“NATO Is DEAD” - The Insider Who Warned 4 Presidents About Iran | PBD #795

Summary

PBD Podcast #795: “NATO Is DEAD” – The Insider Who Warned 4 Presidents About Iran | May 9, 2026

Main Theme

This episode features a deeply candid and strategic conversation between Patrick Bet-David (PBD) and Professor Robert Pape, an influential scholar in international security and U.S. foreign policy advisor to multiple administrations. The focus is the death of NATO as an effective alliance, the shifting calculus regarding Iran, U.S. strategy (and missteps) in the Middle East, understanding Iran’s resolve, the risks of punishment strategies, and concerns over America’s strategic trajectory versus China and Europe.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. NATO’s Demise

• Thesis: Professor Pape argues boldly that “NATO’s dead. We’re writing its obituary” ([00:01]).
• Explains that Article 5, NATO’s core, requires an integrated command led by an American general; the recent handling of the Iran crisis shattered this model ([88:38], [88:41]).
• The U.S. expecting European militaries to act independently in dangerous scenarios, and asking them to “throw your bodies in front of our bodies,” undermined the core trust and unity ([91:00]-[92:32]).
• Recent European leaders’ public statements reflect a belief that “Americans can be beat,” further eroding trust ([100:11]).

Notable Quote:
"NATO's dead. We're writing its obituary. We meet at a dangerous moment. The world has learned that Americans can be beat. That's what I'm telling you."
— Professor Pape ([00:03])

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2. U.S. Strategy Toward Iran: Misconceptions & Mistakes

a. Punishment Doesn’t Work

• Core Argument: Efforts to punish Iran into submission have consistently failed. The assumption that enough punishment will force capitulation is, according to Pape, a “smart person’s mistake.”
  ([11:26]-[12:33]).
• Historical analogy: “Once you give in to the bully, you’re his forever.” ([00:16], [12:34]-[14:41]).
• Cites U.S.-led sanctions/blockades and bombing campaigns failing to topple regimes in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere ([115:30]-[121:12]).

Notable Analogy:
“If I start to punish you, Patrick, and I want that microphone from you, and I’m going to threaten to take that pen and stab it in your hand, what am I going to do next? … Once you give in to the bully, you’re his or her forever.”
— Professor Pape ([00:16], [12:34])

b. Distribution of Resistance: Fight, Flight, Freeze

• Populations are not monolithic: around a third will fight, a third will flee, and a third may freeze. Even a 10–15% with arms is enough for regime survival. ([14:57], [18:06])

c. Misreading Tactical vs Strategic Success

• U.S. policymakers and military leaders often mistake tactical victories (turning away ships, killing regime figures) as strategic ones. The latter requires altering political outcomes, which punishment rarely achieves ([51:12]-[56:58]).

d. Missed Strategic Opportunities

• JCPOA (Iran deal) was successful not due to U.S. diplomats, but because Russia and China were part of the coalition ([07:47]).
• Trump’s withdrawal from the deal and reliance on force/punishment worsened the situation ([24:40]).

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3. Inside U.S. Policy & Political Psychology

a. Pape’s Bipartisan Experience

• Advised Ron Paul, Obama, Trump (on Afghanistan), and Biden White Houses ([05:08], [40:54]).
• Not overtly partisan; refuses to blindly back any political team ([39:38], [42:14]).

b. Risk of Escalation Traps

• Warns the audience and imagined policymakers: Rapid, punitive escalation often backfires and leads to entrenched resistance ([33:30]-[34:30]).

c. Importance of a “Team B” Backup Plan

• Advises always preparing a contingency plan for when main strategies fail ([35:58]).

Quote:
“The number one thing you should do is cover your risk. And what that means is, is not putting on the side and say, I'll get to that if it fails. No, you start now...”
— Professor Pape ([35:58])

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4. Political Violence in the U.S. & Moderation

• Points out that rhetoric from leaders (Trump, Biden, Harris, Johnson) after assassination attempts shifted to moderation, which data shows helped reduce public appetite for political violence.
  ([46:59]-[49:11])

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5. China’s Technological & Urban Leap

• Detailed recounting of Pape’s visits to China, contrasting U.S. and Chinese urban and industrial revitalization models ([68:06]-[78:53]).
• China is uplifting entire cities with AI, infrastructure, and urban planning, not just superstar companies; U.S. is falling behind, stuck in the “batter’s box” ([77:58]-[78:26]).
• Warns American "soda straw" analysis misses China’s holistic, city-sized advancements and vertical integration ([68:23]-[73:19]).

Quote:
“I think they're 10, 20 years ahead of us, maybe even more. Not because they're a couple months ahead or behind on deep seek or ChatGPT, but because of uplifting the entire cities here...”
— Professor Pape ([77:51])

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6. The Numbers Behind Global Power

• Since 1990, U.S. share of world GDP has remained at ~26%; European countries and Japan have plummeted, while China rose from 2% to ~17% ([94:17]-[98:13]).
• U.S. was the primary economic beneficiary of the end of the Cold War, not just an altruistic hegemon ([113:25]).
• Worry: U.S. could slide, and China eat America’s lunch if strategies don’t adapt ([98:14]-[98:53]).

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7. Geopolitical Realignment and Breaking of Old Orders

• As the U.S. falters or hesitates, traditional alliances unravel: the Abraham Accords against Iran are fragmenting; Gulf states and even OPEC show new cracks ([103:52]).
• The perception that "Americans can be beat" is driving regional actors to hedge, fragment alliances, and reduce reliance on U.S. leadership ([100:30]-[107:43]).

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8. Case Studies and Historical Analogies

• Sanctions on Iraq (1990s–2003) severely hurt the economy but did not topple Saddam—they only enabled him to more tightly control resources ([115:30]-[121:12]).
• Regime change by bombing alone: “Bombing alone has never toppled a regime since World War II.” ([121:13])
• Economic pressure rarely achieves big goals without ground intervention.

Quote:
"Bombing alone has never toppled a regime since World War II."
— Professor Pape ([121:13])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On U.S. strategies with Iran:
  “The fundamental problem here is you think punishment, if you punish them enough, they're going to cave. This is the fundamental misconception. They're not going to cave…” ([12:27])

• On America’s economic standing:
  “We can say, you know, oh, poor us. All we've done has been taken advantage of by the world. We're making out like bandits here.” ([113:25])

• On being a rare bipartisan advisor:
  “How many people have come in here who have advised for the presidential campaigns a Republican who's on those stages and a Democrat who's on those stages at exactly the same time ... two Republican and two Democrat? That's just a very rare thing.” ([40:06])

• On today's policy failures:
  “These tactical successes are not leading to strategic success. Similar with the bombing, the bombing was tactically successful ... This is one of the big points I make on the escalation trap.” ([51:12])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:01-00:03 — "NATO's dead. We're writing its obituary."
• 12:34 — Punishment strategy analogy (bully/tabletop scenario).
• 24:40 — Pape’s alternative strategy for Iran: build a real coalition, long-term plan for regime change.
• 51:12 — Tactics vs strategy in sanctions and bombing campaigns.
• 68:06-78:26 — Pape’s report from China: uplifted cities, integrated AI infrastructure, comparison to US urban decline.
• 88:38-92:32 — NATO, Article 5, U.S. military leadership, why the alliance model is broken.
• 94:17-98:13 — Economic power stats: US, Europe, China, and Japan post-1990.
• 115:30-121:12 — Case studies: why sanctions and bombing don’t change regimes without follow-up, lessons from Iraq, France, Germany.
• 121:41 — “I would love to see the IRGC fall ... it is one of the most evil regimes on the planet.”

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Tone & Style

• Professor Pape: Erudite, direct, frank, occasionally wry, always analytic. Willing to challenge assumptions, regardless of partisan sensitivities.
• Patrick Bet-David: Probing, energetic, sometimes challenging—but respectful; eager to explore the deeper logic and blind spots in expert opinions.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a sobering, sometimes blunt assessment of American strategy, alliance health, and the evolving 21st-century global order. Professor Pape urges U.S. policymakers and observers to move past comforting but mistaken beliefs about punishment, sanctions, and quick fixes—whether dealing with Iran, China, or alliances like NATO. He stresses the importance of true strategies over tactics and warns that misreads not only prolong failure but erode America’s position as a global leader.

For a more comprehensive perspective, see Professor Pape’s latest book “Our Own Worst Enemies” and his Substack, both linked in the show notes.

Transcript

[Patrick]

What's your position with NATO?

[Professor Pape]

NATO's dead.

[Patrick]

Do you think NATO's dead?

[Professor Pape]

NATO's dead. We're writing its obituary. We meet at a dangerous moment. The world has learned that Americans can be beat. That's what I'm telling you.

[Patrick]

The Strait of Hormuz still blocks. What did the administration not know about Iran Prix going in?

[Professor Pape]

If you punish them enough, they're going to cave. They're not going to cave. And you yourself have said you don't understand why Washington has insisted Iran was accepted, strict limits on its nuclear program before the war can end. I'm not satisfied with it. If I start to punish you, Patrick, and I want that microphone from you, and I'm going to threaten to take that pen and stab it in your hand, what am I going to do next? I want your computer or I'm going to do it again. I want the shirt off your back or I'm going to do it again. Once you give in to the bully, you're his or her forever. Iran calling Trump's effort delusional.

[Patrick]

You have three different types of people. Fight, flags, flight, freeze.

[Professor Pape]

Yes. But within that distribution, once you have that amount, who will fight? You are in a different world of hurt.

[Patrick]

Nobody wants everybody who sees it like, wait a minute, what is your real name? Because your real name's not Patrick.

[Professor Pape]

No, I understand.

[Patrick]

That's the thing we get all the time. I'm like. I'm a Syrian. Armenian. So, anyways, great to have you on. Truly.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, really. I'm looking forward to this, too.

[Patrick]

I've seen your stuff. I want to say we both agreed in the back when we're talking. I don't know if anybody picks better title names for books than you.

[Professor Pape]

Thank you.

[Patrick]

So you got bombing to win, 1996. What a great title for Dying to Win. So one is Bombing to Win, dying to win 2005.

[Professor Pape]

And it's deeper than that, because if you had read Bombing to Win, and. And I know you haven't, but if you had read it, and the academic world did, as soon as they saw the title for my book on suicide terrorism, they already had half of the story. Because once you get inside and understand what it takes to win, and then you apply it here, so it has more meanings than it's. It's a really interesting thing when you have multiple audiences and over time. So I've been an academic, but it's not only been an academic, I've been in the public since 1991. It's a long time. This is not My first road.

[Patrick]

Oh, no, it's not.

[Professor Pape]

I mean, many, many times. And so I. And I'm not where you. You guys live in the public. Okay. I really still live in universities. But nonetheless, you understand multiple audiences.

[Patrick]

No question about it.

[Professor Pape]

So that's what these titles do. At least connect with multiple audiences.

[Patrick]

And then you got Cutting the Fuse and you'll reach someone. Which is our own worst enemies.

[Professor Pape]

That's right.

[Patrick]

You're all over the place. You got your PhD from Chicago. We just had John Cochran here, who's also. I think he's a professor there as well. PhD from University of Chicago. And then you did a lot of work with the U.S. air Force, teaching them for three years.

[Professor Pape]

Yep.

[Patrick]

And then aside from that dark.

[Professor Pape]

Basically leadership decapitation of Saddam Hussein. I know all about that. And then also it was Pyongyang, so we're dealing with North Korea. So this is deep discussions here actual

[Patrick]

going through right now.

[Professor Pape]

Yes. And then I modeled, starting in 2005, the bombing of Iran for 20 years. So there's a lot of continuity with this work. And then I've been adding layers to it over time.

[Patrick]

So what does the average person. Because when you think about from the. There's two things we experienced the last four years. You know, Russia's gonna attack Ukraine. Okay. Russia's gonna destroy Ukraine. Didn't happen.

[Professor Pape]

Right.

[Patrick]

Us, you know, and Israel, they're gonna attack Iran. But boom, it's gonna be done because Venezuela, quick, we got Maduro, we're out. Oh, boom. You know, everything was so quick. Iran maybe gonna be two to four weeks. It's not two to four weeks. So what is the app? Because you advised Ron Paul, you advised Obama, I think in the 2022.

[Professor Pape]

And I just went to Ron Paul's just this weekend. I was at Ron Paul's conference down in. Off about an hour outside of Houston, just literally five days ago. I had dinner at his house on Friday night. His. He's. He is firing the white heat. He stood up for 25 minutes on Friday night and gave a spectacular. No notes whatsoever. I mean, unbelievable. Getting rounds of applause on Friday night. And then he did it again on Saturday at noon. I'm just telling you, you've been in the public eye. You stand up and give those speeches. I mean, oh, my goodness gracious.

[Patrick]

90.

[Professor Pape]

He's 90.

[Patrick]

We had him on the podcast last year. I'm like, I cannot believe this guy's energy at this age. And he's been out of. For a long story.

[Professor Pape]

And he's just, I think A bit like me, energized by the fact that this war is going the wrong way. And he just wants to do everything he possibly can to try to get on a better track. That's really, I think, where's that energy?

[Patrick]

And I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about that. But it's important because you did help Obama, you did help Ron Paul, Libertarian, Democrat. And then at the same time, you've advised presidents the last 20 years, including the Trump first administration. Right. So I think that's.

[Professor Pape]

That was on Afghanistan.

[Patrick]

Important qualifier for the audience to know. And although you were not negotiating on the deal with Obama with Iran, you were. I read some places that you were advising. They were consulting.

[Professor Pape]

Well, there's a whole story. So I was on. I'm glad to do this in the public. So in 2008, when I'm on the Obama primary team, I was on the Middle Eastern team because. Dying to win. But I had a good friend, Sean Kay, who was on the NATO team. So this is how it works in these primaries. You get carved up into different parts or different issues in the world. And I had, I knew Sean for a long time, for decades. And so I called up Sean one night and I said, sean, you know the number one problem that Obama's going to face when he's elected is Iran getting a nuclear weapon. Now, this is 2008, February 2008. Most people are not. They're focusing on beating Hillary Clinton. Okay. This is. I'm just saying. And Sean and I agreed on that. And I said, sean, I got an idea. If you're really going to get real pressure on Iran, we need Russia. We need Russia. And I'm glad to explain what. Why said that. Yeah, but we need Russia. And Sean said, well, Bob, I'm on the NATO team. You know, Russia hates our guts. How are we going to do that? And I said, I got an idea. We trade away national missile defense in Eastern Europe, which is basically a not very good system. And I think this would actually move Putin. And Sean said, I'll write the memo. He wrote the memo up the chain. That's what Obama did. 2010. So how did you get the JCPOA in 2015? This is not starting in the story of 2015. Now, it starts in 2008 and it starts in 2010. You need Russia and not just Russia saying, well, I won't get involved. You need Russia to be part of the public coalition once you bring in the target's military allies, Patrick, now you got Leverage and pressure. Right now we're totally not doing that. Okay. And it's in, well, now they're eating our lunch. But, but I'm just telling you that, that you're talking to somebody who has been thinking about these problems for decades and who has said that, and I've said this even in print in 2008 in the weekly Standard, the number one problem that Obama's foreign policy is going to face is Iran getting a nuclear weapon. And everything needs to be organized around that. And he did. And he did.

[Patrick]

Would you consider JCPOA a success?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, yes, but it's a success because Russia and China were part of it, not because we had some brilliant diplomats. And oh yes, our diplomats are just so much better than all the other diplomats. When you're in Washington, you want a job. You know how you get a job? You say you're the best diplomat. Everybody else is not. Okay. I'm not looking for that job. Okay. I'm looking to what would you actually do to solve the problem? And I'm perfectly happy being a professor at the University of Chicago who sits around, thinks about these ideas, comes up with an idea and then tries to persuade a White House that, you know, this is a better way to go. And I'm not looking to become that person in Washington. And the reason is because most of the time they self destruct and go up in flames and they end up having a disaster.

[Patrick]

So look at what end up getting a job.

[Professor Pape]

Oh, my God. Yeah. Just look at over and over and over again.

[Patrick]

Post career, post job, almost every, I

[Professor Pape]

mean, since the last time we had somebody successful in the west, in the west wing was 1991. Who's that? Oh, Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker as White House chief staff who just, who just died? Colin Powell when he was good. You put then Colin Powell back up as Secretary of State. It's a total disaster. Okay. His reputation goes like that.

[Patrick]

Yeah. Let's bring it to today. So you've been studying this for a while again, like your books. Suicide bombing.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah.

[Patrick]

You know, you said, you know, analyzing 30 major air campaigns across World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, and found that bombing civilian populations and economic infrastructure consistently fails to break an enemy's will.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, that's the targeted population. This is the big point. The public doesn't get, they turn. So what the public thinks is, and President Trump probably thinks this, it's not unique and it's not a stupid thing to think. It's a smart mistake. There are stupid mistakes where you make it because you're stupid. And then there's what I call smart people mistakes. So keep in mind I'm educating people at the University of Chicago that have more than a triple digit iq. I'm educating not just people in the Air Force, but future three and four star generals in the Air Force. These are not dumb people. These are people who are at the top of their game. They're coming in, we're spending months really focusing on things. So I have a very good understanding of where people start out, what their initial thoughts are. And then I also spent a lot of time in the public. I just went to Ron Paul, spoke to 200 of his people and then spent all day there. Do not do with a parachute in, parachute out because I want to soak it up. I want to see this is me getting face to face. I want to know where they're coming from so I can better understand. And I'm telling you, you asked me what is the number one like misconception or mistake. First thing to say is it's not a dumb person's mistake, it's a smart person's mistake. And it's that this punishment is actually going to work. And because once you believe that, then it's just a matter of well what are the tools of the punishment and do we have some smarter ways to do and so forth. But once you believe that it's punishment, who's going to get states to give up these massive topple governments, give up their weapons of mass destruction? Once you believe it's that, you're going down all the wrong roads. And that's what all this work really, really has shown. And that's why if you want to win, when we stop the Bosnian civil war, we didn't do it through punishment. We did it through hammer and anvil, basically bombing to win lays out the strategy for this. So we won. We stopped the Bosnian civil war.

[Patrick]

What did the administration not know about Iran pre going in?

[Professor Pape]

That punishment was going to fail.

[Patrick]

That punishment was going to fail.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, yeah. It's other punishment of the regime. So again there's a couple different detail ways or specific strategies. But if I'm talking to President Trump here, I'm going above the details because he wants face to face. Like I'm talking to you, I'm telling President Trump the big issue here. And you yourself have said you don't understand why is that punishment is not working. You try to punish the regime, it's not working, it's making them harder. You're now have the blockade and you're trying to punish the. The economy, the society. It's not working. You threaten all 92 million at with punishment. It's not working. The fundamental problem here is you think punishment, if you punish them enough, they're going to cave. This is the fundamental misconception. They're not going to cave is that

[Patrick]

they're not going to cave. That punishment doesn't work with anybody. Or punishment doesn't work with anybody.

[Professor Pape]

No, it doesn't work with any.

[Patrick]

Tell me why.

[Professor Pape]

The reason is because if. If I start to punish you, Patrick, and I want, say, for example, that microphone from you, and I'm going to threaten to really take that pen and stab it in your hand. And you say, okay, I'll give you the microphone. What am I going to do next? I want your computer or I'm going to do it again. What do I want next? I want the shirt off your back or I'm going to do it again. What if I. What am I going to do next? I want your bank account. What am I going to do next? I want your family. There's no end once you go down this road. Okay, we need to just understand that. And this is true in a lot of other. You see this in the Godfather. You know, how does the Godfather become the Godfather in Godfather Part 2? He doesn't keep giving in to the old guy. He literally kills him. Okay, that's denial. That's actually a denial strategy. And he becomes a godfather here, but it's not through punishment. He's not actually engaging in the punishment spirals. You see what I'm saying? And this is the problem. The reason is that these are. Another way to put it is once you see that I'm willing to hurt you this way, everything becomes about future pain. It's not just the current idea, because why am I going to stop? And this is just true in general. So the punishment. Now sometimes with the punishment, the other side just stays passive. So it doesn't always have the backlash, but often if they have an opportunity, like once I start to threaten you to take that and threaten to put the pen in your hand here, what you're going to start to think about is, well, wait a minute, they're going to bring me a cup of coffee. And while I'm looking down, that's when you're going to hit me. You see, because you're lashing back because you. You're worried that once I drink that cup of coffee, I'm coming right back at you with more demands, more threats to hurt you. Bodily. This is just the way it is. So almost like on the playground, you start to give in to the bully, you're his or her forever. You see, you're not just. It's not a.

[Patrick]

In this case, us is the bully. And Iran is saying, I'm not going to give in to you because I know long term you're going to get everything from me.

[Professor Pape]

Oh, absolutely.

[Patrick]

But if you think about DNA and wiring of the people, you have three different types of people. Fight, flight, freeze. Right. So we've heard that before. So, you know, some are fighters.

[Professor Pape]

That's right.

[Patrick]

Some flight, some freeze.

[Professor Pape]

Yes. But within that distribution, it's a distribution that's common across all people. So within that, 92 million. Okay, let's just say it's a third. A third? A third. Well, that means you've got something like 25 to 30 million who are gonna fight. Now, maybe you'll have 25 or 30 million who will freeze. Maybe you'll even have 25 or 30 million who will do flight. But once you have a third or even 10 or 15%, as long as they have the guns, once you have that amount, who will fight? You are in a different world of hurt because that's what happens on the playground with the bully. So when I'm in fourth grade, Alvin was the bully. Okay. And he was a lot bigger. Even. I mean, our relative difference. He. He was.

[Patrick]

You're a big guy.

[Professor Pape]

I was telling you I was in fourth grade. Okay. He was in seventh grade.

[Patrick]

Okay, That's.

[Professor Pape]

That's a difference. But in that age group, you also know that's a big difference. So Alvin was going around being the bully on the thing and he. And then he started to pick on me and I just went right at him, got him down to the ground. Okay. Now, truth is, I went home and. And I had tell my mom I. I hit a door. I didn't. Why did I. And I said I hit the door. You know, just the. The kids. Because I didn't want it.

[Patrick]

What does Alvin do today, by the way?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, you know, I don't. I. This eerie. I don't know. That was a long time ago. So I don't know. I hope good. I hope. I hope good.

[Patrick]

Alvin, if you're watching this, let us know what you're doing. We'd love to know what you're doing.

[Professor Pape]

Erie, Pennsylvania. St. Mary's was the elementary school. But the. But what happened is he left me alone. He left me alone.

[Patrick]

You see, because you're part of the fight community. Well, that's not everybody.

[Professor Pape]

No, that's what I'm trying to say. But there was other on the playground. So. But this is. Once you see countries are not one on ones countries are distributions of people. Then you can see even if you have 25% or, or so who are the fighters. That's plenty because they're often then the folks who are going to be the ones rising up as the leaders because they will have fought at other different.

[Patrick]

I don't even think you need 20. I think you need 1% of extremists. That's all you need 1% of extremists.

[Professor Pape]

Well it depends on if they have the guns. It really is a matter that's a, that's again once you get into the difference and this is what I do Once you get in the difference between. Okay, so now let's say it's not 25%. Now you're talking about what you call extremists or, or terrorists. Well then it's a question here of do they have the guns and do they have enough acquiescence by the rest of the population. That's the big issue. So that's what happens when you have extremists. So you can always find some, some 1 percenters if you would of extremists. But they need a minimum 10%, probably 20% of others to at least go along and often support because they get killed.

[Patrick]

They get killed of the 1 million military or of the 92 million of them.

[Professor Pape]

No, it's more of what I would say in, in, in the case of Iran is you, you. Well, what we've done is we've radicalized quite a bit of the 92 million at this point. So this is not a case just 1%. But what I would say is that let's start with the 25% who are fighters. Once you start to get into this then you will, you will have with the leadership. You're going to have thousands of extremists who are part of the regime, the revolutionary regime. And that's because the Guardian Council over decades has, has promoted those kinds of people here for off a political office. That's because the Republic, the Revolutionary Guard fought in the Iran Iraq war where in order to survive in that, in that bloody war which I know you live through part. Where did you live In Tehran.

[Patrick]

Tehran. Tehran. And my grandparents were from Bandar Pahlavi, which is north right by Caspian Sea.

[Professor Pape]

Oh I see, I see, I see. So Palavi. Okay, very good. So, so the.

[Patrick]

But you then and that Means port. So think Port Pahlavi is where my grandpa and we lived in Tehran 10, 11 years.

[Professor Pape]

And then you were, I think I heard, born in 74, if I remember right.

[Patrick]

78.

[Professor Pape]

78. So you're just about coming of age where you would have been paying attention.

[Patrick]

I remember the war with Saddam Hussein.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[Patrick]

I don't remember the revolution because the revolution happened. 79. So I was an infant. I was born three months after the Shah went into exile.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah. So the kind of fervor, once you're in a war of attrition like that, the kind of fervor, the emotions here and they're going in different directions. I'm not saying it all points in one direction, but my God, these are emotional situations here. Well, this is infecting more than just like 5 liters at the top or even a few thousand at the top. It's seeping into large parts of society. Now, maybe it's not seeping into a hundred percent again. It's. You can also look at it as the fight or flight, but you are moving from that 1% of extremists and you're deepening that pretty far down. How far down? It's a little hard to say, but it's probably closer to 10, 15%. And once you. And they have the guns, this is, this is where you're, you're not getting. If, if, if, if Iran was going to be knocked off relatively quickly here. Actually, the, the, the time that would have been, most likely would have been when Saddam Hussein attacked Right. About a year after the revolution because wasn't really fully consolidated yet. As you know, there was a liberal part of the revolution that happened before the religious part of the revolution. So there's all kinds of factions going on in the country at the time. Foucault, I don't know if you know that name. He's a famous philosopher, liberal. He wrote articles for newspapers. He was at Berkeley, and he was a big believer in getting rid of like, American imperialism. So he actually went to Tehran in the early part of the revolution and he wrote articles for newspapers. This is before we had substacks and he was a big believer. And then he literally watched as the revolution he thought was so good, so well intended, transformed into the worst awful religious dictatorship essentially that he could possibly imagine. And he wrote, continued to write those articles until it got too dangerous, and then he published it as a book. So, you know, if anybody wants to relive that period from a liberal's Perspective. You can read Foucault's book on this. It's the famous Foucault who wrote Discipline and Punished that many folks will have read. And you can really get a different window into this. From somebody who starts out all good intentions, everything looks optimistic. This thing goes completely belly up. And I think what you're seeing here, Patrick, is the conservative flip side of that right now. People thought had good intentions, they wanted X, Y or Z to happen. They're coming at it not from the liberal side of the House, from the conservative side of the House. And what they are seeing is the same problems Foucault saw. And it's not because it's a particularly liberal bias or conservative bias. People don't understand that punishment is not a very good strategy.

[Patrick]

So let me ask you, for a country. So. So do you think like, let's just say, let's go back to eight weeks ago, pre war.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah. Yep.

[Patrick]

You get a call, you go to the White House, Right. Let's just say you go to The

[Professor Pape]

White House 3:15 On February 27, Donald Trump says, hey, I've got Wyckoff and my son in law Kushner here. Professor Pape, will you come in on the phone?

[Patrick]

And you go in and they say, listen, when it comes down to Iran, how big of a threat you think Iran is to the safety of America and the world long term, 30 years?

[Professor Pape]

I would say serious but not imminent. So what I would say is that it's not just yellow. If you say green. No, it's not a green. This is. Some people are trying to say no threat whatsoever. This is a big mistake. A lot of my Democratic friends don't like it when I explain that this is a mistake. It's not just even yellow. It's kind of yellow moving to red. And the reason is because of all that enriched uranium that is now we have, I have visible evidence of it dispersing around the country. If I have that evidence, I already know what's in the intel community. They're gonna have a lot more and it's gonna point in that direction, showing

[Patrick]

trucks that are moving things from the areas that were hit. So if they're moving things with those trucks, we've seen those clips, it means you probably didn't hit what you thought you were gonna hit.

[Professor Pape]

And some of it is now places you don't know anymore. So I am not at all surprised to hear the most recent leaks just now, eight weeks later is 20%. We don't know where 20% of that stuff is so Pete Hegseth last yesterday just testified. We know where it all is. I want to see that data and he should publish that data. Because I think that what the reality is, from what I'm hearing from the

[Patrick]

leagues, isn't that even a bigger threat if we don't know?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, for sure.

[Patrick]

Okay, so if we don't know. So now let's go to how.

[Professor Pape]

That's how, by the way, I was able to predict so accurately what was going to happen in this war. So my predictions not to be.

[Patrick]

But I don't want to do prediction. This is what I want to ask

[Professor Pape]

before we go February 27th.

[Patrick]

Yeah. What I want to go to is

[Professor Pape]

what I want to. Let me explain the strategy. Yeah, that should have been the strategy. Strategy, number one is you don't reject the deal. President Trump, you look at this as a long campaign. You look at this as you got a problem right now, and it's getting worse. And between us, President Trump, you made it worse when you bombed Fordeau. Never say that publicly to you, but you won't want to say that publicly. But you know, you wouldn't be here in this room right now if bombing Fordeau had solved the problem. So that made the problem worse. So we're at this, you know, yellow now moving into early red. So what do you need to do? You need to build an even stronger counterbalancing coalition that will have a real opportunity to build on the growing pro democracy movement. There is a pro democracy movement there. We know that the regime has just killed some tens of thousands of them. But you're not going to solve this over a day or a week or so. You need to come up with a strategy over two or three years where you're actually going to move this in the right direction, just like happened in Syria. So the model here would be closer to Syria, where over time Now, Syria took 13 years, but over time, this really did change. And then the next step, I would have said is, okay, so what's the concrete thing that you need to do? You need not to have as the operational counterbalancing coalition simply this vague idea of the Abraham Accords. Okay? Because the truth is that what's happening with the Abraham Accords is there's a big contradiction inside of it once it gets serious, which is you're never going to be able to have the Saudi population, not the leaders or the UAE population support Israel as its conquering Muslim ground. It's just not going to work. You know, you're even talking about that in Gaza. So what you need is you need to build a stronger anchor literally around Saudi Arabia and the UAE because they have the most to lose. This isn't about Israel has the most to lose. If you go down this counterbalancing coalition, the governments that are going to be toppled in the next year or two are MBS and the uae. So therefore as you have said President Trump many times, you've got to align interests and strategy. Who has the most to lose here? It's not Israel, it's UAE and Saudi Arabia. They also have covertly tentacles society tentacles and you can build then a stronger societal bottom up pressure here to change the revolution, change the regime. And moreover the Supreme Leader is 86 years old. So what you really should be doing is not killing the Supreme Leader because that's only going to put in a stronger the tougher guys let him die on his own. And what you're playing for is to move the the group of clerics who's going to put the new Supreme Leader in to make it somebody who's just one notch closer to your position. Not completely to your position but what you want to do is have a longer term strategy over a couple years.

[Patrick]

That would work.

[Professor Pape]

And why not?

[Patrick]

I don't think that would work and I'll tell you why. Because again my opinion and position the world so I would sit there and I would think any. Every president that's come in has tried to slow play Iran. They've all set the same script from Bush to never trust when you're negotiating with Iran, to Clintons to Obama to any. They've all said the same thing about Iran is you know, number one threat in the world. They've said it in many different ways. Okay. And every one of them says that who seems strong but then when it comes down to doing it, hey, let's negotiate. Here's some money for you. Here's pallets of money and we've seen all the pictures.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, no, that's not where I'm going.

[Patrick]

I know you're not, I know you're not. But what I'm saying is he knowing his style, he watched what happened with Ghassam Soleimani when he killed it. Number two guy, that guy was a player. He was their patent. So it's not like they took out a regular guy. So he took out Patton and he watched how they retaliated and didn't do anything. They hit a small base that nobody was.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick]

So then he's sitting there watching this and he gets the chokehold with Venezuela, so he knows China's relying on Venezuela. Then he goes and gets, you know what happens with Panama. Panama's president turns against CK saying you can't have control of the two ports. So now he's got China in trouble because China's at the US Under a lot of power. And I know you went to China last year for a couple weeks. I want to talk about that experience as well in a minute. So for him, if he waits to do it long term.

[Professor Pape]

No, no, no. There's no waiting here two to three years.

[Patrick]

As long.

[Professor Pape]

No, no, no, no. But let me. So this is almost surely what he would say back. So I really like, Patrick, that you're. You're, what you're articulating, because I've watched almost every single, single one of President Trump's speeches over the last two years. This is. I DVR them, so I really want to know what's going on here.

[Patrick]

You've laughed a lot.

[Professor Pape]

I've laughed, yeah. He's actually pretty. I've been to Butler. I've been to actually four of his rallies all day. I've actually spent the whole weekend with a hundred thousand people there where you have to stand. Literally, there's no place to sit. That's why hundreds drop over and you got to have all the paramedics there. Okay. So you may not have been there. Okay. I've been to four of these things, and I've also been to Kamala Harris, where people get there an hour before. No, with the Trump rallies, you're. If you're there at the 7am you're late. Okay. If he doesn't start talking till 5 or 6, it usually says 5. It doesn't get there till 6. So. But, well, it's not ridiculous. It's the amount of fervor here.

[Patrick]

Oh, they love it.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah. But you got to be there. I mean, this idea. Just hear about it. I mean, being there. And I did four of them. My wife came with me here on three of them. I mean, just to really. And it's really. But this is what you're articulating is very likely what he would say. And I would say, President Trump, there's. There's two issues here to really explain. I definitely understand that you're in a hurry here. You want to make this happen during your presidency. But here's the big, the big issue you need to hear, which is that idea of punishment that you're going to. Your change to the past is rapid. Punishment is exactly what other presidents have tried to Do. Bill Clinton tried to do this with Slobodan Milosevic in March 1999, and that produced massive backlash, which made a giant a problem. That was a problem, a gigantic crisis here. And this could be 10 times worse. And the reason is, because what happens when you try to punish is what we were just describing before. You're going to get a fight or flight response by a distribution of people inside the government and also in the society. And you only need a 25% or a third of that distribution to want to fight before this all becomes worse. Because what you may think you're going to do is knock off the worst of the worst here, but that's not what's really going to happen. What you're doing is you're taking a risk that when you try to speed this up, it will become 10 times worse and you're going to have to walk away with a gigantic black eye here. And that's what happened to Bill Clinton when he tried to do this. And that's why when we went into this with the bot, with the Balkans, after this whole thing blew up. Yes, we finally fixed it. And I was giving advice here, there as well. Sandy Berger's son was actually at Dartmouth where I taught at the time. So he was the national security advisor. So the bottom. But the bottom line is, sir, that this is not the way to win. You may think and hope to win this way, but what you're doing is you're taking a risk that's even bigger. When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, When Japan attacked us at Pearl harbor, they wanted a quick solution here. And what happened is they unleashed a tiger, a much bigger tiger, and they got crushed. This is the danger. The. I understand the other way seems a bit slower. It seems not distinctive enough, but this is the way to actually win here over time. And, sir, you just had this happen in Syria and you were part of this. So it is not the case that there's no analogy that you cannot understand here, but it is not. Maduro, this is a mistake. This is a complete mistake. Okay? What Rodriguez is doing is not giving you any oil, sir. Yes, you can tell the public it's this spectacular victory, but the bottom line is you went into that wanting oil companies to pump out two or three times more oil than they said. And the reason they're not doing that, sir, and this is on my X account, by the way, when this came out, is not because you didn't pick up Maduro. It's because it is way too dangerous for those civilian Contractors to go in. They told you that to your face. You did not like it. But the bottom line is you're not at. That is the wrong analogy. The better analogy is actually Syria. It takes time. And you're right, it's risky. It may not work, but the other alternative is ten times more risky.

[Patrick]

By the way, I agree that this is a very risky move he made, but the way I process it, Brian, let me clear. Clear my thoughts and then just.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, it's okay.

[Patrick]

I think, you know, like, you calendar your year, right? You and your wife, you sit down and say, babe, what are we doing? Hey, we're gonna go Christmas anniversary, summer, we're going here, we're going. Okay. So I think of him as a calendar guy, okay? And. And there's some people calendar three months out, some people calendar a month, some people a week if you're in sales. But some people calendar out four years. So he my impression, try to compress time frames to do what would take somebody in three terms to do to do one term. And the way he looked at it, my opinion is, forget 2028, because if you try to have something like this go into 2028 election year, you're gonna give the victory to the Democrats. So then you try to do it pre midterms, enough time to see if you can get this thing done before World cup, and that'd be a positive distraction. And everybody moves on to the next story. If you get the victory, helps you out. So he probably wasn't expecting this to take as long as it did. So I'm thinking for sure, I'm with you. I think on the side, on the calendar side, there's no way he can do the long term ways. Because look at this as two terms. First two years, second two years pre midterm is one term that you have. The second two years, you go into election 2028. And he probably wants his VP to win, to kind of show, hey, look at me, I'm a president. My VP became the president, or one of my cabinet members, like Rubio became president, or we kept.

[Professor Pape]

So then my Republican is there. So then my response is, sir, I can't change your time frame because he's the president. I cannot do that. What I can then tell you is you need a dedicated backup plan and you need to organize an entire team. Because when this does go negative, as I'm telling you, and I'm telling you, it's 90% likely to go negative. And let's say I'm wrong, sir, you're Right. I'm a professor, you're the President, United States, you've won reelection. I have not do this, though, at a minimum, have a backup plan so that when this goes completely south, you actually have a, have, have a plan here. And that is what I've done with the Air Force. So when I've had my debates in the Air force in the 1990s, when I went toe to toe with the leaders of the leadership decapitation school, with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, we had some of these classified debates over Easter with generals having to give up Easter with their families. And, and believe me, the idea that generals want to give up Easter with their families to listen to some 32 year old professor, this is not going down well. All right. But the, nonetheless, my, my real bottom line argument was you may be right. You're going to do an A bombing campaign that will do something no one has done in history in over 100 years. And I can't tell you 100% for sure it will fail. But what I can tell you is the number one thing you should do is cover your risk. And what that means is, is not putting on the side and say, I'll get to that if it fails. No, you start now with an entire group of people and their job is Team B, their job. And you keep it classified, you keep it off to the side, but you don't wait here. You do this now as you're giving the go order, because you know there's some chance I'm right. And if there is a chance, well, I'm just trying to. How do you cover the risk? And this is what, this is the way you can actually move people in government, Patrick. Because the truth is they do know things I'm not going to know. And that's going to be true. The President has the greatest.

[Patrick]

Did you vote for him? Did you vote for him?

[Professor Pape]

So I did.

[Patrick]

Because you're a liberal Republican. Did you vote for him? Have you ever voted for him?

[Professor Pape]

Well, have I ever voted for him? No, I have not. No, I have not. I voted for Republicans in the past,

[Patrick]

but not him specifically.

[Professor Pape]

Not him specifically. And I also have not always voted for the Democratic candidate. So one of the issues, Patrick, is that there are times here when I haven't voted for anybody. And the reason is, because if you go back to, you just said, I'm one of the rare people here who was supporting Ron Paul, who's extreme Republican and also Barack Obama in 2008, what I'm doing is I'm looking for who has the best foreign policy for the country as a whole. And there are times when nobody has that best foreign policy and I can't bring myself for principled reasons. See, I'm not looking to and this is probably why I don't think I'll probably ever have a, an, an offer to become a, say, national security advisor because I'm not doing the the way you become a national security advisor is not just you talk and get on the media is you've got to be a consistent soldier, which that means is you always will be politically behind whatever

[Patrick]

you're comfortable with that. I get the vibe that you're very

[Professor Pape]

comfortable because I get a chance because I get an opportunity that very few people have had in the last 20 years.

[Patrick]

Right.

[Professor Pape]

How many people have come in here who have advised for the presidential campaigns a Republican who's on those stages and a Democrat who's on those stages at exactly the same time. And how many people have had an opportunity to advise four White Houses in a row, two Republican and two Democrat? That's just a very rare thing.

[Patrick]

It is very rare. But that's also a reason why you get millions of views that people want to know.

[Professor Pape]

Well, and that's also, and that's why I'm being very upfront. You asked me here and I'm telling you something. You push hard. No, I don't always vote for the I don't always. There are, there are, there are times when I do just sit it out and I don't like it because I wish there but this is what keeps me up. I'm not going to comment. You've heard me, you heard me go pretty far down this road sitting this one.

[Patrick]

I would have been a good one if you were going to vote for comment. I don't know.

[Professor Pape]

I hear you. I hear you. Let me just also say I was very much not just in a. So I advised the Biden White House probably a dozen times here.

[Patrick]

The West Wing present.

[Professor Pape]

Never. No, never spoke to Biden himself, a lot of people, but always on the west, always in the west. But the West Wing and half in person, half on zoom because there was also Covid and, and just to be clear, I was never a supporter of the open borders and I thought, and not just thought in vague way that this was adding to the fuel of the fire that's happening inside the country. So when you see the book that comes out and it's going to come out called Our Own Worst Enemies, you're not going to see me Just say, oh, sure, if you had just voted for Harris, this would have all worked out. If you voted for Trump, it was all going to work out. What you're going to see me explain is our country has now got at a minimum four parties and they have two radical wings. And those two radical wings are taking turns here and spiraling in ways that are breaking the country apart. And we can't just keep doing that. So that's what you're also seeing here. In my personal behavior, I cannot really get behind the just, let's just destroy the country a different way because then I could maybe have a cabinet office. No, that's not happening with Professor Pape. Professor Pape just is very, is completely comfortable and actually honored to be in the position we need, we need guys

[Patrick]

in your position though, like the, the main, the regular people that are watching need folks like you to give your opinions for us to be like, why is he saying like, I just had a lady on Susan Kokinda and she is saying all this stuff that Britain's behind everything and no one is saying that. So I'm like, why would she say that?

[Professor Pape]

Right, that's right.

[Patrick]

And so you, you're giving your own angles. I think we as the audience need to hear that on different opinions. But let me, let me go. So some people would say the following. Some people would say, Brian, when it comes down to the blockade, right, you know, I'm watching Trump the last couple weeks, he's like, well, you know, the, you know, ceasefire indefinitely is done, or two weeks, you have 10 minutes and then all of a sudden, you know, they better do a deal. It's not a good idea, they better do a deal. And you're almost wondering now, he's not in a hurry. So either he's not in a hurry because they have no other plans, or he's not in a hurry because he feels they're shutting down of the strait. What they've done. The blockade is destroying Iranians economy, Iran's economy. A million people don't have a job. Another million people are indirectly impacted by. Prices are up 67%. So people may turn against the regime and say, we're sick and tired of this. We don't have the Internet, so we don't know if it's happening or not. But some people may say the way he's moving yet King Charles, he seems relaxed, telling jokes, White House correspondents, everybody gets up and runs out, he's still sitting there. He seems so calm, as if they have everything under control. What do you say to those people,

[Professor Pape]

well, a couple things. So first of all, President Trump is the, in some ways the greatest politician we've had as president in my lifetime. Now, often people will say Ronald Reagan, others will say Bill Clinton, others will say Barack Obama. And I realized people want their, their, their favorites here. It's like fan favorites. They want that thing. Bill was amazing. But what's really important to understand is that President Trump is, if you saw what his demeanor was when he was just had a third assassination attempt. I think this is an even a better example of what I'm about to describe here is that he has been under personal pressure more than any of those other presidents. So, so it's true. Ronald Reagan did have Hinckley. So he was, and he, and he, by the way, similar to President Trump, told jokes with the doctors as they were trying to save his life. So just to be clear, so I don't mean to say that, that there's nobody who, even, who had anything like. But President Trump's had that three times. And in all three of those times, it's really quite stunning. His balance, his, his poise, his ability to look beyond the moment to what the moment would mean for, for the future. Just unbelievable, unparalleled. Now, others maybe haven't been as tested as much, but he's done this under fire three times. And what he did on Saturday night was really quite, quite remarkable in the following way. It wasn't just poise under fire. What he said, which was extremely important and I'm sorry to say the Democrats did not follow up on this as much is basically he gave a unity speech. Speech. If you go back and listen to when he came to the podium, when after this he said there was literally love in that room, just remember that. And what was in that room, the people in that room were not maga. This was not, I mean, of course his cabinet was there. So I.

[Patrick]

90% is not MAGA. 80%.

[Professor Pape]

So just imagine this is a man whose wife could have been killed, killed. So it's, it's him, he could have been killed. If that shooter had just gotten another, say 20 or 30ft in into that room. They were so packed like sardines in that room. If he had gotten off five or six shots, you probably every single, every single one of those bullets would probably hit a person, maybe multiple, depending on how, how this could work. So this was not, this was a true near miss experience here. And you can see how panicked the media was because they're there. So if you compare their Poise to President Trump. Trump. So in this particular case, we need to understand that he really is the most poised individual that we have seen. But not just a matter of poise. He was thinking about the future and he offered an olive branch in this case. And I have said this publicly on MSNBC and Ms. Now, not just in I go on Newsmax, I go on Ms. Now. I mean, it's really quite an honor here, Patrick, to be involved in these. And it's because I'm coming at it from what you're seeing here. And the fact is that this would have been a great opportunity for Hakeem Jeffries to have reached out. Now, I don't mean to make concessions. So this is what people are saying, well, should they make the concession with dhs, we need to get above this a little bit. And that's where President Trump was going. He wasn't on that night and on the 60 Minutes interview, he was not talking about, I want this particular concession. He was looking forward in big picture way here that presidents do, that leaders do, not that staff do. So staff are going to come at you and say, president Trump, get that deal. Get that deal. That's not what he was doing. And I really believe maybe there's still an opening here. I hope this week hasn't closed it off. But you can see how quickly the angry politics, I call it violent populism, is coming back in. And I really believe that's something we need to understand. There was an important olive branch there. And by the way, with President Biden, one of the things I was doing a lot was I was showing the data on our surveys on support for political violence in the United States. And I was making the argument and he and his people did. And he gave the speeches that certain the way his rhetoric had to change, that he gave a speech, a famous speech with red behind him called the Philadelphia Speech speech. And I specifically was arguing for a different approach. And then with these assassination attempts, first the Pelosi attempt, which was just before the midterms, and then with the President Trump attempts here twice, and then Kamala Harris, they used different rhetoric. Their rhetoric was not we're right, you're wrong. Their rhetoric was let's bring down the temperature overall. And in our data, what we were tracking with our surveys is it actually was coming down over. That's one of the. Over the fall of 2024. So the rhetoric here was actually moderating. And then you could see the support for political violence literally declining in our surveys. So that when the election Happened and the Democrats lost. I wasn't at all surprised. We didn't have political violence. A lot of people were saying, where's the violence? Well, by bringing it down, the support

[Patrick]

for violence they learned from first term. I mean, there's a bit of what you're. Some people may say it's naive because the first time when he won, they couldn't wait to get rid of him. They created rumors, Russia collusion every day, mainstream made his life a living hell, and they thought he would never get back in. So when they screwed up with Biden and then they brought Kamala in and they didn't choose somebody else, like, who's the fellow from Ohio, who's the governor of the philosopher. Josh Shapiro.

[Professor Pape]

I think you're from Pennsylvania.

[Patrick]

Yeah, Pennsylvania. I'm sorry. Yeah, from Pennsylvania. Like, if they would have chosen Josh Shapiro, who maybe would have been a better VP candidate to go. But no, they chose Kamala. Kamala was not qualified. She destroyed the board or all this stuff. The second time around when Trump won, the mainstream media has nothing to say. What are you gonna say now?

[Professor Pape]

Well, what I'm trying to point out, Patrick, is that you could have had a different outcome that was bottom up, and that did not happen here. And it didn't happen. And I believe part of the reason you're right, there's another part I don't mean to say this is just a monoc outcome was you. You literally did have leaders. And I'm giving credit here to President Biden and some to Kamala Harris, but also, if you look at Mike Johnson's rhetoric here during this period of time, this was after the first Trump assassination attempt, and after the second here, you see it's. It's a much more moderated. Everybody needs to bring down the rhetoric.

[Patrick]

Call me 8647. I mean, the other way, which is

[Professor Pape]

going in the other direction.

[Patrick]

Yeah, but they celebrated that. They said, what's the big deal? So to me, a part of the target with the word, you know, what's being said. They've been trying to take this guy out for a while, three times now. They've tried, you know.

[Professor Pape]

Yes.

[Patrick]

And directly, indirectly, whatever you want to call it. But going back to it, so specifically on the blockade topic.

[Professor Pape]

Yes.

[Patrick]

What do you say when some people are saying it's working, you know, he is making Progress. Iran is losing 450 a day, 13 billion a day, 13 billion a month. What do you say to that?

[Professor Pape]

They're looking at tactics, and they're not seeing the strategic effects are not coming like they want. So tactically, as with the bombing, when the bombs were launched against Iran on February 28, bombs hit, target bombs killed, leader. With the blockade, tactically you have the same thing. In fact, we've turned around something like 40 ships, 38 ships here that was carrying Iran's oil. So tactically that is, that's a success. If you also look at it tactically from the perspective of we've produced about a million unemployed right now in Iran. So that you can say is a tactical success. But look at the Supreme Leader statement just a few minutes before we came on the show today. Look at what's happening around the world in the last 30, 36 hours, 72 hours. This is a strategic disaster. This is not. These tactical successes are not leading to strategic success. Similar with the bombing, the bombing was tactically successful. In fact, I talked to the US Air Force. I have nothing but enamored with our military. They are doing a fantastic job with what they're being ordered to do. They're doing it above and beyond what, what you might, no shirking here and so forth. And that's true with the blockade as well. So tactically you're seeing success, but what we're doing is it's too easy to confuse tactical success with strategic success. And this is one of the big points I make on the escalation trap. But since I taught for the Air force in the 1990s here, this is one of the things I discovered by teaching colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors who were the best of the best, that think of them as like the top guns. That was too easy for them to confuse tactical success with strategic. Because for their last 12, 15 years, they were tactical people, they were doing tactical operations and they're being promoted above. They're the best of the best at tactics. But what's happening when they're a mid level officer, when they're about to become a general, is this is a different game now. They're not going to be in those cockpits now. This is not the same thing. They're going to now have to think about strategy. Strategy is a different outcome. And the reason is because with tactics, what you're thinking is how bombs hit a target or how ships block other ships. With strategy, it's how does that military action affect politics? Politics, no matter how many times, how many sorties you've flown in either an F117, a B2 or an F35, you're not focusing on politics there. That's just not happening. When you're suddenly now in the game of strategy. It's if I do X to the enemy, what is it going to do politically to the enemy? This isn't just a matter of how many launchers I'm taking down. That's my lane. That's what I deal with in bombing to win. My work on economic sanctions and blockades, which, which is another 30 years of work here, is also about the same thing. It's not just how to or I know a lot about the details of the tactics I have to to. But when I'm my lane and what I'm talking to the White House is about is not how to rearrange what the military does. They're the best of the best. I know because I have been there up close and personal with them. The it's about when you do X, what's that going to do politically to the target? That is not something you learn when you're in deployment in Fallujah. That's just not what's going on now. You do actually learn more about it over time. And when you start to study it, as I do a lot of those deployments, people will start to make some analogies, which is, oh yes, now I see that when we, when we started out in 2004 and we had these more heavy handed tactics, we were actually producing more terrorists than we were killing. And that was back then in 2003 and 4. That was the big issue I was engaged with, which is I want to kill terrorists. I absolutely wanted to kill terrorists. It's not that I want to let them off the hook. I want to know how do I kill the current generation of terrorists without producing a second generation that's even bigger? And even Don Rumsfeld finally started to say we're producing more terrorists than we're killing. That's why we changed strategy, not just tactics, but we literally changed our approach and we ended up up defeating aqi. And we did this through a political strategy by empowering the Anbar Awakening who were this hundred thousand set of Sunni tribes that were numbering a hundred thousand and we took a big risk here to get rid of aqi. What did we do? We gave them money. We gave the Sunni tribes, not aqi. But when we gave the Sunni tribes money, this was a big risk because maybe they would turn their guns on us. And I knew this up close and personal because in February 2007, even though I was a critic of the war here and I was saying we're doing so much wrong, I was invited to go to the 3rd Infantry Division in February 2007. Speak to all 150 of their officers. Two weeks before they deployed to Baghdad. Had two weeks before they deployed.

[Patrick]

Wow.

[Professor Pape]

It was a two hour briefing. And they wanted to know no kidding, how could they calm this thing down? No politics were in the room there. This was a no kidding. And they, their lives were on the line. Patrick, you think about that honor that when we talk about the honors that I have had, this is just one of the many unbelievable.

[Patrick]

When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscan Italy. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skill pants. We chose patience. Spending two years perfecting every detail. And we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the future looks bright collection. Not rushed. Not disposable. Not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious. Timeless. If we were to say, make a list of top 10 books that officers and generals and sergeant majors have had to read the last 30 years, both your books are going to be probably on the list.

[Professor Pape]

But let me go back to this because how you defeat terrorists here is all part of a mix here. So when I went in, I was asking the. Because I was brought into this, this big meeting with the intel officers who were, who were bringing me in and I said, well, will you tell me a little bit about your orders that you're going to have when you go into Baghdad? That. And they said well of course, sir, you understand it's all classified. But what I can tell you is that we are, we are debating here, we haven't decided whether we're going to go into the. It's called Solder City in Baghdad, the Shia area of Baghdad. And, and then I took that little bit of knowledge and I was able to reorganize it to explain to them over two hours that if they would do that, they would probably double the amount of suicide terrorism in Iraq at the time and make everything worse. And that what they needed to do was not go into Solder City militarily. Needed to keep to their main footprint, which was these more Sunni neighborhoods. There were seven of them. So we got into the details here and that if they would do that with some other ideas too. So it wasn't just literally that this would have the best chance of putting the capping, I called it of the volcano. Well, I can't tell you that I only go into these things for two hours and then I go And I take all the questions and I go home. And then they listen to other people. Well, they never did go into Solder City. I can't tell you it's because of what I said. But what I can tell you is we did cap that volcano. And when we then, and this was under Obama in 2010 and 11, when we ignored the problem and allowed the Anbar Awakening, that. That key force of Sunnis to be crushed by the Shia Maliki government, of course ISIS was going to come back. And that's why I was right there tracking this thing. And as soon as ISIS came back, I was right there with the strategy of how do you defeat isis? So my goal here is, Patrick hasn't always been to just say you're doing something wrong. It's been to come up with all terms. That's why when you asked me what would I have told President Trump on February 27, actually have an answer. And it's not just making it up off the fly. It's because. But you can't, you can't go to the White House, knock on the door, do you mind if I come into your super secret classified meeting?

[Patrick]

I do know. I do know. I think you said in one of the interviews that both Iranian state TV and Russian state TV invited you to be on or something.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, and I won't go. Yeah, yeah. In fact, the, the, they've just recently wanted to get me on the. They call you on WhatsApp or whatever and you can't. And I get so many calls. So I answered the call and they said, well, we sent you all these things. And I said, well, wait a minute, tell me more about your organization. So this is where you have to ask about your organization. You're famous. Not everybody's famous like you. So. And then it was, it was just, it was. Russian television actually just had masked the name of that. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. The reason is because I just made a decision in 2014. This actually goes back to when Russia, Russia took Crimea. So if you looked at my history here in the years before Russia took Crimea, I went on rt, I used to do that. But then when Russia took Crimea, this was just quite clearly. I mean, this is just, you know, flat out aggression. You're literally seizing territory that's not yours. And you're, you're, you're doing it now. It's a fait accompli. Didn't really have much fighting, but nonetheless. So I had a lot to say in the media about what we should do about that as the pushback to that. But I just made a decision that I wasn't going to do that. I've been offered trips to go to Iran multiple times and I just won't go. And the reason is because I'm not here to become a. Look, if I'm not willing to be a pawn of Republicans or Democrats in my own country, why am I going to be a pawn of somebody else? And also, Patrick, there's lots money here that, so when I make arguments in books, this, this does help certain groups. And you wouldn't believe the amount of money that I've turned down because they, they throw money at you thinking, well, you'll just do things. You're, you're, you're kind of going in that certain direction. And I'll tell you a case with 2014, what really broke the, the back here. And the CIA knows this and the FBI knows this, but I'll just tell the case publicly here, which is I got an email in soon around the time that Putin took Russia, took Crimea. And it was from a New York firm, New York law firm, and they wanted to have a conversation because they had some clients and they knew I thought economic sanctions were bad here. That's true. I think they don't work very well. And they wanted to talk to me about what I might be able to do. So, so I got on the phone and here it was a set of lawyers in New York and I won't say who the, who the firm was, but it was a set of lawyers in New York and they wanted to pay me and they were willing to pay me a lot of money to do Freedom of Information act requests they wanted me to do to get information about the economic sanctions on Russia. I said, wow, okay, so, but who's your client? And they said, well, okay, say it's Rosenev. Now, Rosenev, if your listeners will go, is the conglomerate of Putin the croniest of crony Putin? Conglomerates of oil and gas in Russia? So basically I was being offered an enormous amount of money to do essentially work here for Putin, and I'm just not going to do it it. And so if RT wants to know, this is the reason. Okay. And everybody in the US Government knows about this. So I'm not.

[Patrick]

Oh, you reported it to the government?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. And by the way, you don't.

[Patrick]

Was it money?

[Professor Pape]

I'm not going to talk about the level of details I just told you is money. But what I'm saying is that people might Say, well, wait a minute. Do you have to report? I guarantee you the guarantees a little strong. We should not be surprised that they already knew that. They already know that all this stuff that we think, like right now, if we take our cell phone out. So we're not actually even. You know, the cell phone is closed. It's all being completely monitored here. And you can turn it off and literally turn. That's why you have to put. When you go in the West Wing, they're not just turning off the cell phone. Okay? They're literally taking your cell phone and they're putting it in this unbelievably thin, thick, safe thing that no amount of material. Because we live in a world, Patrick, where. And it's not because people are monitoring Professor Pape. It's because they're already monitoring everything from the other, other side. So. So this is. So. For me, I just simply am not going to go down these roads here. And it's. It's really just based on. On. On principle here. And I'm glad to be at the University of Chicago where every single dime of what I spend is constantly. I mean, oh, my God, you know, the amount of paperwork you got to do. If I have a driver who takes me to the airport and it's not through the Uber company. Oh, my goodness gracious. The amount of paperwork here.

[Patrick]

Yeah. So I got an email. The audience may think, wow, you know, these types of things don't happen. I got an email, 2018, 2019, I made three China videos criticizing China in a big way. And then I got an email from a PR firm in New York. We have the entire paper trail. This Chinese charity, this Chinese billionaire, who was worth at the time, 20, $30 billion, wants to give you $600,000 in return, he wants to invite you to a charity event, and he wants you to take 300,000 of the 600,000 and give it to the charity. And he wants to take a picture with you. We got on a call with me, a guy named Gerard and Mario get on a call. They're presenting it to us. Man from China is on the call. The PR firm's on the call. And I said, what charity is this? And they're kind of going through, well, we want to show you China because we want you to see the greater part of China. I'm like, great. And so let me get this straight. You want me to take 600k and give a charity? Yeah, that's all we want you to. And you can keep the other 300,000. So you want to, for the rest of my life hold me hostage? That I took 600k from you guys? Yes.

[Professor Pape]

Well, that's the second. That's the. Remember how I told you, told you the story that if you try to bully people and as soon as you give the bully what they want here, they're just coming, right. They're going to do it again.

[Patrick]

Not interested.

[Professor Pape]

This is just. So when I see these stories in the, in the newspaper here, it's, it's just, it's, it just reminds me again, I'm in fourth grade, Alvin's in seventh grade, and we got somebody trying.

[Patrick]

We got to find this Alvin guy. Alvin, honestly, message us, we need to figure this out.

[Professor Pape]

But I'm just pointing out that it's, it's, it's.

[Patrick]

It doesn't work with you.

[Professor Pape]

It doesn't. Well, it doesn't work with me. And I, and I, and I.

[Patrick]

When is your birthday? What month's your birthday?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, April. I just had my birthday. It was a, it was the same day of Ron Paul. I went to Ron Paul. It was April 20, last Friday, April 24.

[Patrick]

Happy birthday.

[Professor Pape]

Thank you very much. And it was. Well, it was a great present. I hadn't seen Ron Paul in, God, 15 years. Some long period of time. Been a long time because the issues had moved and so forth. And now the Iran war. There was a reason to bring it back together. Yeah. Getting a band is really quite interesting to see what happened and, and my wife got to be. Be there to see it all, which was really quite a. You know, it's. There are these personal things, you know, have a chance to show off a little bit.

[Patrick]

That's great. So let's talk China. So you went to China last year?

[Professor Pape]

I think last year, June, during the bombing of Fordeaux. Yeah, right.

[Patrick]

During the bombing of. You're there for two weeks, 18 hours a day, and you're in the factories, you're in places. What did you learn about where China's at that the rest of the world is not aware of?

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, what I learned is we're tracking about, I would say from the newspapers, that is Wall Street Journal, New York Times, even the business side. Probably about 10% of the real big picture of what's happening in China. What we are doing is taking a soda straw view of what's happening, focusing on individual companies. And I know because when I went, I wanted to visit the companies BYD Xiaomi, which is another electric vehicle manufacturer. It's like the Porsche level. And also Alibaba, also some laser advanced AI in Wuhan and I wanted to go visit the companies because that's what I thought I should do. I wanted to see, and I did. I visited the companies on the shop floor. I got a chance to see how the robots actually work. They for, for, for hours, not just for a few minutes. And, and I did learn some things there and I'll come back to the detail in just a second. But by doing this, by going to not just, you know, Beijing and Shanghai, which many people will do all time here, but by going to Wuhan, Hangzhou, Sunshin to actually go on the shop floor, spend hours and hours and hours there, then go to dinner with all the, with the executives to really talk about the situation here. Also in the Middle East, I learned something really big, Patrick, which is what China's doing is not just simply uplifting a company. They, they are doing that, they're uplifting whole cities. So think not about an AI company in Pittsburgh. Think Pittsburgh itself is being uplifted. So what I saw was say I'll just pick Wuhan because Wuhan is a steel, an old steel city like Pittsburgh is now. It's 9 million. Pittsburgh's about 350,000. So it's, it's bigger. But what they did in Wuhan upon was they are uplifting all of the medical industry, they are uplifting all of the city's transit infrastructure with AI I don't just mean redoing the paving, the potholes here. They are uplifting. When you go to get your driver's license in, in these cities that I'm in, they have rebuilt the entire buildings where it's not that they just accommodate your cell phone. It's like start cell phone build building around the idea of a cell phone. Okay. This is a completely different experience where you go into the building to get a say either you want a building permit or you want your driver's license. Here you're going in and the very first thing you do is you have to tap your phone so that you get everything downloaded on your phone because there's an awful lot of forms you need to fill out. And you might try to do this at home, but they explain to me, yes, but when we try to do that, we need to have people standing on the side so that there's always going to be a question here or there that you're going to have. And so then what do you have? You don't have these long lines. Univers City of Chicago Motor vehicle. Oh my goodness, great. Just imagine if those of you could Just imagine it's worse than you imagine. Okay? But, but what happens it in these advanced cities, advanced cities now is they have the equivalent of Starbucks right there. They have little areas for the kids to play because what the parents have to do, the people, the adults have to come in is they got to go and work on their cell phone to fill out all these forms and then they will have about 10% contact with humans, other people there. Because it's not going to be just, you can't do everything on your phone, but it dramatically reduces all of the issues we, we deal with. So, so it's, they are, they are uplifting wholesale. And then if you, then one of the big fears we have here about AI is it's going to put everybody, it's going to make everybody unemployed. That's not what's happening in Wuhan and Shenzhen and Hangzhou. You're having massive construction. Because what you're doing is you're feeding AI in at every single street corner. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. When you get a, you know, it's, it will, this will probably happen to us very soon. When you get a speeding ticket. Now, you know how we have the red lights here, okay, they take the picture, they take the picture and we get about two weeks later here. And you don't know that it happened for two weeks. Okay, what happens in China? And they showed me, literally the driver showed me. This is when you, when you run that speeding ticket, you get it in two seconds, stop it. And they take it right out. No. And you could just push pay now.

[Patrick]

That is hilarious.

[Professor Pape]

And so it's happening like that, kind of for me.

[Patrick]

I have way too many tickets. My license got suspended for the third time two weeks ago. Well, I'm just, my wife's like, you know, your license is. I'm like, what are you talking about? Yes, unpaid ticket.

[Professor Pape]

So, but that doesn't happen without massive construction. So their construction workers are actually doubled what they were over the last 10 years. The health industry is growing as well. Because, because all of this, it's not about the company alone. And then the other thing that I really was just knocked me off my socks was the integration with university systems. So now of course, I'm a professor and I'm interested in doing that. And as I'm doing this tour, they want to hear my talks on, say, Trump foreign policy and tariffs, things like that. So that's natural. I would also go to the university. But when I go to the universities. I'm getting these deep presentations, not just me about talking, talking to them about how they're integrating with the AI because you've got basically AI that doesn't need a BA you've got AI that needs a BA, AI that needs a master's and AI that needs PhDs. And then they started to take me these different firms. So a lot of the firms are what's called vertically integrated, where what they're doing is building their own silicon chips. So they took me to the chip factory. Factory. So, so this would be a chip factory. I went in, say, Wuhan, which is part of a laser AI laser company. So they have the AI lasers here that are doing all this special carving with, with lasers and AI but then they do their own chips. So they took me to the chips where you've got to get all dressed in the suits because you can't have any, any, any spotty, any dirt that gets in. And then they started to explain to me, they. And they showed me that what's really happening here is you can't do this with bas. You've got to actually have masters. And some of the chip assemblies here need to be done with PhDs because it's really very technical and very hand. Very specific. It's not just people turning widgets or screwdrivers like Howard Lutnick was. Was describing a couple about a year ago on Sunday show. This is a very different thing thing. So you need to, you want to work very closely with universities. So I, I'm coming back and I'm looking. I'm. I'm from Erie, Pennsylvania, and, and I've seen Erie, Pennsylvania just kind of the bottom fallout since over the last 30, 40. It breaks my heart. I mean, we basically have two. We used to have all these industries and we had paper industries, all these tool and dye industries here. You know what the big industries in Erie, Pennsylvania are? Hospitals where you're born and funeral powers where you die. Okay. And this just breaks my heart here. And, and we just don't have any real approach like this. But what China's doing is they're not just uplifting a, a Deep Seek or an Alibaba there. They are creating webs of doing that. But 90 of this is happening in a much broader context where they're taking, say a St. Louis and they're uplifting the whole area. They're taking a Pittsburgh, they're uplifting the whole city. They're taking Detroit and they're uplifting the whole city. And they've done. I went in that two week period. I went to these four, these four areas. It's about 50 million people that are being uplifted now. Maybe they haven't uplifted anybody else. I don't know. I didn't actually. They, they're, they're, they're telling me that if I went to the more rural areas, I'd be impressed there too. And maybe I will go back.

[Patrick]

Back.

[Professor Pape]

But the bottom line is let's assume it's only 50 million people. Only 50 million people. And we're going to look down on that. No, I think they're 10, 20 years ahead of us, maybe even more. Not because of, they're a couple months header behind on deep seek or chat gbt, but because of uplifting the entire cities here. And this is, you know, this is what digital China is, is uplifting this whole area. And quite a few of these, these business owners, when I had dinners with them here, they would tell me their personal story, just like when we started out here. And almost, you know, many of them had a very similar story which was, well, in the 1980s or 90s, I lived in rural areas and I didn't even have shoes. And now look at me. Okay, so this is, this could be America.

[Patrick]

Well, this is America. They kind of duplicated us without us trying to.

[Professor Pape]

But where are we? Where are we right now? You see, I are the juggernaut.

[Patrick]

We are the greatest country in the world that everybody copies and duplicates.

[Professor Pape]

Then let's get juggernauting. Okay, so I am definitely, I'm not, I'm not going to become a salesman or, you know, sort of supporter of China. I'm going and looking at this as let's get moving here. And I don't think we're even getting to first base. I don't know if we're really out of the batter's box here. So we've got all these plans, we've got all these ideas and I see the stock market and this.

[Patrick]

Have you been to, have you been to Tesla's headquarters, Space Sex's headquarters? Have you been to Nvidia's headquarters? Have you been.

[Professor Pape]

I have not. And with this show, invite me, with this show, invite me, show me that you're at least as ahead. Now with the, the other thing I want to say to your, your audiences right away, right now, they're probably going to go and start to Google. Oh, okay. Professor Pape is saying all this stuff. I'm going to go see for myself. You can't see it on Google. And the reason is because they won't

[Patrick]

let what they're doing in China.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, the advancement, I mean the actual shock. Top floor, right? Just like you go in the West Wing, they take the cell phone. Okay. They don't want. They could easily be talking smack and bragging and showing all this off. They're just not doing that. And, and that tells me we're up against not just a competitor, but we're up against somebody who wants to keep going under the radar.

[Patrick]

You know, it's interesting because when, when you go to places where like this, they're only going to show you the good, they're not going to show you the ugly, the bad. The fact that their population has decreased five years in a row and some people are reporting that the number of them being 1.4 billion is not the real number, that it's a lot less than that. Because if you do the math, from the moment they went to one child policy, you know, they're, they're, they're inviting you to show you the best.

[Professor Pape]

Let me give you a little bit of background, a little bit more. So my first trip to China was 1979. 79. I was a first year undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. I heard about a trip that 30 of our professors were going on to study the economic industries in China. A couple graduate students were going and I said, well, are there any undergrads going? No. So I wrote a letter to the Chancellor, his name was Wesley Posvar. And two page letter, brilliant idea. You're going to be the first university trip ever. Too bad you don't have an undergrad going. I got a free trip to try. So I always tell that story to my students. Just write those. What do you got to lose? Okay. And so I get a five week trip. This was not a short thing. Five weeks.

[Patrick]

79.

[Professor Pape]

1979. And what we did is we went start in Hong Kong, we went to can, it's called Canton. It's not, that's not the, the Chinese name, but that's the Americanization of it. And then we basically went to multiple cities just like I did here. And my presentation shows I have the before and after here. And Sen Chen is like unbelievable. It was just a little fishing village back then. And what, and what we did is with these 30 economists. I was there with them in the morning, we tour the shop floor in the afternoon. We'd spend time with all the leaders here in all the stats and so forth that they wanted to collect because they wanted to Know, could China change? Could China. That was the big issue here at the time. Well, I started to go back in 2012 now. 2012, this is after the Olympics you're talking about. They don't show you the best. Well, this was during the air.

[Patrick]

They rushed the Olympics.

[Professor Pape]

Well, they did. But this was during the air apocalypse which your listeners can also look up. So the air apocalypse was the worst atmospheric pollution that we have had in any urban area probably here in about a hundred years that we used to have this in, in say London here long time ago in the 19th century, where there was so much soot in the air from all of the, the chimneys that were churning out all this coal driven energy here. It was literally pitch black at noon. So when it's, when it's, you're at. In Beijing, you have to wear an N95 mask. This was before COVID That's the first time I wore an N95. And I still went, even though maybe I shouldn't have, but I still went because I wanted to see what it was really like. And I wore the N95 here. So I saw some. And I used to call it, you know, you said that China had the one child policy. I called the air apocalypse the one parent policy. Because I said what's really half joking, only half. I said China's got a, doesn't want to have Japan's problem. Too many old people. How do you do that? You have a lot of pollution. But now what's happened in the last 10 years is they've gone huge into solar, as most people know. Well, what does that mean? Mean far less pollution, far less pollution here. And you know that because you go to the cities and they literally don't have like the air apocalypse. I was there. I physically was there. Where when you take off from Beijing, the airport in Beijing at noon and it's totally pitch black. Once you're at 15,000ft, the sun. Okay, this is, this was, this is real, real problems, you know, big problems, not just poverty. And so I, I saw it, but I also see China. They're cleaning things up and we got to get moving here, Patrick. We got to stop talking. We're going to get moving and just deciding that certain billionaires, we're going to fund their companies or help their companies get ahead, that we need to do more.

[Patrick]

See this picture? Is this kind of what you're talking about, how it went from.

[Professor Pape]

Oh, exactly.

[Patrick]

I, I have pictures 10 days apart part.

[Professor Pape]

That's right. And also then in, if you. So in 2015. When I went to Wuhan, you would see Wuhan because it's a steel. It was a. It's more of a steel company. Steel. So if you had a picture from Wuhan 2015 there. Yeah, there you go. There you go. I was literally giving talks in Wuhan. That's exactly right. And then I went literally last June. Okay. And it's just a different. It's a. Now does it ever get like that? It probably still does some. But I'm just pointing out that over time, what is happening here is changes occurring in China. And the other thing I learned is that very few people from America have gone to China since COVID So before in the last say. See the University of Chicago, we opened our Beijing center about now almost 20 years ago. Eighteen years ago, we have a Hong Kong center. It was really the thing to do. The fad. If you were in universities around the Olympics, you would. The Olympics started. All the universities, Stanford, you know, etc. Open these Bay. Open these centers in. In China. A lot of them in Beijing. Well, what happened with COVID and, and there's also. We're mad at China because of COVID I understand. But people stopped going. And so the amount of tourism in general has gone way down.

[Patrick]

Specifically Wuhan. Right. Because you, you, you, you now know it was, it came out of the lab and you now know they could have done something about it. They didn't move quickly and then boom.

[Professor Pape]

That's right. I went to the Wuhan lab. I actually went to the area that it was there. I took pictures of it and so forth. So I have a, you know, I do have a bit of an understanding of where the market was versus where the lab was.

[Patrick]

How far is it? What is it?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, it's only a couple miles away. It's a very. It's. You, you could.

[Patrick]

We.

[Professor Pape]

I don't think we've really gotten to the bottom of this with the public information. And, and I, and I see the

[Patrick]

story that came out with Foushees two days ago. I don't know if you saw this or not. Literally a story was dropped two days ago. Former Foushee. This was a New York Times story. Former Fauci aide charged with conspiring to evade Covid related records requests. Ex NIH official David Moore accused of stealing emails.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, I haven't seen that story. But just in the more basic level. Patrick, after Pearl Harbor. Let me put this in my context, okay. After Pearl harbor, we had an intelligence failure. It took a couple years, but only a couple years. And then Our Congress did a massive, I think it's 76 volume study of the intelligence failure of Vietnam, of Pearl harbor, how that was an intelligence failure in the middle of World War II. We did this, okay? So we didn't wait till World War II was over. If you just compare that to what we have here, we have nothing like that coming out of Congress. And this isn't like.

[Patrick]

I agree.

[Professor Pape]

Well, and I just want to make the other point.

[Patrick]

I agree.

[Professor Pape]

It's not like. Well, it's not like we just need to flip parties here. What I see is that we are. Whether we have the Democrats running it or we have the Republicans running it here, at least with these current extremes on both sides, we're just not getting to the real information that would be helpful for the country. I don't think this is just about, you know, I know Epstein's a big thing here, but it's not just about one thing, Patrick. It's about so many things. And I think that what you're describing here, getting to the bottom here, what exactly is it that we are protecting? With all the sources of methane, you're telling me we really can't redact that we could do this during World War II with Pearl harbor, we really can't make a fantastic more information available to the public to understand what happened, whether this was from a market, this was from a lab, whether we're providing the precursors to this stuff for the lab or not. Why does this have to be in conspiracy land? Land? You see, I don't believe this must be. And I believe that we used to operate in a. In a world where we did massive. We put massive amounts of information out there.

[Patrick]

Conspiracy is another one of those words to label on people so others question them, and mainstream media will use that. Brian Pape, conspiracy theorist, says this, you know, so.

[Professor Pape]

So what I'm saying, Patrick, is exactly

[Patrick]

to get rid of that. Let's just. Let's get.

[Professor Pape]

And let's. Let's move forward on that.

[Patrick]

I mean, tens of millions of people agree with you to see, hey, what happened? Let's find out more. By the way, what's your position with NATO? Where are you at with NATO?

[Professor Pape]

Because NATO's dead.

[Patrick]

You think NATO's dead?

[Professor Pape]

NATO's dead. We're writing its obituary. Tell me why once. So first thing people need to know about NATO is it's not just a political alliance. It is a political alliance where leaders get together and we have Brussels and so forth, Forth. But it's more. We have a thing that your listeners will hear called Article 5. Okay, we have, we decide we're going to fight together in a war. Much more than that. Article 5 says that when you agree with Article 5, there will be an integrated command structure. What does integrated command structure mean? An American general runs the militaries of all the other NATO countries, countries like World War II with Eisenhower, five star general. So just pause for him. See, notice how this changes your thinking. Okay, so Article 5 is not just oh, now we're gonna fight together and then sort out the command lines of authority. No, Article 5 is once we agree and we've only done this with, with Afghanistan. That's the one time we've done Article 5. 5. It means that an American general, now we could second it. We can make a decision. Just so you know that let another general do it. But it would be the idea was American general is going to make the key decisions and sort out the roles and missions for everybody. Because if you don't have a sink, a commander in chief in a theater, that's what a sink is, commander in chief. Everybody's going to not know their piece of what they're supposed to do, their geographic location. All of that needs to be sorted out or you can't efficiently fight. And you'll have a lot of friendly fire, casual and all kinds of other problems here. So you need an integrated command structure. If you're going to have a, what's called a combined set of militaries where you have militaries from other countries coming together. Well, that was the beauty of NATO, which is we run the show militarily, not just as a, we're the biggest, you know, 800 pound gorilla in the, in the, on the planet. Well now what you've had, not just last year we had Trump tariffs hurting different countries. Something very different happened with Iran. What happened with Iran is that when President Trump failed strategically, tactically succeeded, but failed strategically. What did he say? He wanted the European militaries to send the militaries because we weren't going to put our ships in harm's way. Think about that. This is too dangerous for our ships to go into harm's way. And what he said is he wanted them to put their ships in harm's way. Once you did that, I think there is no way that any European political leader or a military leader is going to essentially follow orders under Article 5 by General Kane. So what Article 5 would, would mean again, that is an American Commanders who are going to be running the show essentially here. And what happened with this war is we have shown that by the lack of strategy, by the disastrous way this has unfolded. And then on top of all that, Patrick, for President Trump to say, we want you to throw your bodies in front of our bodies, this is not, this isn't going to work. And I am not at all surprised that what you see is Stormer, that's the leader in Britain here, Carney, you

[Patrick]

are seeing so much from your angle because he also led the way. We led from front. We gave all this money to protect Ukraine because they treated him like a NATO ally. And so Trump probably used it as a way to show the world, look at these guys, they don't even pay their 2%. And I've been able to increase it from 3 in 2014 to now 32. But the messaging is important. But the point is, all of this stuff we do for them and they don't do nothing for us exposed to the world now, why do we need to be part of.

[Professor Pape]

Let me come at this from a little different perspective. So, first of all, President Trump's start in the first term, that's mostly what that rhetoric was from. He did move them from 2% to now the average is near 3, and it's going to soon be 3 and a half. That part is not really what I'm. That's true. And it was the first three.

[Patrick]

We're paying 2%. Now it's 32.

[Professor Pape]

Exactly. That's first term President Trump. So that all came from the first term of President Trump. But let me tell you a set of data that you don't hear in this regard very much by the Democrats, even either, which is what matters for power in the world is your economy is so critical because it generates the money and the technology and the resources for your military and your, your, your actual military. In 1990, when the Cold War ended, America's economy was 26% of the world's economy. Write it down. 26% of the world's economy. 1990 World bank numbers. These are all verified. Okay, what is it today?

[Patrick]

15.

[Professor Pape]

No, 26. 27%. 2025 numbers. Look at our European allies during this time. Let's pick Germany, for example. Germany was about 6, 7% of the world's economy in 1990. What are they today? Three and a half. Three and a half. What about Britain? Britain was about four and a half percent of the world's economy in 1990. What are they today? Three. France, almost exactly with Britain. Four and a half to about three. I could go through Italy. So what does that mean, Patrick? If you take power.

[Patrick]

I'm really curious what you think, because

[Professor Pape]

I'm wondering what show you the power here in 1990 compared to our European ally, European allies here. Okay, we were certainly big, but notice they weren't trivial, certainly as a, and as a group.

[Patrick]

Sure.

[Professor Pape]

But as we stayed at 26, they fallen by a third. They've fallen by a third, Patrick. So the way I put it to my classes, sometimes I lay this out for them and I say, yeah, we say we're uncle sucker, but who's the sucker here? Who's the real sucker here? See, what I understand President Trump saying, if he just looks at this statistic about who's paying for defense, and that's. And he's right on the numbers. This is not a mistake of numbers. It's not that President Trump's getting his numbers wrong, but there's a businessman, you know, if you're up against companies here, if you're one of the big mega companies here and you're 26% of the market and your competitor is here at like 7, 8% of the market, and you stay at 26 and they go to 4, who's got the power here? Who's gaining power here? We're gaining power. I'm very concerned that what's going to happen in the next five, 10 years is we'll go from 26 to 22 to 23%, something like that, that other countries, and I'm mostly worried about China are just going to eat our lunch and then maybe even the Europeans will start to get their act together and start to become economically stronger. Now, I'm not saying they will for sure, but we have not had our lunch eaten from us here since the end of the Cold War. And this is over 30 years. So this isn't just in a yearly thing. So I really believe that we are not, not using, I keep trying to explain. We're focusing on issues of tactics. We're not focusing on the bigger picture numbers here. The bigger picture outcomes that matter for America's. Another point I want to, want to make what, what does Bob believe? I want us to be 26%. I want us to be 30%. I don't want us going down. So when we had our big conversation about China, China, I'm looking at this number. I'm looking at we're pulling ourselves and hurting ourselves with trade. And I'm not coming at this as some liberal normative, let's make other people richer or something. No, that's not it at all. I'm looking at this from essentially a primacy lens, I'm looking at this. How does America remain the number one most powerful, wealthiest country in the world for the next 20 years? And I think we need to understand that we have actually had quite a set of advantages versus Western Europe and also Japan. You know what Japan was in 1990? 10%. Japan was 10% in 1990. You look at Japan today, they're 4%. Wow. So just think about that for a moment.

[Patrick]

What has China gone from? China?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, China went from two in 1990.

[Patrick]

Huh.

[Professor Pape]

Two to 17.

[Patrick]

Okay.

[Professor Pape]

Two to seven.

[Patrick]

That's the one that matters to me.

[Professor Pape]

Well, no, yes, but the whole thing needs to matter to you is what I'm telling you. Because you want us to be not just bigger, better than China, you want us to be the biggest, baddest, richest here of 26%. That's what's made America the place to come to be the golden goose, the place to come for entrepreneurs here. If we.

[Patrick]

Ain't nobody waking up in the morning going to China. Ain't nobody waking up every morning China.

[Professor Pape]

I'm worrying about that over time we are going to lose this. And I think what we need to do is understand that we've actually made out quite well versus the Western Europe.

[Patrick]

So you, so you and also Japan.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, they're not eating our lunch.

[Patrick]

Okay, so what do you think about the chances of us leaving NATO under Trump?

[Professor Pape]

Oh, he just announced. Well, so just in the last 72 hours. So I've been saying NATO has been dead for about three weeks now. So I've been on a lot of these podcasts and so forth and other people have asked me about this too. So I've said, NATO's dead, we're writing its obituary. That line has been out there for three weeks. Well, what just happened here this week on Monday is merits. The leader of Germany has come out vigorously and he's slapping Trump right in the face saying that Iran has humiliated America. And then on top of that, if you look at the papers and I, I looked at the actual documents that come out of the governments, not just simply the, you know, what's out on 30 second tick tocks here. They've come out with a new strategy, Patrick, and their new strategy, this one right here, is to talk. Yeah, this is the clip.

[Patrick]

They let them travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result. A whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so called Revolutionary Guards odds. And in that respect, that's the clip.

[Professor Pape]

So Americans may not want to Hear that and I can, I'm an American. And that, that hurts me to hear that. But we need to understand that's not unique. Macron thinks that Starmer thinks that that's the leader of, of France and Britain. Carney thinks that that's the leader of Canada. They're all global.

[Patrick]

All of them are globalists.

[Professor Pape]

Oh, undoubtedly. She thinks that, that you look at the smiles on Putin's face. So Putin just met with.

[Patrick]

Are you surprised they're saying that? Because I'm not.

[Professor Pape]

No, I'm telling you that they what, what has the world has learned which they had not known since Vietnam is an American can be beat. That's what I'm telling you. Now when we had the Vietnam War, this was a material disaster, but it was a disaster for our power beyond simply the material consequences of what happened in Vietnam because that small country beat us. In fact, what started me on my quest to understand air power as a dissertation topic in the 1980s, I wanted to know how we could lose to such a small country. I was going to go into the foreign service. I was going to become a, in the Reagan administration. I was going to go get a Ph.D. and you know, I was, I told you, liberal Republican. Reagan's basically a liberal Republican. He might not admit it but, but he is. And I was going to go and try to spread democracy here, but I wanted to know if I'm going to do this, how did we lose? Because after all, I don't want to lose here. That's not the point. So. But what you saw then is the military, not just the Reagan administration, we upended ourselves in the military. That school that I taught at, at the early force, it was a brand new school started in 1991 by Larry Welch, Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And he told me and other four star generals directly told me because they wanted to fix the problem they saw in Vietnam as airmen did not know air strategy. And I was being hired because my book, my work the only said they wanted some civilians. Well they couldn't find any would study their strategy strategy. And, and I'm the one who actually came closest to thinking about strategy the way it should be understood, which is not how to put a bomb on a target, but what happens when bombs hit targets to the politics of the situation. And so that went that we were in lockstep here at that point in time. What you, what you are seeing here though is, is since Vietnam, we have not. We, we had Desert Storm 1991. Yes. We've had other problems but we haven't had a disaster like this since Vietnam, and we haven't. And in Vietnam, America didn't do things that are wrecking the world's economy. So this could be even worse than Vietnam on that dimension. What you're seeing with these world leaders is they have learned America can be beat. Why is the UAE pulling out of opec? They don't want to be tethered to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, even though it's a collective, does is the biggest one in opec. And they call most of the shots in opec. And they, as we know, MBS was on the phone right next to Netanyahu in court encouraging Trump to do the regime change bombing. So if that's true, then you know that this Iranian regime, as it gets more powerful, they're coming at, they want to topple now the Saudi regime. Why are you in the UAE wanting to hit your wagon to that? It's not that you want to have any love for Iran, but the last thing you want to do is get sunk by this. These groups over here, you think that's

[Patrick]

why they left opec?

[Professor Pape]

I don't know for sure. I have no deep knowledge. But I said on my substack that as this was before they left opec, I said that what you're going to see is as Iran emerges as a far more powerful global player here, and it's just beginning in the Gulf, what you're going to see is fragmentation, that you had unity, you had this with the Abraham Accord words, you had Trump. And this was Jared Kushner's idea, really, from going back to the first Trump administration, where you're going to try to counterbalance Iran. Now, he didn't use that term, but that's basically what's happening here, what was happening. And so you're going to build a coalition where it's Israel, it's the uae, it's Saudi Arabia. If you can bring in the other GCC countries, that's great. And that's what Trump's last May, you saw, he did a wide swing through the GCC countries, countries. And what they're basically doing, among other things, is they're building a counterbalancing coalition against Iran. And but what as Iran grows, and especially as everybody sees what he is now articulating merits, is articulating, is that we can be beat. This is, this is not going to hold together. You are not going to be able to keep this counterbalancing coalition together. And it's not because of, you know, Trump's Unique. It's because this is the pattern of history. This is going to fragment. And then I explained they would have different countries fragmenting in different ways. It wasn't going to be a, a unison. Everybody moved to Iran. It's fragmentation or atomization, and that's what's happening here. Iraq was actually the beginning of this, as I point out in the substack. They started to be far more critical of Americans. And what did Iran do? They started to let some Iraqi oil go through. So the more these countries are moving in, even Macron was, was making statements here that Iran found positive and they let a French oil tanker through. And that's one of the reasons why Trump decided to the blockade, because he doesn't want Iran feeling its oats and using its power in this way. But what you're seeing is, I believe the, the beginning stages of what I was would happen is fragmentation of the Gulf. It's not greater unity in the Gulf. And it's because once that power, once everybody knows America can be beat, there's a power vacuum now in the Gulf. It's literally a power vacuum. And that power and the states are going to respond on their own, on their own for their own survival. They may make mistakes, they may do something good for their survival, but they're not going to simply live. Listen to President Trump, Jared Kushner, and just simply say, oh, sure, we're just going to keep doing everything and following your lead. And with OPEC now, this is, this is a real, this real sign of disunity. And you see this in the, in the, in NATO here. And the idea. And you saw with Japan, President Trump browbeat the leader of Japan and she would not vote. Well, they're only 4% of the world's GDP now. They're not 10% like they were. And why exactly are they throwing their bodies in front of this thing? What they. And their oil. Where is this idea that somehow we're going to bet Japan is an island state? I studied this in World War II. They are an island state. They depend so much on that incoming oil. That's really one of the things that crushed Japan in World War II is we had a naval blockade that really worked to crush their military, their civilian. They didn't crush their morale, but it did work weaken their military. Well, this is still true today with Japan. And so where are we bailing out Japan?

[Patrick]

So one thing we could do, they just got 910,000.

[Professor Pape]

No, let me give you a real policy. You want to get two, three days

[Patrick]

ago I think a ship showed up from us. Rob, if you have that. No, no, no.

[Professor Pape]

Let me give you an actual policy here, Patrick, to show. So Japan's economy is about to go into the toilet as a result of all this. Where's the bill going through Congress that we're going to backstop all the loss of Japan's economy over the next two years? We're going to backstop it with American cash coming out of Congress. Where is that, Patrick? You want to get Japan on your side. You've just caused that them you don't know how bad it's going to be. I'm not saying you give a certain number. I'm saying it's worse than that. We know the direction of where this is going for Japan. Why aren't we saying if it costs $5 trillion to backstop you Japan, Here's a blank check. We will bet we caused the problem. We will backstop you. Where are we saying that to Western Europe? We're not. And so what are they hearing? They're just hearing you want us to bail you out and take all your pain. They're not going to do it. We're not, we're not even. It's, it's not just. We're not admitting we're losing. This is much worse than that. When we're talking about these leaders. This is power politics of the first order here. And this would be like companies. This is like you're getting in a deal with a set of companies and the leading company makes a decision that the whole group goes down, down. Well, what would be the rest of them would want before they walk? Well, what if the leading company says, okay, I'll. It was my fault, I made a mistake. I'm going to backstop you for say a year. Okay. That would be like a business way to handle this. All right, where is that? Nowhere. And that was why President Trump is getting nowhere now. I don't think you could see right away getting that through the American, the US Congress right now, probably not happening happening. So this is why we're in an escalation trap. I can give you solutions to get out of the trap.

[Patrick]

Just tells me how much more leverage is on is on his side. Everything you keep saying, I'm thinking, okay, that even more leverage because we owe Japan what one point. They bought a $1.1 trillion of our debt. I think they have more of our debt than China does. Right. So.

[Professor Pape]

Well, they do. But if we Welsh, if we 1.24. Yeah, but if we welsh on that what that's going to do is increase interest rates, rates for the next round of debt. So, so bring Scott Besson on and you talk to him about whether we should welch on this for real. Get him to really.

[Patrick]

They're planning on doing that. That's.

[Professor Pape]

No, no. I'm just telling you what will really happen.

[Patrick]

But they're not, they're not even talking about that. Well, I'm just not even. That's a non issue.

[Professor Pape]

Then we don't have leverage. If we can't welch on their deal, we have no leverage.

[Patrick]

If, if you.

[Professor Pape]

There's no leverage there. The. They have leverage over.

[Patrick]

Did you see the ship that just came in us bailing them out to get some oil? That came in. 900,000 that came from us just two days ago. And how they're celebrating that is on the dollar.

[Professor Pape]

This is pennies on the dollar. There's no. I'm not, I'm, I'm glad he's doing it. I'm not saying this is a. Take it back.

[Patrick]

This is almost for.

[Professor Pape]

This is pennies on the dollar.

[Patrick]

I get that. But this is forcing a lot of these countries around the world to come in and say, hey, it's hi, America. Hi, America. They're coming to us. So some may say, well, the real

[Professor Pape]

future here will be if we want the rest of the world to come. They won't come while Trump is a strong president because he caused the problem as they see it. You're hearing them say that here, by January here. That is as we go to January, as the world suffers for this at this time. Trump's presidency may be completely dead by then. Now it may not be. We don't know what's going to happen in the midterm.

[Patrick]

How many people saying this and the guy keeps winning.

[Professor Pape]

No, I know.

[Patrick]

I hear people insane.

[Professor Pape]

And I went to Butler and I talked. I spent all day with those. And I'm not telling you I have a.

[Patrick]

There's difference between being hopeful that he fails, which tens of millions are hoping he fails.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah.

[Patrick]

And then there is the other part where you're like, if it fails.

[Professor Pape]

Yeah, yeah, but I'm not going down that road. Exactly. Just bear with me. What I'm saying is from the perspective of whether these other countries will come and organize with the United States to push back on Iran with controlling the Strait of Hormuz, they're not going to do that as long as President Trump is a strong president. Now, if you're right, not going to

[Patrick]

do that as long as President Trump is A strong president.

[Professor Pape]

No, because he may stab them in the back again, just like I'm saying with the bully. The problem here is that what President Trump did, you could say by not consulting. That's kind of a nice way to put it. But what he did is he took action where the biggest losers, economically, we're actually not going to be the American consumer. We will lose. The biggest losers are going to be in Europe, they're going to be in Asia. And so essentially, he played with other people's money and other people's lives.

[Patrick]

They've been playing with our money for decades.

[Professor Pape]

Well, go back to the numbers.

[Patrick]

But no, what I'm saying to you is like, you're saying it as. As if we're, you know, we've been taking care of the world for how long? You know, you go back and you think about China. China wouldn't be China without Nixon and Soviet Union, because the triangular diplomacy, they were worried that Soviet Union was getting so strong. So let's open it up for China to get strong. So we've been taking care of everybody.

[Professor Pape]

Yes, but let's look at how much we've gained compared to Everybody else. So 1990, here, the cold War ends. Who makes more money on the Cold War ending than anybody else? It's American companies. We go in. So there's a power vacuum because you. What you have is you have the Cold War ending. And that isn't just ending in, you know, sort of eastern Germany. It's ending in Africa, it's ending in Asia. There's a whole set of Soviet puppets here that suddenly there's a giant, giant vacuum. Well, this is what the roaring 90s was all about for America. A large part of it. There was some in our country as well, for sure, but a large part of this, and a lot of the business people will know this, and certainly Alan Greenspan will be able to come and tell you about this. Is we are filling this. Is this spread of global capitalism here to large parts of the world. Even Vietnam, for example. Vietnam today is almost a golden case of growth here, and it's really soaring from the 1990s on as the Cold War ends. Well, that is a success story for America. So we can say, you know, oh, poor us. All we've done has been taken advantage of by the world. We're making out like bandits here. And I think we need to understand that that's really healthy for us. That's how we're staying at 26% of the world's GDP. We're making out as change happen.

[Patrick]

But to say, to see a, you know, you know, it's hurting them and this is not fair what America is doing because it's hurting them. Well, if America eliminates a potential enemy long term that would like to kill the western way of doing anything, irgc that doesn't want to do business with anybody, maybe that benefits the world now, you know, you could disagree and say, I wouldn't go and take out the 50.

[Professor Pape]

And with you right there, it's just we have no strategy to get there with President Trump.

[Patrick]

You think you're not on the inside to say, can we make comments like that? And we don't know. Right. To be honest, all I can say

[Professor Pape]

is you are, I will say there's no evident sign of that strategy and there's a lot of evidence of everything going negative. So if this were two months ago, that would be a different story, Patrick. But it's not two months ago. This is not just the opening days where we're going to have a short air campaign and things are going to work out. And President Trump has many off ramps. Trump's here. President Trump. We're now at, I believe this is day 60, if I remember right. So we are now starting the third month of this. And so the, it is high time now for there, if there is a strategy there where we can be confident, it's it's time. And the idea that we just keep what President Trump has said is his strategy because he was, he was given a set of options here just a couple days ago in the Oval Office office. It was, does he start the bombing campaign up again? Does he pull out everything? This would, this would be, well, we marched in, let's completely march out. Or does he do just keep the blockade? Those were the three options on the table. It's not a strategy. Those are just military options. They're not being tied to ends. That's just a military, that's tactics. He chose the middle ground to basically keep the block going. That's not a strategy. That is a set of tactics. And there's no connecting that to the outcome. And I'm saying there's a big problem with connecting it to the outcome is where is the case of maximum economic pressure, crushing a state like Iran? We have plenty of cases where we've done that. We just had Iraq in 1990. In Iraq, we slapped on the toughest oil sanctions blockade in history, bringing down Iraq's GDP by 47% for 12 years. For 12 years, we crushed Iraq's GDP more than we had any other country before with, with economic sanctions. And it was really a tight blockade because we stopped the, the land routes as well. That's what led us to do a ground war. And what happened to Saddam Hussein's regime, regime, it did not crumble, it did not crack. The same problem of the water, you know, we're worrying about the water going in and this, this was not enough. It did not happen to the extent and so forth. What happens instead? And this is my area again, how, how the pressure affects the politics. When you take a country and you weaken it economically and you cut its pie in half, half and the government is still in place, what does the government get to do? Redirect the remaining half to its supporters, Take away the resources from its opponents. And that's exactly what Saddam Hussein did. And that's what the Iran government is doing. They're going to privilege the Revolutionary Guard. They're not going to first take money from the Revolutionary Guard to go pay the pro democracy movement in Iran. Iran, that's Saddam Hussein. Same thing. Yes. The, the country's pie, the economic pie is cut by half. But what happened is you became more beholden to support the, the dictator you didn't like. And by the way, that's not unique to Saddam Hussein. When Germany occupied France In World War II, you know, they beat France in six weeks and then they ought to occupied it for four years. Notice that there wasn't an uprising by the French population. Why not? It's because Germany held all the keys to the economic flows inside of occupied France, including the food. You wanted food and ration cards. Guess what you had to do? Go to the factories that were working for the German Germans. You don't want to go work for the Germans. No problem. You just don't get any food. Okay, so there's. We have books on this. So I'm not just. When I'm talking about studying economic pressure, I'm not doing the hand wavy stuff, Patrick. I'm going through case after case. And the truth is we just don't have this case of economic pressure crushing the resistance, crushing the regime with, without, without military force. So what you see is economic pressure is a precursor to conquest. If you want to use military force to conquer territory, perfect sense to weaken the enemy economically here. The idea though that you weaken them economically and that alone. This is President Trump again up against the weight of history of a hundred years years. This isn't up against, just simply a matter of. Well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. With regime change, bombing Something I again, bombing to win is all about this. This is the book on regime change, bombing. It shows Since World War II, bombing alone has never toppled a regime. My work on economic sanctions, economic blockades, multiple academic articles about this is showing side by side, side Since World War I, economic pressure alone, meaning without follow up ground conquest is not toppling a regime. Now if you want to get them to negotiate on a price of trade here or release a few hostages, you can have economic pressure do that. So minor goals can be achieved.

[Patrick]

This is massive.

[Professor Pape]

But if you want the big ones, topple the regime, surrender weapons of mass destruction, stop a military offensive like they're doing in Hormuz here. The record shows Trump is up against the weight of history and these are the things that he and his folks need to hear. And this isn't coming from somebody who's, you know, the liberal goody two shoes or somebody who's just trying to torpedo, you know, Trump.

[Patrick]

You'd like to see him succeed.

[Professor Pape]

Oh my God. I want to see. Because so many.

[Patrick]

You would like to see IRGC fall.

[Professor Pape]

I would love to see the IRGC fall. I think the, it is the most, it is one of the most evil regimes and has become more evil that we have seen on our planet. What we saw in, on, on January 14th here, where within about 72 hours somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people were murdered in the streets. We have not seen that in a condensed, certainly a condensed period of time that many people die at the hands of their own government. Government. Since the late 1980s when Saddam Hussein killed 20,000 Kurds in Iraq in about two weeks, we've seen in Srebrenica. This was in 1995, July 1995. We saw the Serbs kill 7,000 Muslims in, in about a weekend or so, 7,000. So we've seen some of this before. I don't want to say we've, we've never seen this before. I'm not saying that Pat Metric. What I'm saying is this, this regime has, has demonstrated is one of the most evil regimes that we have seen on the planet, period. And it has just now become even more evil. So no, I am all down for as I said, 2008. I said the biggest problem Obama is going to have is Iran nuclear weapon. I didn't say it was rise of China, I didn't say it was Russia. I didn't say it was holding on to solving problems of 2% a nature NATO. I said this was the number one problem. And I got to say I was not part of the Obama administration. But everything I saw is he took it seriously. It was his number one problem here. And he was willing to make deals with Russia and China in order to do what was necessary to do the coalition to get basically a weak deal. I am not saying that JCPOA was a great deal. I lay this out in my class in detail. I tell them exactly what the limits of it were, what the advantages of it were. I just want something better. And the idea you're going to throw away something that is, that's, that's, that's half a loaf for a. A magical hope of a full loaf. No, that's. My books would then be called bomb bombing. Hoping to win. Okay, I do not hope to win. I'm. I demand. And basically on the right and the left, and the left doesn't like it either when Professor Pape gets in the room because I complain about their economic sanctions and I explain that you're killing people with these sanctions because you end up having the malnourished. The young people here, the people under five years old, they die when there's more malnutrition, they die when there's more disease. So these economic sanctions, this economic pressure is not humanitarian the way it's often, you know, sort of articulated. And the truth is, when I, when I go toe to toe with the folks on the left on this, of which I've done in print, they don't like it either. So I'm not really picking favorites here. I'm holding people to a common standard, which is have a strategy to win that takes into account the downsides for real. Not just blow it off and say, oh, well, no, we'll solve those when we come to them.

[Patrick]

I think you're fair. And I think it's, it's a voice that people need to hear my opinion. This is why I listen and see what you're saying, to see blind spots there. I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did. We're going to put the links below to all your books, every one of them, especially the most recent one that came out. Rob, if you can put. Make sure. Put the links to all three and maybe put the recent one all the way at the top so the audience can go find it. Direct link to Our Worst Enemies, 2026, and the Substack that he has. If we can put the substack there as well. Thank you very much, sir. This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming down.

[Professor Pape]

Excellent. Excellent. And I, and I so appreciate that. I believe you asked questions and push back the way your audience would be if they were sitting right here. And I don't know, I've never met President Trump. I can't say that it would have been, I think maybe a version of it, although I suspect he would be pretty tough. Okay. Not necessarily nasty, but that's fine. I'm up for that. Because if it turns out there's a better position than what I'm offering, I'm down for that. But I love about you for America.

[Patrick]

What I love about you is you're, you're about America winning. And, and as long as that we can have different ideas and disagreements. As long as we both want to see this country win.

[Professor Pape]

Absolutely.

[Patrick]

We're on the same team. We don't have to agree on everything. We want that to be the same.

[Professor Pape]

Okay. Thank you so much. Absolutely.

[Patrick]

You know, this whole thing with Value Tim and PBD podcast started with a phone. Me and Mario. That's it. And it grew today to, you know, 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full time employees. And that relationship, are you watching us and supporting us? Wouldn't happen without you. But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel. And it would mean the world to us if you could press that subscribe button and notification why? It allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you. So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button. It would mean the world to us. Thank you so much.