As for the Houthis in Yemen, they are structurally different, geographically isolated, and organized along tribal lines. It is unlikely that the impact of “Lebanon First” on the Houthis would be immediate. However, if Iran’s broader structure weakens and its ability to finance its proxies diminishes, the Houthis would gradually lose their strategic depth over time. This would be a subsequent effect, not an immediate domino effect. Accordingly, the State Reconstruction Program is not merely a policy toward Lebanon, but a policy toward Iran. It targets Iran’s regional structure at its strongest nodes, and does so through an effective state rather than through bombs.

The Soviet Union did not collapse because the United States invaded Moscow, but because its satellite states—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria—fell one after another between 1989 and 1991. Each defection weakened the credibility of the center, encouraged the next state, and demonstrated that it was possible to break away from the imperial model. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the question was no longer whether the Soviet system would survive, but how quickly it would collapse. The center held together until the periphery made that cohesion impossible.

Clearly, Iran’s regional structure operates according to the same structural logic. Tehran spent four decades building a network of proxy investments—Lebanon/Hezbollah, Iraq/the Popular Mobilization Forces, Yemen/the Houthis, and Syria (until 2024)—a network that served as strategic depth, deterrence assets, and pillars of regime legitimacy. Each proxy reinforces the rationale for the others, making the “Axis of Resistance” narrative dependent on the emergence of a coherent and expanding arc stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean. If one node were to fall in a convincing manner, the narrative would begin to fracture.

Syria has already moved out of Iran’s sphere of influence. If Lebanon were to follow, and the ecosystem that Tehran built around Hezbollah over decades were to fracture, Iran could find itself facing the loss of a fundamental part of its regional investment. Within Iran, these losses could become more prominent in public debate if the costs spent on regional proxies were compared with the results they had achieved. At that point, the narrative that external influence provides Iran with strategic depth—and that “the Resistance protects Iran”—could weaken when the very structure of the Resistance itself begins to collapse.

Just as the Soviet Union was unable to survive after losing the satellite states of its socialist bloc in Europe, Iran, in the document’s argument, cannot ultimately survive the successive loss of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. At that point, bringing down the regime would not require a military invasion; rather, it would require rendering it irrelevant to its own surrounding environment.