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This is as good a take as I've seen, but it's a more detailed version of (slightly uncharitably) "the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region".
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so. In the meantime, what happens to their clients? If Hezbollah and Hamas can both be neutralized as military forces while their sponsor is down, the PA can be strengthened as the leadership of the Palestinians and some sort of deal becomes at least more possible than it currently is. Oct. 7th was Iran's last dice throw to stop this process, and it didn't work.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
In the current conflict the Sunni countries (excluding the UAE) pretty much just sat there and took it as Iran obliterated their air defenses, military bases and essential infrastructure with missiles and drones. Whether this is because they fear Iran itself or because they fear their own people rising up if they get too cozy with Israel, either way their oil output has cratered and Trump's blockade currently aims to drive Iran to the state that Iran has already driven every other Gulf nation to (except Oman).
If anything it looks like it's the US that's going to be systematically excluded from Middle Eastern affairs as Gulf countries discover that cutting a deal with Iran is the only way to get oil to market without getting struck by Shaheds. In the long run the Aya-toll-ah could generate more revenue for Iran than oil exports ever did.
None of those groups were "Shia-aligned"; those are American-aligned groups, and their slaughter is a demonstration of the impotence and short-sightedness of American imperial policy. Yet more proof of Kissinger's old adage that to be America's enemy is dangerous but to be America's friend is fatal.
If Iran were to make a comeback in Syria it would be through funding pissed off (mostly) Sunni Syrians in the territory that Israel occupied after the fall of Assad to create a kind of Hamas-Hezbollah hybrid. If anything, fighting the US directly creates more opportunities for this sort of cross sect collaboration; the Houthis started working with Al-Shabaab and AQAP after they achieved "street cred" fighting the US Navy during Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider.
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