During the Twelve-Day War last June, Hezbollah remained conspicuously sidelined while Iran faced the United States and Israel alone. Critics suggested Tehran was deliberately preserving its “crown jewel” for the inevitable future showdown. Tehran did not want to burn its Ace. Now, facing the consequences of past military miscalculations, the Party must strike with all its might, or risk total strategic irrelevance.

The dark clouds of conflict over the Middle East are no longer gathering; they are breaking. As the world braces for war with the Islamic Republic, the central question is not whether Hezbollah will join the fray, but how devastatingly it will do so. To view Hezbollah as a mere proxy is to misunderstand the DNA of the modern Levant. Hezbollah is the shield, the sword, and the soul of the Iranian revolutionary export. In the looming shadow of war, Hezbollah will not sit in quiet contemplation; they will thrust forward, because their existence is defined by the very hand that feeds them.

As former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned bluntly, “If there is a direct war with Iran, Hezbollah will not be a bystander. It is Tehran’s most potent retaliatory force.”

To understand why this intervention is inevitable, one must look at the structural symbiosis between Beirut and Tehran. Hezbollah is a local actor with regional ambitions, a national party that answers to a transnational cleric. This duality allows it to claim the mantle of Lebanese “resistance” while simultaneously functioning as the western flank of the Iranian military apparatus.

When the first missiles are launched from their silos in Isfahan, the response from........

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