Expert Robert Pape warns the U.S. faces a “50/50” chance of ground war as Iran’s vengeful new leader hides nuclear assets following the death of Ali Khamenei
A top strategist has warned the U.S. is walking into a deadly “trap” as Mojtaba Khamenei, the vengeful son and successor to the assassinated Ali Khamenei, scatters Iran‘s nuclear stockpile into the shadows.
Robert Pape, who has advised every White House administration from 2001 until 2024, claims President Donald Trump is losing his grip on a crisis that he claims carries a terrifying 50/50 chance of boots on the ground.
Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats warned that Iran’s vast geography is now being used as a weapon to “blind” U.S. surveillance following recent air strikes.
Pape said: “Last May, it was very clear they had the material for 16 bombs. What’s going to happen is, after about a year, we are going to panic, because that material could be dispersed anywhere in Iran.
“Look at how big that country is compared to the United States. It could be dispersed anywhere now, and how many of those are actually developing toward a bomb, we will not know.”
Pape noted that while the U.S. is tracking movement via civilian satellites, the collapse of diplomatic frameworks has left Washington’s intelligence looking like “Swiss cheese at best.”
He added: “We don’t have the exquisite intelligence we had with the Obama deal to know we had frozen the programme.”
Despite President Trump’s “America First” stance and his public desire to avoid “forever wars,” Pape argues the administration is being outsmarted by a regime that has spent years preparing for this exact confrontation.
He said: “We’re missing that we’re stuck in a trap of our own making. We are losing control of the situation, and what you are seeing with President Trump is he’s trying to regain control.
“[The Iranians] have prepared for this war, just as we have, except they’ve been preparing for how to be resilient, how to now lash back in increasingly aggressive ways. They are winning the escalation part of the war, and that’s not an accident.”
A significant factor in the spiralling conflict is the rise of Iran’s new Supreme Leader. Pape warned that Mojtaba Khamenei is even more aggressive than his father, wielding a level of military authority that makes him far more dangerous.
He said: “He’s got the religious authority to do anything like what his father did. This is a very different world, and he’s known to be way more aggressive than his father. He’s been in charge of the Basij, the police that like to go and kill the protesters.
“When you take out the leader, you may kill the leader, but you get in its place a harder regime, a more resilient regime, a tougher regime that wants to lash back even more aggressively because you killed his dad.”
Pape, the author of Bombing to Win, argues that Iran is successfully driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies by targeting the regional economy, specifically tourism.
He said: “They are threatening tourism and hitting the economic nodes. They’re hitting hotels and they’re hitting the airports. Tourism varies from 5% to 10% of the GDP of these countries. They’re basically trying to drive wedges between these countries and America right now.”
With intelligence failing and the regime feeling it has “every incentive to develop the nuclear bomb” for its own survival, Pape’s final assessment on the likelihood of the U.S. deploying ground troops was grim, describing it as “at least 50/50.”
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