The US and the *escalation trap” in the Iran War

The historian Robert Pape has studied the realities of air power and bombing in particular. His 1996 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War surveys decades of experience going back to the Second World War and stresses the evidence against the idea that mass bombing is a magic bullet in wars. In that book he notes that in the 1990s, use of air power for coercive purposes became more attractive to American policymakers and politicians as a way to exercise military power in what was then part of the “unipolar moment” for the US of being the clearly dominant major world power, while minimizing the use of ground troops. Both strategic and tactical bombing were major features of the Gulf War of 1990-1991. (1)

This trend was also apparent in the growing role of air power in U.S. military strategy in the 1990s. As policymakers perceived the American public's willingness to bear military costs as having declined, the role of air power in overseas conflicts increased because it can project force more rapidly and with less risk than land power and more formidably than naval power.

The US continued after the war to pursue severe sanctions against Iraq, which included partial US control of Iraqi airspace and featured the bizarrely named Operation Desert Fox by the Clinton Administration in 1998. (The World War II German general Ernst Rommel was nicknamed “the Desert Fox.“) The US and Israeli strikes against Iran during the 12-Day War in 2025 were a similar kind of operation. The Trump regime apparently hoped to have a relatively short repeat of that experience in the current war.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in a piece published the day before the current Iran War began noted:

The current force level is comparable to Operation Desert Fox, the Clinton administration’s punitive 70-hour bombing campaign after Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with UN nuclear inspectors. Like then, U.S. forces in the Middle East can launch 150–250 Tomahawk missiles and other long-range missiles (e.g., JASSMs) against facilities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli airpower might contribute to a punitive campaign. [my emphasis] (2)

The problem is that in all wars, the enemy has a say. And in the current war, Iran is striking back in ways that produce casualties in Israel and other countries allied with the US against Iran. Robert Pape and other are using the terms like “escalation trap” and “escalation dominance” to describe the dilemma of the current US posture in the Iran War.

The US currently appears to be in what authorities like Paper call an “escalation trap,” in which it is Iran that controls the escalation, which means that if the US and Israel just stop bombing with no formal agreement acceptable to Iran’s leaders, that doesn’t ensure that Iran will stop their current military actions like the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz:

Experts point in particular to the risks of an escalation trap – whereby the attacker is drawn into an ever more complex, protracted and costly conflict than envisaged at the outset – from a widening disparity in the US-Israeli campaign between the tactical and strategic level. Put simply, the tactical level involves specific military tasks – such as airstrikes hitting their intended targets – where the campaign has been successful. The strategic level defines whether the political and national security aims of the war are being achieved and at what cost.

“The are several stages to the escalation trap,” said Robert Pape, a US historian who has studied the limitation of air power and has advised a number of US administrations.

“What we saw with the initial attack was tactically almost 100% success,” he said. “The problem is that when that doesn’t lead to strategic success … you get to second stage of the trap.

“The attacker still has escalation dominance, so there is a doubling down, which then moves up the escalation ladder and that still does not lead to strategic success. Then you reach stage three, which is the real crisis, where you are contemplating far riskier options. I would say we are stage two, and on on the cusp of stage three.”

He said the Trump administration had become mesmerised by the initial attack and had an “illusion of control” based on the accuracy of its weapons. All of this has pushed Tehran towards its own model of escalation, one with a far wider global economic and political impact, Pape and other critics say. [my emphasis] (3)

Military air power since its inception – the first aerial bombing from a plane took place in 1912 during the First Balkan War when a Bulgarian pilot bombed a Turking train station – has always brought out a certain amount of “boys with toys” enthusiasm for seeing the latest development in air power as a magic weapon. The military in the 1990s talked for years after the Gulf War about a “revolution in military affairs.” It even had its own abbreviation, RMA.

The atomic bomb after 1945 was touted as the super weapon that would end all wars. The latest featured hopes in that category are drones and artificial intelligence (AI). And what Pape wrote in his 1996 book remains true today:

Countercivilian attacks can lower morale, increase absenteeism, and cause some deurbanization as refugees flee vulnerable cities, but these problems rarely have serious effects on production or cause civilians to put effective pressure on the government to surrender. (4)

The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) provides this recent interview about the “escalation trap” with Pape including the early days of the Iran War. He’s pretty blunt about it. He’s also been modeling Iran War scenarios for two decades. (5)

Notes:

(1) Lacquement, Jr., Richard (2020): The Gulf War 30 Years Later: Successes, Failures, and Blind Spots. War on the Rocks 09/09/2020. <https://warontherocks.com/2020/09/the-gulf-war-30-years-later-successes-failures-and-blind-spots/> (Accessed: 2026-17-03).

(2) Cancian, Mark & Prk, Chris (2026): With Trump’s Middle East Buildup, Think Desert Fox - Not Desert Storm. Center for Strategic and International Studies 02/27/2026. <https://www.csis.org/analysis/trumps-middle-east-buildup-think-desert-fox-not-desert-storm> (Accessed: 2026-17-03).

(3) Beaumont, Peter (2026): The escalation trap: how the Iran war could become more costly and complex. Guardian 03/14/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/14/how-iran-war-escalate-vietnam-trump-netanyahu-us-israel> (Accessed: 2026-17-03).

(4) Pape, Robert (1996): Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, 23. (Accessed: 2026-17-03).

What could falling into an 'escalation trap' in Iran mean for Canada and the rest of the world? CBC News YouTube channel 03/15/2026. <https://youtu.be/j0DQXnErlCk?si=FfcVlV8mIJrWfWhA> (Accessed: 2026-17-03).