It is time to call time on the notion of an “axis of resistance”. Throughout the 20 years of the term’s existence, it has been useful for invoking Iran’s network of proxies in the Middle East. But the term masks the realities of Iran’s and its proxies’ objectives and relationships. The current Gaza conflict has underlined that the “axis of resistance” is a myth that never existed.
In January 2002, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, US President George W. Bush famously used the term “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address, in which he said that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea constituted an axis harbouring and supporting terrorists. Bush’s speech painted a picture of a binary in the world, with enemies of the United States characterised as sending “other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder” and embracing “tyranny and death as a cause and a creed,” and presented the US and its allies as fighting those enemies for freedom.
Bush’s words referenced Iran’s behaviour since the 1979 Islamic revolution, of which exporting the revolution is a pillar. The rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saw Iran sponsoring proxies outside its borders, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, and promoting martyrdom as a path towards liberation. Following Khomeini’s death, Iran continued to present this scenario as necessary for fighting tyranny, placing the US and Israel as the two main evils it is striving to counter.
But what was meant to be a term undermining Iran ended up giving birth to another term that Iran has been using since 2004 to upgrade its revolutionary propagation. For the last two decades, Iran has been invoking the term “axis of resistance” as the antithesis to Bush’s dichotomy.
With its connotations of legitimacy and justice, the term “axis of resistance” eventually replaced that of “exporting the revolution” in much of Iran’s public rhetoric because it proved to be more useful for achieving Iran’s objective of spreading its influence in the Middle East.
And while Bush’s words in 2002 directly opposed Iran’s revolutionary framework, Iran’s subsequent embrace of the notion of “axis of resistance” has intended not just to deflect the notion of tyranny from itself but also to show that Iran is actively standing up to the US and Israel, and that this “resistance” is not done singlehandedly but is part of a wide regional alliance.
Such an articulation became useful when Iran and Hezbollah began intervening in Syria in aid of the regime of Bashar al-Assad following the 2011 Syrian uprising. In a bid to legitimise its intervention, Iran characterised the Syrian conflict as a confrontation between the “axis of resistance” and axis enemies. Such characterisation persists. Last month, Yemeni Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi gave a statement in which he said that the Houthis would coordinate with the “Axis” in retaliation to Israel’s attack on Hodeida Port in Yemen.
