Can You Negotiate with a Network?
Notes on the Middle East, No. 2
The map everyone carries in their head about Iran’s regional influence looks something like an octopus: Tehran as the brain, tentacles reaching into Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Gaza. The map is useful and it is also, I think, responsible for a specific kind of strategic error that matters right now, with Khamenei dead and the question of what his proxies will do sitting at the center of every conversation I’m part of.
The error is this: if you believe the octopus, you believe that killing the brain collapses the tentacles. And if you believe that, you are currently expecting either coordinated retaliation (the tentacles striking in concert, following orders from Tehran) or coordinated collapse (the tentacles going limp without instruction). Neither of those appears to be what is happening. What seems to be happening instead is that each node in the network is making its own calculation, based on its own local circumstances, with its own survival as the primary variable. Which makes this a very different kind of problem than the one most analysts, and most governments, have been planning for.
I want to trace how we got here, because I think the history of how these relationships were actually built explains why they’re fragmenting the way they are.
The standard origin story of Iran’s proxy network begins with the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which is true enough as a starting point but obscures the thing that actually matters about how the network was constructed. The revolution gave Iran an ideology to export: Khomeini’s vision of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) extended naturally, at least in theory, to Shia communities across the region who had their own grievances and their own reasons to listen. But ideology alone has never sustained a militia. What sustained Iran’s network was something more specific and more personal, and for most of the last three decades it had a name: Qasem Soleimani.
Soleimani’s essential idea was to locate existing movements with political and military capacity in foreign states, build their strength with Iranian money, weapons, and training, and transform them into instruments of Iranian influence. In the useful phrasing of one Lebanese analyst cited by the Middle East Forum, Soleimani’s method was to insert a kind of Iranian-controlled “deep state” into the body of an existing state.
Soleimani ran the IRGC’s Quds Force from 1998 until his assassination by the United States in January 2020, and the way he built Iran’s regional architecture tells you almost everything you need to know about why it is behaving the way it is now. He did not build a command-and-control structure. He built relationships. As a former militia coordinator who later defected described it, Soleimani “acted like a spiritual father in networks akin to a mafia head,” maintaining personal relationships with leaders at every level, managing separate budgets and objectives, ensuring that each proxy group believed it had the closest relationship with him. He flew to Beirut and sat with Hezbollah commanders. He was on the ground in Iraq during the war against ISIS, personally directing operations alongside Iraqi militia leaders who owed their positions, their funding, and in some cases their lives to him. He cultivated the Houthis in Yemen, brokered relationships between groups that had little in common besides their utility to Iranian strategy, maintained the whole architecture through personal trust, personal loyalty, and an extraordinary willingness to be physically present in the places where it mattered.
The network Soleimani built worked the way franchise systems work: shared branding (the “Axis of Resistance”), resource flows from the center (money, weapons, training, intelligence), ideological alignment on a few core principles (opposition to Israel, opposition to American hegemony, Shia solidarity), and significant local autonomy on everything else. Hezbollah ran its own domestic political operation in Lebanon, fought its own wars on its own timetable, maintained its own social services infrastructure, collected its own taxes. The Houthis were fighting a civil war in Yemen that had its own logic long before Iran got involved, and their military operations in the Red Sea served Tehran’s interests and their own simultaneously. The Iraqi militias were embedded in Iraqi sectarian politics and pursued Iraqi objectives, sometimes in alignment with Iran and sometimes in tension with it.
What held the franchise together was the coordinating hand. Soleimani was, in the language of the business world, the franchisor: the person who kept the brand coherent, resolved disputes between franchisees, allocated resources, and ensured that local autonomy didn’t drift into local incoherence. When the United States killed him in 2020, the network absorbed the blow, but it absorbed it unevenly. His successor at the Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, was by most accounts a competent administrator who lacked Soleimani’s personal relationships, his operational daring, and his willingness to show up. Qaani was reportedly so concerned about his own safety that he became far less active, avoided the face-to-face meetings that had been Soleimani’s primary instrument, and lost the ability to balance competing proxy groups the way his predecessor had. The franchise continued to operate. The coordination got looser.
Hezbollah is the oldest and most sophisticated franchise in the network, and its history with Iran is the one I find most instructive for understanding what is happening now.
The group was born in 1982 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, midwifed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards who arrived in the Bekaa Valley and began training, funding, and organizing a Shia militia from a population that had genuine and longstanding grievances against both Israel and the Lebanese political establishment. Iran provided the resources and the ideology. Lebanon’s Shia community provided the fighters, the anger, and the social base. From the beginning, the relationship was symbiotic: Hezbollah served Iran’s strategic interests by establishing a deterrent on Israel’s northern border, and Iran served Hezbollah’s interests by giving it the means to become the most powerful non-state military force in the region.
Over forty years, Hezbollah became something that complicates the word “proxy” almost to the point of uselessness. As one analysis of Iran’s proxy network noted, Hezbollah has “outgrown its proxy status and reached near peer status with the Quds Force,” even becoming a middleman helping Iran train other militias. It built hospitals, schools, a telecommunications network, a media empire, a political party with seats in parliament and ministers in government. It fought a war with Israel in 2006 that ended in something the Arab world read as a victory, the first time an Arab force had fought Israel to a standstill in living memory. It became, in effect, a state within a state, with its own foreign policy, its own military doctrine, and its own domestic constituency whose loyalty was to Hezbollah first and to Iran only insofar as Iran enabled Hezbollah to deliver.
This is the crucial point. Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran was always transactional at its core, even when it was also ideological. Tehran provided money (estimates have ranged from $700 million to over $1 billion annually), weapons, and strategic coordination. Hezbollah provided Iran with a credible deterrent against Israel: the implicit promise that any attack on Iran would trigger a devastating missile barrage on Israeli cities from Lebanon. That deterrent was the insurance policy. It was the reason attacking Iran was supposed to be too costly to contemplate. And it had already failed once: during the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, all of Iran’s proxies, without exception, elected to stay out of the fight.
Two things happened to that insurance policy before Khamenei was killed. First, Israel systematically dismantled Hezbollah’s senior military leadership in 2024, killing Hassan Nasrallah (Hezbollah’s Secretary-General and Tehran’s most trusted regional partner), most of the group’s senior military commanders, and much of its operational infrastructure. Second, the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria in late 2024 severed the land corridor through which Iran had supplied Hezbollah for decades. By the time the US-Israeli strikes hit Tehran in February 2026, Hezbollah was already a diminished force: its leadership reconstituted under Naim Qassem, its arsenal still formidable but its supply lines cut, its domestic political position weakened in a Lebanon that was moving toward parliamentary elections and openly debating Hezbollah’s disarmament.
When Khamenei was killed, Hezbollah launched rockets and drones at Israel, explicitly linking the attack to Khamenei’s assassination. But the analysts I’ve read on this are nearly unanimous that the decision was driven less by loyalty to Tehran than by Hezbollah’s belief that it was next on Israel’s target list. It was a preemptive move, an attempt to demonstrate continued relevance and capability at a moment when the group feared being destroyed. The Lebanese government responded by declaring all Hezbollah military activity illegal and ordering its disarmament. Hezbollah responded by launching more strikes the following day, essentially daring the Lebanese state to enforce the ban.
This is a franchise in crisis, fighting for its own survival, in a local political context that has its own logic entirely independent of what is happening in Tehran. The question Hezbollah faces is not “what does Iran want us to do?” The question is “can we survive the next six months in Lebanon?”
The Stimson Center’s analysis of the network’s future puts it well: the proxy network was “already in disarray before Khamenei’s death,” and its future is now “directly tied to Iran’s internal transition.” The question is whether a hardline IRGC consolidation can hold it together or whether each node drifts further into its own orbit.
The Houthis present the opposite problem. Where Hezbollah is an old, deeply institutionalized franchise whose relationship with Iran is layered and complex, the Houthis are a newer and more autonomous partner whose alignment with Tehran has always been more opportunistic.
The Houthis began as a Zaydi Shia revivalist movement in northern Yemen in the 1990s, fought a series of wars against the Yemeni government between 2004 and 2010, and seized the capital Sana’a in 2014 during Yemen’s civil war. Iran’s involvement grew over time: weapons, training, financial support, intelligence sharing. The IRGC helped the Houthis develop their ballistic missile and drone capabilities, which by 2023 had become sophisticated enough to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and eventually Israel and international shipping in the Red Sea.
But the Houthis were never an Iranian creation in the way that Hezbollah was, and their military campaigns have always served a dual purpose: advancing Iran’s regional interests and consolidating Houthi control over Yemeni territory. Their Red Sea shipping campaign, which disrupted roughly 10-15% of global seaborne trade at its peak, was framed as solidarity with Gaza. It was also a bid for regional standing, a demonstration that the Houthis could impose costs on the global economy in ways that gave them a seat at tables they had previously been excluded from. As one analysis put it, the relationship between the Houthis and Iran is “convergence, not command: overlapping interests expressed through a campaign serving both actors, but not entirely owned by either.”
When the US-Israeli strikes hit Iran, the Houthis announced they would resume Red Sea attacks. But as of this writing, the announcement has not been followed by action. The Stimson Center published a detailed analysis of the Houthis’ decision calculus noting that the group initially “showed restraint, announced political solidarity with Iran while signaling a posture of deliberate, conditional restraint.” The Houthis signed a deal with Trump last May to stop attacking American ships, and resuming attacks means risking that agreement. They have also, according to Foreign Policy, begun manufacturing their own weapons domestically, which reduces their dependence on Iranian supply chains and gives them more room to make independent decisions. The Houthis are, in franchise terms, developing their own product line and weighing whether the brand is still worth the cost of membership.
Iraq is the most complicated case, and the one where the franchise metaphor strains the most.
Iran’s relationships with Iraqi Shia militias were forged in the chaos of the post-2003 occupation, when the fall of Saddam Hussein created a power vacuum that Tehran filled with extraordinary speed and skill. The IRGC’s Quds Force, under Soleimani, cultivated a constellation of armed groups (Kataib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, the Badr Organization, and others) that served simultaneously as Iranian proxies, Iraqi political parties, and participants in the US-backed campaign against ISIS. The relationships were personal, built by Soleimani through years of direct engagement, and they were embedded in Iraqi politics in ways that make the word “proxy” misleading. These groups have ministers in the Iraqi government. They control significant economic resources. They have their own domestic constituencies.
When Khamenei was killed, two Iraqi groups expressed readiness to defend Iran and Kataib Hezbollah claimed drone attacks on US bases in Baghdad and Erbil. But the most striking detail I’ve encountered in the reporting is that during the January 2026 protests in Iran, there were credible reports of Iraqi militia members being deployed inside Iran to help suppress demonstrations. The “proxy” was being used as domestic riot police. That tells you something about what the relationship has become and what Tehran’s priorities actually are: the network is as much an instrument of internal regime security as it is a tool of regional power projection.
I’ve been thinking about this through a lens that comes from my professional life. In the world I work in, people talk about “platform risk,” the danger of building your business on someone else’s infrastructure, someone else’s rules, someone else’s continued existence. If the platform changes its terms, or collapses, or simply loses interest, the businesses built on top of it are exposed. They don’t vanish. They scramble. As Small Wars Journal argued this week, the proxy network “was never the target of Operation Epic Fury at all,” and what no air campaign alone can destroy is “Iran’s forty-year strategic investment in a distributed proxy architecture.”
Iran’s proxy network is experiencing platform risk. The platform (Tehran’s coordinating hand, its funding streams, its strategic direction) has been severely damaged. The franchises built on top of it are not collapsing. They are scrambling, each one making independent calculations about survival that reflect their local circumstances far more than they reflect any coordinated strategy from a capital that is itself in crisis.
This is, I think, the most important thing to understand about what happens next: the network is weaker as a coordinated force and harder to resolve as a diplomatic problem, because there is no single counterparty. You can negotiate with a hierarchy. If the Supreme Leader says stop, the system can, in theory, transmit that order. What you cannot negotiate with is a set of dispersed actors pursuing local survival, each with its own red lines, its own constituencies, its own reasons to escalate or hold back. The Chertoff Group, in a threat assessment published this week, put it directly: “Organizations should treat the proxy network as a distributed threat that does not require central Iranian command to activate.”
I want to be careful with the franchise metaphor, because it can flatten real differences. Hezbollah’s forty-year institutional depth is nothing like the Houthis’ decade of insurgent opportunism, and the Iraqi militias occupy a different political position entirely. But what the framework captures, and what I think matters most for anyone making decisions about this region right now, is that the assumption of central control was always partly a fiction, and the fiction is now fully exposed. Each franchise has its own P&L, its own market, its own competitors. Tehran was the brand. The brand is in receivership.
Whether that makes the region more dangerous or less depends entirely on which franchisee you’re looking at, and what their local incentives demand. That is the kind of problem that does not resolve quickly, does not resolve through a single negotiation, and does not resolve at all if you’re still looking at the octopus map.
Notes on the Middle East is written by Karlo Dizon. He works in global capital and geopolitical strategy. These are his personal views.