Iran’s June 8 missile attacks on northern Israel heralded the first direct exchange of fire between both countries since a cease-fire began in April. They were soon followed by news that a U.S. military helicopter collided with an Iranian drone near the Strait of Hormuz. The United States struck Iran in retaliation, and Tehran followed that up with missile attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. These incidents serve as the latest escalations in the “no war, no peace” paradigm that emerged after the cease-fire.
The events of the last few days are a snapshot of a bigger problem. Iran is neither deterred, nor is it desperate for a deal. Instead, the regime’s new leaders are more assertive than ever. Tehran is now demonstrating a higher risk tolerance and willingness to use force to constrain its rivals. It has eschewed its traditional policy of “strategic patience,” where Iranian forces often avoided responding to escalations and preferred to play the long game. What’s more, by going toe-to-toe with Israel in defense of Hezbollah, Iran is doubling down and reasserting its support for and leadership of the so-called Axis of Resistance.
Iran’s June 8 missile attacks on northern Israel heralded the first direct exchange of fire between both countries since a cease-fire began in April. They were soon followed by news that a U.S. military helicopter collided with an Iranian drone near the Strait of Hormuz. The United States struck Iran in retaliation, and Tehran followed that up with missile attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. These incidents serve as the latest escalations in the “no war, no peace” paradigm that emerged after the cease-fire.
The events of the last few days are a snapshot of a bigger problem. Iran is neither deterred, nor is it desperate for a deal. Instead, the regime’s new leaders are more assertive than ever. Tehran is now demonstrating a higher risk tolerance and willingness to use force to constrain its rivals. It has eschewed its traditional policy of “strategic patience,” where Iranian forces often avoided responding to escalations and preferred to play the long game. What’s more, by going toe-to-toe with Israel in defense of Hezbollah, Iran is doubling down and reasserting its support for and leadership of the so-called Axis of Resistance.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s reason for launching a “special military operation” against Iran in February remains disputed. But the United States’ broad goals were clear: compel Iran, which the 2025 National Security Strategy labeled as “the region’s chief destabilizing force,” to abandon its sponsorship of a regional network of violent nonstate actors and curtail its nuclear program. In short, the United States sought to force Iran to comprehensively overhaul its grand strategy, through either regime change or a deal.
To understand how badly this effort has failed, it’s important to understand how Iran’s grand strategy has shifted. Iran’s long-standing approach centered on forward defense, which reflected the country’s belief that it could not win a state-on-state war against its qualitatively superior foes. As such, Iran cultivated a network of regional allies and proxies to provide it with both strategic depth and a force multiplier for any conflict. That is why it developed close ties with nonstate actors on its rivals’ borders—Hamas and Hezbollah for Israel, the Houthis for Saudi Arabia—and even sometimes within their borders, as demonstrated by the recent arrests of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps cells within Bahrain and Qatar. The network was intended to spread Iranian power and deter retaliation while keeping Iran insulated from any conflict.
Yet even with this extended network, Iran generally eschewed open confrontation for strategic patience. Iranian leaders recognized that a prolonged war could degrade the regional capabilities it had worked so diligently to build. Moreover, its leaders believed that time was on their side, because the more entrenched their allies became in the countries they operated, the more they were able to practice state capture. This would allow Tehran to incrementally remake the regional balance in its favor, which it did for years in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.
This worked until it didn’t. Iran’s leaders were reportedly hoodwinked by Hamas when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The militant group apparently sought to commit an attack so shocking that it would compel Iran and others within the Axis of Resistance to go all in and abandon strategic patience at last. But while Hamas’s attack was indeed shocking, it failed to bring Iran fully into the war. For all its bellicose rhetoric and decades of support, Iran sat back and did nothing while Israel carried out its brutal campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s Hezbollah limited itself to persistent but relatively low-level attacks, which sought to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza without inviting a full-scale Israeli retaliation.
Iran’s belated attempts at course correction only made its situation worse. In April and October 2024, it attacked Israel directly for the first time. In previous years, this would have constituted a shocking and unexpected event. Instead, given the repeated setbacks that Iran and its allies suffered at Israel’s hands after Oct. 7, multiple commentators with no love for the regime questioned why it took Tehran took so long to retaliate. It was only when Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed a senior Hamas leader in Tehran that the regime finally roused itself into action.
Yet Iran still could not bring itself to abandon strategic patience. It aped Hezbollah’s performative playbook by allegedly communicating its intentions in advance and mainly using slow-moving drones that were shot down. Iran’s apparent goal, then, was to demonstrate resolve without causing much damage.
That backfired spectacularly. It not only normalized state-on-state conflict between Israel and Iran, but the attacks suggested that Iran’s bark was worse than its bite. They were, in short, too little and too late. Worse still for Tehran, the long-term damage to its ability to project deterrence was even more profound. Where forward defense was intended to avoid an attack on Iran’s homeland, these actions led to just such an Israeli strike.
In the face of Israel’s increasing use of force, it is possible that there was no amount of Iranian retaliation that would have been enough to deter Israel without provoking a direct attack. But either way, by last summer, Israel determined that it could launch a long-discussed attack on Iran’s nuclear program without having to pay an unfathomable price. Iran did retaliate with more substantial strikes against Israel, but they were largely blunted by Israeli and U.S. missile defenses, leaving Israeli leaders to conclude that they had calculated correctly.
When the United States subsequently joined Israel’s attack, Iranian leaders also retaliated. In response, Iran shattered another taboo when it fired a salvo of missiles from its own territory at a major U.S. base in Qatar. But as with its attacks on Israel in 2024, this was calculated to do minimal damage; Iran informed the United States and Qatar in advance, the base was evacuated, and the missiles were intercepted. Similarly, Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz during that conflict came to nought.
Yet again, Iran’s response proved insufficient. Several months later, both Israeli and U.S. leaders concluded that they could launch a full-scale attack against Iran, complete with targeting and assassinating the country’s head of state, and weather the regime’s response.
Only after Israel and the United States attacked in February did Tehran fundamentally recalibrate. It is understandable that the United States, Israel, and the Gulf states were all shocked by Iran’s wholesale attacks on civilian targets and critical infrastructure throughout the region during the current war and by its closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Their predictions of how Iran would fight were based on its past actions. But Iran was determined to break out of this straitjacket, and it has done so with increasing efficacy and assertiveness.
The April cease-fire had precipitated a reduction but not an end to the exchanges of fire. In the cease-fire’s first two weeks, Iran attacked Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait; the United States, however, did not respond. As peace talks dragged on, the Trump administration became more willing to use force in what Washington termed “defensive” and “preventative” measures against Iranian military targets in the Strait of Hormuz. But Iran escalated after every U.S. strike by attacking civilian targets and critical infrastructure in the Gulf states. One recent example is the United States’ use of a single missile to disable the engine of an Iran-bound tanker, which had ignored warnings to stop. In response, Iran bombed and heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport in an attack that killed one person, injured more than 60, and led to the closure the country’s airspace.
Iran’s recent attacks on Israel are part of this same strategic recalibration, which were in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of a suburb in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. The strikes then precipitated several rounds of Israeli and Iranian attacks on each other’s territory, with Yemen’s Houthis also joining the fight. As in April and October 2024, Iran did little damage. But these were not purely performative strikes. Instead, Iran sought to create new rules of the game in Tel Aviv’s conflict with Hezbollah—that any Israeli attacks significantly north of Lebanon’s Litani River and in Beirut were off-limits and would be met with retaliation.
The attacks on Israel also illustrate that Iran is reasserting its self-appointed role at the head of the Axis of Resistance. The likely intended recipients of Tehran’s signaling were as much inside Lebanon as outside it. Lebanon’s government is conducting direct peace talks with Israel while the latter occupies large swaths of Lebanese territory and has displaced more than 1.2 million of its people. Tehran was attempting to demonstrate to Lebanon’s population that Iran and Hezbollah—rather than country’s government—are its true protectors. Equally, it sought to illustrate that Israel only understands force, thereby vindicating Hezbollah as a “resistance” movement and challenging the Lebanese government’s pursuit of a deal.
The ongoing evolution in how Iran fights demonstrates why the Middle East will likely remain unpredictable and violent for the near future. The apparent paradox is that while two years of regional turmoil have diminished Iran’s regional influence, Iran’s new leaders are as revisionist as ever. But unlike their predecessors, they are increasingly willing to take risks, impose costs on its rivals, and even scupper a comprehensive deal with the United States.
This is less a paradox and more a rational strategic calculation. Iran has already endured its nightmare scenario—a joint Israeli and U.S. attack on its own soil. It happened twice, and regime collapse did not occur. Having weathered that threat and survived, the regime is now more assertive, risk-tolerant, and willing to escalate to deter its rivals or compel them to change their behavior. This is why Iran is redoubling its support for the Axis of Resistance while jettisoning strategic patience. All of this seeks to compensate for the systemic flaws in Iran’s grand strategy and the challenges that it has faced since Oct. 7. And so far, it’s working.
