Study

Editor's note: The following study is not meant to be read in one sitting, but in segments. The author apologizes in advance to the reader, but the academic approach followed could not allow for a split into several articles or a summary that would weaken its substance and nuances. Mea maxima culpa, therefore. In early April 2026, Israel circulated a “new” map of southern Lebanon, highlighting a zone of approximately ten kilometres north of the border inside Lebanese territory, coloured in yellow, representing the geographic space that its army has occupied since the beginning of its military offensive in March. This demarcation line, which by default has come to be called the “Yellow Line”, is presented by Israeli officials as a ground reality under the control of the IDF, accompanied by a prohibition on the return of residents to fifty-five Lebanese localities. The model, by the Israeli military commanders’ own admission, is the one already applied in Gaza. Experience speaks for itself: Israel does not improvise tactically. Symbolically, the map is not without crystallising the resurgence of a territorial imaginary that runs through the history of Zionism from its origins, and which the conjuncture of 2024–2026 — with the collapse of Hezbollah as a first-rank military force, the disintegration of the Iranian empire, and the paroxysmal symbiosis between Donald Trump and Tel Aviv — reactivates with an audacity not seen since 1967. Even on the eve of the November 2024 truce, Israel was close to consolidating a horizontal buffer line stretching from Naqoura to Kfarshuba, some one hundred kilometres wide and between seven and ten kilometres deep, amounting to roughly 452 square kilometres of Lebanese territory under effective Israeli control. Beyond this first line, Israeli military planners were developing a second defensive perimeter between the Litani and the Awali rivers, designated internally as a “hunting and pursuit zone”. Netanyahu himself declared: “Every terrorist position — and there are many — is simply being flattened”, adding that the Israeli army had “expanded its presence in Lebanon beyond the five positions established in 2024” to constitute, in his own words, “a solid, deeper security zone.” And it is evident, to judge by the declarations of Israeli leaders, that they have no intention of withdrawing from this zone in the months, or even the years, ahead. The systematic demolition of entire villages is irrefutable proof of this. It is a demographic void that Tel Aviv is engineering — and this comes as no surprise. Israel has been a master of this practice since 1948… Beyond a simple strategic occupation for security purposes, the “Yellow Line” is not without arousing the dread of outright annexation as part of a much older and wider imperialist project. The Geography of Desire To understand this legitimate apprehension, and the accompanying perception of the Israeli logic underlying these operations, it is necessary to return to the ideological matrix of the Zionist project itself. Israel’s territorial ambition has no doubt varied according to trends and periods, yet it has always been there — and it proves necessary, for the purposes of this study, to attempt to trace its genealogy. Eretz Yisrael HaShlema — the “Land of Israel in its entirety” — is indeed an expression carrying multiple and evolving biblical and political meanings. In the flux of nationalist or Zionist movements, territorial obsessions have varied across periods and currents — Labour Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Religious Zionism — but two primary definitions emerge: one, narrower, designating Israel together with the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza; the other, maximal, designating the vast region stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism, himself traced this perspective during a conversation with Max Bodenheimer, noting in his diary that the Jewish state should extend “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” Since then, the formulation has reappeared regularly in Israeli political literature and in the declarations of officials — including, in 2024, the activist Daniella Weiss, who asserted: “We know, from the Bible, that the real borders of Greater Israel extend from the Euphrates to the Nile.” It is, however, between these two poles — biblical maximalism on one hand, the pragmatism of stages on the other — that the real strategy of the Hebrew state has been constructed. And never was this dialectic formulated with such clarity as in the celebrated letter that David Ben Gurion wrote to his son Amos on 5 October 1937, in the aftermath of the Peel Commission. Just “the Beginning” Dispatched in the wake of the outbreak of the Great Arab Revolt in 1936, the British Royal Commission on Palestine, tasked with proposing modifications to the British Mandate over Palestine, had proposed in 1937 the abolition of the Mandate and the partition of Palestine into two states — an Arab State in the south and a Jewish State in the north. Ben Gurion, to the surprise of many of his comrades who championed “Greater Israel”, accepted it. Yet this acceptance was more a matter of tactical pragmatism than a renunciation of Zionist ideology. In his letter to his son, Ben Gurion wrote: “My assumption — and this is why I am an ardent advocate of a state, even though it is now linked to partition — is that a Jewish state on only part of the country is not the end but the beginning. (…) For this increase in possession matters not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the entire country. The establishment of a state, even on only a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time, and a powerful boost to our historical endeavours to liberate the whole country.” This cold logic of accepting today what can be obtained in order to prepare for tomorrow’s desires constitutes the keystone of Zionist strategy from its origins. It explains, consequently, why every gesture — whether ceasefire, agreement, partial withdrawal, or otherwise — has always been presented as provisional by the proponents of Greater Israel. Time is not the static time of obfuscation, but that of a continual narrative, in constant elaboration. In 1954, the journals of Moshe Sharett reveal that Ben Gurion described Lebanon as the “weakest link” of the Arab League, proposing the creation of a separate political entity and the annexation of the South as far as the Litani. Moshe Dayan, for his part, advocated exploiting Lebanon’s internal divisions to facilitate intervention and eventual control — something that was attempted, with the relative success that history records, through the use of both actors sympathetic to the project (the Lebanese Front of the 1970s and 1980s, then Saad Haddad) and those ostensibly hostile to it (Hezbollah…). But it was Assad who would perfect the technique. From the early 1960s, Yitzhak Rabin in turn identified the Litani as the ideal northern border. As for Netanyahu, one need only listen to the declarations of his ministers — Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for example — to understand that in the Israeli political imagination, at least a portion of Lebanon belongs to Israel. The Obsession with the Litani In surveying the literature on Israel’s posture towards Lebanese territory, it becomes clear that the question of the Litani is one of the oldest and most constant obsessions of Israeli geopolitics, dating back to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Thus Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion had, at that Conference, submitted a map of the desired borders of the future Jewish state that included the Litani. But the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1915, by which Britain and France had already fixed the border between Lebanon and Palestine, put paid to their plan. At France’s insistence, the Litani therefore remained Lebanese. The Israeli claim, however, did not disappear. Ben Gurion would still affirm: “It is necessary that the water sources upon which the future of the country depends should not lie outside the borders of the future Jewish homeland. This is why we have always demanded that the Land of Israel include the southern banks of the Litani, the headwaters of the Jordan, and the Hauran region.” In 1978, Israel would name its invasion of southern Lebanon “Operation Litani”, the stated objective being to reach the river. And since 2025, an Israeli settler movement called Uri Tzafon has been openly campaigning for the annexation of southern Lebanon as far as the Litani, asserting that “southern Lebanon is simply northern Galilee.” The hydraulic dimension of the project is not incidental. Water is a strategic resource in an arid region, and after the 1967 war, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan declared that Israel had achieved “provisionally satisfying borders, with the exception of the one with Lebanon.” That is to say, the Litani — within reach, yet always out of reach. Not anymore. It goes without saying that the discovery of offshore gas south of the Litani has done nothing to calm Israeli appetites. Quite the contrary… The Yinon Plan and the Doctrine of Fragmentation Ben Gurion’s letter of 1954 constituted a kind of declaration of intent and a structural, progressive plan by stages. The celebrated document published in 1982 by Oded Yinon in the Hebrew journal Kivunim represents its most explicit and systematic strategic translation. A reputed former adviser to Ariel Sharon and a former official of the Foreign Ministry, Yinon published in February 1982 an article entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, in which he analysed the weaknesses of Arab states and concluded that Israel must work towards the fragmentation of the Arab world into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings. “Every form of inter-Arab confrontation”, he argued, would be advantageous to Israel in the short term. The plan operates on two fundamental premises: to survive, Israel must become a regional imperial power, and must bring about the division of the region into small states through the dissolution of all existing Arab states, the size of these entities being a function of the ethnic or sectarian composition of each territory. Lebanon occupies a particular place in this plan: Yinon saw the contemporary events in Lebanon as a harbinger of future developments across the Arab world as a whole, whose convulsions would constitute a precedent for guiding Israeli strategies in the short and long term. He seems, to say the least, to have been widely heeded… The Yinon Plan has naturally prompted multiple rereadings since 1982, with certain commentators arguing that it describes, in prophetic or programmatic fashion, what has in fact unfolded across the Middle East over the past forty years — notably the establishment of buffer zones inside Lebanon, the annexation of Syrian territory beyond the Golan, the support for the Alawite regime in Syria against the Sunni majority, the empowerment of the Iranian regime in the Near East to destabilise Arab regimes, the removal of the bulwark constituted by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, support for Druze and Kurdish groups favourable to a fragmented Syria, strikes on Iraq and Yemen, and even the emergence of Hamas to weaken Fatah… All these developments would have put in place, for various analysts, a new version of Sykes-Picot centred on the Yinon Plan. The problem, obviously, would be to fall into a conspiratorial logic that confuses Israel’s capacity to steer political events in the direction that serves its interests with a grand scheme devised half a century in advance — rather like the famous Kissinger plan for Lebanon, whose latent function is to relieve the protagonists of responsibility for their own tactical and strategic errors, in the name of inexorable fate… Rather too convenient. Netanyahu and His Cartographic Confession If one characteristic is particular to Benjamin Netanyahu, it is his capacity to pass without any inhibition whatsoever from ideology to practice, not without a certain euphoria of ostentation. The man and the aforementioned ministers of his government are far from practising the art of rhetorical subtlety, diplomacy, or even duplicity. His passion for geographical maps is documented since 1990, and one would readily wager that, far from being accidental, it is entirely calculated — a mode of symbolic governance, by image. On 22 September 2023, two weeks before the Hamas attack, Netanyahu had presented before the United Nations General Assembly a map entitled “The New Middle East”, which included neither the West Bank nor East Jerusalem nor Gaza, incorporating de facto these territories into the body of Israel. Earlier in the same speech, he had also shown a map of Israel in 1948 that included the Palestinian territories within the new state. Whatever indignation was expressed proved to be short-lived… and the attack engineered by Sinwar and his associates served to erase the monumental insult dealt to international law before the General Assembly. And it is remarkable that, at a time when certain European countries are over-zealous in curtailing civil liberties with legislative proposals such as the so-called “Yadan law”, the world managed to overlook Bibi’s display, which had erased Palestine with a map, thus connecting “the river to the sea.” That display was certainly no diplomatic accident. Before his departure for Washington in early 2025, Netanyahu had already, in a statement, pledged to “redraw” the map of the Middle East, in reference to his government’s plan to create a “Greater Israel” encompassing the entirety of the Palestinian territories and significant portions of neighbouring states. Within this government, the most explicit faction is represented by Smotrich and Ben Gvir. On 23 March 2026, Smotrich appeared before his parliamentary bloc in the Knesset and explicitly invoked the Litani as the line delimiting a northern sphere of Israeli expansion, mirroring developments in Gaza and Syria. Does the complete disappearance of entire southern Lebanese villages — doubtless forever erased from the map in the Israeli perspective — obey purely security considerations? The question must be posed with acuity, and necessarily raised within the context of negotiations by a Lebanese state intent on preserving its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and on defending its rights against occupation. The Golan as Laboratory for Permanent Annexation It is no doubt the trajectory of the Golan that offers the most accomplished and instructive precedent for the progressive annexation process that characterises the Israeli method. Occupied in 1967, unilaterally annexed in 1981 in a gesture that the international community refused to recognise for decades — and which Assad readily conceded to his tacit ally in exchange for his perpetual retention of power in Damascus — the Golan saw its Israeli sovereignty recognised de facto by Donald Trump in 2019, the first act in a series of normative reconfigurations whose effects continue to unfold. Since the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024, Israel has extended its military presence into Syrian territory beyond the buffer zone established in 1974, creating new facts on the ground. This model, which follows the pattern of occupation / settlement / fait accompli / deferred recognition, is precisely the one that the Yellow Line in southern Lebanon appears to seek to replicate, with the adaptations imposed by a different context and a resistance of a different character. The Logic of “Thresholds”: from Founding Myth to Political Programme It is necessary, once again, to introduce a nuance indispensable to the analysis — at the risk otherwise of falling into the trap of conspiracy where one should rather read the structural tension between founding myth and political decision. The term Eretz Israel HaShlemah did not enter common political usage until after the 1967 war. During the Mandate era (1920–1948), the Zionist camp was divided. Some supported the militant Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who argued that both banks of the Jordan had been promised to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration. Others, following Ben Gurion, accepted the framework of the British Mandate over western Palestine. With the rise of Likud, heir to the Jabotinskyan revisionist current, the term Eretz Israel HaShlemah became more popular, and the project of complete annexation became the central objective of the ruling coalition. If the territorial dreams of the Zionist right once seemed to be nothing more than colonial fantasies without a future, current events in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria show that the hopes of an Israeli far right in full ascent are closer to realisation than ever before. The border between myth and reality has never been so blurred. It is probably appropriate to situate this epidermic resurgence of “Greater Israel” within the context of this wind of “nostalgia for a mythical golden age” that stirs all the calls of empire — as Samir Frangieh noted in an interview shortly before his death. From Putin and Ukraine and the Baltic states, to Trump and Venezuela and Cuba, through China and Taiwan, or Erdoğan’s Turkey and the demons of the Ottoman Empire, without forgetting the theocratised empire of Darius III currently expiring under Israeli-American bombs… it is a blizzard of megalomania sweeping the entire world. The imperialist myth constitutes, in this framework, a horizon of desire that structures the strategic thought of a significant part of the Israeli establishment, calibrating its ambitions according to the opportunities offered by the regional and international balance of power at any given moment. The new map is certainly not that of the Euphrates to the Nile. But it may well constitute a stage towards it. And Ben Gurion warned, in 1937, that the stages were precisely what mattered. He was not lying. And today, Netanyahu is not bluffing. At some point, it will be necessary to move beyond the local adversarial posturing that continues to believe Israel is an exhausted power, on the verge of collapse, moribund. Tel Aviv has been at war for three years, and, this close to its objective, why would it renounce it — especially when it has never enjoyed such unconditional support from its American ally? What the “Yellow Line” May Announce At the conclusion of this exposition, it is appropriate to answer the question of whether the “Yellow Line” is purely of a security nature, linked to the primary principle of ensuring the permanence of northern Israel against potential attacks. While it is naturally impossible to answer this question with full certainty, the rhetoric and conduct of Netanyahu and his ministers are nonetheless manifest and virtually transparent on the subject. Why not simply listen to them? Moreover, if Tel Aviv now holds golden arguments — the pretext for reprisals graciously provided by Hezbollah through its desire to avenge Khamenei — along with total impunity and an unprecedented alignment of political stars to realise its project, why would it not act, especially within a regional and global context entirely destabilised, in which the United Nations and international law no longer count for much? The opportunity may well be unique. The de facto annexation of southern Lebanon is undoubtedly an attempt to solidify a territorial fait accompli in the absence of any recognised international legal framework, drawing on the Gaza precedent and the political support of the Trump administration. The American envoy Tom Barrack has even floated, on his side, the creation of a “Lebanese economic zone” that would replace the centuries-old border villages. As in Gaza. The formalisation of dispossession in all its splendour, with the delights of progress and development dangled as incentives. A peculiar “positive” propaganda founded on human misery. The destruction of homes, the demolition of infrastructure, the prohibition on the return of populations… all of this is not without tracing the outline of a project that exceeds security concerns and manifestly touches — evidence in hand — on demography, human geography, and the durable modification of the border space. From the Peace Conference of 1919 to the internal debates of the 1950s, from the Yinon Plan to the speeches of the current coalition, Israel’s northern border has never been considered definitively drawn. Some voracious Israeli appetites fantasise their annexationist pleasure as far as Tyre. Others, perhaps, even further. Who knows? In an imploded world that deliberately looks away, imagination and delirium know no limits. What the “Yellow Line” may well reveal, in sum, is that the dream of “Greater Israel” — in its various forms and shifting iterations — is being lived in the present tense. Just as, for that matter, the dreams of other fallen empires. Lebanon, in 2026, is without doubt — as Gaza was in 2025–2026 — the most immediate and most painful theatre of this. At the risk of progressively suffering the same fate. Done with a Lebanese Myth Yet — and it seems necessary to conclude on this inescapable clarification — nothing of the foregoing can justify the current rhetoric defended by the champions of moumana’a, namely that Israel’s cupidity proves the war would have happened regardless, and that one must cease holding Hezbollah responsible for what is occurring. It is time to be done with this master-key of argumentation that seeks to justify everything the Hezb does — and, in a grotesque paradox, everything Israel does as well — through a pseudo-law of inevitability. This reading dismisses, through ignorance or bad faith, a whole set of factors. Without wishing to enter into all the sterile sophisms developed to justify Hezbollah’s war, it is worth pausing at just one: if “resistance” is legitimate against a state that continues to covet its neighbours’ territory, the decision to resist can belong only to the Lebanese state, not to a paramilitary group subordinated to Iran, which for twenty-five years has been dictating what it wishes — not only war and peace, but also what may be said and done, and who deserves to live or die — to the other components of Lebanese society, on the basis of an imperialist political project in which Lebanon is merely a province and the Lebanese mere cannon fodder. And if the state has thus far been unable to play this sovereign role, it is specifically because, from within, the Iranian Trojan horse was unwilling to restore this prerogative to it, out of blind fidelity to Iranian hegemonic will. The experience of Hezbollah’s “Islamic resistance” has been a national catastrophe on every level — and it is not yet over. “Greater Persia”, of which Hezbollah is merely an outgrowth, has never been mandated by the Lebanese people to confront the project of Greater Israel. Only Greater Lebanon can do that — symbolically and practically, by all legitimate means, beginning with diplomacy. So: to Greater Israel, Greater Lebanon. And only that.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The study that follows, dedicated to a detailed analysis of the logic of war in the Persian-Iranian spirit and practice in the light of the current conflict with the United States, is not to be read in a single sitting, but in segments; the digital medium is no doubt ill-suited to the length of the text. It is more advisable to print the article and read it on paper. The author offers his apologies in advance to the reader for this inconvenience, but the academic approach followed cannot tolerate a break into several articles, or a summary that would dilute its substance and nuances. Therefore, mea maxima culpa . On Tuesday, 21 April 2026, late in the evening, Tehran announced that it would not participate in the Islamabad negotiations scheduled with Washington for the following day, citing “prohibitive conditions” imposed by the Americans. The ceasefire, concluded on 8 April after fifty days of open war, had just expired, and Donald Trump found himself compelled to extend it to give the Islamic Republic still more time to reach an agreement. The Strait of Hormuz had been declared fully open to commercial traffic on Friday, sending oil prices tumbling by more than 10%, before Iran closed it again on Saturday, once Washington refused to lift its naval blockade. Donald Trump had declared the ceasefire null and void “Wednesday evening Washington time” while simultaneously dispatching two negotiators to Pakistan. Tehran had, according to the official IRNA agency, described American statements as a “media game” designed to exert pressure through a “blame game” — all while keeping the Pakistani channel open until Tuesday evening, the hour of the dramatic twist. And the dramatic twist is the following: Tehran rejected Trump’s ceasefire, declared the 8 April agreement null and void, and formally reopened the path to a resumption of hostilities… All this diplomatic confusion unfolding before the entire world, like a dangerous and lowbrow case of mixed signals that defies comprehension, is in fact nothing of the sort. Tehran is applying a doctrine. It is — replayed with the instruments of the twenty-first century (ballistic missiles, FPV drones, oil blockade, communiqués from semi-official agencies) — the same strategic pattern that an attentive observer could have described after Marathon, Salamis, or the Peace of Callias (the very existence of which historians still dispute). For twenty-five centuries, the constants of Persian power under maximum pressure have not changed. Among them figures a subtle and mastered art of alternating heat and cold, of denying what one does while doing it, or of holding the line between war and peace in a state of deliberate indeterminacy. Contemporary Iran, engaged since 28 February 2026 in the most existentially perilous conflict in the history of the Islamic Republic, thus replays models of confrontation that neither Alexander’s conquest, nor Arab Islam, nor the Khomeinist revolution managed to erase. This recurrence proceeds from geopolitical factors, and therefore from factors invariable across the centuries: the interior geography of power, the logic of the plateau facing the sea, but also of the core facing the periphery — factors that cannot but structure the entire military history of this civilisation. Seven polemological invariants traverse this continuum. I — The War of Time, or Sovereignty “on the Threshold” The first of these constants is no doubt the least evident to an observer not steeped in the habits of Persia and its history. It constitutes, however, the deepest element — and paradoxically the least visible — of the Median strategy: the doctrine of temporality as weapon. What is commonly called Iranian “duplicity” in negotiations is not ordinary diplomatic cunning, in the sense of a one-off lie designed to deceive an adversary on a specific point. Not Ulysses’ Trojan horse. It involves a structural duplicity, constitutive of the doctrine itself, consisting in the capacity to maintain simultaneously two contradictory discourses without the contradiction being experienced as internal incoherence… because it is experienced as the normal management of a temporality that is not that of the Western adversary. This pre-Socratic esoteric thinking, which the West fails to understand whenever it comes to dealing and negotiating with Tehran, resembles the dynamic monist thesis that Heraclitus of Ephesus (and later Ibn Arabi) defended prior to the emergence of Platonic ontological dualism. According to Heraclitus, opposition is not contradiction, but a tension between two ends of the same principle pulling in opposite directions. In the Persian sense, this non-duality exists between the zâhir , the manifest, the exoteric, and the bâtin , the hidden, the esoteric. The two registers coexist because they belong to different planes of reality. The One contains both poles, of which it is two manifestations. Dissimulation, taqiyya , is therefore not a lie in the Western sense of the term, but the recognition of these two states — separate orders existing simultaneously without contradicting each other. To maintain a double discourse, to hold that all knowledge is defined not in itself but by virtue of the knowledge still to be gained — that is, by the negation of what exists — is consequently a sane and legitimate process, a sign of ontological wisdom. The Iranian oscillation between war and peace is therefore the position sought by Iran. There is no other. Opposites cohabit and are therefore coherent. Enough to drive Westerners mad, who search for the truth behind the mask, when there is no mask — only two “variable positions” of a single posture that has never sought a “logical” unity. Herodotus’s Testimony It is Herodotus who, involuntarily, first documents the oldest mechanical translation of this idea in history. After the Battle of Marathon (490 BC), Darius does not capitulate, does not negotiate, does nothing legible that might be rationally comprehended. Somewhat like the Sauron of The Lord of the Rings, he waits and prepares in silence, accumulating for ten years the machinery of the second invasion. After the Battle of Salamis (480), Xerxes withdraws but leaves Mardonius with an entire army in Thessaly. Neither peace nor war, therefore, but a suspended state of strategic indeterminacy that exhausts the Greek city-states politically and economically, far more effectively than a new battle could ever have done. The Peace of Callias (449 BC — the very existence of which historians still dispute, which is itself revealing) would have formally ended the Persian Wars. But the Persians simultaneously continued to finance Sparta against Athens, then Athens against Sparta, turning the Peloponnesian War into an instrument of their policy without ever appearing in it officially. Here lie the origins of today’s Iranian war by financial proxy, by the corruption of élites, and by the deliberate cultivation of chaos in the adversary’s camp — all without a front line, through an invisible game played on the contradictions of others. What the Greeks did not understand is that the Persians simply did not share their ontological relationship with time. Where the Greek city-state thought in terms of agôn — decisive clash, settled battle, clear-cut outcome — the Iranian empire thought in terms of duration, patience, slow accumulation and deferred reversal. This pattern finds its translation in Islamic jurisprudence itself, through the concept of the hudna , the temporary truce that is not peace — a suspended contract allowing a pause to rearm and reposition before battle resumes. Far from being perceived as surrender, the hudna is a tactical parenthesis in a war whose strategic horizon remains intact. Cyrus and his successors were of course far from possessing this theologico-juridical concept… yet they had nevertheless developed its absolute intuitive practice… Ambiguity as Strategic Posture Iran’s nuclear strategy since 2003 — but also that of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which cries victory amid the rubble the moment the enemy’s cannon ceases to thunder — constitutes the modern textbook case of this doctrine. Over twenty years of negotiations, partial concessions, calculated violations, returns to the table, enrichment thresholds crossed then frozen, agreements whose ink had barely dried before their ambiguities of application were already being instrumentalised… For Tehran, the 2015 JCPOA was not an act of disarmament, but an act of temporal management. Through the agreement, Tehran was buying time under maximum pressure, while keeping the threshold within reach for rapid redeployment. And it is the same logic operating currently: denying talks while dispatching delegates, opening the strait on Friday to close it on Saturday, calling the American dialogue a “media game” while keeping the Pakistani channel active… Iran never deals in ambiguity by accident. It does so because ambiguity is its natural strategic position, the medium in which it has breathed for twenty-five centuries — and which, it knows full well, wears out its adversaries, anchored in the Hegelian diachronic historical time. What the West stubbornly refuses to understand is that the meaning of History, for the neo-Persians, thus also operates in reverse… but also in transcendence, in that zaman el-latif defined by Sohravardi, that time between times which has no use for the contingencies of diachronic historical time (see in this regard the article published on this site on 7 March 2026 under the title “The End of a Utopia”). II — The Forward Defence, or War Beyond the Plateau The second structural pattern is what the Achaemenid strategists practised without naming it and what the Islamic Republic has theorised under the term defa’ pishgin , forward defence. The Achaemenids had understood that the empire’s vulnerability lay in its surface area. Too vast to be defended from within, it was therefore necessary to multiply peripheral glacis and transform the satrapies into militarised buffer zones, in order to fight as far as possible from the Persian heartland. Thus, it was not out of any desire for gratuitous conquest that Darius I had launched his armies into Thrace and Macedonia. His objective was to keep threats at a distance from the Iranian plateau. And it was the same reason that had led Xerxes to cross the Hellespont (today’s Strait of the Dardanelles), only to meet Leonidas’s 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The Iran of the mullahs reproduced exactly the same logic. Since 1982, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had deployed its advisers — among them the four famous “diplomats” later kidnapped by Elie Hobeika’s Lebanese Forces — in the Bekaa Valley to organise what would become Hezbollah, the first successful experiment of modern forward defence, the first export of the so-called “Islamic Revolution”. Like the Achaemenid satraps who raised their own armies in the name of the King of Kings, the militias of the Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Factions — constituted so many militarised satrapies, vassals of Tehran without formally being its arm. The principle advanced by Tehran being that wars must unfold outside Iranian borders so that Persian soil need never be the theatre… But this principle has always had its interior reverse, which both Achaemenid and Islamic history confirm with regularity: the more the empire projects its power toward the periphery, the more it must compress and lock down its own centre. The satrapal revolts that punctuate Achaemenid history (Egypt, Lydia, Babylon, etc.) are the internal symmetrical equivalent of every major external campaign. It is no accident of timing that the Islamic Republic was massacring its own demonstrators in January 2026, just weeks before launching the war in February. It is the same logic of compression at work, the same imperial reflex demanding that the inside be crushed so that the outside may be attacked. In this sense, forward defence is always, in hollow, an interior tyranny. III — The Composite War, or the Art of Vassal Coalitions The Achaemenid army was a constitutive ethnic mosaic, composed pell-mell of Medes, Bactrians, Lydians, Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and so forth. Each satrapy furnished its contingents according to a system of graduated military tribute, the peoples closest to Persia paying fewer taxes while serving more under arms. Herodotus, in his lists of Xerxes’s armies, unwittingly paints the portrait of a power that never fights alone and always wages war through intermediaries. Contemporary Iran has reproduced exactly this architecture. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi militias and the Houthis constituted a regional network capable of operating below the potential nuclear threshold, imposing diffuse costs on its adversaries without triggering a massive response against Iranian territory itself. One finds even a similar chain of command between Persians and mullahs. The satraps were appointed and controlled governors, the “eyes and ears of the king” who supervised their loyalty. The militias of the Axis of Resistance depend likewise on Tehran’s financial control and military supervision, under the political and religious command of the wali al-faqih , whose transnational Shia doctrine unites the imperial body despite the particularities of each paramilitary force and its milieu. It should be noted, moreover, that adherence to the wilayat al-faqih has ended up overflowing the Shia framework, segments of other communities — in Lebanon, for example — having been “converted”, subtly and subversively indoctrinated in the service of the project, under the cover of a universalist anti-American and anti-Israeli left — the struggle of the oppressed against “the imperialist Great Satan and its regional satellite, the Zionist project” —, of a Palestinian cause abandoned by the Arab countries, or of the ideology of the alliance of minorities and their protection… IV — The Mastery of Straits, or the Geopolitics of the Bottleneck Xerxes did not content himself with crossing the Hellespont in 480 BC. He set about mastering it, ordering the construction of a boat-bridge to signify, symbolically and materially, his domination over the passage between two worlds. The Achaemenid navy was fundamentally an instrument of control over sea lanes (the Ionian coasts, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf). For in geopolitics, whoever holds the bottleneck holds the world. This is the oldest and most constant axiom of Iranian strategic thinking. In 2026, Iran targeted the region’s oil infrastructure, notably ships in the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. The threat of total closure, uttered with growing insistence, reactivates this millennial doctrine. The tactical success of maritime saturation by FPV drones in March 2026 — which replayed the Millennium Challenge 2002 scenario with considerable technological improvements — forced the American fleet into an interception munitions attrition crisis. The Iranians thus demonstrated that swarm warfare is the technological reincarnation of the naval harassment warfare that the Persians already practised against Greek triremes. What played out on Saturday 19 April in the strait — the opening, the closure, and ships caught in fire mid-passage — constituted the same choreographed sequence… with twenty-five centuries in between… V — The Asymmetric War, or the Ontological Refusal of Frontal Clash From the Battle of Marathon onwards, the Persians wagered on saturation through arrow fire — the distance weapon, the one that degrades before the engagement — rather than on the phalangic clash. The Achaemenid cavalry was a force of harassment, envelopment and flank rupture, avoiding the central clash at all costs. There is no cowardice to be seen in this refusal of hand-to-hand combat — merely a doctrine aimed at victory through attrition. Where the Greek warrior sought to be decisive, the Persian strategist sought duration… Which goes to show that philosophical thinking inevitably leaves its mark on the means of waging war… Iran’s long-term strategy has indeed always consisted of avoiding direct confrontation with militarily superior forces, by extending influence through indirect means. In 2026, Tehran adopted a deliberately asymmetric posture: hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles to saturate enemy defences, attacks on energy infrastructure to raise the political cost of the war for Washington and Tel Aviv, and an obstinate refusal of ground engagement that would expose the conventional vulnerability of the Iranian army. Distance as weapon — formerly the bow, today the ballistic missile and the FPV drone — remains the invariant polemological signature of the Iranian warrior. To this must be added the desire to create several simultaneous fronts, something Che Guevara advocated when he sought to generate “several Vietnams” to exhaust “Yankee imperialism”. The Achaemenid Persian world used the same stratagem to wear down its adversaries and set them against one another. VI — Decapitation and the Fragility of the Centre The sixth invariant is perhaps the most tragic. The absolute vulnerability of the command centre, when the forward defence strategy collapses and the war returns toward the plateau, represents the Achilles heel of every empire of this type. Alexander understood in 330 BC that the Achaemenid Empire, despite its immensity, rested structurally on the person of the Great King. To force Darius III to flee at Gaugamela was to decapitate simultaneously the political legitimacy and the military command of the entire imperial machine. Accordingly, the Macedonian generals never sought to hold each satrapy one by one. They aimed at the symbolic and practical node of the empire. The opening of Operation Epic Fury, on 28 February 2026, eliminated the heart and head of the Iranian regime by targeting Ali Khamenei, simultaneously plunging the Iranian leadership into a profound decisional disorientation. Mojtaba Khamenei was elected on 8 March to replace his father, but the rushed election of a successor — himself the victim of a military strike and whose fate remains uncertain — has not reconstituted the legitimacy accumulated over forty-five years of symbolic power. The New York Times described, at the end of March, a leadership paralysed, its decision-making process severely disrupted. Twenty-five centuries certainly separate the tent of Darius III fleeing Gaugamela from the IRGC bunkers after Epic Fury, yet the structural logic is rigorously identical. An empire built on the will of a single sovereign — whether King of Kings or Supreme Guide of the Islamic Revolution — can be struck down by the elimination of that central node. The difference, no doubt, is that Alexander had the nobility to weep over his enemy’s body and to adopt his mother as his own. Trump, on the other hand… Some will no doubt argue that Darius III deserved noble treatment in the chivalric political logic of respect between friend and enemy and the moral code that accompanies it, whereas Khamenei… This paralysis of the Iranian centre has produced another consequence, less visible but structurally weighty. The erasure of the Supreme Guide has opened a space of rivalry between the Pasdaran — guardians of the armed revolution whose logic is that of total war and the refusal of any concession — and the political option embodied by the negotiators and part of the Pezeshkian government, more sensitive to the economic and human costs of the conflict. This rift is not new. It had already been silently traversing the Islamic Republic for years, but Khamenei’s assassination has rendered it glaring. Where the wali arbitrated, absorbed the contradictions into the One of his divine person, and could manipulate the scene at will — raising and lowering (Machiavellianism obliges) hawks and doves according to political opportunity — the void now arbitrates by default in favour of the hardliners. And for good reason: in a regime whose legitimacy rests on resistance and revolutionary logic, no political actor can afford to appear as the one who capitulates. It is precisely this mechanism — that of decapitation radicalising the decapitated body — that the Macedonians did not have to confront after Gaugamela, for want of an ideological body sufficiently structured to survive the flight and assassination of the king. VII — The War of Legitimacy, or the Narrative as Armament Far from being merely a conflict of armies, the Iranian war has always simultaneously been a battle to define who has the right to wage war and in whose name. Ideological legitimacy and psychological warfare form the two faces of a single pattern: the narrative as prolongation of military violence, and military violence as confirmation of the narrative. Here one finds again this ontological absence of Persian dualism — the zâhir and the bâtin as simultaneously true registers of a single reality. Persia invented a singular instrument of soft conquest long before the Trotskyist strategy of “entryism”: the Cyrus Cylinder — a narrative war designed to bring Babylon in without fighting, by presenting itself as liberator rather than invader, as restorer of local gods rather than imperial iconoclast. The Cyrus Cylinder Written in cuneiform Akkadian, probably in 539 BC, immediately after the conquest of Babylon, the Cylinder is a text dictated by Cyrus — or in his name — in which he presents himself as a “liberator” mandated by Marduk, the supreme Babylonian deity, to restore the order that the previous king Nabonidus had disturbed. He announces the return of deported peoples to their lands, the restoration of temples, and freedom of local cults. It is on this text that the tradition rests — popularised in the twentieth century notably by the United Nations, which had the cylinder reproduced in 1971 — according to which Cyrus would have proclaimed the first charter of human rights. At the polemological level, the Cylinder constitutes a psychological warfare operation of a sophistication that the twentieth century has not surpassed. Through this Mephistophelian process, Cyrus turns the enemy’s legitimacy against itself by presenting himself in the name of Marduk, the Babylonian deity, whose elected servant he claims to be, rather than in the name of the Persian gods. A symbolic colonisation prior to territorial colonisation. Before the Persian army enters Babylon, the Persian narrative has already occupied the Babylonian pantheon. Nabonidus is delegitimised by Babylon’s own god. Cyrus is merely that god’s expression… In so doing, Cyrus also renders conquest indiscernible from liberation. Babylon is “restored to itself”. It does not fall. This semantic manipulation neutralises all legitimate resistance: to resist Cyrus is to resist Marduk and one’s own restored order. It is the zâhir of tolerance as weapon of the bâtin of annexation… Does Hezbollah liberate the territory, or does it in its name conquer power in Beirut…? The ambiguity of Cyrus’s gesture is not accidental. Historians still debate whether the Cylinder reflects his genuine convictions or a pure strategy of manipulation. But once again, the question is simply ill-posed. In the doctrine of “variable positions”, there is no hidden truth behind the text. The zâhir is policy, and the bâtin is also policy, on two simultaneously true registers. Did Cyrus believe in Marduk? The question has no binary answer where the binary itself does not exist. He acted as if he believed it, and his performance was at once sincere and strategic… exactly as the Islamic Republic acts as if its regional mission were theologically mandated and just, without this excluding the coldest calculation of power… and the sacrifice of the revolutionary hearth, territories and human beings. The Achaemenids thus practised soft coercion before the very category existed. Intimidating embassies, honourable surrender offers, staged displays of royal clemency… so many modalities of a psychological warfare seeking to demoralise the adversary before the first clash. Where Cyrus decentralised legitimacy by respecting local cults, the Islamic Republic centralised it on the unique figure of the Guide — thereby weakening the entire apparatus the moment that node came to be suppressed. The Parallel with the wilayat al-faqih Imam Khomeini did not invent the war of legitimacy through narrative. He merely Islamicised and theologised it. Where Cyrus had borrowed the enemy’s god to legitimise himself, Khomeini built, using Shiism, a juridico-theological doctrine — the vicariat of the theologian-jurist — that transforms each militia, each proxy, and each regional intervention into an act of devotion. In neo-Persian logic, Hezbollah is more than Tehran’s armed wing. It is the zâher of the narrative, a community of faith in resistance. And it matters little whether this narrative performance is “true”. What matters is that the daawa — the rhetoric — be operationally effective at the strategic level. Here, the end justifies the means, and there is no time to lose between “true” and “false”, “lie” and “truth”, “reality” and “fantasy”. All this exists in unitary pairs, in the name of a “coherence” called “wisdom” and justified by the ultimate principle of victory… The wilayat al-faqih therefore plays exactly the same structural role as the Achaemenid propaganda of tolerance. It transforms Iranian regional expansion into a mission of divine tutelage, into a theological mandate over the oppressed community. But where Cyrus played on clemency, contemporary Iranian doctrine has developed what one might call martyropathy — sacrifice as an operational doctrine that transforms death into narrative victory, renders every military defeat legible as spiritual elevation, and welds combatants together in the face of conventional adversarial superiority… while rendering the regime structurally incapable of negotiating defeat without symbolically destroying itself. It is a psychological war turned against itself as much as against the enemy: its ultimate strength is also its absolute limit. What Solution? How to deal with such an adversary? This is the question that Themistocles, Alexander, Henry Kissinger and Mike Pompeo all asked themselves, with radically different answers and unequal successes. It is also the one Trump is asking again in this spring of 2026, without having yet found a coherent answer. The first error, and the most constant, is to seek to fix the adversary of variable positions, to constrain it to a state defined by an ultimatum. Every announced deadline (“open the strait or we strike”, “last chance to negotiate”) offers it precisely a new opportunity to produce a response that is simultaneously both, so much so that it exhausts the questioner and reveals their mental rigidity. Maximum pressure, founded on the hypothesis that at a certain level of pain the adversary must choose between capitulating or fighting, hits the same obstacle. The adversary of variable positions does not structurally need to choose, because suffering, negotiating, resisting and waiting are not for it exclusive states, but registers it can inhabit simultaneously. Once again, what American doctrine reads as irrationality is in reality a rationality of a different order, operating on a temporal axis that electoral democracies — condemned to the short time of the political cycle — are constitutionally incapable of maintaining. What works, partially, imperfectly, but as documented by history, is to adopt oneself a share of this temporality, without making it an absolute. If Alexander defeated the Persians, it was not by forcing them to fight by Greek rules. He fought with their speed and mobility while maintaining the superiority of shock at the decisive moment he alone chose. Kissinger, facing Hanoi — another adversary of variable positions and another civilisation “of the threshold” — finally understood that it was necessary to negotiate on two registers: the official table for the zâhir , and the secret channels for the bâtin , without ever demanding that the two coincide. Transcending Dualism Concretely, this implies never posing questions to which one demands a binary answer, but rather processual questions: “what is the next step?” rather than “do you agree?”, because a step is accomplished where an agreement can remain simultaneously accepted and refused. One must therefore hold one’s own threshold without announcing it. In this sense, effective deterrence against this actor is opaque deterrence — that which the adversary knows exists without knowing its trigger. This is, after all, what Israel, despite everything, has better understood than Washington in this conflict. But the hardest truth to formulate is perhaps that there will be no definitive treaty with Iran — only a succession of hudna , of maintained unstable equilibria, and of “variable positions” managed over time. Peace with such an adversary is a continuous practice. It is not acquired in a single blow, unless through truly devastating means such as those that had brought Japan to its knees and ended the Second World War. The only total victory over this type of adversary — and Alexander had understood this by proclaiming himself heir to Cyrus, that is, by playing the Persian zâher better than the Persians themselves — presupposes a cultural depth and a strategic patience that no contemporary actor is in a position to deploy. Which leaves the others in the only realistic position: learning to cohabit with the oscillation, to manage the threshold rather than suppress it… and never to confuse a signed ceasefire with the end of the war. The Boomerang as Structural Law Beyond all the foregoing, there exists nonetheless a law deeper than the mere recurrence of patterns. This law — which neither Cyrus nor Khomeini knew how to conjure — holds that every Iranian strategy carries within it, structurally, the mechanism of its own inversion. Forward defence creates, in the periphery it seeks to control, the conditions of an adverse coalition that ends up striking the centre. Composite warfare engenders proxies whose partial autonomy escapes central command at the decisive moment. Mastery of the bottleneck transforms the strait into a blockade target the moment the adversary decides to no longer tolerate the blackmail. The doctrine of the threshold and the in-between, finally, eventually provokes the pre-emptive strike it was precisely designed to prevent — because a sufficiently patient adversary always ends up deciding that sustained ambiguity is more dangerous than open war. The Achaemenid Empire learned this with Alexander. The Islamic Republic has just replayed it in 2026. This boomerang constitutes the tragic and necessary consequence, inscribed in the very logic of this empire from the very first day. It carries within it, somewhere, its own limits — even the seeds of its own undoing. The Tragedy of Continuity What is striking, at the end of this polemological traversal across twenty-five centuries of Iranian military history, is certainly the resemblance of the warrior forms, but above all the persistence of the same fundamental contradiction. The Iranian projection strategy has always created, in the periphery it intended to control, the conditions of its own reversal. Forward defence produced the strategic boomerang. Composite warfare engendered the opposing coalition. Mastery of the bottleneck transformed the strait into a blockade target. The doctrine of the in-between — this sovereignty “on the threshold” which is the deepest invariant of Iranian power — cannot function indefinitely. It presupposes an adversary incapable of enduring ambiguity over time, and Washington, by striking on 28 February 2026, signified that this patience had a limit. On this 21 April, the ceasefire has just expired. Tehran slammed the door on Islamabad, invoking prohibitive conditions. Iran denies sending delegates while having sent them until this very evening. It reopened the strait on Friday to close it on Saturday. It declared the negotiations dead while maintaining the Pakistani channel alive — until tonight’s dramatic twist. Cyrus had said, according to Herodotus, that soft peoples come from soft lands. He believed that the Iranian plateau forged hard men. What the long history of Persian power teaches is rather that the Iranian plateau forges empires whose greatness is inseparable from their fragility. Empires of the mastered periphery, of the held threshold — which collapse when the periphery turns against the centre, when the adversary’s time at last catches up with theirs, and when the in-between in which they had for so long flourished closes brutally, like a vice. Where some continue to see in the Iranian posture some kind of “victory”, one must avoid the perilous slide they are making into the ahistorical world — a world reminiscent of sects cut off from reality. Tehran cannot go on indefinitely biting its own tail in the face of American firepower and an adversary as brutal as the one it currently confronts — for the first time since Saddam Hussein —, an adversary who himself has no use for historical time, nor for democratic principles, and against whom dualism, esoteric thinking and other soft powers inevitably collide with a raw mixture of nihilistic realpolitik , the cunning patience of the businessman, bloody and populist Caesarism, a providentialist messianism that likewise believes itself mandated by God and by America, and vatenguerriste bellicism, all pushed to their paroxysm… Pull the tiger’s whiskers too long, and one ends up inevitably being devoured.

It seems necessary to dwell for a moment on the insidious game played by Israel, acting as a puppet master, in the context of the geostrategic ambitions of the Iranian Islamic Republic. For half a century, Tel Aviv found in the “alliance of minorities” (Alawites, Christians, Druze, Lebanese Shiites, Kurds) a geopolitical buffer against the Sunni hinterland. The Israeli «periphery doctrine» (1950s-70s) was indeed based on an axiom: ally with minorities to break the Sunni encirclement. In this context, the Alawite regimes in Damascus — Hafez and then Bashar al-Assad — were declared but predictable enemies; ideologically stable; obsessed with their internal survival; and perfectly dissuadable. Israel preferred a cynical and rational Assad to a nationalist or Islamist Sunni Syria. And the Western world, both the United States and European countries, followed suit with the Hebrew state, purely out of utilitarianism. The henchmen of the Assad regime rendered so many good and loyal services to European intelligence agencies over the past four decades… why get rid of such an accommodating enemy? And, to add to the ridicule, several decades after the massacres of Homs and Hama, it is only today that these countries salute the demise of an inhumane regime they constantly legitimized, even when it resolutely massacred civilian opponents in 2011 and handed the country over to Daesh by amnestying Islamists, only to then cry wolf… Hezbollah, in Lebanon, eliminated all the leaders of the National Resistance Front to Israel, formed by the left, starting in the 1980s. What the Hebrew state did not do, the pro-Iranian party completed. Until it became a perfect border guard to prevent any Palestinian aspirations from taking root in South Lebanon. In exchange, Israel overlooked the Syrian takeover of Lebanon in 1990 and the conquest of the Lebanese state by Hezbollah starting in 2006. Moreover, it took advantage of the Hamas-Fatah quarrel to weaken the Palestinian internal front… Maintaining the mimetic rivalry With the fall of Assad and the arrival of Ahmed al-Sharaa, Israel finds itself facing a geostrategic paradox: in the short term, Iran — whose exaggerated imperialistic hubris, in Zionist logic, it was time to humble — loses its Levantine bridgehead. In the medium term, a recomposed Sunni Syria reappears — with all that this implies in terms of doctrinal, tribal-military, and regional unknowns. It must be understood that Israel has constantly sought to maintain the mimetic rivalry that already exists between the communities of the Levant against a backdrop of existential anxieties. Thus, playing Christians against Sunnis, Sunnis against Shiites, Alawites against Sunnis, according to pure Machiavellian logic… by restoring balances when they are broken. The function of this strategy is obvious: to guarantee the survival of the Hebrew state by exploiting the weaknesses, fears, and contradictions of others, as well as the fragility of the pluralism of Levantine societies. And, consequently, to eliminate any possibility of the emergence of a credible Palestinian resistance and the birth of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state with international legitimacy. Certainly, the Sharaa regime completely breaks Iranian influence, closes arms routes to Hezbollah, draws closer to Riyadh and Washington; it attempts a «conservative normalization» to exorcise its jihadist past and provides an opportunity to extend the Abraham Accords to Syria with Sunni legitimacy. But for Israel, this recomposition remains ambiguous: a former jihadist group turned state power is less legible than a stable Alawite dictatorship, and a Sunni power can serve as a complement to the Palestinian cause. While dialogue with it to push for peace is necessary, pressure on the regime must be maintained to keep it in a state of fragility and dependence, whether by neutralizing its military capabilities, stirring up factions within minorities, or creating a buffer zone inside Syrian territory. For Israel, the entire dichotomy lies here: the Iranian Empire is collapsing, but with it, the comfortable logic of the “alliance of minorities.” Tel Aviv loses an “intimate enemy” (whose fall it delayed as much as possible) in Bashar — the “old pair of socks,” to use the phrase of an Israeli official in 2011 regarding the Syrian president — for an unpredictable neighbor, but one that can guarantee lasting peace, provided it is kept under tight Western politico-economic and Israeli military control. The empire in fragments What remains for Iran at the end of 2025 is no longer an axis, but the pieces of an imploded star: Bab el-Mandeb and the Houthis, Gaza in ruins and Hamas, an isolated Hezbollah trying desperately to reconstitute itself, an Iraq under control but suffering from internal tensions, and a Syria definitively lost. Even the heart of the empire now groans under the weight of sanctions and shortages. Tehran's imperial strategy has not disappeared; it has been shattered, partly a victim of its imperialistic hubris, for wanting to play cunningly with those more powerful than itself. Like Saddam after the invasion of Kuwait. “If he debases himself, I praise him; if he boasts, I humble him“, Machiavelli advised. The frog who wanted to make herself as big as the ox, wrote La Fontaine. Darius III was assassinated by his own people after his defeat against Alexander and the fall of the empire. Will the current Iranian directory suffer the same fate? Perhaps. The difference being that Alexander had wept for Darius III. No one — absolutely no one — will shed tears over the ruins of the vilayet el-faqih. Read on the same topic “The Iranian Empire”: Anatomy of a Fall (1/5) “The Iranian Empire”: In Yemen, the Houthi Gamble (2/5) “The Iranian Empire”: The Land Corridor and the Ambition of the Levantine Empire (3/5) “The Iranian Empire”: Iraq, Open Wound; Gaza, Palestinian Depth (4/5)

For a long time, Iraq was the keystone of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s geostrategic maneuvers and ambitions. Without Iraq, nothing holds together: neither the land corridor to Syria, nor the sanctions-busting economy, nor the network of militias that provided Iran with strategic depth in the Gulf. Powerful Shiite militias (the PMF), financed, trained, and supervised by the Revolutionary Guards, controlled for years the border areas of al-Qaim/Bukamal, through which weapons, fighters, and technologies transited toward Syria and Lebanon. The Iraqi government, wavering, constantly oscillated between Washington and Tehran, yet Iranian leverage remained massive. Today, Iraq has become a field of contradictions: U.S. pressure is increasing to sanction pro-Iranian networks; militias have been weakened by the disorganization of the Syrian front; the recent internal dispute over the classification of Hezbollah and the Houthis—placed on and then removed from terrorist lists within a few days—clearly reveals confusion; and, last but not least, an Iraqi nationalism is taking shape that rejects Iranian interference as much as American dominance. Baghdad is now walking a tightrope between Washington, Tehran, and Riyadh. Tehran retains real and essential influence there, but no longer the “corridor” that made Iraq a natural extension of its defensive architecture. The Iraqi link still exists; but it no longer structures the regional space. Gaza, or the Palestinian Depth of the Iranian Axis There remains Gaza. Why this geopolitical attachment to the Palestinian card, beyond the political asset it had represented since 2006—namely, a Sunni extension of Iran and a bargaining chip with the West over the nuclear issue, as a tool of pressure on Israel? To understand Gaza within the Iranian system, one must dismantle the myth: Hamas is not an Iranian creation. Hamas is the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its establishment was clearly facilitated by Israel in order to create a counterweight to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, to divide Palestinian ranks, and to justify the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the grounds of the existence of an extremist terrorist actor. Between 1990 and 2000, Hamas gradually moved closer to Iran and Hezbollah, against the backdrop of its rejection of the Oslo Accords. In 2007, the takeover of Gaza at Fatah’s expense increased its growing dependence on Iranian support at all levels. To be sure, Hamas is not Hezbollah—which is a direct emanation of the Pasdaran through Lebanese intermediaries. It retains ideological and tactical autonomy—but it is fully embedded in Iran’s strategy. For Tehran, Gaza serves three functions. First, it constitutes a permanent internal front against Israel. The Gaza Strip is unavoidable for Tel Aviv: enclosed and explosive, it is impossible to neutralize politically without a colossal human and military cost. The systematic destruction of the enclave and the methodical elimination of its inhabitants since October 2023 have failed to crush Hamas. The conflict ties down part of the Israeli army, prevents Israel from freely projecting power across the region, and opens a permanent breach in Israel’s internal security… but, paradoxically, it allows Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in power despite the corruption charges against him. Second, Gaza provides Palestinian legitimacy to the Iranian narrative—a function also performed by Hezbollah’s discourse. Without Gaza, Iran cannot claim to be the champion of the Palestinian cause. With Gaza, the “resistance” narrative takes on substance—the rockets fired at Tel Aviv and Ashkelon supplying the imagery necessary for Iranian grandstanding. It is the perfect distraction, diverting Arab populations from what matters most: the grip of the vilayat-e faqih over the Middle East, in the name of restoring a mythical imperial golden age. Next article: Israel and the alliance of minorities: a paradoxical stability (4/5) Read on the same topic “The Iranian Empire”: Anatomy of a Collapse (1/5) “The Iranian Empire”: The Houthi Gamble in Yemen (2/5) “The Iranian Empire”: The Land Corridor and the Ambition of a Levantine Empire (3/5)

Iran's strategy is not solely maritime. It has been built, with almost Roman patience, around a land arc : Tehran – Baghdad – Damascus – Beirut. For twenty years, Tehran patiently constructed a “Shiite crescent” connecting Iran to the Mediterranean, under the control of the vilayet e-faqih , the Iranian spiritual guide. Thus, it has sanctified Shiite militias and taken control of border areas in Iraq; it gained decision-making ascendancy from 2012 in its partnership with the Assad regime, with the intervention of the Pasdaran and Hezbollah to protect the Assad regime (later shared with Moscow during the Russian intervention from September 2015; and, above all, with the peak, from 2008, of Hezbollah in Lebanon as an expeditionary force and strategic projection tool). This axis had a dual function. Firstly, to create strategic depth against Israel. Hezbollah, with tens of thousands of rockets, made southern Lebanon an advanced deterrence platform. Syria, meanwhile, served as a logistical matrix: depots, bases, arms corridors, border crossings allowing the transfer of missiles and technologies. Secondly, to project an Iranian presence as far as the Mediterranean, this old dream of the Persian and Ottoman empires: to have maritime outlets, control routes to Europe, and integrate Syrian ports (Tartus, Latakia) into a geopolitics of infrastructure.  Iran was not seeking to become a Mediterranean naval power in the classic sense, but to deny the Mediterranean to its adversaries, in this case Israel and the United States, through a system of proxies. Europe understood this too late. Beirut was already drained, and the Syrian revolutionaries of 2011, abandoned to their fate, were literally pulverized by Assad, in the total indifference of the Western world. Obama merely hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Levant in 2015.  In summary, entirely sanctified, the Tehran–Baghdad–Damascus–Beirut route thus allowed Iran, for two decades, to ensure the transfer of weapons and technologies to Hezbollah; to project Iranian power to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean; to bypass the American system; and to constitute a permanent threat to Israel from the north. All this collapsed like a house of cards between late 2024 and mid-2025. Hamas dragged Hezbollah into a suicidal spiral, and, as a consequence of the considerable weakening of the Shiite militia, which had become the Praetorian Guard of the Assad regime, Damascus fell into the hands of Ahmad el-Chareh, from the ex-HTS. Tehran faded, replaced by a new power anchored to Ankara and Riyadh, eager to legitimize itself internationally, obsessed with the complete liquidation of Iranian influence in Syria and pragmatic enough to normalize relations with Israel.  Assad, as a minority, could not grant legitimacy to a formal agreement with Tel Aviv. An old ancestral arrangement cynically made the regime a kind of Hagana for the Hebrew State – invasion of Lebanon, control over power in Beirut, bringing the Palestinians into line, containment of Hezbollah in South Lebanon under its tutelage, and, above all, the closure of the Syrian Golan front since 1973…  The advent of Chareh in Damascus had another disastrous consequence for Tehran: Iranian depots were seized, border crossings locked, militia networks cut off from their logistics. Then, in June 2025, Iranian military infrastructures were struck deep by Israeli aviation. The strategic apparatus was shaken. Patiently woven, thread by thread, like a gigantic spiderweb or a Persian carpet, the Iranian Empire shattered.  Hezbollah, whose military leaders were decimated daily by Israeli aviation, survived, but isolated, deprived of its Syrian backbone. And its bravado was mainly directed – chase nature away, it comes back at a gallop – against the Lebanese state and its will to regain the monopoly of legitimate violence and to avoid, by negotiating with Israel, even more strategic internal suicide, with its share of destruction and innocent victims. Practical result: the Iranian dream of territorial continuum towards the Mediterranean, this Persian Levant of Darius III fantasized by Khamenei – it's over.  Next article: Iraq, backbone and open wound Read on the same topic “The Iranian Empire”: anatomy of a fall (1/5)  “The Iranian Empire”: In Yemen, the Houthi gamble (2/5)

Tehran's regional policy over the past twenty-five years has obeyed a clear logic: to establish itself on the bottlenecks and corridors of the Middle East, transform straits, land routes, and enclaves into instruments of strategic blackmail, and build a defensive depth around Iran made up of militias and subservient regimes. Within the framework of this policy, Yemen and the Houthis have played a central role. Yemen, fragmented and failed, constituted the ideal terrain for the Islamic Republic of Iran to install this 'western twin'. The Houthi movement, backed by a Zaydi matrix and a malleable anti-imperialist grammar, offered Tehran a proxy capable of: holding the capital Sanaa; controlling a large portion of the Red Sea coast; and threatening Bab el-Mandeb with missiles, drones, and booby-trapped boats. Bab el-Mandeb thus becomes a strategic lever, a variable that Iran can activate according to the pressures it faces: sanctions, Israeli escalation, tensions with Riyadh, confrontation with Washington. Tehran's message is as follows, invariable: if you touch Iran, you will suffer the consequences for your global trade. In this sense, the Houthi attacks of 2023-2024, reactivated in 2025 under the pretext of Gaza, were far from isolated acts: they reflected the Iranian doctrine according to which Bab el-Mandeb is the maritime extension of its deterrence system. The turning point in Tehran's favor was undoubtedly the assassination of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2017, when the Houthis coldly eliminated the former president who was preparing to reconcile with Riyadh. His death closed the door to a national political solution. It largely benefited the Houthis — and therefore Iran — in the short term, much like the assassinations of Rafic Hariri, the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the disappearance of Yasser Arafat. Saleh's death ruined the possibility of a unified Yemen and trapped Tehran in an alliance with a radical and chaotic — almost caricatural — movement impossible to integrate into a regional compromise. However, the anti-Houthi front fragmented with: the rise of the Southern Transitional Council, supported by Abu Dhabi; the Saudi military withdrawal after its disastrous 2015 offensive and the beginning of a dialogue with Tehran; the collapse of the fiction of a unified state; and increased international pressure on the Houthis, particularly through Israeli and American strikes and international sanctions. No matter... Although shaken, Tehran's proxies are still standing: the north of the country remains under their control, their security apparatus functions, their capacity for disruption remains intact, and rhetorically, they remain a link between Iran and the Red Sea. The internationally recognized government, meanwhile, is reduced to a fiction. The Iran-Saudi agreement of 2023, negotiated under Chinese auspices, ended seven years of rupture. It aimed not so much to reconcile two existentially rival powers, but to freeze a front that neither was able to win. Riyadh wanted to exit the Yemeni quagmire, reduce drone strikes on its infrastructure, and protect Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030. Tehran wanted to gain implicit recognition of its gains in Yemen and Iraq, reduce its isolation, and avoid an American escalation. But the truce has resolved nothing. It frames Houthi nuisance without ending it, limits Iranian ambitions without disarming them, and creates an unstable balance. Above all, it protects Saudi Arabia from Iranian retaliations on its territory in the context of an Israeli-Iranian conflict. Moreover, Riyadh has no interest in reopening a war in Yemen from which it emerged exhausted, and Iran, weakened by Israeli strikes, does not have the means to broaden the conflagration. Yemen thus becomes a controlled, useful but contained, tension zone that both capitals prefer to maintain at low intensity. Next article: The land corridor and the ambition of the Levantine Empire Related article “The Iranian Empire”: anatomy of a fall

The year 2025 was a pivotal year in the Middle East, as it shattered a project that had been in gestation since the early 1980s - including the al-Daawa party in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria - Michel Seurat had been one of the first to discuss it in his articles. Later, in the 2000s, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen joined this dynamic, which also attempted to establish itself in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011. It was, incidentally, in 2005-2006, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the July 2006 war, and the gradual subjugation of Fatah by Hamas in Gaza, that the Iranian “Shiite crescent” project truly took shape… before receiving de facto legitimacy in 2015 through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iranian nuclear, a golden “gift” from Barack Obama that benefited the imperialist ambitions of the mullahs. For a quarter of a century, Tehran's regional policy has followed a crystal-clear logic: to establish itself on the bottlenecks and corridors of the Middle East, transform straits, land routes, and enclaves into instruments of strategic blackmail, and build around Iran a defensive depth composed of militias, captive regimes, and fragmented states. On one side, the straits: Hormuz to the east, Bab el-Mandeb to the south of the Red Sea, and, on the other, the land corridors: Tehran – Baghdad – Damascus – Beirut. Then a third level, long underestimated: Gaza, an internal pressure point on Israel, but also on Egypt. Finally, a little-understood tectonics because never sufficiently explained: “the alliance of minorities” that structured the Levant for half a century — and which Israel accommodated as long as it guaranteed a predictable order. And then… on October 7, 2024, in a suicidal gesture, a certain Yahya Senouar plunged this project into the abyss, taking with him the senior leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. And, in December 2024, the Iranian Empire awoke to the coup de grâce - the fall of Damascus, with the flight of Bashar al-Assad, abandoned by his soldiers and allies. The collapse of the axis naturally led to the heart of the empire itself being attacked, the Pasdaran high command itself being eradicated by Israel, and the nuclear program being crushed. A look back at the Iranian imperialist project, now fragmented, but still capable of harm, through a geopolitical approach. Bab el-Mandeb: the other throat of the world Scholarly analyses generally begin with the Strait of Hormuz, the access route and easternmost part of the Persian Gulf. Hormuz is indeed a vital strategic point, as it represents an essential commercial route for international traffic, used by more than 30% of global oil trade. In addition to Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, the strait controls access to other equally important hydrocarbon-producing countries such as Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. No fewer than 2,400 oil tankers transit through it each year, carrying approximately 17 million barrels of oil per day. It is therefore a fundamental trade corridor, as the only satisfactory exit route for Saudi, Iranian, and Emirati oil (representing a quarter of the world's crude oil production). Options for exporting oil bypassing the strait are limited, and these exports can only be in limited quantities. Iran, bordering the strait, can block access to it. It is no coincidence that on June 29, 2008, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammad Ali Jafari, stated that if Iran were attacked by Israel or the United States, it would close the strait. However, the focus on Hormuz somewhat obscures the fact that the system functions in some ways like an hourglass: Hormuz in the northeast, Bab el-Mandeb in the southwest. Bab el-Mandeb is a strait in the Red Sea connecting it to the Gulf of Aden, and separating Djibouti and Eritrea in Africa from Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. The strait is also an important strategic choke point and one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, as it lies on the route through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. It accounts for more than 10% of global maritime traffic, including 75% of European exports; it constitutes an energy corridor between the Gulf, Europe, and Asia, and the point where oil routes, grain flows, and containerized logistics converge. For trade between Northern Europe and Asia, the alternative is via… the Cape of Good Hope, a detour of 6,500 km! Therefore, when Bab el-Mandeb closes… Suez ceases to exist. For Iran, the equation is clear: if there is a second Hormuz, it is indeed Bab el-Mandeb. Next article: In Yemen, the Houthi gamble