There is a phenomenon on Twitter popular among OSINT enthusiasts called surveillance situations. For those lucky enough to live real lives, monitoring situations is the Olympics of toxic masculinity, which refers to the act of stalking conflicts on social media. It’s a multidisciplinary pursuit that can include inspecting aircraft and closed airspace, comparing different weapons systems, checking deliveries at a Washington pizza shop, looking for obscure facts about obituary authors, digging up old “pookie” tweets from Supreme Leader Khamenei, noticing that Reza Pahlavi has an especially big nose, or wondering why Donald Trump exhibits all the attributes of the Ottoman emperor (PS: all referenced tweets are at the bottom). Over the past three days, social media users have displayed an unprecedented level of monitoring the situation since the United States and Israel launched a campaign to decapitate the so-called axis of resistance. But what is the axis of resistance? Don’t worry, because even if you’re not monitoring the situation, here’s a small detail about what’s going on middle East So far.
key moments in history
There are some pivotal moments in history that end up changing the course of the world.An Italian mistook the Caribbean for India. An East India Company agent appears at the court of the Mughal ruler. An archduke was murdered. An Austrian was rejected from art school. A Swiss patent clerk was bored with his job. Japanese pilots decided to fly a little more than usual. A plane flies into the building. The virus escapes from the laboratory. A former president mocked a real estate developer at a White House dinner. In hindsight, some Hamas terrorists paraglided into a music festival in Israel. Now, as historians are wont to point out, the rift in the Middle East certainly did not begin on October 7, 2023, but its events certainly accelerated the events we are seeing today.
What is the axis of resistance?
If you’ve ever been on social media, you’ve seen this meme: Iran, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is often used to portray Iran as some kind of secular utopia, where John Lennon’s “Imagine” meets Rick Bryan’s Casablanca. Then came the Islamic Revolution, which brought the Islamic Republic of Iran to power, specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its external operations arm, the Quds Force. The new Iranian state has a creed: attack the Big Satan (America) and the Little Satan (Israel) in every possible way. This meant building what came to be known as the “Axis of Resistance,” a name that was a verbal scorn for the “Axis of Evil” (a term used by George W. Bush). Bush described Iran, North Korea and Iraq in 2002.Soon, the axis took shape. Hezbollah was born out of the ashes of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and was trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Yemen’s Houthi rebel group has found a benefactor in Tehran who can attack Saudi oil fields and disrupt Red Sea shipping lanes. Under Hafez and later Bashar Assad, Syria became an indispensable corridor, a land bridge that allowed Iranian weapons and other items to enter Lebanon. Meanwhile, after the destruction of the 2003 U.S. invasion saddam husseinIran-backed Shia militias have become a pain in the ass for U.S. forces due to the Iranian regime’s control of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Finally, the Sunni Palestinian movement Hamas found common ground with Tehran, whose hostility to Israel ignores any other religious misgivings.Of course, at the top of the Axis pyramid is the Iranian regime led by Supreme Commander Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
How did Israel respond?
After the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a chilling statement that all the attackers were “the walking dead.” Politicians rarely keep their promises. Many things that Western civilization holds dear—from the atomic bomb to literature—were designed by Jews. So it’s no surprise that they’ve also perfected their revenge on an art form. QuoteOver the years, rumors have told us how deeply Israel has penetrated its enemies (so much so that the joke is that the only living members of Iran’s high command are three Mossad agents whose identities are unknown to each other). Netanyahu and his colleagues acted sloppily in Gaza, killing Hamas commanders with precision and not caring how many civilians they accidentally killed. From exploding pagers to missiles to bombs, Israel dismantled every branch of the Axis powers and then went after their heads.Over the years, Israel has built its own network in Iran, conducted daring attacks and built a war machine that Bob Dylan could sing about. The final attack took just sixty seconds and was a testament to its success, taking place multiple times at multiple locations within the heavily fortified compound. As Oded Ailam, the former head of Mossad’s counterterrorism unit, told the Guardian: “60 seconds. That’s all the time this operation took, but it was years in the making.” The modern battlefield is no longer defined solely by tanks and aircraft. It is defined by data, access, trust and time. One minute can change an area. “The axis of resistance was built over decades. Israel, with the help of Uncle Sam, destroyed it in a little over two years.As the operation went on, it was so successful that it seemed to have eliminated all potential successors. As Donald Trump candidly told reporters: “The attack was so successful that most of the candidates were eliminated. We’re not going to think of anyone because they’re all dead. The second or third place finisher is dead.”
Trump salvo
Of course, none of this would be possible without Donald Trump returning to the White House, especially during a second term in which he has no one to limit him.Trump has long harbored the deepest aversion to Iran.read: OG TrumpismThe first time he expressed any views on foreign policy was in a 1980 interview in which he wondered why a country like the United States could not rescue its own citizens during a hostage crisis.For him, Iran has always been a demon that the United States cannot tame. During Trump’s first term, he launched a drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force and generally considered the most powerful person in Iran after the Supreme Leader. Soleimani was often called “the most powerful agent in the Middle East” during his lifetime, and some experts pointed out that Soleimani’s death did weaken the strength of the Axis powers.Since then, Iran has been hell-bent on assassinating Trump and, failing that, ensuring he is not re-elected. This includes hacking Trump’s campaign and even running content farms to try to turn Americans against him.When October 7 occurred, Joe Biden was president, and his views and actions have successfully alienated Americans both for and against Israel. When Biden dropped out, Harris inherited his misgivings, and she tried to drum up support from both parties by running two campaigns simultaneously.Trump’s arrival is manna from heaven for Netanyahu. Don Luoism does not believe in the rules-based international order, believes that whatever he can come up with is the best, wants to improve his monetary status in any feasible way, wants to avenge Iran’s national humiliation, and ultimately believes: We are the United States, b*****. This means that, unlike previous presidents, Trump is the one who ultimately approves the use of lethal force against Iran.All of this foreshadows the arrival of Trump, who has made “peace” in the Middle East one of his pet projects, setting up a peace council composed of key regional players, many of whom oppose Israel but do not say so publicly. Half of the committee is now involved in the war, with its only South Asian member fighting in Afghanistan.He is a man who needs no congressional oversight or legal sanctions. Having survived an assassination attempt and political exile, Trump (and his supporters) appear to believe that he is God’s chosen warrior, walking the talk. After Khamenei’s death, Trump declared: “I caught him before he got me.”Trump and his administration have tried to give various reasons to justify their timing. Very few people pass the smell test.
start
Of course, this isn’t over yet. Like Israel, Iran is a survivalist state that has been preparing for isolation, sanctions and war for decades. Regimes born of revolutions do not disappear simply because their leadership is targeted, nor do networks patiently built in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen simply because a series of operations are executed with astonishing efficiency. They retreat, they realign, they regroup.
The axis of resistance may fracture, its chain of command may be undermined, and its deterrence weakened, but the forces that produced it remain stubbornly alive. Sectarian politics has not disappeared. Regional competition has not abated. External forces have not withdrawn. What has changed is the balance of fear and confidence, and that balance in the Middle East is always temporary.Trump may believe he has avenged decades of humiliation since the hostage crisis. Netanyahu may believe that he has fulfilled the vows he made after the events of October 7. Yet the region’s history rarely rewards final pronouncements. It tends to respond to certainty in a complicated way.This means that despite precision strikes, covert infiltrations and bold rhetoric, none of us can confidently say what the next chapter will look like. As in the digital age, we can only observe flight paths, read oil markets, parse official statements, and pretend that pattern recognition is prescient.In other words, we will continue to monitor the situation.PS: The tweet mentioned above.1) Pentagon Pizza Watch2) Vague facts about the obituary author3) The old “pookie” tweet4) Reza Pahlavi’s nose5) Donald Trump is the Ottoman Emperor
