The War Is Spiraling | Robert Pape on Iran and the Escalation Trap

The war with Iran has entered what Robert Pape, Professor at the University of Chicago, calls the "spiral phase" — a dynamic that's both vertical, with harsher strikes on both sides, and horizontal, with the Red Sea now pulled into the conflict via a Houthi blockade. This week brings the death of three more U.S. service members, bringing the total to 17, a bombing campaign now targeting Iranian civilian infrastructure at scale, a reinstated naval blockade, and strikes on multiple Kuwaiti desalination plants — cutting off water that millions of people depend on, with no backup supply.

We cover why Pape believes he's been modeling this exact war for twenty years, and why he traces its real starting point to the bombing of the Fordow enrichment facility in June 2025, not the more commonly cited February 2026 date. We discuss new intelligence around a facility Pape refers to as "Pickaxe Mountain" and concerns about uranium enrichment moving toward weapons-grade levels, why Pape argues that neither Trump nor Iran actually controls the outcome of this war — commercial shipping companies do — and the parallel Pape draws between Trump's political calculus now and Lyndon Johnson's decision-making during Vietnam.

Pape publishes ongoing analysis of the conflict in his Substack, The Escalation Trap: https://escalationtrap.substack.com/

For more analysis on this conflict, subscribe to the At the Water's Edge Substack: https://substack.com/@scottatthewatersedgeorg

This is a weekly recurring conversation tracking the Iran war in real time. New episodes drop every week.