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As American and Iranian diplomats gathered in early April in Islamabad for Pakistan‑mediated ceasefire talks to end the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and its regional allies, including Hizballah, a sticking point emerged: whether the ceasefire was to include Lebanon. The United States and Israel initially rejected the notion that Lebanon had been part of the agreement, with President Donald Trump referring to Israeli operations there as a “separate skirmish.” Conversely, the Iranians signaled that Lebanon had been part of the agreement and threatened to unilaterally end the ceasefire if Israeli attacks continued against Lebanon.
Although the ceasefire remains fragile, with Iran continuing to exert direct control over transit through the Strait of Hormuz while U.S. naval forces try to enforce a wider blockade targeting Iranian shipping, the dispute over Lebanon’s inclusion in the agreement points to a deeper flaw in how Iran’s relationship with Hizballah is understood by many in the West. Iran’s insistence on including Lebanon in any ceasefire deal with Washington, together with Hizballah’s own participation in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, undercuts the idea that the organization is a mere supplicant proxy of a supposedly domineering Iran.
Broadly speaking, a proxy is understood as a state or non‑state actor that wages conflict to advance the interests of, and with support from, a far more powerful external benefactor referred to as a principal. While the interests of the proxy and principal tend to be compatible, it is the principal that provides direction, resources, and strategic guidance, while the proxy mostly executes with limited room to deviate at the margins. However, as political scientist Bertil Dunér points out, such features alone are not sufficient to determine a proxy status. What truly distinguishes it is whether the intervening actor “has been subjected to the exercise of power by some other state; whether it has been pressured to interven[e].” In his view, “a proxy intervenes on account of the positive or negative sanctions (or threats of sanctions) which are directed against it; without such sanctions the intervention would not come about.” In the context of Iran’s relationship with Hizballah — in particular, the two sides’ behavior throughout the course of this war and the ceasefire talks — there is little indication that Hizballah has been compelled into action through sanctions and leverage. Instead, we observe a distinct convergence of interests in a mutually reinforcing alliance.
Iran’s insistence on Lebanon’s inclusion in any long-term ceasefire deal with Washington stems in large part from utilitarian considerations: It is linked to the strategic posture of Iran and its wider network of regional alliances, commonly referred to as the Axis of Resistance. Meditating on the events that have unfolded since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — the grinding attrition of 2024, the Iran-Israel war of June 2025, and the recent regional war with the United States and Israel — Iranian leaders have likely drawn the conclusion that the axis is most effective when its components act in concert and most vulnerable when a flank is left to fend for itself and bleed in isolation from the rest of the network. But the concern with the axis’s effectiveness is only part of the story. There’s also the question of cohesion: If the axis is to remain together, the most powerful node of the axis — Iran — cannot be seen as willing to abandon its longest‑standing partner — Hizballah — for it might prompt other allies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to wonder whether Iranian guarantees are contingent and revocable as soon as Tehran deems the costs of solidarity too high to bear.
But even if we set the broader Axis of Resistance to the side for a moment and look at Iran’s deterrence posture in isolation from the rest of the axis, it’s easy to see how Lebanon, in and of itself, constitutes the outer ring of Iran’s deterrence posture vis-à-vis the United States and Israel. The presence of an Iran-allied fighting force as capable and reliable as Hizballah in Southern Lebanon had for decades functioned as a crucial bulwark not only against an Israeli invasion of Lebanon but also against an Israeli strike on Iran. Indeed, as repeatedly and openly acknowledged by Israeli leaders as senior as Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu himself, serious operational planning for a direct war with Iran only became conceivable after Hizballah’s significant weakening toward the end of 2024. Therefore, for Tehran, any Iran-U.S. ceasefire that does not credibly ensure the restoration — or at a minimum the functional preservation — of Hizballah’s deterrent capacity in Southern Lebanon would amount to undermining Iran’s own deterrence.
In short, Lebanon is not external to Iran’s deterrence architecture but is structurally bound up with it, which is precisely why it is so difficult for Iran to accept a ceasefire deal with the United States that does not take Lebanon into account.
But beyond cold cost-benefit calculations, there are also deep institutional and societal factors that make it difficult for Tehran to turn a blind eye to Lebanon’s plight.
While religious and social links between Iran and Lebanon’s Shiite community are by no means novel and predate Hizballah’s birth in 1982 by centuries, decades of intimate military cooperation between Iran and the organization have deepened and reorganized these ties into dense, overlapping networks spanning clerical establishments, political organizations, and security apparatuses in both countries. Personal and familial bonds, including high‑level intermarriage within leadership circles, have only further reinforced these ties. A case in point is the marriage of Zeinab Soleimani, daughter of the slain Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, to Reza Safieddine, the son of assassinated Hizballah figure Hashem Safieddine.
Institutional entanglement, reinforced by personal and familial bonds, makes it politically costly for decision‑makers in Tehran to treat Hizballah as a mere fungible proxy that can simply be discarded whenever convenient.
But if this interweaving of institutions and elites acts as a powerful brake on any effort to treat Hizballah as an expendable instrument of Iranian interests, public sentiments inside Iran tighten the constraint further. For a significant segment of Iranian society, support for Hizballah and Lebanon is rooted less in strategic calculations and more in solidarity with their fellow Shiite brethren in Southern Lebanon, a sentiment that has most likely only deepened since Hizballah entered into the war shortly after the start of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran. This sense of obligation towards Lebanon and Hizballah found vivid public articulation amidst reports that, despite the temporary ceasefire between Iran and the United States, Israel had in fact ratcheted up its strikes across Lebanon, fueling suspicion amongst Iranians that Lebanon had in fact been excluded from the ceasefire. Many Iranians demonstrating in cities like Isfahan and Badroud reacted with outrage at the mere specter of a ceasefire without Lebanon, chanting slogans such as “A ceasefire without Lebanon is a betrayal of Islam” and “Lebanon is our brother, Hizballah is our ally.”
Given the combination of entrenched institutional ties, personal networks, and domestic opinion in Iran, even the most calculating politician in Tehran would struggle to justify to domestic audiences any acquiescence to U.S. demands that Lebanon be left out of a broader ceasefire agreement with Washington.
But it’s not just Iran’s handling of the ceasefire that casts serious doubts about the adequacy of the proxy model as an analytical frame for understanding Iran’s relationship with Hizballah. The organization’s own response to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran further illustrates the limitations of the proxy framework for making sense of the Iran-Hizballah relationship.
Hizballah’s participation in the war has been described as a subordinate client’s rushing to a patron’s defense on cue. While Tehran most likely expected Hizballah not to stay idle in the event of a strike on Iran, Hizballah’s own interests appear to have been far more central to its decision to enter the war: namely, a severe erosion in the organization’s deterrent posture in the 15 months leading up to the recent war. Hizballah was forced to relocate much of its visible military infrastructure north of the Litani River, almost the entirety of its senior leadership was assassinated in September 2024, and Israel was routinely violating a November 2024 ceasefire that was already in its favor. It had, therefore, become a matter of existential necessity for the organization to demonstrate that Israeli incursions, assassinations, and occupation of southern Lebanon would no longer go unanswered. At the same time, a major Israeli attempt to deliver a decisive, possibly terminal, blow against the organization had started to look increasingly inevitable. Entering this latest war on March 2 allowed Hizballah to choose the timing of what it regarded as an unavoidable confrontation while denying Israel the element of surprise. It also meant engaging an adversary whose military resources were now stretched across multiple fronts — in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and later Yemen — thereby reducing Israel’s ability to fully concentrate the totality of its firepower on Lebanon alone. Crucially, Hizballah’s own firepower was now augmented by the fact that, for the first time, it was being deployed in tandem with Iranian drone and missile strikes on Israel, an advantage the organization lacked during the 2024 ground war with Israel.
Precious little about this mutual dependence between Iran and Hizballah bears much resemblance to the attributes normally prevalent in a proxy relationship. Recall from the earlier discussion Dunér’s emphasis that what truly distinguishes a proxy relationship is not support alone but whether the intervening actor — in this case, Hizballah — has been subjected to the exercise of power by some other state — in this case, Iran — through positive or negative sanctions, or threats of sanctions, to intervene. But there is little to no evidence that Hizballah has ever been coerced in this way by Iran in its decisions to enter or escalate conflicts.
While it is true that Iran is far stronger than all of the nodes that make up the Axis of Resistance, it still lacks the kind of overwhelming power asymmetry required to generate the coercive proxy dynamic Dunér describes. Instead, it would be more apt to describe Iran’s relationship with allies like Hizballah — just as other scholars have done in the past — as one of mutual dependence, dense organizational and personal networks, and a shared strategic project in which leverage is largely reciprocal and authority is primarily dispersed rather than strictly hierarchical.
Sajjad Safaei, Ph.D., is a multidisciplinary researcher, lecturer, and analyst based in Germany. Previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, he has also taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Zurich. His research and commentary on the politics, society, and foreign relations of Iran, as well as Middle Eastern geopolitics and security have appeared in Foreign Policy, Responsible Statecraft, Al Jazeera, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), and The National Interest.
Image: khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons
