Expert Explains: Why Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s death breaks Iran axis into more erratic parts

Nasrallah’s death marks an unprecedented blow to Iran’s regional instruments of influence. Given his unparalleled prominence in the pantheon of Iranian resistance leaders, Nasrallah’s killing is arguably a bigger loss to Iran than even Major General Qassem Soleimani of the Revolutionary Guards, in 2020, and Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh earlier this year.

The rapid depletion of Iran’s strategic human resources in its ‘axis of resistance’, is bound to set a regional re-arrangement in motion, since Tehran is the only prominent opponent of the pro-Israel drift in Middle Eastern politics in recent years. What then do these developments mean for India’s own Middle East policy?

Across the last decade, India’s bet in the Middle East has been an attempt to capitalise on the near revolution in the Gulf Arab states’ foreign policies which reflect their attempts to economically diversify away from their over-reliance on oil. The economic and strategic opportunities this unlocked for India, given the Gulf reset with Israel in the Abraham Accords, culminated in the India-Middle East Economic Corridor in September last year when even Riyadh was teasing normalisation with Israel.

Supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah carry his pictures as they gather in Sidon, following his killing in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday. (Reuters)

Even as the Saudis publicly pull away from such prospects presently, the larger economic rationale underwriting their new outlook for the region continues. Israel’s war in Gaza, despite having killed over 40,000, has not changed this. Consequently, India has surged ahead with its gambit, finding ready partners in states such as UAE – with whom it now cooperates even on nuclear energy and on whom it is relying on to get the IMEEC’s first sea leg going, and even new bilateral military drills with Saudi Arabia.

The corollary to this reset has been a deepening engagement with Israel especially through new regional structures such as the I2U2. Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations, even as reports of Nasrallah’s death trickled in, showed how much Israel itself recognises and reciprocates this – Bibi held up a map that all but represented the IMEEC as “the blessing” as opposed to “the curse” (Iran, Iraq, Syria).

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 27, 2024. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo)

For Israel, the quietness of the Gulf Arab states betrays their discomfort with the October 7-induced upset to their plans. They remain patient even as Israel flattens Gaza, allowing the United States to dangle more carrots than sticks to prevent regional escalation – principal among which is a potential Washington-Riyadh defence pact that was an unbearable prospect to Israel at least a decade ago.

Naturally then, the Iranian card in the Middle East is a spoiler for India. Even as Tehran and New Delhi continue their point focus on developing Chabahar, Iran’s value in India’s strategic calculus has plummeted, adding to the historic strain of Western sanctions on anything India-Iran and the struggling pace of the International North South Transport Corridor.

Few things symbolise this more than New Delhi’s rebuke to Khamenei’s criticism of India earlier this September, which was markedly more public and assertive compared to its quiet demarches to the Iranian Ambassador in the past.

The new Lebanon theatre, however, is more novel. The Gulf Arab states have been historically influential in Lebanon-Israel politics and directly involved – Hezbollah’s initial growth was possible thanks to the Riyadh brokered Taif Agreement in 1989 that left all groups, but the Hezbollah, disarmed. Even as the GCC and Arab League declared Hezbollah a terrorist organisation by 2016, these capitals have been sensitive to developments in Lebanon (like in Yemen).

Their interest in the multi-ethnic Lebanese state has had to grapple between the historic military threat from Israel (with the memory of two invasions) and pervading Iranian influence through the Hezbollah. Now, with the first acting against the second, it arguably only catalyses the Arab reset. A post-Gaza ceasefire Middle East, without a potent Hezbollah, will give these states a better bargaining position in negotiating a sustained regional peace with Iran – the contours of which has been evident since the Riyadh-Tehran rapprochement in 2023.

For India then, a weakened Iranian axis of resistance means fewer sources of disruption to its grand regional connectivity plans; without requiring changes in its traditional principled support for the two-state solution. India believes that the Palestine question can be resolved through Arab-Israeli negotiations, sans a third-party disruptor. The joker in the pack, however, is the ability of organised resistance groups such as Hezbollah to continue to mount attacks against Israel through more guerilla tactics, with an ability to weather attrition.

Notwithstanding its sustained exchange of fire with Israel since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah under Nasrallah did maintain some form of escalation control, avoiding commitments to a ground war – a constant feature in Nasrallah’s speeches since the first on November 3rd. The routinized engagement that both sides had settled into, has now broken, arguably leaving the cadres of the resistance to now act more erratically. As a column in this newspaper put it earlier, “Israel’s actions are not self-defence, they are animated by almost a will to apocalypticism, as if the chaos and destruction will create its own security.”

Bashir Ali Abbas is a Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.