Front Burner - Iran and the escalation trap

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Today on the show, we wanted to bring on Robert Pape. He is a political scientist with the University of Chicago. And we’ve been following his work on his substack “The Escalation Trap” with a lot of interest since the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. Pape is going to argue that the U.S. has walked into an enormous, military escalation trap. He takes a hard look at things like missile supplies, and air defense systems, and models them out. His predictions for the future of this conflict, based on present information, and history aren’t great.

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Hey everyone. I'm J.B. Poisson. Today on the show, we wanted to bring on Robert Pape. He's a political scientist with the University of Chicago. And we've been following his work on his substack, the escalation trap, with a lot of interest since the U.S. Israeli strikes on Iran. Pape is essentially going to argue here that the U.S. has walked into an enormous escalatory trap. He takes a hard look at things like missile supplies and air defense systems, and he models them at. His predictions for the future of this conflict based on present information and history, well, they are not great. So let's get straight to that conversation. Here is Robert Pape. Mr. Pape, thank you very much for being here. Glad to do it. Thanks for having me.

So much of the work and writing you've been doing related to this war in Iran is built around a framework that you have called the escalation trap. What is the escalation trap and how does it relate to this U.S.-Israeli war in Iran? The escalation trap is a framework that unpacks the stages of escalation in political conflict, and then it applies it specifically to this conflict, which I have called the smart bomb trap. Now, this is stages. So stage one of the smart bomb trap is where the allure, the seduction of the promise of 100% tactical success, that stage one will then soon lead to a stage to recognition of failure to achieve the strategic objective. You see, just because you have destroyed the target does not mean you have achieved the actual goal why you wanted to destroy the target. So June last summer, President Trump is very concerned about the nuclear program in Iran.

Iran has a thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium. So he orders the smart bombs to destroy foredo Natanz, these large industrial facilities for generating large amounts of enriched uranium. The UN nuclear watchdog saying enrichment facilities in Iran have taken direct military strikes. Joining us now, as I'm so pleased to say, the IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi. I have said that no country in the world is enriching uranium at this level of 60%, which is technically almost equivalent of 90%, which is needed to have a nuclear weapon. Well, we do drop those bombs. They work exactly as the bombs are supposed to work.

They hit the targets where they were supposed to hit. There's a problem, though, and that is the enriched uranium. We have no idea where that enriched uranium. is. There is satellite imagery that was taken just a couple days before the bombing last June that shows they may have been, the Iranians may have been taking it out. We have truck visualizations of this. And the fact is this was always the expectation. This was always what you would expect, which is you would destroy the target, Natanz Fordo, and have no idea where the enriched uranium is. And that means a year later, or nearly so, you are really worried because maybe they are fashioning. that enriched uranium into a bomb. And literally last week, when Steve Wickoff is negotiating with the Iranian negotiators, the Iranian negotiators tell him point blank to his face, we have the enriched uranium for 11 nuclear bombs.

Almost literally exactly what I just laid out. What are you left with? Stage two, you go for regime change. Because once you fail in stage one strategically, you have very few other option. In fact, trying to change the regime is the only option. And that is where we are today. So now we're stuck in the middle of stage two. And now stage two is failing. Yeah. I want to get to stage two. But before I do, can I ask you a question about those remarks that were made to Steve Whitkoff that Iran has, you know, all of this enriched uranium? Do you think that they actually do?

I would, I certainly think it's more likely than not. Again, I'm following this very much. very, very, very closely and have for 20 years. So it's not like I'm just catching up on this. And the fact of the matter is we've been able to track the enriched uranium that Iran's been producing since about 2002. We do that with the IAEA, which is the International Atomic Inspectors of the UN. And they have been on-site inspecting until, Until recently, the enrichment facilities of Iran, as they're enriching uranium, they were doing it multiple times a year, and publishing giant reports. We had cameras 24-7. We just had an enormous amount of clarity. Well, that is why we have a fairly good estimate. Is it absolutely perfect? No, but it's probably beyond the 95th percentile.

Okay, so let's go to stage two, right? So this war began with airstrikes, a series of raids over the skies of cities like Tehran that targeted military installations but hit civilian ones as well, including an elementary school for girls in which more than 100 students were killed. Iranian officials say airstrikes hit an elementary school Saturday, killing more than 160 people, mostly children. What was your initial read on that first volley of missiles by Israel and the U.S.? My initial read is the smart bomb trap is beginning that stage two was actually underway and that President Trump was up against the weight of history. Because you see for over 100 years, attacker states have been trying to topple regimes with air power alone. And I've studied all of these cases in detail for many years. And the fact of the matter is, and I'm going to choose my words carefully here, it has never worked.

I don't mean it's rarely worked or sometimes, yes, sometimes no. It's really quite a stunning, remarkable pattern of 100% failure. And we rarely have those patterns in military history and international politics. But the first thing to know is this is the weight of history, not just Iran and not just this regime. there are real reasons why this does not happen. And we've tried, America's tried before. We tried the dumb bomb age, the smart bomb age. Other European countries have tried. Russia has tried. This is not a party issue. This is about the reality of what air power can and cannot do. I want to get into some of the historical examples with you in a few minutes, but just, you know, broadly, why do they never work? They don't work because before the bombs start falling, and you heard this in this case, you hear about the dynamics between the society and the regime.

And societies often don't like their rulers. This is really quite common. Right now, what is, Donald Trump's got a 38% approval rating. So you could say there's a pretty big gap there between society and our government. But then once the bombs start falling, the equation changes. This is where the trap comes in because the politics changes. It's not about the bombs not hitting targets. It's about the bombing itself is foreign bombing, foreign military intervention.

And now you have a three-actor game where now, in this case, the Americans are saying, we will decide who should be the government of Iran and we'll just keep killing them until we get the one we want. Well, what that means is that suddenly you now have nationalism infused in the politics of the regime and nationalism infused in the society. Because a society may not like its rulers, that's for sure. But does that mean it really wants America to pick who's going to run the country? And in Iran, we did this before in 1953. There was a democratically popular leader. His name was Mossadegh.

We worked with the British, and we controlled then parts of the military of Iran. So that's why we were able to have a coup, and we installed the Shah of Iran. And so you have a situation where we don't have that control of the military. And so the bottom line is you've changed politics. And when you change politics, you fuse. the society and the regime closer together, even the pro-democracy movements now start to become more silent. Now, why would that be? Well, yeah, why would that be? I guess the question I have for you is, you know, when Donald Trump tells the Iranian people to get out onto the street

and to take back their government that it is theirs to take, you know, does the bombing, what does the bombing campaign do to whatever sentiment the people there might have, to want to, to overthrow their own government. It turns the pro-democracy movement into traders of Iran. They become foreign agents of America. Huh. And that's why it often, and this isn't just in this case, this is over and over in history. It usually weakens the pro-democracy movement.

Donald Trump, 38% approval. There's a gap. You've already heard, just in fact, this morning from Pete Hegsafe that Iran's tried multiple times to assassinate President Trump just in the last couple years. Well, let's assume that they were to succeed. Does that mean Democrats would take to the streets and say, thank you, Iran. Come on over. Let's have a dinner party.

I don't think so. And that's what basically Donald Trump's asking. You say he's asking the pro-democracy movement now to do it for America. This is a gigantic strategic contradiction. This is not about the tactics of which we can also talk about of putting bombs on targets. This is the fundamental political problem why you have not had air power alone change regimes for over 100 years. It's self-contradictory at the political level. Are you ready to inspire the next generation in French?

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We'd love to talk. Business. Well, let's talk about the tactics, too, a little bit here. Yes. I think maybe you're going to go to the specific kinds of missiles and weapons that are being used. We could do that, but there's a bigger thing first, which is the Iranians clearly expected we were going to do leadership decapitation. And what do they do? They basically have pre-war plans for decentralizing their command and control or government or regime.

whichever term you want to use are all the same. And what that means is that they become more cellular in structure. And it's overlapping cells. So there is no longer this hierarchy where you lop the head off. The Supreme Leader is gone and nothing works. Well, a lot of people apparently thought in Washington that was going to be the case. And they were surprised when after they did, in fact, kill the Supreme Leader on hour one, they were surprised that Iran retaliated, and retaliated in ways they weren't quite sure.

And you might recall on Saturday, you had folks saying, well, that's just the spasms of the last muscle twitches of the dying body. Well, this morning, General Kane, forthrightly, honestly said, Iran has its command and control intact, and they're launching coordinated, orchestrated retaliation across the region. That's why they're panicking and trying to get a million Americans out of the region. It's because they now know that this, and they should have known before, by the way. This was always a plan. It's called Mosaic, that this has been in public, in detail for weeks, the decentralization plan. And it is the fundamental reason why the regime is now more resilience than it was before the Supreme Leader was killed. killed. More resilient. That's interesting to hear you say that. It's more resilient. The more leaders you

kill, you're just going to get them replaced. And in fact, then somebody might say, well, well, wait a minute, how can it be more resilient because they can't do quite the same functions? Well, if it's okay, let me answer that because this is one of the questions that military officers often puts me all the time. So here's the issue. If Iran wanted to orchestrate what's called a combined arms offensive, where they take their Navy, their Air Force, and their army, and they intricately integrate them in a combined arms attack to, say, attack some base we have in the region, then this decentralization plan doesn't work. You can't do that with it. But Iran was never planning on a combined arms. And why not? It's because since 1991 for over 30 years, all the states,

all the terrorist groups in the world have learned you cannot go toe to toe with the American conventional military. One thing's been missing since 1991, and that is a conventional army up against our military. And there's a reason. They know they will get crushed. And that's why they don't do it, and that's why they fight other ways. I was reading this morning in the New York Times, they're reporting that the Iranians have successfully hit key communications infrastructure on several U.S. military bases across the Middle East. Also, there's a report published by CNN this morning, which mentioned that U.S. officials,

specifically Pete Hegsa, the Secretary of War and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have acknowledged that Iran's shot. head attack drones represent a major challenge and U.S. air defense will not be able to intercept them all. I was warning, yeah, this is all coming out now, should have been out a week ago. I was talking about this on the substack a week ago. So Iran has been the major supplier of the drones for Putin in Russia's war against Ukraine. Now, these drones, many of them can be zeroed in.

they're essentially precision guided weapons. So we're running out of precision guided weapons. You're hearing that this morning. Who's not running out of precision guided weapons? It's Iran. And this really quite stunning. So now we're in a situation where we're going to have fewer precision weapons than the enemy. This may be the first time in history that has happened,

where America has been outmatched precision weapon to precision weapons. Now, it hasn't happened just yet, but it might happen by the end of the week. I mean, if it happens, like, what is that? Like, what's what happens? Massive widening of escalation. So, again, we need to see that we talk tactics, right? And people get mesmerized by the hardware and they're, and they're all impressed because they're not used to thinking about all that. And now we're talking about it on the side of the bad guys. But we got to come back to strategy and the escalation. Well, what that means is. wider war under the control of Iran.

So in stage two, it starts with the Americans starting the regime change. But what's happening now in the middle of stage two is control over escalation is shifting to Iran. Right. And day by day, hour by hour, it is shifting to Iran. And now you hear this morning, General Kane is saying that in so many ways. words. Iran, on the other hand, has been indiscriminate and more imprecise in their attacks. They've fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones, striking innocent civilian targets throughout the region. Our partners are answering the call to defend themselves

right alongside us. Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait are all defending their people with their own combat capability with precision and restraint. The anecdote about the Shahed drones really reminds me of the brief military conflict between the U.S. and the political and military organization known as the Houthis, which took place in Yemen last year. After the Hussis started attacking boats and blocking shipping route traffic through the Red Sea, the U.S. spent more than a billion dollars on the operation, which lasted only weeks. And in that time, despite a great differential in resources and power, the Houthis managed. to shoot down several $30 million American jets. And soon enough, Trump announced a ceasefire and ended up really, frankly, complimenting the Houthis for their fighting and their endurance and their bravery. And the whole thing was kind of understood by many to have been a military loss by the United States.

And what do you think the lessons from the U.S. I really couldn't add to the detail that you said there. You did usually what I have to do. But let me talk about the implications. Thank you. Sorry. Yeah. What are the lessons that the U.S. should have taken from that.

Well, the lessons are if you have a Houthi force that can do this, can beat America at the precision game, that's what happened there. Then what's going to happen when you have a country 92 million that has over a million people in arms? And they're not going to try to combine them together in nice kill boxes for you to just pick them off like a turkey shoot. That's not what's happening. here. My point is that with the smart bomb trap, you get mesmerized. You basically drink too much your own Kool-Aid. You think you have more control

of the dynamics than you do. And you learn slowly you don't. And that's what's happening right now. We're coming to the realization that we don't. We are now up against, I don't know exactly how to put numbers on it, but think about it as like a 50 times more powerful enemy than the Houthis. Something on that order. And this is going to go on and on. And you were

seeing just the beginning of this. I'd like to ask you about Israel specifically here. They have invested enormous resources into a pretty comprehensive air defense system. The Iron Dome is a point of great national pride, as is their David Sling defense system. And how do you think their defense doctrine shapes their offensive one or shapes their kind of offensive military calculus? Well, I think Israel's focused a lot on trying to stop the missiles coming in. I was in Israel in December 2019. So I was in air raid shelters. I was in Gaza. I went up north near the border with Lebanon. So I saw quite a bit of this for myself. And so I think they've actually done quite a good job to the extent you can. And we saw last summer that there are real limits to the Iron Dome. When Iran focused on retaliation, against Israel last June, Iran sent 3,000 Israelis to the hospital. And I think may well have been that the Americans and Israel thought, oh, they'll just do this again. They'll focus on Israel again. We know better now. We're prepared for that. But that's not what the Iranians have done.

They did have hit Israel. That's for sure. It's not off the target list. But what they're doing is widening the war. Turkey has now come under attack. They are attacking in the region more widely. And this is the soft underbelly of America and Israel, because this is now going to create giant wedges between those governments and their own people. And those governments here have been trying to be quiet, but they've effectively been helping Israel expand. And now this is going to start to become more and more evident and visible to the street, it's called, the actual populations. This is not going to work out well. The grand strategic problems for Israel are just beginning. And this is, and Iran is doing that, and they haven't even started with terrorism yet.

And just think about all the tools that Iran still hasn't even used. There's many, many more tools to widen this war. And politically, this works against Israel. dramatically because those Arab governments, unless they start to distance themselves from Israel and America, they face being toppled, they face being assassinated. And I don't just mean by Iran. I mean by their own people. This idea you have been hammering throughout this conversation that this kind of strategy has never worked. You know, I'm sure people are thinking about Libya in 2011, Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan, in 2001. There are.

dozens and dozens of countries all over the world. Which one? So I'm absolutely having advised all the way through all of these. So which would you like to choose? Just pick one. I'd like you to choose. You know, what example? Well, let's start with Libya.

You started with Libya. I haven't talked about Libya today. So talked about the others. But let's just pick Libya. People probably remember Obama bombed Libya. What they probably don't either remember or didn't even maybe know at the time. is that there was a militant group in arms, think of them as armed terrorist militias, that were toppling the government, that were going against the government.

So when by the time Obama bombed a convoy of Gaddafi troops that were heading to what's called Benghazi, what had happened by that point is the Libyan government had disintegrated. Many had left the country. and then that's when the terrorists started to form the militias, and they were forming bigger militias than Qaddafi had left. So this was not, from an American perspective, we say, well, that was just American air power. Well, no, there was a civil war underway, and that regime was already disintegrating fast. And then there were army, essentially militias, little white infantry units that were stronger than the Libyan government. That is the situation there.

Now, we did a bomb targets, that's for sure. We helped tilt the battlefield, so to speak, toward the militias here. But we actually didn't kill Gaddafi. The Libyans killed Gaddafi. His son, we never did find. We found a few pieces of him, safe Gaddafi. But this was not a case of leadership decapitation. And you can see right away, well,

okay, so if you're going to bomb when there's an ongoing civil war, I don't mean there's a pro-democracy group. I mean, there's literally a civil war. Well, you're going to get some different outcomes than where we are right now in Iran. Listening to you today, talk about how, you know, there's no historical precedent for success for this kind of strategy. I just, why do you think they ultimately keep doing it? I mean, you advise these guys in the first Trump administration. Some of them are still around, I guess. But like, why are they doing it? They get moved into the seduction of stage one. And they continue to have the illusion of control.

And this is not an American thing. We could say, well, we Americans, we just don't know enough about history. No, that's not it. I've many times with European governments in the region itself, whether that's UAE or this is not the case. This is not about an American failure. I just think it's probably just straightforward human nature. When you see in front of you this unbelievable tool of precision weapons,

you right away start thinking about, well, my goodness, if it's got a five-foot CEP, it's called sort of distance, you know, air where you aim for and you, have a five foot miss, you know you can kill a leader. You just know that. And you don't need any expert to tell you once you know, see those facts. And then once you see it laid out, um, by, uh, in PowerPoint form, oh my goodness gracious. And I think what it does is it leads to the illusion of control. And then sometimes there are off ramps we can develop. This case, we've gone pretty far in. This is not a gold. There's no gold in off ramp or else I would, I'd come up with it

for the good of the country. This is not the. case. We are deep into the smart bomb trap now. We've gone in multiple thresholds here, not just stage one. We're now way into stage two. And this is up against the most dangerous opponent we have ever gone up against in the precision age. And now we're running out of precision bullets. That's really quite stunning. Mr. Pape, that was really nice to hear you kind of end much where you started, although extremely disconcerting. Thank you very much for your time. Absolutely. Thank you very much. All right. That's all for it today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you

tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.