Why Do Experts Keep Leading Us into Forever Wars?: Iran and the Making of Endless Conflict

The 5th annual Andrew Mack Memorial Lecture that took place on October 1, 2026 featured Dr. Negar Razavi, a political anthropologist and public scholar whose work sits at the intersections of critical security studies, anthropology, gender studies, and global Middle East studies. Her forthcoming book, The Geopolitics of Expertise examines the role of policy experts in shaping U.S. security policies toward the Middle East generally and Iran specifically. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran marked the latest U.S. intervention in a bloody twenty-five year history of nearly continual military interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. Rather than securing peace, however, these Forever Wars have only exacerbated conflicts in the region and made communities around the world less secure. To better understand how and why the U.S. continues to engage in these misguided wars, Dr. Razavi looks to the role of an elite community of experts, based at Washington think tanks, who have helped sustain the logics of war-making in the region for the past two decades. In particular, she examines how they collectively laid the ideological groundwork for the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, paying specific attention to the ways these experts have coopted discourses around human rights and human security to ensure this war.