Political science professor Robert Pape, an expert on national security and terrorism, explains why President Donald Trump is “losing control of the situation” in his war of choice against Iran.
Pape, the founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) at the University of Chicago, told New York magazine’s Intelligencer that the one aspect missing from the president’s execution, along with Israel’s, of military action is the political dimension.
“The fundamental problem here is that bombing by a foreign power changes the politics of the situation,” he says. Despite the precision of today’s modern bombs, “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.”
On his Substack, Pape writes, “no regime in modern history has fallen solely because it was bombed from the air.”
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“Strategic bombing has destroyed armies and shattered cities, but it has not by itself toppled a functioning regime,” Pape notes. “Political collapse happens when ruling coalitions fracture under internal pressure, not when buildings burn.”
“Bombs can devastate states,” he adds. “They do not, by themselves, disintegrate regimes.”
Speaking to Intelligencer, Pape said, “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,” he explained. “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.”
Today, he says, the “waves of nationalism” are “being left out of this conversation” in Iran.
“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.”
He says that the military technology has “almost like a mesmerizing effect.”
“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.”
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