TO many people the words “Hezbollah” and “Iran” are synonymous. There’s good reason for this of course, given that the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group is seen as Tehran’s proxy and wouldn’t exist without its backing, financial support, weapons supplies and military training.

If Iran says jump, Hezbollah says how high, goes the common belief. But it’s not always been that clear-cut. Back in the early 1990s while based as a journalist in Beirut, I found myself interviewing the elusive Lebanese cleric Shaykh Subhi al-Tufayli, who served as Hezbollah’s first secretary-general from 1989-1991.

Tufayli by then was rapidly falling out of favour with the “The Party of God”, that he, along with five other Lebanese Shiite clerics and activists, formed in 1982 – but more of that falling out in a moment.

Among the other founders were two set to become Hezbollah’s subsequent secretary-generals, Abbas al-Musawi and Hassan Nasrallah, both killed by Israeli targeted assassinations, the latter in an Israeli air strike only last week.

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The day after Nasrallah’s killing, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made a big thing of vowing to retaliate over the Hezbollah leader’s death, insisting that it “will not go unavenged”.

Khamenei’s proclamation was very much in keeping with Iran’s prevailing strategy right now of such retaliatory action occurring at a “time and place of our own choosing.”

Tuesday night was one such moment as Iran launched almost 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel. That the regime in Tehran was determined to do serious damage is without question. The nature of the attack and missiles used showed a capacity and level of sophistication that will trouble Israel, even though most were intercepted before hitting their targets.

It was certainly a step up from Iran’s previous attack on Israel in April, when it launched “Operation True Promise” in response to the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital Damascus, which killed two Iranian Revolutionary Guards generals.

Following the July assassination of Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, which occurred in Tehran itself, there was a growing sense in some quarters that Iran might be heavy on rhetoric and light on action.

While Tuesday night’s missile barrage might have allayed such fears among Iran’s proxies in the so-called “Axis of Resistance” of which Hezbollah is the most powerful part, it was still carefully calibrated.

For no sooner was the missile attack over than Tehran was at pains to stress that its retaliatory action was finished for now.

In short, Tehran was willing to draw a line on further escalation even if Israel will now most likely respond in kind.

Iran’s willingness to draw a line tells us much about the political tensions currently gripping the country between on the one hand, military hardliners and religious leaders, and on the other, reformists like President Masoud Pezeshkian.

For weeks after Pezeshkian’s surprise election in July, Iranian politicians had been publicly pushing a message of restraint even as Israel increased its attacks on Hezbollah.

Which takes me back to Hezbollah’s first general-secretary Tufayli and his falling out with the group back in the 1990s. Tufayli’s main gripe back then was what he saw as a growing Iranian hegemony in the region.

A control from Tehran that the soon-to-be-expelled Hezbollah leader thought was preoccupied more with interfering in Lebanese and other regional politics rather than focusing on fighting an armed resistance and insurgency against Israel.

In Tufayli’s opinion, Iran’s prime motive was to use Hezbollah as a “border guard” against Israel and he resented increasing Iranian pressure on Hezbollah to undergo fundamental political structural changes to suit the then Iranian president, Hashimi Rafsanjani and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

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In the end, Tufayli and his supporters inside Hezbollah became increasingly sidelined by their Iranian overseers who over time pushed their chosen man Nasrallah to the fore who was only too willing to do Iran’s bidding.

I mention all this because today, just as back in the 1990s, Iran’s internal political power struggle could well impact on its long-term relationship with Hezbollah.

What I mean by this is that should the reformists like Pezeshkian ultimately get their way then Iran’s support for Hezbollah could well find itself being curtailed.

That might well be the price a more reformist regime would be willing to pay to have crushing Western economic sanctions lifted against Iran. The lifting of those very sanctions is what Pezeshkian campaigned on in Iran’s recent election.

To that end Pezeshkian, went out of his way last week in a speech at the UN to call for a “new era of cooperation”, with the West, adding that Iran did “not wish to be the cause of instability in the Middle East.”

Many regional analysts are convinced that the “moderate” Pezeshkian has gained the tacit support of Iran’s more hardline Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to pursue a policy of cautious engagement with the West in order to secure relief from economic sanctions.

But Tuesday night’s missile attack on Israel suggests that for now Iran’s hardliners, bent on revenge and fearful the republic was looking increasingly weak, won the argument for retaliation against Israel.

The question then is where does this internal Iranian power struggle leave Hezbollah, not least given that it’s now bitterly embroiled in a ground war with Israeli forces?

Could it now be the case that Tufayli’s earlier concern that Hezbollah was at risk of becoming nothing more than a “border guard” for Iran against Israel is borne out, and that should reformists like Pezeshkian ultimately win the day in Iran, then their Lebanese proxy becomes surplus to requirements?

Curiously enough, in a recent interview with Time magazine, Jonathan Lord, a former Pentagon official and director of the Middle East Security programme at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), echoed those same concerns made by Tufayli all those years earlier about Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah.

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“Iran doesn’t fight for its proxies, its proxies fight for it,” observed Lord, in words eerily reminiscent of Tufayli’s back in the 90s.

“The regime is most interested in self-preservation and won’t knowingly put itself at risk,” Lord added, an observation that also sits convincingly alongside the apparent restraint that Tehran has shown, acting only when pressured by the hardliners.

All of which might not bode well for Hezbollah in the future.

Who knows, perhaps Tufayli might yet prove right in his assessment that when the chips are down, Iran is not really the ally that Hezbollah thinks it is.