For much of the past decade, Iran’s regional strategy looked like a blunt answer to a simple question: how do you deter Israel and U.S.-aligned pressure without fighting a direct war you cannot control? The answer was to build depth, cultivate partners, and keep escalation ambiguous. That model is now damaged, not because Iran has abandoned it pragmatically, but because a string of shocks in 2024–2025 raised the costs of direct balancing while degrading the very tools Tehran used to avoid it. In that altered landscape, Iran’s most rational short-term move is not maximalism. It is buck-passing: shifting the costs of balancing a shared threat onto other actors who, for their own reasons, are increasingly compelled to confront Israel’s expanding freedom of action.

Buck-passing, in the classic realist sense, is not mere passivity. It is a deliberate bet that someone else will shoulder the frontline costs of containment. That “someone else” does not have to be an ally, and the burden does not have to be military combat. It can be diplomatic risk, coercive signalling, air-defence deployment, political exposure, or the costly job of managing escalation dynamics. The essence is the same: you conserve resources and avoid being the primary balancer, because the strategic environment has created stronger incentives for others to do the heavy lifting.

Three events explain why this logic has become attractive for Tehran. First, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut in September 2024, a blow that was both operational and symbolic for Iran’s deterrence ecosystem. Second, Because of a weakened Hezbollah, Turkish betrayal to Astana agreement and some other reasons, Syrian rebels seized Damascus in late 2024 and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, opening a transition led by new authorities associated with Ahmed al-Sharaa (widely known by his earlier nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani). Third, Israel and Iran fought a direct 12-day war in June 2025 that ended in a ceasefire on June 24 after Israel’s terror campaign began on June 13 and U.S. strikes hit Iranian nuclear-related sites.

These shocks do not prove Iran is “weak” in some absolute sense. They show something more actionable: Iran’s margin for absorbing another direct balancing cycle shrank. Hezbollah’s leadership loss and the Syrian rupture weakened Tehran’s indirect levers at precisely the moment the June 2025 war demonstrated the danger of direct exposure. The result is an incentive to buy time—time to rebuild missile production, restore damaged networks, and reassess escalation thresholds—while other regional actors collide over Israel’s posture.

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This is where a blunt but important historical reversal comes in: for years Iran paid the costs of containing Israel, and countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar benefited from that burden being carried elsewhere. Today events have unfolded such that these countries themselves must confront Israel’s expansionism. The claim is not that Riyadh or Ankara have become “pro-Iran.” It is that their threat perceptions are shifting in ways that can reduce the load on Tehran.

Nowhere is this clearer than Syria, which has become an arena of rivalry between two US........

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