Dr. Annelle Sheline knows firsthand what it means to act on principle. In March 2024, under President Biden, she resigned from the State Department in protest of U.S. support for the Gaza genocide, announcing that she could no longer “serve an administration that enables such atrocities.” Now a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., Sheline continues to speak out against U.S. militarism.

She sat down with Current Affairs to discuss her resignation, the unforeseen global consequences of war with Iran, and the culture of impunity that allows these policies to persist.

Nathan J. Robinson

I thought I might begin by asking you to comment on some comments that were made by a fellow former Biden administration official this week, and that would be Samantha Power. She was the head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She, before that, was a scholar of genocide, most noted for advancing the idea that the United States had tragically failed to stop many genocides that it ought to have intervened in. She was roundly criticized by many for being a genocide scholar working in an administration that was funding and arming a genocide, and she was asked this week about why she didn't resign.

Now, I believe having you on to comment is most appropriate, because you were faced with a similar dilemma when you were in the Biden administration, and you made the opposite choice. And I wondered if you could comment on Samantha Power's justification, which I must presume, given your own actions, you strongly disagree with.

Annelle Sheline

I do very strongly disagree with Samantha Power's justification for staying in, which, as you said, is based on the idea that she was able to do more by staying in than she could have done by leaving. Whereas, in fact, Gaza had the highest rate of starvation ever recorded globally. The idea that she was able to do some kind of good by staying in is nonsensical, whereas the idea of her leaving would have sent such a clear signal.

If the person who made her entire professional career calling out genocide were to have quit over this, it would have been very clear that this is, in fact, a genocide, or that it was unconscionable that the Biden administration was continuing to support Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza. I responded on Twitter to this and said much the same thing.

I really commend the student who asked her about this, and I don't know if that student was given the opportunity to follow up to say, "How on earth can you pretend that by staying in you had some kind of positive impact?" Because it was so obvious that was not the case.

In particular, I think when the Biden administration, on these specious claims from Israel, cut UNRWA funding—the funding to the UN Refugee and Works Agency—that was the most important institutional actor on the ground in Gaza and continues to operate inside Gaza despite the Israeli government's efforts to render it illegal. It still employs over 10,000 people inside Gaza and continues to pay those salaries for teachers and medical workers to try to support the population inside Gaza, despite the fact that hundreds of those employees have been killed. But when the Biden administration decided to cut those funds, how could Samantha Power tell herself that she was in any way doing better by staying in than she would have by resigning in protest?

And I think it just speaks to the fact that these people in these positions of power within the administration are addicted to that power and are not interested in using their power to actually push for something different.

Robinson

You've mentioned there that, in fact, you can do good by resigning and calling attention to it and showing that there is dissent. I suppose one other element of this is that you don't just do good by resigning, but you do active damage by staying in.

That is to say, by having someone with her credibility as a genocide scholar remain in the administration, it sort of implicitly acts as a statement that this is not a genocide, because you would assume that if she believed it was a genocide, she couldn't be a party to it. So it ends up lending one's personal moral authority to an administration by staying in.

Sheline

Absolutely. And I think in her case, she is the example of this above all others because her entire reputation was built on calling out genocide. Sometimes I've had people ask me about decisions made by others inside the administration. For the most part, I went public with my resignation because of colleagues inside the State Department who, for whatever reason, felt that they couldn't resign. It's hard to not have a job in the United States—not having health care.

Whereas the people who really could have made a difference if they had resigned were those people who would have been fine, someone like Samantha Power or these other top government officials, if they had resigned. They have wealth, they have connections, and they're going to be fine, but the people who ended up resigning were those who were not in such positions of power. And again, as you said, it would have sent a much clearer signal if she or someone else very high ranking had resigned.

Robinson

What you say is important, because I think it indicates something that people need to understand as they see people resign in protest from an institution, which is that the people who resign in protest aren't necessarily the only ones who agree with the position. They're not necessarily the only dissenters within the institution. It may be that you were in a position where you thought, "I don't want or need a long-term career within this institution, or I don't think I'm going to have one, so they can't wield as much of a threat over me."

But plenty of people may silence their doubts and disagreements. But it doesn't mean that you were the only one in the State Department who found what was going on heinous.

Sheline

Absolutely. Those of us that did resign were in touch with each other. And I wanted to highlight the fact that there's going to be a book coming out by prize-winning New York Times contributing opinion writer Julia Angwin and former White House senior policy advisor Ami Fields-Meyer; they're writing On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, a guide to confronting fear. And so Ami, who had been inside the White House and quit quietly over Gaza, did not go public—again, this isn't a household name the way Samantha Power is, so not to say that his quitting would have sent as strong of a signal, but still, it would have been a stronger signal for someone inside the White House with that proximity to power.

And now this individual, with this journalist, is writing some book about being a dissident in the age of fear, and this question of, are they going to talk about Gaza at all? I kind of doubt it. Maybe they will. And I think of other people who resigned alongside me, who I feel extremely fortunate to be at the Quincy Institute, to have had an academic background, and to have had some of these other connections, whereas, for those for whom resigning was to really burn every professional bridge they'd ever built.

Robinson

I detect somewhat that you felt, when you were in the Biden State Department, a sense of disappointment that you're seeing this horror unfold, that the government that you're working for is essentially perpetrating the horror—we can say aiding, but at a certain point it becomes perpetrating itself—and hearing people with discomfort about this, unwilling to do anything for the very reasons that Samantha Power lays out there.

Could you talk a bit about what it was like to be someone feeling this, watching this unfold, and feeling like nobody's willing to step up and do anything about this?

Sheline

Yes, that was the question. So before I resigned, I had let it be known internally that I was resigning over Gaza, and my plan initially was that I wasn't going to go public, but I sort of had let it be known and was given the opportunity to speak with some senior officials about it. And the question was often, do you think you're going to be more effective protesting out on the street than you are on the inside? And the answer was, well, there were certainly people much higher up the hierarchy than I who were extremely concerned; were opposed; recognized this for what it was, and were trying to do what they could on the inside to push for a different policy to no effect whatsoever.

So it was just so clear that by staying in, I was signaling my agreement with or support for this policy, and that there was zero evidence that it was going to change. It was six months between October 7 and when I resigned. And during that time, I submitted a dissent cable. I signed on other dissent cables. I was involved in some internal efforts to try to advocate for a different policy. And this gets a little bit to kind of what Samantha Power said in her statement about when the President and those around him have made a decision, you can't impact it, and you just have to kind of do what you can within that.

But then it's like, okay, well, if that's the case, then you step away; you don't go along with it. I think another super important thing as progressives, or as people are thinking about where we go from here, is that I worry a lot about the fact that so many of these figures inside the Biden administration really haven't paid any kind of a reputational price. They've landed these cushy gigs at Harvard, nice consulting firms, or lucrative law positions. They're all fine, and there hasn't really been this grappling with enabling genocide. And also the pigheadedness of the Biden administration and then, subsequently, the Harris campaign to double down on unconditional and illegal support for Israel was a crucial factor in why the Democrats lost the election.

Robinson

I seem to remember that internally, some part of the State Department had concluded that US military aid to Israel was in violation of US law and was then overridden by Antony Blinken. Am I remembering that correctly?

Sheline

Yes. People may remember this was around May of 2024, when there was the NSM-20, where there was this sort of internal investigation of specifically whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. Because if a country is blocking US humanitarian aid, they are no longer eligible to receive security assistance. And it was so blindingly obvious that was what was happening. And those people inside the State Department working on that assessment who were going to put forward that, yes, Israel is blocking aid, instead, the thing that came out in the end was the opposite of what they had found.

They concluded that Israel was not blocking aid. That was when you saw Stacey Gilbert resign in protest because she worked on that document. She was someone who'd spent years inside the State Department and had certainly held her nose and gotten through policies that she disagreed very strenuously with, including aspects of the invasion of Iraq and other things that she personally did not agree with but felt that it was more important to stay inside. Whereas this was so egregious—the fact that the US was just openly lying. That was when she resigned.

Robinson

We've been talking so far about the Biden administration, which you served in, and Gaza. Of course, right now we are in a different situation. We are speaking now in 2026, and we have a different heinous war of aggression against a different civilian population with greater direct US involvement. But I wanted to draw the link between these two things, not just in terms of their similarity, but their causality.

You have a new piece in the New Republic, "The Unbelievable Madness of Our War With Iran," and in that, you cite a piece that you wrote back in July 2024 in which you were saying that the Biden administration's support for Israel was threatening a regional war. That we should see the problem here as going beyond US support for Israel, leading to many Palestinian casualties, but there were even greater threats and risks. And I wonder if you could explain what you were pointing out in July of 2024.

Sheline

Yes. Well, and as I say in the piece, my fears at that time look almost quaint, because what I wrote about that summer was my concern that Israel might invade Lebanon and that this could drag in the United States, and this could become yet another endless war in the Middle East. And we know that Israel did invade Lebanon on October 1 of that year, with horrific civilian damage across Lebanon, and that there was an official ceasefire declared around eight weeks later, which Israel then violated with impunity. But at that point we did not yet have Trump in the White House.

Then we follow on to last summer, the 12-day war, and then now. Basically my fears at that time were too small. I did not anticipate that we would have a US president foolish enough to actually launch a war on Iran at the urging of Prime Minister Netanyahu. So the fact that we are now in this situation where we have not only the United States engaged in a war that was completely of our own making—we launched it. And the fact Rubio was saying, well, Israel was going to do it anyway, so we just wanted to get out ahead of them, which is nonsensical.

And there's the impact this is having on the global economy, on energy markets, and on the transit of fertilizer through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the time of year when farmers in the northern hemisphere are planting crops. We could see food shortages in a few months, even beyond what we may already be experiencing due to the impact on global shipping. The decimation of the Gulf economies—these are very significant players globally in terms of being transit hubs and financial centers. I forget who made the point that this is one of the first times since World War Two that we've seen cities that are central to the global economy impacted by war, whereas the wars since World War Two have tended to be more in peripheral spaces. And then the fact that Trump seems to have been completely flat-footed by all of this, just completely surprised by the fact that the Gulf countries would be angry by the fact that the Iranian government would not simply crumple if the Supreme Leader was assassinated. And there's the damage that has been sustained by American military installations around the Gulf and the damage Israel is sustaining.

Again, I was underestimating the foolishness that could inhabit the White House when I wrote that piece. And now here we are.

Robinson

I took one of your points to be that until there is a break from the bipartisan consensus, the virtual consensus that Israel must be supported unconditionally, that policy leads us towards inevitable, catastrophic war. Netanyahu said pretty openly that he's been trying to get the United States to go to war with Iran for 40 years and finally got his opportunity.

And so, I took one of the warnings that you gave was that we cannot let Israel's interest or perspective guide US policy for human rights reasons, but also because that path is—every word that comes to mind is like, insane, crazy. Because of the, I would say, delusional and homicidal orientation of the thinking across much of the top Israeli government, you would say we absolutely have to break from this government.

Sheline

Exactly. One of the points that I make in the piece is that you have Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, apparently eager to, he said, shed these stupid rules of engagement and adopt what apparently looks like the Israeli Dahiya doctrine, which is named for the suburbs of southern Beirut that Israel destroyed in their war on Lebanon in 2006. That you just level residential areas. Your aim is maximum destruction and completely disproportionate to whatever you experienced or think you might experience. The reason Israel adopts this kind of approach is because they are operating under a genocidal logic whereby, in Gaza, they see their interests as served by annihilating that population, whether by murdering them or removing them. Similar in the West Bank, except they can't completely destroy the West Bank the way they did Gaza because there are so many illegal settlements all over it. And now, applying that sort of logic to Iran.

The clearest demonstration of this is the fact that the US struck the girls school twice, if not three times, as I've seen in some reporting, within the opening hours of the war. This was intentional. They knew that the IRGC facility was separate. It was in its own compound. And apparently they intentionally struck the school, which is horrifying to think that the United States has adopted this genocidal logic of maximum death and destruction and targeting of completely non-military infrastructure. It's so obvious to say this violates international law, and it very much does, but it's not even effective for one thing.

Hegseth seems to be operating under the delusion that if the US hadn't had these stupid rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US might have won those wars, when actually, looking at the reason the Afghan population was so quick to abandon the puppet Afghan government when the US was pulling out, it was because of 20 years of brutally violent US occupation. It was the civilian toll of that violence that led people to conclude that it's better to survive, albeit under the Taliban, than to be killed under US occupation. It's just so stupid. And so again, Hegseth seems to be laboring under the assumption that we can't be constrained by silly things like not targeting civilians. That's also just a recipe for failure, especially thinking about Iran.

And obviously, this is a deeply unpopular government. Obviously, people saw the massive demonstrations against them. But everything that the US is doing, including saying things like, "We're going to redraw the map of Iran"—this is just bolstering this rally-around-the-flag effect. Iranians certainly may not want to continue to be ruled by the Islamic Republic, but they also want to survive and want their country to remain intact and not descend into chaos.

Robinson

It strikes me the same arguments were made about Vietnam: if we'd only dropped more napalm, maybe we would have successfully built political support for the South Vietnamese government. And it seemed implausible there too. You mentioned something there that I think is important: you're talking about the strike on the school. Now, initially, the administration denied or obfuscated. Trump said he thought that the strike was carried out by Iran because their missiles are so inaccurate. It was then proved that it was done with a Tomahawk missile, which was made in the United States, and maybe the Iranians got one of their own. And then the US's own report concluded that it was, in fact, the US.

Trump was asked about this. They said, "Why did you blame Iran?" And he said, "Well, I don't know enough about it." It was an interesting response, like, "I'm blaming Iran because I'm totally ignorant." But I think what is important is that now that the US responsibility is clear, there will be the next stage of denial, which is to admit that the thing happened but to characterize it as a tragic mistake that was made because of some error somewhere in the process, and we regret this deeply, so that you can't accuse the United States of a war crime. But what you said there is that we really should understand that the indiscriminate bombing is a strategy that has been intentionally adopted. So these cannot be construed as accidental, regrettable deaths.

Sheline

One hundred percent. And you think about other infrastructure that the US has hit. And I know sometimes it can be hard to tell: was it the US, or was it Israel? And I do think Israel is going for state collapse. They will be relatively insulated from the chaos and flows of refugees that would flee a collapsed state or a raging civil war inside Iran. So they don't care. Whereas I think the US is still at least somewhat—and I worry that maybe American and Israeli goals are increasingly aligning on this and pursuing state collapse. But I do think that the Gulf countries are extremely concerned about that prospect.

How can they have any hope of trying to rebuild their image of this luxurious bubble of stability there in the Persian Gulf if they've got this neighbor just across the Persian Gulf in absolute chaos, with waves of refugees, human trafficking, and drug trafficking just coming across the Persian Gulf? It's going to be very difficult for them to rebuild after this and to attract investment and travelers and influencers, which has been their model. And especially, you think about a country like Saudi Arabia, which is involved in this very fundamental transition, a huge component of which is merely to employ the female half of their population. That until relatively recently, the expectation was that Saudi women stayed home and didn't work, and the Saudi government paid men a high enough salary that they could support female dependents. And so to not only try to diversify their economy off oil but to also sort of employ the other half of their population, this is why Vision 2030 has been so fundamental.

This is part of why we saw MBS looking to reduce tension, not only with Iran but also to end the Saudi war on Yemen once the Houthis demonstrated that they could really hit the Saudis and make it hurt. This goes back to 2022, when the Saudis agreed to that truce. Trump, I think, is still influenced by the Gulf leaders, in part, because they've bribed him with so much money and investments in Trump properties.

Robinson

The plane.

Sheline

The plane. And not to mention billions of dollars in the US economy itself. And then, in addition, Europe is terrified of what it could be. During the Syrian civil war, about a quarter of Syrians were externally displaced and fled as refugees, many of them towards Europe, and that was only a few million people. Whereas, if a quarter of Iran's population is displaced outside of Iran, that's 23 million people. Many of them will try to get to Europe. And so Europe is terrified. The Gulf states are so angry. And while Trump may not care, I think Trump is aware of the impact on the markets and on the price of oil. He knows this war was already deeply unpopular, and he launched it anyway.

But I think he still seems to think that his base supports it, whereas they're talking about a ground invasion. I would hope that people who voted for Trump based on the idea that he wasn't going to start any more stupid, endless wars would try to send him the signal that they are opposed to this.

Robinson

I wanted to conclude by asking you about international law. We had Trita Parsi on yesterday, and we talked extensively about the human toll of the war and some of the decision-making behind it and the trajectories the war could take. But one thing we didn't discuss is international law. And it comes up in your piece.

You mention that this war not only threatens the direct destruction of human lives, infrastructure, and the economy, but you say it threatens to destroy the system that prevented a third world war for over eight decades. And I wondered if you could elaborate a little bit on why it's so important how blatantly illegal the war is.

Sheline

So the broader point I was trying to make there in the piece was about the fact that during Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, you saw very little pushback from the rest of the world. I'm thinking about European countries that continue to maintain relationships with Israel. You saw a few efforts by entities such as the Hague Group, which was a group of countries from the Global South that convened last year to try to impose consequences on Israel for its violation of international law, and they have subsequently added more and more countries.

I just got back from the Netherlands, where the Hague Group met at The Hague to talk about the ongoing need to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law. Obviously we did see things like at the UN General Assembly. You saw countries trying to condemn Israel, but you didn't have it in the Security Council because of the US veto. And you did see certain countries like Colombia blocking their coal exports to Israel, for example. Or just recently, Spain said they're pulling their ambassador from Israel. So there's kind of a piecemeal effort at some kind of accountability efforts towards that. But for the most part, there wasn't real accountability for what Israel was doing in plain view of the whole world. And so as a result, Israel was emboldened, and the United States, to provide cover for Israel, is actively attacking things like the International Criminal Court and sanctioning those judges, sanctioning people like Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—just taking a sledgehammer to these various institutions and the UN, with Trump setting up the Board of Peace to directly challenge the UN as an institution.

There's certainly plenty of criticism one can make of the post-World War II institutions as still being deeply rooted in colonialism, in the sort of European-oriented balance of power at the time, but there's still something there in that they're supposed to be grounded in this idea that aggression is one of the greatest crimes a state can commit. Genocide also. That there should be rules around how states conduct war, that you do not target civilian infrastructure—schools, hospitals, or residential areas. And even just the line that Israel kept saying about "Israel has the right to defend itself." They wanted to continue to frame it in that way because that sort of gave them the legitimacy—a justification under international law that they're merely defending themselves, which itself is nonsense, because Hamas is not a state; they are under occupation, so Israel doesn't actually have a legal justification there.

But all that is to say that Israel and the US have been actively dismantling and damaging the credibility and the viability of these international institutions that have successfully prevented World War Three up until now. They're not perfect there. They need reform, but we haven't had another world war. We obviously had a lot of other wars, but not yet at the level of superpower war. So if we don't have those anymore, if the UN completely falls apart, if you don't have the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, and all of these global institutions truly fall by the wayside there, there's nothing there to prevent another world war. And I think a lot of people have been asking about the possibility that this war could escalate to World War Three in terms of Russia and China attacking the United States in a superpower war. I don't see that happening yet, but I do just really worry about a world where the United States no longer even pretends to care about operating in a way that is beneficial for the rest of the world, whether that's on tariffs or security agreements.

And when you no longer have these global institutions, we're dismantling all of these guardrails that have helped to prevent a return to great power war. And you also think about things like the expiration of New START, that Trump's not reinstalling any kind of weapons control measures with US-Russia relations. I know a lot of people feel like international law is kind of feckless, but I think we will really miss it when it's gone.

Robinson

But that's partially because we treat it as such. We're a major reason why international law doesn't have teeth, because for a long time, we have treated it as something that applies to countries other than the United States.

Sheline

Exactly.

Robinson

But we have a lot of power. If the United States were to decide tomorrow we're going to strictly abide by international law, and we believe in it, and we're going to support these institutions, I think you would see a change in that. So I don't think it would be feckless if we put our muscle behind it.

Sheline

Absolutely. And what's fascinating is seeing the ways—again, recognizing that many countries fell far short of what would have been required under international law to respond to Israel's genocide in Gaza, but at least recognizing that other countries still view it as important. And even if they don't always fully adhere to it, they still operate as if it matters, and they try to sort of position themselves as operating under international law. So most other countries around the world still see it as valuable.

And it's just kind of wild that the United States, which had been such a key actor in establishing it after World War Two—the UN is headquartered in New York—that we've just come so far away from that.

Robinson

To the point where Trump says, "International law? Well, I follow my own personal morality. That's my law." I believe that's what he said. Well, it's a sobering warning that we appreciate you delivering, and we encourage all of our listeners and readers to follow your work, Dr. Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

People should check out your new piece in the New Republic on the Iran war. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Sheline

Thank you so much for having me.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth