WASHINGTON, D.C. — Of all the things that have changed in the world this past year, perhaps nothing has had a more dramatic turn than the fortunes of Iran and its Axis of Resistance.
In early 2024, the Islamic Republic seemed on the cusp of becoming a nuclear-armed state—and its proxies appeared to have a chokehold on the Middle East. Hamas terrorists had carried out the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis—the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hezbollah’s rocket fire emptied northern Israel, and Houthi militants nearly shut down commercial traffic in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the leader of Tehran’s closest Arab ally, was being feted by Gulf royals and European diplomats.
What a difference a year has made. Assad is now in exile in Moscow. Hezbollah is agreeing to a ceasefire; Hamas appears close to one as well. And the Israel Defense Forces destroyed most of Syria’s military arsenal over the past month.
All of this has American and Israeli military strategists telling The Free Press that the incoming Donald Trump administration has an unprecedented opening to further damage Tehran’s alliances and potentially end its pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The question is what the White House will actually do come late January. As the president-elect prepares to take office, there’s a mounting debate inside the Trump administration and Republican Party about how aggressively to pursue Tehran and deliver a killer blow.
On one side are people like Republican Senator James Risch of Idaho. “I don't think we need to finish [Iran] off. They’re finishing themselves off,” the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told The Free Press in an exclusive interview. “They talk about it, but where’s the nuclear weapon? They could have had one a long time ago. . . . I think they are deterred,” Senator Risch added.
Trump’s former national security adviser, retired General H.R. McMaster, has a different perspective. “I think what you were beginning to see is how profoundly weak this [Iranian] axis is . . . And I would say there’s an opportunity to go on the offensive, if not necessarily militarily, but from a diplomatic and financial perspective,” General McMaster told me. “I think the problem with Trump is he’s consistent on a lot of things, but then he's very inconsistent on others. He understands peace through strength, but he also has this impulse to retrench.”
The president-elect has surrounded himself with Iran hawks and has threatened to bomb Iran into “smithereens” over reports that Iranian agents plotted to assassinate him. But he has also vowed to end U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars and dismissed the prospect of his administration playing any role in nation-building. The question is which faction—the hawks, led by incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State-nominee Marco Rubio, or those who lean more isolationist, such as vice president-elect J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for intelligence chief—will have the most sway.
Senator Risch himself will have significant influence over this foreign policy debate through his Senate perch. The 81-year-old, like most Republican leaders, sees China, not Iran, as the U.S.’s primary competitor and the Pentagon's most important military threat. “[China’s] the long-game foreign policy challenge for the United States for this century,” he said. “The American public really doesn't have a full grasp of the challenge that China is for us.”
Risch and fellow Republican lawmakers, including Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, have taken to the airwaves in recent weeks to welcome the fall of Assad while also voicing serious concerns about the political actors who might replace him. They echoed Trump’s skepticism about Washington’s ability to shape politics in Damascus and said the U.S.’s primary goal should be to secure Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles and make sure both Iran and terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, or ISIS, can’t operate openly in that country.
Risch said he’d be reluctant as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to lift sanctions on Syria’s new leaders, many of whom have direct ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. “I am not in favor of taking the designation and sanctions off of those [in Damascus] until we see what they really look like,” the Idaho lawmaker said.
A bigger question in Syria for the Trump administration is whether to maintain the Pentagon’s military footprint in the Levantine country. The president-elect, during his first term, deployed thousands of American troops to northern Syria in a military campaign—conducted with allied Kurdish groups—that largely eradicated ISIS. But Trump has indicated he might remove these U.S. forces now, despite the fact that they and Kurdish troops continue to guard thousands of ISIS fighters still imprisoned there.
“I don't think the Kurds could fight ISIS by themselves without us,” Risch told me. “And you turn that many ISIS fighters loose on the planet, that’s not a good thing.”
Following Assad’s fall, Trump posted on Truth Social that Syria “IS NOT OUR FIGHT” and that the U.S. should essentially stay out of the current turmoil. But a number of Middle East strategists working on his transition team said this posture would be difficult to maintain given the thousands of Americans stationed across Syria, and the signs ISIS could come back to life. “There are things we can certainly do to shape events in Syria short of sending more troops,” said an official from Trump’s first term who’s involved in planning for the next.
A number of Republican politicians and strategists are also pressing Trump to take advantage of Iran’s weakened condition to target the Houthi militia that continues to attack Israeli and Western shipping from its base in Yemen. The Houthis’ actions have driven up the costs of global commerce as tankers and commercial vessels are being redirected around the Horn of Africa. And with Tehran on the back foot, the U.S. could also pressure Iraq to sever or weaken its military ties to Iran.
“I would hope [we’d] step it up, and the message to Iran should be: ‘Okay. You lost Hamas, in large part, you lost Hezbollah, in large part. You’ve lost Assad completely. Now we’re going to take out the Houthis as a significant part of your empire,’ ” said Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special envoy on Iran during his first term.
Many American, Israeli, and Arab intelligence officials had once believed the Axis of Resistance was virtually impregnable and that Assad had effectively won his 13-year war against largely Sunni rebels. But Israel’s actions over the past year have exposed how faulty these assessments were and forced a reevaluation of Tehran’s military capabilities. The primary question now being asked among Trump strategists is whether Iran, knowing its weakness, might accelerate its efforts to build an atomic bomb, or stand down.
For one, Israel’s Mossad spy service penetrated the leaderships of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran to a far greater degree than the Biden administration had estimated, according to current and former U.S. officials. This allowed Israel to assassinate Axis leaders from Beirut to Damascus to Tehran, essentially decapitating the command-and-control structures of both Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel’s use of explosive-laden pagers to kill or injure thousands of Hezbollah operators in September particularly rattled the Iranian alliance.
And Israel’s direct military operations against Iran, particularly in April and October, exposed weaknesses in Iran’s defenses that were not previously understood. U.S. officials had worried any strikes on Iranian soil would lead Iran’s feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to hit American military bases across the Middle East and unleash potentially devastating strikes on Israeli civilian centers. But Tehran’s reprisals have been limited, and most of its missile attacks have been thwarted by U.S. and Israeli air defenses.
“We also badly overestimated the broader consequences of attacking Iran directly,” John Hannah, who served as a top Middle East official in the George W. Bush White House, told The Free Press. “Israel has demystified the whole concept of acting against Iran militarily. That’s an important inflection point.”
Both current and former advisers to Trump say they’re closely studying how these developments could allow the Trump administration to further weaken Iran as well as Tehran’s allies in Russia and China.
Another critical question for Trump will be his willingness to directly challenge Tehran’s leadership in Iran itself. Hard-line Iranian news sites have criticized the IRGC’s abandonment of Assad after Tehran’s enormous financial and military investment in his regime. Iranian journalists have tracked discord among IRGC members on social media, many of them furious that Iran didn’t hit back harder at Israel following its air strikes and assassinations of Axis leaders such as Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. (Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran.)
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a recent speech, blamed Israel and the U.S. for Assad’s fall and vowed to defend the Axis of Resistance. “The Resistance Front is not a piece of hardware that can be broken, dismantled, or destroyed,” he said. “Resistance is a faith, a thought, a firm and heartfelt decision. . . . Not only it doesn’t weaken under pressure, it also becomes stronger.”
Incoming Trump administration officials, including National Security Advisor Waltz, have vowed to reimpose “maximum pressure” on Tehran, largely through sanctions and draining Iran’s oil revenues. But it remains unclear if Trump will support operations to destabilize the regime internally such as by funding anti-regime political, labor, and ethnic movements or information operations inside Iran to highlight the regime’s failings. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly posted videos calling for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, including one in early December.
The most important outstanding issue remains the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli Air Force destroyed a key nuclear facility in its October attack, The Free Press recently reported, and greatly diminished Iran’s air defenses and missile-production capabilities. Netanyahu and his advisers have signaled their willingness to take advantage of Iran’s instability to further degrade Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. And they're seeking Trump’s help.
“It looks very, very, very good based on the people that he's surrounded by,” Jacob Nagel, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, told The Free Press. “Ask me about Iran: I think for the first time, I’ve crossed the 50-yard line on the question that [Trump] might even join us in something with Iran.”
