Hundreds of people reportedly killed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and global oil prices skyrocketing—the news since the United States and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran has been a stark reminder of how quickly a conflict can escalate and how fast the costs can add up. Now, as Iran’s retaliatory strikes continue in all directions, a broader conflict threatens to engulf the Middle East and beyond as third-party countries must decide how to respond. This latest war contributes to an already tense international security landscape marked by increasing great power competition, growing militarization, and unwaveringly nationalist, strongman leaders.

In this volatile global security environment, the question Joshua Schwartz asked in his 2022 doctoral dissertation, Dovish Reputation Theory: When Fighting to Demonstrate Resolve Backfires, seems very much of the moment: “For what reasons should countries be willing to go to war, risking the lives of thousands or even millions?” Leaders, of course, have a range of factors to consider when deciding, in the face of a perceived military challenge, whether to engage in violent conflict or to back down: military capabilities, domestic and international pressures, national objectives, and even, perhaps, their reputations. Schwartz, now an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology, received a grant from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in 2021 to examine the last of these considerations. In particular, he sought to challenge the longstanding rationale among many policymakers and scholars that standing firm and engaging in military conflict enhances a state’s reputation for resolve, whereas backing down harms it.

A state might choose to fight to protect its reputation for resoluteness and thereby deter other adversaries

Especially during the Cold War, academics and leaders alike debated whether a state’s reputation can have a real-world impact in international affairs. If reputation is how a state is expected to behave or act in the present based on its past actions, then reputation for resolve is the perception of a state’s willingness to fight and endure costs in order to achieve its goals. “The conventional wisdom, which I call Hawkish Reputation Theory, is essentially that if a country backs down from a conflict today, they’re going to suffer reputational consequences tomorrow,” explains Schwartz. For example, a state backing down now could invite future aggression from adversaries who interpreted their present acquiescence as a weakness to exploit. To avoid that, a state might choose to fight to protect its reputation for resoluteness and thereby deter other adversaries.

In his research, Schwartz provides several examples of American leaders using the United States’s reputation to justify costly military interventions, from the Vietnam War to the US intervention in Somalia. Sometimes this rationale only becomes apparent when closely examining declassified historical records, but other times, leaders are more explicit. Take, for example, former President Bill Clinton’s speech on October 8, 1993, when he justified an increase in US soldiers in Somalia after eighteen American soldiers were killed in an incident that would later inspire the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.“ Our own credibility with friends and allies would be severely damaged…and all around the world, aggressors, thugs, and terrorists will conclude that the best way to get us to change our policies is to kill our people,” Clinton said. “It would be open season on Americans.” In other words, the US needed to act with force in order not to appear weak to adversaries and invite further attacks.

On the opposite side of the reputation theoretical spectrum are those who argue that a state’s reputation for past action, or inaction, is inconsequential. “The second school of thought, which I call Skeptical Reputation Theory, basically holds that what you do in the past doesn’t really matter much at all for the future,” explains Schwartz. “The reason being that past conflicts are just different from future conflicts and thus are not predictive of a state’s behavior moving forward.” Accordingly, skeptics might argue that the current US-Israel war on Iran would have little bearing on how Russia might evaluate US support for Ukraine, or how China might measure US resolve for defending Taiwan.

Through a combination of survey experiments in the United States and United Kingdom, statistical analyses, and historical case studies, Schwartz argued that neither of these theoretical positions is quite right. He found that while reputation does matter, choosing to fight for reputation’s sake can have unintended consequences. This forms the basis of Schwartz’s “Dovish Reputation Theory.” “In some cases, when you stand firm and fight—such as in the Vietnam War—it leads to a backlash among the general public and leaders, which may then make that state less willing to use force and bear high costs in the future,” he argues. This backlash, which Schwartz defines as “war weariness,” is more likely to occur if (1) the conflict’s objective is regime change rather than simply restraining a country’s foreign aggression; (2) there are few direct security interests involved; (3) the human and monetary costs are high; or (4) the fighting results in defeat. In this way, choosing to fight in order to maintain a reputation for resolve can inadvertently result in the diminution of a state’s perceived resoluteness as adversaries observe signs of war weariness.

So, what might Schwartz’s Dovish Reputation Theory mean in today’s era of heightened geopolitical competition and conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela, and, most recently, Iran? It is certainly too early to tell what the full consequences of the current US-Israel-Iran war will be for the United States’s reputation, especially as neither the factors that might contribute to war weariness, nor the decision-making that led to this conflict, are fully apparent.

The conflict could end up harming Washington’s reputation for resolve and its ability to deter adversaries in the future

Still, Schwartz sees reputation for resolve as one possible factor in the US’s decision to attack, pointing to a recent New York Times interview with Nadia Schadlow, who was the deputy national security advisor in President Donald Trump’s first term. “When [Trump] had said about two months ago that he was going to back the Iranian protestors, people were very upset because nothing then happened. I think that was in the back of his mind and did not go away,” said Schadlow. “I think part of what President Trump is doing now in his actions, or at least the effect of them, will be a seriously strengthened deterrence posture for the United States. No one is going to think that we’re not going to act when we say we’re going to act.”

If reputational concerns were, at least in part, a motivation behind the US starting a war with Iran, then we might see another outcome predicted by Schwartz’s version of reputation theory. Given the relatively strong opposition to this war already apparent in recent polling of the American public, Dovish Reputation Theory would suggest that the conflict could end up harming Washington’s reputation for resolve and its ability to deter adversaries in the future.

 “Policymakers and scholars,” Schwartz cautions, “should be more skeptical about using military force for reputation’s sake.”

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