Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, an act from which experts can draw a straight line to the current U.S.-Iran war, and the strategic dead end the Trump team now faces in that conflict. The October 7 assault represented an attempt by Hamas, a key member of an Iran-led “Axis of Resistance,” to compel Israel to end its control of Palestinian territories. More broadly, the Hamas attack, backed by Tehran, sought to upend an emerging U.S.-led coalition that included Israel and moderate Arab states. Hamas viewed the moderate, U.S.-aligned Arab states as increasingly willing to forsake the Palestinians for a strategic alliance with Israel and their own economic prosperity. Israel responded to the attack with overwhelming force that destroyed most of Gaza and, in the process, killed tens of thousands of Gaza civilians, and the assault returned the long-neglected Palestinian issue to the center of regional and global discourse.
Several days after the Hamas attack, Iran’s closest ally, Lebanese Hezbollah, which is similarly positioned along a border with Israel, joined Hamas by launching rocket and missile attacks on Israel. Hezbollah’s attacks were intended to assist Hamas by bogging down Israel’s military advance into the Gaza Strip — a combat mission Israeli leaders insisted would not end until Hamas was eliminated as the governing and security authority in Gaza. Although Israel largely achieved most of its military objectives in Gaza and in Lebanon, its use of overwhelming airpower and ground maneuvers on both fronts fueled regional global outrage, backed in some cases by economic and diplomatic sanctions against Israel, as an imposition of collective punishment on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
By late 2024, experts assessed Hamas’ October 7 attack represented a strategic blunder that threatened to permanently shift the regional balance of power to the U.S. and its allies or even destroy the Axis of Resistance coalition outright. Israel succeeded in decapitating the leadership of both groups, killing Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader, also the architect of the October 7 Hamas attack, Yahya Sinwar. Israel’s gains set the stage for Washington to broker ceasefires and peace agreements with both Hamas and Hezbollah on terms largely favorable to Israel, although neither peace plan has yet produced the full disarmament of the two militias. In Iraq, leaders in Baghdad bowed to U.S. economic and political pressure to insist that Iran-aligned Shia militia groups disarm, although some groups have continued to launch strikes on regional targets in support of Iran’s war effort.
In December 2024, the Iran-led Axis suffered perhaps its most enduring setback when the Assad regime collapsed at the hands of a Sunni Muslim movement intent on unifying Syria after a decade of civil war — a war in which Tehran was the main backer of Assad. The new government in Damascus expelled Iranian (and Russian) influence from the country and quickly aligned with the U.S. and its regional coalition of moderate Arab states, in an effort to obtain sanctions relief and reconstruction investment. Strategically, the change of regime in Syria deprived Iran of a secure land corridor with which to resupply and rebuild Hezbollah.
The setbacks suffered by the Iran-backed groups caused some Iranian leaders to question the premise of Tehran’s decades- long strategy, conceptualized and nurtured by the slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qasem Soleimani, to cultivate regional pro-Iranian non-state actors as instruments to deter attacks on the Iranian homeland and project power in the region. Assessing its “unity of fronts” strategy against Israel had redounded to Tehran’s disadvantage, some Iranian strategists have advocated retrenchment — shifting toward defense and deterrence against Israel and the United States rather than backing non-state allies as instruments of Iranian power. U.S., Israeli, and moderate Arab leaders perceived the strategic shift as ushering in a new regional paradigm focused on economic diversification and technological development and downplaying security issues. Still other elements, including hardliners within the current regime’s leadership, believe that Iran has not done enough to support its proxy forces and should in fact double down on rebuilding them as an essential piece of Tehran’s foreign and security policy.
Judging Iran and its Axis severely weakened, U.S. President Donald Trump, taking office for a second (non-consecutive) term, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to take the battle to the Iranian regime on its own soil. In a June 2025 joint air campaign, the U.S. severely damaged Iran’s main uranium enrichment facilities, and Israel attacked key centers of the regime’s power. Iran responded with missile and drone strikes on Israel, but it did not seek to close the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise damage the global economy. After six months of relative quiet, a major Iranian uprising during December 2025-January 2026 appeared to convince Trump and Netanyahu that a modest input of outside intervention might succeed in ousting the regime altogether. Yet their joint campaign, limited to air power, quickly reached a strategic dead end, despite an initial decapitation strike that killed a large portion of the senior Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Facing a crisis it had long anticipated and planned for, remaining regime leaders regrouped and reorganized, demonstrating resilience and the regime’s entrenchment. Iran quickly acquired strategic leverage by closing the Strait of Hormuz to energy export traffic, and Iranian missiles and drones inflicted significant damage on U.S.-manned bases and energy infrastructure facilities in many of the Arab Gulf states. The success of its counter-attacks will likely compel Tehran to shift its doctrine toward self-reliance on its own technology and forces, and away from a dependence on non-state allies as a “force multiplier.” On the other hand, one non-state ally, the Houthi movement, has remained relatively unscathed during the Iran war. It is helping Iran project power by threatening another key chokepoint, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, emboldening those in the regime who want to rebuild Iran’s ally-based forward defense strategy.
Iranian strategy has largely succeeded in pressuring Trump politically, although it has not compelled Trump to end a naval embargo of Iranian ports, to withdraw U.S. forces, or to rule out further strikes. The U.S. team has, since April, sought to de-escalate and forge an agreement with Tehran that would end the conflict and move toward talks on the main issue of U.S. concern, Iran’s nuclear program. But even if a U.S.-Iran settlement is reached, the war has recast the region’s strategic landscape. Iran’s refusal to change its policies in the face of the U.S. bombardment exposed the difficulty of compelling a defiant, highly ideological, mid-range power to capitulate. U.S., Israeli, and Arab leaders now assess that they will likely be battling Iran’s regime and its Axis of Resistance indefinitely.
The failure of the U.S. to prevail decisively has called into question the viability of the U.S. security umbrella that moderate Arab leaders have relied on. Facing a “worst-case scenario,” in which the U.S. has left in power a vengeful and defiant regime in Tehran, the Arab states are likely to entertain, at least outwardly, Tehran’s longstanding proposals for a new regional security architecture that excludes outside powers. Trump’s rejection of a Saudi request for direct U.S. intervention to stop a Houthi ground offensive, which advanced along the Red Sea coast to the Bab el-Mandeb, has fueled additional doubts about U.S. leadership. U.S. officials, surveying the damage Iran inflicted on U.S. bases, will reassess whether defending the Gulf states, going forward, might require returning to “over-the-horizon” rather than a forward presence in the Gulf. Neither U.S. nor Gulf state officials have, to date, announced whether they intend to rebuild the bases damaged by Iran, either whole or in part.
Yet the leaders of the Gulf and other moderate Arab states are clearly unwilling to risk their close defense relationship with the U.S. The refusal of Türkiye and Pakistan to invoke their August “Mecca Defense Agreement” with Saudi Arabia in response to the Houthi advance to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait demonstrates the limited utility of shifting to regional defense partnerships. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, both parties to the Trump-brokered 2020 Abraham Accords, are likely to cooperate closely with Israel, but some other Gulf states are unlikely to follow suit. As they reassess their security relationships, the Gulf and other Arab states will likely focus on building up their own capabilities, including hardening their energy infrastructure sites and building up their supplies of missile and drone defenses, including systems supplied by Ukraine.
The post The Region Still in Crisis Three Years after the October 7 Attack appeared first on The Soufan Center.