As the conflict escalates between Israel and Iran to an unprecedented degree, with Iran and Israeli missiles clashing in June 2025, representing the most tangible military conflict ever witnessed between these two nations, it will be argued that the actual might that Iran poses doesn’t lie within what we can witness, but instead within what they have worked hard to hide. As everyone focuses on watching ballistic missiles traveling across Middle Eastern skies, it will be realised that Iran’s most potent weapon remains invisible.

Iran has baffled its enemies for several decades. It has been at once isolated and indispensable, weak yet resilient. According to the Middle East Council on Global Affairs’s Hamidreza Azizi, “this seeming contradiction embodies a foreign policy paradigm which aims ‘to compensate for material weakness through strategic ambiguity and indirect power projection.’”  Iran’s most significant foreign policy skill would be aptly termed shadow diplomacy—determining an outcome without occupying the chair.

“The Iranian leadership seems increasingly confident operating below the threshold of outright warfare,” warned CIA Director William Burns at the start of 2024. As Burns said, Iran prefers escalation through “partners, proxies, and deniability” rather than direct confrontation. It is often most influential precisely where it remains least visible.

The implications of this strategy are evident in Ardavan Khoshnood’s research on the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), an undercover influence operation set up approximately in 2014 to nurture Iran-compliant analysts within Western think tanks, news media, and policy circles. Internal communications were uncovered, showing regular interactions between government representatives and foreign-based scholars who, as Khoshnood describes, “regularly........

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