Joint U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iran have killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and a wave of possible successors. But the Iranian regime is forging ahead with new leadership, and it shows no sign of giving up the fight as it continues to sow regional chaos with drones and missiles.

The Trump administration’s war of choice is already illustrating the limits of air warfare, which perhaps nobody is better qualified to opine on than Robert Pape. A professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Pape has been writing and commenting on the subject for decades, including in his 1996 book, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, and countless articles and interviews. He also consulted with U.S. Air Force commanders on how to end the Bosnian War, briefed Congress on the Afghanistan War, and is a frequently cited source on other topics from domestic terrorism to social-media propaganda.

On his Substack, Pape frequently writes about “the Escalation Trap” (which gives the blog its name) and “the Smart-Bomb Trap” — theories that elucidate how a technologically superior power can fool itself into being overly optimistic about the effectiveness of military might. I spoke with Pape about the problems of air deterrence and why he believes Iran’s enriched uranium will likely bedevil the Trump administration no matter how the next few weeks play out.

In an essay on your blog this week, you wrote, “In war after war, cities have burned, infrastructure has collapsed, leaders have been targeted from the sky, yet no regime in modern history has fallen solely because it was bombed from the air end.” Could you briefly explain your overarching theory as to why this is so ineffective as a tactic for regime change?The fundamental problem here is that bombing by a foreign power changes the politics of the situation. We are virtually 100 percent successful, tactically, with precision bombs. 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.

Before the bombs fall, it’s essentially a two-actor game. You have a society and you have a regime, and a lot of times the society doesn’t like its regime. But when you have the foreign power come in, it becomes a three-actor game, and the foreign power using military force injects nationalism into the politics in a way that just simply wasn’t there before. That means there’s nothing for intelligence to pick up on. The air-power folks, the folks who’ve really have been trying to work on and solve this problem for 30 years, they always want intelligence to do better and better, but they can’t because the political reaction hasn’t happened yet.

To actually crack the regime — that’s what I wanted to explain in this piece. I wanted to get into not only why it’s not working, but what it would even look like if it did. We’ve seen regimes crack under military pressure, and it’s when they lose major ground wars. That’s what happened with Russia in World War I. They had these massive battlefield losses, their soldiers came back, and they were very angry at their regime, their czar. But that was a bottom-up process. The Germans were not bombing Moscow to accelerate it — in fact, had they done that, they probably would’ve extended the czar’s reign. Not only was it not up to the control of........

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