For more than two decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has relied on a network of regional proxies, calibrated escalation, and asymmetric capabilities. These tools have deterred adversaries and preserved regime stability without engaging in large-scale interstate war.
This “forward defence” strategy has allowed Tehran to externalise conflict, expand influence, and mitigate threats at relatively low cost. Since 2023, however, this model has faced acute strain. Proxy organisations have suffered attrition. Direct exchanges with Israel have increased. Economic pressure has grown, and great-power coordination has narrowed Iran’s flexibility.
These changes raise a core question: Has Iran’s strategy reached its structural limits?
I address this question through omnibalancing theory. This argues that leaders in the developing world prioritise political survival, rather than abstract national interests. They align externally to deal with both internal and external threats.
Thus, alignment decisions are not solely about systemic balancing. Domestic regime vulnerability shapes them as well. Iran is a prime example of this logic. Its leaders have used regional alignments and proxies to deflect external threats and consolidate authority at home.
Iran’s post-2023 experience suggests that proxy-based omnibalancing can shift from efficient deterrence to risky escalation. As adversaries weaken proxies, coordinate retaliation, and intensify economic pressure, the regime loses its protective insulation. The regime then faces external threats directly, while domestic vulnerabilities simultaneously intensify.
Traditionally, neorealism portrays the international system as competitive, with states functioning as units constrained by systemic pressures. While no two states are identical, neorealist theory treats these differences as “variations among like units”, as US scholar Kenneth Waltz argues. However, fellow scholar Steven David departs from structural realism by arguing that Third World leaders balance not only against external rivals but also, often primarily, against domestic opponents.
According to David, the alignment decisions of Third World leaders are driven primarily by domestic political calculations, in which the central motivation is the leader’s desire to remain in power, even if this entails harming broader state interests or aligning with a superpower that poses a potential external threat. Omnibalancing is particularly useful as an analytical framework because it bridges the divide between domestic and international politics in explaining foreign policy behaviour.
In David’s view, balance-of-power theory fails to adequately explain Third World alignments because it overlooks the fine-grained dynamics of domestic political vulnerability and elite insecurity that shape foreign-policy decision making, particularly in regions such as the Middle East, where internal contestation and leadership survival are central determinants of state action.
States, therefore, evaluate not only external military threats posed by other states but also internal risks such as coups, revolutions, insurgencies, and secessionist movements.
Iran’s omnibalancing: Understanding Iran’s evolving security dynamics amid regional transformation, internal strain, and global power realignment requires analysing its “omnibalancing strategy”.
As a structurally constrained state operating under sanctions and conventional military asymmetry, Iran’s leadership prioritises both domestic stability and external threat mitigation. Examining Iran’s failures, adaptations, and recalibrations through this lens enables a more comprehensive assessment of where Tehran has succeeded and where it has encountered structural limits.
The central argument is that while this strategy enabled Tehran to project influence at relatively low financial and military cost during the period 2003-2023, it is undergoing significant strain in the period 2025-2026. Following the October 2023 war in Gaza and subsequent confrontations involving Iran’s regional partners (Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen), the so-called “Axis of Resistance” has experienced substantial degradation, rendering the strategy more costly and less effective than in previous decades.
Between the US-led invasion of Iraq and 7 October 2023, Iran’s omnibalancing strategy relied on four pillars: ideological cohesion, forward defence via proxies (Hizbullah, Hamas, the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, and the Houthis), plausible deniability through non-state actors, and asymmetric warfare using drones, missiles, and cyber capabilities to offset military and sanctions constraints.
However, since October 2023, as proxy capabilities have degraded, Iran’s omnibalancing strategy has become less sustainable in its traditional form. The “Axis of Resistance” has weakened, economic pressures have intensified, and direct confrontation with Israel has increasingly supplanted low-cost proxy warfare.
The outbreak of the direct US-Israeli war with Iran represents a turning point that allows us to realistically evaluate the continuing viability of Iran’s omnibalancing approach.
Although the trajectory of the ongoing US-Israeli-Iranian confrontations remains uncertain, emerging dynamics already reveal strategic strain on omnibalancing: degraded proxies (Hizbullah weakened, Hamas reduced), loss of plausible deniability (direct strikes inviting retaliation on Iran), mounting internal pressures (stagflation and protests), deepening isolation (2025 UN sanctions constraining finances and proxy networks, exacerbated by energy market risks), and the systematic eliminations of Iran’s senior political and military leadership.
Under these conditions, Iran’s omnibalancing strategy appears to be transitioning from a cost-effective instrument of regime security to a high-risk posture marked by escalation exposure and diminishing returns.
In a best-case scenario, with the erosion of Iran’s regional proxy network, the resilience of Gulf states in the face of Iranian retaliation, and the neutrality of other key regional actors (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan), the likelihood of regime change in Tehran could increase, especially as public opinion support and regional solidarity with the Iranian regime decline due to its sectarian policies in several Arab countries.
The worst-case scenario involves the resurgence of Iran’s omnibalancing strategy as a result of US and Israeli miscalculations, such as deploying large numbers of troops in Iran (“boots on the ground”), dismantling the Iranian armed forces, or disbanding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with its more than two million personnel, as well as the possibility of a more extended Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Such moves, which Iran may anticipate, could become the lifebuoy the Iranian regime seeks. In that case, the resulting “doomsday scenario” would not be hypothetical. The regional turmoil that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 would pale in comparison to the scale of instability that could then unfold.
The writer is a lecturer at the University of Chicago in the US.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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