No one would accuse Hamas leaders of being the first to make a strategic miscalculation of epic proportions in the Middle East. After all, from Napoleon to former U.S. President George W. Bush, the region’s history is strewn with the calling cards of leaders whose ambitions turned to disaster.

Even so, the collapse of Syria’s Assad family dynasty — a more than half-century-old enterprise of brutality, repression and corruption — places Hamas’ plans to reshape the Middle East in firm contention for the title of (to paraphrase another contender, Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein) the Mother of all Miscalculations.

Hamas did mean to cause regional upheaval. But surely, the last thing it wanted was to trigger the unraveling of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” Israel’s encirclement engineered by Iran. Yet that’s exactly what it did.

Shortly after the Oct. 7 rampage — or the “big project” as Hamas called it — one of its leaders explained to the New York Times that the goal was to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash” with Israel. And indeed, the entire equation has now changed, just not in the way Hamas intended.