Americans repudiated President Donald Trump this week, and 74 percent declared that the Iran War was a major or crucial factor in their vote, leading Vice President JD Vance to blame the historic GOP wipeout on both the conflict and support for Israel. With Benjamin Netanyahu also facing a collapse of his coalition and reportedly deploying intelligence services to delegitimize the recent election, a new article in Middle East Policy analyzes how the Israeli prime minister’s drive for power sparked the unprecedented attacks on Iran and how scholars should rationally study irrational policies—especially ones that directly affect them.
This analysis, “The Scholar’s Dilemma: Rational Study of Irrational Wars” by Annie Tracy Samuel, is outside our paywall and available in our special issue, October 7 Legacies: Regional War, Global Crisis. The collection features investigations of Netanyahu’s fostering pre-October 7 security lapses and ginning up enthusiasm for war with Iran, as well as global crises triggered by the Iran War, the clerical hold on power in Tehran, and the Palestinian struggle for autonomy. Fifteen of the 17 articles are outside our paywall and free to read. Also available are our Fall 2026 double issue and our special issue commemorating a quarter century since the 9/11 attacks. If you find this article useful, please forward it to others you believe will benefit. You can register to receive our weekly updates here. And please follow us on the social media platforms X and LinkedIn.
As Israel launched its June 2025 bombing campaign against Iran, Tracy Samuel, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, found herself at a unique vantage point. An American expert on the Islamic Republic—who has close family in Israel, lived there for years, studied and married there, and became an Israeli citizen—she faced aerial attacks during a stay in Tel Aviv.
We found ourselves stunned and transfixed as the interceptors of Israel’s multi-layered air defense system cut across the night sky in steady succession. Then, shifting our gaze from west to east, we saw the dim lights of the interceptors give way to the piercing glare of ballistic missiles shooting directly toward us. We turned and ran for the bomb shelter, just as the explosions gave off deafening booms and the building shook violently beneath us. We repeated this routine multiple times a day for the next week and a half, with each round making it clearer how lucky we were to be alive, especially as our neighbors began dying.
This experience of becoming a target of Tehran’s retaliation led Tracy Samuel to more clearly understand the escalating crisis as not simply a matter of international relations but as a symptom of contemporary politics in Israel. “Only then was I forced to fully digest what my scholarship had told me to be true but what the imperative of living life as normally as possible makes it all too easy to lose sight of: protecting Israelis is not what the Israeli government prioritizes,” she writes. “Individual Israelis can be and are regularly and readily sacrificed in the name of the state and its regional aspirations.”
The analysis holds Netanyahu directly responsible for what Tracy Samuel terms “the paradox of the mission to keep Jews safe.” The prime minister “is driven not by the goal of making Israelis or Jews (or anyone else) safer,” she contends. “To stay in power and out of jail,” he compromises the security of Israelis “by convincing them that they face annihilation unless they allow him to lead them through an endless series of supposedly existential wars.”
Tracy Samuel maintains that the 12-day 2025 attacks and the Iran War “[blew] up…the diplomatic and institutional means for constraining the nuclear program, which have always been the only viable paths for achieving what bombing never could.” Recounting the effectiveness of diplomacy and the nuclear deal forged in 2015, she laments “the base, self-serving motivations that animate Trump’s actions, as well as Netanyahu’s sway over his thinking.” Although “the Islamic Republic wantonly violates the human rights of its people,” she argues,
foreign-imposed regime change and the aggressive use of military force are immoral, illegal, ineffective, and counterproductive. Neither the Islamic Republic nor its nuclear program can be bombed into submission or nonexistence. Killing Iranians is not saving Iranians. And killing Iranians is not saving Americans or Israelis.
Most important, Tracy Samuel reflects on the responsibility of the scholar who finds herself subjected to the consequences of the decisions that are the stuff of her vocation:
What living through a war against Iran has reinforced is that the logic so central to scholarship must take account of the pervasive illogic of lived experience. Analysts must be reasoned and dispassionate. We must carefully and rationally interrogate the world with all of its contingency and complexity….While we cannot understand reality without acknowledging what is, we cannot critically assess it or draw out meaning without some sense of what should be.
October 7 Legacies: Regional War, Global Crisis
A Middle East Policy Special Issue
ISRAELI POLITICS AFTER 10/7
Free to read!
Paradigm Lock-In and Strategic Surprise: Explaining Israel’s October 7 Intelligence Failure
Ruth Hanau Santini | Andrea Novellis
Open access!
Israel’s Netanyahu Trap
Bulent Aras
THE US-IRAN WAR
Open access!
The Stability-Instability Paradox and the Evolving Balance of Terror in the Middle East
Thomas Juneau
Open access!
Signals, Red Lines, and Collision: The Israel-Iran Spiral and US Intervention
Buğra Sari
Crisis in the Strait of Hormuz: What Lies Ahead?
Gawdat Bahgat
Open access!
Visions of Gulf Security in an Era of Uncertainty: Between External Alignment and Regional Autonomy
Rory Miller | Şaban Kardaş
Open access!
Trump’s Transactional Diplomacy: Breakthrough or Breakdown?
Guilain Denoeux | Robert Springborg
CAN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC SURVIVE?
Open access!
Iran’s Revolutionary Situation and Digital Authoritarianism: 1979 vs. 2026
Mohsen Askari
Open access!
Qatar and Iran: Market Access Under Geopolitical Conflict
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
Open access!
Between Ideology and Strategy: The Iranian Revolution and the Reconfiguration of Middle Eastern Security
Alabbas F. Alsudani
REGIONAL WAR, GLOBAL DISRUPTION
Open access!
Maritime Disruption in Yemen: The Making of a Hybrid Red Sea Order
Federico Donelli
Open access!
Russia’s Strategic Paradox: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Risks from the Iran War
Namig Abbasov | Emil S. Aslan
Free to read!
Russia and Iran: The Axis of Transactions Unraveled
Federico Manfredi Firmian
PALESTINE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTONOMY
Free to read!
Beyond Symbolism: The Effects of Palestinian State Recognition
Dalal Iriqat
Free to read!
‘I Thought I Would Die’: Testimony from Palestinian Women Jailed by Israel
Oqab Jabali | Saqer Jabali
New Political Actors in Palestine: The Digital Efficacy of Gen Z
Abdalraheem S.H. Shobaki | Mahmoud S.H. Shobaki
Free to read!
The Scholar’s Dilemma: Rational Study of Irrational Wars
Annie Tracy Samuel
BOOK REVIEWS
The Wretched of the Earth: Rashid Khalidi, Omer Bartov, and the Palestinian Tragedy
Review essay by Mohammed Ayoob
Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza; El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Reviewed by A.R. Joyce
Azizi, The Axis of Resistance
Reviewed by Mahmood Monshipouri
Lynch, America’s Middle East
Reviewed by Yasir Kuoti
Strand, Israel and the Gaza Strip since 1967
Reviewed by Abdulgani Bozkurt
Manfredi Firmian, War in Syria and the Middle East
Reviewed by Bahram P. Kalviri
Donelli, Power Competition in the Red Sea
Reviewed by Riccardo Gasco
Haberman and Swan, Regime Change
Review essay by A.R. Joyce