Hezbollah and Iran remain unbowed despite US-Israeli assault

The US-Israeli imperial war machine has been hitting Iran and Hezbollah for months. That machine is a vastly superior killing implement  – on paper, at least. Yet the so-called ‘axis of resistance’ is still alive and kicking as a potential Pakistan-brokered peace deal edges closer.

This all speaks to US decline, but it also outlines a deep Western misunderstanding of how the opposition functions. Faced with a US-provisioned force with a full suite of air-power, artillery, drones and cyber, Hezbollah killed 15 Israelis overnight, reports say:

🚨🇮🇱 NEW: The US and Israel say that Hezbollah killed 15 Israeli soldiers overnight, which prompted strikes on Beirut

[@tparsi]

— Politics Global (@PolitlcsGlobal) June 7, 2026

Even a former Israeli PM Ehud Barak has said Hezbollah cannot be conquered:

A year and a half has passed since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, after the cease-fire, that “We’ve set Hezbollah back decades.” What empty boasting.

He added:

We’ve indeed seen some amazing achievements – the pagers operation, the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah figures, the fatal attack on the Radwan forces and the missile array and its operators.

But all of this has melted away as if it never existed.

Barak, no stranger to war crime accusations himself,  also lamented that fact that Israel had “no solution” to Hezbollah’s FPV drone tactics.

Hezbollah appeared to be in a pugnacious mood. According to the Cradle, they refuted Trump’s claim he was in dialogue with them:

Senior Lebanese Resistance figure, Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Political Council Mahmoud Qamati, confirmed to AFP earlier today that no direct communication channels exist between Trump and Hezbollah officials, dismissing Washington’s attempts to portray a direct diplomatic breakthrough regarding the war.

Qamati reportedly said:

Trump may have intentionally mischaracterized indirect diplomatic channels, noting that Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s adviser regularly communicates with the US ambassador to convey messages.

Westerns misreads and miscalculations

Meanwhile academic Trita Parsi said the West has routinely misunderstood the nature of the Iran-Hezbollah relationship. And the media has repeated these errors verbatim.

There is a surprising level of surprise in the West that Iran was serious about its demand for a region-wide ceasefire and that it would act against Israel if it continued attacking Lebanon.

I explain here: https://t.co/Rs000ZMhJM

…why Tehran was dead serious about forcing…

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) June 7, 2026

There is a surprising level of surprise in the West that Iran was serious about its demand for a region-wide ceasefire and that it would act against Israel if it continued attacking Lebanon.

He said the idea Hezbollah was simply a “proxy” for Iran was a fatal error in analysis:

Hezbollah is consistently described in the Western discourse as an Iranian proxy. And it appears that this statement was genuinely believed by Western observers.

Adding:

So if the belief is that Hezbollah is no more than a proxy, it also becomes more difficult to take Iranian threats that it will defend Lebanon seriously. A proxy, after all, is a piece on the chessboard whose fate almost invariably is to be sacrificed or consumed.

The reality is that the relationship is:

a mutually beneficial alliance in which Tehran clearly is the bigger party but not one that can simply issue dictats for Hezbollah to follow.

If this had been properly understood:

Iran’s warnings against continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon would likely have been taken more seriously.

Iran and Hezbollah still standing

The US expended $25bn in munitions, fuel and other areas in the first eight weeks of the war. This is a conservative estimate. Some sources say:

that the $25 billion estimate did not account for damage from Iran’s retaliatory attacks, which could put the total cost of the war so far as high as $50 billion.

Israel spent around $11bn.

Yet the signal achievement of the attack is a global economic crisis. Hardly something to write home about.

Even legacy media outlets like The Atlantic were withering in their assessment:

If these are indeed the conditions under which the war is concluded, the U.S. emerges from the conflict in worse strategic shape than it started, and Iran emerges in better condition in the long run.

Adding:

Although the U.S. demonstrated tactical and operational excellence throughout the conflict, it was not sufficient to provide a real victory.

The ‘butcher’s bill’ of this Trumpian blunder has not yet been counted. But when it is, US – and Israeli – influence in the region will have been vastly diminished. Despite lacking any of the fancy equipment and eye-watering war budgets available to the US, Iran, and Hezbollah are intact and undefeated.

Featured image via the Canary