Six weeks into the Iran war, indirect peace negotiations appeared to have broken down due to recent Truth Social ultimatums by President Donald Trump. On Tuesday afternoon, the Collegian spoke to Associate Professor of Political Science Jacqueline McAllister, who served as a senior advisor in the United States Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice until its dissolution last July and was also recently featured in a faculty panel on the war, to better understand the historical moment.

In light of Tuesday night’s two-week ceasefire announcement, McAllister provided a supplementary comment to the interview in an email to the Collegian on Wednesday: “It is a tremendous relief that President Trump did not — as he put it — ‘end a civilization.’ Ceasefires are incredibly tenuous at baseline. The U.S.’s ceasefire with Iran is especially so given the Trump administration’s decision to renege on prior agreements (e.g., the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)) and negotiations with Iran (in June 2025 and then in February 2026, when the U.S. decided to launch military strikes while it was actively negotiating with Iran). […] The weeks ahead will be fraught and uncertain. Yet the stakes of striking an agreement have never been higher.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tadhg Sahutske (TS): How should Kenyon students understand this moment, six weeks into the war, from a political science perspective?

McAllister: I would argue from a political science perspective that we are at a critical juncture or an inflection point. The U.S. decision to invade Iran in the first place was extraordinary, and there’s no easy way to end it at this point. A lot of the ways that the international system worked until the present moment are being turned on its head. Historically, the U.S. has engaged in wars abroad, but has sought to legitimate those uses of force under international law and hew to particular forms of conduct, and we’re not doing that anymore. It’s a very uncertain and dangerous time, because we have unleashed forces that are not going to easily be put back in the bags. So it’s a big moment because it’s rewriting or attempting to upend a lot of the rules that have generated some — albeit imperfect — stability in our world. It’s going to be hard to dial it back.

TS: What impact is this going to have on Kenyon students? Is it mostly oil prices, or what else should be expected?

McAllister: I was talking to some of my professor friends on campus that are my age. When I was in college, we went into Iraq, and that decision dramatically impacted me. And having that play out at a time when your country goes to war with another country on dubious grounds, it really, at least for my part, altered my worldview in a pretty fundamental way. It changed the whole trajectory of my generation, just in terms of what we were paying attention to, how we viewed ourselves as Americans, what our role in the world was. In many ways, it set up my whole career and interest in political science. How can this happen? Why are we doing this? Is this the solution? And I think this conflict could be something similar for your generation. It’s a really big moment in world politics that’s showing a pretty big shift from what came before, and is going to have very dramatic consequences. We have had some casualties so far, but who knows how far this is going to go? It’s already costing the U.S. tremendous amounts of money, which is going to eat into long-term opportunities for your generation, not to mention my own. And I just felt like, after the Iraq war, it created a series of things that we never quite recovered from. There are a lot of downstream consequences, and it will be no different for this. So, yeah, I think it’s a big moment for views of the world and long-term opportunities and prospects and not to mention prices in the short term.

TS: The conflict of this war began with the rhetoric of annihilating Iran’s nuclear capability. But for a country like Iran, is increasing its nuclear capability a rational choice? Is that the factor for international sovereignty?

McAllister: From Iran’s perspective, if they’d had a nuclear weapon, the United States would not have done what it did. So in a way, I do think this incentivizes other states to get a nuclear weapon. It’s the one thing that can deter the United States from intervening in your territory. I know after the strikes last summer, they didn’t necessarily ramp things up, but the reporting was that there was a greater view of the need to have a nuclear weapon.

I think in some ways it is sending a powerful signal to others in the system that if the U.S. is going to take these kinds of actions, the one tool that can keep it from affecting you is having a nuclear weapon. So yeah, I think we are going to see a problem with nuclear weapons proliferation.

TS: I think it was sometime last year [that] the prime minister of Canada gave a speech about the end of the rules-based international order.

McAllister: The rupture speech, yeah. It was [the] Munich Security Conference in January of this year.

TS: Well, do you think the rules-based international order is breaking down?

McAllister: I think it is being severely strained and tested. I think having the U.S. at the center of the rules-based order, that part of it is definitely breaking down. I think the rules and the world are being challenged and maybe creatively destroyed.

I think fundamentally these rules that govern the international system, about the use of force and conduct in times of war and core human rights principles have a lot of constituencies that support them, and it’s been a really long, drawn-out fight to build up these principles in international law, as unsatisfactory as they may be. And given that long history, I don’t think they are going to go away. But I think the U.S. role in enforcing that system under this administration has gone entirely out the window. So, having the U.S. as a guarantor of that system is gone unless there are major changes within the United States. Donald Trump himself is on the record saying that he does not acknowledge the authority of international law. He sees himself as the only authority.

TS: I wanted to ask about domestic politics. It appears that executive powers, war powers, have increased in the last 50 years. Are we shifting, as a democracy, toward something more plebiscitary, as in Americans voting every four years to give one person absolute authority?

McAllister: I sincerely hope not. I think power is dangerous, and dividing it and balancing it is the best way to handle it. You are right that there has been a movement toward what’s called the imperial presidency, started under [President] George W. Bush. And each administration since has gotten more and more powers vested in the executive, particularly with respect to foreign affairs and war-making. And it is very dangerous. In my view, those powers need to be walked back. 

TS: What would you say is one of the most misunderstood aspects of this conflict by the media or Kenyon students?

McAllister: I think one thing that’s getting missed, and I don’t know if this is getting missed by Kenyon students so much as the public writ large, is that Iran, the regime, the leaders of Iran, are incredibly dangerous. Iran is one of the largest state sponsors of terror. They have committed horrific acts of violence against civilians through proxies and have had their fingers in a lot of pies. There’s a really long history of how this regime came to power. And the U.S. definitely created a conducive environment for the rise of this regime, which is part of this history, like supporting the shah and our nefarious things during the Cold War. So we’ve kind of created a basis for the current conflict that I think a lot of people lose sight of. 

And I am also deeply concerned about this tendency to view every problem with a military solution in mind. Trump’s claim is that this is such a dangerous regime, and he’s the only one who’s going to fix the problem by using military force and all the rest. But the use of military force should be absolutely a last resort, and the tools that President Trump had at his disposal to alleviate the situation were not effectively or comprehensively deployed. And the current moment is a great teaching moment in some respects because it shows the consequences of not trying to exhaust all your tools before you go to the use of force.