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Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews
4/8/26 Robert Pape: Trump’s Ceasefire Does Not Close the Escalation Trap
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A
You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest, according to the American people.
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B
What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the President does it, that means that it is not a liberty. We're gonna take out seven countries.
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A
They don't know what the they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war.
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B
And now, here's your host, Scott Horton.
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A
All right, you guys. Introducing Bob Pape again from the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win and Bombing to Win and Cutting the Fuse. And he's got a great new substack, the Escalation Trap. And so as we're recording this, it's what, Wednesday morning and last night it was announced that there's a ceasefire for two weeks between America and Iran. And according to Trump's post last night, the discussions for a final deal will be based on Iran's 10 point proposal. Although according to his tweet this morning, no, it's going to be according to America's proposal where they, they sign on our dotted line. So I guess we'll see how the talks go. But what's your initial response to the declaration of ceasefire instead of the wiping out of all of Persian civilization as was the previous threat?
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B
That's right. So the very first thing we have to say is that we were within an hour or so of President Trump possibly pushing the go buttons to destroy targets that would possibly have led to the deaths of tens, hundreds. Gosh, we don't even want to think about millions here that could have possibly died because the amount of power at President Trump's disposal is truly extraordinary. And I'm glad to explain some of that in just a moment, but we need to just be very, very thankful. And this means for the 92, the harm that did not happen to the 92 million Iranians, the harm that did not happen in consequence to tens of millions in the Persian Gulf. And I should say the harm that's been possibly slowed down. I don't think we're out of the, out of the woodshed here to Americans in the future. So that is by far very, very important. Deepal matter most. But I want to also say there's a big buttons here. Number one, the escalation trap is not over. The idea that this is all over and so forth. People are breathing sighs of relief about that emotional moment that I just described. But the reality is US forces in the region are still there, they're still poised on a hair trigger for this to really start to truly unwind. You would have to see American forces move out of the region, the Marines move out, the three carriers move out, the Special Forces standing down and moving back to their bases. Based on Secretary Het says briefing this morning, however, I find that very hard to believe they're going to do that because he made absolutely blisteringly clear that we are going to get meaning in the United States the enriched uranium that this was all about first place. And because Iran still has the enriched uranium for 10 to 16 bombs and he made it very clear that they're talking about going and getting those that material. Well, that is highly unlikely to come from cooperation from Iran at this point. And so and also Iran has plenty of missiles and a drone capability. Even by the Pentagon's own estimate, it's 30 to 50% left. So this is really not the closing of the trap. There's more points to make, Scott, but if you like, we could talk about that or I could tell you there's two other points, big points I'd like to make, but that one right there is pretty important for people to hear.
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A
Yeah, no, go ahead. I'm curious, obviously.
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B
Second big thing I understand. No, and this is good. The second big observation here is what we have just witnessed in the ceasefire itself and Donald Trump's agreeing to negotiate on the basis of the ten point plan. That's all Iranian favored is the shift in world power that I was talking about in the New York Times piece I published just on, just on Monday. So on Monday of this week, today is Wednesday, I published a big piece in the New York Times explaining that what's happening as a result of the war is Iran is emerging as a 4th century center of global power. And it's not year that year, I'm sorry there yet. But it is the case that you are seeing that Donald Trump is kowtowing to Iran in the sense that he cannot open the Strait of Hormuz on his own short of a ground war. And he is recognizing that the only alternative is to cooperate with Iran. As I've been saying, these are the two real choices here. But cooperating with Iran means Iran has the cards and the power and it, and in Iran's agreement here, they made very, very clear states can pass through, ships can pass through the Strait of Hormuz so long as they cooperate with the Iranian military. Notice it's not cooperating with the US in any way. It's about cooperating with Iran. And this just shows that Iran didn't just temporarily control and have influence over the Strait of Hormu and the global price of world oil. But where it has going forward, that's true. And the hierarchies, the geopolitical hierarchies in the region and in the world that are starting to change as a result of that. And then the final thing, Scott, that's very important to really come to grips with is the civilization ending threat that President Trump made in his posts. Now, it's true after the ceasefire, he hasn't repeated that, but that's not really at issue. He said, he literally said, for the first time in American history, an American president declared that he was going to destroy a civilization if Iran did not obey his demands. And Iran did not, by the way, obey the demands. But nonetheless, he made a civilization ending threat. And we need to understand a couple of things about this. Number one, even when President Truman dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and in his statement, and your listeners can go and find it, he did not make a civilization ending threat. When he did that, he, he limited his threat to destroying the military power of Japan. And that really matters here. And what Donald Trump did was not just make a more expansive threat than Truman, but make, use the word, civilization ending. And that's exactly the issues in the genocide treaties for banning genocide, because the issue here is the intent of the actor to destroy a whole people or a part of a people. Well, President Trump made it absolutely, blisteringly clear that was his intent. Rarely in genocides, here in the history of the treaty do you have such clear state statement of intent. And I don't know how you could get a greater statement of intent than that. And then the other point I want to make about the civilization ending threat is that before the war, there was clearly interest, I would say more than interest in Iran developing nuclear weapons. That's how we got here in the first place. But there was pushback here. There was parts of the Iranian leadership that were not in favor. And we know that probably only a fraction of the people of Iran supported the regime. Well, now that Donald Trump has threatened to kill each and every One of the 92 million Iranians, this is changing in a clear way. Where are the Iranian people going to go for their security? Are they going to count on Donald Trump not waking up someday, next week, next month, next year, deciding out of the whim to blow their civilization to smithereens? Or are they going to support Iran getting a nuclear weapon? I think you're about to see that the possible sources of support for Iran inside of Iran in developing Its material into nuclear weapons are vastly growing, vastly accelerating. And I think that this is effectively. Now you're effectively going to have 92 million Iranians supporting its government getting nuclear weapons. And this year, not like 10 or 20 years from now. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the next year, they not only have nuclear weapons, they test them and they show the world, because how else are they actually going to deter future nuclear threats to blow their civilization away?
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A
Yeah, well, they killed the supreme Leader who said that God said, you can't. So now we'll see what his son's opinion is about, what God's opinion is on this issue.
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B
But obviously, I think, Scott, you could put the most pro democracy person in Iran in charge right now and you'll get nuclear weapons on the time frame. I'm saying the idea. You're really going to trust Donald Trump or really any American president right now. I mean, just think about this. We elected Trump.
- [10:18]
A
Wait, they're not even threatening to leave the NPT right now.
- [10:24]
B
I think this point, the, the, these, all these discussions here. So international law, we all know, it's, it's, it's, it's a weak force, but it's a valuable force. What Donald Trump has done is destroyed the value that it had because he's used the negotiation. One of the most important, you would say, norms in international, that's even under, underneath international law itself, the details of what's written is the idea that when you have international negotiations, you have a safety for the people doing the negotiation. Well, twice, not just once. Twice. Donald Trump has used the umbrella of the diplomatic negotiations as cover for his surprise attacks or the surprise attack of Israel. Well, this is, you can't just keep going on this way and just assume that this will somehow go back to normal. As long as Donald Trump is president for sure, this is not going back to normal. And this is something that's really been carved now in stone in history and it's going to endanger Americans. It's, it's an, it's illegal, it's immoral, and it is a danger to all Americans whether they voted for Trump or not. This is a great, what we are seeing is the rising danger in this world. And it's, it's stunning how much we thought we had kind of reached the peak of the dangers here, but it's stunning how much it's ratcheted up just in the last few days.
- [12:08]
A
Hey, guys. Scott here for Mundo's Artisan Coffees. It's the Scott Horton show, flavored Coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to scotthorton.org coffee and they'll forward you on there to Moondo's Artisan Coffees. Get it? They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondo's and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton Show Coffee is the number one best selling coffee at Moondo's Artisan Coffees right now. Just go again to Scott horton.org coffee well, look, you may have seen the Time magazine article about Trump trying to find off ramps to the war. And in there they say that Netanyahu told Trump after the June war that, oh no, now they're more likely than ever to try to break out and make nukes, so we gotta attack them again, which is exactly what I said was going to happen then. And then after they started this war, Netanyahu said, oh, now that we started this word, now they're more likely to make nuclear weapons than ever before. That's why we definitely can't stop. We have to see this thing through and really make sure we get a regime change to somebody who won't make nukes, which is exactly the same trap
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B
and what that is. Scott Summer and then.
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A
But the thing of it is though too, that, well, first of all, they can't change the regime. There's, they're not putting the entire army and Marine Corps on the ground in Tyron, so that's not changing. We already knew that that was not going to change. And we also have the reality, though, of a couple things. First of all, as you said, their incentive to go ahead and make atom bombs now is greater than ever before, just as Netanyahu says. But it's his fault. But anyway, that's all true. And it's also true that no matter how effective the bombing campaign was, and even if they had completely destroyed Natan and Fordo, which apparently they at least buried everybody and everything down there deep enough that would take a major effort to get back down there. Still, they have uranium mines in their country. They have access to fluoride. I don't know where you get fluoride from, but I'm sure they can get fluoride. And so and they can get aluminum to make centrifuges out of and cascades, and they have the knowledge they've mastered the fuel cycle. And you can't kill every last physics student in the country. We're talking 1945 technology here. So the fact of the matter is that no matter how severely you set back their nuclear program, you can never entirely destroy it until you have your own Reza Shah sitting on your peacock throne doing whatever you tell them, or something like that. So, and. And again, that which is completely off the table, on the other hand, they really did bury Natanz and Fordo. They blew up all the elevator shafts and all the air vents. Anybody working down there was buried alive. And maybe they got their uranium out and buried that at Isfahan somewhere else or whatever. But those cascades of centrifuges at Natanz and Fordo are completely offline, as Trump even admitted, actually, in his thing that he wrote this morning, or was it yesterday's thing that he wrote that, where he said they haven't touched their. What, we bombed last June since then, and we're watching by satellites, which, as Daniel Davis pointed out, severely undermined his case for war when he tried to pretend that there was a nuclear threat there. But anyway, I'm just saying it is true that he obliterated their program. It is true that they would basically have to start from almost scratch, sort of.
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B
Yeah, sort of. Scott, let me say a few words about. Well, first of all, the basic story I agree with you 100 here that you've laid out, which is what is the escalation trap. So this is the modeling of the 20 years when I've been modeling the bombing of Iran since 2005 at the University of Chicago. What I have been finding is that you would go through a series of stages. Stage one, you would bomb Bordeaux. You would disable the facility as an industrial enrichment facility, but not get the actual material. Material and that material. Then there would be worry about dispersal. And just to be clear, we have satellite civilian photography on my sub stack of a couple days before the bombing of Bordeaux last June, where the Iranians are taking stuff out and what the intel is. They took it out and maybe they moved it to Esteban. Well, so maybe Trump's right. They are not doing it in Bordeaux. But that is not that. That's too narrow here to understand the bigger picture. But then you would go a year later in the modeling and you would get regime change, bombing, not because it was going to work, but because you would be desperate, because you would be seeing the signs of that dispersal. And even at Estefan last February, in February, just a few months ago, we have satellite photography of digging out stuff from Estefan over weeks in February. That probably was the key thing that was pushing toward this war. In addition to Israel and Netanyahu pushing. But now you've actually had the war, the bombing, and then that's when you get the lash back. And what does the lash back do? They get Hormuz, they get global power, they become the fourth center or emerging fourth center of world power. So now, in addition to everything else, you've not stopped the nuclear program, you've incentivized them to go forward, but they're raking in 75, $100 billion a year to help do that. And money is in Chinese banks. You can't take it away without declaring war on China. So you have a situation where we now have a nuclear capable oil hegemon in the Persian Gulf as a result of the bombing that President Trump has done over a period of time, June and now in February. And this is not just as, it's not like, oh, it would always have been this bad. No, this is the, this is the world that Donald Trump has created. And it is a world that again, there's illegal issues, there's moral issues and there's strategic issues that are off the charts. This will be the worst strategic disaster for the United States since the Vietnam War. And it may actually eclipse the Vietnam War before is all said and done, because we're not all said and done here. We need to understand that we are, we're breathing sighs of relief right now, but we still have all of these original issues that were driving this escalation trap are still there. And Iran is even more powerful now. And so these are our choices. Do we come back and use military force to try to get the nuclear material, or do we accept Iran as the fourth center of world power, which means a nuclear weapons oil hegemon here. And I'm not saying today, on April 8, I'm saying by the end of the year or in a year. This is, these are the choices in front of us. And it's not, oh, we'll just go back to February 27th and pretend as if this didn't happen or we're, we're going to pretend it's some victory for Donald Trump. This is domestic politics here, is going to work dramatically against Donald Trump in the coming months. But all of this is, is what we really have in front of us. This is a much worse, much more dangerous world in multiple ways.
- [19:47]
A
Yeah, well, so, yes, it is. It's the same thought experiment that we went through last June that, okay, now that you've accepted Israel's definition, that any nuclear program, any enrichment whatsoever is equivalent to a nuclear weapons program and must be stopped now, not through negotiations, but through war and all that, they've called the Iranians bluff on their latent nuclear threat at that point and incentivize them into making a bomb. But even if they don't make a bomb, even if the Ayatollah still says that, God says, no, we can't make bombs, and they don't make bombs, they still are going to, no matter what, insist on enrichment as a matter of pride and independence and sovereignty and all that. And they have their own domestic uranium enrichment, I mean, their own domestic uranium mines. So obviously they want to burn their uranium and sell their oil, and it. They're not going to give that up. But so once America is now accepted, once Trump has accepted Netanyahu's line that enrichment at all is a nuclear bomb, then that just means you have to keep going until you get regime change. But then if you kill the aola, which can do, if you can put eyeballs on him, you can put a bomb on his head. That's not a problem. They can do that. They did that. But then what? The Mullers are going to appoint a new Ayatolla. And if you kill them, then some other ones are going to. Now, on that ladder, you're going to have to actually occupy the country and execute every last Shiite cleric until nobody can call himself the Supreme Leader anymore. We're going to occupy this massive capital city with our entire army and Navy and Marine Corps forever. Kind of million men to invade Persia like it's D day or something. Obviously, we can't do that. We're not doing that. So we got ourselves in a, well, essentially a rhetorical trap, like, painted into a corner, but just based on the agreed upon premises of our stupid policy that we decided kind of thing. So, in other words, Trump could go right back to the previous policy of, okay, we'll accept some enrichment, just don't make a nuclear weapon. Which it may be way too late for that, but I don't necessarily think it's too late for that, because the truth is, Bob, that this is the same standoff that we had. Why didn't they make a bomb all along? Let's assume that the Ayatollah did not really get a message from God saying to not make bombs. Instead, he didn't make a bomb because he knew that Bush or Obama or Trump or Biden would carpet bomb his country before they were done. If they decided to break out, they couldn't do it in secret. Everyone would know that they. They would have to kick the inspectors out, take that uranium and enrich it to higher percentages, etc. And we would go to war against.
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B
Let me explain why they didn't do
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A
it right where we could still go back to war against them.
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B
And reasons Guy here, go ahead. Here's the reason that, that you could see the doves arguing, don't build the bomb. And that is that then Iran is the bad guy for building the bomb. And the world, not just the United States and Israel, the world then isolates Iran. What's happened, Scott, is that in the June.
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A
I'm just saying there's still the time involved that we could go right back to war against them before they were able.
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B
We could go back to war against
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A
them, regime change, but we could probably bury their guys alive again like we did the last time.
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B
But there's, there's the, the world is not going to just look at this now. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon and say, Iran, all the bad guys are in Iran, they're going to blame Trump and the United States and Israel for this. And that's really fair because they are to blame. And so for Iran, it's the international pressure and consequences have been lessened, not just the internal incentives for moving forward with the bomb. Now, I do agree there's some 5 or 10% chance it's not quite fully inevitable that they will develop the bomb. But I think that it's gone from more likely than not 50, 50 to 80, 90% likely. And it's for all those reasons that I've been saying, and I think that it's really important to, to recognize that, that this whole idea of preventive war was supposed to be, oh, we're going to prevent this outcome. We've actually caused exactly the outcome we were trying to say we were going to prevent. And we've done it in 40 days. I mean, just, just think about the time scale, how quickly this has happened here. So you could say, well, they would eventually, five or ten years from now, get nuclear weapon. Yeah, well, so this is like suicide. You're committing suicide for fear of eventual death. Let's kill ourselves today because we might die in the next 20 years.
- [24:39]
C
ExpandDesigns.com that's my friend Harley Abbott's company and he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton show as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website. He's done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of web masters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years. The thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website, you need it fixed up, you need a new one. Setting up a business, working on any kind of online project like that. Check out expand designs.com so let me
- [25:33]
A
try to examine a little deeper your point about Iran's now increased power and influence in the region and therefore the world because it is energy supplies of so much of Eurasia and all that. America's entire bluff of being the regional hedgeman from those Carter Doctrine bases all throughout Saudi Arabia. And then of course up into from Earbold to Muscat. Right. Like all the entire way from Iraq to oman. All those 13 bases are offline or they're proven at least that they can be destroyed. Even if Iran didn't completely destroy all of them, they destroyed enough of them that they basically turned them off and the guys left. Justin Logan at Cato said what could. It's a base that you can't wage a war from. I about died laughing. Well, I don't know. I, I did at least lol when I saw that.
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B
Chicago, University of Chicago.
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A
Yeah, but, oh, I, I read that the Iranians were not hitting the Al Udid Air Base in Qatar. But then the reason why was because the Qatari government had told the Americans that they were forbidden from launching any sorties.
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B
Exactly.
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A
So in a deal with, you know, whether they made a deal behind the scenes with the Iranians or just kind of a, you know, an overt like obvious one there, just don't hit us because we're not even letting them use our Central Command headquarters, our Air Force headquarters in the region there. So all that is completely cancelled. And I guess I don't know how the politics play out in the future, but it seems like there's just no point whatsoever in trying to reestablish those bases now. I mean, how laughable is that? And then now we have, you know, again, as Trump says, at least this is a reasonable basis for negotiation. Is Iran's proposal that they will completely control not just the Straight of Horus but the gate of the entire Persian Gulf in cooperation, split the proceeds with Oman and America, really. I mean, we know that they cannot reopen the strait with force. They cannot prevent Iran from being able to reach out and touch any, any oil tanker that they wish in the entire Gulf, wherever they want. And so they are conceding in order to reopen the thing, they're conceding a massive, you know, w. I guess to Iran in a way that I believe I read you said, or in one of your interviews, I think you said, that in the entire modern history of oil being transported out of the Gulf since What, World War I or before
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B
that, that that never happened.
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A
It was always international waterway and people would just sail in and out of there. And so this is a huge amount of hegemony that has been just completely handed to them. A bluff that they would never in a million years with the old ayatollah decide to call America's bluff and bomb all 13 of our bases and force us out of the region and all of that. And it's just USA did that for them.
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B
You have caught. That was brilliant. That's why I love coming up. That was brilliant. I really don't know if I can add much to that. That was just so well done. One thing to your readers or your listeners may want to know. So we have aircraft carriers in the region. We're keeping them 1,000 miles away. So just imagine this, the Strait of Horamuhus, you know, it's only about 20 some miles from the Iran territory to Dubai. And we have to be 1,000 miles away because otherwise our carriers are going to have a giant risk of being sunk. And so you have the vulnerability. One of the points I've been trying to make conceptually here on the sub stack and then also in my class, is that we need to understand that power here you're seeing is about vulnerability and risk. And right now those bases and our carriers are all above ground. They're fixed installations. And Iran has precision guided drones. And those drones can find any of those fixed coordinates and they can hit those fixed coordinates just like our precision capability could. So what you are seeing is that as the diffusion of precision air power is occurring, America's silver bullet, so to speak, that we had in 1991 that nobody else had, it was power through vulnerability. Wasn't just the GDP or the military numbers that we had. We had power through vulnerability. Now you're seeing power through vulnerability for Iran with geography. And this then is making Iran that regional hegemon. So we have actually caused the for the world's fourth, a regional hegemon. And it may end up becoming more dominant in the Middle east than Russia is even in Europe. I mean, after all, Russia has only 11% of the world's oil. Iran at 92 soon 100 million people. Russia is about 160, 170 million people. Before long, I might not write a piece about how Iran's emerging as the fourth center of world power. It's becoming number three. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if Iran and Russia start working more in cahoots. They've already been cahoots and military dimensions a lot. But imagine if both Iran and Russia took all their oil off the market and gave it sold only to China. Imagine what that would do to the US economy. And after all, why, you know. No, they would never want to wreck America. No, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people in those countries here who would be angry at America. After all, America wrecked Russia with shock therapy. Remember the 1990s, we were supposed to create this wonderful democracy and rich and middle class life in Russia and life expectancy under our tutelage went from 73 to years of age to 56 for 58, excuse me, for the average white Russian male. Think about that. And that was under our so called tutelage of shock therapy. So this is, there's a lot of anger here against what America has been doing in the world. And right now it's, it's starting to line up now actually seriously, against America.
- [32:15]
A
Well, first of all, I need to send you a copy of my book Provoked. I have a whole section in Shock therapy in there. You'll like it.
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B
There we go. There we go.
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A
Also, speaking of Iranian hegemony, you know me.
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B
Well, I've got you here just one second and I'm learning on, on Substack we can do a live briefing, I'll interview you.
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A
Oh great.
- [32:39]
B
Send me your book. I've never done that. I mean I'm learning all these new things. Yeah.
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A
Oh, that'd be fun. Interviewed on the Bob Pape Show.
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B
Well, I've never done that. I've never interviewed. But you'd be the first one and I, it'd be an honor. I mean, I'm serious. So anyway, we'll talk about it later.
- [32:56]
A
Well, the book is, I mean if it was six by nine it'd be a thousand pages. So it's going to take you a little while. So you might have.
- [33:05]
B
The people on my are the ones who are the hungry for the subs. I'm just telling you, I don't give them half. I mean they're not getting the soft stuff. Yeah, that's good.
- [33:15]
A
Well, and, and by the way though, I should disclaim, I don't want to scare anyone off, it's about a third footnotes. So it's really only like.
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B
Yeah, this is. This would be the crowd. I'm just telling you. I think you might be finding a crowd. Yeah. All right.
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A
Now, I don't remember I was gonna ask you anymore, though. Wait, what was it? Let me think.
- [33:33]
B
Well, we're talking about shock therapy and provoked and.
- [33:36]
A
Yeah, but that wasn't it. That was the aside it was going to be. I'll just ask you this instead and maybe I'll think of it. What about the Israelis? Are they gonna just completely sabotage this thing?
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B
Well, there's been this big spoiler here for, for a long time now. So after, you know, back in the 12 Day War, it wasn't America's bombing of Cordo that happened in the middle of the 12 Day War. It was actually led with Israel's bombing. And then you saw here sitting in the Feb.28th, the lead bombing here was by Israel. They are the ones who actually killed the Supreme Leader. And then about 20 of the doves, actually, that he was meeting with dovish leaders here. So they have been the spoil all the way through and they may continue to do it. I just would point out, and I've been saying this in Haaretz and other places, that all of this is working to Israel's strategic disadvantage. Netanyahu may believe different, and of course he's the leader and has the right to do that, but that doesn't mean he's right. Just because he's got the power doesn't mean he's doing the right thing for Israel's security. I think it's important to understand that Israel's only 7 million Jews surrounded by 500 million Muslims. And it is going about a process, a serial process of conquering more Muslim territory that's just going to alienate people. People don't like their territory taken. It's just the way it is. It's not about religion. They just don't like it. And you're going to end up not just having a couple hundred thousand of those 500 million activated in Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. Right now there's only a few hundred thousand at most activated to take risks with their lives to attack Israel. This could easily grow of the 500 million as Israel keeps going. Well, now, of course, America as the big protector that's disappearing, AKA, you know, what we just said about America's basis. America's power in the regions declining fast. So Israel's security is less and less and less and it just doesn't have good options to change that. And these ideas that it can always pull the rabbit out of its hat, you know, do the nuclear. These are not, they wouldn't work in their security even if they did these things. Israel needs to about face dramatically reorient its policies or else Israel's in real danger that those 7 million Jews who are there, many of them are going to start, I think to leave. Will there even be 7 million Jews in Israel three years from now? I'm not sure.
- [36:18]
A
Yeah. And which reminds me of what I was going to say that you know me, I gotta emphasize how this is all David Wormser's fault. Him and Richard Pearl, they told Benjamin Netanyahu that we should do a clean break from Oslo and peace and dealing with the Palestinians and dealing with our Arab neighbors. And instead they said we should just have peace through strength and total dominance over our neighbors. Break their countries up, figure out a way to regime change Iraq, regime change Syria. And even if it leads to a rise of fundamentalist terrorism, we don't care about that. We hate the Bists more. And all they ended up doing, Dick Cheney's Middle east advisor and the chair of the Defense Policy Board, all they ended up doing was handing Baghdad to Tehran's best friends. In fact, people who had lived in Iran for 20 years, Abdul Aziz Al Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and all of his guys and the Dawa Party and they came in and they're the ones who won Iraq War two. And then when Obama built the caliphate to spite them and say, well, if we put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, at least we can take them down a peg in Damascus. Instead, the Bin Ladenites created the caliphate and sacked western Iraq. So then we had to launch Iraq War 3 again on the side of Iran and Iran's best friends and clients in Iraq to the point where you even had American Air force jets flying, I know this is your expertise flying air cover for literally the Iranian K force on the ground when they were liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown of T from the Islamic State caliphate of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2015. And so America has fought two massive wars for Iran in the region. And the only consolation prize now for Israel is that at least America and Turkey help them help Al Qaeda overthrow the Baathists in Damascus. That's their one big win in the whole game.
- [38:30]
B
You have put your finger. That was so well done. Yes, you've got it, Scott. And the in the clean break, if those on Your show haven't. I bet many have. They should go and look at it. It's not very long. They'll understand immediately where the seeds of this come from. But also notice when they read it, they should understand that the real gap here is not with the military element. It's the gap between military and politics. You see, just focusing on the military and you see this with Secretary Hegsett. He keeps talking about, you know, the military is hitting this target and that target. Notice the weakness here is in the relationship of the military instrument to what it's doing to politics. Politics in the opposing enemy, the rivals, politics in the, in the neutral countries, politics even in our home country. And it doesn't work out well. And the reason is they're not taking seriously the political dimension that is going the other way and actually creating contradictory tensions with the military. And that's really the problem. It's not that they don't have generals advising about what a bomb can hit on a target. It's the political level is supposed to be not just bomb hit target, but they're supposed to be black belts in how this arrangement works with politics. That's where this is all going wrong. You see what I mean? That's the issue.
- [40:03]
A
Exactly. In fact, I'm glad that you said that because it reminded me about the big New York Times story about how Netanyahu talked Trump into this and, you know, how the discussion went around the table and everything. And you know, it's funny because, you know, Donald Trump is such a character and a caricature that people just put whatever they want on him and whatever like that. But to me, the real point of that, and look, whatever, it's the New York Times and it's hearsay from inside the government, whatever. I take all those caveats and grains of salt. I understand that, you know, as Maggie Haberman on all these kooks wrote the thing, but I think it's still fair to, to glean from it the scene in the Situation Room during the meeting with Netanyahu and then later when he's gone and everybody else is there and then Vance finally gets there from out of town and they he'd been messing with the Aziris. I wonder what that was about. But anyway, and then he comes in and they all have this talk. And I think the real point of it to me was how this is really just six dudes in a room talking about this. And they may or may not be on the level of like the average professor at the University of Chicago or even the average, you know, daily consumer of anti war.com, where. And also there's this basic kind of diffusion of responsibility, too, where they'll say, okay, I'll. I'm describing a bunch of things to you, Mr. President, but I have no advice or opinion you are to make of these things. I say what you will, sir, yes, we can bond the crap out of them. And then, so to Trump's ears, yeah, I mean, we could bomb the crap out of them. So, like, what are they really gonna do about it? Kind of thing. And they're not really. He's not really hearing, however, sir, the thing of it is this. They can just. They got the volume of missiles to overwhelm our defenses, and worst case scenario, they really could shut down our entire Middle Eastern empire.
- [42:07]
B
Right.
- [42:07]
A
Nobody really told him that. And you could probably read, you know, whatever, 500 different articles by just regular people out in the alternative ish media over the last 20 years that point out all these same things. Why you. There's real good reason why not to attack Iran, because they really can hit us back in a way that Iraq sure never could, and that kind of thing. And you could just tell that they didn't really have that part of the conversation. In fact, the part that's fanciful is when Netanyahu says it'll be a snap of the fingers to get a regime change. They say, don't believe that. But then they say, but we sure can really set them back and we don't have to worry too much about what they can do in response.
- [42:52]
B
So that's really the big failure. That's right, Scott. The echo chamber is right. I've been in debates here, like in the 90s on that with the Air Force, on what bombing strategy should end the Bosnian civil war. And we ended the Bosnian civil war with a bombing strategy. But it's closer to bombing to win than leadership decapitation. When they kill a single leader in 1995 to do that, not a political leader. And so what you're seeing here, Scott, is that it's the echo chamber. And then the price of the echo chamber is not taking seriously the enemy's ability to do something against us, if that's really what. We didn't even think they could hit the Gulf states. I mean, President Trump said never occurred to him they would hit the Gulf state. He said, you know, they're underrating the ability of Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, not seeing they were starting to move in that direction at the end of the 12 Day War. So these are the real price here. It's not just an echo chamber itself. It's worse because the echo chamber blocks the ability to see the real dangers and even have any preparation for the dangers whatsoever. That's why Trump's calling audibles, talking about what about the curve? I mean, these are all audibles like in football now. And also, by the way, the Azeris. What's going on with Azerbaijan, Scott, you may want to know, that would be where we would start to put in the ground force to go to Tehran. So if you're going to put in ground troops to go to Tehran, you want to put in three divisions, you're going to want to come through Azerbaijan. That's been part of the war game for a while. So that was when I saw Iran on, I think it was day one or day two of the war, send a missile in Azerbaijan's direction. That told me they've been war game in this out pretty well because very few people and nobody on CNN seemed to know what was going on with Azerbaijan here. And it told me the Iranians are on it. They know what aeran means in this context.
- [44:58]
A
Yeah, the Israelis had bases there and were preparing to bomb Iran in 2007. If they could get the green light from Bush, they were going to do that. Arad De BER Grav wrote that story and I interviewed him about it at the time. I remember. Right.
- [45:11]
B
There you go.
- [45:12]
A
All right. This episode of Scott Horton show, brought to you by the books I wrote.
- [45:17]
C
You can see them behind me there.
- [45:19]
A
Enough already. Fool's errand. And then enough already. And Provoked. And then of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul. Scott Horton show interviews and Hotter than the Sun. You see that one back there over there? That way. Hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did, all about nukes and really great stuff. And I busted my ass on these things. And, you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all been endorsed by Ron Paul. And Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one.
- [45:56]
C
I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that Provoked is the definitive account.
- [46:03]
A
In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate said about it, too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that out. And yeah, and of course, everyone knows America backs the hereditary dictatorship there since 1993. As long as that oil pipeline goes west and not.
- [46:23]
B
Yeah, another one of the. Yep, yep, obvious trade offs here. Yep.
- [46:28]
A
All right now, geez, I'll let you go. But I guess let me ask you here real quick. Well, I don't know how real quick. You like talk as much as I do, even which is amazing. No, I'm just kidding.
- [46:42]
B
Fair, fair criticism.
- [46:47]
A
I'm. It only comes with a massive admission on my own part. No, but seriously, what do you think is gonna happen next few weeks here? Like Trump's really gonna. And this is really his greatest virtue, right, is that he can just flip a floppa from unconditional surrender to. Yeah, forget about it. You guys could do whatever you want.
- [47:07]
B
Have a. My subject tomorrow night. I'm doing. So I've been having live briefings every two weeks. I just did one last Saturday. I'm going to have an emergency one, so to speak, tomorrow night on Thursday. We're going to talk about this with the, with the, with the. I mean they're really good questions that come in and so forth and so on. But basically, Scott, I'm going to lay out the indicators here to really watch as we go forward, forward, because we're at a really delicate point. We're not out of the trap. All these underlying issues are there. So what's really important now is to actually be very, very attuned to the indicators to keep us ahead. And that's what I try to do on the substat. What I'm really doing is not exactly making crystal ball guesses here is I'm doing risk assessment and I'm trying to give them like a days or weeks ahead and I think that's, that's happened here. So I, I told them, had the substack with them about the fourth center of world power before this really became the New York and that. And now you're seeing with this ceasefire, it's really coming true. So, so they're hearing it first here. And this is what I think we need to really understand that, that we are miles apart. President Trump this last night said that he's going to offer, he's going to negotiate on the basis of the ten point plan. Well, that's Iran's wish list. Then he said no, no, no, we're going to do it from our 15 point land. Well, that's the American wish list. These things are completely miles apart and all those militaries are there, hair trigger, ready to go right back at it here. The American public, the publics want this to be over, but that's true in most wars. World War I, the publics wanted that to be over too.
- [48:55]
A
You know, Bob, I've been telling people that, like, yeah, the real problem is here is the only thing that'll really work is if Trump just quits and literally says, captain, fly home, Admiral, sail home and disengages in such a way that then the entire burden is on Iran to knock it off and make a deal with somebody to reopen the Strait and the rest, which. That is completely impossible. That's mine.
- [49:20]
B
There's one card that Trump could play that I've been talking about, which is an enforceable military containment of Israel. That's a card that could still be played. I don't think he'll get as much for it, though, because I was explaining this in the opening days of the war. But now it's not just that Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. They're feeling their power, Scott. They know they have the power. In the opening days, they were kind of creeping around, getting the power. Then they had the power. Notice in the last few weeks, they are using their power. This is, you know, once you get states in any human being, you know, power is the heart of darkness. They love that power. And I, and I think that this is why your point is probably right, that it's really going to have to accept Iran as an oil hegemon, nuclear capable for years to come, because the only alternative to that is going to be the actual ground war. That has not changed here. And President Trump, he will be the one who caused that, and that will be his legacy. Worse than Lyndon Johnson, worse than Jimmy Carter. This is President Trump's legacy now. This is the big L he wears. There is no Mount Rushmore coming here. He is the biggest L of all of our presidents right now.
- [50:46]
A
Yeah. And seriously, the same way that Johnson could have learned from Truman's experience, Donald Trump could have absolutely looked at George W. Bush and said, wait, the Israelis say we got to do this because of nuclear something and it'll be easy. No, like, that's what you said the last time in a country that's a third of the size and has no mountains. So forget it.
- [51:10]
B
But we got to leave it there because I've got to go teach.
- [51:13]
A
I know. Thank you, Bob, for doing the show. Appreciate you.
- [51:16]
B
Oh, my God, this is, it's great, as always. And I just so appreciate the depth of which we get into.
- [51:22]
A
So, yeah, yeah. Great conversation. It's the escalation trap.
- [51:26]
C
The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my book books, Fool's Errand, Enough Already, and my latest, Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above@scothorton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at scothortonshow.com and patreon.com Scott HortonShow Bumpers by Josh Langford music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media Audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y' all next time.