Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science Dominic Tierney recently appeared on NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon to discuss the uncertain future of the ongoing war with Iran.

Tierney, the author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Little, Brown, & Co., 2010) and The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (Little, Brown, & Co., 2015), believes that the situation in Iran is yet another example of the United States' inability to wage war decisively.

"[Iran] is part of a longer story where America has struggled in war for many decades," he says. "Since World War II, the United States has barely won a war and instead has endured a string of stalemates and defeats and quagmires - Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now potentially the Iran war."

In Tierney's view, the United States and its military leadership erred by overestimating their ability to shut down Iran's nuclear capabilities and foment a popular rising that would lead to regime change. In fact, he argues that pursuing the latter goal may have backfired and strengthened the regime's power and fits into a larger pattern of American policy unintentionally aiding Iran, which Tierney wrote about in The Atlantic in 2018.

"The key point is that the regime is arguably in a stronger position now than it was when the war began," says Tierney. "And we saw that with the recent funeral of the killed supreme leader, with apparently a lot of nationwide support. We've ended up in a campaign that has not achieved the core goals. Iran is stronger, although it has been punished, and the U.S. is trying to get out of the ditch."

Regarding the future of the conflict and its potential end, Tierney believes the negotiations will be drawn out, pointing to previous examples in American history of diplomatic difficulty.

"It took five years to negotiate a way out of the Vietnam War. We spent three months in Vietnam just negotiating the shape of the table around which we would negotiate with the other side. And similarly, it took years to get out of Afghanistan. So this is not going to be a quick process. We're only in the middle of the movie here, and we've got to be ready for a difficult process of extrication."

Dominic Tierney is a professor of political science, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic.

He completed his PhD in international politics at Oxford University in 2003, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University and the Olin Institute at Harvard University before coming to Swarthmore in 2005. In 2008-2009, he was a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.