Donald Trump declared the Iran war “very complete” on Monday. His defence secretary Pete Hegseth promised “the most intense day of strikes yet” on Tuesday. The contradiction at the heart of America’s messaging may be more than confusion — it may be a symptom of a trap.
That is the reported assessment of Professor Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats and author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, who argues in a Foreign Affairs essay that the US and Israel have been drawn into exactly the kind of conflict that destroyed American ambitions in Vietnam.
The parallel is uncomfortable. In Vietnam, the US won every battle across 11 bloody years and never lost air superiority. It quickly dismantled most of the military and industrial infrastructure on which the enemy was thought to depend. It still lost the war. North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces outmanoeuvred Washington not by matching American firepower, but by escalating “horizontally” — widening the conflict into the towns and cities of the south on their own terms.
Iran, Professor Pape argues, is doing the same thing now.
The theory of horizontal escalation
“Horizontal escalation occurs when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre,” Pape writes, according to a Telegraph report. “It is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk – drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict.”
The missile and drone barrages that have struck gas, oil, water, air, shipping and tourism infrastructure across the Gulf and beyond are not, in Pape’s analysis, the desperate thrashing of a regime on its last legs. They represent something more deliberate — “a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration.”
The goal is political, not military. By spreading damage across the region, Iran is applying pressure to voters, investors and US allies, hoping to erode the support — tacit or otherwise — that sustains the American-Israeli offensive and force Trump back to the negotiating table.
“Horizontal escalation presses on the soft seams between governments and their societies,” Pape writes.
A contest of endurance
Nowhere is that pressure more acutely felt than among the Gulf autocracies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman have all spent decades in dread of exactly the kind of popular uprising that toppled the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979 and brought the Islamic Republic into being.
By striking civilian infrastructure across those countries, Tehran is not just inflicting physical and economic damage — it is warning those regimes that continued alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv carries a domestic political price.
“Horizontal escalation is not simply about hitting a wider array of targets. Its deeper effect is to change how a foe perceives risks,” Pape writes. “By widening the theatre and prolonging the war, Tehran is shifting the contest from a battle of military capabilities to one of political endurance.”
It may be a footnote of history, but a telling one — Iran is the only major conflict since Vietnam in which Britain has not joined the US from the outset.
How Trump escapes the escalation spiral — one that experts warn could yet spiral toward a wider regional or even a WW3 global conflict — is not yet clear. Eleven days in, it has become his defining challenge.