Coercive Bombing Doesn’t Work!

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Every indicator-and-warning light is blinking red: The US and Israel are about to unleash a massive terror campaign on Iran from the air.

The US is amassing an absurd level of firepower around Iran with no particular purpose other than regime change and the brutal (and illegal) destruction of Iranian critical infrastructure. As Robert Pape cautioned:

This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.

This biblical-level war-crime in waiting against Iran is not unique; it’s archetypical.

When the US invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president on January 3, 2026, Rubio stressed that US efforts aimed at coercing Venezuela, albeit toward no particular end other than control of the country’s resources and politics. The New York Times even ran a headline, “Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It.”

As I write this, the US is imposing a physical blockade of Cuba, cutting off the resource-starved island nation from the oil its people need to survive. The aim? Regime change.

The ICE surge in Minneapolis and the military deployments in California, Portland, and Washington, DC were also done for the sake of coercive spectacle. When you try to “make an example” of someone through punishment, you’re attempting to coerce them.

I could go on. Just about everything the Trump administration has done has a coercive component. It’s a crucial means to their counter-revolutionary project.

Coercion is the use of threats—which can be words or the “diplomacy of violence”—to either prevent someone from doing something (deterrence) or to make someone take a positive action (compellence). While coercion is the modus operandi of the Trump administration, it is the coercion of fools. The insecure jingoes stewarding America’s imperial decline have mostly not read the coercion literature and are spasming in every direction like a drunken Thrasymachus.

The problem with the coercion-first mentality is that coercion is extremely difficult in the best of circumstances.¹ Coercion is supposed to be used sparingly because it always produces side effects and unintended consequences that tend to outweigh whatever benefits you were looking for.

Coercion-as-habit is what it looks like to seek domination stripped of hegemonic obligation. No public goods. No international order. No attempt to manufacture consent. Just the power to kill, wielded for the sake of nonsense—libido, spectacle, and oligarch payola. As we learn anew everyday, and as Jeffrey Epstein boasted to his pedo friends, geopolitical instability is always ripe for primitive accumulation.

What’s scary about our current conjuncture is that the people with power have fashioned a way of thinking that not only dehumanizes most of us; it also makes them insensitive to costs.

So when civilians are harmed, it doesn’t matter. When our own troops die, they knew what they signed up for. When military spending soaks the working majority, who cares. When peace protestors are converted into prison labor and even US citizens start ending up in concentration camps, boohoo, cry me a river. And when the economy is pillaged to benefit a handful of rich assholes, well that’s what bunkers in New Zealand are for.

We are well past frameworks of rationality or justifications of state power on the basis of the “national interest” to understand what’s going on. Monarchies and empires are shit at governance precisely because they’re insensitive to the costs they generate through their actions, costs that always get offloaded to others. And the empires of old didn’t have nukes or the world’s vastest and most lethal national security state.

I think the idiot lesson the hawks learned from Iraq was don’t do a large ground campaign or military occupation, just bombing. The carnage waiting to be visited on Iran will be horrific. And we’re all going to pay for it.

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1. There are two broad schools of thought about coercion theory. One, exemplified by Robert Pape in Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, argues that punishment-based strategies against civilian targets don’t work but that “denial” air strategies targeting military infrastructure can work. He overstates his case and the idea that air power alone can achieve coercive outcomes is pure myth, but he’s right about the not targeting civilians. The opposing school holds that coercion rarely works at all regardless of whether the style is punishment or denial (denial strategies also inherently involve punishment). When coercion does work—which is rare—it’s because the goals are realistic, the coercion builds in face-saving de-escalation off-ramps, the coercion is paired with positive inducements and reassurances, the coercion does NOT proceed gradually, and the type of coercion is deterrence rather than compellence. This latter school finds champions in most of the coercion literature but it’s exemplified by someone like Wallace Thies in When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict 1964-1968, as well as the vast body of work by the likes of Alexander George and Robert Jervis. (Thies was my dissertation chair, RIP)