The Shia-Sunni divide is Islam's oldest wound. Since the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632 CE, the question of who rightfully leads the Muslim world has driven wars, revolutions, and proxy conflicts across the Middle East. But for all their mutual enmity, Shia and Sunni factions have always agreed on one thing: opposition to Israel. Destroying the Jewish state has been the ultimate credential in the competition for Islamic leadership.
For Iran – a Shia nation of 90 million in a Muslim world of nearly two billion, overwhelmingly Sunni – opposition to Israel was a strategic masterstroke. Tehran could never win the legitimacy contest on demographics alone. But by positioning itself as the only power willing to confront Israel while the Sunni Gulf monarchies signed peace accords, Iran transcended the sectarian divide. The proxy network was its instrument: Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the southwest, Shia militias in Iraq, Houthis in Yemen. A "ring of fire" designed to destroy the grand prize without exposing Tehran to direct retaliation.
That strategy is now in ruins. The events of 2023-2026 – Israel's operations in Gaza and Lebanon, followed by the joint US-Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic – shattered the Axis of Resistance with a thoroughness that would have seemed unimaginable three years ago. Nine hundred combined sorties in the first twelve hours alone. Iran's ballistic missile production reduced to zero. Eighty-five percent of its air defenses destroyed. Supreme Leader Khamenei killed in the opening strikes. The proxy strategy that took four decades to build collapsed in weeks.
Yet even as its network disintegrated, Iran revealed a capability it had long denied. On March 21, it fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, the joint US-UK base roughly 4,000km from Iranian territory. Both failed to reach their target – but the attempt shattered Tehran's repeated assurance that its missiles were limited to 2,000km. A missile with that range can reach Paris, London, and Berlin. On March 24, Lebanon declared Iran's ambassador persona non grata – furious that Hezbollah had dragged the country into devastating war – while Iran launched at least eight separate missile barrages at Israel the same day, striking central Tel Aviv.
There is a principle in clinical psychology called symptom substitution. When a therapist blocks a patient's compulsive behaviour – nail-biting, hair-pulling – without treating the underlying anxiety that drives it, the compulsion does not vanish. It migrates to a new outlet. The surface behaviour changes; the root condition does not.
The analogy to geopolitics is imperfect but instructive. For four decades, radical Islam's obsessive focus on Israel was the behavioural expression of a deeper drive: the competition for legitimacy within the Islamic world, the theology of martyrdom, and the hunger for a defining victory. The 2026 strikes have now blocked that particular behaviour with overwhelming force. But the underlying drive – the ideological compulsion, the grievance, the need for a cause – remains entirely untreated. And if psychology teaches us anything, it is that the compulsion will find a new outlet.
A rational adversary surveying the post-2026 landscape would observe a stark asymmetry. Israel has demonstrated that attacking it risks the total destruction of the sponsoring state. The cost has become prohibitive. But look westward, and the picture is very different.
In 2024, Gallup International found that only 32 per cent of EU citizens would fight for their country. In Italy, 78 per cent said no. Among Germans aged 18-29, 59 per cent rejected the idea outright. By contrast, 77 per cent in West Asia said they would fight. Israel maintains universal conscription and just demonstrated the capacity to destroy a regional power's infrastructure in days.
The military dimension reinforces the picture. Britain's Defence Secretary has admitted that the army cannot fight a war. Recruitment hit just 64 per cent of target. Only three NATO allies have reached the 3.5 per cent GDP spending target. And as the Diego Garcia strike proved, the adversary now has the physical means to reach European capitals.
Then there is the factor European leaders prefer not to discuss. An estimated 44 to 50 million Muslims live in Europe. The vast majority are peaceful citizens. But Europol's 2025 report documented 334 suspected Islamist arrests, up from 266 the prior year. The radicalisation pipeline is already running, and the Gaza war and strikes on Iran have generated precisely the grievance narratives that radical recruiters thrive on.
The 2024 pro-Palestinian campus protests that swept across Western universities offered a preview: a generation that will not fight for its own country actively sympathises with narratives hostile to Western security interests, and would struggle to identify what it is defending, let alone defend it.
None of this means a coordinated campaign against Europe is imminent. But the strategic incentives have shifted. The nail has been placed behind a barrier so formidable that continued biting risks destruction. The question every psychologist would ask – and every policymaker should – is: where does the compulsion go next? The path of least resistance points toward societies that won't fight, militaries that can't, and populations among which radicalisation can occur largely unchecked.
This is a warning, not a prophecy. The shift can be countered – but only if it is recognised. Recognition means understanding that the defeat of Iran's proxy network is not the end of radical Islamist ambition but an inflection point that may redirect it. It means acknowledging that Europe's security posture is not calibrated for what may be coming. And it means abandoning the comfortable post-9/11 assumption that terrorism is a manageable law enforcement problem rather than a strategic challenge.
The grand prize proved too costly. But the hunger that drove its pursuit has not disappeared. It is merely looking for a meal it can afford.
Doron Goldberg is the CTO and co-founder of Acumen Risk Ltd., a firm specialising in risk management. He studied social psychology and writes on the intersection of behavioural science, strategic risk, and Middle Eastern security affairs
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