Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has tightened its control over Hezbollah as the prospect of American military strikes looms over Tehran, according to multiple reports. IRGC officers have been rebuilding Hezbollah's military infrastructure and managing strategic war plans, sources told Al Arabiya and Al Hadath, a development that reframes the stakes heading into a new round of nuclear talks scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.
The timing is not coincidental. President Trump previously gave Iran a deadline of 10 to 15 days to respond to a deal. With that clock running, Tehran appears to be hedging its bets, negotiating with one hand while reconstituting its proxy network with the other.
According to Fox News, Ross Harrison, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of "Decoding Iran's Foreign Policy," said that Hezbollah could become a weapon of desperation if Iran's leadership feels cornered.
"If the regime in Tehran feels threatened, the likelihood of unleashing Hezbollah against Israel and U.S. regional assets increases substantially."
Iran's proxy infrastructure took significant damage over the past year. Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last year, decapitating the organization's command structure. Iran's nuclear sites were destroyed last June. The twin blows gutted Tehran's two most important strategic assets: its atomic ambitions and its most potent regional militia.
But regimes built on revolutionary ideology don't accept new realities quietly. According to Harrison, Iran is now scrambling to rebuild what it lost.
"Iran is trying to resurrect lost assets, such as its missile program and its connections to Hezbollah."
Harrison noted that the IRGC has supported Hezbollah in Lebanon for decades and that since Nasrallah's killing, "ties and operational coordination have to some degree been reestablished." The relationship never disappeared. It was wounded. Now it's being sutured back together under IRGC supervision.
This is what Iran does. It absorbs punishment, retreats into its proxy architecture, and reconstitutes. The pattern has repeated itself for forty years. Expecting otherwise requires ignoring everything the regime has shown us about itself.
Harrison laid out a framework for how Iran might deploy Hezbollah depending on how threatened the regime feels. The calculus is layered, not binary.
"Hezbollah would not be activated right away, unless the attack immediately targets the leadership of the Islamic Republic. But as part of a graduated response, Hezbollah will likely be seen as an asset."
In other words, a limited strike on Iran's military infrastructure might not trigger an immediate Hezbollah response. But a strike perceived as existential, one aimed at the regime itself, changes everything.
"If it faces an existential risk, then Iran may throw caution to the wind and try to deploy Hezbollah to the maximum."
There is a meaningful caveat here. Hezbollah is not simply an Iranian puppet. Harrison acknowledged that the group "has its own interests, connected to but separate from Iran," and that "whether its leadership will go all the way for Tehran is unknown." Hezbollah's new leadership, whoever has filled Nasrallah's shoes, will have to calculate whether dying for the mullahs is worth the cost to Lebanon. That calculation got harder after last year.
The danger extends well beyond Lebanon's borders. Harrison warned of the "potential for attacks to spread across the region, to Israel through direct Iranian ballistic attacks and via Hezbollah, and to the Gulf Arab states through Iran directly and possibly via the Houthis from Yemen."
This is Tehran's leverage, and it knows it. Iran has spent decades constructing a web of militias, proxies, and allied groups precisely so that any confrontation with the United States or Israel carries the risk of regional conflagration. The strategy is designed to make the cost of action prohibitive.
Harrison suggested that Gulf Arab states are already communicating this concern. If the U.S. is engaging with the Saudis and Emiratis, he said, "they are getting warnings about the possibility of this war spreading to the broader region, which would be deleterious to the U.S. and its allies."
The Saudis and Emiratis have good reason to worry. They sit within range of Iranian ballistic missiles and Houthi drones. But regional caution cannot become regional paralysis. The Gulf states have spent years watching Iran's proxy empire expand while the international community wrung its hands over "diplomacy." At some point, the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action.
One of the more revealing elements of Harrison's analysis concerns how the Iran decision is being made within the administration. According to Harrison, the circle is tight.
"The decision-making circle in the White House is very small regarding Iran, with the president keeping a close hand on it all."
He added that normally there is input from the National Security Council and the wider intelligence community, but "since the decision-making process in the White House is opaque, it is hard to know how much of this is getting through."
A small, closely held decision-making process on a matter of this magnitude reflects the seriousness with which the administration is treating it. Iran is not a problem that benefits from consensus by committee. The interagency process that characterized previous administrations' Iran policy produced the 2015 nuclear deal, pallets of cash on airport tarmacs, and a decade of Iranian nuclear advancement. A tighter circle suggests a more decisive approach.
The upcoming Geneva talks are expected to focus on Iran's nuclear program, including uranium enrichment levels and sanctions relief. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly appointed close ally Ali Larijani as the country's de facto leader, a move that signals Tehran is consolidating internal authority heading into negotiations.
This is the backdrop that matters. Iran is rebuilding its proxy forces, consolidating political power domestically, and walking into Geneva with the implicit threat that any failure in talks could trigger a wider conflict. The IRGC's tightening grip on Hezbollah is not separate from the diplomatic track. It is part of it. Every militia reconstituted, every weapons cache restocked, every operational plan coordinated is a card Tehran intends to play at the table or on the battlefield.
The question is whether Iran believes the current administration will call its bluff. Previous administrations didn't. The regime grew bolder each time. Tehran built its nuclear program under the cover of diplomacy, expanded its proxy empire under the cover of "regional stability," and violated every agreement it signed under the cover of international patience.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment but received no response.
Iran has spent four decades building Hezbollah into a deterrence asset against exactly this scenario: an American president willing to act. The regime's playbook is predictable. Threatened escalation. Activate proxies. Bet that the fear of regional war paralyzes Washington into another round of concessions dressed up as diplomacy.
Whether that playbook still works depends entirely on what happens in the next few weeks. The deadline is ticking. The IRGC is moving. And Tehran is watching to see if this time is different.