Chairman Cardin, Ranking Member Risch, and distinguished members, thanks for inviting me to contribute my views on the intensifying threats posed by Iran’s proxy community throughout the Middle East and the way U.S. coverage may counter these threats most successfully. It is an honor for me to handle this committee.
I’m vp and director of Foreign Policy on the Brookings Institution, a U.S. nonprofit group dedicated to impartial analysis and coverage options. Brookings’ mission is to conduct high-quality, impartial analysis and supply revolutionary, sensible suggestions primarily based on that analysis for policymakers and the general public. My testimony represents solely my private views and doesn’t replicate the views of Brookings, its different students, workers, officers, and/or trustees.
The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a critical and abiding risk to U.S. nationwide safety by its decades-long bid to attain a nuclear weapons functionality; its in depth observe file of terrorism, hostage-taking, and violent subversion; its deepening involvement in Russia’s barbaric and unlawful battle in Ukraine; and its brutality towards its personal residents. One of essentially the most worthwhile instruments within the Iranian arsenal is the community of militias that its management has cultivated, coordinated, skilled, and provided with superior weaponry. The community extends throughout the broader Middle East from Lebanon to Pakistan, and these proxies have confirmed integral to Tehran’s safety, longevity, and affect. They present the Islamic Republic with strategic depth and large regional affect and entry whereas insulating Iran’s management from the total threat of their actions.
Since the stunning massacres perpetrated by Hamas in Israel on October 7, hostile actions by Iran’s proxy militias have dramatically escalated in ways in which pose a posh problem for Washington and the world. Already, militia assaults have resulted in a minimum of 186 accidents or deaths to American troops serving within the Middle East, together with 130 who’ve suffered traumatic mind accidents and the tragic lack of three U.S. service members in Jordan, in addition to two U.S. Navy SEALs killed in a mission to interdict illicit Iranian weapons.1 And the Iran-backed Houthi motion in Yemen has launched a minimum of 57 assaults on industrial delivery within the Red Sea, prompting the rerouting of maritime freight visitors with vital delays and extra value.
The persistence of lethal militia violence augurs even better dangers. A miscalculation by any of the actors concerned might ignite a a lot wider and extra intense battle throughout the Middle East, with profound injury to regional stability and the worldwide economic system. Over the long run, the empowerment of those nonstate armed actors contributes to the erosion of governance and safety throughout the area to the benefit of Iran and different unhealthy actors.
Over the previous 4 and a half months, the Biden administration has been resolute and pragmatic in managing the threats posed by Tehran and its self-described “axis of resistance” within the wake of Israel’s battle in Gaza. The speedy deployment of American navy property to the area, along with tireless diplomatic engagement by President Joe Biden and a bunch of senior U.S. officers, have so far succeeded in averting the broader battle that Hamas had hoped to precipitate. And a sequence of U.S. retaliatory strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen since October have degraded militia capabilities and management and signaled to Tehran’s companions that they are going to pay a steep worth for continued aggression towards Americans. Still, the post-October 7 strategic panorama calls for extra from each the United States and its allies and companions within the Middle East and past.
Iran’s proxy community within the Middle East
One of an important parts of Iran’s regional and worldwide energy projection is its deployment of proxy militias. Over a long time, and with solely restricted efficient pushback from regional states or the worldwide neighborhood, Tehran has assembled an adaptive, layered community of regional militias with discrete organizational buildings and management and overlapping pursuits and ties to Iran’s safety and non secular institutions. This proxy infrastructure has enabled the Islamic Republic to wield vital sway and sow instability throughout the broader Middle East and past whereas preserving believable deniability. Although these relationships are sometimes extremely opportunistic, that doesn’t invalidate their utility for both aspect of the equation; in lots of respects, it displays shared preferences for autonomy and self-interest. And the evolutionary nature of Iranian investments in its purchasers has labored to its benefit, enabling Iran’s safety institution to construct partnerships of tolerating strategic worth.
Over 4 a long time, militant proxy teams have turn into a core part of the Islamic Republic’s regional and worldwide technique, which depends on uneven warfare to realize leverage towards extra highly effective adversaries, together with and particularly the United States. In looking for to entrench its personal affect on the expense of its adversaries, Iran’s energy projection by way of proxies is purposeful reasonably than wanton, acutely aware of the steadiness of prices and advantages, decided to use openings or weaknesses, creative in its implementation, and wide-ranging in scope. Iran’s entry has been boosted by the elimination of its historic rivals among the many radical camp within the Middle East. As deep-pocketed dictators like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi had been eradicated from the scene, the Islamic Republic has turn into one of many solely video games on the town.
Tehran’s operational governance of its proxies has confirmed versatile and dynamic, using umbrella teams and joint operation rooms to coalesce and direct numerous factions, whereas at different instances fragmenting present teams as a way of sustaining its sway.2 While Iran’s provision of funding and materiel assist has lengthy been a central dimension of sustaining its relationships with particular person militias, more and more, Tehran is provided to switch not simply weaponry however the technique of manufacturing and modification to allow impartial manufacturing as effectively. Any dangers of obsolescence appear to be outweighed by the chance to construct redundancy of provide, seed innovation, and improve deniability.3
A quick overview of Iran’s “shadow military” will give attention to its most distinguished and efficient parts—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the panoply of Iraqi Shia militias, and the Houthis in Yemen. These teams have emerged as essentially the most highly effective nodes of Iran’s militia community, however they symbolize solely a small minority of the multitude of teams internationally that Tehran has patronized over the previous 45 years.
Iran’s proxy community emerged organically from the transnational operational and ideational networks that facilitated the 1979 revolution. From the inception of the Islamic Republic, its management has harbored expansive ambitions. The ideology that formed Iran’s post-revolutionary state was explicitly universalist, and its first chief, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, maintained that exporting the revolution was essential for its survival, arguing that “[i]f we stay in an enclosed setting we will positively face defeat.”4 Determined to spark a wider wave of upheavals, its leaders developed an infrastructure devoted to toppling the established order throughout the Muslim world by proxy teams, Islamist propaganda, and the instrumental use of extraterritorial violence. To prolong the regime’s imaginative and prescient of an Islamic order, Tehran sought to subvert its neighbors by tried coups, assassinations, and bombings.
Despite wide-ranging efforts, the anticipated revolutionary wave didn’t materialize. Still, the Islamic Republic’s early investments yielded one enduring asset: the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) performed a foundational function in forging the group after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, constructing on communal and clerical ties between the 2 states, in addition to collaboration amongst militants throughout the Nineteen Seventies. Hezbollah’s lengthy and bloody observe file features a devastating sequence of suicide bombings in 1983 and 1984 that focused U.S. and French authorities services in Lebanon, in addition to kidnappings, hijackings, and actions additional afield, such because the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural heart in Argentina and the 2012 suicide bombing that killed 5 Israeli vacationers in Bulgaria. Hezbollah has fought and survived a number of wars with Israel, maintains tens of hundreds of energetic fighters, and with Tehran’s assist has amassed a large arsenal estimated to incorporate 150,000 rockets and missiles, largely short-range and unguided, in addition to drones, precision missiles, anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and anti-ship missiles.5
Through its political wing, Hezbollah has insinuated itself firmly within the fraught Lebanese authorities, with members serving in parliament and within the cupboard. This political function has not tempered the group’s reliance on coercion; a number of Hezbollah members have been convicted within the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
Today, Hezbollah is the jewel within the crown of the Iranian proxy community; as Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, who heads Israeli navy intelligence, has famous, “For some time now Hezbollah has not been a proxy of Iran; it’s an inseparable a part of the choice making course of in Tehran … It is not a dialogue of whether or not Hezbollah is the defender of Lebanon, the defender of the Shiites, or the defender of Iran and only one a part of the axis. It is the axis [emphasis added].”6 Its ideological affinity with Tehran is exclusive, its dedication to “resistance” unyielding, and it proved central to the Islamic Republic’s existential wrestle to maintain Bashar Assad’s regime after the eruption of the Syrian civil battle. That battle elevated Hezbollah to first amongst equals, working intently with the IRGC to supply coaching and coordination amongst a wider transnational community of Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.
Tehran’s deep involvement in Lebanon additionally offered the springboard for its patronage of varied Palestinian teams, which additionally constructed on in depth pre-revolutionary interactions. The Palestinian situation has at all times loomed massive for the Islamic Republic’s management, however traditionally, their inroads with Palestinian teams have been restricted by sectarian and doctrinal variations, in addition to by Yasser Arafat’s embrace of Tehran’s mortal enemy, Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein. One key exception to that estrangement was Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a small Sunni group that fused Muslim Brotherhood doctrine with an affinity for the Iranian revolution. Embraced by the IRGC, PIJ’s dedication to militancy made it a worthwhile accomplice for Tehran in its efforts to sabotage U.S.-led efforts to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
In its outreach to the Palestinians, Tehran has constantly sought to courtroom Hamas, which emerged within the Nineteen Eighties as essentially the most influential opponent of Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. With robust roots within the Muslim Brotherhood motion, Hamas leaders historically saved Tehran at a better distance than PIJ, though they too had been receptive to Iranian funding and arms provides. But the connection shifted within the mid-2000s, with the assassination of the group’s founder, the fallout from the battle in Lebanon, and the Hamas victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections and subsequent seizure of management in Gaza. Munitions, coaching, and suitcases full of money started flowing from Tehran to Hamas.
Just a few years later, as Iran mobilized Shia teams from throughout the area to combat on behalf of Assad, its relations with each Hamas and PIJ would as soon as once more turn into strained. But the frictions had been quickly repaired and by 2018, Hamas chief Yahyah Sinwar lauded Hamas’s “robust, highly effective and heat” ties with Iran and boasted that “we now have glorious relations with our brothers in Hezbollah … We work collectively and coordinate and are in contact on an nearly every day foundation.”7 In explicit, Iranian backing facilitated the very capabilities that enabled the October 7 assaults, in addition to Hamas’s stockpile of hundreds of rockets utilized on that horrible day and persisting nonetheless. In flip, each PIJ and Hamas have enabled the proliferation of violent resistance amongst Palestinians, nurturing smaller affiliated cells of violent rejectionists.
A key issue within the convergence over the previous 15 years amongst a various array of Iraqi Shiite militias underneath Iranian coordination was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which eradicated its longtime Baathist authorities and unleashed waves of violent insurgency that mobilized each Shiite and Sunni extremists. Tehran was well-situated for this transition; since Baghdad’s 1980 invasion of the fledging revolutionary state, Iranian leaders had cultivated Iraqi Shiite opponents of Saddam by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its navy wing, the Badr Corps.
The underlying pragmatism of Iran’s management labored to its benefit, as its preliminary allies cooperated intently with Washington within the run-up to and within the years after the invasion. Still, Iran’s companions had been steadily eclipsed as a political and navy power in post-Saddam Iraq by an array of different paramilitaries. The militias initially flexed their muscle tissue to supply safety within the postwar vacuum; many shortly aligned with Iran to undermine U.S. dominance and ultimately to contest Sunni extremists, together with the Islamic State. Tehran developed highly effective operational and monetary relationships with all kinds of Iraqi militias, which proceed to have outsized affect on the state’s political, financial, and safety trajectory.
The most up-to-date addition to Iran’s militia lineup is Ansar Allah, extra generally generally known as the Houthi motion, in Yemen. The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite group, launched an insurgency towards Yemen’s authorities practically 20 years in the past, and have been preventing towards inside and regional adversaries ever since. In 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a navy intervention, with cooperation from its regional companions within the Gulf in addition to the United States. The operation didn’t unify the nation or restrain the Houthis however precipitated a horrific humanitarian disaster in Yemen, in addition to the deepening of Iranian assist to the insurgents. Over subsequent years, it turned clear that the Houthis had developed subtle capabilities to strike civilian infrastructure. Since the 2022 ceasefire, hostilities remained at a low ebb, however an enduring political settlement proved elusive, and Iran continued to supply deadly assist to the Houthis, together with ballistic and cruise missiles, sea mines, unmanned aerial autos, and unmanned marine autos.
Iran-backed militias and U.S. responses since October 7
For the Islamic Republic’s management, the October 7 assaults and the battle in Gaza present a possibility to advance its long-cherished aim of crippling its most formidable regional foe. Iran’s supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has by no means wavered in his feverish antagonism towards the United States and Israel. He and people round him are profoundly satisfied of American immorality, greed, and wickedness; they revile Israel and clamor for its destruction, as a part of the last word triumph of the Islamic world over what they see as a declining West and illegitimate Israel.
The assaults on Israel and the next Israeli navy marketing campaign in Gaza have served a number of essential Iranian targets: elevating Tehran’s stature as a regional interlocutor and heavyweight; emboldening its proxy community; blocking nascent efforts to attain formal normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which might have additional remoted Iran; and weakening its adversaries, particularly Israel which was left with little alternative however to embark on a ferocious offensive that has resulted in immense civilian casualties in Gaza and inflicted injury to its worldwide standing. Tehran and its proxies sensed a possibility to grab the initiative and take a look at the backbone of U.S. leaders within the face of an unanticipated disaster.
The Iranian management has exulted in Israelis’ terror and grief and exploited the immense struggling of Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza in a bid to raise the Islamic regime as a key regional energy dealer. In October 2023, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman positioned his first-ever cellphone name to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who later participated in a regional summit in Riyadh the next month. Other Iranian officers, together with Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, have shuttled across the area and the world, posturing as peacemakers and sincere brokers even because the regime maintains full-throated assist for Hamas and continues to stoke the flames of instability throughout the area.
The Biden administration has engaged in energetic protection, using each navy and diplomatic instruments to comprise or dissuade the extension of the battle past Gaza. The earliest U.S. steps, together with the dispatch of two service strike teams to the area and high-level official engagement, signaled the energy of American resolve and, along with a gradual tempo of Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, prevented the enlargement of a full-fledged battle on Israel’s northern entrance. The administration’s intense efforts to safe an settlement that might implement the phrases of previous United Nations Security Council resolutions and make sure the redeployment of Hezbollah north of the Litani River stay important features of averting additional escalation and enabling some semblance of regular life to renew in northern Israel.
To counter Iran-backed militias, the United States has struck greater than 100 targets in Iraq and Syria related to the IRGC and its property in these nations since late October. And to handle the continued threats posed by the Houthis within the Red Sea, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to intercept Iran’s provides of superior weapons to the Houthis and launched two new initiatives geared toward blunting the Houthis within the area—Operation Prosperity Guardian,8 a multinational safety mission meant to guard secure transit by the Red Sea, and Operation Poseidon Archer, an operation led by U.S. Central Command to degrade the Houthis’ strike capabilities. The administration has additionally resumed the designation of the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization, and reportedly launched a cyberattack towards Iranian ships which have helped facilitate the Houthi assaults.
The path ahead on Iran and its proxies
The Biden administration’s use of power towards Iran’s proxies seems to be having a salutary impact on the disaster, with some early proof that particular person militias could have been weakened and that assaults emanating from Iraq have slowed and/or halted altogether.9 And extra broadly, deterrence is working, a minimum of in forestalling the eruption of a wider battle. Still, the tenacity and adaptableness of Iran’s numerous militias are prodigious and time-tested, and the weapons at their disposal are comparatively plentiful and cheap, particularly as in comparison with the prices entailed in capturing them down. So, Washington should stay vigilant.
But additionally it is clear that using power alone is not going to remove the risk posed by Tehran or its militia community, and overreach or overreliance on navy devices might undermine the last word targets of U.S. coverage within the area and elsewhere. Even a spectacular U.S. strike, such because the January 2020 assassination of Qods Force commander Qasem Soleimani together with a key Shiite militia chief in Iraq, has had comparatively restricted long-term impression on the energy, sturdiness, or efficacy of Iran’s “axis of resistance.”
This can and needs to be a bipartisan effort. The previous decade has witnessed an immensely problematic polarization of the controversy round Iran coverage, each right here in Washington and across the nation. I’ve had the privilege to work with Republican and Democratic administrations on Iran, and there may be substantial alignment across the nature of the Iranian risk and the best instruments for countering Tehran’s malign insurance policies among the many American folks and their representatives and leaders throughout each side of the aisle. Unfortunately, additionally it is evident that the fierce disagreements in Washington have at instances stymied alternatives to reinforce our deterrence.
We needn’t go it alone, and the U.S. navy response within the Red Sea is a reminder that investments in coalition constructing require time and power to germinate and mature. But the disaster within the Middle East has laid naked a number of laborious truths. Like it or not, the United States stays an indispensable participant within the Middle East, regardless of a doubtful observe file of restricted success within the area over the previous a number of a long time. However, no different world energy can surge navy and diplomatic capability to assist handle a spiraling battle to keep away from the worst outcomes. And even when Americans are weary of the navy, financial, and human toll of our dedication there, standing by our allies—even when that requires a cautious steadiness of assist and restraint—and preserving entry to the power that, a minimum of for now, stays important to the world economic system requires that dedication and readiness. Several American presidents have hoped to downsize our function within the Middle East on a budget with a view to give attention to Russia’s pressing risk and China’s pacing problem. Instead, Americans should generate the fortitude to steer on each, whereas additionally endeavoring to extinguish a harmful hearth within the Middle East and assemble the diplomatic pathway that may allow the area to navigate towards a extra peaceable and affluent future.