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Iran had a plan to fight Israel and the US. It all collapsed after October 7.

The rise and fall of the “Axis of Resistance.”

This is not how it was supposed to go for Iran.

For years, the Islamic Republic worked to build up a network of allies throughout the Middle East, widely known as the “Axis of Resistance,” which, in the event Iran itself were attacked, could rain down destruction on Israel, the US military, and American allies in the region.

Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” has failed. Built as a deterrent force meant to overwhelm Israel and constrain US intervention, the network of regional allies that included Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and Hamas has responded weakly to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

The key turning point for the axis was Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. While Iran may not have directly orchestrated Hamas’s attack, the war it triggered allowed Israel to systematically degrade Tehran’s allies.

As a result, Iran is now more isolated and vulnerable than at any point in decades, giving Israel and the US greater freedom of action, as seen in the current war.

The axis includes Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and militants in Iraq. At its peak, Iran relied on the network to promote its hardline brand of Shia Islam against rival powers associated with Sunni Islam, intimidate governments into submission, and scare off Western threats. Perhaps even more than its ballistic missiles stockpile, its nascent nuclear program, and its conventional military, these regional groups were Iran’s deterrent against exactly the sort of all-out attack we’re not seeing.

“The idea was never to be engaged in a war of attrition,”said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow and expert on Middle Eastern armed groups and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Everyone would fire at once, so that Israel would be overwhelmed before the US was able to completely deploy its defenses.”

And yet, since the joint US-Israeli airstrikes against Iran began over the weekend, killing its supreme leader and devastating the regime’s military and infrastructure, the response from the Axis of Resistance has been fairly feeble.

The Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which in the past has boasted of the ability to destroy Tel Aviv, fired a “handful” of rockets into Israel, which prompted a much larger campaign of airstrikes by Israel in southern Lebanon and Beirut. Wary of being dragged into yet another war, the Lebanese government has taken the unprecedented step of banning military activities by the group. Yemen’s Houthis, who dramatically shut down most global shipping through the Red Sea two years ago, have been conspicuously quiet. Militants in Iraq claimed a drone attack on a US military base in Erbil, but the attack was intercepted without any casualties, and some groups seem to be staying quiet.

The impotent response is part of a larger story of the Iranian regime’s collapse from a fearsome military power to a weakened state fighting for its survival against an emboldened America and Israel. Rather than secure it from attack, its strategy of backing proxy forces in conflicts abroad played a critical part in dragging it into the existential crisis it faces now.

And while there are a number of factors that led to its unraveling, there’s one clear moment when it all started to go south: Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Pride before the fall

In the spring of 2018, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had every reason to feel confident about Iran’s position in the Middle East. It was arguably the moment of greatest power and influence for the Axis of Resistance.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s........

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