Western strategic literature has had an insufficient vocabulary to deal with Iran’s regional posture for long. Analytical terminologies and political terminologies cannot be synonymous with each other. Take for example “proxy network,” or “terror axis,” which are not terms for analysis; rather they exist to delegitimize.
The first step toward seriously discussing Iran’s regional architecture is to let go of such language altogether and jump straight to the architecture itself.
Iran’s larger strategic community of sub-state, semi-state, and state players whose interests coincide with Tehran’s in the Middle East, and the Levant is what I refer to as the “Ring of Fire.”
On different sides of this arc, on different sides of Iranian command, with different ideologies, and different domestic bases, there are Iraqi Shia Militia networks, and Syria under the Assad government until it collapsed in December 2024, various militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen and smaller militias dotted around the region. It isn’t a united front in the Ring. It’s a coming together of interests due to the existing structural condition of the region.
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The Triple H Alliance (Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis) is the most visible, the most militarily active, and the most ideologically coherent component of this broader focus. The differences between the Triple H and a traditional client-patron relationship are exactly the independence of each one of its parts.
Hezbollah is a reaction to the many years of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the marginalization of the Shia community in Lebanon, which would have led to some armed resistance anyway, if not for the presence of Iran. Hamas is the result of the failure of the Oslo process and the continued suffocation of Palestinian political dreams, occupation, and displacement.
The Houthis emerged from years of neglect, marginalization by the Yemeni state and the ravages of a Saudi-led war in the north. These movements were not being made in Tehran. It acknowledged them, established converging interests’ relationships with them, and created a deterrence architecture on pre-existing social forces.
A true understanding of the Ring as a strategy and not as an aggression begins with the conditions Iran was in and is still in. Israel has never joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, possesses an undeclared nuclear arsenal, and has attacked Iranian assets, territory, and personnel with impunity over the years.
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The U.S., Israel, and the Gulf monarchies waged a coordinated assault on Tehran over the years: sanctions that have been choking the country’s economy, covert nuclear sabotage, and ongoing military posturing on its borders. The strategy of parity with this nexus, was not a realistic option in the strategic sense.
The Ring of Fire was not the policy of the state aiming for regional hegemony. It was the logical response to a situation of continuous asymmetric attack: enhance the deterrence by the addition of depth, increase the cost for the opponent of any direct engagement, and build strategic assets into the social life of allied movements, rather than leave them vulnerable to direct attack.
Epic Fury and the Anatomy of Persistence
The latest and toughest test of this architecture was Operation Epic Fury, a collective US-Israeli military action, carried out on 28 February 2026. When the strikes began around 0700 AM local time, they attacked the Iranian national leadership, not to mention military, intelligence, and nuclear infrastructure, as well as the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in the first few hours of the action.
The big news story in the West was that the Ring of Fire had been broken. Carefully reviewed observations of the evidence tell a different story.
On 2 March, Hezbollah launched a rocket and drone at a military base in the city of Haifa, claiming the attack was in reaction to Israel’s killing of Khamenei, “in defense of Lebanon and its people”, and “in response to repeated Israeli aggressions.”
Israel’s retaliation after that attack went on to target hundreds of Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, such as command centers, weapons storage areas and military leaders, but to no avail: despite being recognized as having suffered 18,000 casualties in the 2024 war, with 5,000 killed, Hezbollah managed to continue carrying out its operations. It’s an institution that many Westerners have declared dead many times over. It was not destroyed.
For the first time in history, Iran fired ballistic, cruise and drone swarms simultaneously against all six GCC countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The targets were not chosen at random. They also contained the infrastructure of the Gulf monarchies that had surreptitiously helped or allowed the anti-Tehran campaign: Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil terminal in Saudi Arabia, the Fujairah oil terminal in the UAE, and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
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By 4 April 2026, the ISW/AEI Critical Threats Project had recorded 95 Iranian strike waves under Operation True Promise IV, all impacting the seven target countries in the first 48 hours, including one of the nine AN/TPY-2 THAAD radars available in the inventory, at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan, which was destroyed in one of the most significant strikes, and worth a total of $300 million.
The Houthis acted carefully when they intervened. The Houthis’ rhetoric and mass protests were the only support they offered in the week following the 28 February strikes and analysts pointed to the fact that Houthis’ long-range drone and missile attacks on the Gulf states and Israel “may prove more effective at a later stage of the conflict when air defense systems may face resupply constraints.”
The Houthis joined the conflict with two attacks, one missile and one drone, on Israel within a span of 24 hours a month into the war, promising to continue their fight on behalf of “resistance fronts in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.” This was not the manner of a movement that takes orders from a patron. The timing was key, not using forces further away until the time was right.
Hamas did not muster a response. In the biggest military standoff in Iran’s recent history, Gaza was left within an existing ceasefire and Hamas refrained from joining the conflagration. In essence, Hamas called upon its “brothers in Iran” to refrain from targeting the Gulf countries and urged de-escalation, an act which directly contradicted Tehran’s campaign logic.
This silence would be inexplicable if the Triple H were a simple client-patron system with elements that are activated by Iranian orders. It can only be understood through the prism of what Hamas has consistently shown since October 2023, that it acts based on its own political calculations, and stashes away what little is left in its arsenal to use when conditions are strategically favorable to Palestinian goals.
Tehran did not command it. Proxy actions is not that kind of behavior. It is the actions of an independent movement, one that has a strategic focus of its own.
The Cost-Exchange Logic
The ring has never relied on symmetric power. It has been based on cost imposition. The conclusion of CSIS, CFR and Soufan Centre is that the US has achieved tactical objectives, but couldn’t eliminate underground infrastructure, failed to eliminate the Strait of Hormuz threat, and the production of the political result it was looking for.
Despite the success of Operation Epic Fury in destroying 77 percent of the visible tunnel entrances, US intelligence later acknowledged that it had been at least 50 percent off in estimating the damage: Iranian military engineers quickly cleared bombed entrances and quickly returned the sites to full operation within hours with pre-positioned excavation equipment.
“To equate the removal of a leader with systemic failure would be a recipe for analytical failure,” as regimes like these are designed to replace leaders and absorb the loss of figures, radicalize narratives, and make attacks into an endorsement of internal consolidation, RUSI argued.
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To say after every Israeli or American military operation that these groups have been “decimated” is to conflate two distinct concepts. Militarily, decimated groups cease to exist, while politically, persistence is an entirely different concept. Iranians have long viewed Israel’s protractedness as indicators of their political persistence.
They have thus maintained a policy of strategic patience, an intricate form of restraint that they believe provides a protective umbrella against military threats. ‘Operation Epic Fury’ did not destroy this strategic web of patience but demonstrated to Iranian leaders that this restraint was not protective.
While the groups within the “Ring” will fundamentally alter their forms, this is not a product of Iranian will, but of the persistent and ongoing structural conditions. The conditions of continuing Palestinian suffering, deepening Lebanese state collapse and dysfunction, and a state of political anarchism in Yemen continue to exist. So long as these conditions endure, the movements intertwined in them will endure.
A military operation is not a political solution. The fires that sustain Iran’s Ring of Fire were never Tehran’s to light, and they will not be extinguished from the air.
*The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.
Muhammad Mahad Samija
Muhammad Mahad Samija is a student of Political Science at Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at muhammadmahadsamija@gmail.com
