of, and dependent on, its Iranian masters.What was the goal of the strategy?The goal of this strategy was to project power across the region. But in the specific Israeli context, the idea was to seed organizations of this type on Israel’s borders, so that they might be activated at the appropriate moment.It was generally held in Israel that this moment would be when Israel chose to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities.Indeed, these organizations were seen as part of an Iranian effort to build deterrence against any such attack. But there was a broader logic at work.Iran was engaged in a strategy of long war against Israel, intended to conclude with the Jewish state’s implosion and demise.The proxy armies along the border were intended to keep Israeli society in a constant state of neither peace nor war, intended to whittle away at resilience.In this, the Iranians had inherited the Arab and Palestinian nationalist idea, according to which Israel is an artificial society lacking strong internal cohesion or deeply held patriotic and nationalist loyalties among its population.For many years, this strategy appeared to be proceeding apace. Hezbollah brought about a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, fought another inconclusive war against Israel in 2006, and after 2008 emerged as the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon.Hamas, aligned with Iran from the early 1990s, won Palestinian elections in 2006 and then took exclusive control in Gaza from 2007.Further afield, the Iran-aligned Shi’ite militias of the Popular Mobilization Units emerged as the single strongest political and military force in Iraq after the war against ISIS.In Yemen, the pro-Iran Houthis militia seized the capital and a large stretch of the coast in 2015, and have held it ever since. In Damascus, Iran’s militias played a key role in preserving the rule of Iran’s one state ally in the Arab world – the Assad regime in Syria.Soleimani himself was killed by the US in January 2020. But on the eve of October 7, 2023, it looked like his vision and his formula were delivering for the regime he served exactly what it wanted: a formula for projecting and retaining power and influence across the region.What has happened since, however, has exposed the stark limitations of Soleimani’s approach.The key flaws of Soleimani’s strategyThe key flaw, revealed in a series of episodes, was the failure of Soleimani’s strategy to account for the possibility that the proxies, once they had obtained power and influence with Iranian assistance, might then use the capacities acquired to further their own visions and interests, rather than those of their patron.This pattern begins with the October 7 massacres. While Hamas was dependent on Iran for its military know-how, the October 7 attacks do not appear to have been coordinated in advance with the Iranians.There are no indications that Tehran had decided that it was time to launch war. Rather, Hamas made this decision for itself, evidently expecting that its allies would intervene to assist it.In the event, the mobilization of Hamas’s allies was partial and piecemeal, taking place not as a result of a single decision, but rather in an uncoordinated fashion.First Lebanese Hezbollah, then the Yemeni Houthis, then the Iraqi Shi’ite militias, and finally Iran itself each made their gestures of support.The absence of a clear and centralized plan enabled Israel to deal with each assailant separately and score telling blows against each. The Israeli attack on Iran two weeks ago may be seen as the culmination of this.The response of the proxies to this attack on their patron offers further proof of the apparent flaw in Soleimani’s strategy.For many years, it had been assumed that the various militias had been assembled and developed for precisely this moment.When it came, all the proxies elected, without exception, to stay out of the fight.In Lebanon, a badly mauled Hezbollah was dissuaded from action by its own weakness and by the determined objection of all other political forces, up to and including their fellow Shi’ite Islamists in the Amal movement.The Iraqi Shi’ite militias similarly encountered objections from other Shi’ite elements to any action on behalf of Iran (including the influential Moqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani).With wealth and holdings of their own potentially at risk, they chose to sit it out. Even the Houthis in Yemen avoided anything beyond statements of support.The flaw in Soleimani’s plan seems to be that he assumed that religious and ideological loyalties would win out over local self-interest. In some ways, this failure is reminiscent of earlier periods.The Socialist International in Europe was meant to prevent the outbreak of World War I. Instead, its members in various European countries enthusiastically joined their respective national armed forces in 1914.The Communist world, too, supposedly united by ideology, ended up fracturing along national lines, except where Moscow could hold other countries by force.Iran’s proxy alliance is neither destroyed nor conclusively defeated, it should be noted.Yet Soleimani’s vision of powerful Islamist militias moving in unison to war across the Arab world, under Tehran’s leadership, appears to be one of the most notable casualties of the events of the last 20 months.The post The limits of Iran’s proxy strategy: How Soleimani’s vision failed in recent conflicts appeared first on World Israel News.