On Wednesday, March 4, over 40 Swarthmore students and faculty packed into a classroom in Old Science Hall to witness the political science department’s latest “Lunch with Faculty” discussion. The event is part of a departmentally sponsored series that returns, according to Associate Professor of Political Science Jonny Thakkar, “when there’s a pressing event, and we want to bring the discipline of political science to bear on contemporary affairs and current events.”
This lecture was organized in response to the fatal U.S.-Israeli strike against Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Saturday, Feb. 28, an event that marked the start of an ongoing major military campaign against Iran by the two allied countries. Violent conflict has unfolded over the past three weeks, resulting in approximately 1,500 total deaths — including thirteen American service members — and leading to major global economic fallout over war-related disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.
Thakkar launched into the discussion by introducing the lecture’s featured speaker, Claude C Smith ’14 Professor of Political Science Dominic Tierney, who holds a Ph.D in international politics and has authored numerous articles and books on international conflicts.
Tierney began his discussion of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran by remarking on the confusion that has and continues to define the conflict: “First of all, the war is incredibly uncertain, so anybody who has a very confident view about especially the evolution of this war, you can almost dismiss them immediately, because it’s probably just consistent with their priors,” he said, arguing that, ultimately, “people tend to see what they want to see.”
Tierney continued his introductory comments by arguing the war was “incredibly unnecessary.”
“There was no clear and present danger to the United States,” he continued. “The United States had not just been attacked, we were engaged in negotiations, and Iran is actually much weaker in many respects, and has been for a long time.” It was because of this weakness, he explained, that the U.S. decided to attack Iran.
He referred to the war as a “preventative war” and distinguished this term from a “preemptive war.” The latter is “ethically and legally dubious, but can be defended” in the event a country truly believes itself to be in imminent danger, whereas the former “in ethical terms, [is] highly dubious, and in legal terms, [is] nearly always considered illegal.”
Tienrney explicitly claimed that the war in Iran was illegal, stating that “Trump has made almost no attempt to provide a legal framework for the war.” In past administrations, presidents had usually sought permission from the UN or Congress before any major military action. Even former President George W. Bush — who Tierney said “was often condemned for a unilateralist cowboy diplomacy” — “actually made considerable efforts to provide a legal and political basis for the Iraq war, including sending Colin Powell to the UN to try to get a UN resolution.”
“So this really is unilateralism to a next level.”
To conclude his opening thoughts, Tierney briefly discussed the military might of the combined US and Israeli forces, which, by comparison, made Iran a “weakened, cornered animal.” But despite this military mismatch, he explained that Iran would still be able to inflict major pain on the U.S., whether through killing American soldiers, attacking regional U.S. allies, or, most notably, through economic levers, according to Tierney.
“I actually think the biggest single pressure point for Trump, the thing he looks at most, is the market, broadly understood, the stock market, the oil market — those kinds of dynamics. That’s actually what would have the most direct, forceful pressure on Trump,” Tierney noted.
Thakkar continued the discussion by posing the question of how the U.S.’s entrance into the war provides any indication of how it may be planning to end it. To that end, Tierney, whose work has largely focused on the end of wars, explained that the U.S. had entered the war under the “improvisational model.”
“This seems to be broadly what Trump has followed. You don’t necessarily have clear aims, you just start it, see where the chips fall, and then sort of go down whichever path you like.”
This plan, or lack thereof, “it’s very flexible. It means that whatever the United States has achieved at the point of which we call this quits, Trump will turn around and say, ‘Those were the aims.’”
However, that is where the model’s advantages end.
“There’s an enormous cost in having no idea where you’re going when you start just blindingly obvious,” Tierney said. “This all should have been thought through very carefully, and there’s little evidence of that kind of planning. So it’s ripe for a horrendous mess.”
Tierney also noted how wars usually metastasize in the face of rising costs: “When leaders suffer costs, most obviously, like their soldiers are killed, what they tend to do is raise their aims and actually demand even more from the war … to justify all of this expenditure.”
Thakkar then questioned how the military, as a bureaucratic machine, would respond to orders coming from a leadership without any clear plan in place.
“There are limits and there are circumstances in which the military would refuse to go along with something,” Tierney replied, “But, broadly speaking, Trump won the election. He’s the legitimate president … and the military’s job is to carry out their functions as the Constitution prescribes.”
Thakkar’s next question concerned how other countries neighboring Iran might respond to the war or become involved in it. According to Tierney, the Iranian government has shown some restraint before in previous wars but has been launching more missiles in this conflict than in the past ones.
“I mean, its leader was killed in a surprise attack during Ramadan. And as the Iranians would see it, they were still in negotiations when their leader was, as they see it, assassinated as a martyr … So they may not see a lot of logic behind restraints at this point.”
Tierney added that this has put the other states in the region in difficult situations. “They don’t want to be dragged into the war. Some of them, privately, I think, were egging the U.S. on — there’s some reports of that — but they’re very nervous. There’s a lot of very vulnerable gas and oil insulations. Desalination plants are critical in the region, and a lot of them are very vulnerable to quite cheap drone strikes and so on.”
At this point in the lecture, Thakkar opened the podium to questions from the audience. One attendee started by asking Tierney to expand on his previous comments on the U.S. military’s potential response to future illegal orders. In response, he plainly stated that “the circumstances in which members of the military would not follow orders are very limited.”
Tierney pointed to the fact that, during conflict, the military must follow its own formal codes, as well as those stipulated by international law, including a ban on the deliberate killing of civilians. He explained a famous combat rule often used to illustrate illegal battlefield actions: if one party sinks a boat, it cannot kill the floating survivors after the fact.
Even rules as seemingly clear as this, he noted, are sometimes evaded or not explicit enough. The Trump administration has allegedly broken this straightforward rule, striking a second time the survivors of a ship destroyed in a laser-guided bomb attack after seeing them floating on part of the wreckage. In this context, it is difficult to discern precisely how the military will follow its own rules.
“If you are relying on the U.S. military to step in and restrain Trump from unlawful actions, you are putting far too much of a burden on the U.S. military,” argued Tierney. “It is other actors in the American political system who need to step in well before we ask the military to not follow orders.” Thakkar chimed in at this comment, stating that any sort of military revolt against the president could very quickly transform into a coup d’etat, a thought which Tierney strongly agreed with: “That is a catastrophic outcome for the Republic,” he noted.
Another attendee asked a question about the UN’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the possibility that it might be used by the Trump administration to justify intervention in Iran. R2P is a set of guidelines created in the wake of the international community’s lack of response in the Balkans and Rwanda genocides that dictates how countries can perform humanitarian interventions without affecting nations’ sovereignty.
“You can intervene across borders to stop human suffering, but with a lot of guardrails in place,” summarized Tierney. “It has to be an absolute last resort where you have tried to negotiate with the government, you’ve tried everything, and then finally … you build a coalition, and you go and stop it.”
“I have yet to hear the administration make any kind of R2P-type of argument for this. If they do, or have, and I missed it, then it’s slightly laughable, because they’re not really framing this in that way,” commented Tierney. The Trump administration has not used R2P as a justification for the U.S. attacks in Iran, but rather a wide swath of claims that include vague accusations of an “imminent threat” from the country.
Trump’s relative lack of ethical argumentation in defense of the war, Tierney highlighted, departs from previous administrations. According to the professor, the Bush administration cast their war with the Taliban within “idealistic, moralistic American, traditional American, creedal terms. And Trump just hasn’t done that with the Iran war.” This lack of moral positioning affords Trump a unique position to hold peace talks with the Iranian regime anytime. “He’s fine doing that. He’s much more pragmatic, transactional, and that comes with some advantages,” Tierney noted.
“However,” he emphasized, “stripping the war of any of its moral or value basis, leaves the war as a very thin husk.”
The next audience member asked about China’s hypothetical response to the war. Tierney expressed his belief in the possibility of a China-U.S. proxy war in the Middle East, adding that China is certainly “pretty happy to see the United States embroiled in another conflict,” but clarified that China generally does not involve itself directly in these types of conflicts. “China, as usual, is playing its cards carefully,” he said, suggesting that the country is ultimately “a little bit concerned about the geopolitical peace and the loss of a partner state.”
At the mention of geopolitical relations, Thakkar offered another question about who may stand to lose the most at the dramatically delayed export of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. “It’s really the local actors who would be the most affected,” replied Tierney. “Some of that [oil] capability can be redirected through pipelines and so on, the United States now produces a huge amount of energy, and so the U.S. is actually more insulated for some of those effects than China.” Europe may also feel the effects of high oil prices, which Tierney suggested could pressure the U.S. to end the war sooner.
The next question came from an attendee who asked about the implications of a war powers resolution that failed in the House on March 4, with regard to Congressional oversight for the rest of the war.
“No president has accepted the constitutionality of the War Powers resolution,” began Tierney. “None of them, Democrat or Republican. They all think it’s unconstitutional because of their commander-in-chief power. However, many presidents have acted consistent with the War Powers resolution.”
Tierney then moved on to analyze Congress’s — particularly Democrats’ — potential political responses to the war. He argued that Democrats are generally put off by national security issues, but “once it’s really turned into a disaster, and support is down at the 35-40% level, then Democrats will say, ‘Actually, maybe this is a bad idea.’ But it often takes a few years for Democrats to really come out forcefully against a war.”
Tierney pointed out that, despite Democrats’ general opposition to war, the party may more strongly oppose the Iranian regime due to its history of killing thousands of its own civilians. He went on to say that Democrats have, with this in mind, defined the conflict as a “war of choice,” forcing it to become “Trump’s war.”
“The Democrats want to clearly say, ‘You chose this. You didn’t have to do it; you chose it.’ They’ve held back mostly from saying it’s clearly a terrible idea, nervous about looking weak,” Tierney said.
Even if Democrats win the House and Senate during the 2026 midterm elections, Tierney argued, they may still be disinclined to stop the war themselves, since they may not want to risk taking ownership of it.
The lecture ended with a larger discussion of Iran’s military tactics. Tierney, in response to a question from Thakkar about Iran’s sponsorship of small non-state actors in the Middle East, agreed that Iran’s military consists largely of these groups rather than the traditional military infrastructure common in the world today.
“That actually has been quite an effective strategy over recent years, because most of the conflicts we’ve seen have been these internal conflicts, and Iran has been able to manipulate these conflicts and support various non-state actors and gain a lot of influence in these different countries.”
In the war against the U.S., this decentralized military may play to Iran’s advantage. While the U.S. has to focus on international politics, balance other global qualms, and deal with the war on an international scale, Iran only needs to consider the war on a local, day-to-day level.
“If you are the powerful side, if you are Goliath, you’re expected to win pretty quickly, right? If you are the weaker side, mere survival is victory,” Tierney said. “If this regime in Tehran is still there and still throwing punches, still firing a few drones and rockets in a few weeks time, it will absolutely claim victory.”
In response to a final audience question about how the U.S. may attempt to arm rebels in Iran, Tierney cast doubt on any sort of plan to do so: “The track record of these is often not very successful, and crucially, those groups often evolve in ways you don’t expect because you don’t have a lot of control over these proxy forces.” He also noted that there is no organized group in Iran powerful enough to act as a rebel force, which complicates this potential strategy.
“I’m worried that this mission has not really been thought through, and the U.S. is now scrambling for ways that it can topple the regime without sending ground forces, and is thinking, ‘Oh, I know, we’ll just let someone else do it.’ But who is that someone else?”
