Expansion to the eastern Mediterranean has, for over 250 years, since the days of the Safavid empire, been an Iranian strategic objective. That Iran secured a strong presence in the eastern Mediterranean, stretching from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, was a major achievement for the Islamic Republic. Even the Republic’s ardent opponents in and outside of Iran relished that their country had realised that objective that has, for centuries, been lurking in its psyche. In some interpretations of Iranian history, that objective of reaching the Eastern Mediterranean and establishing a presence there goes way back, and was a key factor in the wars between Iran’s Sassanid empire and the Eastern Roman Empire.

That this strong Iranian presence in the eastern Mediterranean has been dealt an acute setback, at the hands of Israel in the past year, is one of the greatest challenges the Islamic republic in Iran has faced since the end of its war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the late 1980s.

Several factors exacerbate this setback and make it particularly problematic.

One — This setback was preceded by and entailed several significant dilutions of pillars of that Iranian expansion in the past few decades. Two episodes were particularly painful to the Iranian leadership: the assassination in 2020 of Qassem Suleimani, the most successful Iranian military strategist in the past half century, and the assassination, in September 2024, of Hassan Nasrullah, the chief of Lebanon’s Hizbollah, the most charismatic leader who had belonged to Iran’s political project in the eastern Mediterranean.

Two — This setback came at a time of transition in the leadership of the Islamic Republic, from the generation of the founders who had surrounded Ayatollah Khomenei in the 1970s and 1980s and who has continued to steer Iran’s Islamic Republic in the past three decades, to a new generation. This transition is particularly fraught because the formative experiences of that new generation has been Iran’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean. They cut their teeth in strategising, implementing, and in the cases of many of them literarily fighting for consolidating this expansion and for entrenching Iranian presence in the region. That this generation is coming to power at the time when that expansion has been dealt a dramatic blow, would highly likely engender desires for not only regaining what was lost, but also for revenge. This could mean potential further Iranian-Israeli confrontations in the near future, as well as potential assertive stances by this new generation of Iranian leaders towards powers centres in Lebanon, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Three — The assassinations of key figures in the Iranian project in the eastern Mediterranean, figures that had inspired millions of Iranians and of people who intellectually and emotionally belong to this project, resonate with the sense of victimisation that is at the core of the Shii psyche (which had emerged from the legacies of some of the most painful episodes in Islamic history).

Four — This setback is particularly problematic to Iran because the successes that it had achieved in the past two decades, much of which have now been lost, is unrepeatable in the foreseeable future. This is because Iran had managed to expand in the eastern Mediterranean in the past two decades primarily because there was a large political vacuum that was waiting for an agile, ambitious, and intelligent player to fill it. This vacuum emerged with the acute weakening or utter disappearance of key power centres in the region, those that surrounded Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and Rafik al-Hariri. Iran’s ability to expand and fill that gap was also strengthened by the presence of Bashar al-Assad who not only choose to be close to Iran, but who was unlike his father Hafez, detached from the Arab Nationalist project. And all of that was taking place at a time most of the Arab world was undergoing turbulences in the decade after the Arab uprisings that had begun in 2011. None of these factors is present at the moment. And so, whereas Iran, twenty years ago, found the way from its borders to the eastern Mediterranean open, now that road entails serious obstacles to any Iranian expansionism.

Crucially, Iran managed, in the past 20 years, to defend its presence in the eastern Mediterranean. But the situation has changed dramatically now, to a large extent because the strategic calculus of Israel has changed significantly in the past 18-months, as the next article of this series will discuss.