Why Trump Is About to Lose Control in Iran

Benjamin Hart · 2026-03-04T16:49:10.379Z

Joint U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iran have killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and a wave of possible successors. But the Iranian regime is forging ahead with new leadership, and it shows no sign of giving up the fight as it continues to sow regional chaos with drones and missiles.

The Trump administration’s war of choice is already illustrating the limits of air warfare, which perhaps nobody is better qualified to opine on than Robert Pape. A professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Pape has been writing and commenting on the subject for decades, including in his 1996 book, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, and countless articles and interviews. He also consulted with U.S. Air Force commanders on how to end the Bosnian War, briefed Congress on the Afghanistan War, and is a frequently cited source on other topics from domestic terrorism to social-media propaganda.

On his Substack, Pape frequently writes about “the Escalation Trap” (which gives the blog its name) and “the Smart-Bomb Trap” — theories that elucidate how a technologically superior power can fool itself into being overly optimistic about the effectiveness of military might. I spoke with Pape about the problems of air deterrence and why he believes Iran’s enriched uranium will likely bedevil the Trump administration no matter how the next few weeks play out.

In an essay on your blog this week, you wrote, “In war after war, cities have burned, infrastructure has collapsed, leaders have been targeted from the sky, yet no regime in modern history has fallen solely because it was bombed from the air end.” Could you briefly explain your overarching theory as to why this is so ineffective as a tactic for regime change?The fundamental problem here is that bombing by a foreign power changes the politics of the situation. We are virtually 100 percent successful, tactically, with precision bombs. But that doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t help. The problem is not that the bombs don’t go off. The problem is not that the bombs don’t hit the targets. The problem is not that the targets aren’t cratered or the leaders aren’t killed. The real problem is we’re a foreign power, and we’re using military force to pick a new government.

Before the bombs fall, it’s essentially a two-actor game. You have a society and you have a regime, and a lot of times the society doesn’t like its regime. But when you have the foreign power come in, it becomes a three-actor game, and the foreign power using military force injects nationalism into the politics in a way that just simply wasn’t there before. That means there’s nothing for intelligence to pick up on. The air-power folks, the folks who’ve really have been trying to work on and solve this problem for 30 years, they always want intelligence to do better and better, but they can’t because the political reaction hasn’t happened yet.

To actually crack the regime — that’s what I wanted to explain in this piece. I wanted to get into not only why it’s not working, but what it would even look like if it did. We’ve seen regimes crack under military pressure, and it’s when they lose major ground wars. That’s what happened with Russia in World War I. They had these massive battlefield losses, their soldiers came back, and they were very angry at their regime, their czar. But that was a bottom-up process. The Germans were not bombing Moscow to accelerate it — in fact, had they done that, they probably would’ve extended the czar’s reign. Not only was it not up to the control of the Germans, but look who came into power: the Leninist communists and later Joe Stalin, who then really strengthened Russia and the Soviet Union and crushed Germany. So they got regime change.

I wasn’t expecting Stalin to come up in this conversation. But you’re saying this dynamic is fairly constant throughout history. Again, it’s because of the waves of nationalism that are being left out of this conversation. The politics are being left on the side. We’re spending time talking about the hardware and the technology and the sensors, and we’re missing the discussion of the politics, because the technology being so 100 percent tactically effective tends to narrow our focus. It’s almost like a mesmerizing effect. You get the idea that, “Oh, we can actually control escalation. We’ll modulate this.” And you hear this in President Trump in the last three days, where he’s saying, “I have all these off-ramps, and I can do this, and I can do that.” Well, notice he’s now doubling down in ways he wasn’t expecting to. He’s no longer taking ground forces off the table. He’s losing control of the situation.

I would say that part of the problem is that unlike some past air campaigns, where the planners expected some kind of seamless regime change, it wasn’t even clear what Trump wanted in the first place here. His message has been so muddled from the beginning.Well, except — I don’t know how much you’ve been hearing behind the scenes — and look, I’m in Chicago, but I’m hearing it loud and clear. The under-the-radar plan here, which has been going on to all of the top reporters in Washington, is you’ll bomb for a while, whether it’s a few days or a few weeks, and then you have the shah’s son come in. This is what I call the Ahmad Chalabi option. You’ve probably been around long enough to remember him. But what happened when we actually got into Iraq — we took an army of course, to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime — is that Chalabi got nowhere. He was quickly forgotten once we actually had regime change, because he had no actual popularity.

So the idea that the shah’s son — I mean, this is really quite extraordinary. In 1953, when we actually had control of parts of the Iranian military with the British, we used the Iranian military to do a coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a popular democratic leader in Iran. Everybody in Iran knows this. Then we installed a shah. He was our guy, and this was a puppet regime of the first order. We gave him $8 billion, and that’s why the new ayatollah government took our hostages in the embassy — they wanted their $8 billion back, and they got it back. Ronald Reagan gave it back to them on his first day of office, and that’s why we got our hostages out. We gave in. So the bottom line is that this plan I’ve been hearing about — it’s stunning to me that it could get as far as a professor at the University of Chicago.

I’ve certainly heard that floated, but it also seems like everyone’s flailing around for a plan, and there’s a lot of post hoc reasoning going on. But the bottom line here, I think, is that this has always been about the nuclear program. In June, we bombed Fordow, and we were tactically successful in terms of cratering dirt and concrete. But what that meant is that we had no idea where the enriched uranium was. I always said that once you can’t find the enriched uranium, it would be a year or two later when you’d have the regime-change bombing. The bottom line is this was going to drive us crazy, because it really is a problem, having 1,000 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium and 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20 percent enriched uranium. We’re now at stage two of the Smart-Bomb Trap, that exact stage. And even if after four weeks we somehow do all of this damage to the regime, and somehow it’s the first case in history of regime change from the air, we still won’t know where all — probably any — of that enriched uranium is. And that is going to drive us even crazier.

And what happens if, in what I call horizontal escalation, the Iranians start to put some of that enriched uranium on the nose cones of drones as it’s hitting Riyadh? That would not be weird.

And it could happen tomorrow, or it could happen 60 days from tomorrow. And that’s not up to Donald Trump. So I think it’s really not right to say we really don’t understand the goals. It’s true that the PR discussion here has been all over the map. And that’s what the media mostly focuses on, the PR stuff, but that’s not the reality. The reality is I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and since 2002, this has been about the enrichment of uranium. And that problem is being solved nowhere as I speak, and it’s unlikely to be solved at all with air power.

The only way it would be solved is with an actual new government, you’re saying?Well, Trump had a deal on Friday that was better than the JCPOA, and he said it wasn’t good enough. The problem here is how will you ever be able to truly know that you’ve got all the enriched uranium for a bomb? The amount of material that I just ticked off for you — the 60 percent amount — is enough for ten nuclear bombs. The other 5 and 20 percent is enough for six additional nuclear bombs. So that’s 16 bombs’ worth of material, and they could have enriched that even further. This can be done in much smaller cascades than they did in the industrial sites they had. They don’t need industrial sites for that. And so tracking all this down at this point, this is really the problem that we’re really missing. This is the Smart-Bomb Trap: All the focus is on the tactics, and we’re missing the big picture, which is the strategy of the strategic outcome. And, in fact, we may be accelerating the development of nuclear weapons.

If the regime survives this, I think they would want those weapons as a deterrent, because it’s the only thing that would prevent it from happening again.But even if the regime doesn’t survive — that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Even if we get lucky and pull a rabbit out of the hat, the best-case scenario is a failed state. Some people are saying that’s what Israel really wants. They want a failed state, and they want to turn it into a version of Libya. Libya is about 6 million people; this is 92 million people. And Libya didn’t have all of that enriched uranium. So if you do create a failed state, you’re going to have a loose-nuke problem that’s much worse than the loose-nuke problem in the ’90s with Russia, because that material is going to be fantastically valuable on black markets. I guarantee there will be many takers.

Though the U.S. has assessed that Iran isn’t actually that close to making a bomb. We’ve been hearing they’re on the verge for a long time.Saying “We assess they’re X, Y, or Z” — this is meaningless. This is meaningless. We do not have the International Atomic Energy Agency in there. Our best assessments came when we had the great inspection regime, the verification regime, where inspectors were going in several times a year. They had all the cameras on 24/7, and we had cooperation with Russia on it. That was when you could have had confidence in an assessment.

People don’t want anybody to really focus on the actual strategic outcome here. I wrote this in a Foreign Affairs piece last summer before we bombed — I explained we would never find the 408 kilograms of enriched uranium. So this isn’t just after the fact. I’ve been modeling all this for so long — if you look at the dates on the Substack, you’ll see that these are explaining the stages before they unfold. And it’s not because I have any clearances — I’m sitting in Chicago, I have no clearances. I have been studying this for a long period of time, and this is what I do. I know about the politics of the escalation dynamics and I have the frameworks for it. It’s not because I speak Farsi, it’s not because I’ve got a secret in with the CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. In fact, when I worked for the Air Force, I had all the top clearances, I used them all, but that’s not how we ended the Bosnian War. Not at all. Again, you get mesmerized by what appears to be hyperexquisite information. If you’re eavesdropping on somebody and you’re listening to them talk about their girlfriend, you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool.” Well, fine, but we have a strategic problem to solve.

So given that you’ve diagrammed this and it’s gone according to what you have expected so far, what do you think is going to happen in the next week or two?President Trump’s on the horns of a dilemma — multiple dilemmas, in fact. He can declare victory. And Pete Hegseth set the stage for that the other day. He can say all we wanted to do was destroy Iran’s navy missiles, and now we’re happy and we’re going to go home. But that will be a political price he’s going to pay, because he’s put himself out there on regime change. He killed the supreme leader. This is the pope of the Shia world and 49 others. So there’s no golden off-ramp here. That’s dilemma one.

Dilemma two is he goes and plays this out for four weeks, six weeks, and then leaves — or plays it out another two months, it becomes Kosovo in three months, and then he leaves. Now he’s got a Lyndon Johnson problem, where he’s doubled down so many times, and unless he’s got that enriched uranium, at the end of those four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, he’s still got an Iran — or people inside of Iran, groups inside of Iran, or terrorist groups — that could develop a nuclear weapon. They may not do it; you’re quite right. But that is the real issue. The political cost will be even higher. This is why — I can’t read his mind, but I hear him bouncing all over with bombing X days, X weeks. He’s not taking ground forces off the table.

It’s a matter of picking your poison. Do you want the short-term costs, which are real and immediate and you accept it and you move on and deal with them? Or do you run the risk of another gamble and end up having bigger costs down the road? And the longer this goes on, the more risk there will be of further horizontal escalation. The fact of the matter is there are plenty of smart people in Iran who are going to come up with lots of nasty things to do to airports and all kinds of things down the road.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.