Iran and the escalation trap

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Hey everyone, I'm JB Poisson.

Today on the show, we wanted to bring on Robert Pate.

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.

Pate 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 out.

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 Pate.

Mr. Pate, 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 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 two 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 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium.

So he orders the smart bombs to destroy

for doe Natans, 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 is 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 in the tons for doe

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 Wyckoff

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 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 options.

In fact, trying to change the regime is the only option.

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 Wyckoff that Iran has 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, 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 recently the enrichment facilities of Iran,

as they were enriching uranium.

They were doing it multiple times a year

and publishing giant reports.

We had cameras, 24 or 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.

OK, 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 US?

My initial read is the smart bomb trap is beginning.

This stage two was actually underway,

and that President Trump was up against the weight of history,

because you see, for over 100 years,

attackers, states have been trying to topple regimes

with air power alone.

And I 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 just 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've 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 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 rate.

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,

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 Mosadek.

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, 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.

Does the bombing, what does the bombing campaign do

to whatever sentiment the people there might have

to want to overthrow their own government?

It turns the pro-democracy movement into traders of Iran.

They become foreign agents of America.

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 Hegseth 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 see, 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.

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Well, let's talk about the tactics, too, a little bit here.

Yes.

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 to capitation.

And what do they do?

They basically have a 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 lock 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 fourth rightly,

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.

That's because they now know that this,

and they should have known that before, by the way,

this was always planned.

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 resilient than it was

before the Supreme Leader was killed.

More resilient, that's interesting to hear you say that.

It's more resilient.

The more leaders you kill, you're just gonna get them replaced.

And in fact, then somebody might say, 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 a military officer is often puts me all the time.

So here's the issue.

If Iran wanted to orchestrate what's called a combined arm's

offensive where they take their navy, their air force

and their army, and they intricately integrate them

in a combined arm's 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 arm.

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.

Right.

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 US military bases

across the Middle East.

Also, there's a report published by CNN this morning

which mentioned that US officials

were not going to be able to do it.

And they're not going to be able to do it.

They're not going to do it, they're not going to do it.

They're not going to do it, they're not going to do it.

They're not going to do it, they're not going to do it.

The US officials specifically Pete Higgs

at the Secretary of War and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

have acknowledged that Iran's Shahed attack drones

represent a major challenge.

And US air defense will not be able to intercept them all.

Yeah, I was worried, 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 drone zones

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 weapon.

And now it hasn't happened just yet,

but it might happen by the end of the week.

I mean, if it happens, what is that, 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 all impressed because they

used to thinking about all that.

And now we're talking about 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 American starting

to regime change.

But what's happening now in the middle of stage two

is control over escalation is shifting to Iran.

And day by day, hour by hour, it is shifting to Iran.

And now you hear this morning, a general cane

is saying that in so many words.

Iran, on the other hand, has been indiscriminate

and more imprecise in their attacks.

They 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.

Jordanian air defense.

The anecdote about the Shahed drones

really reminds me of the brief military conflict

between the US and the political and military organization

known as the Houthis, which took place in Yemen last year.

After the Houthis started attacking boats

and blocking shipping route traffic through the Red Sea,

the US spent more than $1 billion 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 complementing 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 in the US

operate?

Yeah.

I really couldn't add to the detail that you said there is.

Usually what I have to do, but let me talk

about the implementation.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Yeah.

What are the lessons that the US should have taken?

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 shoe.

That's not what's happening here.

My point is that with the smart bomb trap,

you get mesmerized.

You're basically drinking too much your own cool way.

You think you have more control of the dynamics than you do.

And it takes, 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, but 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 retaliating 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 Iran is doing that and they haven't even started with terrorism yet.

And maybe 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 the 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.

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.

So what example?

Well, let me start with Libya.

You started with Libya.

Haven't talked about Libya today.

So to talk 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 Qaddafi 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.

You 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 Qaddafi,

the Libyans killed Qaddafi.

His son, we never did find,

we found a few pieces on him, safe Qaddafi.

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

there's no historical precedent for success

for this kind of strategy.

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 where 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 an expert to tell you.

Once you see those facts and then once you see it laid out

by a power point 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 and off ramp

or else I would 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.

Alright, that's all for today.

I'm Jamie Pusson, thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.