IV. Conclusion: Is “Forward Defense” A Sustainable Military Doctrine?

Iran’s forward defense doctrine draws on a long history, including a critical period of consolidation over the 2000s and 2010s. However, as the United States increasingly perceives direct challenges to Iranian proxy actions as a workable strategy, it is far from clear if the doctrine will prove sustainable over the 2020s.

Kayhan Barzegar, a prominent analyst in Tehran on Iranian regional policies, describes Tehran’s logic behind forward defense as “preempting the penetration of symmetric and asymmetric threats inside Iran’s borders.”¹ According to this line of thinking, Iran not only has to secure its national borders but in certain circumstances it has to go outside of its borders as part of a preemptive national security strategy.

Barzegar calls this the concept of “wider security zone,” which he argues is part of the “the strategic calculus employed by Iranian political-security elites.”² The mastermind behind the concept was Soleimani and, at its core, the logic holds that socio-political turmoil in the region, including the emergence of new security threats such as ISIS, requires an increased and active Iranian response, according to Barzegar.³ Others are less certain about the soundness of such logic. Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues the notion of “Soleimani the savior” is highly ironic. According to him, “the Islamic State’s victories in Iraq [after 2014] were largely due to the ultra-sectarian policies he pressed on authorities in Baghdad.” As Clawson puts it, Iran and Soleimani have been both the “fireman and the arsonist,” in regard to conflicts in Iraq and Syria.⁴

What Barzegar calls the application of power in Iran’s wider security zone is merely the latest reincarnation of forward defense. As described above, this concept has evolved over the last 40 years since Iran’s practical military needs during the Iran-Iraq War. It was then that young IRGC commanders like Soleimani looked for ways to overcome Iran’s limitations given Tehran’s isolation and lack of access to conventional military platforms.⁵ Today, the proxy model still reflects Iran’s military weak points but it has also proven its utility.

Since the beginning of the Arab uprisings in 2011, the generals in the IRGC have argued that the shifting regional security environment requires Iran’s military strategy to adapt and reinvent itself. When ISIS carried out its first attacks in Tehran in June 2017, the proponents of forward defense wasted no time in arguing that had Iran not militarily intervened in Syria and Iraq, Iran would have had to confront a far greater ISIS threat inside its borders.⁶ By implication, since the Iranians officially maintain that the United States has been an enabler for the rise of ISIS, Tehran’s rhetorical stance was that fighting ISIS is tantamount to aborting American plans aimed at Iran. As Khamenei put it a few months before the ISIS attacks in Tehran, “there are well-documented news of American aid to ISIS and some other terrorist groups, and now that they [the Americans] have formed an anti-ISIS coalition, some U.S. agencies are still assisting ISIS in other ways.”⁷ With the United States at the heart of Iran’s security calculations, this sort of logic is pervasive in Tehran. Put simply, the fight against ISIS as leverage against the United States is a common theme in the messaging of Iran’s leaders. The Revolutionary Guards Commander, Hossein Salami, explained in September 2019: “In war, the victor is the one that can shape the power equation. No power in the world today, including the United States, has the capacity to wage war against the Iranian people.”⁸ Nonetheless, Iranian academics, including those linked to the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, openly publish works admitting that Iran’s rivals do not see Tehran’s military posture as defensive.⁹ By implication, this is an admission that, in the Middle East at least, the concept of forward defense on a large scale is viewed as part of a grand strategy to expand its influence.

For Iran’s regional rivals, the Islamic Republic’s forward defense is considered a case of an ideological commitment rather than an Iranian national security imperative. That Tehran’s reliance on forward defense and depending on foreign militias is mostly by choice, driven by Tehran geopolitical choices and principally its rivalry with the United States and her regional allies. In turn, states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and, to a lesser extent, Turkey, are determined to stop Iran in its tracks even as they each are pursuing their own versions of geopolitical forward defense from Yemen to Syria to Libya. As part of this cycle, many billions of dollars are invested in competition for influence in the region.¹⁰

The resultant proxy warfare arms races pose a challenge to Iranian strategy, which has sought to minimize costs to the Iranian people. So far, Iran’s forward defense appears largely to have been implemented on a tight budget. Iran is not the biggest military spender in the Middle East today.¹¹ But Tehran also has far less cash on hand due to American sanctions. President Hassan Rouhani has claimed that American sanctions have cost Iran $200 billion.¹² The issue of Iran’s ability to fund its proxy allies, and the reliance of its approach in cases like Syria on stopgap measures that can encourage escalation on the part of its rivals, poses a threat to the sustainability of the forward defense model. However, it is not an imminent risk to Iran’s ability to pursue the strategy.

As Tehran has demonstrated over the years, it is able to prioritize. Not every Arab proxy group has the same value to Iran. Hezbollah of Lebanon is, to a significant extent, politically and religiously indistinguishable from the Islamic Republic. There is, however, much daylight between the Houthis of Yemen and the Iranians. Aside from an ability to prioritize if needed and redefine forward defense depending on circumstances, the Iranian regime as a whole, including the IRGC and its foreign branch the Qods Force, have demonstrated that they are rational actors that engage in a systematic cost-benefit analysis when contemplating military action. Acting rationally does not equate to flawless execution, however. The Iranian military strategy bears the hallmark of trial and error and has proven to be open to mishaps. The Islamic Republic likes to portray itself as a martyrdom-seeking state, but in reality, Iran’s military strategy remains cautious.

Moreover, while the Islamist message has helped Tehran mobilize support in certain pockets in the Arab World, and provided it with a vehicle to expand its regional influence and with Iraq as the best example, excessive attachment to a sectarian agenda can create its own problems for Tehran. The Islamist ruling elite in Tehran is aware of the perils of Iran becoming an entrenched Shia power in an Islamic World where the Shia are a minority and Iran’s Islamist credentials are dwindling. Tehran does not want to feed the narrative that Iran is a Shia sectarian power bent on expanding its influence in Sunni-majority Arab countries.

Meanwhile, as the Islamic Republic faces a deep crisis of legitimacy at home, it is difficult to see how Tehran can stay the course without risking political blowback from an Iranian public that yearns for nation-building at home and an end to costly foreign projects. This anger is nothing new but Soleimani’s assassination, and Washington’s determination to push back against Iranian regional efforts, might give enough reason for the political and military elite in Tehran to rethink the concept and the sustainability of the forward defense doctrine.

In Western analysis, Soleimani is often depicted as a brilliant strategist who exploited chaos in Iraq and Syria to project Iranian power. There is no doubt that he managed before his death to cultivate a warrior image for himself. But Soleimani, and his brothers-in-arms in the IRGC, have come to a critical juncture. Washington has openly warned Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, that he too will be assassinated if he opts to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor.¹³

This ultimatum presents the biggest challenge for the Islamists in Tehran and test of the proxy warfare strategy. Forward defense and the use of foreign proxies, such as Hezbollah or the Iraqi militant Shia groups, are today seen by the average public inside Iran and in the broader Middle East as a projection of the ideological zeal of the Islamic Republic and a trend that is depleting Iranian national resources while fueling a costly competition for regional influence with regional rivals. The United States has settled upon a strategy that views this as a sufficient leverage point to enable coercion of Iranian policymakers by moving the conflict towards more direct confrontation.

However, the IRGC appears to view its proxy network, built over four decades, as a sustainable counterweight that can survive such pressure. As a result, the current uncertainty regarding whose assessment of the sustainability of Iran’s proxy strategy is correct is likely to prompt a series of crises in which the U.S.-Iran conflict moves towards direct confrontation as the two sides play a game of chicken. Important to watch across these crises, however, is the extent to which Iran increasingly plays up ideological rhetoric to sustain both transnational and domestic mobilization amid the repeated crises.

Whether or not the mobilization methods are successful in prolonging the sustainability of Iran’s strategy, they will likely play a critical role in shaping the IRGC of the 2020s, just as previous actions shaped today’s IRGC. Those changes bear close monitoring by policymakers and consideration as the United States continues to pursue its strategy of amping up the pressure on Iran as a way to force the leadership in Tehran to reconsider their priorities.