Iran’s strategic blunders paved the way for humiliating defeats, experts say

Less than two years ago, the Iranian government seemed to be triumphant.

It was in November 2023, just a few weeks after Hamas’ deadly attack on October 7 against Israel, and a senior Iranian general predicted that the regime and its proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon were ready to defeat Israel, the United States and other enemies.

“We fight America, Zionism and all those who target the greatness and honor of the Islamic Revolution of Iran,” said General Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Elite, in a speech in the city of Kazvin.

“We are about to conquer great peaks. … We completely overcome enemies.”

Now Iran has been in its most precarious position since the early 1980s.

His Hezbollah allies in Lebanon were devastated, Hamas was eviscerated in Gaza, the nuclear sites of Tehran have been strongly bombed and the Israeli army now has the sky on Iran.

As for Salami, he was killed in an Israeli air strike this month.

The way Iran has arrived here can be attributed to a series of false calculations and strategic blunders, experts and former officials say, the result of decisions taken decades ago and only months ago.

The often obstinate diplomacy of Tehran, the excessive overcoming of regional activists and poor quality security left it vulnerable to adversaries with much more powerful soldiers. And at a crucial moment, the regime leaders failed to grasp the intentions and capacities of his enemies of Arc in Jerusalem and Washington, without a foreign partner ready to come to the aid.

“Iran was too inflexible when it had to be less stubborn,” said Ali Vaez of the international reflection group of the crisis group. “It never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Among its most recent missteps, Iran has not learned how other countries have managed their relations with President Donald Trump or how the land had changed after Israel has devastated Hezbollah activists supported by Iran in Lebanon, said Vaez.

But perhaps Iran’s largest error has been to count on these Hezbollah attorney in Lebanon in the first place to serve as a “defense before” against any possible attack by Israel. This approach worked for years, and she brought a blow to Israel when she sent land troops to Lebanon.

But everything changed when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mainly civilians. Iran had armed, formed and financed Hamas, and the group’s assault sparked a chain of events that left the regime with seriously weakened Tehran and its regional power has decreased.

“I think there is a direct line from October 7 to today,” said Jonathan Panikoff, former senior intelligence.

While Israel moved away from Hamas activists in the Palestinian Enclave in Gaza after October 7, Iran and its Hezbollah allies prepared for a possible Israel ground attack in Lebanon. Instead, Israel has taken a different approach, targeting Hezbollah commanders and its first leader through air strikes and trapped viewers used by Hezbollah members. Israeli forces have staged a small foray into southern Lebanon.

Alex Plitsas, a former official of the Ministry of Defense of the Atlantic Council’s thinking group, said: “The dominoes that fell after October 7 have left Iran’s proxy network in ruins, eroded deterrence and reduces its counter-puite capacities.”

But he said that Iran had failed to adapt and refuse Washington’s diplomatic openings despite his increasingly vulnerable position.

Seth Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that after the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran invested massively in the armaments and the formation of militias in the region through his revolutionary guard body, with Hezbollah as the anchoring of an “resistance axis”.

The program worked for decades, said Jones, but that has neglected the country’s armed forces, which fell far behind.

“What it means is that your conventional forces do not get the same level of concentration,” said Jones.

During the Israeli air campaign, “the Iranians were fighting an enemy who had fifth generation F-35 stealth aircraft.”

“They just don’t have an answer to that,” added Jones.

Iran has also wobbly on the diplomatic front.

In discussions on its nuclear program, Iranian leaders have respected an uncompromising position wrongly believing that they could buy more time and get more Trump dealerships, as well as his predecessor, Joe Biden, said experts.

For four years, Iran dragged its feet and delayed talks with the Biden administration, which expressed its desire to revive and revise the 2015 nuclear agreement, which Trump had abandoned in 2018, according to Western officials.

When Trump returned to the White House, his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, offered Iran a means of continuing to enrich uranium for a period of several years, while other countries in the region would help him develop a civil nuclear energy program. The Israeli government and republican hawks feared that Trump’s offer is too generous. But Iran seemed to have read Trump badly, calculating that he could extend the talks over a longer period, say Western experts and officials.

In the end, billions of dollars and decades of effort that Iran has devoted to its nuclear program “provided the nor nuclear energy or deterrence,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour, the Carnegie for international peace, on social networks.

Rely on Russia

In addition to its regional proxy forces network which extends from Lebanon to Yemen, Iran has long been based on the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as its only authentic ally. But the Sunni rebels ousted Assad in December, and the officers of the Iranian Revolution Guard are no longer welcome in Damascus.

Iran had also described its growing cooperation with Russia as a “strategic” partnership, Tehran, providing thousands of Shahed drones for its war against Ukraine, as well as technical advice to help Moscow build without names in Russian territory. In return, Iran has acquired Russian air defense systems, but promised fighter planes and other materials have never been materialized.

Over the past two weeks, Israeli air forces have destroyed Iranian radars and Russian anti -aircraft weapons, Tehran losing control of its airspace.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made no mention to provide military assistance to Iran when he met the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi in Moscow on Monday.

Despite the rhetoric of the hard line of Iran on the conquest of its enemies and its vast intelligence and security apparatus, Israel has repeatedly carried out the sabotage and assassinations of the best military officers, nuclear scientists, Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Gaza. Operations have humiliated the Iran regime and have shown that the country’s intelligence services are unable to protect high -level officers or other key personalities.

“Iran’s entire investments in its defense program in advance, its missile program and its nuclear capacities have evaporated during 12 months of regional war and 12 days of war on its own territory,” said Vaez, of the International Crisis Group. “To judge by this result, there is no doubt that Iran has badly calculated in each turn.”