In its current phase, the war between Israel and the United States against Iran and its allies has become a testing ground for two opposing concepts of military escalation, each of which threatens to become a trap.
On the one hand, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have so far failed in their shifting and ill-defined strategic objectives. Despite killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other key leaders in the opening salvo of the campaign, the clerical regime persists and Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium is not assured. Airstrikes are intensifying and hitting a greater number of targets.
Tehran’s response is a “horizontal escalation”, prepared for a long time by the regime, which seeks to expand the conflict geographically, with attacks on the Gulf States, and also in terms of costs for Washington and the global economy, especially in terms of energy supplies.
The coming days and weeks are likely to reveal important lessons, above all about the potency of American military power in an increasingly fragile and multipolar world.
Experts point in particular to the risks of an escalation trap – in which the attacker is drawn into a conflict that is increasingly complex, protracted and costly than initially anticipated – due to a growing disparity in the US-Israeli campaign between the tactical and strategic levels. Simply put, the tactical level involves specific military tasks – such as airstrikes that hit intended targets – in which the campaign has been successful. The strategic level defines whether the political and national security objectives of the war are being achieved and at what cost.
“There are several stages to the escalation trap,” said Robert Pape, an American historian who has studied the limitation of air power and advised several American administrations.
“What we saw with the initial attack was tactically almost 100% success,” he said. “The problem is that when that does not lead to strategic success… you reach the second stage of the trap.
“The attacker still has dominance of escalation, so there is duplication, which then moves up the escalation ladder and that still does not lead to strategic success. Then you get to stage three, which is the real crisis, where much riskier options are contemplated. I would say we are in stage two, and on the cusp of stage three.”
He said the Trump administration had been hypnotized by the initial attack and had an “illusion of control” based on the precision of its weapons. All of this has pushed Tehran toward its own escalation model, one with a much broader global economic and political impact, Pape and other critics say.
By attacking the Gulf States and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated that it can raise the costs of war for Washington far beyond its military capabilities to significantly counter direct attack by the United States and Israel.
Iran’s attacks “are designed to create wedges between the United States and the Gulf states, in turn creating wedges between the Gulf states and their societies,” Pape said.
“They are forcing the Gulf population to ask: ‘Why are we paying the price for a war that appears to be driven by Israeli expansionist policies?’”
Israel has signaled another escalation. His Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said Thursday that he had ordered the military to prepare to expand operations in Lebanon, where it is fighting Iran-backed Hezbollah, and would “seize territory” if Hezbollah did not cease rocket fire.
Robert Malley, a former U.S. envoy to Iran and chief negotiator in the nuclear talks with Tehran, said that how the United States proceeded in the conflict — and what level of escalation or de-escalation was adopted — would likely be defined less by clearly outlined strategic considerations than by Trump’s psychology.
“At some point, I suppose there will be an off-ramp, but I imagine the escalation will reach levels that we really wouldn’t have contemplated even a month ago… troops on the ground, going after basic infrastructure, taking over parts of Iran, working with Kurds or other ethnic groups. All of that is escalation in a different way.
“But that could trigger reactions on the Iranian side, and then who knows what will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw terrorist attacks against soft targets, American targets, quote-unquote. If that were to happen, whether directed by Iran or not, who knows how the president will react then?
“But at this point, what we should fear is that Trump will feel more comfortable on the ladder, because I don’t think the Iranians are going to make his life easier. I don’t think they’ll hand him the victory on a plate that he wants and say, ‘Okay, let’s stop shooting.'”
Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute argues that the trajectory of the conflict is being driven by a series of debates: between US defense policy professionals and Trump’s inner circles; between the United States and Israel; and among the political and military levels in Iran, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that seeks revenge.
“There is a view in the US strategic community, if not in Trump circles, that sees a risk of state-to-state conflict with China in the near future,” he said. From that point of view, in the United States there has been a desire to avoid the risk of other simultaneous threats and conflicts – involving Russia, Venezuela and Iran – and this has led to a division between those who envisioned war as a limited set of achievable objectives to degrade Iran, and Trump’s desire for “coercive control” over the country’s future.
For Iran, he said, the pattern of retaliation in the Gulf was not simply about reciprocal attacks but also about restoring deterrence in the region. He warned that if Iran struggled to maintain its current intensity of missile and drone attacks, it would not necessarily mark the end of Tehran’s horizontal escalation if it transitioned to a longer-term threat against shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
American author and foreign affairs scholar Robert D. Kaplan pointed out another risk that, while not immediately escalating, could lead to the same end point: “the slippery slope of incrementalism.”
“If a civil war, or something like it, breaks out in Iran, the (Trump) administration may feel compelled to send special forces and advisers to help aside,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.
“And from there the risks of escalation skyrocket. The war in Vietnam took years to evolve into a medium-sized war… The situation in Iran could follow a similar trajectory.”
