After the fall of Assad, is Khamenei next?

If you had asked Donald Trump’s former Iran envoy Elliot Abrams last year how he assessed Iran's strength, he would have told you its fearsome array of armed affiliates was a powerful guarantee of its staying power.

“I would have thought Iran is riding high," the veteran US foreign policy hawk said. "Their system of terrorist proxies in the region is a brilliant system and it's working,” Abrams, the former special representative for Iran during the first administration of Donald Trump told Iran International on Eye for Iran.

Now, he says, its fortunes are at a low ebb.

The sudden uprooting of Iran’s most important Arab ally, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, demonstrates just how brittle Iran may be.

“Iran made many advances, but now in the last year in particular, a lot of it has collapsed. Iran looks more isolated and weaker today,” said Abrams.

"This must be a terrible, terrible turn of events to have lost Assad, your only real important Arab ally, to have lost Hezbollah as a fighting force after, who knows, $40 billion dollars of investment over decades, to have lost the Arab figure closest to you, [Hassan] Nasrallah,” he added.

Days after taking credit for the collapse of Assad in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the people of Iran in his latest of a series of video messages to Iranians, saying the downfall of the Islamic Republic is near.

“Your oppressors spent over $30 billion supporting Assad in Syria, and only after 11 days of fighting his regime collapsed into dust,” Netanyahu said.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a speech this week characterized talk of Iran’s weakening position in the Middle East as criminal, vowing with little apparent grasp of the enormity of his loss that Syria could be won back.

"The territories that have been seized in Syria will be liberated by the brave Syrian youth. Have no doubts that this will happen," Khamenei said, refusing to acknowledge the failure of the so-called axis of resistance.

Such enormous upheavals seemed unthinkable only days ago.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi met with Assad on Dec 2. as Islamist-backed forces were just beginning their lightning march to victory. Assad was distressed and allegedly admitted that his army was too weak to fight, according to Reuters, citing a senior Iranian diplomats.

The collapse of Syria now allows Israel room to launch strikes on Iran, unencumbered by Assad's air defenses - which the Jewish state attacks along with hundreds of other military infrastructure targets this week.

“They're clearing the route to fly. There are no air defenses now, something they [Israel] used to have to worry about," Abrams said.

"They've destroyed the air defenses that Assad had built up. They've shown they've destroyed the S-300 system in Iran itself,” he added, referring to Russian-provided air defenses knocked out in Israeli strikes on Iran on October 26.

“What happened in Syria," said Abrams, "should remind the West that these regimes are like the Soviet regime. No matter how strong they appear, no matter how large their army, they're fundamentally brittle because inside, everyone knows that the people of the country want the regime to fall.”

Iranians took to the streets in nationwide protests in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini who died while under police custody for allegedly not wearing the country’s mandatory hijab properly.

A survey conducted in 2023 by Gamaan, a Netherlands-based institute, found that 60 percent of Iranians want a different leadership or "transition from the Islamic Republic".

The demise of Syria's dictatorship after half a century of family rule seemed a distant prospect two weeks ago and that is precisely why Abrams believes the future may be bleak for the Islamic Republic.

“I think we cannot predict it. Who a month or two ago was predicting the fall of Assad? Who predicted the fall of the Soviet regime?”