As Russia’s war against Ukraine continues, Iran and Hezbollah remain officially neutral. Patron and proxy have neither backed Kyiv’s struggle against Russian aggression – despite their own pretenses to anti-imperial resistance – nor their partner Moscow, which guaranteed their victory over the Assad regime’s opponents in Syria. At different moments, Tehran and Hezbollah’s leadership have even expressed sympathy with both belligerents.
But their neutrality is superficial. A careful analysis of their leadership’s pronouncements, alongside their media outlets, reveals that both are stealthily pro-Russian, hoping its war in Ukraine will erode American global influence, while being officially agnostic.
Iran has reacted carefully to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently addressed the subject, stressing Tehran’s “oppos[ition] to war and destruction,” but without once mentioning Russia.
Instead, he focused on criticizing the United States, calling it a “mafia regime” that creates centers of crisis, like in Ukraine. Khamenei said Washington “dragged Ukraine to this point” – for example through NATO expansion, and blamed the instability on American interference in Ukrainian internal affairs, organizing anti-government rallies, launching velvet revolutions, and visits by U.S. senators.
Iran replicated this veiled approach, blaming the United States coupled with silence on Russia, with its careful abstention on the U.N. General Assembly’s resolution condemning Russian aggression.
Iran’s approach, including Khamenei’s, of fixating on the United States to explain the events in Ukraine, can be explained by the Islamic Republic’s standing paranoia of U.S. sponsorship of regime change, especially stemming from Tehran’s own 2009 Green Movement. Meanwhile, Russia has helped shield Iran from accountability for its own regional destabilization, while Tehran’s leadership favors pragmatically turning East to undermine U.S. global hegemony.
Insofar as the Russian invasion of Ukraine can curtail this American influence, Iran is supportive. These considerations have factored into the Iranian reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Iran also carries a historical suspicion of Russia, dating back to the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, which ceded land to Russia. This also manifested itself during the 2015 nuclear talks, when Iran’s then foreign minister accused the Kremlin of sabotage, and again with the recent negotiations to revive the nuclear deal with Tehran.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov demanded broad economic guarantees from Washington amid a burgeoning sanctions regime on Moscow over Ukraine, an Iranian media outlet even accused the Kremlin of holding Tehran hostage.
Thus, Tehran is treading carefully, explaining the events in Ukraine through its anti-American ideological lens, but without being decidedly pro-Russian.
Hezbollah has largely adopted this Iranian playbook in its reaction. Given the magnitude and expected global impact of the Russian war on Ukraine, Hezbollah’s leadership appear to be actively attempting to ignore the matter and avoid taking sides.
In fact, some of the group’s officials castigated the Lebanese Foreign Ministry’s pro-Ukrainian statement on the war – not necessarily for siding with Kyiv, but for taking a side at all, a sentiment echoed by the ostensibly “leftist” pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar
What commentary Hezbollah’s leaders have offered has been fleeting and circumspect, confined to condemnations of the United States for – as they put it – starting the war.
In this vein, from Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah down to the group’s parliamentarians, the party has confined itself to applying the mainstays of Hezbollah’s anti-American propaganda to the particulars of the Ukraine-Russia war: That, true to form, the United States instigated the conflict by inciting the Ukrainians, prevented Moscow and Kyiv from reaching any peaceful solutions, and now that war has broken out, has abandoned its Ukrainian allies to their fate.
Even the two notable exceptions to this studied neutrality, by Hezbollah Central Council Member Nabil Qaouq and former Minister Mohammad Fneich, were more descriptive than prescriptive.
They noted that the United States had stoked the war through Ukrainian “tools” to halt the trend towards a multipolar world order, and away from Washington’s “exploitative” global primacy, but that the international balance of power was nevertheless now set to tilt against the United States and, by extension, its Middle Eastern allies.
Hezbollah’s official media outlets have picked up on this theme and, as a result, have been expressing full–throated support for Russia – in contrast to the group’s leadership, but unlikely without their blessing. Echoing Hezbollah’s leadership’s not-so-subtle hints, its media has framed the conflict in Ukraine as “Russia vs. the United States,” as the dramatic banner atop Hezbollah’s official Al-Ahed newspaper read.
Three common themes can be detected among the group’s various media outlets. They have been uncritically repeating Russian propaganda, including claims that: Russia invaded Ukraine to “denazify” it from the “rule of U.S.-backed Ukrainian nationalists“;” the invasion is meant to restore Ukraine to its “historical borders” and “correct” history; Ukraine threatens Russian national security and is a platform for separatism from the Russian Federation; Western media is spreading anti-Russian “disinformation” the war; and that the United States and the West are sending ISIS fighters from Syria to fight in Ukraine.
The second theme is that the war in Ukraine will reverberate in the Middle East. The overall thrust of the pieces in this category claims this impact will benefit the Iran-backed “Resistance Axis,” and – as a corollary – will harm its foes, particularly Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf states.
But above all, Hezbollah’s outlets have been expressing a sense of joy – rejoicing [ibtihaj], in the words of Al-Akhbar’s official editorial line – that Russia’s invasion heralds the demise of the American–led World Order.
“What’s most important to us,” reads one such article in Al-Ahed, “is that this war is the most prominent milestone on the road to the end of the Era of Unipolarity, and that its results, which appeared certain even before it started, will be the creation of the most solid ground from which to inaugurate a new 21st century, one that will be as far as possible from being an American Century.”
Hezbollah’s ideologically-rooted enmity towards the United States, inherited from its Iranian spiritual forefather Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, explains this exuberance over the erosion of American global dominance.
The 1985 Open Letter, Hezbollah’s still-binding manifesto – labels the United States the “first root of evil [munkar]” and “mother of wickedness [khaba’ith]” in a section titled “America is the source of all of our misfortunes.” Of all Hezbollah’s enemies, the Letter reserved this level of opprobrium for Washington alone. Hezbollah thus declared its “confrontation with America” as the yardstick for all its other activities.
Importantly, despite Hezbollah’s periodic claims, its antagonism towards the United States isn’t contingent upon American behavior, good or bad. Instead, it has animated its belief in the inherent ideological incompatibility and irreconcilability between the United States’ “capitalist” worldview and the theocratic and political “neither East nor West” outlook which Hezbollah inherited from Iran. The competition between them is zero-sum.
Exacerbating matters, the United States, uniquely, has an unparalleled global economic, military, and cultural reach, particularly after the Soviet Union’s collapse left it without a competitor. Ending American global hegemony is therefore as much an ideological mainstay for Hezbollah as its unyielding enmity towards the United States.
At various times, through both soft power and force, Iran and Hezbollah have tried to end or blunt Washington’s global influence. Both Lebanese proxy and Iranian patron are acutely aware of their limitations in confronting or curbing the American juggernaut and the global order that it is propping up – the very order which restrains their freedom of action and the export of the Khomeinist ideology.
Warily, they hope Russia, through its invasion of Ukraine, could irreversibly erode American hegemony, ushering in an era of global multipolarity where a humbled United States will be reduced to being one power among many, and thus easier for Iran and Hezbollah to circumvent or ignore.
Jason M. Brodsky is the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI). Twitter: @JasonMBrodsky
David Daoud is the director of Lebanon, Israel, and Syria research at UANI and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Twitter: @DavidADaoud
Arrogant brutes! as can be seen by their discreet quietnesss. They have nothing constructive to shout about nor where withall to bribe the World. They know that France and Britain retained a lot of influence even after they were no longer the paramount power. The US will still be important even when China is the lead economy because the US soft power is built on its constructive academia and much else. So far neither Russia nor China have fielded anything new – just caught up with what the West has already done. Iran will be able to be a nuisance – and literally bloody with it – but that does not mean it will be loved nor copied given its bone headed prayer vision and nothing else.