Iran is not fighting this war alone. Through its network of regional allies and proxy forces, Tehran has expanded the conflict’s geographic footprint far beyond its own borders, turning the entire Middle East into a theatre of operations and ensuring that any ceasefire must address the interests and activities of multiple actors simultaneously. Understanding this proxy dimension is essential to understanding why ending this war is so much harder than winning any single battle.
Hezbollah has continued to fight Israel across the Lebanon border, engaging Israeli ground forces south of the Litani River and launching rockets at northern Israel. Iran has made explicit that any ceasefire agreement must include a halt to Israeli operations in Lebanon — a condition that effectively gives Hezbollah veto power over any Iran-US deal. Israel has shown no inclination to agree, and its forces have been steadily advancing into Lebanese territory despite fierce Hezbollah resistance.
In the Gulf, Iran has used a combination of direct missile strikes, drone attacks, and covert operations to pressure US-aligned Arab states. The fire at Kuwait International Airport, the interception of drones over Saudi oil fields, and the arrest of an alleged Hezbollah assassination network in Kuwait all reflect the breadth of Iran’s operational reach. These attacks serve a dual purpose: they impose costs on states facilitating US military operations and they demonstrate to the Iranian public that the war is being prosecuted on multiple fronts.
Iran’s military strategy of opening multiple simultaneous fronts draws on decades of investment in asymmetric warfare capabilities. The combination of ballistic missiles, drone swarms, Hezbollah ground forces, and maritime harassment creates a complex and resource-intensive challenge for the US-Israel coalition. No single military action can neutralise all these capabilities simultaneously, which is why the conflict has proven so resistant to a decisive conclusion.
For the diplomats working on a ceasefire, the multi-front nature of the conflict means that a deal focusing only on the US-Iran bilateral relationship will be insufficient. Lebanon, Hezbollah, the Gulf states, and the broader question of Iran’s regional influence must all be addressed in some way for any agreement to hold. This complexity is not a coincidence — Iran has spent years constructing a deterrence architecture specifically designed to make any conflict with it comprehensively costly and multi-dimensional.