Axis of Resistance: The Hezbollah-Iran-Syria Relationship

By Steven Ward

Steven R. Ward is a retired intelligence officer and former member of CIA’s senior analytic service who specializes in Iran and the surrounding region. A retired U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and graduate of the United State Military Academy at West Point, he currently is a contract historian for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint History Office. Between 2010 and 2012, he was a CIA Visiting Professor to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. From 2005 to 2006 he served as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East on the National Intelligence Council, and he was a Director for Intelligence Programs on the National Security Council from 1998 to 1999.

Tehran likes to style the alliance between itself, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime in Syria as the core of an “Axis of Resistance.” The name tries to evoke the strength of will to confront, if not overthrow, foreign occupiers and oppressors—that is Israel and the United States—by Iran and its regional partners and proxies. Hezbollah has been the most active and effective anti-Israel and anti-U.S. participant in this Iranian and Syrian supported resistance since the group’s formation in the early 1980s.

Another definition of resistance, however, is a measure of the difficulty a power source faces in forcing electric current through a circuit. In other words, the amount of power lost or wasted in an endeavor. Amid the continuing chaos in Syria, this second meaning may be more relevant to describing the transitions within the relationship among these three allies, especially Hezbollah.  For Washington, a dissipation of Hezbollah’s power is, at best, a mixed blessing because, as Daniel Byman of Brookings has pointed out, the group is one of the Islamic State’s most formidable foes and is a barrier to Syria’s violence spreading to a vulnerable Lebanon.

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