Trump IS TRAPPED In Iran Escalation Nightmare

Joining us now is Professor Robert Pape. He is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago But he is also the author of the escalation trap Which is a sub stack where there will be a link down in the description all of you should go and subscribe right now Thank you very much for joining us, sir. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Absolutely So sir, you are an expert particularly in airpower and in what you call the escalation trap. You studied, I think, every, what, every US bombing campaign going back all the way

to World War II, and you've talked to us.

World War I. World War I, okay, so every bombing.

So my book, Bombing to Win, goes back to World War I. I've spent years teaching for the US Air Force, conventional targeting strategy in particular. I have spent 20 years modeling the bombing of Iran. So this is something I know quite a bit about. I also study economic sanctions, terrorism. So all of that is why I built the Escalation Trap, because those frameworks I've been using

for so long for chiefs of staff of the Air Force, for White Houses, and so forth, I thought, really time to bring them to everybody.

Right, which is why you're such an important guest for us. And we do have some latest news before we get into some of your theory about the escalation trap we want your reaction to. Guys, let's go and put D1 up there on the screen. We have now seen an expansion of Iran declaring that U.S. and Israeli economic banking interests in the region are targets.

We have seen this now repeatedly, sir, where we've moved from initial military targets to then the striking of either civilian infrastructure by the United States or Israel inside of Iran, now an expansion to the banking sector. So it does appear as if your theory about escalation in air power continues to spiral as this war now enters what's its 13th day now so

far. So your reaction to this particular piece? Yeah, this is confirmation of what I've been saying. So when states try to use air power alone to topple regimes, it has never, and I'm choosing my words carefully, never worked in over 100 years. And we've tried many, many times, I'm glad to go through the cases. But what you get is often this lash back effect that you're not prepared for because you're overconfident

You think you're going to win quick and decisively so you don't prepare for the worst cases And now the worst cases are coming and what so we're we're always behind Now what Iran is specifically doing in this lashing back is a horizontal escalation concept. It's actually a concept called parallel attack that we developed in the 1990s in the Air Force to use with precision targeting.

And so with precision targeting, and they have precision drones, so we're effectively seeing two precision air campaigns collide for the first time in history. So their precision air campaign against us is parallel bombing at the same time, multiple nodes,

not one at a time like we did in World War II. They're hitting multiple nodes in a network. They're treating their enemy as a system like we taught in the 90s to treat others as a system. You see, this is what their intel has been scooping up. They've been learning from us and studying how to do this.

And now what they're doing is they're widening that horizontal escalation and those nodes because the more nodes you can attack at the same time in parallel, the more system shock you produce so what you are seeing is Trump has triggered a

Lashing back that is now producing System level shock this one of the things I explained and that system level shock is not just in Iran It's not even just in the region. It's now going global. And so this is really probably gonna go down as the most disastrous air campaign in history. Not quite there yet,

but we're heading to major system shock and the panic that everybody's talking about with trade of foreign moves. This is just the beginning here You see there. There's no there's no control. The biggest thing I want to say and then I'll stop is that we've lost control of escalation

You see one of the things I'm trying to explain in these writings is that there's the illusion The attacker has control and now you see each time president Trump says he's about to stop the war. Nobody listens anymore Prices are going up. Nobody's paying attention because we all now know whether we say it or not He's losing control more and more to iran and also more and more to the system Shock, you see actors are going their own way And that's part of the system-level shock that

is occurring.

Well, let me get your reaction to some of what President Trump is specifically saying, because he paints a very different portrait, I would say, than what you're painting here for us, Professor. But D2, up on the screen, he spoke with Axios. He told them in a phone interview yesterday the war with Iran will end soon because, quote, there is practically nothing left to target, little

this and that. Anytime I want it to end, it will end, he said during the five-minute call. What is your reaction to his presentation of how this is all going?

Well, this is what I call the victory narrative, but it's meeting escalation reality. And the reality is that he's one actor in the system now, but Iran is another actor who's actually driving the escalation pretty strongly. So if he's want to shut this war down, he's got to shut down the attacks on Iran. Well, he's already tried to break Iran. That's not working So what's he gonna give Iran to get them to stop?

You see he had a deal on the table the Friday before that. He started the bombing He can't I'd be very surprised and go back to that deal now and then on top of that Imagine he could even get the Iranians to come back to a third round of negotiators. Keeping in mind, we've killed the previous negotiators twice now. But keep in mind, let's say he pulls that out of the ... How's he going to get Israel to stop killing the leaders the next time?

You see, so is he going to slap sanctions on Israel and say, you kill more Iranian leaders? So he's got ... And these are just ... And I haven't even talked about the Gulf States and others and Russia Oh my goodness gracious. So as this has become a system level problem those actors multiply who have Control and increasingly more control than the United States. So just imagine I just named Iran

Israel and Russia that he has to get to call this thing off. How's he going to do that exactly? What's the plan here? Again, this is victory narrative. We're in now the midst of escalation reality.

And that victory narrative, we're just going to find fewer and fewer people paying any attention. They may listen, Trump loyalists may say they verbalize it, but that's like as if, you see, it's not real. And it's, we all know that because the prices are going up. And then when the price of the gas is going up,

everybody's gonna know victory narrative is meeting escalation reality.

Very, very true. So let's turn to some of your own is meeting escalation reality. Very, very true. So let's turn to some of your own points here about the risk, guys. Can we put his slideshow, D4, up there on the screen? So you start with multiple risks that we are now seeing. Energy shock, about 20% of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. If that flow is disrupted even partially, the economic shock would hit, obviously, the

entire globe. Energy markets watching that. Risk number two is horizontal escalation, which I believe you've just talked about. Risk three is global infrastructure vulnerability. Risk four is military and economic strain.

And risk five is strategic distraction. Can you just break some of that stuff down for us so we can get into it?

Yeah, so what you are seeing is not, this disaster that is unfolding is multidimensional. Now, we've had disasters in the past, but they have been more uni or single dimensional. The reason I'm laying this out in threads here is because the threads allow us to see

the different dimensions of the risk. And there are dimensions like a layer cake that are intersecting in real time, you see. And it's becoming – and the point on – you've laid out the risk. And I'll just mention the point on the distraction. As the risks come together, they overload us. We get overwhelmed

well

that's why I put out these frameworks in the escalation trap and then tie them to the events that are occurring because as I have Over the years I started to develop these when I taught for the US Air Force because I saw that the in war in crisis people are Overloaded and that's when the frameworks believe it or not become the most important saw that in war, in crisis, people are overloaded. And that's when the frameworks, believe it or not, become the most important because they need those

to make sense of this complex chaos. Otherwise, they're just bouncing all around, you see. So what you're seeing with that distraction is one of the most difficult challenges right now. It's not just that we have a lot coming in our Twitter feeds, our X feeds, that's not quite it.

It's that there's multi-dimensions. So, let's break them apart, let's talk about them, let's see how they're unfolding in stages. The post I'm about to put out on Substack pretty soon after this interview, is going to help tie those together so people can see that and then help see where this thing is heading,

you see. And what is really in front of us now is probably the worst disaster that's unfolding here that's been triggered by air power, certainly in most of our lifetimes. And we'll see how far this goes, but it's no longer just President Trump, as I'm saying, oh yeah, he's just gonna wake up.

Well, he can try it. He can announce today, right now, this second. You know, Professor Pape, you're wrong. I announced today, the war is over. Let's see if it stops the next hour. You see, because it's got all those other actors here who are, you know, he had chances to stop this in June.

He could have negotiated. He's now touched off the escalation trap. He's in it. It's not something that he controls.

And what does the next level of escalation look like? I already have a broadening of the war. Obviously the GCC countries have been hit pretty significantly. They seem quite upset. Israel is getting hit. They're saying they may set up some positions in the Horn of Africa.

We have reported involvement of the Russians and the Chinese. What does the next level of escalation look like?

The next level is going to be about the dispersal of the enriched uranium that you're hearing quietly, that, you know, these briefings on Capitol Hill, the senators coming out ashen-faced and so forth. We have to keep in mind that for 25 years, not just Donald Trump, this whole crisis

with militarized crisis with Iran has been about Iran's enriching uranium Well, they have a thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium That was in Fordow Natanz Essofon other places and when Trump bombed that in in June He destroyed buildings and functioning of buildings He didn't get that enriched uranium. And we have satellite photography of likely the dispersal of that material, and that's

on my sub stack. So people can go and watch a video. They do have to subscribe. It's free, but you can see the actual satellite photography of this. And we also have more photography from satellites, and this is civilian satellites by the way, in February in Essofon.

So this is now happening, you see, and it's coming out. President Trump himself a couple days ago in one of his discussions mentions this dispersal happening. This is very worrisome. That material can be, yes, down the road fashioned into bombs, but it can be used for radiological weapons.

So imagine that sprinkled on those cones of some of those precision drones going into Doha. When's the next time a billionaire is gonna show up there? So you end up with, so there's a lot of real capability here that Iran has not used yet. And this image of Iran as a beaten down,

you know, tiny little, you know, pipsqueak of a country with no capability that we've been hearing for years. This has never been true. Okay, so what's happening is Iran is a fairly strong country, 92 million.

It's as you reported, exporting oil when the rest of the world can't get. Just think about this for a moment. So they have a lot of capability here yet to go. And this is where the real danger is down the road. We're only at the beginning of the dangerous part of the escalation trap.

Professor, I am very worried about the breaking of a nuclear taboo, not necessarily just in the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, but an atmospheric nuclear test. Where would that fit into your escalation line? Am I being crazy?

Yeah, I'm going to be writing. So I give lectures on this. So again, this is now going to come forward. I will put these as lectures and video online. So every two weeks for some part of my sub-stack, I do these video briefings now. And so we can talk about these serious issues. So what people have been saying is Iran is so radical, irrational,

that what they're going to do is they're going to fashion a bomb. And the very first thing they're going to do is they're going to drop one and the very first thing they're gonna do is they're gonna drop one on Tel Aviv and maybe a second one on New York here. And then what this is is an image of Iran, they're painting an image of an irrational state that spasmodically reacts without thinking.

That's not what Iran has been doing for 25 years. So I'm not trying to paint them as 10 feet tall, but they've been pretty strategic. I would say I would give them at least a B plus, if not an A. So they've been pretty strategic in how they've behaved.

And what you would do with nuclear weapons is the very first thing is you don't just set off when you have one. You want to follow the North Korea pattern, which is you want many nuclear weapons. Notice North Korea has got 60-plus nuclear weapons, and we're suddenly saying that, well, okay, we're not going to tickle that tiger.

Well, Iran saw that. So Iran is, that's why in their material, all that material, that thousand pounds, and all everything I'm describing, that's enough for between 10 and 16 Bombs so what Iran really wants if they're gonna go the nuclear route is not one bomb They want five or six bombs

Because the very first use of that bomb is probably gonna be quote a test and then what are we gonna say? We're gonna say oh, that's not good enough. They only had one, they only had one. So then they're gonna have to do a second test, probably on their own territory. Once they do two, they're not gonna need to do three or four and people are gonna panic.

And then we're gonna see the real consequences of what's occurring here, you see. So the way to understand this is the politics of strategy, the politics of escalation, that's my forte. So I taught the best pilots in the Air Force, those folks weren't coming to me

and learning how to put a bomb on a target. They wanna know when their generals and their four-star generals and their chief of staff, what's going to happen here after the bombs hit the target, you see. And that's why quite a few folks, I've even received emails here from my former military students, saying, my God, Professor Pape, you were teaching this 20 years ago here.

You must be hitting your head about what's occurring because it's unfolding just as you told us it was going to unfold in your frameworks. They're appreciating now those frameworks are becoming more available so people can understand this. That's why I think you saw the military being much more reluctant to get on this board with regime change.

You saw that, right? There's a gap here. And the military, they're very professional. They're going to do what they are ordered to do. They will give advice, but if the president says, that's all fine and good, but I'm gonna ignore your advice,

they will do that because they are professionals. They are loyal to the constitution as they see it Here, but that's the real danger sir. So I hope I explained that this is where the scariness, uh here could get worse Um and and god and and we have big midterms coming up. So why wouldn't they time this around the midterms? I mean that would really just think about what that would do for Trump. The soft underbelly that we know and our enemies know is our politics.

That's why they've gone the long war strategy. And what you're seeing is they're having all different dimensions of the long war. And more and more, Trump is looking like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, where he just lost control.

Wow, and my last question for you is, there's been a bunch of reporting looking like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, where he just lost control. Wow. And my last question for you is there's been a bunch of reporting about how Israeli interests and goals may diverge from U.S. interests and goals,

and I'm curious your thoughts on that. And also, you know, while you see this as going catastrophically for the U.S., is it going catastrophically for Israel?

Because it seems to me that just having Iran's capabilities degraded and the possibility of chaos on the ground in Iran serves Israeli interests fairly well. And certainly it's been a goal of theirs for a long time to get us and the Gulf states, et cetera, embroiled directly in this war.

Yeah. So I want to separate what Israel and Netanyahu may think their interests are, and I understand they have the right to define their own interests, from what I think is their actual security interests. And what I think is happening here is that Israel's security is getting worse with the passage of time, not better.

And I think they, too, have been mesmerized by the hyper accuracy of precision weapons they can bomb targets and so forth and then they can actually destroy buildings with precision weapons as you're seeing they've learned in Gaza that you can actually mass coordinate those bombs and say you're not targeting civilians while you wreck the civilian infrastructure for anybody to live anywhere. So they're learning this.

But the bottom line is that this is, those things I'm talking about, like let's just pick the nuclear, the dispersal of nuclear material. Trump's bombing of Fordow did not contain the nuclear problem in Iran.

It triggered the dispersal of nuclear material. And as that material disperses, that's a danger not just to America, that's not just a danger to say Basra, that's a danger to Tel Aviv as well. And what is Netanyahu exactly gonna do here?

You know, are they seriously gonna put ground troops in? Are they seriously gonna think about nuclear escalation? I mean, this is the kind of things you got to scratch your head and say, what are they actually thinking? Because this dispersal of this material, none of those options are guaranteed to protect. So this, this really is not, I would say in Israel's interest,

but they've got their stated views and, and they may disagree. And as they disagree, then the real divergence here is between their stated views and they may disagree. And as they disagree, then the real divergence here is between their stated or thinking and the actual reality that they are facing. That's the real

issue here. Last question for you, sir. You said this is close to the most disastrous campaign.

What is the most disastrous campaign? Yeah, the most disastrous campaign was probably Bill Clinton's campaign in March 1999, when he had a three-day bombing campaign. He thought it would be three days to hit 51 regime targets in and around Belgrade, including Milosevic, the leader's home. Now, the idea was to wreck the crony regime of Milosevic. We had this model of cronyism in Serbia.

And what happened was that triggered a lashing back where Milosevic sent 30,000 troops in a horizontal escalation way to cleanse a million, 980,000 Kosovar civilians from Kosovo, that's 50% of the population. Now, what do we have here comparing that so far?

We have 50,000 Americans who've run away, so that's not a million who've run out of the region, but still, that's 50,000, and as time goes on, the economic consequences here are going to reach not just millions, but probably hundreds of millions of people.

That's only at the beginning stages now. So that's why I say we're entering that. But if this goes on for three or four weeks, as it well could, and we're're gonna discover that Putting out those oil reserves are one time you use it once and it's gone And then that's all gonna start to get priced into everything as those price surges

Continue to go up in by April You're gonna start to see the real pain come in and it's and it's gonna start to make Kosovo look like a small hill. So this is where we're really heading, and notice we haven't even talked about the most scary stuff that we were just talking about before. So as this thing unfolds, we need to understand

that we really, really have touched off the escalation trap in a way, and the biggest problem is that President Trump just is losing control. And he's gonna try to get the control back, but so too did Lyndon Johnson.

He's got double down.

That's the LBJ trap, we can call it that.

It's the LBJ trap. It's the same, this is the same. LBJ didn't think he was gonna lose. I guarantee you, he didn't wake up. It's one day and say oh, yeah, how can I actually become probably the worst president? In history and then beg for other presidents to come in like Jimmy Carter so forth to bail him out I mean, this is really they don't wake up that way. I guarantee you what they're waking up is there there I think

mesmerized by this illusion of control of Escalation and you even hear President Trump saying, when will Iran reach the breaking point? That was exactly the rhetoric of LBJ. How can we break the back of the North Vietnamese? And that search for the breaking point,

there's actually articles with those titles. The search for the breaking point, you see. And that language, I mean, I don't think Trump probably went back to the speeches of LBJ. This is the reality of the frameworks. The frameworks force this, you see.

And so that's why those frameworks matter.

Yeah, well, he's out right now saying that high oil prices are actually good for the US. So I think to your point about how people are not going to be listening to him, they have their own interests when they see those prices hit the gas pump.

I don't think they're going to be feeling like that's great for us.

Yeah, we're just enjoying eating.

But you know, we're eating three meals a day, and most of us probably should just be having

one. No, this isn't gonna work. Great, great tactic. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Escalation Trap, sub stack link is down in the description. Also, I just ordered your book on Amazon while you were talking.

Oh my God, okay.

Bombing to win, it's on my way to my house and I'll do a review here on the show.

Thank you so much. Yeah, well, and I really appreciate what you're doing for the country here and see that there's some way to understand what's happening to us.

It's our honor.

Yeah, it's our privilege. And we hope you'll join us again.

Absolutely, thank you very much. It's my pleasure.

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