Opinion...

Iran’s shadow diplomacy: The art of winning without showing

December 14, 2025 

Middle East Monitor

People continue their daily life under the shadow of the ceasefire reached with Israel, in Tehran, Iran, on July 15, 2025. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]

by Jasim Al-Azzawi


As the conflict escalates between Israel and Iran to an unprecedented degree, with Iran and Israeli missiles clashing in June 2025, representing the most tangible military conflict ever witnessed between these two nations, it will be argued that the actual might that Iran poses doesn’t lie within what we can witness, but instead within what they have worked hard to hide. As everyone focuses on watching ballistic missiles traveling across Middle Eastern skies, it will be realised that Iran’s most potent weapon remains invisible.

Iran has baffled its enemies for several decades. It has been at once isolated and indispensable, weak yet resilient. According to the Middle East Council on Global Affairs’s Hamidreza Azizi, “this seeming contradiction embodies a foreign policy paradigm which aims ‘to compensate for material weakness through strategic ambiguity and indirect power projection.’” Iran’s most significant foreign policy skill would be aptly termed shadow diplomacy—determining an outcome without occupying the chair.
Strategy through absence

“The Iranian leadership seems increasingly confident operating below the threshold of outright warfare,” warned CIA Director William Burns at the start of 2024. As Burns said, Iran prefers escalation through “partners, proxies, and deniability” rather than direct confrontation. It is often most influential precisely where it remains least visible.

The implications of this strategy are evident in Ardavan Khoshnood’s research on the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), an undercover influence operation set up approximately in 2014 to nurture Iran-compliant analysts within Western think tanks, news media, and policy circles. Internal communications were uncovered, showing regular interactions between government representatives and foreign-based scholars who, as Khoshnood describes, “regularly defended Iran’s strategic intentions within influential Western platforms”. The goal here was not persuasion but normalisation.

Alex Vatanka, a Middle East Institute expert, places it within an overall strategy conducted by Iran: “It would appear that Tehran uses stories as much as it uses missiles. Influencing perceptions of Iran within capitals like Washington, Brussels, or London constitutes a form of deterrence”.

A proxy ecosystem: Power without presence

Iran’s shadow diplomacy takes its most deadly form through its regional proxies. “They fund them, they train them, they equip them,” testified Lt. Gen. J.B. Vowell, former commanding general of US forces operating against ISIS. “Those missiles in Yemen don’t appear by accident.”

Instead, Iran fosters dependence. The Quds Force, an arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, has replaced traditional diplomatic efforts with “an ecosystem of armed clients whose survival depends on Tehran”. Hezbollah, Lebanon; militias within Iraq; and Houthis, Yemen—the list goes on and represents Iran’s expanding influence as it removes itself from any possible retaliation.

Iran-backed militias within Iraq and Syria have conducted a total of 160 attacks against US forces since 7 October 2023. Nevertheless, Iran continues to deny controlling these attacks. Ray Takeyh, a Council on Foreign Relations expert, describes Iran’s calculation: “Iran supports these attacks but refuses to leave its fingerprints on them. It’s an ambiguous strategy—and very effective”.

The drone attack on Tower 22 in January 2024, which took the lives of three US soldiers, illustrated the power and risk associated with this drone model. Analyses carried out by US intelligence suggested that, as much as an Iran-backed Iraqi militia had conducted the attack, escalation levels were a source of alarm among Iran’s political leaders. Once shadow power is unleashed, it can be tough to control.

Winning in the shadows

The secret to Iran’s success is that it capitalizes on a blind spot within Western thinking. It believes that, for power to exist, it must be visible. As Azizi writes, “The Islamic Republic has learned to make itself at home with prolonged instability. It often considers crises ‘not problems to be solved, but environments to be managed’.
Four cornerstones define this strategy:

First, proxy projection rather than direct confrontation. Proxy projection enables Iran to deter and punish without going to war.

Second, control via networks and narratives. The IEI showed how Tehran embeds its worldview inside Western debate without a formal diplomatic presence.

Third, crisis exploitation rather than resolution. “Iran is not in a hurry to end regional tensions,” Vatanka notes. “Time usually works in its favor”.

At Last: The Role of Ambiguity as a Resource. As a Gulf security expert so aptly summarized an Iranian strength: “You can rarely prove its hand, even when you feel its grip.”

The changing landscape

The Israeli attacks against Iran conducted in June 2025 weakened its air defense systems, production facilities for missiles, and nuclear infrastructure. Both Hamas and Hezbollah were struck hard by the loss of leadership, and with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government at the end of 2024, Iran’s overland route to the Mediterranean Sea began to unwind. On paper, it would appear that an Iranian axis of resistance has never looked weaker.

Nevertheless, Iran adjusts. The Persian Gulf States increasingly acknowledge Iran as “a permanent geopolitical fact” and prefer coexistence and not confrontation. Saudi-Iranian talks on détente and Emirati-Iranian economic outreach are a consequence of this shift.

By turning towards the East, Iran expands its buffer zone. Through partnerships with Russia and China, it receives political and economic support to maintain its shadow operations despite pressure.

The costs of invisibility

Shadow diplomacy is a source of leverage, but it comes at a high cost. Iran’s shadow wars have brought about irreversibility and displaced millions. A 2024 United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on “Tehran’s Shadow Army” illustrates bipartisan discontent regarding Iran’s shadow warfare.

The then US Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, argued that with oil revenues abridged due to sanctions, Iran suffered because: “Funding to proxies dried up.”

However, it seems that conventional diplomacy offers little reason for Iran to comply. Years and years of isolation have made it a master of sneak diplomacy.

As summarised by Azizi: “Since Iran cannot be at the table, it will learn to arrange the chairs”.

Conclusion: The power of the unseen

In an increasingly tense scenario involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, it has become imperative to make sense of the shadow politics of Tehran. It’s no crystal-ball gazing, but a strategy perfected over several decades that aims to influence without being seen.

Iran does not appear regularly.

It rarely needs to.

And in an exhausted region, amid obvious wars, invisibility remains a permanent advantage for Tehran, at least while it still matters.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.