President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is not going well. He began the conflict with a promise to use an air campaign to initiate regime change in as little as “two or three days.” But about three weeks in, Iran’s government, military and security forces remain highly functional. No popular uprising has emerged. And Iran’s government has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices surging and Trump into a panic.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is one of the analysts who saw this situation coming a long way off. An expert on air power and regime change who has also taught at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Pape is almost comically well suited to address the core dynamics underlying how the war on Iran is unfolding. His scholarship and his newsletter, “The Escalation Trap,” all point in one direction: Trump’s goal of toppling Iran’s regime from the air alone is doomed, because fighting a war only with air power is by its very nature ill suited to win hearts and minds.
I spoke with Pape on the phone this week, and he explained why this kind of intervention has such a poor track record, what isn’t working strategically, why Iran isn’t losing the war, and what this all means for the possibility of Trump sending in ground troops.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: When you heard in Trump’s initial announcement that he’s going to use air power alongside Israel to clear the way for protesters to take over the government, what did you think?
Robert Pape: What I thought is that President Trump was up against the weight of history. I’ve studied every air campaign since World War I, and in all that time, over 100 years, air power alone — without ground forces — has never toppled a regime. There have been times when there have been pro-democracy movements in combination with the air power; it has never worked. It has not worked in the dumb-bomb age, the smart-bomb age. We’ve tried so many different combinations, so much intelligence, and it has never worked.
You’re ending up with leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs.”
ROBERT PAPE
Aleem: Could you expand on how air campaigns haven’t succeeded even when coordinated with pro-democracy movements?
Pape: There’s no case where air power alone has coordinated with a civilian unarmed pro-democracy movement to topple a regime. The closest you get to this is in 1991, after the 39-day American air war and after the four-day ground war against Iraq to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The view inside of the George H.W. Bush administration was Iraq was so weakened and Saddam’s regime was so battered that Bush called publicly for the Shia to rise up and topple the Saddam Hussein regime. If you just looked at it on a piece of paper, it would seem like “Goodness. Well, of course, the Saddam regime would crack and it would fall.”
What happened instead? The Saddam regime had plenty of residual capability and butchered and killed tens of thousands of those Shia who rose up, and the bodies piled in the streets.
Aleem: What is it about air campaigns that makes them so ineffective at achieving regime change?
Pape: It’s ineffective not because the bombs are technically ineffective. It’s ineffective because the bombing triggers politics in the target government and in the target society that work against us. It’s a politically self-defeating strategy.
Before the bombing starts, you typically have a gap between the society and the government. What the bombing does is it changes from an internal game inside of Iran to now the foreign military attacker dictating the government that Iran should have.
And in this case, it’s not just any old third party doing the bombing. It’s the Godzilla of the American precision military. It’s the Americans who historically have done regime change in Iran before. In 1953 we controlled parts of the Iranian military and we fostered a military coup that put in the shah of Iran, a dictatorship, along with the SAVAK, which was one of the most brutal security agencies in history.
Notice President Trump did not say, “Well, we’re just simply going to ask the pro-democracy movement who they want.” Instead we — Americans — are going to decide who the government of Iran will be. Whether we call it a dictatorship or a puppet regime or not, that’s exactly the way this is going to be interpreted, and injects the politics of nationalism into the equation. Once you have nationalism, you have a fundamentally new political dynamic.
The new politics that have been triggered by the bombing work to the disadvantage of regime change, in the positive sense that you would get a generation of leaders who would be more likely to do Washington’s bidding. What you’re getting instead is negative regime change: You’re ending up with leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs in order to punish America, and allies of America.
Aleem: I think when people see the incredible power and precision of American strikes to take out targets, they think it might just work anyway.
Pape: The incredible power of precision attacks produces incredible fear and anger in the target country, both in its leadership and in its society. And that incredible fear and anger morphs into lashing back, right? The fear and anger causes fight-or-flight, and the fight aspect becomes much more dominant in this situation. And precisely because there’s not a ground force there, there are opportunities to lash back.
Aleem: If you had to say someone was winning this war or losing this war, what would you say?
Pape: I would say that this war has been tactically brilliant by the United States — the U.S. military has done everything we’ve asked it to do. But Iran is not losing the war.
The core reason is that by controlling and disrupting passage through the Strait of Hormuz, it has already gained enormous leverage. It has gained leverage in [raising] world energy prices. That leverage also works to its financial advantage, because Iran can shift its own oil through the strait; if we blow up those tankers — which we could easily do — this will only drive oil prices up even further.
Iran is not losing. It’s more powerful today than before the war.
Robert Pape
And if we have [to use] ground efforts in order to open the strait, I call this the limited territorial control option on my Substack. … This will only deepen the escalation trap even more, and a big reason for that is because, as my work on terrorism that I’ve done for over 25 years shows, 95% of all the suicide attacks around the world are in response to foreign ground presence.
Iran is not losing. It’s more powerful today than before the war.
Aleem: The Washington Post reported this week, according to a State Department cable that it reviewed, that Israeli officials believe Iranian protesters will get “slaughtered” by Iranian security forces if they mobilize, but Israel is still publicly calling for an uprising. What do you make of that?
Pape: I think this is an example of victory narrative meets escalation reality. There are domestic political incentives for the Israeli government and the U.S. government to articulate the victory narrative, which is this illusion that there is this quick and decisive victory just around the corner. But this is meeting escalation reality inside of their own administrations, inside of their own intelligence units, inside of their own militaries, that this victory narrative is not real.
Aleem: The Financial Times recently reported that many Iranians who initially supported the U.S. bombing have now switched their opinion and oppose it. Do we have any evidence to believe that that’s a widespread thing?
Pape: There’s a powerful indicator that the media is not using. But the actual indicator here is whether or not you are seeing a rise in targeting intelligence by those pro-democracy movements to help the Israelis and the Americans kill and target inside of Iran, and what you’re seeing is probably the opposite of that.
If we could kill 300 leaders in Iran on a single day, we would definitely do that right now. The reason that’s not happening is because we don’t know where they are. The fact that that’s not happening is a strong indicator that a true alliance between the pro-democracy movement and the American bombing campaign is not building.
Aleem: What does the killing of Ali Larijani — the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and considered by many to be the country’s de facto leader after Ali Khamenei’s death — say about the strategy at play right now?
Pape: It’s pennies on the dollar. Iran had a “mosaic” plan, fully expecting that America and Israel were going to do leadership decapitation. That mosaic plan was essentially decentralizing all of the decisions that had to happen so you could still fight the war, even though you lose leaders along the way. I think this is just part and parcel of what Iran has been expecting.
You don’t see a single loss of a beat in their behavior. It’s not like we finally found the one leader who, once we kill that leader, the whole house of cards comes apart, because it’s not a house of cards. This is more of a matrix — a flexible matrix.
Aleem: Because of chains of succession?
Pape: No. 1, change of succession, and No. 2, the amount of high-volume real-time communication you need between the midlevels of the government and the very senior leadership is very thin. If you go down to, say, the brigade level in Iran, and you kill the brigade leader, you will paralyze the entire brigade of 4,000 or 5,000 men for probably weeks. But you take out a leader, and you might think, well, I’m going to have a much bigger effect. No, it’s the opposite, and the reason is because the volume and real-time connectivity that you need between the top echelons of the leader and the midlevels of the organization is different. It’s thinner.
Aleem: What are the off-ramps here? And what do you think are the chances that there’s a possibility of boots on the ground?
Pape: There’s no golden off-ramp where President Trump now will come out of this politically stronger than he was before. If there was, he would have taken it, because obviously he’s very sensitive to that.
The real choice here: Does President Trump cut his losses now, have some variant of declared victory? The political losses will be pretty severe, because if he tries to leave the conflict now, then this will likely leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which they were not in control of before. And they will likely have uranium to make a bomb, and that will not change. So the political costs that President Trump would have to make to cut his losses — and he would have to move all of his forces out of the region to do this, otherwise it wouldn’t be credible — would be severe, but his presidency might be recoverable from that point on.
But if he goes deeper, if we go to stage three in the escalation trap, we actually cross the threshold to even limited ground operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, this will likely lead to a much longer set of consequences, and the political costs will go up rather dramatically. And he may still decide, say, in July or August to pull back or cut a deal with Iran in some way, but that then may well be his presidency. He can’t recover. He will be in Lyndon Johnson territory, to use a Vietnam analogy, and Lyndon Johnson was never able to recover once it was clear that escalation could not defeat the North Vietnamese.
What we’re learning is, the more escalation with Iran, the more escalation is favoring Iran, and that is what I see going into the future. To me, the best option for President Trump is to cut his losses now. Yes, the political costs will be high. He won’t be able to get the same deal he could have gotten from Iran even before the bombing started, and he didn’t like that deal. This will be a deal he doesn’t like even more. But the alternatives here are politically worse for him, and also worse for the country and the world.
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