Robert Pape Exposes How We Underestimated Iran... | DSH #2070

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Digital Social Hour
Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Professor Robert Pape
Episode Title: "Robert Pape Exposes How We Underestimated Iran... | DSH #2070"
Recorded On: June 9, 2026
Published: July 17, 2026

In this gripping episode, Professor Robert Pape, renowned political scientist and expert in international security at the University of Chicago, sits down with Sean Kelly to dissect the dynamics of the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict. Pape offers a candid, deep, and sometimes unsettling analysis of how both American policy and global perceptions have critically underestimated Iran’s capabilities and ambitions, especially regarding drone warfare. Through vivid chess metaphors, historical analogies, and direct discussion, the episode digs into why old strategic assumptions are failing and what the path forward might (and might not) look like.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Middle Game” of the Iran War (02:00 - 11:52)

• Pape’s Core View: The conflict with Iran is not just dragging on; it’s evolving. According to Pape’s research and modeling, the war entered its “middle game” much faster than many expected, and there’s no clear end in sight.
  • “We are in a middle game. Iran won the opening, that's for sure. Iran is now pressing its advantage ... This is not like people have been expecting. Oh, sure, Iran will just throw up its hands. The US Blockade ... No, that's not what happens in chess. That's not what's happening here.” (04:17)
• Chess Analogy: Iran has moved from mere survival to a position of ambition, and is methodically seeking regional power—a far more dangerous trajectory than mere resistance.
• US Missteps: American policymakers underestimated both the duration and complexity of the conflict, likening the initial moves to a game with a predictable and short conclusion.

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2. Historical Context—The “Hinge War” (12:00 - 18:32)

• Why This War Matters: Pape compares the current conflict with Iran to the aftermath of the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War—a “hinge point” marking the end of one era and the rise of another.
• Major Contrast with Gulf War:
  • In 1991, America’s overwhelming technological advantage and “precision revolution” made it a “turkey shoot”; expectations now are dangerously out of touch.
  • “This is the inverse of that war in every single way. ... Iran is the biggest, baddest dude we've gone up against. Put in a little more ordinary language since World War II.” (17:51)

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3. The Drone Revolution—Leveling the Playing Field (18:32 - 24:47)

• Drones as a Game Changer: Iran’s capacity for mass producing cheap, precise drones has upended the regional (and global) balance of power. The US failed to anticipate the scale and sophistication of this effort, even as Iran was supplying Russia with drones during the Ukraine war.
  • "This is not a situation where... this is a situation where truly the precision revolution has come to a major second-tier state. ... The drone revolution on mass cheap drones ... that's how you shut down the Strait of Hormuz and gain control." (19:02)
• Implications: The era where expensive, integrated systems guaranteed dominance is over—now quantity, flexibility, and innovation can topple even the most established powers.

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4. Area Denial and Strategic Denial (24:47 - 47:11)

• What Makes Iran Dangerous: By combining technological adaptation and geographical advantage, Iran has implemented an “area denial” strategy, making crucial American and Allied positions in the Gulf far more vulnerable than previously imagined.
  • “What we had been thinking... was pretty much impervious to attack because we wouldn't have stationed it in these highly vulnerable ways... Well, now that's what the other side can do.” (25:01)
• Loss of Strategic Control: American military hardware and infrastructure are now exposed to attacks once believed improbable.
• Historical Echo: Pape draws parallels to Germany’s rise in the 19th century—technology married to strategic geography creates a ‘forcing function’ that can dramatically reshape regional order.

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5. Regional Hegemony and the Rise of a New Security Architecture (29:58 - 53:28)

• Trajectory to Gulf Primacy: Iran is not just seeking parity. Pape describes Iran as “on the trajectory to become the regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf,” with ambitions to build a sphere of influence—coordinated, region-wide, and reliant on allies and proxies.
  • “It's, it's on a trajectory. It's not there yet, but it is on the trajectory to become the regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That means primacy over other countries in the Persian Gulf ... other countries have to pay attention to what Iran says.” (29:58)
• Abraham Accords Collapse: The U.S. and Israel’s attempt to form a counter-Iranian bloc via the Abraham Accords is collapsing, as regional leaders hedge their bets amid the shifting balance.
• Expansion of Iranian Influence: Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” is rapidly taking shape, stretching from Lebanon to the Red Sea and deep into the GCC.

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6. Strategic Misconceptions: The Failure of "Punishment" Doctrine (33:51 - 47:11)

• Punishment Doesn’t Work: Pape argues forcefully that American (and Israeli) reliance on threatening punishment or imposing blockades is naïve—“almost always, you get the punch back.”
  • “In international politics, you almost always get the punch back for these punishment. ... What you get is fight or flight. ... For that government, almost everybody who's in the government already, they're already fighters.” (35:03)
• Effective Strategy is Denial, Not Punishment: Only by denying the enemy the capability to succeed militarily can coercion work. Iran’s denial strategies are currently working, confining US strategy.

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7. The "Escalation Trap" and No-Win Scenarios (59:18 - 67:33)

• No Easy Way Out: Disengaging from the conflict would mean retreating from major US military installations and conceding regional power to Iran—politically and strategically unpalatable for any American administration.
• Political Cost: No US president, regardless of party, is likely to “walk away” and risk the perception of capitulation. This leads to a protracted “forever war” scenario.
  • “The trap of the escalation trap is in order to make these Dr. Concessions, you have to eat drastic political cost.” (64:49)
• Possible Out: The only plausible “exit ramp” is a prolonged blame game, similar to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“This was always going to be this long, protracted war… We’re not out of the woods on any of those. I'm sorry. Everybody wants everything to be over. That's just not the way my 20 years of studying this has looked. And we're pretty much on track.”
– Professor Robert Pape (03:28)

“Iran won the opening, that's for sure. Iran is now pressing its advantage in the mid game. It's not looking for a draw... This is not like people have been expecting.”
– Professor Robert Pape (04:17)

“Iran is the biggest, baddest dude we've gone up against... since World War II.”
– Professor Robert Pape (17:51, recapitulated several times)

“We apparently knew they had drones, but we didn’t understand they might use their drones.”
– Professor Robert Pape (18:32, and revisited in various forms throughout)

“That’s a new change in the world. ... Now that’s what the other side can do. They can see it, it's above ground, doesn't move, it's gone.”
– Professor Robert Pape (25:01)

“We are stuck in an escalation trap here that is working to Iran's favor for us. Our strategic position weakens with almost every move. Iran's is strengthening by every move.”
– Professor Robert Pape (10:50 approx.)

“Punishing regimes, punishing populations… doesn't really work. … What you get is fight or flight… And you end up with stiffening the backbone of your enemy.”
– Professor Robert Pape (39:16)

“If you have very low or zero probability of success, I don't have to change the cost. ... That's what most people are starting to think about America's presence in the Persian Gulf: what's the point?”
– Professor Robert Pape (44:40)

“Iran is on a trajectory—bit by bit by bit—to regional primacy. This is not limited to what is happening today. Iran is on a high and it's not overreaching yet.”
– Professor Robert Pape (52:07)

“So gas is going to hit $10.”
– Sean Kelly (57:07)

“This is what you're seeing right now, Sean, is why Iran is not just going to call off the crisis in the world economy without getting something ... What they want is they want those 13 American military bases in the Gulf region out. That's what they want.”
– Professor Robert Pape (57:11)

“So when you say walk away, Sean, the problem is... you're gonna have to shut down those 13 military bases, pull out 50,000 ground, those 50,000 troops. ... That's gonna be that. ... In essence what you're doing is you're surrendering to Iran's unconditional demands.”
– Professor Robert Pape (63:27)

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Important Timestamps & Segment Highlights

• 02:00 – 06:22: Chess analogy for US-Iran war trajectory; discussion of early and middle-game dynamics
• 12:00 – 18:32: Comparison with Gulf War & the notion of “hinge wars”
• 18:32 – 24:47: Drone warfare, area denial, and the new military balance
• 24:47 – 29:53: Technological change and geographic advantage
• 29:58 – 33:51: Iran’s growing hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf, decline of Abraham Accords
• 33:51 – 47:11: Ineffectiveness of "punishment" strategy, importance of denial, and the escalation trap
• 47:11 – 57:11: Regional dynamics (Israel, proxies), world economy implications, the Axis of Resistance
• 57:11 – 67:39: Discussion of policy options, the blame game, why a true withdrawal is unlikely
• 67:39 – 71:11: Concluding thoughts, listener engagement invitation, chess rematch banter

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Final Thoughts & Closing

Pape wraps up by inviting Sean's listeners to share their honest thoughts and questions, emphasizing the importance of dialogue across generations and ideologies. His message is clear: The world is changing, new powers are rising, and static thinking anchored in past success is now a liability.

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For listeners seeking a comprehensive, reality-check perspective on the Iran crisis, U.S. grand strategy, and the shifting world order, this episode is a must-listen.

Transcript

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[Professor Robert Pape]

by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. Twas a lovely suv, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. This was always going to be this long protracted war and we're not over. It's not over. Iran is the biggest status dude we've gone up against. Put in a little ordinary language since World War II, is that we apparently underrated and didn't take seriously their drone capability. We apparently knew they had drones, but we didn't understand they might use their drones.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Okay, guys, we got Professor Robert Pape here today. We're filming this on June 9th. How's it going, Professor?

[Professor Robert Pape]

It's going great, Sean. Nice to meet you.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, nice to meet you too. A lot of developments lately, right?

[Professor Robert Pape]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's actually just another day at the office. So I've been doing this for. It's hard to believe. I think we're at day 102 of the war. 102.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

It's stunning, isn't it? And this is no end in sight.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Sean, when this war first started, did you think it would end up this many days.

[Professor Robert Pape]

I did. I did. And I'm not just saying that. So as you know, and some of your listeners will already know, I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for quite some time. This is part of a background done for decades, actually. And for me, the war didn't start on February 28th. It started a year ago when we bombed Fordeau. So I'm glad to unpack it. But that was always the beginning, US bombing Fordeau, and then that led in all this modeling to about a year later, maybe two years later, turned out to be only eight months later. That would take us back to regime change bombing. And so starting in last year, literally almost a year ago right Now, I mean, 51 weeks ago, Sean, it's kind of hard to believe is when we bombed Fordell. And that's. I published a piece in Foreign affairs, so people can go check it out. You'll see. I'm not just saying this after the fact. And I'm expecting this was gonna go on, but I wasn't expecting we were gonna go immediately to regime change bombing in, like last July. No, this was always gonna be about a year, maybe two. Turned out to be quicker than a year turn. Turned out to be eight months. And so this was always going to be this long, protracted war. And we're not over it. It's not over all the bad things that we've talked about. No, we're not out of the woods on any of those. I'm sorry. Everybody wants everything to be over. That's just not the way my 20 years of studying this has looked. And we're pretty much on track.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

So what do you think we are? We're in the early stages still of this war.

[Professor Robert Pape]

No, I would say that we're past the. If you liken it to chess, we're through the opening. We're not in the mid game. Think of it as the middle game. And those who are listening, who know about chess, the middle game is everything. I mean, everything at chess is everything. It's so much hinges on every move. Right. That's why you study every individual move. But that said, the middle game is that long part of the chess game 90 some percent of the time. And so you end up having a lot of change, a lot of dynamics, and we are in a middle game. Iran won the opening, that's for sure. Iran is now pressing its advantage in the mid game. It's not looking for a draw. So this is not like people have been expecting. Oh, sure, Iran will just Throw up its hands. The US Blockade. It's kind of like a set of pawns. I hope you don't mind me expanding. I haven't done this on any other podcast. I just gotta play with this a little bit. It's like setting up a set of pawns here, and then the other side is just gonna crumble. No, that's not what happens in chess. That's not what's happening here. Now, of course, this is a lot more serious than a game of chess. A lot more emotion involved, politics invol harm involved. So I don't want to make too light of this, but the fact of the matter is, it's better to think about this as being in the middle game, where Iran is moving from survival to power, survival to ambition. And that is going to take some time to play out because the other side is not completely defeated. So United States, of course, remains very powerful. Israel remains very powerful. Gulf allies remain. Well, gee, which side are they going on here? So this is. This is what things look like in the middle game in chess, and that's where we are today.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Sean. Hey, keep the chess analogies coming. I'm a big chess player. I play every day, so I love it.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Oh, my God. What rating are you?

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

I'm 1800.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Oh, I went. So I. I kind of maxed out at like, high 1600s.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Oh, that's good.

[Professor Robert Pape]

The 1700. In high school, I was the captain or, you know, that whatever, the leader of the chess team in high school.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Well, back then it was way harder to get good because now we have AI telling us every wrong move we made.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Oh, well. Yeah. And I'm sure we hit. My butt kicked pretty badly. So I keep fantasizing. I have got my old chess books. I keep fantasizing. Someday I'm going to go back. I used to play the Leningrad Dutch here, and I picked the Leningrad Dutch because that's how I kind of moved up in the early stages. I selected an opening. Almost nobody knew.

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[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

That's funny.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, and I got the book. I actually went and I ordered the. I'm sorry to go on, but I hope this. Okay. When I was in high school, there was a bookstore and I told my mom that my idea. And I had a big chess book of openings, and it was one of the rare ones. And then I found out there was a book on the Leningrad Dutch, and my mom, when I was just in high school, went and ordered it, and it took a month for. There's no Amazon to Come in. And I still have the Leningrad Dutch book. That's amazing. But as you get old, as it goes though it does, the novelties wear off quick here. I never got to your level.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Well, I feel like the openings at a higher level, they don't matter as much because you kind of know what to defend, certain patterns. You know what I mean?

[Professor Robert Pape]

Yeah, yeah. What happened in this game coming back to the war is it was.

[Commercial Announcer]

It's.

[Professor Robert Pape]

It's. It's like we. We didn't even really play the opening. You know, it like we thought somehow that we were going to make a move, pawn to queen four, and then just somehow get our knight out and start to make moves, which was just completely crazy. And so there was not even an opening. I wouldn't even say what we did is we did a predictable first couple of moves, but we weren't at all anticipating the next few, few moves by the other side. And it's like leaving your knight, or really, in this case, your rooks in the middle here and just letting the other side pick them off as if somehow they're going to be intimidated. And that's. So this isn't even a formal opening. I would say what we did, that's when we say we don't have a strategy. That's really. Here. We had a few opening moves, the moves went to the squares, but that didn't mean the other side was intimidated. And. And then we tried some backup moves, you know, so we did that. But the fact of the matter is we're through the opening now, we're in the middle game, and we've given the other side this enormous advantage here. And this is our strategic position has been weakened at every move. This is continuing to weaken at every move. And the other side is not playing for a draw. They're not saying, oh, I'm up against a grandmaster, I've gotten through the opening, I'll take a draw. They're saying, this, this old guys that we're up against, we're just going to beat their butt. We're the new power players here, and they're not giving us a pass, they're not giving us a draw, and they're playing this out. And at the moment, they're bidding for power. So this is this idea. They've gone initially for survival, they consolidate that, then they gain some pretty serious power. And a lot of people thought this would be temporary somehow. This was all supposed to be a house of cards, and it was going unfold. So we continue to have this false set of Expectations. And there's been no house of cards here. And I've been focusing on this for a long period of time. It was highly unlikely there would be a house of cards that would simply collapse at some point. And what you are seeing is just in the last few weeks, you're seeing a bid for regional primacy. That's what you're really seeing. So this is shifting from survival to ambition. And it's in the early stages of regional primacy. So I want to be underscore this. This is going to go on for a year, year and a half. This is not going to be over even by the end of the summer. Even as the crisis and the economy becomes bad in the summer, Iran is going for a bit of regional primacy. It takes time. And Iran is on that track. And other states in the past have done this. They don't all succeed by any stretch. But there's no reason, and I've said this for a long time, there's no reason to think this is going to just end because Iran's going to call it off. We are stuck in an escalation trap here that is working to Iran's favor for us. Our strategic position weakens with almost every move. Iran's is strengthening by every move. And we keep seem to keep playing as if this is all gonna be over tomorrow. When Iran is playing a full chess game, they're playing a match. We don't seem to have woken up that we're actually in a chess match or a match, not just simply here for a day.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

They don't seem to fear us like other countries do. We could just kind of intimidate them. Right. But Iran's not bogging down at all.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, that's right, Sean, but those other countries that we used to intimidate, I'm glad to develop this. They're not gonna be so intimidated anymore. See, this war is a hinge war. So we're going through something now. A lot of your audience here, and I really want to say how great it is to speak to an audience. Obviously, I'm a different generation. Everybody's going to know that. But I really do love my students at the University of Chicago here, all wicked smart. I assume that's very much like your audience. So I have a sense that they'll know There was a 1991 Gulf War. They know there was a Cold War, but of course, they didn't live it. It wasn't their lived experience. But what we experienced when the Cold War ended, we had some geopolitical change. And then right away the 1991 Gulf War happened and it became an exclamation point on the geopolitical change. It led to the real unipolar moment. So what happened in 1991, Sean, wasn't just an isolated war. It happened at hinge point in history similar to what's happening now with the demise of the liberal international order that predated this war. And the 1991 Gulf War then was a point on that war that really made a new set of rules clear that went on for decades. And that period became, you call it the post cold war world or America's unipolar moment where that was the striking thing that happened in the first Gulf War was seeing that Saddam Hussein who invaded Kuwait had 300,000 troops in Kuwait. 300,000 troops. And these were battle hardened troops that had just come through the Iran Iraq war. So these are no pansies. And Iraq had a big hunk of the world's oil, Kuwait, a big hunk. And they were right on the border cusp of Saudi Arabia. That would put Iraq, if they had just gone another hundred miles south in control of 20 to 25% of the world's oil. Almost identical to the situation we're in.

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[Professor Robert Pape]

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[Professor Robert Pape]

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[Professor Robert Pape]

What happened is the United States defeated with a big hunk of the world. But we led with our new precision revolution. This was where the smart bombs became revealed to the world. And all they could do in very synchronized ways. Well, we watched this in real time. This was war on television. Every night, time for the prime time audience, 7pm Eastern time. Man, you turned it on. Hours we watched on CNN as Baghdad was being bombed in real time. So this was the opposite of what had been a previous war, the Vietnam War. And we ended up cleaning Iraq's clock in 43 days, kicking all those 300,000 troops out of Kuwait in 43 days. We lost. And you hate to lose anybody, but we were expecting before the war to lose 10,000 dead. We brought 10,000 body bags with us. How many died? 147.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

147. Think about that. So expectation was x 43 days later, man, complete reversal. This is the inverse of that war in every single way. The inverse of that war. So we had these big expectations and President Trump had them as well. Well, we're just going to go in here, right? We're going to have a few days of bombing and we're going to gain this spectacular victory. And if not, oh, it won't be so bad. And President Trump, I think it was the Monday after the bombing, somebody asked him what's the worst case? Oh, just same as before. Well, no, that was not, you see, this was always going to be a hinge war. Iran is the biggest, baddest dude we've gone up against. Put in a little more ordinary language since World War II.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

World War II, bigger and badder dude than North Vietnam. So this is really, really a big, a big, a big challenge. It's not just another, another one of the laundry list of states we've gone up against. And it, as we now know, and it had been obvious before, when you study it, they have all these geographic advantages. And then the big thing that also is still, still stymies me to this day, is that we apparently underrated and didn't take seriously their drone capability. We apparently knew they had drones, but we didn't understand they might use their drones.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

This is going to be one of these big things. We'll be looking for documents on this, Sean, for decades. Because this is truly, truly going to be one of these mysteries that kind of the nerdy. More people like me are going to really want to know what happened here because Iran was the big supplier of drones to Putin, to Russia in the Ukraine war.

[Commercial Announcer]

Right.

[Professor Robert Pape]

They have been producing 55,000 drones a year, shipping them off to Putin. Well, that's a lot of drones. Okay. And we now know they have deeply buried caverns. We know they basically have been preparing for this for quite some time. We don't have an idea about how. I'm pretty sure we would have had some idea of what they had, but we apparently didn't stitch together, connect the dots to understand that the way the strata four moves could be shut down with drones. And that's what's happened here. So this is not a situation where, this is a situation where truly the precision revolution has come to a major second tier state. This not a trivial state, it's not already a world power, but that drone revolution on mass cheap drones, not just three or four, but on mass cheap drones that can be precision guided, each and every one of them to their target on a very selective basis. That's how you shut down the straight of four moves and gain control. It's not shutting it down in a blunt force way where you're, you're loading it up with mines nobody could ever get through. Your whole economy is sunk for years as well. That's what I think we had the image of. We had an image of an older generation of an enemy here with Iran and somehow that did not update even as Iran's behavior, military behavior literally was changing. With the Ukraine war, do you feel

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

like drones have leveled the playing field? Because in prior wars if you had a size advantage or better weaponry, it really affected the war. But now it seems like you could spend a lot less and have better

[Professor Robert Pape]

results in 91, in 1991, the precision revolution favored the strong. They favored because so expensive. So think about stealth fighters, integrate this with satellites, integrate this with awacs, with what's called jstars. These are battle management systems. And it's not that each individual plane or so platform is expensive, although they wickedly are. It's the integration of all of that which was so difficult. And that's what scared the bejesus out of the Russian side. Coming Gorbachev in the 80s, he saw this thing, it was called the Reconnaissance strike complex by the Soviet military. And they saw this thing coming, and we now have some of the documents. Man, they were terrified. So one of the reasons they ended the Cold War is they saw stealth coming. They realized this was a new generation of technology here that they were not able to replicate. The Chinese didn't quite follow this in the 80s, but you can see in their documents in the 90s, they saw the 91 Gulf War and they gutted their army. They had 3.5 million troops. 3.5 million troops. And after the Gulf War, they cut it to 2 million.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Like that. And why? Because they knew they were just targets waiting for the American military. This was not going to be. This would be a turkey shooting. In the case of Iraq, this was a turkey shoot for the US boat. And I know because I taught the Air Force, for the Air Force immediately after that, I taught the Baha' is who bombed Baghdad. I know all the gun film here. I mean, I have a very good, detailed knowledge of what happened there. And it really was a gigantic turkey shoot with all of our technology. Well, the other countries saw that as well. And so that's why when you talk about how other countries respond, they responded pretty quickly within a year or two, a couple of years, to that American unipolar moment and that precision revolution. But now what's happened in the last five or seven years, Sean, is for real. Not just like emerging, but for real. That revolution has diffused and you are seeing cheap mass drones and you don't need. You can integrate. And Iran actually has some satellites, so you can integrate this with satellites. But the bottom line is that you can flood the zone like you would in talking about football terms. You could flood the zone and you don't have to have all your wide receivers get open. You just, when you flood the zone, you just need one for that touchdown. That's what's happening here with Iran. They're flooding the zone with those mass drones. Shoot down nine or ten of those mass drones. Shoot down 14 out of 15 of those mass drones, 19 out of those. Mastro, you're talking like, oh, yeah, I really did something. No, you didn't, because that just got sunk. Yeah, you see what I mean, Sean? So here we are puffing up our. Oh yeah, we destroyed these weapons, these launchers and everything. And Iran's just looking at that, scratching their head. That's all well and good. We're just going to go ahead and clean your clock.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, there's a lot of stories of their drones taking out really expensive equipment.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Of ours right there are. And I think we. I don't know the classified details. This will come out. So apparently in Bahrain, they got something really juicy that we were building here.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Oh, wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

And I have a. One of my. One of my. My. One of my kids. My daughter is about to get married and her fiance works for one of the defense contractors in outside the Washington area. And he works on some of these satellite dishes and downlinks and so forth. He doesn't talk to me about the details. Okay. But we drive by his office and we see some of the satellite stuff on the outside, that kind of thing. But the fact of the matter is that we had been thinking this stuff was pretty much impervious to attack because we wouldn't have stationed it in these highly vulnerable ways where. See, the way we're used to thinking is from that if we, meaning America, can see it and it's above ground and it doesn't move, we can blow it up. Well, now that's what the other side can do. They can see it, it's above ground, doesn't move, it's gone. That is a new change in the world. That's not just a, you know, let me give you a laptop. Let me give you. This is a new change. And they're being mass produced. That's really the key to this. It's not just that each individual item is cheap. So that's true. There's an arithmetic where the interceptor is expensive, the drone is cheap, that's for sure. But that would not matter if you didn't have mass numbers of cheap. So it's drones on mass that are cheap and they can be produced almost anywhere. You don't need fancy industrial style 4 does to produce these things. And so what you're doing, and in fact here at home, we're about to see Amazon start delivering, using these mass drones. Start delivering stuff to my front porch, right? And that's exactly what's happening around the world. So this is being diffused and that is the big change. But it's not just a technology. In the case of Iran, you're marrying that with geography. So we're used to thinking of major powers according to indices. What fraction of the world GDP does United States have, China have? And all because I teach about the structure of world power all the time. But what we're doing, often forgetting, is that technology is a force multiplier to those resources, as is geography. Now, not in every single case, but in history, geography, technology has gone together to produce modern. Germany, for example, that's where that came from. That was a combination of railroads, set of Prussian principalities, the forcing pressure of the 1870 Franco Prussian War, which some of your folks can either know about or be able to quickly Google, that was a forcing function similar to how this war was a forcing function. And so you marry these together and you produce the Germany. That's where that came from. And it wasn't just a group of countries here. It was a powerful thing that could become more powerful over time as a result of again, technology. That was railroads and geography and the forcing function of war. You marry that together. Sean. Now this is what's happened to Iran here, and this is why Iran is this ambition. I was in business.

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[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

That's SelectQuote.comDSH describing in this middle game,

[Professor Robert Pape]

it's, it's on a trajectory. It's not there yet, but it is on the trajectory to become the regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That means primacy over other countries in the Persian Gulf and that means a sphere of influence. That means other countries have to pay attention to what Iran says right now. Who do we pay more attention to? President Trump's most recent tweet that the Iran deal is only two days away or something coming out of the ircg.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Probably Trump.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, maybe we pay attention to Trump, but the smart folks are paying attention to the ircg. Yeah, yeah, that's what's really happening? Yeah. Trump still got his bobbling up and down on this. I mean, but he's been predicting that we're only two days away. I actually looked it up this morning because it's happened again. He's talking about. Since March 29th is the last time, is the first time I found him predicting that. That's 72 days ago.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

So he's been saying this for 72 days. And if one of your listeners finds it earlier than that, shoot me a note, because they might be. That's just as far back as I could find it.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

I know you said earlier this war started a year ago. Do you think this would have happened under Kamala if she won, for example?

[Professor Robert Pape]

I don't think so, no. Because the Biden administration was not heading down these roads. They were much more circumspect about their relations with Israel. So if you look at, in fact, the Biden administration, it's not that they had a solution to this problem. I wouldn't go that far. It's that they were so focused on what was happening in Ukraine that I think that they were just not interested in this opening up this can of worms. So there was a guy by the name of Gallucci. He was the envoy for the Biden administration. And he was hardly. I'm sorry. Oh, no, it's Bob. Maui. Bob Malley, not Gallucci, Bob. Maui. And Maui was the envoy. And he was keeping things very much under the radar as we were going forward here. Now, Iran was progressing with its enrichment program. So this was not as if. If the Biden administration had capped the problem and had taken it off here. So the problem really, that we're dealing with now, I think there's various places to date it. You could say 2002. That's when the Iran enrichment started. So 26 years, 24 years ago. But 2018 is when President Trump ripped up the Iran deal. That was the deal that Obama had, and that had really limited things rather greatly. It wasn't by any stretch perfect. But ever since President Trump ripped up that deal, Iran has been enriching uranium on an increasing rate. That happened in President Trump's first term, last two years, all four years of Biden. The enrichment curve's going up and up and up and up here. And then it was happening in the beginning, of course, of the second Trump administration. The Biden administration, I think, still had some hope they would be able to entice Iran into a more somehow cooperative track here. It didn't appear as if that was actually Working just to be blunt here. But what happened with President Trump is he came in and he saw this and then he started to go in the more aggressive direction that I believe made it worse.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Got it.

[Professor Robert Pape]

So I believe, not that Biden had the solution here, but I think that he was actually again, consumed so much with Europe, this was taking a back seat. And he also had the Gaza problem on top of that. This was on the back burner for him. But I think when President Trump came in, he not just moved this to the front burner, he moved it back to this line of maximum pressure, where it wasn't now maximum economic pressure. He was going to exert military pressure. And he started saying that literally a month after he came into office. This was a constant refrain from him, that he was threatening, we're going to settle this one way or another. That was his famous phrase. And that was with Iran first.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

And he threatened nukes at one point,

[Professor Robert Pape]

I believe too, he threatened almost everything. So this is a cavalier attitude toward his rhetoric, which I think reveals a couple of things. So number one, his belief, which is not a dumb person's belief, this first point I'm going to make, it's a smart person's belief. He believes that punishment, threatening to punish, will get the other side to give in. Right now, in a very small context here, where it's just say you and me on the playground and I'm older and you're probably faster than me and you're already smarter than me with the 1800, you might be able to threaten punishment on me and I might give in and give my pen to you or something of that nature. But even on the playground, notice a lot of the bullies don't get away with it because they come up against somebody and that person will punch back. But in international politics, you almost always get the punch back for these punishment. So what a lot of folks come when they teach, when I come to teach them, whether I taught for the Air Force and these were best pilots in the world, 30, 35 years old, they're heading to become generals, whether they're coming to I was a, I taught at Dartmouth for five years. Whether I taught here at the, teach here at the University of Chicago, whether when I go to speak folks in the west wings and so forth, these are wickedly smart people people, Sean. So the idea that they're all just a bunch of doom cops, this is just not the case. And so I know that when they come in, when they're coming in as business leaders or military or smart Students, they come in with a certain set of ideas, and one of those ideas is that punishment in international politics works. They recognize it's immoral. Often you don't want to hurt people, so they don't want to do it. They don't want to have a self that that would be what they would prefer to do. But the truth is, they believe often that when push came to shove, if their family, if their country was at risk, they would punish the other side. No more Mr. Nice Guy. They would just. And that would be a winning strategy. Well, my work for decades has been showing chapter and verse, this is what bombing to win is all about, which this is what was teaching the Air Force was heavily about, which is whether you're talking punishing regimes or punishing populations, no matter how many different clever ways you come up with. And, boy, have we come up with clever ways to do this. Okay, we've got. Just imagine we've been coming up with clever punishment strategies for over 140 years, a long time. So I've always got the new crop coming in. I could think of something that nobody else has done. Okay. We haven't found much yet that's new, really new new tactics a little bit. But bottom line is it doesn't really work. And the reason is because governments and people are made up of vast collections of people. And what you get is fight or flight. And you get fight or flight. And it's about half. It could be even half and half. Think of it that way. But for that government, almost everybody who's in the government already, they're already fighters. So you might have a few flighters in government, but moving up the chain here in most governments, especially in these wickedly difficult regimes, these are not, you know, weak environments here in Iran to stick around. This. This is a tough. These are. This is tough. So you don't get too many flighters in the governments of Iran here. And that's true in our government, too. You don't get, we might say, so and so's a. A wimp or whatever. But the truth is these folks often in our government have come up and they're tougher than they often look sometimes. But then that's true also in the mass public, Sean. So you get a lot of people who want to fight back here in the mass public. And what that does is it tends to crowd out those who might want to give in and might flay because they'll actually go and punch them out, they'll beat them up. They'll be extremely critical of that lane, you end up with stiffening the backbone of your enemy.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

You end up with creating an environment where the enemy has more resources, tools, supporters, not fewer resources, tools and supporters. And that's why these punishment campaigns backfire so often. President Trump seems to be of the belief that punishment is the way to go. And you hear him say, I can't understand why Iran's sticking to this punishment. And you hear him say, I'm going to extend the blockade another hundred days to Labor Day. They're going to give in, right. The back is going to crack, right. Well, this was Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson. We're just going to keep going until the other side cries uncle. They never cried uncle. And most sides don't cry uncle in that way. That's not what's breaking their back here. So I can explain how that back breaks, but it's not through punishment the way most people think. And that's been my big contribution here to explain. This is one of the big things, whether it's air power, economic sanctions, blockades, sophisticated information strategies, all of that often hinges on one of the key arguments is we'll eventually find a way to punish them where punishment is going to make them cry uncle. And it just doesn't work. Now, if we go to the nuclear level now, we're. Now that's a different story, but that's not where we're at here.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Right. So if punishment doesn't work, what do you think would be most effective?

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, the key. And this is what. So this is a lot of my work here is understanding what's going to thwart the enemy's military strategy, what's really going to unhinge their military strategy. It's called denial. In my work, it's called denying the military success. So it's not increasing the cost, it's decreasing the probability of success. So in my book, in my lectures, I lay out a cost benefit function. I literally lay out the variables here in cost benefit function, and I explain that what you think here is not just benefits and not just costs. It's the probability you're going to get those benefits. That's what's called probability of success and the probability you'll face the cost and most of the coercion. And this is my contribution. It's how I got tenure at the University of Chicago is almost all the coercion ideas forever before I worked on this was focusing on either the cost making the C bigger or the probability of the cost make that bigger. It was on the cost side of the equation. I Said they're missing the boat. That's not what actually is the right logic. And it's also because of the reasons I just explained, and also not what works in history. So that's what my work does. That's what bombing to win is setting up to do. It really unpacks in a transparent way. So you, the reader, you don't have to trust me. You verify me. You're seeing it in action in case after case after case in depth. You see, that is what changes now. All of a sudden you're in a different position. So let's look at what Iran has done. So I'm saying we're basing our strategy on this bad idea called punishment or risk of punishment. And it's getting us nowhere. Iran is not crumbling. Let's look at the other side of the equation. What is Iran doing? Iran is engaged with those mass drones and an area denial. What they have done is thwarted our strategy for keeping the strait open. That's what they've done. That's a denial strategy of the first order. And I think that that is the key to their success. Because you see, we don't have a counter to their denial strategy. That's the point of denial. They've put us in a box. Not so much that they're inflicting harm on our ships here. They've put us in a box because they've thwarted our way to keep that choke point open. We don't have a counter to their strategy. That's the same as what the I go through case after case. So how did the North Vietnamese beat us US in the Vietnam War? They didn't beat us by going toe to toe here. They beat us by developing a very cheap asymmetric guerrilla warfare strategy which allowed them to have area control, area denial over villages here. And so that was a key, key, key to their success. And so this is what is important. So for me, at a sort of abstract level, my work is explaining that it's not about changing the cost or the probability of the cost. It's about lowering the probability of success so that if you have very low or zero probability of success, I don't have to change the cost. Whatever cost you were paying when you thought you had a chance to succeed, it's not worth it anymore. It's just literally not worth it. And that's what most people are starting to think about America's presence in the Persian Gulf. Well, wait a minute. We can't stop this drone control, this area control, that Professor Pape's Talking about, so what's the point? That's bombing to win. That's literally the logic of how coercion works in bombing to win. And I know because I'm in the public. I'm talking. I just was at Busboys and poets in Washington, D.C. for a big public thing that I helped organize. It was across the right and the left here. And so I just know people are saying, what is the point? 100%, you see? And that's also how the North Vietnamese beat us. It came to a point which is, we're paying all these costs. And lbj, the President's telling us, oh, it's just one more day. We're going to get through this. And it's clear we don't have a strategy to win, you see? So that's why my book is called Bombing to Win, you see, because if you don't have the strategy to win, what's the point of throwing all these bodies and costs and coal and where is Trump laying out? Here's my strategy to win, an actual convincing strategy to win. Compare that to the ircg Night and day difference, right? Oh, yeah. Night and day difference. And you can see why states are starting to line up. It's not the old Iran. It's not based on their ideology. It's based on their power that's growing because they focused on a strategy that actually thwarts ours. That is the this area denial. So they have an area denial strategy. That's not something that we can take out unless we're going to go and escalate in a much larger way. And even then, you're hearing that this is dicey at best. Right? So we could go in with 300,000 ground troops here, and are we really going to be opening the straight of Hormuz? Well, it's the best you can say is maybe, right?

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, absolutely. Their drones are next level when it comes to Israel. Do you think they are spreading themselves too thin? Because now they're getting involved with another conflict and it seems like they want to keep that up. Right.

[Professor Robert Pape]

They haven't updated yet to the Iran war. So. So Israel is still fighting as if it's February 27th. And now let's go back to February 27th. That's the day before this war kicked off. So. So Israel was expanding. It is not expanding easily because it's also adopting punishment strategies which are not working. So two and a half years after October 7th, you have had leadership decapitation in the sense of killing leaders in Gaza. And Hamas is still governing Gaza. So you have not knocked off off this, and you're using both air and ground power to do all this punishment. You've destroyed 90% of the civilian buildings in Gaza. I mean, so this is one of the largest punishment campaigns in history and maybe the largest by a democracy in history ever here. So this is a. But that is still. We're at February 27th. So they're going down that road. And then they have the Abraham Accords, which the Abraham Accords are essentially building a sphere of influence for Israel as goes about this expansion. So you could imagine, if you're in Netanyahu's shoes, he says this, and I think he believes it. I think he's fundamentally wrong. But this is what his thinking is, is that he's expanding and President Trump is helping him build the sphere of influence with the Abraham Accords, which is giving him sort of a buffer zone for this expansion sphere. Well, now look at where we are 102 days later. Now we're in a very different world. The Abraham Accords dead on adornment. Just a couple weeks ago, President Trump made a big announcement. He wanted all these Gulf states, the GCC states, about 15 of them, to sign up to the Abraham Accords. Nobody signed up. The states that had signed up, Saudi Arabia said, no, we're rethinking this now. So this was not so issue one. That sphere of influence Israel looked like they were building here. That's Khan Kapoof here. And now look at where we are just in the last couple weeks, where Iran, as it's moved from survival to ambition, it is explicitly defining a new security zone. They're calling it the Axis of resistance, existence. Now, just today, they've got this coming out. They're actually defining this, where they're laying out the perimeter of this is their own sphere of influence. And that sphere of influence, Sean, is not just in Tehran, not just the homeland of Iran, not just even the waters of the Gulf. They're laying it out. It goes from Lebanon to the Red Sea to the Gulf. This is a wider sphere of influence. This is Iran moving toward. They don't have it today, but moving toward regional primacy, where they're building now an architecture for that security zone, that sphere of influence that's far more integrated than there was before. So, yes, Hezbollah was there before, yes, the Houthis were there before. But what Iran is articulating and actually their behavior in the last few weeks supports this. It's not just words. But as they're now publicly articulating and their behavior is more and more in line with is they are building a sphere of influence of their own and trying to coordinate things. So you saw in the last few days, you saw that Israel was threatening to attack Beirut. You do that, we'll attack your homeland. Well, Israel did attack Beirut, these certain area where it's a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. And then what happened? Iran, The President Trump tried to get Netanyahu not to respond at all. Maybe pull back the restraint restrained Israel a little bit. Israel did hit Iran, but. And this is the big bot, which is the Houthis, and they're that group in Yemen. They're the group around the Red Sea, which is the other side of the region from the Persian Gulf, where there's 3 to 4 million barrels of oil still coming through.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Wow.

[Professor Robert Pape]

The Houthis have announced they're gonna start shutting down shipping for anything related to Israel.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Geez.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, that's just the beginning, Sean. So you can see that what's occurring here is a prime example of what I've been worrying about, mourning about for months, which Iran is pursuing on a trajectory to regional primacy. This is going to go bit by bit by bit. And that means a sphere of influence. That means coordination, almost a war fighting alliance idea with the Houthis and Hezbollah. And there's also proxies in Iraq. And by the way, these proxies can grow in power. So this is not limited to what is happening today. So Iran is on a high and it's not overreaching yet. But Iran is steadily, drip by drip, establishing this. And that is a different architecture. Because if they can take that. Remember I said that drones are zone control, area control. If they can shift that over to the Red, Red Sea, in addition to what they have in the Persian Gulf, the world crisis, we're on a trajectory in the next, say four or six weeks for a giant crisis in the world economy. It's going to be a much bigger crisis.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Holy crap.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Yeah. This is what the world. We've unleashed here, a new problem. Whereas I said when we began, this is the most wicked enemy opponent we've gone up against since World War II. We're treating it as if it's Grenada, we're treating it if it's a minor actor. And we're just not recognizing all of these advantages. And to this day, we're operating on a bad set of strategic assumptions. The assumptions are that punishment is just going to make Iran crack. And I think by Labor Day, apparently what President Trump thinks and the odds of that happening are Just virtually zero.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

So there's a chance. There's a chance this turns into World War III is what I'm hearing.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, World War 3 is so I notice another smart thing that just to show you how you build these ideas in a methodical way. Way. If we would be methodical, Sean, we would be able to do some. It's like playing chess. Remember how we said it's like a random set of openings here? Okay, we're just not being methodical. The other side's actually playing like they're in 1800. All right, that's just not what's happening here. But what Iran did. This was over a month ago. A lot of your listeners will remember the. The foreign minister of Iran went to the Pakistanis, not to meet with Americans, to talk to Pakistan, went to Putin, met with Putin, went to meet with the foreign minister of China. And what were those meetings about, Sean? All we got out as a readout of those meetings because it wasn't about cutting the deal. President Trump kept saying, oh, he's in there to make a deal with America. No, he wasn't. Okay. He was there to talk about a new security architecture for the region, the Persian Gulf region. Now we're seeing what that architecture looks like. So what he did, Sean, was he consulted his allies. Iran essentially consulted with its major power allies, Pakistan, Russia and China. Notice we did not consult with our allies in Europe or Asia. We just said, well, we're just going to go do it. It. So Iran has had an idea, apparently, and it was a new architecture. But now we're seeing they went and talked to those major power allies. So how do you get people on board? You go and talk to them shot. And you listen to their complaints, you listen to their issues. What have they got? And you methodically build support for your idea. You might have, maybe there were some things that those puncheries wanted or they wanted some this or that. But you take that into account, you don't just slam it through, because if you slam it through like Trump and Netanyahu did, your allies are going to stiff you. So that's what happened here. And so what you're seeing unfolding, I believe is not just a willy nilly random set of missile strikes against Israel. When that changed the ceasefire, that hadn't happened for two weeks. I think what you're seeing is a methodical working out of. Of Iran developing a trajectory bit by bit by bit to be regional primacy.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

That's crazy, man. So gas is going to hit $10.

[Professor Robert Pape]

It could be bad so we don't. And that would see, I think this is what you're seeing right now, Sean, is why Iran is not just going to call off the crisis in the world economy without getting some, something. And I think what they want is they want those 13American military bases in the Gulf region out. That's what they want. So they're going to demand. You're already starting to hear this. There was a senior commander to the supreme leader, gave a statement on Friday to cnn. And you're starting to hear they're starting to up the ante of what they want. They want 24 billion bucks up front just to talk to America. That's not a signing bonus. That's a talking bonus.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

That's crazy. I've never heard of that.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, and they're not that interested in talking. They obviously. Right. And so this is what they're, what I think they're interested in is power. And I think we're just somehow like naively assuming, oh, these are a bunch of ideologues and we're going to run rings around them because we somehow know how power works. I'm not seeing any signs of that. What I'm seeing is the other side is playing like a tough cookie. And I don't think they're 2004s, by the way. I don't think they're grandmasters. That's not what I think is happening here. I think what's happening is they're just playing a methodical game. I mean, I guess if I were going to put this in rating terms, they're like playing like a 1400. Yeah, yeah. Which is not, you know, if you know about this, that's not trivial. You're dealing with lower brown belt. There's, you know, maybe, you know, high green belt, lower brown belt. That's, that's some real stuff. But these aren't white belts. And they're not just kind of scattershot here. But I don't think they're playing at that, at that higher level here. And I think we're, we're just giving them too many easy, easy gains.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Interesting. So at this point in time, seeing the growth of Iran and everything, would you want to pull out or do you think there's still hope that we could and figure something out?

[Professor Robert Pape]

Well, the longer term, and I've given some talks about this and I've done this on my substack, the escalation trap. I give these live briefings where I've talked about this, where there is an alternative here and this is what I would have done back to February 27th, which is I would have done more to not just have the Abraham Accords the way Trump was setting it up as essentially an extension of his real sphere of influence. I think this was a mistake of the first order because those countries, you're putting them in a horrible bind with their populations. Those regimes may be authoritarian and they may crack down on their populations. But Anwar Sadat got killed by his own people. This is the leader of Egypt in 1971, in 1981, when he went too far in the area of the Camp David Accords and supported Israel. So this idea that you're just going to get these authoritarian governments to hammer their own population, they must accept the dominance of Israel. This is not a long term plan that this is really going to work out. A long term plan that might work out is where they become the true counterbalancers to Iran themselves. Not extensions of Israel where the Gulf states at Saudi Arabia, the uae, Kuwait, they start to operate more as not stronger than Iran, but as the true counterbalancers to Iran. So that, for example, if Iran were to do something with drones to threaten their ship at, they would do something with their own drones to threaten Iran's shipping. This wouldn't be a US policy at all, or at least very little. We might have to be involved in some issues. But look, if Iran can have drones sinking ships, you better believe the UAE and Saudi Arabia can have drones sinking ships. This is not beyond the capability of those states. They might need a few months, they might even need six. It's not like they could turn it on in a dime. The big deal is this wouldn't be at Israel's beck and call. That's what I'm really saying. I'm saying this idea that you're going to do all this where you're going to build Israel as the regional hegemon, this just is a pipe dream. This is not happening. You got 500, you got 7 million Jews in Israel, Israel surrounded by 500 million Muslims who they're not out to like be suicide bombers. All of them to go kill Israel right now. That, that's because there's 500 million. If they were all suicide bombers, Israel wouldn't be there. Okay, but they're definitely anti Israel. Clear. So the idea that you're going to turn that into Israel domination of the region, not very easily. So I think a better idea would have been a true counterbalancing coalition of the goal Gulf states. Think of it as like how we strengthened Ukraine in 2014, when Putin took Crimea. And it turned out to be much more effective than a lot of people thought. So you strengthen a country, you strengthen its military, you keep it focused on a limited set of objectives. Here you can actually get quite pretty far as a real containment strategy. Well, that's a strategy that, number one, means it's not. You're not doing this to extend Israel. So, number one. Number two, it's a strategy that's going to take several years to implement. It's not going to be a strategy you're going to knock off on a weekend. Which is why I think, as I presented this, because I presented it in some forum where people who are connected to Trump could bring it to him, but I'm just not sure he's interested, because I think what President Trump. Trump wants is something between the next few weeks to turn the tide between now and the midterms. Well, that's not what I can offer. It's just not realistic. There's no strategy that can do that.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

No.

[Professor Robert Pape]

So when you say walk away, Sean, the problem is most people think that when you talk about walking away, you just mean stop bombing or stop military force. That's what they mean. But. But the reality is you would have to. If you're really gonna walk away, you're gonna have to shut down those 13 military bases, pull out 50,000 ground, those 50,000 troops. You're gonna have to. That's gonna. Subs. That's what it means to walk away. That's gonna be that. That's not gonna happen over a few weeks. And essentially what you're doing is you're surrendering to Iran's unconditional demands. And that is why, for that option, that's a very unl. American president to take. So if Kamala Harris were. Were suddenly became president, which would not be constitutional. But just imagine a thought experiment where somehow we wake up tomorrow and Kamala Harris and the Democrats are now in the White House here. I don't think she's walking away, because you can see right away they're going to be tarred with a giant L. They're going to be tarred with capitulation, and that's the escalation trap. So the trap of the escalation trap is in order to make these Dr. Concessions, you have to eat drastic political cost.

[Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Professor Robert Pape]

And those. Those governments, man, they just don't do that. You see what I mean? Look at how those governments be so sticky for so long on so many issues.

[Advertiser]

And.

[Professor Robert Pape]

And why. It's because they Might have lost some support already, but their view is if they go that next step, they'll lose even more support.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, it's like a prolonged forever war is better on their resume than surrendering. Right? Right.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Yeah, that's what you get. In fact, I had a brilliant military officer write a dissertation, PhD. They came to me to get a PhD and he's now teaching at West Point, still in the military, but his dissertation's public. So I can tell you about it because he spent years thinking this through. How could you solve the problem that I just presented and get out of a forever world war? And he came up with a brilliant idea, which is. But it's not. When you can just manufacture on the fly, you take advantage of an opportunity to blame the other party. So you can play the blame game kind of in advance in your favor. And what Trump did, which was kind of during his first administration, Trump talked about negotiating with the Taliban. I know because I met with, with his folks in the west on this and they were wanting to negotiate with the Taliban. But what he did is he left that for Biden to actually do. That's funny, it was a perfect example. And Sean had already was just finishing his dissertation. It was the perfect example of what this brilliant military officer thought of by Schiff by playing the blame game, which is because Trump saw there was great value in getting out of that forever war. But he also knew there was gonna be a big political price to pay. So Biden pay that price. And then what happened when Biden did pull out? Boy, did Trump twist the knife. He's still twisting that knife. He's playing the blame game, you see. So this is what I mean. Once we get into 2027, maybe there'll be some options here to think about this, but this is gonna be a much more dicey, dicey problem than there's this idea of walking away. Because who for the Democrats to say that Trump should just walk away, well, they want him to be destroyed anyway, right? This is no loss to them. The independents, they don't really want to pay the price of gas anyway, you see. So for MAGA to accept you're going to have the self destruction of your great leader. These are just pipe dreams. Yeah, this is not going to happen.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

We'll see how it plays out. Well, professor, thanks for your time. Anything else you want to close off with here or leave the audience with?

[Professor Robert Pape]

I think it's been great. I appreciate all your interest and your questions and also it's kind of fun to play with some different analogies here. And I'm, you know, and down the road, if you're. I have a hard time with tracking all the comments because my wife says I should spend time tracking the comments. But where does that come from? I don't know.

[Commercial Announcer]

So.

[Professor Robert Pape]

But if there turn out to be comments here, you want to push my way from your listeners here because especially your audience. I don't get a chance to talk to your audience very often. I would be interested in, like, what are the five or six things that you could kind of boil down for me? Please don't send me a bunch of things and just run it through AI or something. I want to know what you. You really think for you. I mean, you and your audience. Not what, some computer things. So I would like you to do that. And then maybe there's a way I can turn it into a post of some kind or whatever. And whatever I'll do, I'll let you know. But I just would be interested because I am really curious about how different parts of our now fragmented world are thinking about this. And I'm seeing a lot of similarities here. And I know it's not going to be all similar, but I would really be curious to know. That's the main thing I want to end on is I'd like to actually understand here. This is the thing I miss here. In our podcasts, when I teach, I have office hours where I'm often there for another two hours with a group who just came out of class, where in this time, it's not the lecture of pain, this is what this has meant. It's the questions you see, and oh, my goodness gracious, is that eye opening? I mean, it's really important, Sean, and that's something I'm lucky that I get to do. But in our media world here, we're often not in that position. On my live briefings on Escalation Trap and my Substance, I get questions in the chat and I do try to go through them, but it's, again, not quite. It's good. I'm glad we do it, but I wish there was a way to sort of try to get this more actual connection. That's why I asked, because I think your audience is going to be a very important one. And I would just really like to understand, even if they want to just say half of what Professor Pape said, it just doesn't connect with me. He's just not. Whatever. Whatever it is, I mean, just. Just do me the favor of just, you know, just tell me.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

I will. We'll take the top five most liked comments guys on this video. I'll email it to you.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Good idea.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Yeah, I'll email it to you and then we'll address it in another video. And if. If I'm ever in Chicago, let's play some chess.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Oh, okay. Well. Okay. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to get my books out before it comes 1800, so this may be some time, Sean. So you gotta remember I'm a bit older. I got my yearbook here from when I was in. In high school being the inch. But it's been a long time.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

Start practicing.

[Professor Robert Pape]

I get creamed on the computers when I play is on my phone. I'm nowhere near the old guy, the young guy.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

It's all good. We'll have some fun, man. Great, great scenery.

[Professor Robert Pape]

Please do stop in. We'll do.

[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

We'll do. Thanks for watching all the way to the end, guys.

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[Sean (Interviewer/Host)]

It helps us grow the show and helps us get bigger guests. Thank you so much.