Iran’s buck-passing strategy in the Middle East

by Hamid Bahrami

People gather during the 46th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover and hostage crisis, in front of the former U.S. Embassy building, in Tehran, Iran on November 4, 2025. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]

For much of the past decade, Iran’s regional strategy looked like a blunt answer to a simple question: how do you deter Israel and U.S.-aligned pressure without fighting a direct war you cannot control? The answer was to build depth, cultivate partners, and keep escalation ambiguous. That model is now damaged, not because Iran has abandoned it pragmatically, but because a string of shocks in 2024–2025 raised the costs of direct balancing while degrading the very tools Tehran used to avoid it. In that altered landscape, Iran’s most rational short-term move is not maximalism. It is buck-passing: shifting the costs of balancing a shared threat onto other actors who, for their own reasons, are increasingly compelled to confront Israel’s expanding freedom of action.

Buck-passing, in the classic realist sense, is not mere passivity. It is a deliberate bet that someone else will shoulder the frontline costs of containment. That “someone else” does not have to be an ally, and the burden does not have to be military combat. It can be diplomatic risk, coercive signalling, air-defence deployment, political exposure, or the costly job of managing escalation dynamics. The essence is the same: you conserve resources and avoid being the primary balancer, because the strategic environment has created stronger incentives for others to do the heavy lifting.

Three events explain why this logic has become attractive for Tehran. First, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut in September 2024, a blow that was both operational and symbolic for Iran’s deterrence ecosystem. Second, Because of a weakened Hezbollah, Turkish betrayal to Astana agreement and some other reasons, Syrian rebels seized Damascus in late 2024 and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, opening a transition led by new authorities associated with Ahmed al-Sharaa (widely known by his earlier nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani). Third, Israel and Iran fought a direct 12-day war in June 2025 that ended in a ceasefire on June 24 after Israel’s terror campaign began on June 13 and U.S. strikes hit Iranian nuclear-related sites.

These shocks do not prove Iran is “weak” in some absolute sense. They show something more actionable: Iran’s margin for absorbing another direct balancing cycle shrank. Hezbollah’s leadership loss and the Syrian rupture weakened Tehran’s indirect levers at precisely the moment the June 2025 war demonstrated the danger of direct exposure. The result is an incentive to buy time—time to rebuild missile production, restore damaged networks, and reassess escalation thresholds—while other regional actors collide over Israel’s posture.

This is where a blunt but important historical reversal comes in: for years Iran paid the costs of containing Israel, and countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar benefited from that burden being carried elsewhere. Today events have unfolded such that these countries themselves must confront Israel’s expansionism. The claim is not that Riyadh or Ankara have become “pro-Iran.” It is that their threat perceptions are shifting in ways that can reduce the load on Tehran.

Nowhere is this clearer than Syria, which has become an arena of rivalry between two US partners: Turkey and Israel. Ankara sees post-Assad Syria as central to its border security, refugee policy, and Kurdish question. Israel sees post-Assad Syria through a different lens: preventing hostile capabilities near its borders and keeping potential threats fragmented or degraded. Those incompatible preferences have produced visible friction. Turkey’s foreign minister has acknowledged technical “deconfliction” contacts with Israel to avoid unwanted incidents in Syria, a sign that both sides recognise the risk of escalation as their militaries operate in overlapping spaces.

For Iran, that Turkey–Israel tension is an opening for buck-passing. If Turkey is already compelled to invest resources to constrain Israel’s operational freedom and shape Syria’s future, Tehran can afford to be a patient observer rather than an active balancer. This does not require a formal Iranian–Turkish bargain. It requires only that Ankara sees Israel’s behaviour as sufficiently threatening to justify costs, and that Iran refrains from stepping into the front line while it rebuilds.

Eastern Mediterranean alignments amplify Ankara’s motivation. Reuters reported this week that Greece, Israel, and Cyprus will step up joint air and naval exercises in 2026, deepening a trilateral defence track that is widely read in Ankara as part of an unfavourable strategic geometry around Turkey’s maritime competition. Tehran need not sit inside that emerging Greece–Israel–Cyprus security geometry to profit from its effects: by intensifying Ankara’s sense of encirclement, it nudges Turkey toward a more costly posture toward Israel, thereby shifting part of the balancing burden away from Iran. The more Turkish strategists view Israel not only as a Syria actor but as a partner in a broader network that can constrain Turkey, the more likely Ankara is to absorb costs in Syria that indirectly limit Israel’s room for manoeuvre.

The missing piece—and one that makes the buck-passing logic sharper—is Turkey’s emerging contact channel with Hezbollah. Lebanese reporting in December 2025 described Hezbollah’s external relations chief Ammar al-Moussawi leading a delegation to Istanbul for a pro-Palestine conference and noted that this followed earlier visits and meetings between Hezbollah officials and Turkish representatives. Whether one interprets this as symbolic signalling, message-passing to Damascus, or a hedge against Syria’s instability, it suggests Ankara is widening its toolkit for managing the Syrian theatre—and that toolkit now touches parts of Iran’s deterrence ecosystem.

This is not a trivial detail. Contacts with Hezbollah give Turkey potential leverage over spoilers and escalation dynamics in Lebanon–Syria linkages at a time when Ankara also maintains deconfliction channels with Israel to avoid accidental clashes. That combination—talk to Israel to prevent unintended conflict, talk to Hezbollah to manage the militant ecosystem—makes Turkey a more capable “carrier” of the balancing burden in Syria without Iran needing to expose itself directly. However, Iran will have no option to avoid direct intervention if Israel decides to attack Lebanon in order to disarm Hezbollah strategically.  A related, harder indicator of Hezbollah-Ankara tactical ties is financial-security friction: Reuters reported that Lebanese authorities seized $2.5 million from a man arriving from Turkey in February 2025, with sources saying it was bound for Hezbollah. Even if Ankara is not “supporting” Hezbollah, Turkey’s role as a corridor and contact space is precisely what can make it a consequential intermediary in this new phase.

Of course, some of the regional narratives surrounding Syria—such as talk of a “David’s Corridor” or schemes for a “Greater Kurdistan”—are contested and often politically loaded. A disciplined analysis does not need to treat them as official Israeli plans to recognise their strategic relevance. Threat perceptions, not just documents, drive state behaviour. If Turkish elites increasingly interpret Syria’s fragmentation and Israeli freedom of action as feeding Kurdish-centric scenarios that threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity, Ankara will act—and in acting, it absorbs costs that Iran would otherwise have had to pay.

As Turkey struggles to check Israel’s room for manoeuvre, Erdoğan is likely to come to Tehran seeking Iranian cooperation. In Tehran, however, scepticism runs deep: influential voices still see Ankara as having reneged on the spirit of the Astana framework, making reliance on Erdoğan a risky bet. If Iran is pursuing a buck-passing approach, it can try to translate this uneasy convergence into a conditional arrangement by asking Turkey to demonstrate goodwill—specifically, by using its influence in Baku to curb Israel’s security footprint in the South Caucasus. In a further twist, Azerbaijan has already functioned as a quiet diplomatic venue for easing Turkey–Israel frictions tied to Syria, which makes Baku both a bridge for Ankara and a pressure point Tehran would want Ankara to manage.

The second theatre where buck-passing is emerging is the Red Sea–Bab al-Mandab–Horn of Africa arc, where rivalries among Persian Gulf states are now producing open fractures. On December 30, 2025, Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia implicitly issued a 24-hour ultimatum for the UAE to withdraw forces from Yemen after a Saudi-led coalition airstrike on Mukalla port targeted what it said were unauthorized shipments linked to UAE-backed southern forces, amid sharply escalating Riyadh–Abu Dhabi tensions. The Financial Times and AP similarly described the episode as a major escalation between traditional partners backing competing factions inside Yemen’s anti-Houthi camp.

This matters for Iran’s buck-passing because it weakens the coherence and bandwidth of the very coalition structures that have historically opposed Tehran and its partners. Iran does not need to orchestrate the rift; it benefits from it. When Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are consumed by intra-coalition conflict, the regional balancing burden shifts away from Iran because its opponents are busy balancing each other. That frees time and space for Tehran to rebuild after the June 2025 war while avoiding actions that would re-center Iran as the primary target.

The Horn of Africa adds another layer. Reuters reported that Israel has recognised Somaliland, becoming the first country to do so. Regardless of whether one accepts speculation about military basing, the recognition injects a volatile geopolitical dispute into the Red Sea vicinity at a moment when maritime security is already contested. It also triggers reactions from regional actors—including the Houthis—who have publicly warned that any Israeli presence in Somaliland would be treated as a military target, explicitly linking Somaliland to Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab security. The more this arena becomes a multi-actor contest, the more Tehran can rely on structural distraction rather than direct confrontation.

Here a plausible scenario emerges that strengthens the buck-passing logic even further: a temporary, issue-based Saudi–Houthi alignment—not an alliance, but a parallel convergence—against both UAE-backed moves inside Yemen and any Israeli attempt to create a foothold or strategic leverage in the Somaliland–Gulf of Aden–Bab al-Mandab belt. Saudi Arabia’s public escalation against UAE-backed forces, and its insistence that its security is a “red line,” shows Riyadh is willing to prioritise curbing Abu Dhabi’s local partners when it sees them as undermining Saudi interests. At the same time, Yemen’s war has been relatively calm since the 2022 stalemate, raising hopes of a path to peace between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government—an environment in which Riyadh could rationally choose de-escalation with the Houthis while focusing pressure on southern separatist expansion. Add Israel’s Somaliland recognition and the Houthis’ explicit threat messaging, and the outline of a tactical convergence becomes clearer: Riyadh and the Houthis could, for different reasons, prefer to deter or complicate UAE-enabled faits accomplis in southern Yemen and to contest any perceived Israeli strategic insertion near the chokepoint. Even if this convergence is fleeting and informal, it would still shift balancing costs away from Iran, because two actors that have long been placed on opposite sides of the Yemen war would be pulling—however briefly—in directions that constrain Iran’s adversaries and dilute coalition coherence.

None of this guarantees a stable outcome. Buck-passing is often a temporary equilibrium: it works until the actor carrying the burden decides it is paying too much and pushes the costs back—through escalation, bargaining, or realignment. Turkey may choose to manage Israel rather than confront it, especially if its priorities shift or if deconfliction becomes normalisation by another name. Saudi–UAE tensions might cool, and Yemen’s internal dynamics can always reorder regional incentives.

Still, the strategic direction is visible. Iran’s post-2025 wager is not that it has “won” the region. It is that, after a bruising sequence of losses and exposures, it can survive—and recover—by letting others with urgent stakes confront Israel’s widening footprint. If you want to know whether buck-passing is really underway, watch behaviour rather than rhetoric: Turkey’s willingness to invest in Syria despite Israeli red lines; the persistence of Riyadh–Abu Dhabi divergence in Yemen; whether Saudi–Houthi de-escalation hardens into a functional modus vivendi as Saudi attention shifts to the UAE-backed south; and whether Red Sea–Horn politics keep internationalizing in ways that multiply the number of actors who must pay the price of instability. In the near term, Iran’s best defence may be that it no longer insists on being the one paying the bill while rebuilding its damaged capabilities.