Buckle up: Analyst warns Iran is going to drive Trump 'even crazier'

U.S. President Donald Trump dances during an event at the Port of Corpus Christi in Corpus Christi, Texas, U.S., February 27, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

International Security Affairs Specialist Robert A. Pape tells the Intelligencer that very smart U.S. leaders have fallen into the trap of over-relying on long-distance missile warfare.

And then there’s President Donald Trump.

Pape speaks of the “Smart-Bomb Trap,” which ensnares technologically superior power leaders who fool themselves into being overly optimistic about the effectiveness of military might.

“[We] are virtually 100 percent successful, tactically, with precision bombs,” said Pape in an interview with Intelligencer’s Benjamin Hart. “But that doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t help. The problem is not that the bombs don’t go off. The problem is not that the bombs don’t hit the targets. The problem is not that the targets aren’t cratered or the leaders aren’t killed. The real problem is we’re a foreign power, and we’re using military force to pick a new government.”

It’s a dynamic that’s fairly consistent throughout history, said Pape. You have a people, and a regime. And when you throw in a third-party to blast everything and leave nothing but a mess it does nothing to help a people overcome the regime without the target population’s thread of nationalism — of which Trump has no grasp.

“The politics are being left on the side,” said Pape. “ … And you hear this in President Trump in the last three days, where he’s saying, ‘I have all these off-ramps, and I can do this, and I can do that.’ Well, notice he’s now doubling down in ways he wasn’t expecting to. He’s no longer taking ground forces off the table. He’s losing control of the situation.”

Bombing Fordow in Iran a few months ago cratered dirt and concrete, but did nothing to locate and destroy Iran’s nuclear potential without ground troop intervention, which is where Trump looks like he’s ready to take the nation.

“We’re now at stage two of the Smart-Bomb Trap, that exact stage. And even if after four weeks we somehow do all of this damage to the regime, and somehow it’s the first case in history of regime change from the air, we still won’t know where all — probably any — of that enriched uranium is. And that is going to drive us even crazier.”

“And what happens if, in what I call horizontal escalation, the Iranians start to put some of that enriched uranium on the nose cones of drones as it’s hitting Riyadh? That would not be weird,” Pape added. “And it could happen tomorrow, or it could happen 60 days from tomorrow. And that’s not up to Donald Trump.”

But even if Trump does manage to long-distance bomb the regime into oblivion, the threat of nuclear proliferation goes nowhere.

“Even if we get lucky and pull a rabbit out of the hat, the best-case scenario is a failed state,” said Pape, and while a failed state like Libya contains 6 million people an Iranian failed state includes 92 million people.

“And Libya didn’t have all of that enriched uranium,” said Pape. “So if you do create a failed state, you’re going to have a loose-nuke problem that’s much worse than the loose-nuke problem in the ’90s with Russia, because that material is going to be fantastically valuable on black markets. I guarantee there will be many takers.”

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