For over 250 years and since the days of the Safavid Empire, expansion to the eastern Mediterranean has been an Iranian strategic objective. And the fact that this century Iran secured a strong presence in the eastern Mediterranean, stretching from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, was a major achievement for the Islamic Republic.
Even the republic’s most ardent opponents inside and outside of Iran relished the fact that their country had realised an objective that for centuries has been lurking in its psyche. In some interpretations of Iranian history, the objective of reaching the eastern Mediterranean and establishing a presence there goes way back and was a key factor in the wars between Iran’s ancient Sassanid Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire.
The fact that this strong Iranian presence in the eastern Mediterranean has been dealt an acute setback at the hands of Israel over the past year is one of the greatest challenges that the Islamic Republic has faced since the end of its war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the late 1980s.
Several factors exacerbate this setback and make it particularly problematic.
The first is that this setback was preceded by and entailed several significant weakenings of the pillars of Iranian expansion over the past few decades. Two episodes were particularly painful to the Iranian leadership: the assassination in 2020 of Qassem Suleimani, the most successful Iranian military strategist in the past half century, and the assassination, in September 2024, of Hassan Nasrallah, the chief of Lebanon’s Hizbullah group and the most charismatic leader belonging to Iran’s political project in the eastern Mediterranean.
The second factor in this setback came at a time of transition in the leadership of the Islamic Republic from the generation of the founders who had surrounded Ayatollah Khomenei in the 1970s and 1980s and who steered Iran’s Islamic Republic in its first three decades to a new generation. This transition is particularly fraught because the formative experiences of this new generation included Iran’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean.
They cut their teeth on strategising, implementing, and in the cases of many of them literarily fighting for consolidating this expansion and for entrenching the Iranian presence in the region. The fact that this generation is coming to power at a time when that expansion has now been lost has dealt a dramatic blow, and it will highly likely engender desires for not only regaining what has been lost, but also for revenge.
This could mean potential further Iranian-Israeli confrontations in the near future, as well as potentially assertive stances by this new generation of Iranian leaders towards power centres in Lebanon, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.
The third factor consists of the assassinations of key figures in the Iranian project in the eastern Mediterranean, figures who had inspired millions of Iranians and who intellectually and emotionally belonged to it. Their assassinations resonate with the sense of victimisation that is at the core of the Iranian Shia psyche, which itself emerged from some of the most painful episodes in Islamic history.
The fourth factor is that this setback is particularly problematic for Iran because the successes that it had achieved over the past two decades, many of them now lost, are unrepeatable in the foreseeable future. This is because Iran managed to expand in the eastern Mediterranean over the past two decades primarily because there was a political vacuum there that was waiting for an agile, ambitious, and intelligent player to fill.
It emerged with the acute weakening or utter disappearance of key power centres in the region, those that surrounded former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, former Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat, and former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri. Iran’s ability to expand and fill such gaps was also strengthened by the presence of former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who not only chose to be close to Iran, but who, unlike his father Hafez Al-Assad, was also detached from the Arab nationalist project.
All of this was taking place at a time when most of the Arab world was undergoing turbulence in the decade that followed the Arab uprisings that began in 2011. None of these factors is present at the moment. As a result, whereas Iran, 20 years ago, found the way from its borders to the eastern Mediterranean open, that road now contains serious obstacles to any Iranian expansionism.
Iran managed over the past 20 years to defend its presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Today, the situation has changed dramatically, to a large extent because the strategic calculus of Israel has changed significantly over the past 18 months – the subject of the next article in this series.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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