• Geopolitics
• Iran
• Middle East and North Africa

June 26, 2025, 9:14 AM View Comments ()

Following the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, U.S. President Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social endorsing regime change in Iran. Since announcing a cease-fire this week that appears to be holding, he has walked that comment back. But the Iranian regime is under considerable strain and unlikely to emerge from the current Middle East war—including the decimation of its proxies across the region and a relentless 12-day Israeli bombing campaign on Iran itself—unscathed.

The demise or prolonged weakness of the Iranian regime would usher in seismic change in the Middle East. The story is not only about shifting geopolitics and the military balance of power. It is also about the demise of Islamism—both its political variant and violent jihadism—in the Middle East, of which Iran has been a key enabler.

Much of the power competition in the Middle East in recent decades has revolved around the spread of Islamism. This was sparked by the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, which made it a core mission to export what its founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called “sacred jihad” across the Middle East and beyond. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) nurtured jihadi groups abroad, providing Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and others with funding, training, and weapons to cement their role as instruments of Iranian soft and hard power.

A commonly used trope in understanding Islamism in the Middle East sees the rise of a Shiite Islamist regime in Tehran as spurring intense religious-ideological competition with Sunni Saudi Arabia. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the latter promoted and exported its own austere version of Islam, Wahhabism, to counter Iran’s spread of Shiite fundamentalism. As such, much of the public and policy framing of the Islamist phenomenon became woven around sectarian tension.

Although that perspective may have had some historical truth until the early 2000s, it is inaccurate today to put Iran and Saudi Arabia in the same basket. The two countries have taken diametrically opposite trajectories on Islamism since 2003—when al Qaeda launched attacks in Saudi Arabia—and especially since 2016, when the Saudi government set off on a vast social, cultural, and economic modernization program for the country. Until then, Iranian-Saudi competition over influence in the Middle East did contribute to the region becoming fertile ground for a wide variety of Islamist groups—Sunni and Shiite, armed and unarmed, national and transnational—which clashed with one another as well as with state authorities.

Iran, on the other hand, continued to fund, arm, and train armed Islamist groups—including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas—as its main model of international influence. Tehran also continued to fuel Shiite-Sunni tension, not least by presenting itself as the patron of Shiite minorities in a Sunni-majority Middle East.

But the sectarian divide was never clear-cut. While Shiite Islamist groups are almost always loyal to Iran’s theocratic regime, some Sunni extremist groups are also aligned with it. Sunni jihadi groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State have always posed a threat to Saudi Arabia, seeking to overthrow the royal family and install a caliphate or Tehran-style regime. Seeing Islamism through the lens of Shiite-Sunni rivalry obscures Iran’s key role in nurturing various variants of Sunni jihadism.

Although Iran-sponsored jihadi groups such as Hezbollah have been active in international terrorism, transnational Sunni jihadi networks—armed elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi jihadis, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State—dominate discourse on jihadism. But there has been a tactical relationship between Iran and al Qaeda since the 1980s that is driven by shared animosity toward the United States and Israel. The U.S. congressional 9/11 Commission’s report concludes that Iran trained al Qaeda operatives in explosives and facilitated their transit to Afghanistan. The report also states that training in Iran and by Hezbollah in Lebanon likely enabled al Qaeda to eventually conduct the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The transactional relationship between Iran and Sunni jihadis continues. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are both Sunni Palestinian groups. Although Shiite Hezbollah and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq have presented themselves as fighting the Sunni Islamic State, there has been tactical cooperation between all sides. Before the military defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2017-18, some PMF factions operating on the border between Iraq and Syria used to rent out highways under their control to Islamic State operatives by the day, as I found out on a trip to the region in 2018. Operatives from both sets of armed groups also collaborated in the illicit economy. According to other field contacts in the area, some Iran-backed factions fleeing Syria into Iraq during last December’s ouster of the Assad regime handed their weapons to Islamic State operatives in northeastern Syria before they left.

This tactical cooperation is made possible by both Iran’s and the Islamic State’s long-standing animosity toward Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that defeated the Syrian regime and whose leaders now rule the country. Iran of course blames the group for the loss of its Syrian ally, and the Islamic State long fought HTS during the Syrian war. In its early years, HTS was affiliated with al Qaeda, and its members continue to embrace Islamist ideology. But its rise to power in multiethnic, multireligious Syria could only happen through distancing itself from its jihadi roots and embracing a more pragmatic political path. Under its new rulers, Syria may be moving toward Islamic governance, but full-on Islamist theocracy would be unacceptable to Syria’s Arab allies, on which Damascus depends for reconstruction funds.

Iran used the PMF’s battles with the Islamic State to increase its political influence in Iraq since these fights cultivated legitimacy for the PMF as national liberators from brutal terrorists. Similarly, Hezbollah used the excuse of defending Lebanon against the Islamic State to justify its intervention in Syria. The continued existence of the Islamic State, therefore, is useful for Iran, including as a tool against the current government in Syria. Islamic State attacks such as the suicide bombing inside the Mar Elias church in Damascus in mid-June benefit Iran’s desire to destabilize post-Assad Syria and create an opening for Iran to reestablish its influence there.

Sunni Islamist solidarity with Iran goes beyond violent jihadi groups. Following the Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt issued a statement in support of the Iranian regime. The statement claimed Islamic unity against Israel as the basis for common ground. This endorsement has historic roots: The theocrats who set up the Islamic Republic were themselves inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose writers and clerics created modern Islamism in the 1920s.

Its public support for Iran will further alienate the Muslim Brotherhood network from Arab states. This includes Qatar, which has been a longtime patron of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni Islamist groups but—following its rift with a number of Arab states over its support of terrorist groups during the diplomatic crisis of 2017-21—has publicly distanced itself from these groups. Today, most Arab governments, from Morocco to the Gulf states, regard the Muslim Brotherhood as a political liability at best; countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates oppose it as a key destabilizing actor. The Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood did not endorse the Egyptian branch’s statement supporting Tehran precisely because it knows that Iran is a political liability in the new Syria, where it hopes to play a role.

With virtually no more political or financial support from Arab states, Sunni Islamism has already lost much of its appeal and authority in the Middle East. While individuals around the world may continue to send funds to Sunni Islamist groups, money without a political patron has limited impact. It is only Iran that continues to instrumentalize Sunni Islamism to feed Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife and foster instability—and, in the case of Hamas, legitimize the Iranian regime as a supporter of the Palestinian fight against Israel. Iran also continues to support Shiite groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen as part of its model of external influence.

Without Iran’s support, all those Shiite and Sunni Islamist groups would lose a major source of funding and weapons, which would in turn translate into political loss both domestically and regionally. In the Middle East, the Iranian regime is the Islamist phenomenon’s last lifeline. That lifeline is now much weaker. Were the regime to fall, Middle Eastern Islamism as we know it would fall as well.