Israel, Iran, and the dangers of strategic collapse

What should Israel fear more: the rule of an Iranian regime projecting force across the region, or the possibility that the regime may weaken so badly that order at the frontier dissolves? And when military pressure is applied to a hostile state, what counts as success if the result is not a clearer balance of power but a murkier landscape, one in which armed groups, smugglers, and neighbouring powers test the cracks? These questions should stand at the centre of Israel’s strategic thinking.

From Jerusalem’s perspective, there are obvious reasons to seek a weakening of Iran’s military threat and its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. That is an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state. Yet a hostile state and a partially ungoverned one do not present the same problem. A regime, however repressive, still maintains checkpoints, border systems, security hierarchies, and chains of command. Once those weaken, the threat alters. It may become less centralised, but not necessarily less dangerous.

Israel seeks to degrade Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure while creating conditions that may encourage internal disorder, even as Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged there is no certainty the government would fall. Israel faces not one danger but two: an intact adversary, and an adversary whose weakening may produce its own vacuum.

Iran’s proxies are not just employed and equipped by Tehran. Their loyalty is rooted in a theological vision that shapes their strategic and political outlook. Hizbullah’s involvement in distracting Israel from its confrontation with Iran is proof of loyalty. It may know the cost, but theological conviction remains a major factor. The slogan “Death to Israel, death to the USA” is not empty rhetoric. It expresses a political vision centred not on Palestinian statehood but on the destruction of Israel and the United States. However unrealistic such aims may be, they reflect a conviction grounded in religious belief. That is among the most dangerous fronts Israel faces.

The Iraqi militias backed by Iran, paid by Iraq’s government, and wearing the Iraqi army’s uniform resemble a model that Turkey reproduced in a Sunni version through jihadi proxies in Syria. The Iraqis appear hesitant, divided, and less eager to join the war, as senior figures have been lost and Iran’s network weakened, for now. That may look like a strategic gain. Yet it also raises a hazardous possibility. Armed groups do not become safer when they lose discipline. They grow more erratic, more local in their calculations, and less answerable to central authority. For Israel, that would mean trading one threat for another, perhaps less hierarchical but more unpredictable.

When Iran’s eastern frontier with Pakistan and Afghanistan weakens, one can foresee waves of Sunni Islamist militants crossing into its territory and developing their own version of struggle against Israel. The wider setting to Iran’s east shows the early outlines of something hazardous. Pakistani and Afghan forces have clashed at points along their border, with the fighting displacing more than 100,000 people. In such conditions, instability does not remain local. It invites opportunists, ideological actors, and regional powers to turn turmoil into leverage. Turkey may seek to project influence into Iran through direct military intrusion or its jihadi proxies, reproducing the Syrian model and creating a Sunni front to spread chaos while expanding Ankara’s reach.

To the north-west, the logic would be familiar. Turkey would almost certainly justify such a move in the language of national security, presenting it as a necessary step to prevent the Kurds of Eastern Kurdistan in Iran from developing nationalist aspirations towards statehood. It is striking how readily such reasoning is tolerated by the Western world. There is sustained sympathy for Palestinian statehood, yet far less urgency when it comes to roughly 40 million Kurds divided across four hostile and undemocratic states. That disparity reveals something bleak about international politics. It suggests that legitimacy is granted selectively, and that terrorism still commands attention that stateless peoples without leverage rarely receive.

The danger for Israel would lie not only in Tehran, but in the possibility that a fractured Iran could become a permissive arena in which Sunni militant networks, Turkish strategic ambitions, and older ideological hostilities begin to reinforce one another, perhaps even drawing in alignments with Iran’s Shiite proxy militias across the region.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)