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What use to Iran is Hizballah in the event of all-out war against the regime? In principle, a great deal. In practice, not so much. The ongoing U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran raises not only what would happen to and be done by Iran, but also the very future and existence of its crown jewel proxy, Hizballah in Lebanon. Almost any conceivable scenario that emerges from this confrontation represents a threat rather than an opportunity for Hizballah, further destabilizing the group and forcing it on the defensive.
It has been a difficult couple of years for Hizballah. In 2024, it started a war against Israel that its Iranian leaders believed they could fine tune, only to provoke an Israeli offensive that destroyed its strategic weaponry and leadership. In the ensuing “ceasefire,” Hizballah has come under near daily Israeli attack and constant pressure to disarm from the Lebanese army, while doing nothing to retaliate. Just as it is settling into this new tempo and pondering how to reinvent itself, the United States appears ready to attack its masters in Iran.
Where does that leave Hizballah? While “United States strikes on Iran” could mean any number of things, the broad contours appear to encompass U.S. attacks on strategic military assets and a dangerous Israeli campaign targeting civilian and military leadership. This could be a means of applying pressure within an actual negotiation, although a highly aggressive campaign may trigger regime collapse. Still, these attacks are unlikely to prompt Iran to “activate” Hizballah, given its profound weakness which we outline below and the unclear benefit of deploying such a long-term asset, however weakened, merely to shape a negotiation.
The question about Hizballah’s behavior really arises in the context of an existential threat to the Iranian regime. It is of course difficult to know what the Iranian regime itself would consider an existential threat. Would killing parts of its leadership count (probably not)? But we can assume the regime would feel endangered if the United States somehow targeted Iran to collapse its main government institutions, destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command structure, kill much of the political leadership, target military and civilian assets beyond Tehran, and actively enable ethnic or sectarian insurrections across different parts of the country, overwhelming the regime, fracturing its ranks, and plunging the country into chaos. This is presumably a U.S. option and one that would pressure Tehran to make decisions about its proxies.
What would that mean for Hizballah? One way for it to relieve pressure on Iran might come from launching operations against Israel, which would in turn deter U.S. aggression. But its latest war with Israel has dramatically reduced its medium-to-long-range strike capacity and decimated its leadership. Its fighters are being killed nearly every day by Israel, and Hizballah has offered no response to this constant provocation. The group no longer benefits from strategic depth in Syria either. It is trapped in Lebanon’s miniscule geography. One might argue that, if things get so dire in Iran, its fighters had best retire to their village homes, wait, and pray to survive it.
From that standpoint, Hizballah’s smartest play is to ignore any Iranian order to escalate, hang on to its few thousand remaining rifles and its commercial interests, and hope for better days. However, Hizballah is not an independent actor but effectively an extension of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and it will follow orders. Nonetheless, it has limited options if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tells it to escalate in Lebanon to relieve pressure on Tehran. It may try to thread the needle by irritating Israel to accomplish that, without bringing its total wrath down on Hizballah and its already battered Lebanese constituency. Its last attempt at needle-threading however, during which it tried calibrated pressure on Northern Israel to press for a ceasefire in Gaza, ended in disaster for the militia.
So, if Hizballah’s options are limited even if the regime is in existential danger, what is Tehran likely to do with its degraded but still significant asset in Lebanon? It could do nothing at all but even that would not guarantee that Hizballah will not be drawn into a fight. Indeed the Iranian foreign minister was quick to point out that Iran “does not need anybody for [its] defense”. Butthat is likely to be an Israeli rather than an Iranian decision. Any U.S. campaign against Iran regardless of whether it has regime change ambitions will almost certainly be accompanied by an opportunistic Israeli escalation in Lebanon against Hizballah.
To further complicate life for Hizballah, the Lebanese cabinet and Lebanese army have pledged to disarm it. They are acting under a strong U.S. mandate with significant material and intelligence support. Their mission has been slowed mostly by their own desire to avoid outright military confrontation with Hizballah and communal strife with its Shia constituency. Limited U.S. military action in Iran would not change that calculation, but an existentially threatened Iranian regime and an even more battered Hizballah might. In this event the Lebanese army would escalate pressure on Hizballah to concede its weapons and positions in order to avoid a confrontation the latter can scarcely afford. No fighting need occur — the new balance of power will suffice.
There is one way Iran can squeeze more mileage out of Hizballah: Send it to Iraq to short up its constellation of militant groups there as part of a confrontation with the United States. Iraq is a more comfortable space for Iran than Lebanon has become, and it is deeply invested in it. Iran is apparently already positioning its Iraqi proxies for a confrontation, and the latter’s rhetoric has been much more belligerent than Hizballah’s in Lebanon. It would still be exposed to U.S. attack of course and Iranian proxies there have already been targeted, but with some more breathing space and proximity to its masters in Iran. This may even rescue Hizballah but will also uproot it and complete its decades-long drift from a hyperlocal, grassroots insurgency into an expeditionary force, at a time when its own Lebanese constituency is adrift and looking to the party for protection against Israel and rebuilding funds.
There is a final scenario in which Iran’s orders to Hizballah become moot: The Iranian regime crumbles so quickly as to leave Hizballah without any meaningful direction at all. The party would be on its own. There has never been a Hizballah without an Islamic Republic, which complicates the analysis. However, there have been plenty of abandoned, rudderless militia in Lebanon over the decades, especially after Lebanon’s civil war ended and foreign support for militant groups dried up. Almost without exception, these armed groups gave up their heavy weapons, kept their small arms, and transformed from true believer militias to organized criminal enterprises with a presence in parliament under an ideological veneer. Seeing as Hizballah has already made healthy progress in these directions, we can expect it to actually look quite similar to its current configuration minus whatever big guns are left, with a smaller constituency owing to its decreased funds, and little attention from Israel.
The ongoing operations against Iran will probably not result in Iran “activating” Hizballah in Lebanon, because that would endanger the group much more than its likely targets and expose rather than protect Iran. Worse for Hizballah, an attack on Iran may well trigger an opportunistic Israeli escalation against the militia and might destroy its leverage against domestic attempts to disarm it. In other words, the attacks on the Iranian regime are less likely to trigger Hizballah action in Lebanon and more likely to empower its enemies, making it the opposite of useful for Iran. Removing it from Lebanon altogether might be expeditious for Iran, at the risk of cutting it off from its beleaguered constituency. In any scenario, Hizballah loses.
Faysal Itani is a senior fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. He teaches Middle East politics and security at Georgetown and George Washington Universities. He is a native of Beirut, Lebanon.
Dania F. Arayssi, Ph.D.. is a senior analyst at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. She teaches Middle East Studies at Georgetown and George Washington Universities. She is a native of Beirut, Lebanon.
Image: Al Manar
