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The Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge, between December 1777 and June 1778, is the stuff of legend. Chased out of Philadelphia by the British Army, George Washington and over 12,000 American troops retreated to Valley Forge, where they spent six long months harried by hunger, disease and the bitter cold.

In this context of frayed nerves and short tempers, a scuffle arose when some of the native-born soldiers antagonized the Irish recruits by dragging an effigy of a “stuffed Paddy” through camp on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1778. The Irish, outraged at the sight of their patron saint being mocked, rose up to meet the challenge with their fists.

But George Washington quickly responded by claiming, “I, too, am a lover of St. Patrick’s Day.” He ordered an extra glass of grog for every man, “and thus all made merry and were good friends.”

By the late 1770s, people had been commemorating the anniversary of St. Patrick’s death – reputedly on March 17, 461 – for over a thousand years. Irish immigrants brought the tradition with them when they moved to North America, and officers in the Continental Army regularly used the holiday to bring glimmers of cheer to their cold and gloomy camps.

‘Till the nation is free’

In Morristown, New Jersey, in 1780, for example, Col. Francis Johnston insisted that “the celebration of (St. Patrick’s) Day should not pass by without having a little rum issued to the troops,” and he bought a small barrel to prove it. Accounts of the party were published in local newspapers.

“The whole army celebrated the day with that decorum which is characteristic of them, and which evidenced their attachment and unfeigned regard to the valiant Irish nation,” said an eyewitness. The soldiers’ dual loyalties to Ireland and America were reflected in the toasts they drank that day.

Cheers were raised for George Washington and “the American army,” but also for Irish patriots such as Henry Grattan and Henry Flood. “May the field pieces of Ireland bellow,” proclaimed one soldier, “till the nation is free.”

As the author of a forthcoming book on the global history of St. Patrick’s Day, the wartime popularity of St. Patrick’s Day does not strike me as surprising. Irish immigrants made up a sizable fraction of George Washington’s Continental Army during the American Revolution, partly because the war came on the heels of the first wave of modern mass migration from Ireland, which lasted from the early 1720s to the mid-1770s.

As a result, Irish newcomers, especially Presbyterians from Ulster, were overrepresented in the Middle Colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and New Jersey when the war broke out. Their disproportionate enlistment accounts for the fact that Pennsylvania’s collection of infantry regiments and companies was nicknamed the “Line of Ireland” during the conflict.

Yet focusing on Irish patriots tells only half the story of what St. Patrick’s Day meant during the Revolutionary War era.

Plenty of Irishmen served as British redcoats throughout the war too.

‘Naturally gallant and loyal’

On March 17, 1779, 2½ years after capturing New York, the British army published a recruiting advertisement in the city’s Royal Gazette newspaper.

“All Gentlemen Natives of Ireland are invited to join the Volunteers of Ireland, commanded by their Countryman, Lord Rawdon,” the ad announced. Francis Rawdon, the scion of a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant family from County Down in the north of Ireland, was a dynamic army officer in his mid-20s and the perfect figurehead for this new regiment.

Later that evening, these Irish loyalists celebrated St. Patrick’s Day “with their accustomed Hilarity,” noted a local journalist. Lord Rawdon’s Volunteers of Ireland regiment led the way with a parade, followed by a banquet.

“The soldierly Appearance of the men, their Order of March, Hand in Hand, being all NATIVES OF IRELAND, had a striking effect,” gushed the New-York Gazette. Being “naturally gallant and loyal,” the Irish will always “crowd with Ardour to stand forth in the Cause of their King, of their Country, and of real, honest, general Liberty.”

To be Irish in New York in 1779 meant being loyal to the crown. But when the British evacuated New York four years later, they took their red coats – and their loyalist St. Patrick’s Days – with them.

Irish America’s many stories

In time, memories of these pro-British parades and banquets proved unseemly in the fledgling republic. They were subsequently written out of most histories of Irish America. The official website of the world-famous Manhattan St. Patrick’s Day parade, for example, makes no mention of these loyalist processions.

Yet taking a closer look at these forgotten chapters of history is important because it reminds us that there has always been a debate over what it means to truly “be Irish” in America.

In the 1770s, it was a conflict over loyalty to the crown. Today, it can mean disagreements about abortion, gun control or immigrants’ rights.

The truth lies buried in the many stories of Irish America.

Cian T. McMahon received funding for this project through a Hibernian Research Award from the Center for the Study of American Catholicism (CUSHWA).

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.

“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, President Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.

Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.

Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.

For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.

A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.

As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.

Two historical examples

In the 1930s and ’40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.

Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.

With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.

No anti-Iran narrative

Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?

Two things.

First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime – the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.

Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.

By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.

In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.

And in recent years, Tehran has lost a major ally in Syria and witnessed its proxy network all but collapse. Iran has also faced crippling economic conditions and historic protests at home.

As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.

Missing a good story

The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.

In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.

Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.

Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.

No wonder 54% of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran and 60% of Americans say Trump has no clear plan for Iran. Also, 60% disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy in general.

By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63% in early 2003.

Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.

Partisan divides run deep – Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.

The way out

If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.

When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.

When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.

Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.

And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.

With Trump’s Iran war, gas prices keep rising, more soldiers are likely to die, and stocks are highly volatile.

Backing down makes a lot of sense. History confirms that.

Charles Walldorf is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

By all measures, the ability to see what the government is up to in the United States has plummeted to new depths since the beginning of the second Trump administration.

For National Sunshine Week in 2025, I wrote about secrecy creep, the adoption of federal secrecy protections implemented by state and local authorities. In Florida and throughout the United States, this threatens the public’s right to be informed about its government.

A year later, this creep toward secrecy has become an all-out slide.

As director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, I track the state of government transparency in the U.S. What has changed since January 2025 is unprecedented.

Clouds in the Sunshine State

Florida is a good example of this slide. Once viewed as a leader in transparency, the Sunshine State now charges exorbitant copy fees that discourage average people from requesting public records.

According to the nonprofit MuckRock, 24% of public records requests in Florida come with a copy fee, averaging US$1,623. Only Oregon charges fees more often, at 28% of the time. Fees are intended to help agencies cover the cost of large requests, but they tend to be arbitrary and are often used as a way to get pesky people to go away.

And that’s assuming you even get the information you want. One of my own studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time, placing the state 31st in the nation.

In 2025, MuckRock put the percentage dipping lower, at 35%. In March 2026, it was at 34%.

In Florida, more and more government agencies are thwarting the public’s right to know, including attempts to hide the details behind Alligator Alcatraz, the temporary immigrant detention center built in the Florida Everglades in June 2025. The state’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, office has pushed cities to be more transparent while withholding its own records.

Members of the state Legislature are attempting to strengthen the public records law. This would improve transparency in Florida’s state government, but I’d argue it doesn’t go far enough. Other states, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, have implemented stronger laws, including independent enforcement of their sunshine laws, to ensure their governments comply.

It starts at the top

State and local governments appear to be taking their cues from the federal government.

President Donald Trump’s administration heralds itself as the most transparent in history, pointing to the president’s willingness to talk informally to the press or directly to the public through social media.

While that may be one definition of transparency, the federal government’s willingness to provide documents that show what the government is doing – not just what it says it is doing – has been eviscerated under the second Trump administration. Examples include:

• Refusing to provide tax returns, again, unlike every other president in modern history, and then suing the IRS for $10 billion when some returns were leaked.

• Removing government websites and databases.

• Firing the national archivist and the director of the Office of Information Policy, the agency within the U.S. Department of Justice that oversees government agencies’ compliance with requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

• Firing and pushing out experienced staffers assigned to handle FOIA requests as part of the 2025 U.S. DOGE purges. This led some agencies, such as the Department of Energy, to apply unorthodox practices, including closing out pending requests.

• Axing the new Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, which was launched to find ways of improving FOIA.

• Pulling out of the Open Government Partnership, which the U.S. helped found in 2011 to foster transparency around the globe.

Typically, the Department of Justice releases annual statistics on FOIA requests every March. When I examined initial reports posted in January, when just 11 agencies had provided their reports, backlogs – that is, requests that remain unresolved after a year – had increased 67% from the previous fiscal year. The time to process simple requests nearly doubled.

Plummeting to historical depths

In order to understand how secrecy in the United States now compares to historical precedent, I reached out to people who have researched freedom of information for decades, some going back to the 1970s.

I asked them a simple question: How does the current state of affairs in freedom of information compare historically?

Here is what they told me:

Jane Kirtley is a longtime FOIA scholar from the University of Minnesota who wrote in 2006, “The Bush administration’s contempt for the public’s right to know amounts to an organized assault on freedom of information that is unprecedented since the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act 40 years ago.”

Today, in comparison? “Abysmal,” she wrote to me via email. “It was abundantly clear from the moment Elon Musk and his ‘musketeers’ invaded and pillaged government electronic records that we have entered a new era of deletion, obfuscation, fabrication and utter contempt for the concept of data integrity and the public’s right to know.”

Thomas Susman, who helped craft the 1974 FOIA amendments and currently assists the American Bar Association, wrote in 2005 that increasing delays and backlogs threatened FOIA’s intended purpose.

In February 2026, he wrote to me that the “arc of the FOIA universe has for six decades bent toward greater public access to government information − until now. If ‘democracy dies in darkness’ (according to The Washington Post’s official slogan), America’s democracy is threatened with becoming dead meat. We’ve survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, Vietnam, Watergate and more. If we fight back hard enough, this too shall pass, though not quickly, and likely with lasting scars.”

Patrice McDermott directed Open the Government from 2006 to 2017 and pointed in 2007 to an underlying tension throughout government: “the ability – and willingness – to harness the promise of digital information for public access and accountability while not abusing its potential for control of that information.”

Today, she writes that, as Benjamin Franklin put it, we “have a Republic … if (we) can keep it” and are committed to the fight for our constitutional form of government.

Perhaps advances can be made to reverse the secrecy trend and carry out the intentions of the Freedom of Information Act, as expressed by Lyndon B. Johnson upon its adoption nearly 60 years ago: “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.”

David Cuillier has received funding from the Democracy Fund and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study the state of freedom of information. He is a board member of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and he coordinates national Sunshine Week.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The war that the U.S. and Israeli governments launched against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, is unprecedented in its scope across the Middle East. With the Arab Gulf states under Iranian attack, and Israel targeting Iran’s militia ally Hezbollah, even experts on the Middle East like me cannot predict the war’s course and especially its likely political consequences.

Still, to better understand this complex situation, I am paying particular attention to four major questions. How these specific issues play out will shed light on how this war might end and what it will mean for Iran, the rest of the Middle East and the world.

What does the US hope to accomplish?

One leader who began the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been dead set for decades on crippling, and ideally toppling, Iran’s Islamic Republic. Iran has a long track record of sponsoring militant threats to Israel and American Arab allies.

Yet U.S. President Donald Trump has not been clear on what the goals of this war are and has said even less about what conditions would lead the U.S. to cease hostilities.

Early signs are that Iran’s capacity to project force across the Middle East is now diminished. What amount of damage to Iran’s military might be enough for the White House to believe that its mission was accomplished? Or does Trump expect Iran’s current authoritarian, theocratic political system to be removed, and for Iranians to establish a government more favorable toward American interests?

Any clarity from Washington on the true aims of this war will help observers understand under what circumstances it can end and what future Iranian-American relations might look like.

How will the war affect Gulf states’ short-term or long-term relations with Washington?

The U.S. has long prioritized deep economic and strategic relationships with the Gulf Arab states, especially Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These relationships have grown closer under Trump’s presidency.

So far, Iranian attacks have not caused significant casualties or damage to oil or commercial infrastructure in Gulf Arab states, collectively the source of 10% of the oil used in the U.S.

Indeed, some Gulf Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, already collaborate enough with Israel that being subjected to attacks from Iran has solidified their current alliance with it and the U.S.

At the same time, Gulf Arab states value long-term political stability to preserve their status as major exporters of oil and natural gas, centers of global commerce and trade and global travel hubs. While each country has its own geopolitical priorities, none wants conflicts that leave it vulnerable.

Iran’s military strategy seems designed to raise the economic and human costs for Gulf Arabs who support the U.S. and Israel.

Greater pain for citizens of the Arab Gulf could fuel leaders there to pressure Washington to stop the war. It’s also possible that Gulf leaders will rethink or rebalance their relations with the United States or Israel should the end state of the war undermine their sense of security.

Such a rethink is more likely if the war continues for weeks and creates major shocks to the global economy. Even if the war ends well for Gulf leaders, by ending concerns about Iranian regional aggression, Washington’s willingness to put Gulf states in the path of destabilizing conflict may lead them to seek less alignment with the U.S.

Who will likely rule Iran?

Mojtaba Khamenei, the hard-line son of the previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has just been named his father’s replacement. This is a clear signal that Iran is not yet moving toward the more cooperative government that the Trump administration wants. But with the fluid state of the war and its effects in Iran, perhaps the most important question is who will ultimately govern the country. Given Iran’s large size, predicting a long-term political outcome at this point makes little sense.

However, several factors do not bode well for a democratically representative government that could benefit ordinary Iranians. First, the Islamic Republic has been in power for decades, going to great lengths to prevent unified political opposition. Iranians’ recent waves of protests have not meant consensus on a future political order.

Second, Iran’s political system may still have support, including among members of the clergy and army. Third, the Trump administration may hope that Iranian ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, may attack or dislodge the remnants of the government. Yet such groups lack the level of military force to ensure success.

For these reasons, the current government or a similarly authoritarian one may well remain in place after this war.

How do Iranians and people throughout the region view the war?

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan runs this year from Feb. 18 to mid-March. It changes the basic rhythm of life for most Muslims to one in which they fast from dawn to dusk and enjoy family and communal festivity late into the night. Throughout Iran and the Arab Gulf countries, these longtime practices have been disrupted by war and nighttime bombings.

Religion is not the primary driver of this war. Still, that war began during a sacred time is one example of an issue that might influence how the people in the middle of this conflict experience it. A less militaristic, more democratic Iranian government is a desirable outcome from a devastating war launched in violation of international law.

How popular attitudes in the region unfold will matter both to Iran’s political outcome and to whether Iran has better relations with Washington in the future.

For now, it is hard to know whether Iranians’ support for the government is growing during a major foreign attack, as it did when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein began a war against Iran in 1980. Certainly, a large swath of Iranians are content with the end of decades of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stifling rule.

Gulf Arabs may be frustrated with Washington and Tel Aviv for starting the war but also want Iran to end up with a less militant government. Most Lebanese have no love for Israel. Yet many also blame their local Iran-backed Hezbollah faction for dragging their country into the current war.

The experiences and views of these diverse populations matter. Trump has launched a war that is different from earlier American wars in the Middle East, both in the number of countries directly experiencing attacks and in the degree of direct coordination with Israel.

In addition to this war’s illegitimacy under international law, Washington has a long record of failing to achieve political results favorable to American interests after using military force in the Middle East. Given this, it is hard to believe that Operation Epic Fury will be an epic success in the long run.

However, how these four questions come to be answered in the weeks ahead will provide better indication of what this new war’s political consequences will actually be.

David Mednicoff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

It has been said that trust is like glass: Once it is shattered, nothing will ever be the same. In the case of the enduring hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States over the past 47 years, even this metaphor may be an understatement.

The tone of the relationship is indicative of this fact.

In 2020, Iran’s supreme leader denounced President Donald Trump as a “clown” who only pretends to support the Iranian people while ultimately plunging a “poisonous dagger” into their backs.

And in a U.S. version of this hostility, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Feb. 23, 2026, about the president’s approach to Iran: “I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated,’ because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t … I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated.”

The war that began on Feb. 28, 2026, hews to a familiar but dangerous pattern. Deep, historical mistrust, incompatible strategic interests, domestic political constraints on both sides, miscommunication and misperception, zero-sum thinking and repeated diplomatic overreach gradually pushed the relationship between Iran and the U.S. toward open conflict.

Rhetoric, not reality

When Tehran refused to yield to Trump’s demands, he described Iranian leaders in blunt terms: “They’re sick people. They’re mentally ill. Sick people. They are angry. They are crazy. They are sick.”

For a deeper understanding of Iran, policymakers in Washington could have looked to the insights of John W. Limbert, a distinguished diplomat with four decades of experience in Iranian affairs and a hostage during the Iran hostage crisis.

In 2008, as part of a U.S. Institute of Peace study of Iranian negotiating style, Limbert outlined 15 principles for Americans seeking successful negotiations with Iranian counterparts. Among his most important observations was that each side tends to assume the worst about the other, viewing its adversary as “infinitely devious, hostile, and duplicitous.”

Little evidence suggests that such hard-earned wisdom has informed recent rhetoric.

Instead, American leaders’ and media’s discussions of Iran over the past few decades have often relied on a familiar narrative: the portrayal of Middle Eastern leaders as irrational or “lunatic” figures − first, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Saddam Hussein, followed by Moammar Gadhafi, Bashar Assad, and now Ali Khamenei.

This narrative conveniently overlooks inconvenient facts.

Getting to breakdown

It was Trump who withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran during his first term. It was also the United States that during renewed negotiations in 2025 and 2026 chose to bomb Iranian targets twice while talks were still underway.

Nor were the negotiations ever strictly bilateral. There was always an unoccupied chair at the table metaphorically reserved for a ghost participant: Israel. In my view, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu skillfully used political leverage and diplomatic pressure to shape the process publicly and privately.

When it came to Iran, Trump often violated a basic principle of diplomacy: asking Iran to concede without any reciprocity. Meanwhile, Netanyahu would repeatedly move the goal posts − asserting that Iran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, insisting it had no right to enrich uranium on its own soil, demanding the dismantling of its nuclear infrastructure, calling for the elimination of its ballistic missile capability, and ultimately advocating regime change.

The extent to which Israeli pressure shaped successive American policies is a question historians and investigative journalists will continue to debate.

Yet responsibility for the breakdown cannot be placed on Washington and Jerusalem alone. Iranian leaders contributed significantly to making the conflict with the United States so intractable.

A corrupt, repressive and economically struggling regime relied heavily on performative anti-American politics for domestic legitimacy. Tehran matched American and Israeli rigidity with intransigence and strategic overreach of its own.

Limiting inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, failing to provide credible answers about past nuclear activities, constructing secret facilities and attempting to negotiate from a position of weakness ultimately proved disastrous when dealing with an impatient and impulsive American president.

The unknown unknowns

What comes next?

If regime change does not occur in Tehran, the two sides will almost certainly find themselves negotiating again once the fog of war dissipates.

The hostility between them will not disappear, and diplomatic niceties may become rarer. Yet diplomacy rarely requires trust; it requires interests.

I believe that future talks are therefore likely to be transactional rather than transformational. Technical and legal parameters will still need to be negotiated. Hawks and doves will continue to compete for influence in both capitals.

And the oldest rule of bargaining will remain unchanged: When you lack leverage, acquire it – then negotiate.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The United States military achieved every objective it set when it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Decapitation: Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and hanged. Air dominance: total, within days. Regime collapse: The Iraqi government fell in 21 days.

Now, consider Iraq more than 20 years after the U.S.-Iraq war. Iraq is still an authoritarian state governed by political parties with deep institutional ties to Tehran. Iranian-backed militias operate openly on Iraqi soil – some holding official positions within the Iraqi state.

The country the U.S. spent US$2 trillion and 4,488 American lives to remake is, by any reasonable measure, within the sphere of Iran’s influence.

As an international security scholar specializing in nuclear security and alliance politics in the Middle East, I have tracked the pattern of U.S. military success across multiple cases.

But the military outcome and the political outcome are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where wars fail.

Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most confident in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming force and no coherent theory of governance for what came next.

The lesson, then and now, is not that empires cannot destroy. It’s that destruction and governance are entirely different enterprises. And confusing them is how empires exhaust themselves.

The U.S. military can destroy the Iranian regime. The question that the Iraq precedent answers – with brutal clarity – is what fills the power vacuum when it does?

The military and political ledger

In April 2003, American L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which served as a transitional government, and issued two orders that would define the next two decades.

Order 1 dissolved the ruling Baath Party and removed all senior party members from their government positions, purging the administrative class that ran its ministries, hospitals and schools. Order 2 disbanded the Iraqi army but did not disarm it. Approximately 400,000 soldiers went home with their weapons and without their paychecks.

Washington had just handed the insurgency – the Sunni-led armed resistance that would turn into a decade-long war – its recruiting pool. The logic behind Bremer’s de-Baathification was intuitive: You cannot build a new Iraq with the people who built the old one. The logic was also catastrophic

Political scientists have long observed that countries are held together not by ideology but by organized coercion. That is, by the bureaucratic machinery, institutional memory and trained professionals who keep the lights on and the water running. Destroy that machinery, and you do not have a clean slate. You have a collapsed state, and collapsed states do not stay empty of leadership.

They fill, and they fill with whoever has the most organizational capacity on the ground. Iran had been building that capacity in Iraq since the 1980s, cultivating Shia political networks, exile parties and militia groups during and after the Iran-Iraq War and beyond with the explicit goal of ensuring a post-Saddam Iraq would never again threaten Iranian security.

Tehran did not need to build infrastructure in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, because it had spent the previous two decades building it. When the old order collapsed, Iran’s networks were ready.

The opposition the U.S. had cultivated in Iraq – Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress – had Washington’s ear but no Iraqi constituency. They had not governed the country, or built networks inside it.

The lesson is that military success created the precise conditions for political catastrophe, and that chasm is where American strategy has gone to die – in Iraq and in Libya, where the Obama administration helped bring about regime change in 2011, but where political instability has endured since. And perhaps now in Iran.

The vacuum is not neutral

The fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of American regime-change strategy is the assumption that destroying the existing order creates space for something better.

It does not.

It creates space for whoever is best organized, best armed and most willing to fill it. In Iraq, that was Iran.

The question now is who fills it in Iran itself.

In Iran, the group that meets all three criteria – organized, armed and willing – is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Revolutionary Guard is not simply a military institution. It controls an estimated 30% to 40% of the Iranian economy and runs construction conglomerates, telecommunications companies and petrochemical firms. And it has cultivated a parallel state infrastructure for decades.

Since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death at the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, the Revolutionary Guard has taken effective control of decision-making. As one Iran expert told NBC News: “Even if they replace the supreme leader, what is left of the regime is the IRGC.”

The succession confirmed it: Mojtaba Khamenei, with deep ties to the Revolutionary Guard, was named supreme leader on March 8, 2026. It’s a Revolutionary Guard-backed dynastic succession that represents maximum continuity with the old regime, not regime change.

You cannot dismantle the Revolutionary Guard without collapsing the economy, and a collapsed economy does not produce a transition government; it produces a failed state. Washington has already run that experiment in Libya.

You cannot leave the Revolutionary Guard in place without leaving the regime’s coercive core intact. There is no clean surgical option of dropping bombs, killing certain people and declaring it a new day in Iran.

The Iranian opposition in exile, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq; the monarchists who support the return of the late-shah’s son to lead the country; and the various democratic factions all present the same problem Chalabi did in 2003: Washington access, no domestic legitimacy.

The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq is listed as a terrorist organization by Iran and is widely despised inside the country. The monarchist movement has not governed Iran since 1979, and its corrupt, despotic leader was overthrown in the revolution. The democratic reform networks that had been building momentum inside Iran were not saved by the U.S. strikes. The regime had already crushed the movement in January, detaining and killing thousands.

Decades of research on rally-around-the-flag effects confirm what common sense suggests: External attack fuses regime and nation even when citizens despise their leaders. Iranians who were chanting against the supreme leader are now watching foreign bombs fall on their cities.

Iraq in 2003 had 25 million people, a military degraded by 12 years of sanctions, and no active nuclear program. Iran has 92 million people, proxy networks that would not disappear if Tehran fell – in fact, they would activate – and a stockpile of over 880 pounds of highly enriched uranium that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been unable to fully account for since the 2025 U.S. and Israeli strikes.

The question Washington hasn’t answered

Who governs 92 million Iranians?

President Donald Trump has said whoever governs Iran must receive Washington’s approval. But a veto is not a vision.

Approving or rejecting candidates from Washington requires a functioning political process, a legitimate transitional authority and a population willing to accept an American imprimatur on their leadership — none of which exists.

Washington has a preference; it does not have a plan. If the objective is eliminating the nuclear program, then why does Iran still hold an unverified stockpile of weapon-usable uranium eight months after the 2025 strikes? The strikes have not resolved the proliferation question. They have made it more dangerous and less tractable.

If the objective is regional stability, why has every round of strikes produced a wider regional war?

Washington has no answer to any of these questions – only a theory of destruction.

Farah N. Jan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When Secretary of Defense James Mattis addressed the intensification of U.S. combat operations against the Islamic State group in 2017, he assured the American public of his commitment to “get the strategy right” while maintaining “the rules of engagement” to “protect the innocent.”

Mattis’ professional tone was a stark contrast to Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks following the first days of the joint U.S.-Israeli combat operations in Iran.

On March 2, 2026, after bragging about the awe-inspiring lethality of U.S. “B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles,” Hegseth casually brushed aside concerns about long-term geopolitical strategy, declaring “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win.”

Admonishing the press for anything less than total assent, he commanded, “to the media outlets and political left screaming ‘endless wars:’ Stop. This is not Iraq.”

Two days later, Hegseth gloated about “dominance” and “control,” while asserting that the preoccupation of the “fake news media” with casualties was motivated by liberal media bias and hatred of President Trump.

“Tragic things happen; the press only wants to make the president look bad,” he said. He dismissed concerns about the rules of engagement, declaring that “this was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, as it should be.”

I’m a communication scholar who has studied MAGA rhetoric for a decade. I have observed how Hegseth and other officials in the second Trump administration refuse to abide by what recurring rhetorical situations – urgent public matters that compel speech to audiences capable of being influenced – typically demand of public officials.

The theme of this administration is that no one is going to tell it what to say or how to say it. It will be encumbered neither by norms nor the exigencies that compel speech in a democratic society.

The big man

When the U.S. goes to war, the public expects the president and the defense secretary to convince them of the appropriateness of the action. They do this by detailing the justification for military action, but also by addressing the public in a manner that conveys the seriousness and competence required for such a grave task as waging war.

But during the first week of the Iran war, Hegseth’s press briefings deviated from the measured tone expected from high-ranking military officials.

Hegseth flippantly employed villainous colloquialism – “they are toast and they know it,” “we play for keeps,” and “President Trump got the last laugh” – delivered with a combative tone that communicated masculine self-assurance.

Many observers were taken aback by his haughty tone, hypermasculine preoccupation with domination, giddiness about violence and casual attitude toward death.

During Trump’s first term, this penchant for rule-breaking was by and large isolated to the president, whose transgressions were part of his populist appeal.

Although Trump’s first cabinet members agreed on most political objectives, they attempted to rein in what they saw as the president’s more dangerous whims.

But with loyalty as the new bona fide qualification for administration officials, Trump’s second cabinet is populated with a large contingent of right and far-right media personalities like Hegseth, including Kash Patel, Sean Duffy and Mehmet Oz.

The anti-institutional ethos of far-right media explains why these officials refuse to conform to “elite” expectations and instead speak in a manner that is bombastic, outrageous and perverse.

Among them, there is little reverence for what they may perceive of as emasculating rules of tradition and politeness in a media marketplace where “owning,” “dominating,” and “triggering” your enemy is precious currency. Far-right media personalities are adept at commanding attention with showmanship and swagger.

Trump appears to have chosen Hegseth for precisely this reason: He performs the role of the big man to perfection.

‘Kill talk’

Hegseth’s language choices and petulant tone do not demonstrate an ignorance of what rhetorical situations demand of him; instead, they reflect a refusal to be emasculated by such cumbersome norms.

When making statements about the first week of the war, Hegseth grinned as he delivered action-movie one-liners, like “turns out the regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.”

Hegseth engaged in what is known as “kill talk,” a verbal strategy, typically directed at new military recruits, that denies the enemy’s humanity and disguises the terrible costs of violence. His repetition of words like “death,” “killing,” “destruction,” “control,” “warriors” and “dominance” framed violence in heroic terms that are detached from the realities of war.

In my view, Hegseth addressed the public as a squad leader addresses military recruits. Hegseth apparently delighted in dispensing death and elevating and glorifying war. He said virtually nothing of long-term strategy beyond “winning.”

In the MAGA media world, winning is really all that matters. If winning is the only goal, then war is, by profound inference, a game, a test of masculine fortitude.

This point was made clear when the White House posted a video that interspersed footage of airstrikes on Iran with “killstreak animation” from the popular video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. In the game, when a player kills multiple opponents without also dying, they are rewarded with the ability to conduct a missile strike to exterminate an opposing team. Again, this message gamifies violence and obscures the destructive toll of war.

Informed by the contemptuous hypermasculinity of far-right media culture, all this taboo behavior and glorified portrayals of death convey one fundamental message: When the public most needs explanation and justification for the actions of their government, the powerful owe the public neither explanation – nor comfort.

Casey Ryan Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration’s aggressive policies on immigration are receiving pushback not just on Capitol Hill but across the country. Democratic leaders in multiple states are refusing to cooperate with immigration arrests.

In response, the federal government is refusing to share evidence with state investigators in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal officers while protesting immigration enforcement in Minneapolis.

Throughout U.S. history, there have been many moments of conflict between the federal and state governments, such as on slavery, racial segregation, school testing requirements, health care, abortion and climate change. Conversely, there has also been a long history of cooperation between the different levels of government in matters such as disaster relief, law enforcement and antiterrorism efforts.

But what happens when the various states and the federal government see the same legal issue differently? Which side wins in a dispute? This is an ongoing and open question, as evidenced by the frequent lawsuits being filed against Trump administration policies by state attorneys general.

As a legal scholar, I study issues related to constitutional law, including federalism, or the division of power between the various levels of government in the U.S. system. Ultimately, the question of who prevails when there’s a dispute depends on whether the issue is more national or local in scope. It may also matter whether the issue affects fundamental rights, which no government may justly infringe.

Layers of authority

The framers of the Constitution saw the division of power between the states and federal government as part of the U.S. system of checks and balances. Just as the judicial, executive and legislative branches check each other, so do the different levels of government. “The true barriers of our liberty in this country are our state governments,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1811.

Still, it’s easy to assume that the federal government has greater power. The U.S. Constitution states that federal laws are “the supreme Law of the Land.” This is a model known as vertical federalism – in essence, putting the federal government above the states and localities.

There are areas of law where that framework clearly prevails. For example, immigration is an issue that the Constitution places squarely under the authority of the federal government. States cannot nullify, or invalidate, federal law. That is vertical federalism.

But the 10th Amendment says “powers not delegated to the United States … are reserved to the States respectively.” There are areas where states retain authority and the relationship between the levels of government is more horizontal, or flat or equal.

Consider cannabis. In 1996, California voters approved a ballot initiative making their state the first to allow the medical use of marijuana since prohibition started in the early 1900s. This was despite the fact that federal law viewed all cannabis as contraband. But California determines its own criminal code.

Californians could not stop the federal government from enforcing a valid federal law in their state, but that did not mean that California – or the vast majority of other states that have since passed their own medical or recreational marijuana measures – have to participate in a federal policy choice.

Federal agencies have continued occasional cannabis raids in California. But for state law enforcement officials, failing to punish a person for the medical use of cannabis is not a federal crime. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot force a state “to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program.” That is horizontal federalism.

Constraints on all governments

The federal government is limited to its enumerated powers – which is to say, the powers spelled out directly by the U.S. Constitution. But states possess “police powers,” which is a broader authority to regulate health, safety and morality.

The federal government is responsible for foreign policy and regulating interstate commerce. But states and localities regulate vaccine mandates, police and fire services, and operate or oversee water and sewer systems, as well as taking stances on moral issues, including alcohol and gambling, due to their potential to cause harm.

But both the federal government and the states are limited by the Constitution. Neither can justly violate the freedom of the press, for example, under the First Amendment.

And the reality is that, at least at this point in history, there is no neat division between federal and state authority on a broad range of issues. The federal government, for example, pays for the bulk of interstate highway construction. But those roads are actually paved by states.

When the federal government is paying a share of the cost of carrying out its policies, the Supreme Court has ruled that it can, in fact, tell states what to do, such as enforcing a legal drinking age of 21 or risk a share of federal highway funds. But it has also found that federal demands on states can be unconstitutionally excessive or “coercive,” as with a mandate under the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid, which the court struck down, even though Washington was paying most of the bill.

Federalism and the question of which level of government has the ultimate say is often complex and messy. But for that reason, as the framers foresaw, it remains an important safeguard of liberty, preventing too much power from residing in one place.

Kenneth Michael White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, American citizens living in or visiting the Middle East found themselves stranded in countries facing bombing attacks by Iran. The State Department on March 2, 2026, urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave via “available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks.” But commercial air travel and airports were shut down in many of those places and the U.S. wasn’t offering to evacuate its citizens.

Media reports featuring frustrated and frightened Americans stuck in places where danger was mounting, as well as growing criticism that the U.S. hadn’t handled the situation well or according to normal procedure, led the State Department to scramble and send charter flights to evacuate U.S. nationals from a handful of countries.

The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed former ambassador Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to understand how such situations are normally handled – and how the current situation diverged from longstanding practices.

What is the customary way that the United States and the State Department deal with U.S. nationals who are abroad in an area that becomes dangerous?

Over my 35-year career, I was ambassador to a small country and I worked a lot on African affairs. But most of my time was spent in consular affairs, which is the part of the State Department that does this work. And over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve developed a model that works pretty well.

When you’re in a country with instability, what you want to do is to get the population of Americans down as small as you can. So the first thing that happens is you have some instability, and you tell Americans, “Listen, we advise against traveling here.” See if you can discourage everybody except missionaries or people whose employers really want them to go there to make money or people visiting family members, but get rid of the casual tourist.

Then, a little more time goes by and things start to get bad, and you say, “You should consider leaving.” And then, a little while later, the embassy gives its own employees and their families what they call “authorized departure,” which is, “It’s OK for you to go back to the U.S., and in fact we’ll help pay for it.” And we tell the public that, and we hope that that’ll help spur more people to leave.

And the step after that?

Next step: We order departure, where we tell parts of the embassy, “You’ve got to go home. You can’t make the decision to stay here, you and your kids go home.” And we tell the public that, and hopefully that makes the number of Americans remaining in the country smaller and smaller.

Then – and it doesn’t always happen – the last step is we evacuate. We say, “We’re getting our people out of here on planes, we’ve got space for you on the planes, you should have listened to us before.”

That’s the standard model. Unfortunately, it didn’t get followed very well this week.

What did you see this week, and how did it diverge from the normal procedure?

We went from zero to 60 very quickly. Look, the Mideast is unstable on a good day, but there had not been a new instability where people should be getting scared and going home. And then what happened was we launched the attack, and all of a sudden there was that instability.

Logically, you would think, there were two places that Americans should be getting out of. One was Iran, where we’ve told people not to be for many years. The other was Israel, because Israel is going to be attacked.

But no, the Iranians attacked over half a dozen countries. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got Americans who feel unsafe in places that have never really been considered unsafe, like Oman, Cyprus or Turkey.

So now you have a long list of countries where you want to encourage Americans to leave and where they want to leave. There’s some demand, and you haven’t got that drawdown, where it makes things smaller, and also you haven’t done anything about arranging charter flights or military flights to get them out. So they’re going to have to stay where they are and feel unsafe for X number of days.

That’s when this started generating news stories.

This led to lot of people calling a member of Congress, a lot of people talking to the press, saying, “We got to get us out of here.” That’ll continue until the evacuation is arranged. There’s a bit of an analogy to COVID. When COVID first took off, we had a lot of Americans stuck overseas. They wanted to get home to their families. They figured U.S. health care to be the best that’s available, and it took us awhile to arrange charter flights. It was a very expensive process to get everybody home. They just kind of had to hunker down. That’s where we are right now.

Do you think this problem that’s being faced by Americans in the Middle East now should have been anticipated by the State Department?

Yes and no. I think a big part of the problem here was that the Trump administration kept the knowledge of the impending attack to a very small circle of people for operational security reasons. You can’t launch a surprise attack if half of Washington knows about it.

You can see a scenario by which a very trusted State Department officer has to eventually talk to a charter plane company about chartering a whole bunch of planes. They’re going to figure out pretty quickly what’s going to happen, and then you’ve got a security leak.

At the same time, I think going back weeks and months, maybe people should have been arranging charter flights and military flights, kind of on spec so that you could flip the switch and get that going right away. They’re kind of starting from scratch this week.

You’ve got people who are stranded, afraid and can’t get on with their lives. What should happen next?

All these Iranian strikes, the casualty numbers aren’t high. So objectively speaking, I think that very few of the Americans over there are in actual, real danger.

But casual tourists do get afraid, and they don’t travel overseas that much. This may be their first time in the Mideast, and all of a sudden this is happening. They want out bad. They’re scared, whether, objectively speaking, they have a good reason to be scared or not. And it’s better for everybody – the U.S. embassy, the host country, for people in Washington – if we get them out of there and get them home.

This will sort itself out. There will be planes, we’ll get all the people out who want to get out, but it’s going to take at least a few days, maybe a week.

Donald Heflin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation