WW3 fears as expert warns Iran has lured Trump into a military trap | US | News
Donald Trump declared on Monday that the Iran war was “very much done.” Defense secretary Pete Hegseth promised Tuesday “the busiest day of strikes ever.” The contradiction at the heart of America’s messaging may be more than confusion; It could be a sign of a trap.
This is the reported assessment of Professor Robert Pape, director of the Security and Threats Project at the University of Chicago and author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, who argued in a State Department article that the United States and Israel were being drawn into exactly the kind of conflict that destroyed American ambitions in Vietnam.
The parallel is disturbing. The USA won all the wars in Vietnam for 11 bloody years and never lost air superiority. It quickly eliminated much of the military and industrial infrastructure on which the enemy was thought to depend. Yet he lost the war. North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces gained the upper hand over Washington not by matching American firepower but by escalating “horizontally,” spreading the conflict into southern towns and cities on their terms.
Professor Pape argues that Iran is now doing the same thing.
Horizontal rise theory
“Horizontal tension occurs when a state expands the geographical and political scope of a conflict rather than concentrating it vertically in a single area,” Pape writes, according to a report by the Telegraph. “It is particularly attractive as a strategy for weaker parties in a military conflict. Rather than trying to directly defeat a stronger enemy, the weaker side multiplies risk exposures, drawing additional states, economic sectors, and local populations into the conflict’s arena.”
Missile and drone strikes hitting gas, oil, water, air, shipping and tourism infrastructure in the Gulf and beyond are, in Pape’s analysis, not the desperate crushing of a regime on its last legs. They represent something more intentional: “an attempt to change the risks of a conflict by expanding its scope and prolonging its duration.”
The aim is political, not military. Iran spreads damage across the region, pressuring voters, investors and US allies; He hopes to erode the support—tacit and otherwise—that has sustained the American-Israeli offensive and pushed Trump back to the negotiating table.
“Horizontal tension is pressing on the soft seams between governments and societies,” Pape writes.
An endurance contest
Nowhere is this pressure felt more acutely than among the Gulf autocracies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman have spent decades fearing the kind of popular uprising that toppled the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979 and ushered in the Islamic Republic.
By striking civilian infrastructure in these countries, Tehran not only causes physical and economic damage, but also inflicts a domestic political cost on regimes that maintain its alliance with Washington and Tel Aviv.
“Horizontal escalation is not just about achieving a broader set of objectives. Its deeper effect is to change the way the adversary perceives risks,” Pape writes. “By expanding the area and prolonging the war, Tehran is transforming the struggle from a struggle for military capabilities into a struggle for political endurance.”
This may be a footnote in history, but it is a significant one: Iran is the only major conflict since Vietnam in which Britain did not join the US from the beginning.
It is not yet clear how Trump escapes the spiral of tensions that experts warn could lead to a broader regional or even World War III global conflict. Eleven days later this became his decisive fight.
