Francis (7:01)

So, professor, we've been really looking forward to this conversation. And there's a lot of people in the uk, America, right away, around the world, who woke up, saw the strikes happening and going, why did this happen? This doesn't seem to make any sense.

Professor Robert Pape (7:17)

Yeah.

Francis (7:17)

So could you just explain what you think is the American strategy for this war and why they. Why they started?

Professor Robert Pape (7:24)

Well, I can also try to explain why these strikes I couldn't have Saved the date. But why? They were almost inevitable that they were going to happen. So I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years. And it's important to understand that starting in 2002, the relationship between the United States and Iran fundamentally changed. Now, for decades before that, there was political tension. Absolutely. There was issues of Israel. Absolutely. But what happened in 2002 is that's when we discovered, the American government discovered that Iran was going to enrich uranium. That became the Natanz issue. And they were getting equipment from Pakistan. So this was 2002. Well, in 2002, these were just holes in the ground. Think of it as giant football fields underneath the ground about 100ft that were being dug out. If you. Well, by 2005, they actually had some concrete facilities and they were actually starting to put centrifuges in. That's when I started to model the bombing of Iran right from the get go, right from the beginning. I do this in my strategy class at the University of Chicago, which I'm about to teach again. And I taught last spring and I teach every spring and the Last day is 90 minutes simulation of the bombing of Iran and what's going to happen. I've been doing that for now. It'll be 21 years. And also right from the get go, I was very familiar with the idea of double tap attacks. In fact, I think I may be the first person on print to talk about that in a Sy Hersh article. So Sy Hirsch was a reporter for the New Yorker, did a lot of pieces for the New Yorker. And he called me up one day because we had worked, talked to me on other things. And he said, bob, I really think that we're going to use a nuclear weapon attack nuke to take out Natanz. And I said, si, I realize you're always looking for a controversial angle here because that's what he made his whole living on. And I said, but that's just not what we're going to do. And he said, what do you mean? I said, we're going to do double tap attacks with precision weapons. He said, what do you mean? I'm calling the Air Force there. Nobody's talking about this. And I said, no, let me explain to you. So. So you know that GPS exists and that is how we guide our bombs. What you may not know is GPS is not two dimensional, it's three dimensional. So even though in history we have never done this, I said, asai, what we're gonna do is we're not gonna wanna use a Technuke and it's just not where we're gonna go. What, what the necessity is going to create the mother of invention. And even though we've never done this in history and there may be no plans in the Pentagon to do this, we're going to do double tap attacks. And what, and he said what do you mean Bob? I said we're going to take 2,000 pound bombs which we had at the time, JDAMs they're called and these create radii of between a blast where in dirt it's about 50ft, in concrete it's about 25ft. So just to give you a sense of the radius we're talking about and what we're going to do is we' going to target Natanz and we're going to have one bomb hit the first top of Natanz and we're going to time the second bomb to come in 15 to 30 seconds later. We're not going to wait to do bomb damage assessment. We're literally going to plan the double tap and we're going to estimate how deep the first one went. And then we'll have the second bomb hit just about 25ft or so deeper. Then we'll have a third bomb hit and we're going to get into those centrifuges. Well, he published that either 2004 or there around in the New Yorker. Your folks can listeners can go find it. Well that is how I started to model the bombing of Iran. So I said we're going to take these B2s we've got, here's the target set, here's what we can find. Now as I'm doing this, Iran is developing from Natanz to 4do. And there's a whole discussion of that I can give you. And then we too are when Fordeaux came on we build the Moab which is the 30,000 pounder. So all the way along the way every year I'm updating now that's like the details of this, of the actual on paper. But what does it mean in terms of the attack? What's the strategic reality? So right from the beginning it was always going to be clear that we, the Americans would be able to attack Natanz, Natanz and Fordeau with 90 plus percent tactical success. Meaning the bombs would hit their targets, we would kill scientists. So I went through all the different targets here that we were going to destroy and we would be able to do that more effectively by far than the Israelis because we could carry in our bombers bigger payloads. Than they could. And so what you would end up with is high degree of tactical success in stage one of the escalation, but very little strategic success. And why is that? Because this tactical success would not destroy, disable, meltdown, the enriched uranium that is the actual strategic.

Constantine (12:43)

Why not?

Professor Robert Pape (12:44)

Because you couldn't be sure you would ever, you might be able to disrupt the centrifuges. So just to give you a sense of the way these, this is set up, so let's just pick Natanz just for one here. So Natanz is like a football field here. So it's 100 meters, you know, by 25 meters across. And you've got rows of centrifuges here which are about the size of us, maybe a little shorter than us, except there's thousands of them in these rows. So when you do the double tap attacks, you are always likely, even if you didn't quite get to the chamber itself to cause earthquake, and that earthquake was going, would, would always likely to be. So this is the, you know, having studied bombing and for a long time, it's not, it's, it's the, there's a blast effect. You see what I mean? So the blast effect itself was very likely to disable maybe 50, 70, maybe even 90% of these centrifuges, in which case you would stop the industrial production, enrichment of the uranium. Okay, but the problem is that you wouldn't necessarily even cause fires down there. You would just, you would be shaking everything up more or less now, maybe you might cause fires. You wouldn't really know for sure. I'm not saying that none of it could have been destroyed. What I'm saying is that what you could be sure of is the shaking of the centrifuges. That would be the bda. The bomb damage assessment from on far would give us high confidence we had created the earthquakes. You see what I mean? What you wouldn't be able to see, and this was always the uncertainty, always was what happened to the enriched uranium. Now, I'm not saying for sure none of it would have been damaged. That's not the problem. The problem coming out of this is that enriched uranium, especially as the quantities grew over time, you see, you would, you would only need portions of that to produce nuclear weapons. You would also need even smaller portions of that for radiological weapons, which I'll say more about down the road. So right from the beginning, there was stage one of escalation. So in my escalation trap that I published before the war started, I laid out three stages of escalation we were going to go through and this is days before the war, all three stages. And we're now about on stage three. Stage one was of the escalation trap was the bombing tactical success. And we'll go back to June in Fordeaux Natanz where you do destroy the facility as an industrial uranium enrichment production center, just as I'm describing. Okay. And it's 90% plus likely that happened. So. Well, that is true, but you wouldn't know what happened to the uranium itself. And that then would lead to stage two. And I always said about a year later, two years later, actually it happened about eight months, a little bit sooner. That's when you'd get the regime change war. And the reason. So there had been regime changes called from Israel. How would you actually get America behind the regime change war? You would start by going after Bordeaux and the tanks. Once you did that, you started the trap because you triggered, you did destroy, but you probably triggered, you wouldn't know for sure, but you probably triggered dispersal of that material. You see dispersal and we saw some

Constantine (16:21)

satellite evidence of that and I have

Professor Robert Pape (16:23)

that on my sub stack. So we actually have some civil. So if we have that in the civilian world, I can guarantee you there is humans, sigint, there's a lot more.

Constantine (16:33)

And in fact he would just thinking logically, given the 12 Day War, President Trump said they obliterated everything, destroyed everything. The fact that there is now a follow up is clear evidence of the fact that President Trump and his team believe that material is still there.

Professor Robert Pape (16:51)

And President Trump, I cannot get inside his head. I'm not gonna put him on the couch. But notice, even after the 12 day war, what did we do? Right back to negotiating with the Iranians. Now if we had actually destroyed all that enriched uranium, the thousand pounds of 60%, the 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20%, what are we talking to them about? Okay, I mean, what is there actually to discuss?

Constantine (17:15)

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Professor Robert Pape (19:03)

There's no trigger of dispersal possible. And then over the months, your intel, you have no more iaea, which was your best intelligence. So people think, oh, it must be the CIA and Mossad who are the best. Well, they can turn individuals James Bond style. But there's nothing like going into, just like you're asking me to come here. There's nothing like being on site and actually looking right across. And if I'm the iaea, I want to actually measure you as the enriched uranium and actually get my measurements out. There's nothing that's going to beat that. You see what I mean? So once you bombed, you were number one, tactically successful, but you're strategically, at a minimum, uncertain, likely failed, and it's dispersing. And then number three, your intel is terrible, terrible. So that's going to put you in a situation of overtime panic because you will get little drops and drips and drabs of additional intel of this and that happening with that material. And we will just simply panic. I mean, we will. Now, we won't say we're panicking because we want to exude control, but we're losing control here. And that's what then sucks that we said would lead to stage two, which was the regime change war.

Constantine (20:25)

So just, just. I'm asking questions just to make it very extra simple. Your explanations are brilliant, but I always like to clarify things for our audience

Professor Robert Pape (20:32)

even more so, Constantine, it's perfect.

Constantine (20:34)

Okay, so what you're saying is stage one, they have nuclear facilities and material, you try and take them out, but it was unlikely to fully work. It clearly didn't work. So stage two is you go, and we know this from some of the things that are being revealed about the negotiations that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had with the Iranians. The Iranians claim to have the ability to make 11. 11.

Professor Robert Pape (20:57)

They said, right. They're talking smack across the table. This is what the Iranians.

Constantine (21:01)

And they're saying, we've got the nuclear material to make a bunch of bombs.

Professor Robert Pape (21:04)

Yeah.

Constantine (21:05)

And your argument is, well, that's when everybody basically panics.

Professor Robert Pape (21:08)

And so I'm saying they were probably were incrementally panicking along the way, because that material in June was enough for between 10 and 16 bombs. Right. So. And that is with high degree of confidence. That's the IAEA's estimate. We know that the time to make those bombs and so forth, it's not a few days. It's more like finishing the enrichment is a few weeks. That's when President Trump's talking about the few weeks. But then it's probably six months after that to actually fashion the bomb. So we have some idea of this, of the actual dimensions. And so I'm not saying that it's literally the Foreign Minister of Iran's comment

Constantine (21:47)

here, but the package of information we're getting from intel, from the negotiations altogether, that creates a picture.

Professor Robert Pape (21:53)

It creates a panicky picture because it's Swiss cheese. Some pieces are hard like this. A lot of it is empty like that. And you are concerned because there's so much of that material. Now, you see, this isn't just tiny amounts. It's not the 300 kg of 5% that was there with the Obama deal. Now we have fantastic amounts more. And so even portions of that can be really, really concerning. And it doesn't even have to be for a nuclear bomb. So you're now seeing the precision drone capabilities of Iran, which I have to say I'm a bit surprised, was not taken more seriously ahead of time, because Iran produced 55,000 of those precision drones in 2025 and gave them to Russia. So the idea that you're not now, I don't know if we have any idea how many thousand they Have. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying the idea that you wouldn't think they would have a lot of thousands here for themselves and they've just given everything to Russia. I think this is kind of foolish. But put the radiological material on the tip of a drone.

Constantine (23:07)

Yes.

Professor Robert Pape (23:08)

Now that's going into Doha, that's going into Dubai. Now take some of that material and hand it off to Houthis Hezbollah. Now you have the possibility of radiological bombs in Tel Aviv. These are radiological. They're not the same as a nuclear. But this will probably. If these things happen, you're gonna see evacuations like you have not seen. You think it's been, you know, people have panic. Now this is probably one of the things that's becoming. It's very concerning as what I'm saying as this intel spreads and I've been saying this to. In the assessment for 20 years that these are the ways that we. That this is the politics of the situation, not just the mechanics of the. So my work is looking at the mechanics of things as it intersects with politics. And the politics is what's left out here in these discussions of escalation dynamics. And was when I taught for the Air Force as well again pilots in the Air Force, best in the world, putting bombs on target. They're told, I want political end state victory. How do you get there? You got to go through politics. And the politics is the. Is what I'm laying out in the escalation trap stage by stage. And so I'm fusing, I'm discussing the interaction.

Constantine (24:34)

Understood. So stage two is you didn't get all the nuclear material.

Professor Robert Pape (24:38)

You go back for regime change.

Constantine (24:40)

You. And why do you, why do you go. Why can't you just keep bombing or try and use intel?

Professor Robert Pape (24:45)

Oh, you. I would say, I said you do the negotiate. Well, how are you going to get a grip on that material, the nuclear material that is now you're worried is going to have some nefarious purpose. And I've given you a number of them. You only have two choices. One, the Iranian regime will negotiate it away. That's what happened with the Obama deal. But once we went through the and I always argued for something, I didn't know it was the Obama deal, but that was. I was, I was arguing that that would be the best thing we could do even before we had a thing called the Obama deal. And there's a whole story about the kind of linkages there that when I was on Obama's primary team, I was Recommending for. For that. So if you want to. If you're interested in that. But I mean, the point is that the reason you go for regime change, Constantine, is because you're desperate and you think, well, okay, the negotiations aren't giving me a big enough deal. They still want to keep their 3.5 enriched uranium. They're not giving the whole thing up like they did for Obama. So what are you left with? You're left with trying to take out the regime. And it's not because it's a great option. It's not. History will show it's not. But the fact of the matter is, you're getting more and more desperate here. And I think that's really what led to stage two. And that's what I said. This is how you will get the regime change war by the United States. It will be an air war, and it will also fail. It will fail because in 100 years, air power alone has never toppled a regime. I always went through the modeling of the regime itself. I do this on my substack. Glad to do it here. There is nothing special about this regime that makes it more likely to collapse with their. In fact, it's the other way around. And I'm glad to explain all that, but the fact of the matter is, you're. You're going down this road. And then the trigger. When would you push the go to go for regime change? Well, in history, this was in 2003 as well, and other cases. America typically goes the hour. It has eyeball sighting of the leader it wants to kill. Not general idea. Okay, not vague idea, but often eyeballs on the target, and then there's a gap because you have eyeballs on the target. Maybe a sat phone here. Well, it takes about six or eight hours to get those bombers there. F117s, B2s, whatever. It's going to take a little bit of time to get there, no matter how fast you think you can make that happen in 2003, this is when CIA Director Tenet ran into the Oval Office with George Bush somewhere around the 20th, the 20th or 22nd of March, 2003. And he writes this in his book. So there's nothing classified here. This has all been made public. And he says to President Bush, we've got Saddam in our sights. He's at Tarnac Farms. He's right there. We've got our human agent in the basement. And Saddam is going to have dinner there tonight again. He was there last night for dinner. He's coming again for dinner. And we have our agent there with a satellite phone telling us this is happening. So that's when George Bush, March 2003, orders the F117s to go. And it takes about, you know, but they timed it right for the dinner. And also, just so you know, we didn't tell the human agent, so that we left the human agent in the basement and we bombed the farm destroy that killed the agent as well. And it just so turned out that Saddam just decided not to go there. Not for any, you know, it's just the randomness of history, of luck here. So that's why we didn't kill him at that time. But this is, and I said the most likely way reason you would, what would trigger the regime change in a very tactical sense is you'd have some probably human eyeballs on the leader that you want to kill. And I didn't know it'd be the supreme leader, but that makes perfect sense under this. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but that's what they. I can see the tactical reasons for this and I think that's what happened. I think what you had is you had this pressure here of essentially fear of what was happening with Iran's dispersing nuclear material and what could happen with that over time mixed with this very exquisite intelligence about this day, this hour, this leader, this group is right there. And it's not one or the other, it's all of those coming together. And I'm fusing it here for your listeners because I can understand why they're confused. They're getting sound bites of six seconds here, six seconds there. This is why I wanted to talk to you, to give a fuller picture of why.

Constantine (29:33)

So we are now in the regime change war.

Professor Robert Pape (29:36)

Yep, yep.

Constantine (29:37)

What's next?

Professor Robert Pape (29:38)

Well, the regime change war is failing and it's failing strategically, not tactically. Just want to be super clear again. Our smart bombs are hitting their targets 90 plus percent of the time. Our military is hyper professional at making those bombs hit those targets. The military is not failing here, the strategy is failing. That we have to be super clear. And why is the strategy failing? It's because at this stage, stage two, the goals are, number one, topple the regime, meaning positive regime change, where this regime goes away and a new leaders come in who are more amenable to what President Trump wants. That's what I mean by positive regime change. Well, that's not happening and it's not happening because what you're seeing is the pattern of history over a hundred years this has never happened. Just to be super clear. Not rarely. It's never happened. And that's what my books show and so forth. But why not? It's because when you kill the leaders, as we did here and as we've done before, as we kill the leaders, the replacement leaders, all the incentives are for the replacement leaders to come in more aggressive than before some of its age just because they're younger. It's like my graduate students are more aggressive than I am. Okay, that's all true. Okay. But some of it is just plain organizational. So just imagine that when you have a situation where there's a two actor game, the society versus the regime. Society versus the regime. Now you bring in this third outside act or the foreign military power. That's a Godzilla. This isn't some little pipsqueak. We're the Americans. We're the omnipowerful American military. And on top of that, in 1953, long time ago, but still historically will be remembered, it was the United States that toppled a democratic leader with the CIA controlling pieces of the Iranian military. It was a military coup that we orchestrated. So didn't use air power, literally made the military do it. Well, that's when we put in the Shah, a dictator, not democratic. And the savak. The SAVAK was the secret police. And the secret police were right up there with Joe Stalin. Secret police. So this is not a nice situation. So this is what the, this gorilla, this, this Godzilla is over here. This changes the politics here. And it changes the politics because suddenly whatever the tensions were here, the gap which is, which is real, just like, you know, 40% of America supports Donald Trump today, there's a gap between America and our government. What does that mean? That if Iran assassinates Trump and we know they're trying, that you're gonna get the Democrats here in Times Square, they're gonna come out, they're gonna have a party in Times Square and they're gonna invite the Iranians to come on over for the party. That's not gonna happen. You see same dynamics here. So the government, you can see the leaders who are taking over now, much more likely to be hawkish because of the issue here with the we have to fight Godzilla, you got to fight Godzilla. And the Godzilla is going to eat us here if we either fight him now or fight him later. But we got to fight Godzilla. But even the pro democracy movement starts to create pro. It starts to create problems because now you are a traitor to your country. You're, you're, you're not getting Self determination. And when President Trump says, well, we will pick who will be your leader? The former Shah's son not good enough. Well, that's probably a good. I'm not saying he would be a good choice. What I'm saying is that notice that it's the President of the United States who's picking who the leader of Iran is again. So no matter how we describe this, no matter how much we try to put a velvet glove over this, this is the use of force to dominate Iran's society. And that is what then takes away self determination. It shrinks the pro democracy movements here, it builds nationalism which confuse parts of this and not instantly. I want to make it clear that politics takes time to work itself out. So now what is this going to mean in stage two? Lash back. Lash back. So you are likely going to see not just a hardened regime, but a regime that's still very capable. They'll take more risks. And that's what you saw with the horizontal escalation. I published a piece in Foreign affairs literally days after the bombing. How could I do that? Because I had it ready to go that this was very likely going to be Iran's lash back because they had drones, they have mines, those drones have precision on them. This was always likely coming. Could I be 100% sure? Of course not. That's why I didn't publish before. But once it started and I saw on the Saturday that the Pentagon was saying, well, these aren't serious attacks by Iran. These are just the spasms of the dying body. That's when I knew that there was a lot of, I thought, misunderstanding of what the politics and the way this would work at the itself out. So history, there's a lot of cases that are similar to this in history I could explain to you not with drones, but with the lashing back in an orchestrated way. And I had a sense of what Iran's capabilities were because again I'm focused on air power. And Iran had a lot of precision drones they were giving to Russia. Why wouldn't they use them in their own defense here? And this was the regional escalation strategy is a reasonable lash back for them. That's a rational approach. And now we're coming to the end of stage two here or starting to move to a new stage. Because that horizontal escalation strategy hasn't just been a retaliation strategy. Iran has gained power with that horizontal escalation strategy. So let me explain that, which is that. So we are now in a situation where before the war Iran controlled four percent of the world's oil. Four percent of the world's oil. Today it controls 20% of the world's oil. So five times more of that's a big increase.

Constantine (36:24)

By closing the strata formation.

Professor Robert Pape (36:25)

Well, by controlling the strata formation, yes.

Constantine (36:28)

Because they still let Chinese and Indians through, right?

Professor Robert Pape (36:30)

No, they let their oil through, yeah. So just to also be clear, when I say control, there's actually quite a bit of control. You see, it's not just damage. It's controlled damage where what they are controlled disruption is probably a better phrase. What they're doing is they are hitting about 20 tankers so far, almost one a day from that are coming from the Dubai. I'm sorry, from UAE or Saudi Arabia or some of the other Gulf states. And that has totally scared that. So that traffic is almost down to zero. But they have had about at least 14 tankers. These are the ones you're describing that are flagged by India or China. And these are carrying Iranian oil. Iran is actually slightly export exporting slightly more oil now than before the war started. Slightly more. And so now that's somewhere around 15 million barrels of oil, which is about a billion and a half dollars at today's prices. Okay, so they are making money on this war. That money is sitting in Chinese banks. That money can be used as collateral for all kinds of bad purposes here and all kinds of. Could be used for reconstruction, but also a lot of other things. And so this is what I mean. Now, let me also put this in a little more of a historical context, which is, since the 1970s, the number one goal of America in the Middle East. What was the number one goal of America since the 1970s? Not Israel preventing an oil hegemon. What is an oil hegemon? One state controlling all the oil that would come out of the Middle East. For all that time, 50 years, the Soviet Union never became an oil hegemon. We prevented that in different ways. Iraq never became an oil hegemon. That's why we fought the 91 war over Kuwait. Iran up until now, never been an oil hegemon. These puddles of oil. There are four puddles of oil here. It's Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. These four puddles of oil have been set, compartmentalized, essentially. Now they've been unified under the control of Ron, who's now got a more dangerous regime. And not just an enemy, but an arch enemy now of the United States. Say nothing of an archenemy of Israel, of course, but arch enemy of the United States. We have caused the number one or one of the number one enemy here to now become an oil hegemon. So think about that for a moment. This is part and notice that the trap gets it's not just stages of escalation. I call this trap for a reason. Every stage. It has been harder for President Trump to walk away.

Constantine (39:39)

If you understood that, good. But I'm going to repeat myself if you didn't, here's what I if you want to actually understand a language, you need to hear how people speak it, not work through textbooks. I grew up speaking Russian and what makes a language stick isn't grammar drills, it's immersion. The rhythm of how people actually talk, the slang, the way a sentence lands in a real conversation rather than on a printed page. That's the whole logic behind Lingopie. It's a language learning platform built around watching real TV shows and films in your target language. The subtitles are interactive. Click any word for an instant translation. Your vocabulary saves automatically and you review it later. With flashcards, quizzes and pronunciation tools, you can replay lines and slow dialogue down until it clicks. Lingopie turns watching into learning without feeling like either. It has over 3000 shows and films across 14 languages on your phone, laptop or TV. Consistency is key when it comes to language learning, and this makes that significantly easier. For 55% off the annual plan, click the link in the description or go to learn.lingopie.com trigonometry that's learn.lingopie.com Trigonometry Let me ask one more quick question before Francis takes takes over. I guess the key discussion in relation to the closure of the stray of hummus is how permanent or long term this is.

Professor Robert Pape (40:59)

Absolutely.

Constantine (40:59)

Before we started I was looking at the calci odds and the calciods for it being opened by 1st of May are very low. It's like low 30s I think as we sit here today. But June, I think July, I think July 1st is like 78 or something.

Professor Robert Pape (41:15)

Yeah, these are all the smart money here and I deal with the smart folks all the time and they make all the smart mistakes. So you just got to understand. I definitely understand. People with 120, 150 IQs are super smart and they go through lots of calculations. Their computers and their brains move very, very quickly and they can make an enormous amount of money really fast. So I got that. That's not strategy. Okay, so this is again weaving out a whole lot of different stages here. And I don't do. I don't have any money in markets. I'm not playing the money game here because that's not what I do. I do risk assessment. Now you're quite right though, about the. But let me just back up one stage here because you're trying to get to again, this calculation, like you would bet on it. All right, but let's just back up for a second. Notice that at stage one and stage two, America is losing control. And we've had the illusion of control going through. You see at each stage I call it the illusion of precision control. Because the precision weapons, they're so precise. You can marry that with this hyper precise intelligence. We can do it now on our phones, really, with signal chat and everything. I mean, we can do this so exquisitely. It's not just creating tactical success. It creates the illusion of escalation control when it's actually slipping away. Now why is it slipping away? It's because you could see why when President Trump does the bombing last June, he. I think for his own political purposes and from what he just said, I think he really did just want to walk away. Okay, but he himself is continuing the negotiations. He knows he can't walk away because tactical obliteration does not equal strategic. A stopping of the nuclear material just doesn't. And I suspect he knows that, cuz he said as much as that. And now we're at the stage where after the regime change, stage two of the escalation trap. Now Iran is an oil hegemon. So the idea that he's gonna walk away when all this enriched material is now dispersing and all those problems on top of that, now it's an oil hegemon. And that billion and a half dollars will come in every two weeks. Every two weeks. You see what I mean? So now you're getting a bigger and bigger. There won't be a Godzilla, okay? But they're going to be bigger than Bambi. Maybe there'll be a bear versus Godzilla, but there won't be Godzilla. I just want to be super clear, but you've changed this, this is now Iran is gaining power here, relative power. That's the pull here. For President Trump to go to stage three, which is likely coming in the next week or two, not three months from now, but now in the near term, which I called before the war started, the limited territorial option. And what I mean by that is we would take ground forces and they would be. Limited ground force, that's how it will be called. And they will be limited here at first.

Francis (44:41)

Sorry to interrupt, professor, when you say limited, what's the number what does that mean in terms of.

Professor Robert Pape (44:47)

No, I do lay all this out and I also did it in a video briefing afterwards on March 8th that your listeners can go find on the substack. So what we're talking about are the if once you know that your opponent has become more powerful and it's about oil and gas in this transit here, you're going to try to take the that power away. And but your options of air power, if you could do it with air power, this would not even have happened. So you're going to be forced to go to ground power options. Same with also the, the nuclear material. So what is that going to look like? That's going to look like taking Carg Island. That's going to look like taking coastal areas right on the, on the Iranian coast, right on the other side of the UAE here. So if you just, if we had a map, you would see that the Strait of Hormuz is here. That's kind of a narrow point. Dubai is here, Iran is here. But then there's the larger part of the Persian Gulf. Well, you are going to want to control this whole, at least big parts of this coast because that's where a lot of missiles are coming from. Not all, as I'll explain, but this will make perfect sense to start talking about as we're doing. And then Carg is up here. And so and it's because if you're really, if you're really going to open these straits in a way that you can have the flow of the uae, Saudi and all the other Gulf states, not just oil, but food, other things coming through here, you're going to need a fair bit, a fair bit of control. And these are Marine missions. So we have one Marine division. This is about a Marine division sort of problem here in terms of the size of the territory to control. That's why we're moving Marines. So not at all surprised we're moving the Marines. This is exactly what you would do here. It's not a, there's nothing secret or classified about this. This is just if you know about operations, you know that this would happen. The Iranians, I think, are well prepared for this. And why do I say that? It's because they hit Azerbaijan on day two. Now why did they hit Azerbaijan when that happened? I didn't hear anybody on any of the cable channels be able to explain this. Okay, well, once you would look at a map as from this perspective, which is assume that if you're Iran, you're Studying this for 20 years, you're planning that if they do regime change, we're going to do something like this. We're going to become an oil hegemon. Okay, what is the next move in the chess game? It's the ground. Where would you stage the ground from? Well, you're going to come. You're going to have to come on the, on the sea. Azerbaijan is a great staging place. It's a great staging place. And once I saw that they hit Azerbaijan here as a brushback pitch, that told me they were right on it. That told me they are studying this appropriately. It's like people studying old Chess games for 20 years. They're going down the natural routes because they're persuading. They're telling Azerbaijan, don't even think about letting American ground forces use you as an aircraft carrier as a staging area here. And Azerbaijan got the message, yes, sir. Iran? No, we're not doing that. Okay, we got the message. And so far that's been the way it is. So you start to see right away that the, the stage three of these limited territorial conquests here, these options lead to military control routes that start to become pretty predictable. And that is what we're facing right now. So we're now at the cusp of moving into stage three. And as we move into stage three, this will be another sort of, you know, sort of a shock to the public and to the world, because ground force, oh, my goodness gracious. You know, this was the one thing that President Trump was never supposed to have done. And of course, we've just come out of these forever wars and there's still more issues with ground forces I'll describe. But in this situation, the amphibious assaults that we're talking about, these are some of the most dangerous military operations ever here. And the fact we're a Godzilla, this, this, this big, huge. We're still talking about exposure here. So what I am explaining, I just did a substack last night on this where I'm trying to explain that we're about to transition from disruption costs that are temporary relatively quickly, you can reverse them to damage costs which are much more difficult to reverse. And that's what this stage three is really about. It's not just military operations. We're moving to a different equilibrium of the escalation. This is a whole threshold we're crossing, and it's a threshold of the type and length of the costs that we're talking about.

Francis (50:00)

So, professor, saying all that, I mean, what you're saying in layman's terms is effectively boots on the ground are inevitable.

Professor Robert Pape (50:08)

And 75%. I've said this before, there's nothing mechanistic, Francis, just so you know, and I know people when I. And I'm talking very, very directly as much as I can. And so it's fair for people to say, oh, Professor Pape's being just too mechanistic about the world. I do want to qualify even myself and say, I'm not Saying anything is 100% inevitable, of course, but what you're seeing is the trap. And it's 75% likely. That's the way I would.

Constantine (50:38)

Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East.

Professor Robert Pape (50:40)

Oh, yeah. They're halfway there and they should be there, you know, sort of end of next week. So this is a Friday here, the 20th. I would expect by the 27th they'll be there. They might need a few more days. We don't know exactly here, but we're not far from the cusp of a decision point by the President at this point. He's planning, putting pieces in place again after being in, you know, sort of west wings here, four different administrations. I don't believe presidents really commit in advance. I believe what they do is they bring pieces together and then only at the very last second do they actually know what they're gonna do. Okay. Cuz I think this is just the way presidents are. I don't think it's just Donald Trump, and I think he is coming to a point, a pretty clear point of decision called a D day here. And I don't know when that'll be exactly, but it's going to be in the next week or two.

Francis (51:36)

But that's gonna be a political catastrophe for Trump, isn't it? Because he ran on a platform of there's going to be, there's gonna be no more wars, there's going to be no more forever wars. I'm not gonna get involved. I'm not gonna sacrifice any more American lives in the Middle East. Well, if he does that, he's going back against every one of his promises. And that means that he will potentially not only alienate voters, but also the base itself.

Professor Robert Pape (52:01)

Yeah. So he is on the horns of a dilemma, Francis, where there is no golden off ramp here. The idea of the golden off ramp here, we're long past that. So what President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices, and he's gonna have to choose between two terrible choices. They're terrible for the world, they're terrible for his presidency. So these are not like one is good for the world. And I would argue one is better, but they're not golden. The one that you're describing is he goes forward and crosses the threshold of phase three and you're explaining this, what people will be talking about next week, there will be a 4 and 5 to the escalation trap. I have not even put on the substack yet that I'll be talking about on my next live briefing on Sunday. So there's more coming here. We're not done with the stages of the escalation trap. But you're right, he is going to be creating an enormous political liability for himself right now. You know that Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, others, he's just had the first recognition from his administration, a very high level here, breaking away from this. These are pro Trump people. These are people who campaigned for President Trump. These are not loosely. And so you're seeing this fracture here. But he's got another problem on the other side. And I think this is why he's going back and forth, which is if he doesn't go forward, then Iran is going to be an oil hegemon. 20% of the world's oil, it's going to keep it. So it's not as if President Trump has an out where, okay, Iran, I'm going to declare victory. And now I'm going to pull all my forces out. I'm going to take, I'm going to cancel the Marine Amphibious, I'm going to send that back to Japan. I'm going to take the aircraft carriers, put them back over to Venezuela. I'm going to do Cuba, okay? So I'm going to go get myself pinned down in Cuba. And so let's say he does that option, which I think is he's been thinking that over Iran is not going to look at that and simply say, here's your oil back uae, here's your oil back there. What the supreme leader's statement here is has been quite, was quite clear. It's I grade people every year and I did this in the Air Force as well, Air Force officers on their coercive strategies, the logic and quality of their coercive strategy. The leader's statement is a B plus, A minus. Okay? It's not perfect. But this is not a C student and I'm not saying he wrote it either. Okay. But I've seen C students, this is not a C student. They really understand the pressure points here and how they're using. And I'm glad that I can unpack that for you. But what I'M trying to tell you is there is no sign. I see that if President Trump picks up the armada and says, I'm just gonna now get bogged down in a different war over here with Cuba, that Iran's gonna say, oh, man, glad that's over. And so here's all the oil back. I don't think that's happening here. And so you're going to have a situation where these are the two choices here that he's facing. And Iran will start to make a real geopolitical hay out of this. You see, the oil hegemon, it's only been a few weeks that they've had this control. We're not seeing yet how this is going to play out with. We see the beginnings, but not fully with China, India, Russia, other Gulf of the Gulf states here. This has the potential to fracture the GCC coalition that Trump and Jared Kushner have been spending years to build with the Abraham Accords against Iran. This has. I'm not saying that they will all fracture all at once, but you just saw the first fracturing in President Trump's orbit in Washington. So what I'm expecting here is these multiple different Gulf states, they're going to start to go their own way. You see, they're going to have slightly different interests here. And also Iran has been very, very smart in that. What they're effectively doing with their propaganda, and this can be turned up many notches, is they're telling the gcc, and not just the leaders, but the publics, this is all a war for Israel. And what it means to be a war for Israel is Israel's conquest of you. You see? So you got to just sit back for a second and people are going to start scratching their heads and saying, why exactly am I paying costs here to help Israel? Take me later. You see, this is what Iran has seen. And that's why I say it's a B plus, a minus in terms of the coercive strategy. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty strong approach. And there's no reason to think they're just gonna give up 20% of the world's oil because there's real geopolitical hate. Amic.

Francis (57:38)

It's somehow March. I don't know how that happened either, but here we are. And I still have the same goals I had in January, which is the good news. The bad news is I am absolutely the person who looks up at 1pm and realizes the only thing I've consumed since waking up is coffee. Just coffee. No, Breakfast, no lunch. Pure caffeine and good intentions. So lately I've been keeping Huel Black Edition around to stop myself doing that. That's H U E L On the days I'm out the door, before I've had a chance to think, I grab a Black Edition ready to drink. It's a complete meal. 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, and it's under five bucks, which is cheaper than a coffee shop coffee that will actively make things worse. My go to is the chocolate flavor, which is so good I'd drink it even if it wasn't a sponsor. Then when I'm home and want something more substantial, I use the Black Edition powder. Blend it with ice and milk if you want a proper smoothie, or just shake it with water When I'm keeping it simple, 40 grams of protein, same complete nutrition, you just have more control over it. The RTD plus powder duo has basically become my insurance policy against chaotic days. Right, here's the offer. For a limited time, you can get 15% off online for new customers with code trigger15@huel.com trigger15 or click the link in the description new customers only. And thank you to Huell for supporting trigonometry. But if you take. So if you take your point about Israel and the propaganda. Well, you look at what happened to Qatar. The gas field of Ras Lafan, which produces around 15 to 20% of the liquid natural gas of all that the globe needs in order to continue functioning. I mean that got bombed and effectively shut down for between three to five years. And Qatar are furious. I mean they're not going to be pro Iran at this point.

Professor Robert Pape (59:35)

Oh well, let's talk about this. So first of all, that was in retaliation for Israel, Right? And what happened here, the Qataris said their statement exactly is we're mad. But just so you know, everybody, we're not getting in this fight. We're going to stay diplomatic, just so you know. So, so they, they reinforce neutrality here as a result of this. Even President Trump said he's not happy with what Israel did and it's.

Constantine (60:05)

And Bibi promised not to do it anymore.

Professor Robert Pape (60:07)

Well, yeah, I don't wouldn't count on. I don't think anybody's counting on that.

Constantine (60:11)

What I'm trying to get at is your point, which is this was retaliation for Israel striking Iran's gas facilities, which even President Trump didn't want to happen.

Professor Robert Pape (60:21)

That's right. And so that means President Trump can't End this war on his own. He can pull out on his own, but that's not gonna end the war because it's not gonna end Israel's attacks, it's not gonna end Russia's intelligence to Iran, and it's not gonna end Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz and therefore 20% of the world's oil. So what you have is a situation where, as I'm getting back to this, President Trump is on the horns of a real dilemma, because it's lose here, lose there. And so it's a matter not of where is there a gain versus a loss. It's a matter of assessing which loss are you. It's pick your poison. Which loss do you want to take?

Constantine (61:04)

And just to be clear, Bob, option one, which you've described in quite a bit of detail, is you pull out now, you leave Iran with control of the Straits of Hormuz, you leave the current regime in place, you still haven't got control of their nuclear material, and that doesn't seem like a win.

Professor Robert Pape (61:23)

Well, it's actually hugely risky. Of course, there's all kinds of risks related to that.

Constantine (61:28)

The other option, the other option is what we started talking about, which is you put Marines on Cog island, you put Marines on the coast of the Persian Gulf to try and control it. Can that work?

Professor Robert Pape (61:42)

It's going to have. That's what I was talking about earlier, Constantine, about we're shifting from disruptive costs that we're paying to damaging costs that are not reversible. Well, you're going to take the amphibious operations. This is Saving Private Ryan. So let's talk about that military dimension. So the principle here, because I know you have very smart audience here, is exposure. That's the key thing that I'm sure you're used to, risk exposure. So same thing with the military tactics. The attacker, in order to take ground, always has to get up and expose themselves over the ground they want to take. The defender can be in foxholes and be behind things and camouflage and so forth. So that's why the defender always has a 3 to 1 advantage at the tactical level. It has to do with this issue of exposure. Well, that issue of exposure is at its maximum in amphibious operations because the water is. There's no cover on the water. Okay. And you've got the. Now Russian intelligence kind of even exacerbating that. You see what I mean? And then when you get up to the territory, there's some of the shows I've been on here, the cliffs, the actual Terrain. This is some of the most difficult terrain to try to control because you've got mountains, you've got stretches of beach. So for the defender, there's all kinds of crevices and crannies and things like that here. But for the attacker here, the side that has to actually take the territory, the exposure is at its maximum now. We will absolutely have the best professionals in the world work in this problem. I spoke to the Army War College about a week before this kicked off. I have military officers coming in, their PhDs under me. I really have nothing but the greatest respect for our military, really. They're really quite good at what they do. That said, there's only so many. Let's take Carg island, for example. There's only so many ways you can approach Carg island, and that will have been assessed not just by the US military for decades, but by the Iranian military. And they will know their terrain better than anybody else. As much as we think we will be able to assess their terrain, they will know their terrain. So if there's a possibility, I'm not saying there is for surprises here, we will have some tricks up our sleeve. They may have tricks up their sleeve, but overall it's about length of time of exposure. The longer the time of exposure, the transit time to go from, like the straight of Hormuz up to Kharg is going to be, I don't know, somewhere between a dozen and 20 hours here for the amphibious, those big. And they're big hunks of metal, these are the things that you're going to be able to eat. The most easy targets to find are big hunks of metal in open water. So they're going to be exposed for long periods of time. You will do everything possible to defend them, without a doubt, but that's a lot of time. And then when they get there, there's going to be hours to get on and actually control before they can get undercover. So if you watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan, it's very similar. You've got to cross the open area and be exposed. Then when you get on the other side now you can go pillbox to pillbox, and you got some cover too, so it's not as if you can't. And so I'm fully expecting we're going to win. I'm not saying we won't take the ground. It's really a matter of the cost, and I can't give you a number. We haven't done any amphibious landing like this in so long. Up against really this kind of a determined enemy, it's going to be very difficult to put numbers on this. I think this will be hard for General Kane, our Joint Chiefs. He will be asked by President Trump how many are going to die. And I think it's going to be hard for him. Not because he's going to be sort of a dovish or not want to give the numbers. It's just going to be hard because he's going to have to go back to, well, when we did this in World War II. I mean, where are you going to go to find the good, actual deep analysis of this?

Constantine (66:03)

You see, and part of the calculus, I imagine, in any president's mind at this point is what happens afterwards, at least I hope it is, which is we will take hundreds of Marines as casualties, God forbid. Now what?

Professor Robert Pape (66:18)

Well, and then let me say the next piece. So we've only focused on the military casualty piece as this is happening from Iran's perspective, this is now a much bigger threat to actually achieve. Now we're bringing ground forces out. So remember, I've said air power alone has never toppled a regime that's over 100 years. Sometimes you put ground forces and you can do that. Okay, so Iran's gonna know that and they're gonna, even if they don't know it, they're certainly gonna feel it right away. So once this even starts, even though it'll be, you know, described as limited, they're not going to Tehran. We'll say all that, I'm sure. Okay. That's not how the other side's gonna see this. They're gonna see this as the beachhead, like Normandy to the end of Germany, you see, which even though that was a year later or 10 months later, so did the Germans, everybody understood. Even though there's a lot of miles to cover once you get the Americans especially, but the Americans, the British onshore here, Germany is in real trouble. Same here with Iran. So what's going to happen is they're likely to be very willing to destroy the oil infrastructure in response, just to be very blunt. So why would they destroy the oil infrastructure? It's because they're going to want to impose long term damage here and they're not going to be concerned that they would want to use it for themselves because for them they may be dead, I mean, as a regime, in six months. So this isn't even, they're not even probably worrying about that. Once you go down this road, you are increasing pressure on the regime, chances you may actually topple it not in a day, but over time and also then more risky strategies by them here which will have costs on us. There'll be damaging costs because when you destroy the infrastructure. These are special made pipelines rigs. In the 90s, where I really got into this was when I was teaching for the Air Force and the leadership decapitation crowd in the Air Force who were my bosses, they're literally my bosses, the actual architects of all of this. So I know all their arguments really, really well. They really like the idea of electric power targeting. So they brought in people from the electric power industry to teach us how to take down electric power plants and grids and so forth. And, and nothing classified. So there's nothing. This was not a secret briefing or anything. And, and so we, and I had students here who wrote master's theses on how to destroy electric power plants that, that you could still save. The big thing I learned is that in an electric power grid you can take out the transformers which are like the fuse boxes in your house. And that knocks out, it causes a brown out like when you overload the system when there's too much, you know, it's too hot and there's too many electric, I'm sorry, air conditioners. And that is a problem for a week or two because you can fix the fuses, okay? But if you go after the, the actual infrastructure, which is the generating halls and you destroy the generator halls, they're out for a minimum of six months, maybe a year because those larger pieces of equipment that are the actual infrastructure, this would be the equivalent of these transmission pipelines that are going from the land to the tankers and things like that. These are special designed, there's not bunches of them laying around. So when you start to destroy that, and that's what's happening in Qatar. So what happened in Qatar is they didn't just hit a little lng, they went after some of the infrastructure. And this is again moving up the escalation ladder to damage. And that's why the Qataris are mad, because that is out for a minimum of a month, maybe three months, because, and that assumes they're even gonna fix it, because if they fix it, Iran could do it again. So you've got a situation where the damage here is not reversible, like the shipping could be reversed because Iran will just simply say, ah, you can pass. Once you start not taking out and destroying the actual big pieces of the infrastructure, this is months. And that starts to dovetail with what the economists are now telling US in the newspaper, which is you don't have to worry about the price of oil until it's stays that way for a month or two, then you'll get a recession. And everybody says, oh that's so comforting because we know it could go right back down, right? Not if you destroy the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is taken out. Now you're in that months period and I can't give you a more precise estimate because I don't know exactly what the damage will be. But I'm trying to lay out the principles here. There's nothing. And you just need to have spent 30 years to figure out how to take down economies and what that looks like for real. And this is what this looks like here. And this is also by the way, not something that you do when you're a pilot in the Air Force. You don't spend six months a year, five years studying the enemy oil and gas grid and so forth. What happens is once you get in the crisis, you bring in people to give you advice and you try to do your best by staying pulling all nighters. So again, I've spent long periods of time thinking about how air power and other military instruments actually interact with economies. And this is what I'm trying to explain, which is we're about to move from what I call disruption to lasting damage. And that is going to put us in the OPEC 73 territory. So that's why you see me really, really genying up, coming on your show. I've been on, I think, you know, why am I, you know, spending 18, 19 hours a day doing this? I'm extremely concerned because as much as this has been dangerous so far, we're going to cross the next threshold which will be, which will be much more difficult. I'm worried. And so I'm going to do everything I can to explain that here because crossing this threshold I think is gonna lead to now the beginning of truly lasting reversible over several months at quickest cost. Not just a day or two where Iran will just simply decide, oh sure,

Francis (73:04)

your ships can pass because what you're essentially talking about is economic warfare. And then the knock on effect of that is that it's gonna affect not only economies, it's going to also affect politics right the way through the West. It's going to change how people vote. It's going to change how people see particular leaders, how people see the right, the left.

Professor Robert Pape (73:25)

Now you see why the Europeans don't want to touch us with a ten foot poll because as these costs start to accumulate in this way, if they're part of the coalition causing it, they then face being toppled by their own people. Because if this goes down in this trajectory here, those costs are going to be biodynamics. Where we had 9% inflation, that's going to be nothing. Okay? And it's going to be that way. The ground war is not just something that you can do and then take back. What you're doing is you are sending the most credible signal that you intend to use ground forces to topple this regime. You can say all you want, you're never going to do that. Okay? If you're on the other side and it's your survival that's on the state. You don't believe this for a moment. Just like when we laughed about Netanyahu promising not to bomb. So you're really going to take President Trump at his word that he would never think about using, never think about doing it? No, you're not going to do that. You are going to see that what's coming at you is not just one hand of the gorilla, which was the air power, but now it's the other hand and both legs of the gorilla starting to get really again, D Day, saving Private Ryan, normandy, you know, June 1944 leads to May 1945.

Francis (74:59)

And it's also not only gonna affect the reputations of certain politicians at home, this is really gonna damage Israel's international reputation because there's a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum who are looking at Israel and going, you started it. This is your fault. Do you agree with that?

Professor Robert Pape (75:18)

I think the blame game has already started because when a victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan. Well, that's what you're seeing here. So everybody' now starting to try to tack to what they should because they're seeing which direction this is going. And who are you going to blame? Well, I don't think you can easily blame the US Military. I mean, there may be some people that try to do that, but I don't see how you blame them. They've been tactically superbed through this. They've saluted when the President has said, jump, they said, yes, sir, and so forth. So I don't see how you blame the military. I don't see how you blame the Democrats here. They have no power and they were blindsided by this whole thing. So I don't see how you say, well, they are the ones who wrecked the whole thing. So I don't see how you blame them. So I think it's going to basically start to come down to Israel and President Trump and the Republicans, which. There's always been this division inside of maga, you know, about half against foreign wars and the other half, you know, more on the other side. And that. You saw that with Ukraine. Well, this is the same thing. It's the same split within maga. Maga's holding together at the moment in the opinion polls only because they're supporting Trump, you know, and that. That's. But as this unfolds and as you get into the midterms and in the summer, I. The way I say this is that I think Trump is gonna start to have an LBJ problem. So if he crosses this Rubicon and he goes down this road, I see that this stage is going to go on for quite some time. And I think that's why the $200 billion request is coming through. They want to put that request through now. Because if you cross this Rubicon, I'm not saying he's going to do it, but I think it's 75% likely you're going to need to spend 200 billion and more. This is going to be very expensive. So you're going to have a. This war is going to go on. And as that war goes on, this is where the real problems for the senators and the House members are going to face when they run for reelection in the midterms. And so you already had a situation before this where there was likely a blue, modest blue wave coming, where the Democrats would win the House and maybe a few seats in the Senate. Not quite clear they would take the Senate. Here. In this situation, you could see a much bigger blue wave coming. And why do those House members and those senators want to just go home? I don't think they're going to. And so I don't know what they will each make. Just like the Gulf states, this will fracture the coalition of maga, and it won't be necessarily cleanly in a division. It'll be more like what I'm describing. When coalitions fracture, typically what happens is the actors that are part of it start to go their own way. And it's not clear that it'll all break in one way. I'm not saying they'll all break against Trump, either. It's gonna be probably seat by seat, state by state, but it's not gonna be the unified situation it is today. It's going to be this more fractured situation. And so those are the real political costs that are coming. And I would say by June 1st. June, you know, now we're going through the primaries here and we haven't crossed the Rubicon yet of stage three. But as that were to unfold, I would say it won't take long. You won't have to wait till August for this. This will LBJ. When. When the bottom fell out of LBJ's presidency, it was March 1968. So he had prompt. We're very much in a similar, like, escalation trap here where LBJ had been promising that just one more rung up the escalation ladder would get them out of the escalation trap. Everybody realized by end of 67, we were in an escalation problem because the VC were getting stronger and stronger and taking territory, actually literally taking territory. And then what happened is he kept promising it and there was a spectacular event called the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was at the end of January 1968. And what the VC did is they, over a period of just a few days, they did a parallel attack across multiple different fronts at the same time, multiple different of our bases at the same time. And they lost each and every one of the individual battles. 25,000 of them died apparently in just these week or so to do this offensive. This led to the political bottom falling out of the Vietnam War. So as I've often said, we won every battle in the Vietnam War, including in the Tet Offensive. We lost the war because what they did was a political strategy similar to the horizontal escalation strategy that Iran is doing. This is a strategy where the end point is political fracture, not gain territory. And the political fracture is the soft underbelly of America. That's how our enemies beat us. Remember, I said I wanted to know how we lost the Vietnam War. It was because we didn't understand the politics of the situation. It wasn't. We didn't understand the military. It's. We didn't understand how militaries and politics fit together. And that's what I've been doing for the last 30 some years.

Constantine (81:03)

So coming back to the military side of it, I get the sense that you certainly feel that even though it's a terrible option, pulling out and not continuing the escalation would be the right. Well, I want to pose.

Professor Robert Pape (81:14)

I want to. Well, it's fair, but I want to pose a third, at least a variant of that, which is. So I think once you see these terrible choices here, then you're quite right, Constantine, that you're going to want to take your losses now because you might be able to recover your presidency. If you wait, then you're in Lyndon Johnson where it's unrecoverable. Your presidency is just gone. You're a lame duck with two years to go. So you're right, this is where I would advise the West Wing here. But what I would say is that the price you're going to have to pay, the politics price here is it's not enough to just pull out because then you're leaving this behind. If you really want to take option one, you're gonna have to cut a deal with Iran, you're gonna have to go back and you're gonna have to cut a deal with Iran. Now, before the bombing started, here's what the deal looked like at 3:15 Eastern Time in the Oval Office with Witkoff and Kushner. And we know this because this is exactly what they said, which is that Iran will not give up its, its enrichment. It wants to keep its 3.5% and it's promising to meld together the 60 and 20% to 3.5. And President Trump said just, just not good enough. Well, in order to cut a deal now with Iran, you're going to have to accept that right away. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, you're going to have to probably accept the oil sanctions coming off. And given the price of oil is going up, notice that Besant is already talking about doing that. Okay, so they' doing that issue is already on the table. But number three, there's a very good chance that you're going to have. Iran will not reopen the straits here on a consensual basis. Will not reopen the straits unless there's pressure put on Israel because Israel is that bombing card. Israel has been, remember the 12 Day War wasn't started by the United States bombing Fordeau that happened in the middle. It was started by Israel. This war, the tactical intelligence for killing the supreme leader and the bombs that killed the Supreme Leader were Israeli. So we need to understand that. I don't think we're in a situation anymore where you're going to get a deal here without pressure on Israel to do what? I think the most likely thing, just to be very specific, is that Trump would have to force Israel to sign the non proliferation treaty. Right now what Israel wants is Iran to have no nuclear weapons and to have all this on site inspection. Well, Israel has all these nuclear weapons and no on site inspection because it's not part of the non proliferation treaty. So I think that what is likely going to be the thing that will be the discussed will be that Trump will force Israel to sign the npt, which means tit for tat on site inspection. If there's on site inspection in Fordo, there's on site inspection in some of the nuclear sites in Israel. So think about that.

Constantine (84:34)

So Israel would have to give up its nuclear weapons.

Professor Robert Pape (84:36)

No, no, no, no, no, no. It has to, it would have to say. So just keep in mind we are a signatory of the non proliferation trade and we still have nuclear weapons. Here's the way that works, Konstantin. And this has been going on since 1970, which is when you sign, you promise you will eventually give up your nuclear weapons. And notice how America has signed and we still got a lot of nuclear

Constantine (84:58)

weapons just like everyone else, just like every.

Professor Robert Pape (85:01)

So that part is not real. The real part is the on site inspection, which is intel. That is the actual teeth in the npt you see. So that's the part that Israel, it's not actually giving up its nuclear. Say that, but it's not the reality. The reality is that there will then be tit for tat and President Trump. This is going to be a big political cost.

Constantine (85:26)

I was going to say. I mean you started a war because you wouldn't do a deal, that you now have to do a worse deal.

Professor Robert Pape (85:34)

Yep.

Constantine (85:34)

That's a humiliation. I mean there's no two ways about it.

Professor Robert Pape (85:37)

That is the political. That's what I'm saying. You pick your poison.

Constantine (85:40)

So it's either that. Well, what I also would like to

Professor Robert Pape (85:42)

explain and you can possibly save your presidency or you don't and you can't save your. What I'm saying is there's no option here to come out the victor here like Gladiator where everybody's cheering. Okay. For the new general. That's not happening in this situation. And if we keep waiting for that, then what it is, is Lyndon Johnson, these are the real choices, I think in front of the President. And what I'm saying is you're absolutely right. But this is why we have to put this bluntly out here, because people from your program will be listening to people in the West Wing will be listening. And this means very directly that they will have to put pressure on Israel and that pressure will be threatening to cut off the military aid for real, not just kind of. Now he can try to gussy it up. And by the way, President Trump, I do believe just to put something here about why he might be able to do this, it's not just because of his relationship with Israel. But President Trump is the best PR politician we've had, certainly at the equal of Obama, certainly the equal of Reagan. Some of my friends who don't like Trump don't like it when I say this. I think he's better. He. Just think about this. He did January 6th and got reelected. Just think about this for a moment. We have not seen, I think, this level of understanding the media and how to. He understands the media better than the media understands the media here. So if there's somebody who can recover his presidency even with all these liabilities, I believe it is President Trump.

Constantine (87:31)

He can sell this deal as an actual victory to at least his base,

Professor Robert Pape (87:35)

and enough time will pass. They'll find other things. We have time. He has time to recover. You take this down where we're still talking about this. Not just talking, but fighting this war in July. That's gone. See that space? He needs space for the pr. The PR is not something he can ginny up overnight.

Constantine (87:57)

Let's talk about that. Because temperamentally, I wonder, you know, your assessment of 75% just from just judging characters, I imagine he would be quite tempted to go with a hard option, potentially.

Professor Robert Pape (88:10)

Well, sure, because he's faced with these horns of a dilemma and he has some hope. But I also think he put pressure on Netanyahu to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza in September. And I was one of the people who was thinking that he might well do that, and it's for the good of Israel, because I didn't believe that it was in Israel's interest to cleanse the. Netanyahu may think that, but I didn't think it was in Israel's interest. And I was on podcasts in this city. Norm Dorfman does the Comedy Cellar here.

Constantine (88:46)

Norm Dorfman?

Professor Robert Pape (88:48)

Yeah, yeah. He. He's. I'm sorry I said the name. Norm's. Now, now. Now he's gonna get mad at me. No, but. No, yeah, no, please, no, no film. But you can go and listen. And he and I had what's called a feisty hour and a half discussion about this in August. And I kept saying that. What you're not seeing is I believe that, in fact, President Trump himself may see the wisdom of going down this road. And I don't know if that at all. I'm not saying there was any connection here whatsoever. But what I am saying is that I do think that President Trump has the power, and I think he may well have the interest. He may see that. What I'm saying here is the best for the country, the world, the region, and his own presidency.

Constantine (89:41)

Bob, I wanna come back to the other option which we haven't followed up, the military option. The Marines on Carg island, controlling the coast. You've hinted that there are more stages to this if that option is pursued. So so far we got to. Let's say they get the Marines. Dangerous operation, very high risk. Let's say it's successful with casualties. The Iranians begin to destroy their own oil facilities and I imagine likely the other Gulf states as well at the same time. At this point, I am not a great strategist, but I imagine the temptation from Israel and America is to say, well, look how terrible these Iranians are. We gotta go harder.

Professor Robert Pape (90:19)

So let me to give you and the listeners some framework here. For the last 30 years, my scholarship has been about air power, economic sanctions, lots of books on books, articles on sanctions and suicide terrorism. And we have not talked about. About the third shoe. Okay, terrorism. So after 9 11, I compiled the first database of all suicide attacks around the world. Israel did not have this database. They had attacks, a database who was attacking them. That was 20% wrong. And I show them and they fixed it. So the. I compiled this database and it produced a finding. And I've published two books on this, lots of articles, but it produced a finding which is that 95% of all suicide attacks are not due to religion. There was half of them at that point in 2001 were by secular folks. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But 95% were in response to foreign ground forces. Ground forces. It's not that you didn't have any of those attacks before. It's that when you put the military, the foreign ground forces in, they went up 20 times. Lives, just to give you a sense, many, many cases of this. Well, I. Before this was even published, I knew Paul Wolfowitz. He was our Deputy Secretary of Defense. I knew him from the 90s. He had other connections with the Pentagon. I gave Secretary Wolfowitz here, the studies here. And this was somebody coming from me. I'm basically a liberal Republican. You could. I had all these friends in the nsc. You could imagine that I was possibly going down that here. Well, this is why I never went down that road. It's because I was showing them rather directly that if they invaded Iraq, and I said this in so many words to them, if they invaded Iraq, they would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times. They would produce more attacks on Western targets. I didn't know London was coming a few years later, but Things like that, they were not stopping the next nine, 11. They were assuring things like that would happen in the future. Came back, this is in November 2002 from the and again, nothing classified here, but it was, it's not been widely known from Andy Marshall and some of the listeners here will know who that person is. Highly credible conduit that we're, we're, we're not going to take a rock off the table, Bob, but what we are going to do is pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia. That's how we opened IUD and cut. So that's how that happened because of this analysis. That's what led to IUD being open. That's what Marshall told me. Well, then we did launch the war in Iraq. And six months after the war, five months after the war, the largest suicide terrorist campaign of modern times actually happened just as I was explaining here. And who started my center, the Chicago Project. This was in February 2004. I had the Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld Defense Department reached out. They wanted more work on suicide terrorism. I had to create a center. So my center at the University of Chicago was at first called the University of Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. Over the years I've kept the acronym seapost but I've morphed it to Chicago Project on Security and Threats. So to expand it a little bit. But I've kept sipos. So it's so ironic. But it was the very people that I was telling were doing exactly the wrong thing that started the center. And then Wolfowitz left and Eglund became the next deputy. And there was all these interactions because as he said, the NSC really wanted to know how good was Pape's data because there were other places we were thinking of putting armies in and we never put those armies there. So there's a whole set of stories about that. So when I say advised and so forth, this is some of the, this is, this was my experience. So I've had experience where people that I have disagreed with here and this was public. So I knew then I was never being hired by an NSA here. And once you go down these roads, notice that nobody's really going to want to hire you because you can't. I'm not a card carrying Democrat, I'm not a card carrying Republican. Second, I'm a professor who's laying out the escalation dynamics and willing to talk to anybody to try to get the better outcome for the country.

Constantine (94:54)

So what are the escalation dynamics of President Trump's pursues the Marines.

Professor Robert Pape (94:57)

Again, the ground force risk. So the number one risk here to produce large amounts of anti American terrorism. And we've seen little bits now, but nothing like could happen is going to be ground military presence and especially the idea that it would lead to regime change. So even if we try to take that off the table, the other side's not going to believe that. And that also means the 92 million people in Iran aren't going to believe that. Some will be hopeful, some will be opposed to that here. That's going to mean others in the region here you're going to see what we call the tentacles of Iran. You know, all the groups that the proxies, so to speak. Here you're going to stir up a hornet's nest of terrorism. Not on day one time it took about five months before it really got going here with. And so we can't put a time, we can't do it to the, to the day. That's what everybody would like. They'd like to precisely time it so they can put money on poly market or whatever. All right? But the bottom line is we know the direction. It's like moving a super tanker and it's, you know, five months, you know, seven, eight months down the road. You can expect a pretty good amount of. And this, and this terrorism could be pretty serious. So just coming this flight here, I didn't have to take my shoes off. Okay, we didn't do that on after 9, 11, until the first shoe bomber you see. So, so we're talking, we're not talking about the, the, the shooting sprees of, you know, 10 or 15 people being killed. So if this goes down this road, the kind of indiscriminate terrorism we're talking about here, we're talking about malls, airplanes, we're talking about, those are the targets that, that will come up immediately. Think about it as ISIS potentially on steroids because ISIS was a group who did those kinds of attacks here. ISIS was a group of just 30 or 40,000. Well, the revolutionary Guards and also the Baiji. That's a million. Okay, so already Iran is already very good at propaganda. They're a state, they're not a group. And they will have plenty, they already do cyber. They'll have plenty of ability to go on telegram. They'll have plenty of ability to do things that we're not even. So when we, we don't even know, I think how a state as powerful as Iran would be able to use the Internet and propaganda to inspire attacks. And that's why I think it will happen. I think there may be some sleeper cells and some command directives, but what ISIS showed is the power of what you can do. When you inspire attacks and you explain that the attacker should take one or two weeks to prepare and you can give them some ideas for how to prepare. But once ISIS started to explain, you should take some time and prep. They did this better than Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda tried to do this, but that's what ISIS really did. It wasn't so much the tactics of the car ramming. I don't believe that. I've been studying terrorism here in detail. 8000 suicide attacks 1 by one by one with research teams at my center. So I've looked at quite a few of these over time. I believe that the issue is preparation. How much time does the would be attacker put into it? The attacker in Texas here was quick, just right off the bat, killed two, wounded about another dozen here. But that's not somebody who spent a week or two preparing crooks. The guy who went after Trump here, he looks like he spent a week or two and look how much closer he got here. Unfortunately, he missed. Unfortunately Trump turned his head. But what I'm saying is that it's the preparation that's the issue. And the longer the preparation, certainly two weeks here, if you have a two week period of time, somebody's willing to put that much time in. And there's just a lot more possibilities here of the bad things happening. And that is what I'm worried about as we go forward.

Constantine (99:08)

Just a very quick aside before Francis takes back over. You said it's not really about religion and it's about ground troops. But why aren't Ukrainians blowing themselves up, killing Russians?

Professor Robert Pape (99:20)

They don't need to. It's success. So there have been a couple of instances that were reported in the news as suicide attacks. And we've drilled into it and we don't think so. So my books explain all all this. So the issue here is last resort. So if it's all about religion, what should be happening is all these Islamic groups, they should be. I kind of put it as looking for the first excuse to get the quick trip to heaven. So any old excuse, they should all be committing, doing this. That's not what you see is the patterns of these suicide campaigns. That's not what Hezbollah's pattern was. That's not what Hamas pattern was. So in my books, I lay out the pattern over time. That's what these big books are doing. They're, they're studying the trajectories of the campaigns and also how they begin with non suicide campaigns. And then they often begin with political protests like the first Innifada leads to, which was. Which was more like throwing Molotov cocktails. That is the beginning of Hamas, not suicide attacks. So Hamas, right off the bat, is Islamic fundamental. So they want all the stuff that you hear. They want the end of Israel. Well, that was all true in 1987 in the charter. Their suicide attacks don't start until years later, and then it's not really going until you get to the second innifada, which is after 2000. So what you see here is that what. It's. What this. What the trajectory of the terrorism is, is the tactics get more desperate and more deadly over time. So Ukraine, they are. They've held the Russians. So except for the first, like, three days of the war. Okay, so go back to the first three days of the war. This is, by the way, the. The smart bomb trap from the Russian side. They. They fell into the escalation trap. And. And it's very parallel to what's happened to us. So stage one, they thought they had a quick and decisive victory strategy. It's with air and ground power, so not just air power. And they get right to the airport in Kyiv here. So right to the gates of Kyiv, they get very, very close. But the fact is, they couldn't get over the edge here. And then within just a few days. And by the way, I said this to some congress folks who came literally right out of a briefing, a classified briefing, telling me that they had just been told the Kyiv's gonna fall in three days. I. That it's not gonna fall. It's 90%. Like, Bob, you haven't been in the briefing. I'm telling you, they've got too much wherewithal here. And so the bottom line is they don't fall. And what do they do? They lash back. They take back over. So From March, April, May, 2022, they're recovering, lashing back. And who's holding on by their fingernails? It's Putin, you see, until he then fires all his military. This is when he's doing all the rearranging of his staffs and so forth to go to stage three. So stage one had the quick and decisive stage two, the lash back. Stage three, for Putin was the war of attrition. And right now, there's barely been any movement since June of 2002. You're talking about a handful of miles. 23, 22. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah. 22. Yeah. Thank you. Since June 2022, three and a half years plus here, barely any movement of the line of contact. So why would Ukraine do. And what they had is they've come up with other ideas like drones, you know, and you've got donors, some of them from Chicago. Jennifer Pritzker is one who has given all this money to the Ukrainians to build these drone factories. And the drones are really making it difficult for Russia to gain any territory. And so what does Russia do? They've got their drone factories in Iran and they've made it difficult for the Ukrainians to take territory. So you've got basically a stalemate like Korea that's occurring. So they don't need suicide. This isn't. This would make. It's not. It's a. My book is called Dying to Win the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. And it's explaining, it's not a religious logic, the way most people think it's strategic. And that explains the ebbs and the flows, the origins and the ends of the campaigns, religion, everything should just be a constant.

Francis (103:52)

Look, there's gonna be a lot of people who are listening to you, professor, who are thinking to themselves. They're looking at the strategies, particularly that the Americans have pursued the Strait of Hormuz, and they're thinking to themselves, why is it that they haven't predicted what is going to happen? Why? They've got some of the most intelligent people, they've got access to some of the most brilliant military minds in the world, military strategists, etc. Why is it that they haven't predicted what's going to happen?

Professor Robert Pape (104:22)

I call it the illusion of precision control. Francis so I've been in the rooms when very, very senior super smart people, and there's no cameras on, are getting these briefings about what air power can hit. And from people with stars on their shoulders, it is amazing to watch. And this can be Republican, Democrat. This is not about party, this is about human beings. You put people in these rooms here and I show you and you really believe not just maybe these bombs will hit their targets 90, 95% of the time, but it's going to be the reality. It's two things are inescapable. Number one, immediately the mind goes, what leader can I kill? Even if the briefer is not talking about that, by the way, immediately the mind goes to that because the briefer is explaining. And again, these people, many stars, generals, that the bombs will hit within, you know, 5 to 15ft, they'll talk about the winds, and they'll talk about all these different conditions. And you will. Then it'll be immediately, well, that's about the size of this room. And who would I like to take out from this on the other side here? So, number one, that's where the leadership decapitation's idea really come from. But there's a second thing that the mind goes to that I've seen. And again, I think this is just human nature. I don't think it's any deeper than that, which is the illusion of control, of the escalation after that. Because I can have this exquisite opening. It's like a chess game where I have the exquisite opening in chess. It may be the absolute perfect exquisite opening in chess, but it's still just the opening. It's not the middle game, which is really where all the strategy in chess is all about here. It's like territory and the moves and the feints and so forth. And then it's not the end game. So you can't. And so just like in chess, you can study endgames, but you can't really think about what endgame strategy to have until you get through the middle, you see? So strategy here with the smart bombs, I call this in with the smart bombs, in particular, a smart bomb trap. Because what happens is it's like an opening in chess. You are so absolutely mesmerized by the accuracy of what you're about to do and the perfection of that opening that you're really imagining. You can totally control the middle game. You can control the escalation from that point on. And even if the briefer here, and I have no reason to think General Kane would not have been cautioning, President Trump starts to give caution about what might. Don't overcome. Overread that opening, sir. And there's the middle game. Even if they do that, seeing that and seeing it so close and believing it's true here, I think it creates the illusion of control. And that's why I think you've seen this with. When President Reagan dropped bombs to assassinate Gaddafi in April 1986, the bombs hit there. That was the very first precision decapitation campaign. We hit his tent, killed his family, some of his family. He just stepped out of his tent, Literally. He was sleeping in a tent, literally, just for a second. But two years later, he brought down Pan Am Flight 103, killed 271 civilians, 190Americans. As his retaliation, President Clinton. Let me pick a Democrat. March 1999. President Clinton wants to negotiate for the pro democracy movement in Kosovo. And he wants to tilt the hawk and the dove balance in the Serbian government, who's on the other side. So he launches a three day, what was supposed to be a three day air campaign, hitting 51 targets in and around Belgrade in order to shift the hawks and doves, shake, if not degrade, if not topple the Milosevic regime. And the bombs hit their targets perfectly. But what happened is the Serbian regime did not fall, it was hardened. And Milosevic countered by ordering 30,000 troops into Kosovo and he expelled, that is ethnically cleansed a million Kosovars from the country. That's 50% of all the civilians from that province. And we had to fight 78 days and put a ground army there to, we didn't have to actually conquer it, but to take it if he didn't back off. And that's what led Milosevic to give up. It was a disaster that we only pulled out at the end by putting in the ground forces here. So this is what we're up against with the smart bomb trap. Now, I talked to on the nsc, President Clinton's briefer, the person on the nsc, I won't say the name, whose job it was to give the all the worst case scenarios. And he showed me the 400 page briefing. This was a year later because I interviewed Ad Asari, the president of film. I spent a lot of time studying these, not just kind of casually. And so he showed me the briefing of still marked top secret. Well, he wrote it so he could show somebody who didn't have a clearance. And he just said to me, he said, bob, it never occurred to me that the Serbs would be that vicious, even though they described it as one of the most vicious regimes ever. He said, it just never occurred to me or to us. We just couldn't imagine that level of evil.

Constantine (110:16)

Professor so all of that being the case, the one question we haven't asked you strikes me as kind of important, is it's academic, but also kind of important. And if we agree, I don't know if we agree, but I imagine we agree that Iran shouldn't get nuclear weapons.

Professor Robert Pape (110:29)

Yeah.

Constantine (110:31)

What should President Trump have done?

Professor Robert Pape (110:33)

He should have gone back to the jcpoa, the Obama deal, because if you can push this problem off 10, 15, 20 years, do it. It's not the best, it's still a problem deal, but it is that deal. Once President Trump broke the deal and withdrew, we saw that Iran put pedal to the metal and it took years, not just a day or two, it took years before it could start to really rebuild its enrichment program. So the deal actually with all its warrants was actually a good deal and it also provided 24,7 camera level inspection of everything here. And I think this is what he should have done. He should have, I think taken versions of the deal that's been on offer as imperfect as it was and he would have to sell it as he found a way to say it's better than Obama's deal and a lot of people just believe him.

Constantine (111:31)

I'm just thinking from a strategic perspective and there's probably gaps in my thinking about it. But if Iran and other countries know that we effectively cannot use air power or indeed ground power for the reasons you've articulated to deal with the nuclear threat threat, wouldn't it be perfectly logical for them to pursue nuclear weapons irrespective of any deal that we do?

Professor Robert Pape (111:51)

Well now we're teaching them very strongly that they, they must have nuclear weapons. I think that's why the I want to come back to what I said is the offset with Israel. So if you can offer Iran the possibility that Israel will be contained, containing Israel, that's worth quite a bit. That's worth quite a bit because you really, as much as I'm laying all this out, notice I'm saying things are 75, that means there's still 25% over here and that's. So you are. If I was advising Iran here, I would say if you can get the containment of Israel, you take it. And what does that mean? Okay, you keep your 3.5 enriched uranium but you open yourself back up to the IAEA, you open yourself up to 24, 7 inspection, you're going to get some tit for tat where you're going to get some inspection of Israel now too. So this is not just you who's up for this but this what I would say is if you want to maximize your survival here and your Iran, that's what I would do. Because there is some chance that we're going to go down these roads. And as much as we're saying we'll never put 100,000 troops in Iran, think about this right now. J.D. vance said we're never putting ground troops in Iran and what are we talking about doing next week is ground troops here at the beginning now still limited. But there's no way that Iran can really be sure we're not going to come at them with some multi division attack down the road and that they'll be able to offset that. So I would still say that, that the bottom line here is containing Israel for Iran. That's something. I think they would be foolish to give that up to surrender that because this is an uncertain world.

Francis (113:49)

Professor Robert Pape, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Professor Robert Pape (113:53)

Oh, thank you guys, man, great questions. Thank you so much.

Francis (113:57)

No worries at all. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

Professor Robert Pape (114:03)

We still haven't talked as much as we should have about the enriched uranium that's floating now. Dispersing. We think it's dispersing at least some inside of Iran. It could be dispersing outside of Iran. And so we've talked about stage one, two and three. I told you stage four. I'm worried about the terrorism. There is a stage five in the fall which is that dispersed uranium finding its way into bad things happening here. So. So I see a lot of bad possibilities here that get worse. That's why I've been putting out images on X of the funnel getting worse here over time. And I think that I'm hoping we won't have to have those Sunday briefings where I go through those in hours. I'm hoping we can stop it here.

Constantine (114:52)

That's us. Thank you so much, sir.

Professor Robert Pape (114:54)

Thank you.

Constantine (114:54)

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