The Axis of Resistance

By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.

JA International Correspondent

When the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, 2026, launching Operations “Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion,” Washington did not merely initiate hostilities with a single country. Rather, it attacked the hub of a regional network Tehran spent four decades assembling – a coalition of allied militias that Iran can activate to fight on its behalf across multiple fronts at once. 

Americans watching a war they were told would be swift and decisive (four or five weeks) should understand six months later what the real war truly means: a conflict with Iran is, by deliberate design, a conflict with several determined adversaries scattered across the Middle East.

That network – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, an array of Iraqi militias, and the Houthis in Yemen – is collectively known as the Axis of Resistance. 

For years, this grouping has allowed Tehran to challenge stronger adversaries and project power far beyond its borders without deploying its own army. Instead, it combines drones, missiles, armaments and economic disruption across multiple theaters. President Trump called severing that network of support one of his explicit war aims, alongside destroying Iran’s missile arsenal and its navy.

No proxy illustrates the danger of a wider war better than the Houthis in Yemen. This Iran-backed group, also known as Ansarullah, which disrupted one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes from 2023 to 2025, has again declared “a complete and total ban on Israeli maritime navigation in the Red Sea.” The Houthis have also warned that all enemy movements are now legitimate military targets. As a case in point, during early July 2026, Houthi fighters sank two commercial bulk carriers, reopening a front that global commerce cannot easily handle.

Tehran has since instructed the Houthis to prepare to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait – the Red Sea’s southern gateway – should Washington strike Iran’s energy infrastructure. With the Strait of Hormuz already embattled, that would give Iran a double chokepoint on global oil and shipping. The Houthis have also traded airport strikes with Saudi Arabia and warned they are ready to escalate – proof their appetite for battle against America and its partners has not diminished.

The broader axis has been battered by two years of relentless Israeli strikes – Hezbollah has lost more than a thousand fighters and Hamas has lost successive military leaders to targeted killings – but analysts warn it has not been eradicated. Instead, Hezbollah is decentralizing, with each component member keeping the capacity to strike on its own initiative, on its own timeline, and for its own local reasons. A weakened network is not a defeated one, and a fragmented grid can be harder to deter.

Compounding the strategic risk is how Washington views its adversary. For nearly two decades, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, a position former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated in sworn testimony. However, Trump dismissed his own agencies – “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters – and instead he embraced the Israeli assessment that Iran was on the brink of having a nuclear weapon. Analysts note the war happened not because the intelligence changed, but because this president was more willing than his predecessors to heed Israeli advice over the CIA.

That reliance carries a structural risk. Israel’s Mossad has penetrated Iran more deeply than any other foreign service, and its data collection is genuinely valuable. But intelligence, however good, carries the imprint of the interests that produce it, and Israel’s interests are not identical to America’s. 

U.S. officials now acknowledge Israel is feeding information to guide Trump’s decisions, and there is measurable skepticism within the American intelligence community about what it receives. The Pentagon has even raised its counterintelligence threat level for Israel to “critical” over concerns that it is spying on American deliberations.

The result is that today we have a war for whose scope the American public was not fully prepared. Washington faces not one enemy but a coalition. The enemy comprises a set of trading chokepoints that can throttle the world economy, and a battlefield picture shaped in large part by an ally pursuing its own strategic aims. 

This is not simply a war against a single country. It is a war against a country (Iran) and everything that country built over decades to fight back – a distinction that will define how long, how wide, and how costly the conflict becomes for the United States.