Tehran’s Two Futures: What Comes After the Proxy War?
Why Strategic Foresight in International Security?
In an era defined by unpredictable escalations, fractured alliances, and blurred lines between military strategy and political theatre, the international security sector cannot afford to think only in terms of crisis response. It must learn to think ahead, not just in policy cycles or electoral timelines, but in multi-vector possibilities.
Strategic foresight is the discipline that makes this possible. Unlike forecasting or predictive modeling, foresight does not claim to know what will happen; it prepares us to navigate what might happen. It is not prophecy. It is preparation.
Within international security, strategic foresight strengthens:
Crisis anticipation: identifying emerging disruptions before they spiral.
Scenario navigation: exploring multiple futures to avoid policy tunnel vision.
Opportunity detection: recognizing points of leverage even in chaotic systems.
Risk containment: shaping institutional agility, not just institutional memory.
When applied to states like Iran -caught between strategic encirclement and internal recalibration- foresight allows security actors to step back from reactive posture and interrogate structural dynamics. It helps humanitarian agencies assess access windows. It informs military planners, diplomats, and multilateral institutions as they attempt to calibrate pressure without pushing toward collapse.
What follows is not a set of predictions. It is a map of the turbulent terrain ahead, built from signals, secondary data, historical patterns, and informed imagination.
Context: A Systematic Dismantling, Not a Sudden War
Parsing the Architecture of Dismantling: A Comparative Look at Two Analyses
Two recent analyses converge on a single thesis: Israel’s confrontation with Iran is neither abrupt nor reactionary, it is the culmination of a long, calculated dismantling of Tehran’s regional architecture. Yet, the route each takes to illuminate this strategic arc differs in scope, tone, and emphasis.
Fidel Amakye Owusu’s analysis1, penned six months ago, situates the Israeli campaign within the larger geopolitical fiction often labeled the "Shia Crescent" a term that thinly masks sectarian narratives in service of power projection. Owusu tracks how successive Israeli strikes, particularly in Gaza and Lebanon, function less as responses to specific provocations and more as components in a systemic degradation of Iran’s proxy infrastructure. His framing resists the reductionist sectarian binaries that dominate mainstream discourse. Instead, he outlines how the weakening of Syrian statehood -accelerated by Israel’s operations and regional rivalries- has hollowed out Tehran’s westward corridor. Importantly, Owusu draws connective tissue between Syria’s collapse and Russia’s entanglement in Ukraine, hinting at the realignment of global power corridors in ways many Western briefings ignore.
Jason Burke’s recent Guardian article, "How the dismantling of Iran’s regional proxies paved way for Israel’s attack,"2 narrows the aperture to a sharper, more tactical focus. It confirms much of what Owusu anticipated, albeit in real-time war reportage. Burke chronicles how the successive weakening of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime has created not just a vacuum, but an opening, allowing Israel to shift from proxy containment to direct engagement with Iran itself. Where Owusu explores structural decay, Burke maps operational tempo: the attrition of Hezbollah, the paralysis of the Houthis, and the erosion of Iran’s regional deterrent. Notably, Burke introduces an underdeveloped variable in Owusu’s piece, Iran’s nuclear program, as a core accelerant, tying Israel’s timing to U.S. domestic politics, particularly the Trump-era pressures on nuclear negotiations.
These perspectives collectively reveal the shift from a shadow war to open confrontation. In the space between dismantling and escalation lies the ground for futures thinking.
Scenario One: Conditional Reintegration under Strategic Constraint
Foresight Scenario Name: “Normalized but Neutralized”
Core Dynamics
This scenario envisions Iran entering a peace agreement; not out of diplomatic convergence but through a coercive geopolitical squeeze. The collapse of its regional proxies, economic suffocation from secondary sanctions, and intensifying domestic fatigue make reintegration into global systems more rational than defiance.
Why Iran Might Accept It
Iran’s strategic calculus is changing. The costs of sustaining forward deterrence have exceeded their returns. With Hezbollah degraded, Hamas under siege, the Houthis fragmented, and Syria effectively neutralized, Iran has lost the geographic bandwidth that once allowed it to balance deterrence with deniability.
Faced with:
An unresolvable economic crisis (compounded by sanctions, brain drain, and capital flight),
Internal legitimacy erosion, especially among urban youth, and
A diplomatic dead-end vis-à-vis the Arab world’s pivot toward Tel Aviv and Washington,
the Iranian leadership may pursue a peace agreement that functions as a strategic reset. But this reset will be shaped by terms that reflect the post-proxy order:
Stricter, broader nuclear constraints than JCPOA, with real-time monitoring.
Institutional distancing from non-state actors, especially Hezbollah and militias in Iraq.
Gradual demobilization of parts of the IRGC’s foreign activities, reframed as economic reinvestment initiatives.
Preferential trade terms contingent on behavioral guarantees, tying Iran to liberal international economic norms and Western-aligned supply chains.
Historical Analogues
Libya 2003: Qaddafi accepted nuclear disarmament in exchange for Western re-engagement. While short-lived, it reflected the logic of surrender under external pressure.
China’s WTO Accession (2001): In a bid for economic modernization, Beijing accepted intrusive economic terms, trading some autonomy for systemic inclusion.
Risks and Security Implications
A modernized, economically integrated Iran with no proxies might superficially appear stable, but such agreements historically produce brittle systems unless political reform follows.
Power vacuums left by demobilized proxies may be filled by fragmented or criminalized militant networks, untethered from Tehran yet ideologically radicalized.
Narrative: How This Scenario Looks and Feels
It is 2027. The skyline of Tehran glimmers with foreign investment: German auto brands, Turkish telecoms, and a return of European diplomats. Headlines hail “Iran’s New Opening,” but behind the camera flashes is a leadership that signed peace out of necessity, not conviction.
There are no missiles in Southern Lebanon, no Houthi naval disruptions, no airstrikes in Syria. The IRGC has been folded into national reconstruction programs and “entrepreneurial” zones under IMF-sanctioned partnerships.
Yet the air feels fragile. University students cautiously organize reform talks. Former Hezbollah commanders run construction firms. Western officials praise a “responsible” Iran. But the sense is clear: this normalization is containment repackaged as cooperation. The old red lines have been erased, but replaced with new boundaries drawn in dollars and compliance clauses.
Iran is back in the system, but the price was its old identity.
Scenario Two: Nationalist Retrenchment under Siege
Foresight Scenario Name: “Fortress Iran”
Core Dynamics
Here, Iran rejects compromise. Instead, the siege logic -military strikes, encirclement, and media warfare- backfires. The external pressure produces an in-group consolidation effect, as seen in conflict-affected states historically. Fear of collapse galvanizes not opposition, but obedience.
What This Looks Like
Unified Nationalism: The state projects a narrative of resistance, framing the dismantling of proxies as a crusade against Shiite identity and Iranian sovereignty.
Expanded Domestic Control: The IRGC takes on a more overt governance role. Surveillance, ideological education, and militia recruitment intensify under national defense narratives.
Horizontal Proxy Proliferation: As seen in Gaza under siege, Iran shifts to enabling smaller, more dispersed, less hierarchically tied networks; “Post-proxy warfare.”
Weaponized Panic: Attacks on critical infrastructure or border regions may be orchestrated to justify emergency rule and suppress dissent.
Signals Already in Motion
State-backed mourning festivals rebranded as nationalist mobilization events.
Proposals to arm civil society groups under “People’s Resistance” banners.
Alignment with Russia and China in intelligence and weapons-sharing agreements.
Suspicious increases in cyber-espionage infrastructure targeting Gulf and Western assets.
Historical Analogues
Post-Intifada Gaza: Israeli sieges created fragmented militant ecosystems no longer directly controllable by any single actor, including Hamas.
Iraq under Sanctions (1990s): The Ba'ath regime intensified domestic surveillance and rationing systems, using siege to harden the regime and justify repression.
North Korea: Long-term international isolation produces regime resilience, not collapse, as systems of control become totalizing under siege.
Risks and Security Implications
Iran becomes less predictable, not a strategic state actor, but a theater of reactive, decentralized resistance.
Humanitarian and political actors lose access to decision-makers amid consolidation of hardliners.
Regional spillovers accelerate, as Iran exports its siege logic through improvised, ideologically fused militant forms.
Narrative: How This Scenario Looks and Feels
It is 2027. The streets of Mashhad and Shiraz are draped in black banners not for Ashura, but for “The Martyrs of Resistance.” Paramilitary training videos are streamed to youth as national service, and women’s dress codes are once again being policed with new rigor under martial pretexts.
Inside Tehran’s cyber command bunkers, engineers launch digital campaigns against Gulf infrastructure and dissident networks. Across Iraq and Syria, remnants of the old proxy system have been replaced by hyperlocal groups, some loyal, some merely useful.
Western media headlines say “Iran Collapsing,” but the reality is a country tightening, not falling apart. Every missile strike is used to unify. Every collapsed economy becomes proof of imperialism. Where the West sees decay, the regime narrates rebirth.
Iran is no longer exporting revolution. It is internalizing it.
Coda: Navigating Futures, Not Predicting Them
Strategic foresight is not about prediction. It is about navigating turbulence, spotting early signals, and avoiding rigid assumptions. As this case shows, two radically different futures -normalization or retrenchment- can emerge from the same foundational dynamics. The choice for international actors is not whether one or the other will happen, but whether they are ready for either, or both, simultaneously.
In a world moving from polarity to fragmentation, foresight is not a luxury. It is a discipline of resilience.
But are these the only futures we should consider? What signals do you see? What paths might we be missing? Share your thoughts in the comments, let’s have a conversation.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fidel-amakye-owusu-8158b6149_6-months-ago-i-wrote-this-is-israel-going-activity-7340124737030836225-Zn7d?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAD--cL4BYhLgmPQzf_lVl29SxdK7fh9HV-s
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/15/israels-attack-on-iran-has-a-real-chance-of-bringing-about-regime-change