As President Donald Trump appears to inch closer toward authorizing a major U.S. military operation this weekend, renowned international security expert Robert Pape warned the president on Saturday that he may very well be walking directly into what he called “the biggest trap yet.”
Reporting suggests that the Trump administration is actively preparing to launch a new wave of strikes against Iran, and officially end the ongoing but weak U.S.-Iran ceasefire. The president teased a full U.S.-takeover of Iran Saturday morning, and later said there was a “solid” chance he decides to blow Iran “to kingdom come” by Sunday.
“The administration may be approaching a dangerous decision point. And the real danger is not simply another round of strikes on Iran,” wrote Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, writing on his Substack. “The real danger is that Trump may be approaching the biggest Smart Bomb Trap yet.”
The “Smart Bomb Trap,” as he called it, was the notion that a quick resolution to the U.S. war against Iran could be achieved with “one precise strike” targeting Iran’s new supreme leader or senior leadership. As noted by Pape, the U.S. war against Iraq began with a series of strikes targeting former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, similar to how the ongoing U.S. war against Iran began with strikes targeting former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
With the U.S. war against Iran hammering Americans’ pocketbooks both at the gas pump and elsewhere, and with the GOP’s midterm outlook growing more dire, such an option would be hard to resist for Trump, Pape argued.
“The possibility that one precise strike could suddenly end the crisis, collapse the regime, restore deterrence, and produce a dramatic political victory,” Pape wrote.
“For any president under pressure, that possibility becomes extraordinarily difficult to resist. Especially for Trump, whose instinct in crisis has repeatedly been to search for decisive demonstrations of strength through precision force.”
However, the unique and asymmetrical circumstances that have allowed Iran – which has military spending roughly 130-times less on its military – to block the Trump administration from achieving its stated war objectives, Pape cautioned, could very well backfire spectacularly.
“Iran would still retain dispersed missile capability, underground infrastructure, asymmetric escalation pathways, and – most importantly – the ability to widen economic disruption across the Gulf faster than Washington could stabilize it,” Pape wrote.
“Especially if the US attacks Iran’s leaders, retaliation could well include Saudi, UAE, and Kuwaiti leaders – the leadership of countries that Iran would surely like to weaken decisively as US allies crucial to future basing of more military power against Iran in the future. That is the key asymmetry in this war.”
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