“Many Will Die:” Military Expert Warns of Iran Escalation Trap

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Robert Pape, welcome back to the program. You recently launched a Substack called the “Escalation Trap.” First of all, what does that mean?

ROBERT PAPE: The escalation trap were a set of frameworks I’ve been developing for 30 years – I started developing these when I taught for the US Air Force – to help people understand what’s in the middle between when bombs hit target and a political outcome. Everybody understands that there’s military action and then some political end state they want. What is that middle? They’re escalation dynamics. It’s where politics and the military interact, and that is what is so special about the escalation trap. 

And in this particular case, when I set it up just before the bombing started in the Iran War, I called it a trap, not just escalation dynamics. And I did that on purpose because I laid out the stages – 1, 2, 3 – of the likely escalation trap that we were getting ourselves into. And with each stage, you lose more control. So the illusion of control is what helps set off the escalation trap in stage one. Precision bombs hit targets, kill leaders, but that leads to then strategic failure, regime becomes more aggressive, more dangerous, don’t get the enriched uranium, then double down, regime becomes more aggressive still, takes Hormuz. Now, that’s stage one and stage two, and I laid that out before the bombs even fell. And here we are with the escalation trap, the teeth closing.

SREENIVASAN: In a way, stage one is alluring, right? If we can achieve our goals from 20,000 feet up, without putting a boot on the ground, and go in and out quickly. But how does it, how is it automatic that it goes from stage one to stage two? How does the trap kind of get sprung?

PAPE: What happens is that add to what you just said, which was excellent, one more point, which is you’re so confident of success, strategic success, you don’t have any backup plan to deal with the enemy lashing back. So once you are so confident, and then it’s – and really with precision bombs, and when you have generals with stars saying, this will be destroyed, 90% plus probability here. My goodness, this is true. These are not false statements. But it’s the illusion of control. And that illusion then leads to downplaying worst-case scenarios. And it’s not unique to President Trump. This one may be the worst escalation trap ever, by the way, with smart bombs. 

But what happened, say for example, with Kosovo, March ‘99, the Clinton administration – three-day air war, tried to take down, damage the Milosevic regime in Serbia, tried to help the pro-democracy movement in Kosovo, this republic in the former Yugoslavia. And what does Milosevic do? He launches 30,000 troops and ethnically cleanses half of Kosovo – that’s 800,000 plus civilians, kills 3,000. And there was no army at the time, that three-day air war was the worst case. And I know because I talked to the people who planned it. They did not even imagine what would be the worst case. What we see here is taking Hormuz, it’s not so much there wouldn’t have been some mention of that in the briefings to Trump. That’s not really quite right. It’s the illusion of control. It’s President Trump and others around his circle seeing, my goodness, we will not just have the bombs hit a target, we control, we will dominate. They wouldn’t dare take Hormuz. Well, they did. They got it. Now they control more oil than we do.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a difference here? Can you spell out for our audience, kind of, was this tactically a success, versus strategically a failure, or kind of what’s the difference? Parse that out.

PAPE: Yeah. So it’s very important to understand that when bombs hit targets, they destroy the facility, they destroy the communications of leaders, and they kill leaders. That’s tactical success. That’s what our military is the best in the world at. I’ve taught our military, I’ve taught the best pilots in the Air Force, and they put bombs on targets better than anybody else. What’s happening is once the bomb hit the target, then how do you get to the political outcome, the strategic success? That’s the stages of escalation where politics comes in. Bombs hit the target, and now, suddenly, politics inside of the target country, both the regime and the society, change. 

So all those pre-war trends you had, all that intel that was, you have like SITK, all these fancy words here for the top secret intel. None of that now is still the same because the politics is changing literally with the dropping of the bomb. And that is where my work has come in to show that for over a hundred years, when you bomb leaders, air power alone has never toppled a regime because what it does is it changes politics inside of the target, makes the regime more likely, the new leaders more likely to fight back and be aggressive, makes even the pro-democracy movements gun shy about supporting the bomber, the 800 pound gorilla of the United States who’s doing all this. And what you end up with then is the possibility of lashing back, lashing back. And in this case, that always meant horizontal escalation, the GCC countries, which, again, President Trump has said, we didn’t think they’d hit the GCC countries. Well, this is just like the Clinton administration, didn’t think they would cleanse the Kosovars, and worse than that, they could take the Strait of Hormuz. So, unlike Serbia, this is likely going down as the worst catastrophe of the escalation trap we have seen with air power in history.

SREENIVASAN: There is always the fog of war, and whether it is intentional or accidental, you have collateral damage. In this case, by day two, we had dozens of school girls killed, and we had the entire family members of the Ayatollah killed. Does that spur a, I don’t know, almost a unification of different branches inside the population to say, you know what, guys, nobody kills our daughters.

PAPE: Even with smart bombs, there’s going to be collateral damage of a serious nature. Why? Because the allure of the precision means that targets will be chosen in civilian areas. So this is part and parcel of why there’s so much civilian damage, even though we’re in the smart bomb age. In this particular case, we killed and literally burned to death nearly 200 girls who were – and we hit them multiple times, not just once, with these tomahawks. And so this is now fuel for the nationalist fire. This makes it – and the supreme leader in Iran’s taken full advantage of this. But we can sort of try to duck it and kind of downplay it. That’s not what’s gonna happen in Iran, the target government, and also across the GCC. Because other states are seeing that when they, when we get involved in these precision wars, they’re anything but purely surgical. There’s lots of damage. And now there’s anger that’s building in Iran. And the supreme leader said they want payback. Well, what’s an eye for an eye? A civilian airliner. So we need to understand there’s about 200 people on a civilian airliner. We just killed 200 people. We will certainly be angry at them for doing that. But we are setting in train exactly the anger for how you get indiscriminate terrorism, and you get people willing to die to kill.

SREENIVASAN: So we’ve had these moments where each side has now escalated because of what the other did, what the other perceives the first one did, et cetera. But there was a moment when the president on February 28th, he told Iranians, he said, “take over your government. It will be yours to take.” Is there any example in history where an air campaign has led to a citizen uprising to take power that’s been successful?

PAPE: The answer is no. Not a single case in over a hundred years. So my book “Bombing to Win” covers every air campaign from World War I, here. And then also, many articles I’ve published in foreign affairs, in probably about 40 cases, we’re 0 for 40. Now, this is rare – rarely do you get in, in anything, much less military operations, literally a hundred percent of a pattern. But that is what you have here. And why – what did we see in the case of Iran? Was Iran likely to be an exception to this rule, for example? You might say, no, there’s something exceptional here. Well, in the middle of January, Iran murdered some 20 to 30,000 of the protestors as they took to the streets. So what the Iranians showed was their security forces were both plenty capable and plenty willing to be incredibly brutal here.

So when President Trump is asking those protestors to come up and to rise up, we need to understand he’s playing with other people’s money. He’s like a gambler playing with other people’s money, other people’s lives here. The people who have to take the risk are the Iranians who just saw 20 to 30,000 bodies pile up in the streets. This is pretty difficult here. And now, on top of it, President – the air campaign is imposing all kinds of costs, killing the girls that we just talked about. Now there’s all kinds of disruption to the economy. That price is being paid by the Iranian people, not by the leaders. And we can say, well, they’ll blame their own government for this. They’re never gonna blame their own government for this. They’re blaming the people doing the harm. They’re going to blame America and Israel.

SREENIVASAN: So what happens? How does this escalation play out where now you’ve got the entire neighborhood, so to speak, involved? Iran has lobbed missiles at, you know, Dubai and, and Abu Dhabi. And so the Emirates are kind of on edge. And then you’ve got kind of, you know, flight paths being diverted over countries, and of course, an absolute bottleneck and chokehold of global oil flowing back and forth. So –

PAPE: And that point you made, we’re heading to stage three of the trap, which will be when the trap really closes, and we’re likely in for months-long war here. And so why is that? It’s because, as I’ve been laying out, in stage two, there’s not just the tit for tat that is going on, but the Strait of Hormuz, that’s what’s special about this case. See, for 50 years, America’s number one goal in the Middle East has been to prevent an oil hegemon in the Middle East, not Israel. Israel maybe could help with this, but that wasn’t; Israel wasn’t number one. Preventing oil hegemon. What is an oil hegemon? One country, whether it’s the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Iraq, or now Iran controlling the oil in the Middle East. That’s the Persian Gulf. That’s the Strait of Hormuz. After — now, Iran has never been an oil hegemon before. Now it is. And that 20% of the world’s oil is more than the 16% America produces. 

So now they are in charge of oil prices more than anybody else, and they’re leveraging that for geopolitical gain, let’s say the Indians and so forth. They’re also making money. They’ve made about a billion and a half dollars so far here on this oil. The money’s in Chinese banks, so we can’t go take it out. And if this goes on for another six weeks, another six months – they’re an oil hegemon with all that nuclear capability – the balance of power is really gonna change here. 

The other military shoe to fall, which is stage three, is the ground operations. Those Marines are moving. The 82nd Airborne is preparing, and this would be stage three. This is the threshold of stage three. They’re not there yet. It’ll be another 10 days, 14 days before these beginning forces are in place. So in that period of time, we’re gonna see a lot of back and forth. I’m hoping we’ll find a way out so we don’t cross stage three. But if we cross stage three, politics will change again. This isn’t just about military action. When those Marines hit the beaches, many will die. When they die, many who are Trump supporters will double down their support. They don’t wanna leave the – they don’t wanna say they, these people died for us, and now we’re going to abandon them. 

SREENIVASAN: So you think we’re just a couple of weeks away from stage three then?

PAPE: I think we’re a couple weeks away from the beginning of stage three, which I always said. Again, I published all three stages before the first bomb fell. I always said stage three would be quote, “limited territorial control.” It would involve the Marines, maybe some airborne. What would happen is there would be coastal areas. Maybe we’re gonna go into some of the nuclear sites. I laid all this out the days before the bombing, and that is now what we are seeing, quote, preparing for. The problem here is these preparations may well become realities because it’s gonna be very difficult to walk away and leave Iran in control of that much power.

SREENIVASAN: Now, for the record, the president has said, look – last week – “I’m not putting troops anywhere…And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.” Is there a way to withdraw from this without boots on the ground?

PAPE: Well, there’s still diplomatic option here, but I think the price is going up high. And I’m not sure President Trump will pay the price. You see, on Feb 27, before the first bomb fell, there was, Iran was willing to have a deal, and this was being explained to Trump in the Oval Office by his negotiators. And the deal was Iran would keep the 3.5% enriched uranium. Trump said, no deal. He’s gonna do the bombing. Well, now, Iran, because it controls – it’s more powerful, it’s not weaker. It’s gonna want more. So it’s gonna want the 3% enriched uranium. And what I’ve been saying in the media the first week is they’re gonna want the oil sanctions lifted. Well, Scott Bessent just lifted the oil sanctions. So they’ve already got the 3.5% they’re gonna want. And now they already got the oil sanctions. They’re gonna want more. And what is that more? Probably military containment of Israel. 

SREENIVASAN: You know, look, on the one hand, the president and the administration said that we had obliterated the nuclear capability and the facilities in Iran. And then before this campaign, that was also in part the justification that we wanna really prevent them. But I mean, if –

PAPE: Yeah, that’s right. So what’s happening? So I’ve modeled the bombing of Iran for 20 years. Americans are gonna bomb Fordow and Natanz because the Israelis can’t do that. They don’t have the air power to be able to take out Fordow. So we are gonna take out Fordow, and when we do, we disable the industrial facility, but we don’t get the nuclear material. And on top of that, the IAEA is never brought back in. Iran’s not gonna just open this back up to onsite inspection, give it up, and so forth. They’re angry. 

And we saw that right away, even though President Trump declared obliterated the program, he began negotiating with Iran again. Why? Because the nuclear material. 

So my analysis was always then, about a year later, you would panic, that disbursed material, you’d never really know if it was being fashioned into a nuclear weapon or a radiological bomb. So you would do regime change. Bombing for regime change was always stage two. I said, this is how America will talk itself into the regime change war, which they have resisted for decades. They will first start by bombing Fordow. And that’s exactly what happened. And that’s why I could publish the stages of the escalation that we’re going through days before we did the bombing on February 28th. That’s why I was confident what the target set would be. I – confident of this, because this was always, always the stages you would go through once you knocked out Fordow in June. You knocked out the facility, not the enriched uranium, and it’s always about the enriched uranium. 

SREENIVASAN: University of Chicago Professor of Political Science, Robert Pape, and author of the Escalation Trap Substack, thanks so much for joining us.

PAPE: Thank you for having me.