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Elli Lieberman

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May 30, 2026, 11:39 PM

Triangular Coercion: US, Iran, and Gulf States

Deterrence and Triangular Coercion: The Limits of Third-Party Constraint Deterrence is a strategy designed to prevent a challenger from continuing to attack in order to alter an existing status quo. In its classical formulation, actor A—the defender—seeks to deter actor...

Mar 29, 2026, 12:30 AM

Beyond the Escalation Trap

Beyond the Escalation Trap: Deterrence Failure, Credibility Erosion, and the Attrition Trap Deterrence theory has long revolved around a central question: how do states influence adversary behavior without resorting to full-scale war? Classical Cold War scholarship, particularly associated with Thomas Schelling and Patrick...

Mar 16, 2026, 12:47 AM

Escalation Trap: Pape and Lieberman on Iran War

Debates about the current war with Iran highlight an important theoretical divide about escalation and deterrence. The argument developed by Robert A. Pape emphasizes the structural dynamics of escalation in limited wars, while Elli Lieberman offers a framework for...

Mar 11, 2026, 8:41 PM

‘Bombing to Lose’? Victory and Deterrence

The current war with Iran was barely a few days old when pundits and scholars began compiling lists of its alleged failures. Many critics rushed to judgment without first defining their theory of victory or explaining what victory would...

Feb 18, 2026, 3:18 AM

Washington and Tehran: Shrinking Bargaining Space

In August 2012, President Barack Obama warned that if the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad used or moved chemical weapons, it would mark a “game-changer”—the crossing of a red line that could shift U.S. policy toward military involvement. Chemical weapons were...

Feb 11, 2026, 11:36 PM

Victory, Deterrence, and the Logic of War

On many occasions in the period leading to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Hamas had been deterred. Since Operation Guardian of the Walls, he noted, not a single rocket had been...

Feb 7, 2026, 12:12 AM

Bargaining Under the Shadow of War

From a rational-choice perspective, the current Iran–United States–Israel interaction is best modeled as a three-player bargaining game conducted under the shadow of war. The actors possess asymmetric capabilities and divergent risk tolerances, yet their preference orderings exhibit partial convergence...

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About Me

Elli Lieberman teaches at the University of Maryland College Park. His areas of interest include international security, the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, deterrence theory, and WMD Proliferation. His articles appeared in Security Studies, the Institute for National Strategic Studies, and several books. His most recent publications are Deterring Terrorism: A Model for Strategic Deterrence (Routledge: Contemporary Terrorism Studies, 2018) and Reconceptualizing Deterrence: Nudging toward Rationality in Middle Eastern rivalries (Routledge Global Security Studies, 2013). Dr. Lieberman earned his Ph.D. in international relations and political science from the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Missouri State University and Loyola University.