Waleed Hazbun, University of Alabama
Until last summer’s twelve-day war, Israel and Iran had avoided direct warfare despite indirect conflict and covert operations spanning nearly half a century. The Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, shattered any remaining Israeli understandings of the effectiveness of deterrence against Hamas. The regional conflict that followed the attacks ended the possibilities for limiting regional conflict through the maintenance of mutual deterrence. Israel’s decapitation strike against Hizballah in November 2024 and attack on Iran the next summer, and the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran in early 2026 all revealed the limitations of deterrence. This essay assesses how the logic of deterrence was used in scholarship and policy analysis before, during, and after the conflicts initiated on October 7.
To the degree that the American National Security Adviser in late September 2023 could state that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in decades,” (Sullivan 2023, 23) it was at least partially due to the establishment of mutual deterrence between Israel and its adversaries. This essay argues, however, that while mutual (non-nuclear) deterrence can help limit conflict to within a set of “rules,” it is often fragile and unstable, especially when it involves multiple, overlapping conflicts. Moreover, deterrence is generally not sustainable after at least one party finds the political or security status quo untenable and is ready to disregard the likely consequences of initiating or escalating conflict. As a result, deterrence deployed as a one-sided military strategy of “peace through strength” without a political agenda for a sustainable status quo is usually a playbook for endless war.
Deterrence can restrain the eruption of major war but always comes with costs and risks. Israeli security strategy has generally sought to deter attacks through the continual demonstration of its ability and willingness to respond with massive, disproportionate punishment. In recent years, with the shift to a concern about threats from non-state actors based in “weak states,” enforcing deterrence has required a continual refreshing of its commitment to disproportionate responses. Beginning in the 1990s, Israel became increasingly subject to “asymmetric deterrence” in which weaker actors, such as the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hizballah, were able to limit the scope of Israeli actions with both sides generally recognizing a set of “rules of the game” (Norton 2000; Sobelman 2025b). Following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, Hizballah claimed that the group provided security for Lebanon due to its ability to maintain mutual deterrence with Israel. Hizballah also promoted its ability to establish asymmetric deterrence as a central strategy for members of the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel. In parallel fashion, by 2023 many Israeli policy makers had embraced the notion that Israel had established deterrence over Hamas confined within Gaza. The October 7 Hamas-led attacks into Israel, Israel’s escalation in against Hizballah, and the eruption of direct military conflict with Iran, however, marked the breakdown of deterrence across these conflicts. While some actors still refer to establishing and maintaining deterrence, it is unlikely that it can be used to limit conflicts in the foreseeable future in the absence of mutual vulnerability and while the political and security status quo remains unsustainable.
The Concept of Deterrence and Its Limits
During the Cold War, the concept of deterrence was central to most international relations scholarship about the prevention and outbreak of war. The mutual vulnerability established between two nuclear-armed superpowers with second strike capabilities created a framework for mutual deterrence and the avoidance of nuclear war. More generally, the concept of deterrence is used to define the conditions and criteria for preventing a rival from launching an attack. For various reasons, many US-based scholars and policy makers have argued that postcolonial states and non-state actors could not be deterred by threat of retaliation alone (for example, see Garfinkle 2006) but only by the elimination of their ability to effectively launch attacks (“deterrence by denial”). More recently, some scholars have developed a literature (the so-called fourth wave of deterrence studies) about the possibilities for effectively deterring, under certain conditions, armed non-state actors, at least for a period of time (Knopf 2010). This debate has informed Israeli efforts to address the rising threat posed by non-state actors such as Hizballah, Hamas, and other groups. At the same time, non-state actors have come to embrace a strategy referred to as “asymmetric deterrence” in which the ability to inflict pain — not achieve victory — inhibits aggression. Once mutual vulnerability is established, “weaker” actors are able to limit the scope of attacks by stronger actors, allowing such groups to achieve political goals while both sides offer relative protection to their own civilians by following mutually agreed “rules of the game” (Sobelman 2025a).
While deterrence can be understood as a tool to limit conflicts, it also carries risks. As Robert Jervis (1976) explains, misperception about the intentions of a rival (such as, mistaking a revisionist actor for a status quo one) can lead to a failure of deterrence or a spiral of conflict. Moreover, the concept of deterrence can also propel recurring violent conflict when an actor understands themselves as a “deterrence actor” and justifies attacks (usually on a weaker actor) as preventing future conflict by continually (re)establishing deterrence (Lupovici 2024). As a result, how the concept of deterrence is understood and deployed can either help prevent conflict and limit violence or justify ongoing violence and create vulnerabilities to be exploited.
Deterrence in Israeli Doctrine and Practice
The notion of deterrence has been central to Israeli strategic doctrine since the pre-1948 Yishuv era (Bar 2020). This doctrine calls for maintaining the credible threat of massive, disproportionate retaliation in response to any attack. From the late 1960s, Israel’s deterrence against non-conventional and existential threats was enhanced by the development of an undeclared nuclear capability. While Israel failed to deter the Egyptian and Syrian offensives in 1973 to recapture territory occupied by Israel since 1967, a central challenge to Israeli strategy emerged with the rise of threats from non-state actors, beginning with “infiltrations” by armed Palestinian forces. As Pearlman and Atzili (2018) explain, one way Israel sought to contain such attacks was by punishing the states that hosted those actors, a strategy referred to as “triadic coercion.” This approach, they argue, is most effective against militarily weaker states governed by a consolidated regime with the capability to contain the actions of non-state actors within their territory. By the 1990s, however, Israel faced multiple non-state actors operating within what Pearlman and Atzili (2018) term weak states, that is, states that lack the necessary coherence and capacity to control non state actors and prevent attacks from their territory.
The Emergence of “Resistance” as Asymmetric Deterrence
The Iran-backed Hizballah movement arose to challenge Israeli forces that fully invaded Lebanon in 1982. By the 1990s, the professionalization of Hizballah as an armed force (Norton 2000) and the mutual vulnerability produced by the ability of Hizballah to fire rockets into Israeli civilian areas, established a new dynamic of mutual deterrence (Sobelman 2025b). As a result of indirect negotiations, the “rules of the game” were established that governed the fighting and limited Hizballah’s attacks to Israeli-aligned forces within occupied Lebanon and Israeli attacks on Hizballah military positions. This system of partial deterrence was vulnerable to violations of its rules that were either countered by balanced responses or else escalations that sought to change the rules, as Israel attempted in 1993 and again in 1996. Meanwhile, Hizballah’s attacks, even if they remained within the rules, imposed increasing costs on the Israelis which eventually became politically unsustainable.
Following the 1989 Ta’if agreement that ended the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), the continuing Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the threat posed by Israel’s military capacity to Lebanon allowed Hizballah to remain the only armed Lebanese group in Lebanon. With Lebanon under effective Syrian control, Hizballah’s armed capacity also served Syrian and Iranian interests by maintaining a mechanism to indirectly challenge Israel. Beginning with Hizballah in the 1990s, the forces of what would later be called the “Axis of Resistance” embraced the notion of asymmetric deterrence: They used their armed capabilities and Israel’s hesitancy to allow escalations that could lead to unacceptable Israeli civilian causalities to establish “rules of engagement” based on mutual vulnerability.
As Pearlman and Atzili (2018) document, Hizballah was able to impose costs “within the rules of the game” on Israel for its continuing occupation of Lebanon. The withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon in 2000 left the remaining Israeli forces in the disputed Sheba’a Farms as a target that Hizballah recognized as within the rules. As a result, after 2000 there was a vast decline in the number of cross-border attacks between Israel and Lebanon as they were concentrated on the remaining disputed territory of Israeli occupation. The 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, inadvertently ignited by a Hizballah attack and hostage taking outside the rules, resulted in a failed effort by Israel to again deploy triadic coercion by targeting civilian infrastructure (including the destruction the Beirut’s southern suburbs with Hizballah’s political headquarters) and calling on Lebanon’s government to contain Hizballah. Late in the war, Israel sought to impose deterrence by denial through a ground invasion to uproot Hizballah from South Lebanon. In the aftermath of the war, mutual deterrence based on mutual vulnerability between Israel and Hizballah led to an era of general quiet across the border. Hizballah largely refrained from attacks and avoided Israeli civilian areas while Israel refrained from attacks into Lebanese civilian areas including conducting aerial assassinations against Hizballah leaders and commanders.
By 2015, the Israeli Defense Forces Strategy would formally incorporate an understanding of mutual deterrence and these rules of the game (Sobelman 2016; Khalidi 2016). Meanwhile, as Hizballah’s capacity expanded with Iranian supplied precision-targeted missiles with longer ranges as well as surveillance drones, both sides sought to maintain the mutual deterrence with expanded, credible threats. Israeli commanders declared their “Dahiya Doctrine” outlining their intent to turn Lebanese urban areas into rubble in any future war, as they did to that Beirut suburb in 2006, while Hizballah professed its intention to match any Israeli strikes against Lebanese cities and infrastructure with their own strikes against equivalent Israeli targets (International Crisis Group 2010).
Something similar evolved after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, as Hamas targeted nearby Israeli communities (in the “Gaza envelope”) with locally-made rockets while Israel responded with unrestrained attacks following a strategy referred to as “mowing the grass.” While Hamas often justified its attacks as seeking to maintain a “balance of terror” with Israel (Baconi 2018, 42), it was only around 2014 that a shift occurred. Hamas demonstrated its capacity to maintain rocket strikes against Tel Aviv for weeks in the face of a brutal Israeli campaign that inflicted immense civilian destruction across Gaza (Sobelman 2025b, 279). Hamas would also come to better regulate the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel (including from other groups) and seek to establish their own rules of engagement with Israel to limit responses by both sides to “proportionate reciprocity” (Sobelman 2025b, 279). While Hamas could not attain its goal of ending Israel’s siege of Gaza, imposed in 2007, it did gain Israeli consent to Qatari financial support for Gaza while Israel “abandoned aerial assassination” since the cost would be retaliatory rocket fire on Tel Aviv (Sobelman 2025b, 280).
October 7 as a Failure of Deterrence
The unanticipated scale, scope, and “success” of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, led to an immediate recognition in Israel that the strategy of deterrence against Hamas had failed. The government of Israel soon embraced the view of many Israeli military analysts that the deterrence of Hamas had eroded and finally recognized the signs that the Palestinians of Gaza had signaled the unacceptability of the status quo of living under siege. More critically, the failure of deterrence in this case resulted not simply in an Israeli effort to “restore deterrence” as in past outbreaks of conflict. Israeli military strategists, political leaders, and the general public seem to have abandoned any notion of the possibility of deterring Hamas and instead were committed to its elimination (Freedman 2023).
Israeli political leaders had largely discounted the signs that the status quo was unacceptable to Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza, even though the signals were especially clear, especially with the expansion of normalization agreements between Arab states and Israel. Additionally, Israel had intelligence about Hamas’s efforts to stage a bold attack. But as Amir Lupovici (2024, 75) explains, “Israel told itself the story that deterrence was working and shaping its enemies’ behavior.” What deterrence theory suggests is that Israel convinced itself that Hamas was (or was forced to act as) a status quo actor burdened with the duty to govern Gaza. While Hamas seemed to have accepted playing by the rules of the game in the meanwhile, Israel had little interest in changing that status quo short of the disarming and deposing of Hamas.
The widespread focus in US and Israeli analysis on the “failure of deterrence” rather than on the unsustainability of Palestinian life in Gaza under siege, avoids any consideration of political alternatives to a military strategy of “elimination.” Moreover, post-October 7, Israeli political leaders (and the public) seem to have adopted the perspective of many Israeli military strategists who had believe that deterrence was always a failed strategy because it led Israel to accept limits on its military actions such that it was “self-deterred in taking decisive action against Hamas” (Ouellet 2024, 351). This post-deterrence view understands claims about mass civilian causalities caused by Israeli offensives into Gaza as part of Hamas’s strategy of deterrence through disinformation (Schleifer and Ansbacher 2024).
This view rejects the notion of mutual deterrence, on the basis that it requires Israel to “remain in a constant state of vulnerability” while accepting limits to its offensive actions (Schleifer and Ansbacher 2024). Prior to October 7 these voices called for the rejection of a strategy of deterrence and for a “military confrontation to dismantle the miliary wing of Hamas” that would likely “entail a large-scale, long-term bloody campaign” (Dekel 2019; Schleifer and Ansbacher 2024). Developing the capability for such a campaign had been part of the IDF force development plan since 2020 and thus the course of the Gaza campaign might have been over-determined (Ortal 2020).
Israeli Escalation in Lebanon and the Collapse of the “Rules of Engagement”
On the day following the Hamas-led attack, Hizballah opened a second front against Israel in solidarity with its Axis of Resistance ally by launching an attack on the disputed Sheba’a Farms (Makdisi 2024). While the conflict between Hizballah and Israel quickly expanded outside of the narrow existing “rule box,” it maintained proportional retaliations across an expanded space on both sides of the border, leading to the large-scale displacement of civilians on both sides. Israel gradually expanded its attacks and crossed existing red lines, such as assassinating a Hamas leader in Beirut and hitting Lebanese civilian targets. Hamas likely had hoped Hizballah would escalate the conflict leading to involvement by all the Axis of Resistance actors, including Iran, as part of a “unification of the arenas” strategy. Instead, with no interest in escalation on the part of Hizballah or Iran, Hizballah maintained proportional retaliations while highlighting its supposed capacity to target Israeli civilians as well as conduct pinpoint strikes on selected Israeli military targets. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly committed to this strategy of seeking to “win by points,” believing that Israel’s fear of an expanded war would deter it from escalation (cited in Sobelman 2025a, 200) while the pressure from Lebanon would help Hamas achieve its goal of a new status quo with an end to the siege of Gaza (Daher 2025).
But in mid-2024, as Israel came close to accomplishing its main military goals in Gaza, it massively escalated the conflict, shattering the existing understandings of the rules of engagement with Hizballah. While Israel was willing to risk higher levels of Israeli civilian causalities and displacement for longer periods than Hizballah seemed to anticipate, Hizballah was forced to absorb higher and higher levels of damage, including the mass assassination of Hizballah commanders and Nasrallah himself. Writing in al-Akhbar, a Lebanese publication aligned with the “resistance,” Zeinab Akil (2025) explains, “What changed was not Israel’s intent, but its capability. A technological leap allowed Tel Aviv to assemble an extensive, high-precision ‘target bank,’ designed to paralyze Hizballah’s deterrent capacity built over nearly two decades.” By late 2024, Hizballah acquiesced to a ceasefire agreement without achieving its goal of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. As part of the agreement, the Lebanese government was expected to ensure removal of armed Hizballah actors and their weapons from south of the Litani river. At the same time, while Israeli troops remain in Lebanon, drones buzz across the country, and Hizballah members continue to be targeted, the United States has pushed the Lebanese government to rapidly implement the complete disarming of Hizballah, which the group has continued to reject. Meanwhile, Hizballah refrained responding to Israeli attacks and violations of the ceasefire agreement. With the UN Security Council vote to end the mandate of UNIFIL in 2026 and US pressure on the Lebanese government to confront Hizballah, Israel faced decreasing restraints on its ability to project power into Lebanon.
A Future Middle East Without Deterrence?
Throughout the 2023-24 conflict, US officials warned regional actors against escalating the war as the United States deployed more assets to the region and ensured that Israel was armed with the capability to continue its wars. In early 2024, a former Defense Department official noted that a “former USCENTCOM commander wrote that the U.S. response has been ‘tentative, overly signaled and unfocused’ and that making escalation avoidance the top priority ‘sends an unhelpful signal to our adversaries as well as our friends and allies.’ He concluded that ‘it is the U.S. that is being deterred, not Iran and its proxies’” (Trachtenberg 2024, 86). Israel continued to escalate the conflict, not only in Lebanon but also by striking a building the Iranians used as a consulate in Damascus. The attack led to a limited Iranian retaliation that Iran claimed was for the purpose of maintaining balance. In the summer of 2025, however, Israel escalated again with an attack on Iran, which the United States later joined with a massive bombardment of Iran’s nuclear complexes. Iran responded with its largest volley of missiles and drones against Israel, but almost all were intercepted. Iran has claimed that it is maintaining a deterrent balance with Israel and the United States (Jamshidi and Mohammadi 2025), although it appears that Iran has simply been able to avoid regime collapse rather than actively establish mutual vulnerability. While the remaining actors within the Axis of Resistance seem to be seeking a restoration of mutual deterrence and re-establishment of the “rules of the game,” Israel, with US backing, clearly rejected such a path.
While soon after October 7 some policymakers and analysts based in the United States and Israel referred to the need to restore Israeli deterrence at the regional level to prevent “a much bloodier conflict in the future” (Satloff 2023), any such strategy would have required the establishment of a status quo tolerable to regional parties. US and Israeli policy makers rejected any such negotiations over a future regional order while pushing maximalist goals in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. The ongoing Israeli strategy of continually deploying force across the region, even in the contexts where ceasefire agreements are in effect, suggests a strategy of dominance more akin to a “mowing the grass” policy at a regional scale with little concern for security and stability across the region. The outbreak of the extended 2026 Israeli-US military campaign against Iran and the Israeli assault against Lebanon might even reflect what Amjad Iraqi’s has termed a strategy of “burning the lawn” (cited in Mizrahi-Arnaud 2026). As a result, establishing mutual vulnerability, in which mutual deterrence can operate, seems out of the question for the foreseeable future. Instead, the United States is committed to expanding its security commitments across the region (US Department of War 2026, 20), although it is unclear if such a posture is sustainable (Karlin 2024, 17). And following the 2026 regional war, Gulf states might begin rethinking their security relationships with the US as these states remain vulnerable to attacks from Iran (Lynch 2026). In any case, a region defined by asymmetric (rather than mutual) vulnerability, without the establishment of a status quo acceptable to all, is likely to prove fragile, unstable, and prone to violence.
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