The Dictatorship
An air power expert explains why Iran is more powerful now than before the war
President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is not going well. He began the conflict with a promise to use an air campaign to initiate regime change in as little as “two or three days.” But about three weeks in, Iran’s government, military and security forces remain highly functional. No popular uprising has emerged. And Iran’s government has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices surging and Trump into a panic.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is one of the analysts who saw this situation coming a long way off. An expert on air power and regime change who has also taught at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Pape is exceptionally well suited to address the core dynamics underlying how the war on Iran is unfolding. His scholarship and his newsletter, “The Escalation Trap,” all point in one direction: Trump’s goal of toppling Iran’s regime from the air alone is doomed, because fighting a war only with air power is by its very nature ill suited to win hearts and minds.
I spoke with Pape on the phone this week, and he explained why this kind of intervention has such a poor track record, what isn’t working strategically, why Iran isn’t losing the war, and what this all means for the possibility of Trump sending in ground troops.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: When you heard in Trump’s initial announcement that he’s going to use air power alongside Israel to clear the way for protesters to take over the government, what did you think?
Robert Pape: What I thought is that President Trump was up against the weight of history. I’ve studied every air campaign since World War I, and in all that time, over 100 years, air power alone — without ground forces — has never toppled a regime. There have been times when there have been pro-democracy movements in combination with the air power; it has never worked. It has not worked in the dumb-bomb age, the smart-bomb age. We’ve tried so many different combinations, so much intelligence, and it has never worked.
You’re ending up with leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs.”
ROBERT PAPE
Aleem: Could you expand on how air campaigns haven’t succeeded even when coordinated with pro-democracy movements?
Pape: There’s no case where air power alone has coordinated with a civilian unarmed pro-democracy movement to topple a regime. The closest you get to this is in 1991, after the 39-day American air war and after the four-day ground war against Iraq to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The view inside of the George H.W. Bush administration was Iraq was so weakened and Saddam’s regime was so battered that Bush called publicly for the Shia to rise up and topple the Saddam Hussein regime. If you just looked at it on a piece of paper, it would seem like “Goodness. Well, of course, the Saddam regime would crack and it would fall.”
What happened instead? The Saddam regime had plenty of residual capability and butchered and killed tens of thousands of those Shia who rose up, and the bodies piled in the streets.
Aleem: What is it about air campaigns that makes them so ineffective at achieving regime change?
Pape: It’s ineffective not because the bombs are technically ineffective. It’s ineffective because the bombing triggers politics in the target government and in the target society that work against us. It’s a politically self-defeating strategy.
Before the bombing starts, you typically have a gap between the society and the government. What the bombing does is it changes from an internal game inside of Iran to now the foreign military attacker dictating the government that Iran should have.
And in this case, it’s not just any old third party doing the bombing. It’s the Godzilla of the American precision military. It’s the Americans who historically have done regime change in Iran before. In 1953 we controlled parts of the Iranian military and we fostered a military coup that put in the shah of Iran, a dictatorship, along with the SAVAK, which was one of the most brutal security agencies in history.
Notice President Trump did not say, “Well, we’re just simply going to ask the pro-democracy movement who they want.” Instead we — Americans — are going to decide who the government of Iran will be. Whether we call it a dictatorship or a puppet regime or not, that’s exactly the way this is going to be interpreted, and injects the politics of nationalism into the equation. Once you have nationalism, you have a fundamentally new political dynamic.
The new politics that have been triggered by the bombing work to the disadvantage of regime change, in the positive sense that you would get a generation of leaders who would be more likely to do Washington’s bidding. What you’re getting instead is negative regime change: You’re ending up with leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs in order to punish America, and allies of America.
Aleem: I think when people see the incredible power and precision of American strikes to take out targets, they think it might just work anyway.
Pape: The incredible power of precision attacks produces incredible fear and anger in the target country, both in its leadership and in its society. And that incredible fear and anger morphs into lashing back, right? The fear and anger causes fight-or-flight, and the fight aspect becomes much more dominant in this situation. And precisely because there’s not a ground force there, there are opportunities to lash back.
Aleem: If you had to say someone was winning this war or losing this war, what would you say?
Pape: I would say that this war has been tactically brilliant by the United States — the U.S. military has done everything we’ve asked it to do. But Iran is not losing the war.
The core reason is that by controlling and disrupting passage through the Strait of Hormuz, it has already gained enormous leverage. It has gained leverage in [raising] world energy prices. That leverage also works to its financial advantage, because Iran can shift its own oil through the strait; if we blow up those tankers — which we could easily do — this will only drive oil prices up even further.
Iran is not losing. It’s more powerful today than before the war.
Robert Pape
And if we have [to use] ground efforts in order to open the strait, I call this the limited territorial control option on my Substack. … This will only deepen the escalation trap even more, and a big reason for that is because, as my work on terrorism that I’ve done for over 25 years shows, 95% of all the suicide attacks around the world are in response to foreign ground presence.
Iran is not losing. It’s more powerful today than before the war.
Aleem: The Washington Post reported this week, according to a State Department cable that it reviewed, that Israeli officials believe Iranian protesters will get “slaughtered” by Iranian security forces if they mobilize, but Israel is still publicly calling for an uprising. What do you make of that?
Pape: I think this is an example of victory narrative meets escalation reality. There are domestic political incentives for the Israeli government and the U.S. government to articulate the victory narrative, which is this illusion that there is this quick and decisive victory just around the corner. But this is meeting escalation reality inside of their own administrations, inside of their own intelligence units, inside of their own militaries, that this victory narrative is not real.
Aleem: The Financial Times recently reported that many Iranians who initially supported the U.S. bombing have now switched their opinion and oppose it. Do we have any evidence to believe that that’s a widespread thing?
Pape: There’s a powerful indicator that the media is not using. But the actual indicator here is whether or not you are seeing a rise in targeting intelligence by those pro-democracy movements to help the Israelis and the Americans kill and target inside of Iran, and what you’re seeing is probably the opposite of that.
If we could kill 300 leaders in Iran on a single day, we would definitely do that right now. The reason that’s not happening is because we don’t know where they are. The fact that that’s not happening is a strong indicator that a true alliance between the pro-democracy movement and the American bombing campaign is not building.
Aleem: What does the killing of Ali Larijani — the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and considered by many to be the country’s de facto leader after Ali Khamenei’s death — say about the strategy at play right now?
Pape: It’s pennies on the dollar. Iran had a “mosaic” plan, fully expecting that America and Israel were going to do leadership decapitation. That mosaic plan was essentially decentralizing all of the decisions that had to happen so you could still fight the war, even though you lose leaders along the way. I think this is just part and parcel of what Iran has been expecting.
You don’t see a single loss of a beat in their behavior. It’s not like we finally found the one leader who, once we kill that leader, the whole house of cards comes apart, because it’s not a house of cards. This is more of a matrix — a flexible matrix.
Aleem: Because of chains of succession?
Pape: No. 1, change of succession, and No. 2, the amount of high-volume real-time communication you need between the midlevels of the government and the very senior leadership is very thin. If you go down to, say, the brigade level in Iran, and you kill the brigade leader, you will paralyze the entire brigade of 4,000 or 5,000 men for probably weeks. But you take out a leader, and you might think, well, I’m going to have a much bigger effect. No, it’s the opposite, and the reason is because the volume and real-time connectivity that you need between the top echelons of the leader and the midlevels of the organization is different. It’s thinner.
Aleem: What are the off-ramps here? And what do you think are the chances that there’s a possibility of boots on the ground?
Pape: There’s no golden off-ramp where President Trump now will come out of this politically stronger than he was before. If there was, he would have taken it, because obviously he’s very sensitive to that.
The real choice here: Does President Trump cut his losses now, have some variant of declared victory? The political losses will be pretty severe, because if he tries to leave the conflict now, then this will likely leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which they were not in control of before. And they will likely have uranium to make a bomb, and that will not change. So the political costs that President Trump would have to make to cut his losses — and he would have to move all of his forces out of the region to do this, otherwise it woul dn’t be credible — would be severe, but his presidency might be recoverable from that point on.
But if he goes deeper, if we go to stage three in the escalation trap, we actually cross the threshold to even limited ground operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, this will likely lead to a much longer set of consequences, and the political costs will go up rather dramatically. And he may still decide, say, in July or August to pull back or cut a deal with Iran in some way, but that then may well be his presidency. He can’t recover. He will be in Lyndon Johnson territory, to use a Vietnam analogy, and Lyndon Johnson was never able to recover once it was clear that escalation could not defeat the North Vietnamese.
What we’re learning is, the more escalation with Iran, the more escalation is favoring Iran, and that is what I see going into the future. To me, the best option for President Trump is to cut his losses now. Yes, the political costs will be high. He won’t be able to get the same deal he could have gotten from Iran even before the bombing started, and he didn’t like that deal. This will be a deal he doesn’t like even more. But the alternatives here are politically worse for him, and also worse for the country and the world.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination, a spokesperson said late Wednesday, as two retiring Republicans on the panel dug in over President Donald Trump’s personal “anti-weaponization” deal with the government he runs.
Sen. Chuck Grassley’s decision to delay the committee vote that had been set for Thursday marks a setback for one of Trump’s highest-profile Cabinet nominees, at the hands of Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a pair of Republicans set to leave the chamber next year.
“Chairman Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure. Senators Cornyn and Tillis want written assurances from the Department of Justice regarding the Trump-IRS settlement,” the committee spokesperson said.
Blanche’s nomination to permanently head the Department of Justice needs the support of either Cornyn or Tillis to make it out of the committee to a vote by the full Senate, assuming all Democrats remain opposed.
“Why don’t you call over the Department of Justice and tell them they have one hour and 50 minutes to get me what I asked for,” Cornyn told reporters Wednesday afternoon amid the hardening standoff over his demand that Blanche and the DOJ put in writing a commitment never to pursue the president’s prized “anti-weaponization” fund, and to clarify the terms of Trump’s personal deal with the Internal Revenue Service.
Tillis told MS NOW that the conversations were complicated by the need for the Justice Department to get “several parties” to agree on the language of the statement Cornyn and Tillis are seeking.
“What I’ve advised the chair, and I would assume Senator Cornyn said something similar, is that we’re not prepared to vote yes yet,” he added.
“The Department has been in regular communication with Committee members for weeks, and we look forward to continuing to work productively with Senators to address any concerns,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in response to the decision to postpone the committee vote.
Cornyn was set to meet with Blanche on Wednesday morning, but the meeting was called off after Blanche failed to meet the senator’s demand for written proposals to modify the controversial settlement agreement he brokered between Trump and the IRS. The Republican senator is set to leave Congress when his term ends in January after a bruising May primary loss to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Trump’s chosen candidate.
“Maybe John Cornyn’s upset with me because I didn’t endorse him,” Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office. “I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t heard that there’s a problem. I heard (Blanche) is going through quite nicely.”
Cornyn made clear to Blanche during his confirmation hearing that he will not get his support until he agrees to reopen and modify the settlement. Due to the committee’s narrow Republican majority, one GOP “no” vote is enough to sink Blanche’s nomination.
The senator has asked Blanche to provide proof that the proposed nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund established as part of the deal between Trump and the IRS is formally dead, and he has also demanded Blanche narrow the tax audit immunity provisions the settlement afforded to Trump and his family.
Blanche has publicly stated that his department has dropped the fund, but he and the DOJ have dodged requests from Cornyn and a federal judge to put that in writing.
After announcing his meeting with Blanche would not take place Wednesday morning, Cornyn told reporters that changes from Blanche “in a modified release form” would be acceptable, but that “for some reason … they simply refuse to do it,” referring to the DOJ.
Shortly after the meeting was called off, a Justice Department official told MS NOW that the department “provided a written proposal to Senator Cornyn’s staff yesterday following ongoing discussion with both the Committee and the Senator’s office.”
Cornyn said that proposal was “not responsive” to his demands because it did not address the tax audit immunity provisions in the settlement, one of his key demands.
In May, Blanche signed an addendum as part of the deal that granted Trump, his family and his businesses immunity from pending IRS tax audits. That agreement, which has been decried by former IRS officials and legal experts as unlawful self-dealing, is being contested in federal court.
Cornyn noted that Blanche testified under oath that he could meet the request during his confirmation hearing.
“Maybe they think I’m just going to give up or you know, go along, but they’re mistaken,” Cornyn said when asked why he thinks the DOJ could be slow-walking his request.
Kevin Frey contributed to this report.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived this week for his tour of Washington, he may have had a mission in mind.
Netanyahu needed to overcome his newly diminished stature and waning influence over his once close friend President Donald Trump as both leaders grapple with the unpopularity of a war they started together and is escaping their control.
His meeting at the White House with Trump on Tuesday, which was closed to the press, was the first face-to-face encounter between the two allies since the U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack against Iran on Feb. 28.
Trump gave him a muted welcome and afterwards simply described the meeting as “very good.” “Obviously, many important subjects were discussed,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Rather than an intimate one-on-one setting, the Oval Office was full of top U.S. officials — Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
But Netanyahu continued the full court press on the Trump administration.
Over the course of two days, in addition to seeing Trump and attending Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral at the Capitol, Netanyahu also met separately with Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio, White House and Israeli officials confirmed to MS NOW.
The Israeli prime minister’s slate of meetings with key U.S. national security officials comes at a pivotal moment in the Iran conflict as tensions escalate in the region and Americans increasingly sour on the war. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows 60% of American voters opposing U.S. military action against Iran and 74% against sending U.S. ground troops into Iran.
Not only does Trump face pressure as Republicans face an uphill battle to retain congressional control in this fall’s midterms, Netanyahu’s fate as prime minister is at stake in Israel’s upcoming September elections – and he can’t afford to lose Trump’s favor.
The talks largely focused on what to do next as Iran continues to menace shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and retaliate against American bases in the region and launch attacks on Gulf allies.
According to a senior Israeli official who was granted anonymity to describe the closed-door meeting, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not come to a final decision after discussing three paths forward: get a “good deal” focused on Iran’s nuclear program and enriched material, have no deal and instead continue the blockade and economic pressure, or take escalated military action.
But Netanyahu did not tell Trump what he should do – nor did he express a preference.
The senior Israeli official noted Netanyahu has not ruled out diplomacy – as long as it is coupled with “very strong pressures,” calling the push to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program “a contest of will and a contest of force.”
“There are ways of squeezing them and squeezing them and squeezing them and negotiating at the same time,” the official said.
Netanyahu did not present President Trump with new intelligence regarding the underground Iranian nuclear facility Pickaxe Mountain, per the senior Israeli official, noting the U.S. and Israel already are constantly sharing intelligence – and know where Iran’s highly enriched material is. “We don’t think it’s moved, and I think we have a pretty good grasp on that,” the official said.
During their meeting on Tuesday, Trump and Netanyahu discussed ways Israel and the U.S. can work together to stop Iran’s nuclear program and get the Strait of Hormuz open to maritime trade, the senior Israeli official said.
The two leaders also discussed a third goal: to continue to undermine the Iranian regime and “possibly create future conditions for a change in that area.” U.S. officials have backed away from pursuing paths that would overthrow the current leadership, but Netanyahu still believes that could happen.
“The chasm that has been created between the people and the regime is not about to be closed,” the senior Israeli official said of Netanyahu’s thinking.
Netanyahu advised Trump in February that Israeli intelligence indicated launching strikes against Iran would lead to the toppling of the Islamic Republic’s regime – and five months later, the slain ayatollah’s son retains power with a close circle of hardliners, calling into question the accuracy of Israel’s intelligence apparatus.
But the senior Israeli official said at the time, Netanyahu did not promise the Iranian people would take fate into their own hands following a coordinated attack. Rather, he chose his words carefully and said that an attack could create conditions to “advance the probability or the possibility that that would happen.”
The conditions needed for the Iranian regime to fall, “did not materialize,” the official told MS NOW, adding, “not for lack of insight, but for either operational failure or decisions that were made.”
Despite Netanyahu insisting Israel and the U.S. are on the same page, differences still remain: the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey and the Saudi nuclear arrangement did not come up during Wednesday’s White House meeting, according to a second Israeli official granted anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
Meanwhile, the conflict continues to spread, with an Iranian drone attacking a U.S. gas storage tanker off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday.
Trump indicated he would not let Iran’s latest action slide, telling reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. would retaliate against Iran even as he leaves room for diplomatic talks to resume.
“It’s our turn, and we’ll see if we get there with an agreement at some point,” Trump said. “But we’re going to hit them very hard.”
As for what it would take for Israel to join the U.S. strikes, the senior Israeli official said that if Israel is attacked by Iran, “We will respond very, very forcefully and very quickly. And I think Iran would make a great mistake.”
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.
International rage over FIFA’s close ties to President Donald Trump has reached a fever pitch after soccer’s governing body announced a plan to sell a significant stake to an investor group led by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law.
The president and his family have all but turned the White House into their personal piggy bank. And FIFA — which has its own sordid history of corruption — seems to have made itself a party to Trump’s self-enrichment under Gianni Infantino’s leadership, such as by paying for space inside Trump Tower in New York. (The organization has defended the office rental as a World Cup outpost.)
Soccer is seen by many as a unifying game. But Trump’s incorporation of FIFA into his political dynasty is threatening that idea.
FIFA has announced plans to sell a large minority stake in a new company that will run its main events, including the World Cup and Club World Cup, as part of a plan to triple the amount of development money it dishes out to its 211 member associations.
Under the proposals — which are subject to approval by a majority of those national associations and FIFA’s 37-member council — a new entity called FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE) will take over all commercial operations, while FIFA remains the game’s global governing body and retains a majority stake in FFE.
A press release from FIFA confirmed the plans and said Thrive Eternal, which was launched by Joshua Kushner, is expected to lead the investment group that would control FIFA Forward Enterprise. FIFA did not clarify why Thrive Eternal was selected, and Kushner was already dabbling in sports.
But Trump basically has already given son-in-law Jared Kushner carte blanche to dictate U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East while simultaneously hatching business plans in the region. (Jared Kushner has denied any conflicts of interest.)
Joshua Kushner reportedly has been a major donor to Democrats. But, predictably, the idea of another Kushner becoming financially entwined with the World Cup — the world’s most popular sporting event — and basically being dropped into a position of global significance isn’t going over well. Several other soccer governing bodies have expressed concerns, including Europe’s UEFA.
“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” UEFA said in a statement about The Athletic’s report, adding: “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade — especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also rebuked the plan, writing on X: “Apparently the fake Peace Prize and giant lease with Trump Tower weren’t enough — now Infantino performs a kickback hat trick by pursuing a multibillion-dollar deal with Jared Kushner’s brother to sell ownership stakes in the World Cup to private investors.”
FIFA, Donald Trump’s favorite corrupt racketeering enterprise in world sports, is now going directly into business with the Trump family!
Apparently the fake Peace Prize and giant lease with Trump Tower weren’t enough—now Infantino performs a kickback hat trick by pursuing a… https://t.co/knSZibuMea
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) July 28, 2026
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., has already launched an investigation into the FIFA leader’s relationship with the Trump administration, while dozens of European lawmakers — citing concerns about “potential breaches of political neutrality” — have called for the FIFA Ethics Committee to investigate Infantino. This new proposal seems unlikely to assuage those concerns.
But what it does seem likely to do is fuel global anger toward the U.S. — the kind that has been growing since Trump retook office.
And when you consider that, it’s truly remarkable how the same MAGA movement whose members whined for years about politics mixing with sports is now in lockstep with a president who seems dead-set on casting his shadow over every sports event he can.
This post on X basically sums up the foul stench around FIFA’s latest proposal.
Sepp Blatter was Infantino’s predecessor as FIFA president and oversaw the organization amid some of its many scandals. When heof all people, is warning about how Trump and Infantino’s relationship is “deeply damaging” soccer, it’s a sign of how far FIFA has descended into the gutter.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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