II. Introduction

The U.S. assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani on January 2, 2020 in Baghdad was so unprecedented that many feared that any move afterward might lead to all-out war between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. After four decades of tense rivalry in the Middle East, the American use of an armed drone to target a military official widely viewed as one of the most powerful men in Iran signaled a precipitous climb up the escalation ladder between Washington and Tehran. Iran in turn retaliated on January 8 with direct missile strikes on American forces in Iraq, although the strikes did not kill anyone.¹ By one account, the Iranians had given the U.S. military an eight-hour notice to clear the bases before the missiles hit. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, claimed that the warning had been given to the Americans because Tehran “did not intend to kill [persons].”² Tehran wanted both to show a capacity to strike at the United States but also to demonstrate that it had no intentions to see the military standoff escalate further.

For now, despite the missile strike, Iran appears prepared to double down on the proxy war strategy that was Soleimani’s most significant contribution to Tehran’s anti-access, area denial approach to deterring American attempts to expand U.S. regional influence that could seed regime change in Tehran.

Over the course of the last decade, this Iranian approach to regional military operations began to be described by its proponents in Tehran as “forward defense.” Put simply, forward defense holds that militarily confronting enemies outside of Iran’s borders is preferable to having to face them inside of Iran’s borders. At its core, forward defense is the embodiment of Iran’s military lessons gained over the four decades since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It reflects a fusion of the tools available to Iranian military leaders combined with the need to address a fast-changing security environment.

While Soleimani was one of the principal creators of the concept, his death will not be the end of the strategy. That has been the message sent by Iran’s Supreme Leader and Commander-in-Chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei swiftly appointed Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, as head of the Qods Force, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that operates outside of Iran’s borders. Khamenei has also been categorical that the mission of the Qods Force as intended by Soleimani will continue. As he put it, “The strategy of the Qods Force will be identical to that during the time of Martyr General Soleimani.”³

In a speech on May 22, 2020 set to coincide with Al Qods Day, which is an event to express opposition to the State of Israel, Khamenei was unusually polemical and signaled his determination to stay the course. In urging the expansion of “jihad inside Palestinian territories [Israel],” he not only praised groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas but vowed that Iran would stand by them on the path of “holy struggle.”⁴ Iranian officials even set aside the usual application of deniability. In a rare move, state-run media publicized the fact that Soleimani had spearheaded the transfer of Iranian weaponry to Palestinian militants.⁵ Such statements from Tehran are a rebuff of American and Israeli demands that Tehran roll back its support for militant Islamist groups in various theaters in the Middle East.

In pursuing this strategy in the post-Arab Spring era, Iran has increasingly come to embrace aggressive means that involve transnational mobilization and the interlinking of proxy forces, which has in turn encouraged the United States and other Iranian rivals to perceive Iran’s strategy as an offensive and revisionist one.

Soleimani’s assassination, increased tensions vis-à-vis the United States, and the fluidity of the geopolitics of the Middle East, have brought into the open questions in Iran about the long-term costs, benefits, and risks of a forward defense strategy that relies on Tehran’s ability to continue to defy the growing pressures on its economy from U.S. sanctions and fund proxy groups. In the same week as hardliners around Khamenei were touting Tehran’s commitment to militant revolutionary foreign policy, a prominent parliamentarian launched a rare public criticism of Tehran’s regional agenda.

Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh,⁶ who until recently had been head of the Iranian parliament’s committee on national security and foreign policy, asked for Iran to reassess its commitment to the Bashar Al Assad regime in Syria. “[Iran] has probably given 20 to 30 billion dollars to Syria and must recover it. The money belonging to this nation [Iran] has been spent there,” he said.⁷ The reference to funds invested in backing Syria’s Assad was a clear attack on Tehran’s foreign policy priorities or that was at least how Khamenei loyalists viewed it. Hossein Shariatmadari, the Khamenei-appointed editor of Kayhan, the Islamic Republic’s equivalent to the Soviet Pravda, denounced Falahatpisheh as doing Trump’s bidding by turning Iranian public opinion against Tehran’s foreign policy.⁸ The incident was a peek into the opaque policy-making process in Tehran and evidence of competing viewpoints in Tehran in regard to the cost of Iran’s regional efforts and whether it is sustainable.

The question now for the Biden administration and Congress as well as for their counterparts in Iran is whether Iranian proxy war strategy is truly built to last. The Trump administration turned the calculus of indirect confrontation with Iran on its head, evidently deciding that the United States either no longer needs or can no longer afford the risks that come with fighting Iran’s proxies in the shadows. Despite the Trump administration’s repeated public pronouncements that it wanted to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East and discontinue its perceived role as regional policeman, the White House opted to put on display American hard power as a way of forcing the Iranians capitulate to a campaign of “maximum pressure” aimed at forcing Iran to recalibrate its approach to Iraq, Syria, and Israel. This new U.S. approach essentially destroyed the crisis stability that was part and parcel of a covert action strategy anchored in plausible deniability. The high-profile assassination of Soleimani was the most overt expression of this new policy. At the same time, Iran has increasingly adopted public, aggressive means in pursuit of its forward defense strategy.

In the short term, this fresh American resolve will have to contend with one simple reality: Iran’s ongoing determination and ability to mobilize, guide, and launch a host of militant groups across the Middle East that Tehran has painstakingly cultivated for decades. In fact, Soleimani and other architects of Iran’s forward defense, proxy war strategy would argue that this turn in American policy has been long awaited, and that Iran and its allies are ready for the challenge.

Yet, while Tehran’s ability to mobilize an array of foreign militias under its flag is no small feat, the contention that Iran can stay the course regardless of American counter-actions is an untested theory as is the hope of some U.S. policymakers that U.S. pressure can effectively rollback Iranian footprint across the region. Evaluating where, when, and why Iran’s forward defense strategy has worked and where it is built on a sustainable foundation and understanding where it has failed and lacks a sustainable foundation, will be central to determining the effectiveness of both U.S. and Iranian crisis management. In the meantime, the uncertainty will likely bring with it periodic crises that at least appear to hold the potential for further escalation to more direct confrontations.

The rest of this report is divided into three sections. The first section examines the historical development of Iran’s proxy warfare strategy under Soleimani. The second section examines the sustainability of the strategy today, and the third and concluding section draws lessons from the clash between Iranian proxy strategy and America’s new hard power approach.