In response to U.S. threats, Iran and its allied militias in Iraq are taking a conciliatory approach to avoid winding up in Washington's crosshairs. But while this will temporarily mitigate the risk of a regional escalation as Tehran engages in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, Iran remains unlikely to fully abandon its proxy strategy. Since the United States began launching airstrikes on Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis in mid-March, there have been reports that Iran and its proxies in Iraq are taking steps to reduce the likelihood of also becoming a target of U.S. attacks. On April 3, The Telegraph reported that Iran had ordered its military personnel to leave Yemen, with an Iranian official saying that the decision was designed to mitigate risks of direct confrontation with the United States if an Iranian military member, such as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, was killed in the ongoing U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in the country. The official also said that Iran was scaling back its support of regional proxies more broadly, in an effort to focus more on direct threats at home from the United States. Then, on April 7, Reuters reported that several Iran-backed Iraqi militias — including crucial hard-line ones, like Khataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada — were considering disarming to avoid confrontation with the United States. These developments come amid U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to conduct direct military strikes on both Iran and its proxies in Iraq — threats that have been made more credible by the United States' ongoing airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen. 

• Khataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada are among the various militias comprising the umbrella Islamic Resistance in Iraq group, which collectively have around 50,000 militiamen and vast arsenals of drones, rockets and other weapons. After the Hamas-Israel war broke out in October 2023, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq's members carried out frequent attacks against the U.S. military presence in Iraq, Jordan and Syria. But the frequency of these attacks has significantly reduced since January 2024, after the Tower 22 drone attack, believed to be carried out by Khataib Hezbollah, killed three members of the U.S. military. 
• Iraq's hard-line Shiite militias generally have closer ties to Iran than Yemen's Houthis. This is due to having more direct supplies, training and support from the IRGC, and the fact that many of these Iraqi militias also have ideological and religious viewpoints aligned with those of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Conversely, the Houthi movement's ideological, religious, political, and funding connections to Iran are much weaker. 
• The scaling back of public support also comes as the United States and Iran held their first round of nuclear negotiations on April 12 and are set to hold more talks on April 19. Khamenei has reportedly authorized Iranian negotiators to include discussing Iran's regional support as a part of those discussions, including (if talks go well) using its influence to curtail military action by the Houthis. In a letter sent to Khamenei in March, Trump reportedly threatened to carry out military action against Iran if the country did not reach a new nuclear deal with the United States within 60 days of talks beginning. 

Iran and its Iraqi allies' recent actions appear designed to appease the Trump administration as the White House weighs taking aggressive military action against them both if nuclear talks fail. The Trump administration's ''maximum pressure'' campaign against Iran and its proxies has increased the risk of direct U.S. and Israeli military action on Iran proper and many of its close allies in the region. Rather than escalating tensions with Washington, Tehran is seeking to launch nuclear talks with the United States to avoid military confrontation. Iran's alleged moves to withdraw its military personnel from Yemen are part of this strategy, as this signals to the White House that Tehran is willing to reduce support for the Houthis and other proxies — something U.S. officials have said is necessary to reach any nuclear deal with the United States. By reducing its military presence in Yemen, Tehran is also simultaneously reducing trigger points for a wider regional confrontation that would immediately halt the potential for any nuclear talks. U.S. strikes in Yemen, for example, could result in a situation where IRGC members or other high-ranking officials are killed, putting pressure on Iran's leadership to respond directly against the United States. Meanwhile, in Iraq, it appears Iran-backed militias are also trying to avoid U.S. strikes that would weaken their political strength in the country, particularly ahead of Iraqi elections due by October. This risk is highlighted by the decimation of Hezbollah and Hamas' political influence in Lebanon and Gaza, respectively, over the past year after the two Iran-backed groups became the targets of U.S. and Israeli military campaigns. Indeed, similar to Hezbollah and Hamas, many of Iraq's Iran-backed militias have political wings that are a part of the current government in Baghdad, and the strength of those wings is somewhat dependent on the strength of their militant counterparts. As such, Iran's allies in Iraq are likely now operating in preservation mode, especially as the United States intensifies its sanctions pressure on Iraq's connections to Iran. 

• In late March, the United States also sent at least six B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean housing a joint U.S.-U.K. base that could be used for a large military operation against Iran without using U.S. military assets in Gulf Arab countries, all of which have reportedly told the United States not to use their territory for a strike on Iran. 
• On March 8, the United States declined to extend a waiver that had allowed Iraq to buy Iranian electricity without facing U.S. sanctions, and is now considering doing the same for a sanctions waiver that allows Iraq to buy Iranian natural gas. 

Iran, however, remains highly unlikely to fully abandon its regional proxy strategy, even if it temporarily scales back more overt support to Yemeni Houthis and Iraqi militias amid nuclear talks with the United States. Israel's wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, along with the fall of Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria, have significantly weakened Iran's regional proxy network over the past year. However, the strategic imperative underpinning Iran's desire to maintain this network — namely, the need to offset its lack of conventional military deterrence — remains intact. Indeed, despite the losses suffered by Hamas and Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis have emerged as one of Iran's most prolific proxies in response to the war in Gaza, as evidenced by the group's success in significantly disrupting Western shipping through the Red Sea over the past year and a half. As such, Iran will likely still seek to maintain close ties with the Houthis, even as it temporarily scales back more visible support to pacify the Trump administration. This will likely see Iran continue to smuggle arms and weapons to Yemen, as it simultaneously withdraws some IRGC personnel from the country. In Iraq, Iran's allied militias are unlikely to fully disarm, and will certainly not heed U.S. calls to disband. The militias may transfer some of their arms and further integrate their operations into the formal Iraqi military (which they already technically are a member of). However, Iran and its Iraqi proxies are highly unlikely to do so in a way that would prevent the militias from regaining access to some of those weapons at a later time — or at least receive more shipments quickly — in order to ensure they retain the ability to increase military pressure on the United States and other rivals within the Iraqi militia-political landscape in response to new threats. Effectively, rather than true disarmament, Iran-backed Iraqi militias will likely increasingly operate under front organizations — like the Islamic Resistance in Iraq — while formally acting as a part of the military. 

• The Houthis' growing self-sufficiency and increasingly diverse arms suppliers will enable Iran to reduce more public-facing support to the group without significantly jeopardizing the Houthis' operative capacity. While Iran almost certainly remains the Houthis' main supplier of advanced components and weapons, the group is increasingly assembling weapons domestically and smuggling arms and components from other sources, including Russia and China. As evidence of this, the United States on April 2 sanctioned several Russia-based actors who allegedly procured millions of dollars worth of commodities from Russia, including dual-use technology and weapons, for the Houthi movement in Yemen.

Nevertheless, in the short term, Iran's pragmatic strategy will reduce the risk of violent attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq, and help facilitate nuclear talks with the United States. In Iraq, any moves by Iran-backed militias to disarm — however limited — will reduce the short-term risk of violence targeting U.S. troops and military equipment stationed in the country, as well as U.S. business operations. This is because such moves would clearly indicate militias' intent not to provoke the United States, even if they have the military capacity to do so. More broadly, this would also reduce the likelihood of an Iraqi militia attack on a U.S. target spoiling newly launched U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, making those negotiations slightly more likely to progress. However, many constraints unrelated to Iran's regional proxy strategy — like the precise nature of Iranian concessions on its nuclear program — could still stall progress toward a deal, sustaining the potential for U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.