This War Will FAIL" - Military Expert Prof Robert Pape

Stage one was of the escalation trap was the A bombing, tactical success, where you do destroy the facility as an industrial uranium enrichment production centered. And that then would lead to stage two. That's when you'd get the regime change war. Stage three. Which is likely coming in the next week or two.

We would take ground forces. Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East. Oh, yeah, they're halfway there. What President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices. They're terrible for the world. They're terrible for his presidency. So we are now in the regime change war. Yeah, yeah. What's next? There will be a four and five to the escalation traffic.

This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out their incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at Hillsdale.edu slash trigger. Professor Robert Pate, welcome to trigonometry. Before we get into the war in Iran, the escalation trap, all the rest of the good stuff. Just tell us who you are, your journey through life, and how you came to be sitting in this chair. Uh my name is Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago. Um

When I was in high school, my mother had this great idea. I should spend a summer with a German family. Uh, and I did that in West Germany. And I came back thinking I should be an interpreter at the UN. So I went to um um University of Pittsburgh as an undergrad. And I started taking all these language classes. Well that then I wanted to become a foreign service officer.

Because I thought, well, that might even be better. So then I thought I was actually quite good in school. So I wanted to get a PhD. And I said to myself, I actually want to get a real PhD as I called it. I didn't want to get a sort of credential. So I ended up going to the University of Chicago to get a PhD in the 1980s, and I was heading to the Foreign Service.

I said to myself, what am I going to write on for my dissertation? And I said, well, I'm going to go represent our country. We had just, you know, 15 years ago uh had this disastrous war in Vietnam. I should find out why we lost. And so I wanted to know, how could we lose the Vietnam War with all this power, all this air power?

So I had no real background in military. This was not coming from war gaming or anything like that. Um, and so I ended up going to the library, and I wanted to find the book. that had all the air campaigns in history and explained why the one in Vietnam didn't work out. There was no book. Well, that became my dissertation and then

Um when the um uh after I finished, uh I wanted to do what a lot of people do. I wanted to publish an article before I went to the Foreign Service. So that was just me wanting to do that. The Cold War ended. And what happened when the Cold War ended? the first Gulf War, which was heavily er I mean completely different than the Cold War. And suddenly all of this work I had done, and I'm just a young kid at this point.

Um I'm I'm in the front pages of the USA today because we have no talking heads at that point in time, no generals uh uh and so forth. Uh Schwartzkopf was the only one who was really on television. And for six months really I was uh i really just amazingly in the media And that just uh surprised me uh because I could help design and structure what was the air power debate even about. And then the US Air Force called me up.

And I had no idea this was gonna happen. It was out of the blue. I mean, who would think the US Air Force, they're bombing Baghdad? Literally the month we're bombing Baghdad with the F-117s. I get the phone call. Um uh Professor Pate, would you please come down to Maxwell Air Force Base? Uh this is where we do our mid-level officer, not the undergrad, the mid-level officers, and we're gonna stand up a brand new school that's gonna focus on air strategy.

So, okay, well, I'll try it'll go down. And I get there, and here the chief of staff of the Air Force, other four star generals. What I'm being told is they thought the reason we lost the Vietnam War, again, they're thinking why lose the Vietnam War was because we didn't understand air power. I mean that was the whole reason I'd been working on my dissertation was I couldn't believe it. It was uh

And so I come back, I tell my family, I you're not gonna believe this. I think we should go to Mont Montgomery, Alabama, Maxwell Air Force Base. I mean, this is I'm a northern, I mean, this is just a very, very unusual and It was uh tremendous because here I am teaching the best pilots in the world how they know how to put bombs on a target. Манаць when I really discovered my true contribution.

was in between what happens when bombs hit targets and the political outcome, which I call mechanisms. In my book, uh Bombing to Win, that became the frameworks of escalation in this substack I call the escalation traffic.

I started developing these thirty years ago. Uh I teach them now at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago, I do have some military students. Well But I mostly am telling people when you go on the NSC, and I have folks who have been on the NSC, senator staffs, et cetera, et cetera, these are the frameworks of escalation you need to understand because it's not uh military strategy is not just about putting a bond, that's tactics.

What's the real strategy, the actual strategy of strategy, is in between the tactics of military force hitting things. And political outcome. And that is the stages I lay them out, but it's this middle that's very hard to get a grip on. And that's really what I've been doing for better part of thirty years is focusing on I call it the escalation dynamic.

Uh and that's true in all of my work, really. Uh not just the air power part of my work. And that's one of the reasons I've advised every uh Uh well in when I worked for the Air Force, I got in big debates about bombing strategy to end the Bosnian Civil War. And I was uh very uh strongly showing the uh limits of leadership decapitation, which was becoming the air force's favorite uh way to to use precision air power.

And uh the bombing strategy that stopped the Bosnian Civil War had no leadership decapitation. It was almost pure hammer and anvil. It's right almost right out of bombing to win. Um, and that was my first time of actually having any real uh contribution, I would say. Um, and then uh as time went on, that just continued from two thousand one to two thousand twenty four. I've advised every White House, including that includes two Republican, two Democrat.

Uh I don't pick a president. I advise about the best uh what I uh the best way to manage these escalation dynamics uh for the good of the country. And so I hope that gives you some sense of where I've come from, why I'm here. And I used to joke I was gonna I'm just w still studying for the Foreign Service exam. I'm pretty sure I've aged out of that at this point. So so I think I'm sort of stuck as an academic. I I love being an academic, by the way. It's the perfect place for me. 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. Yeah. So could you just explain what you think is the American strategy?

for this war and why they why they start Well I can I can also try to explain why these strikes I couldn't have say the date, but why they were almost inevitable that they were going to happen. So I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for twenty 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 uh we discovered, the American government discovered um that Iran was going to enrich uranium. That became the Natans 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 a hundred feet 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. Uh right from the get-go, right from the beginning, I did this I do this in my s on my strategy class at the University of Chicago, uh, which I'm about to teach again, and I taught last spring, and I teach every spring, and the last day is ninety minutes.

simulation of the bombing of Iran and what's going to happen. I've been doing that for Uh now it'll be twenty-one years. Um and so uh and also at uh right from the get-go, um 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 Cy Hirsch article. So Cy Hirsch was a reporter for The New Yorker, did a lot of pieces of for The New Yorker, and he called me up one day because we had worked talked to me on other things.

And he said, um, uh Bob, I really think that we're gonna use a nuclear weapon, attack nuke, to take out Natas. And I said, Sai, I I realize you're you're always looking for a controversial angle here, um, because that's what he had made his whole living on. Um, and I said, uh, but that's just not what we're gonna do. And he said, What do you mean? I said,

We're gonna do double tap uh 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 something. 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, sorry, what we're gonna do is we're not gonna wanna use a tech nuke and that'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 we had at the time, J Dams they're called, and these ha create radii of between um where of blast where in dirt it's about 50 feet in concrete. It's about 25 feet. So just to give you a sense of the radius we're talking about. Um and what we're gonna do is we're going to target Natans, and we're gonna um have one bomb hit the the fur the first uh top of Natans, and we're going to time the second bomb to come in 15 to 30 seconds later. We're not gonna 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 plant have the second bomb hit, just about 25 feet or so deeper. Then we'll have a third bomb hit and we're going to get into those centrifuges. Well, he published that. It's either two thousand four or th they're around in the New Yorker your folks can uh listeners can go find it.

Well, that is how I started to model the bombing of Iran. So I I said we we're gonna take these B twos, we've got here's the target set, here's what we can find. Uh now as I'm doing this. Um, Iran is uh is developing from an atans to Four Do, and there's a whole discussion of that I can give you. Um, and then we too are. when Fort O came on, we build the Moab, which is the thirty thousand pounder. So so all the way along the way, every year I'm updating now.

That's like the details of this, of the first, of the of the actual um uh on paper. But what does it mean in terms of the attack? What's the what's the strategic reality? So right from the beginning, it was always going to be clear. That we, the Americans, uh, would be able to uh attack Natans, Natans and Fourdeaux with 90 plus percent tactical success, meaning the bombs would hit their targets.

Um, we would kill scientists. So I went through all the different targets uh here that we were going to destroy. Um, but we would and we would be able to do that um more effectively by far than the Israelis because we could carry in our bombers bigger payloads than they could. Um 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 these, this tactical success would not destroy, disable, melt down the enriched uranium. That is the actual strategic term Why not? Because you couldn't be sure you would ever you might be able to disrupt the centrifuges. So so just to give you a sense of the way these uh uh this is set up. So let's just pick Natans just for one here. So Natans is like a football field here. So it's a hundred 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 attack, You were always likely, even if you didn't quite get to the uh 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 in for a long time, it's not j it's it's the the there's a blast effect, you see what I mean. So the blast effect itself. was very likely to disable maybe 50, 70, may maybe even 90% of these centrifuges, um, 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 you would just you would you would be shaking everything up more or less. Now maybe you might cause fires. You wouldn't really know. Uh for sure. I'm not saying that none of it could have been destroyed. What I'm saying is that you what you could be sure

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 is that enriched uranium, especially as the quantities grew over time, you see, 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 was days before the war, all three stages, and we're now about on stage three. Stage one was uh of the escalation trap was the bombing tactical success, and we'll go back to June in Fourdeaux, Natans.

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, uh that 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.

And uh the reason so there had been regime changes called for Europe, you know, from Israel. How would you actually get America behind the regime change? You would start by going after Fourdeaux and Natan. Once you did that, you started the track. Because you did you triggered and you 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 satellite evidence of that. And I have that on my sub stack. So we actually have some civili so if we have that in the civilian world, I can guarantee you there is humans Sigant there's a lot of more. And in fact, i it would just thinking logically, given the twelve 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. 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 sixty percent, the ten thousand pounds of five and twenty percent. What are we talking to them about? Okay, I mean, what is there actually to discuss? You say, If you own gold and it's just sitting there not earning anything, you need to hear this. What you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert. Today's sponsor is Monetary Metals, and what they're doing is rethinking how gold is used. Traditionally, gold ownership is passive.

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your intel, um you have no more IAEA, which was your best intelligence. So people think, oh, it must be the CIA and Moussad 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 ask me to come here. There's nothing like being on site and actually looking right across and if I'm the IAE, yeah, I want to actually measure you as the enriched uranium and actually get my measurements out.

There's nothing that's gonna beat that. You see what I mean? So once you bombed, two you you you did you were number one tactically successful, but you're strategically uh at a minimum uncertain, likely failed. Um, and it's dispersing. And then number three, your intel is terrible. Terrible. So that's gonna 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 uh 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 I always said would lead to stage two, which was the regime change. No, no. So just just uh I'm asking questions just to make it very ext extra simple. Your explanations are brilliant, but I always like to clarify things for our audience even more so. Constantine, it's perfect. 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 Whitkov had with the Iranians.

The Iranians claim to have the ability to make eleven. Eleven three. This is what the Iranians claim we've got the nuclear material to make a bunch of bombs. Yep. And your argument is well that's when everybody basically panics and so I'm saying they were probably were i incrementally panicking along the way because that material in June was enough but 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 uh

uh make those bombs and so forth. It's not a few days. It's more like uh 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. uh of the actual dimensions. Um and so I'm not saying that that it's uh literally the foreign minister of Iran's comment here.

Uh but the package of information we're getting from Intel, from the negotiations, all together that creates a picture. It creates a panicky picture because it's Swiss cheese. Some pieces are hard like this, a lot of it is empty like that. Right. And the problem 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 three hundred kilograms of five percent that was there with the Obama deal. Now we have fantastic amounts.

And so even portions of that can be really, really concerning. Uh, and it doesn't even have to be for a nuclear bomb. So uh 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 uh ahead of time because uh Iran produced fifty-five thousand of those precision drones in two thousand twenty-five and gave them to Russia.

So so the idea that that you're you're not taking 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 uh to Russia, I think this is this is kind of foolish. So nut but then but put the radiological material on the tip of a drone. Yes. Now that's going into DOA. 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 and television. These are radiological. They're not the same as in nuclear, but this will probably um this if these things happen, you're gonna see evacuations like you have not seen you you think it's been, you know, people have panic now.

Th this is probably one of the things that's becoming that's very concerning as what I'm saying as this intel spreads. And I've been saying this too uh in the assessment for twenty years, that these are the ways. So my work is a very important thing. is n 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. The again, pilots in the Air Force, best in the world, putting bombs on target. They're told, I want political and state victory. How do you get there? You got to go through policy. And the politics is the d is what I'm laying out in the escalation trap, stage by stage. And so I'm fusing, I'm discussing the interaction. Understood. So s stage two is you didn't get all the nuclear material. Uh you'll go back for a regime change.

And why do you why do you go why can't you just keep bombing or try and use Intel Oh well you what I would say I said you'll do the negotiation well, how are you going to get a grip on that uh material, the and the nuclear material that is now you're worried is gonna have some nefarious purpose. And I've given you a number of them.

Um, you only have two choices. Uh one, the Iranian regime will negotiate it away. That's what happened with the Obama deal. Um, but with uh 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 are I was arguing that that would be the best thing we could do, even before we had a thing called the Obama.

And there's a whole story about the 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 that how the reason you go for regime change, Constantine, is because you're destined. And you think, well, okay, the negotiations aren't giving me a 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. Uh 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.

Uh and uh but the fact of the matter is you're you're getting more and more desperate here. And I think that's really what led to um 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. Uh, and it will also fail. It will fail because in a hundred years, air power alone has never toppled a uh a regime. Uh I always went through the modeling of the regime itself. I do this on my sub stack, glad to do it here.

Um, 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. Um, 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, F-117s, B-2s, whatever. It's gonna take a little bit of time to get there, no matter how fast you think you can make that happen. Uh in 2003, this is when CIA Director Tennant ran into the Oval Office with George Bush.

somewhere around the twenty-third or twenty-second of or twenty um sorry, the the twentieth or twenty-second of March two thousand three. And there's and he write writes this in his book. So there's nothing classified here. This has all been made public. Uh and he says to President Bush, we've got tsunami our site. He's at Tarnak Farms. He's right there. We've got uh our human agent in the basement and Saddam is gonna 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. And he is telling us this is happening. So that's when George Bush, two th March 2003, orders the F-117s to go. And it takes about, you know, but they timed it right for the dinner. Um and also just so you know, uh we didn't tell the human agent. So that we left the human agent in the basement.

Um, and we bombed the farm, destroyed that, kill the agent as well. Um, and it just so turned out that Saddam just decided not to go there. Not not for any, you know, it's just the randomness of history. uh of luck uh here. So that's why we didn't kill him at that time. But this is uh and I said the most likely way w reason you would uh what would trigger the regime change in a very tactical sense.

is you'd have some um probably human uh 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 uh under this. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but that's what they I can see the the tactical reasons for this. And I think that's what happened. I think what you had is you had this str 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 it it's all of those coming together. And and I'm fusing it here for your your listeners because I can understand why they're confused. They're 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. So we are now in the regime change war. Yep. Yep. What's next? Well, the the regime change war is failing. And it's failing strategically, not tactically. Just wanna be super clear. Again, our smart bombs are hitting their targets ninety plus percent of the time.

Um our um military uh is hyper-professional at making those bombs hit those targets. The military is not failing here, the strategy of That we have to be super careful. And why is the strategy failing? It's because at this stage, stage two. The goals are number one, um, topple the regime, meaning positive regime change, where this regime goes away and a new leaders come in who are more

uh 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 um what you're seeing is the pattern of history. Over a hundred years this has never happen just to be super clear. Not rarely it's never happened. And that's what my books show and and so forth. Uh but why not? It's because when you kill the leaders, as it as we're was we did here and as we've done before, as we kill the leaders.

Um, the replacement leaders, all the incentives are for the replacement leaders to come in more aggressively. than before. Some of it's age, just because they're younger, it's like my graduate students are more aggressive than I am. Okay, that's all true. Okay. Um, but some of it is just plain organizational. So just just imagine that when you um 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 actor, the foreign military power that's a Godzilla. This isn't some little pipsqueak. We're the Americans. We're the um omnipowerful American military. And on top of that, in 1953, long time ago, but still historically will be remembered, um, it was the United States. that um uh toppled a democratic leader with it the CIA controlling pieces of the Iranian military. It was a military coup that we orchestrate.

Uh so didn't use air power, literally made the military do it. Well that's when we put in the Shaw, a a dictator, not democratic, and the savat. The Savak was the secret police, and the secret police were right up there with Joe Stalin's secret police. So this 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. Forty percent of America supports Donald Trump today. Uh there's a gap between America and our government. Well 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, we're gonna have 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 pro the government, you can see the leaders who are taking over now much more likely to be hockey.

uh because of the issue here with the uh we have to fight godzilla. You gotta fight Godzilla and the Godzilla's gonna eat us here if we either fight him now or fight'em later, but we gotta 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, uh, well, we will pick who will be your leader.

Uh the former s Shah's son not not good enough. Well th that 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 um now, what is this gonna mean in stage two? Lash back. Wash back. So you are likely going to see not just a hardened regime, but a more a regime that's still very capable. They'll take more risks. And that's what you saw with the horizontal escalation.

Uh 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 lashback. Because they they had drones. They have mines, those drones have precision on them. This was always likely coming. Could I be a hundred percent sure? Of course not. That's why I didn't publish before. But once it started, and I saw on the Saturday.

that um 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 uh I thought m misunderstanding of what the politics and the way this would work itself out. Uh 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 I had a sense of what Iran's capabilities were because again, I'm I'm focused on air power and and Iran had a lot of precision drones they were giving to Russia. Why wouldn't they use them in their own defense? Uh Uh here. And this was a uh the regional escalation strategy is a is a reasonable uh lash back for them. That's a rational approach. And now We're coming to the end of stage two here, or we're 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 twenty percent of the world's oil. So five times more of that that's a big increase.

By closing the straight or from us. Well by controlling the straight. Because they still let Chinese and Indians through, right? No, they let their oil through. Yeah. So just to also be clear, when I say control There this actually quite a bit of control. You see, it's not just damage, it's controlled damage. Where what they are a controlled disruption is probably a better phrase.

What they're doing is they are uh hitting about 20 tankers so far, almost one a day, um from that are coming from the uh Dubai, I'm sorry, from uh 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 uh at least 14 tankers.

Uh these are the uh ones you're describing that are flagged by India or or uh or China. Um and these are carrying Iranian oil. Iran is actually slightly export exporting slightly more oil. now than before the war started. Slightly more. And um 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. They are 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 uh 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, uh uh, which is Uh since the nineteen seventies, the number one goal of America in the Middle East. What was the number one goal of America since the nineteen seventies? 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. Um, Iraq never became an oil hegemon. That's why we fought the ninety one war with co 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 carved uh you know, um compartmentalized essentially 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, uh say nothing of an arch enemy of Israel, of course, but arch enemy of the United States, uh, we have caused. the number one or uh the one of the number one enemy here to now become an oil hegemon.

So think about that for a moment. This is what 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. Nu har vi med oss, Sandra. Du och familjen fick punkka på bilen innan egent fram till djurparken. Ja, det blev häng på erfirans rastplats istället. Ja.

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For 55% off the annual plan, click the link in the description or go to learn.lingopie.com slash trigonometry. That's learn.lingopie.com slash trigonometry. Let me ask one more quick question before Francis takes uh takes over. Um Th the I I guess the key discussion in relation to the closure of the strain of homes is how permanent or long term this is. Oh absolutely. Before we started I was looking at the Calci odds and uh the Calci odds for it uh being

opened by first of May are very low. It's like the low thirties, I think, as we sit here today. But June and I think Jul uh July I think and July first is like seventy eight percent or something. Yeah, these are all the smart money here and I deal with um the smart folks all the time and they make all the smart mistakes. Okay. So so just gotta understand. I I definitely understand people with a hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty 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. 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 those markets. I'm not playing the money game here because that's not what I do. I do risk assessment.

You're quite right though about the i but let me just back up one stage here because you're 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, you know, 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 the uh you could see why. In uh when president Trump does the bombing it last June.

Um, he he I think for his own, you know, political purposes and from what he just said, I think he really did just wanna walk away. Okay. But he himself is uh continuing the negotiations. He knows he can't walk away. because tactical obliteration does not equal strategic uh stopping of the bomb of of the nuclear material. Just doesn't. And I suspect he knows that because he said as much as as as that.

And now we're at the stage where after the regime changed, stage two of the escalation trap, now Iran is an oil hegemon. So the idea that he's going to 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. We'll come in every two weeks. Every two weeks.

You see what I mean? So now you're getting a bigger and bigger they won't be a Godzilla, okay. Uh but they're gonna be bigger than Bambi. Maybe they'll be a bear versus Godzilla, but it's there there won't be Godzilla. I just wanna be super clear. But you've changed this. Relative power. That is... k that's the pull here for President Trump to go to stage three, which is um likely coming in the next week or two, not three months from now, but now in the near term.

uh which I called um before the war started the limited territorial um option. And what I mean by that is we would take ground forces uh and they would be um limited ground force. That's how it will be called, and they will be limited uh here at at first. Uh sorry to interrupt, Professor, but when you say limited, what what's the number? What

What does that mean in terms of it? No, I do lay all this out. Yeah, and I also did it in a video briefing afterwards on March eighth that your your listeners can go find on the Substack. Um so what we're talking about are the um 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 uh

uh that power away and but your options of air power, you if you could do it with air power, this would not even have happened. So you're gonna be forced to go to ground power options. Um same with also the um the nuclear material. So what is that gonna look like? That's gonna look like taking Karg Island. Uh that's going to look like taking coastal areas right on the um 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 gonna wanna control this whole uh at least big parts of this coast because that's where the m uh a lot of missiles are coming from. Not all, I'll as I'll explain. But this will make perfect sense to start talking about.

uh as we're doing. And then Karg is up here. And so uh and it's because if you're really uh if you're really gonna open these um straits in a way that you can have the flow of the UAE, Saudi and all the other Gulf states. uh not just oil, but food, other things coming through here, you're gonna need a fair bit uh a fair bit of control. And these are marine missions. So we have one marine division. This is about a marine division. And uh sort of problem here.

um in terms of the size of the territory to control. Uh that's why we're moving Marines. So I'm 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. Um, 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 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 uh from this perspective, which is assume that if you're Iran, you're studying this for twenty years. You're planning that if they do regime change, we're gonna do something like this, we're gonna become an oil hegemon. Okay.

Uh, what is the next move? In the chess game, it's the ground. Where would you stage the ground from? Well you're gonna come you're gonna have to come on the you're on the sea. Azerbaijan is a great staging. It's a great stage. And once I saw that they hit Azerbaijan uh here as a brushback pit. That told me they were right on it. That told me they are studying the this appropriately. It's like

People studying old chess games for twenty years. They're going down the natural uh routes because They're persuading to uh they're telling Azerbaijan, don't even think about letting American ground forces use you as a aircraft carrier, as a staging area.

Here in Azerbaijan got the message. Uh yes, sir, Iran. Well no, we're not doing that. Okay, we got the 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 uh limited territorial conquests. Here, these options lead to military control routes that are start to become pretty predictable. And that is what we're facing right now. So we're now at the cus. of moving into stage three.

And as we move into stage three, um for uh this this will be a uh a another, you know, sort of a you know sort of a 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 to have done and

Uh, and of course we've just come out of these forever wars. Uh and uh and there's still more issues with ground forces I'll describe. But in this situation, the amphibious uh uh uh assaults that we're talking about. These are some of the most dangerous military operations ever here. And the fact we're a Godzilla, a a this this this big, uh huge. We're we're still talking about exposure here.

Uh what I am explaining, I just did a substack uh last night on this where I'm trying to explain um uh 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 uh equilibrium of the escalation. This is this is a a a whole threshold we're crossing, and it's a threshold of the type and length of the costs that we're talking about. Uh so Professor, saying all that, w I mean what you're saying in layman's terms is effectively boots on the ground are inevitable. And seventy five percent. I've said this before. I'm when I

You 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 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 I'm not saying anything is a hundred percent inevitable. Of course. But what you're seeing is the trap.

And it's seventy five percent likely. That's the way I would Well the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East. Oh yeah, they're halfway there and they'll they should be there, you know, sort of end of next week. So this is a Friday. Here the twentieth. I would expect by the twenty seventh they'll be there. They might need a few more days.

Uh we don't know exactly here, um uh but it's we're we're not far from the cusp of a decision point by the president. At this point, he's planning, putting pieces in place. Uh again, after uh being in um, you know, sort of West Wings here uh four different uh administrations.

Uh, 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, because I think this is just the way presidents are. I don't think it's just Donald Trump. And I think he he is coming to a a pretty clear point of decision called a D-Day.

uh here and um and I don't know when that'll be exactly, but it's going to be in the next week or two. 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 and well if he does that, he's going back against every one of his promises. Yep. And that means that he will potentially not a not only alienate voters, but also the base itself. Yeah, so so he is on the horns of a dilemma, Francis. Where there is no golden The the idea of the golden off ramp uh here, that that's that we're long past that. So um 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 uh one is good for the world and they're there I do I would argue one is better, but they're not they're not golden. The one that you're describing is he goes forward and crosses the threshold of phase three.

And uh you're explaining this what what people will be talking about next week. There will be a four and five to the escalation trap. I have not even put on the sub stack 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.

But you're right. He is gonna be um uh creating uh an enormous political liability for himself. Uh right now, um uh you know that uh Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, others, he's just had the first regulation from his administration of very high level here breaking away from this. Uh this is a ver these are pro-Trump people. These are these are people who's who who uh campaigned for President Trump. These are these are not, you know, loose these are 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 gonna be an oil hegemon. Twenty percent of the world's oil. It's going to keep it. So it's not as if uh President Trump has an out where um, okay, Iran, um, I'm going to declare victory and now I'm going to pull all my forces out. I'm going to take uh I'm gonna cancel the the marine amphibious. I'm gonna send that back to Japan.

I'm gonna take the aircraft carriers, put them back over to uh Venezuela. I'm gonna do Cuba. Okay, so I'm gonna go get myself pinned down in Cuba. Um and so let's say he does that option, which I'm I think is he's been thinking that over. Iran is not going to look at that and simply say, here's uh your oil back, UAE, here's your oil back. There what the Supreme Leader statement here is has been quite was quite clear. It's it's uh 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 is a B plus A minus. Okay, it's not perfect, but this is not a C student. This and I'm not saying he wrote it either. Okay. Um, but I've seen C students. Okay. This is not a C student.

Okay, he real they're they really understand the pressure points here and how they're using and I'm glad to and I can unpack that for you. But what I'm what I'm trying to tell you is there is no sign I see. that if President Trump picks up his 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 sh man, glad that's over. And so here's uh all the oil back. I don't think that's happening.

And so you're gonna have a situation where these are the two choices here that he's facing. So um uh and and Iran will start to make a real geopolitical hay out of this. You see. The oil hegemon. If it it's only been a few weeks that they've had this control. Uh, we're not seeing yet how this is gonna play out with ch we we see the beginning, but not fully with China, India, Russia.

uh other Gulf uh of the Gulf states here. Um this has the cape the potential To fracture the GCC coalition that uh Trump and uh 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 uh in President Trump's orbit in Washington. So what I'm expecting here is these multiple different Gulf states, they're gonna start to go their own way.

You see, they're gonna 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 public. 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 so you gotta just sit back for a second and people are gonna start scratching their heads and saying, why exactly?

Із май пай кос хир топ Ізраї. Take me later. You you see, this is what what Iran has seen. And that's why I say it's a it's a B plus A minus in terms of the coercive strategy. It's not perfect, but it's a it's a pretty strong approach. And there's no reason to think they're just gonna give up twenty percent of the world's oil because there's real geopolitical hate in it. It's somehow marked. I don't know how that happened either. But here we are. And I still have the same goals I had in January.

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But if you take I so if you take your point about Israel and the propaganda, well you look at what happened to Qatar. The gas field of Raslafan which produces around fifteen to twenty percent 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, are they? Oh, well let's talk about this. So first of all, that was in retaliation for Israel, right? Um and what happened here? The Qataris uh said their statement exactly is um we're mad, but just so you know everybody, we're not getting in this fight, we're gonna stay diplomatic.

Just so you know. So so they they reinforce neutrality here as a result of. Um uh even President Trump said he's not happy with what Israel did and it's And BB promised not to do it anymore, right? This was uh a retaliation for Israel striking Iran's gas facilities, which even President Trump didn't want to happen. That's right. And so that means President Trump can't end this war on his own.

He can pull out on his own. Yeah. But that's not gonna end the war because it's not gonna end Israel's um attacks, it's not gonna end uh Russia's uh uh intelligence to Iran, and it's not gonna end Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz. And therefore twenty percent of the 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 it's uh 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 where uh which loss are you it's pick your poison. Which loss do you want to take? And just to be clear, Bob, uh 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 the nuclear material. And that doesn't seem like a win. Of course there's all kinds of risks related to that. The other option is what we started talking about, which is you put Marines on Karg Island, you put marines on the coast of of of the Persian Gulf to try and control it. Can that work?

Uh y it's going to have that 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 gonna take the amphibious operations. This is saving private Ryan. So let's talk about that military dimension.

So um the principle here, because I know you have very smart audience here, is exposure. That's the key thing. And I'm sure you're used to risk exposure. So same thing with the military tax. 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 three-to-one 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 t there's no cover on the water, okay? Um, and um 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.

Um, there's um uh some of the shows I've been on here, the uh the the cliffs, the the actual terrain. Th this is 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. uh here. Um but for the attacker here, the the the uh side that has to actually take the territory, the exposure is at its max

Now we will absolutely have the best professionals in the world working this problem. I I I spoke to the Army War College about a week before this kicked off. I I I have military officers coming in their PhDs under me. I I really have nothing but the greatest respect for our military. Really. They're really quite good at what they do. That said, um, there's only so many, let's take Carg Island, for example. There's only so many ways you can approach Carg Island. Um

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 there if there's a possibility, I'm not saying there is for uh uh surprises here.

Uh 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. Uh, the transit time to go from like the Strait of Hormuz up to um Karg is gonna be, I don't know, somewhere between a dozen and twenty hours here for the uh amphibians those big sh and they're big hunks of metal.

Uh these are the things that uh you're gonna be able to eat mo the most easy uh targets to find are big hunks of metal in open water. Um so they're gonna 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 take and so I'm fully expecting we're gonna win. I'm not saying we won't take the ground. It's really a matter of the cost. And I and I don't can't give you a a number. We haven't done any amphibious landing like this in so long.

up against really a this kind of a determined enemy, it's it's gonna be very difficult to put numbers on this. I think this will be hard for General Kane, uh our joint chiefs. He he will be for he will be asked by President Trump, how many are gonna die?

And I think it's gonna be hard for him, not because he's he's gonna be uh, you know, uh sort of a dovish or not wanna give the numbers. It's just gonna be hard because he's gonna have to go back to, well, okay, when we did this in World War Two, I mean, where are you gonna go to find the good

actual deep analysis of this, 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 we'll take Hundreds of Marines as casualties, God forbid. Now what? 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.

So remember I've said air power alone has never toppled a regime. That's over a hundred years. Sometimes you put ground forces in, 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 tear on, 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 ten 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 and the British on shore here. Germany is in in real trouble. Same here with with Iran. So what's going to happen is uh they're likely to uh 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 gonna want to impose long-term damage here.

And they're not gonna be concerned that they would wanna use it for themselves because for them, they may be dead. I mean, as a regime in six months. So this isn't even an they're not even probably worrying about that. Once you go down this road. You are uh 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. uh here, which will have costs on us that'll that'll be damaging.

because when you destroy the infrastructure, these are special made uh pipelines, uh rigs, um In the 90s, where I really got into this was um when I was teaching for the Air Force and the uh the uh the leadership decapitation crowd um in the Air Force who who were my bosses. Okay, they're literally my bosses, the actual architects of all of this. So I know all their arguments really, really well. Um they really like the idea of uh electric power target.

So they brought in um people from the electric power industry to teach us how to take down electric power plants and grids and so forth and and um uh nothing classified. So there's nothing this was not a secret briefing or anything.

Um and um uh and so we uh and I had students uh here who wrote master's theses on how to destroy electric power plants that are still available that you could still say. 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 brownout, like when you overload the system when there's too much uh, you know, it's too hot and there's too many electric uh 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 hall. 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 designs.

There's not bunches of them laying around. So when you start to destroy that, and that's what's happening in Cutter. So what what happened in Cutter is they didn't just hit a little 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 uh 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 m. 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 stays that way for a month or two. Then you'll get a recession. And everybody say, 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 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 You just need to to have spent 30 years, you know, to to figure out how to take down economies and and what that looks like for real. And um uh and this is what this looks like.

Uh here. And this is also, by the way, not something that is you do when you're a pilot in the Air Force. You don't spend six months, a year, five years studying the enemy uh oil and gas grid and so forth. What happens is once you get in the crisis, you bring in, you know, people to give you advice and you try to do your best by staying up and pulling all nighters. Um so again, I'm I've spent month 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 put going to put us in the OPEC-73 territory. So that's why you see me really, really gennying up uh coming on your your show. I've been on uh I think uh 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 we're going to cross the next threshold, which will be. Which which will be much more difficult, I'm worried. And so I'm gonna do everything I can. to explain that here um because crossing this threshold I think is going to 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, 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 going to affect not only economies, it's gonna also affect politics right the way through the West.

It's gonna change how people vote. It's gonna change how people see particular leaders, how people see the right, the left. Now you see why the Europeans don't want to touch us with a ten-foot pole, because as these cops Start to accumulate in this way, if there part of the coalition causing it.

They then face being toppled by their own people because over because as if this goes down is in this in this trajectory here, those costs are gonna be by dynamics where we had 9% inflation, this is gonna be nothing. Okay, we're we're we're the we're we're we're and and it's gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna take President Trump at his word that he would never think about using never think about doing it. No, you're not gonna 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 uh again, D-Day, saving private Ryan, Normandy. Uh you know, June nineteen forty four leads to May nineteen forty five.

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 political spectrum who are looking at Israel and going, You started this, this is your fault. Do you agree with that? I think the blame game has already started. Because when uh

you know, a victory has a thousand fathers, uh, you know, uh defeat is an orphan. Well that's what you're seeing here. So everybody's now starting to try to tack to what they should, because they're seeing which where which direction this is going and and who are you gonna blame? Well, I I don't think you can easily blame the US military. I mean, there may be some people that'll try to do that, but I I don't see how you blame them. They've been like tactically

superb through this. They've saluted when the president has said jump, they said yes, sir, and uh 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 I don't see how you you say, well, they are the ones who wrecked the whole thing. Uh so I don't see how you blame them. So I think it's going to basically start to come down to uh Israel. And um uh uh President Trump.

And the Republicans w which have there's always been this this uh this division inside of MAGA. uh, you know, about half against foreign wars and the other half uh uh 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.

Uh I ex 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 I see that this stage is gonna go on for quite some time. And I think that's why the$200 billion request is coming through. They wanna put that request through now. Because if you cross this Rubicon, I'm not saying he's gonna do it, but I think it's seventy five percent 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 the real problems for the senators and the uh House members are going to uh face when they run for re-election in the midterm.

Um, and so you you already had a situation before this where there was a likely a blue, uh 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 case. 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 gonna and so I don't know what they will each make just like the Gulf State.

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 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 uh it'll all break in one way. I'm not saying they'll all break against Trump either. I it's gonna be probably seat by seat.

State by state, but it's not going to be the unified situation it is today. It's going to be this more fractured situation. Um and so I that 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 prom that 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 him out of the escalation trap.

Everybody realized by um end of sixty seven 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 spec there was a spectacular event called the Tet Offensive. The Tent Offensive was was at the end of January, 1968.

And what the V C did is they uh over a period of just a few days they did a parallel attack across multiple different uh 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 lost, 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 thirty some years. So coming back to the military side of it, uh 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 thing to do.

So what's what I think once you see these these terrible choices here, then you're you're quite right. Um Constantine, that that you're gonna wanna um uh take your losses now because you might be able to uh recover your presence. If you wait, then you're in Lyndon Johnson where it's unrecoverable. Your presidency's just gone. You're a lame duck with two years to go. But but so you're right. This is where I would I would advise uh

uh uh the West Wing uh here. Um but what I would say is that the price you're gonna have to pay, the politics price here is uh you it's not enough to just pull out. because then you're leaving this this behind. If you really want to um uh take option one, you're gonna have to cut a deal with Ron.

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 315 Eastern Time in the Oval Office with uh Whitkopf and Kushner, and we know this because this is what exactly what they said. Which is that Iran will not give up its its enrichment. It wants to keep its three point five percent and it's promising to meld together the sixty and twenty percent to three point.

And President Trump said just not good enough. Well, in order to cut a deal now with Iran, you're going to have to accept. Right away. Okay. So that's number one. Number two, you're gonna have to um probably accept the oil sanctions coming off. And given the price of oil is going up, notice uh that uh Besson is already talking about doing that. Okay. So they're already doing that. That that issue is already on the table.

Um but number three There's a very good chance that you're gonna have uh Iran will not n uh uh reopen the Straits here um 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, uh remember the 12-day war wasn't started by the United States bombing Fourdeaux. 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 Israel. So we need to understand that that uh I don't think we're in a situation anymore where you're gonna get a deal here without pressure on Israel. To do what? Uh I think the most likely thing, just to be very specific.

Is that um uh Trump would have to force Israel to sign the non-proliferation treaty. Uh the non-right now, um uh what Israel wants is uh Iran to have no nuclear weapons and to have all this uh on site inspection. Well, Israel has all these nuclear weapons and no onsite inspection because it's not part of the non-proliferation treaty. So I think that what um is likely gonna be the thing that will be discussed.

will be that um Trump will force Israel to sign the NPT, which means tit for tat on-site inspection. If there's on-site inspection in Fordell, there's on-site inspection in some of the nuclear sites in Israel. So think about that. So Israel would have to give up its nuclear weapons. At least No, no, no, no, no, no. It'd have to give it would have to say so just keep in mind, we are a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty and we still have nuclear weapons.

Here's the way that works, Constantine. This has been going on since nineteen seventy. 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 weapons. Just like everyone else. Just like every so so that part is not real. Right. 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's, it's not actually giving up its nuclear. It may say that, but it's not the reality. The reality is that there will then be tit for tat. Um and President Trump, this is gonna be a big political cost. I was gonna say, I mean, you started a war.

because you wouldn't do a deal that you now have to do a worse deal. Yep. That's a humiliation. I mean, you there's no two ways about it. That that is the politic that's what I'm saying. You pick your poison. So it's either that or what I also would like to 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 the Victor here, like Gladiator, where everybody's cheering, okay, for the new general.

That's not happening in this situation. And if if we keep waiting for that, then what it is is Lyndon Johnson. That's the these are the real choices, I think, in front of the president. And what I'm saying is you're you're absolutely right. But I'm this is why we have to put this bluntly out here, because people from your program will be listening to uh people in the West Wing will be listening and 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 uh now he can try to gussy it up and by the way president trump i do believe just to put something here about why uh he might be able to do this It's it's not just because of his relationship with Israel, but but President Trump is uh the best PR politician we've had, certainly at the equal of Obama, certainly the equal of Reagan.

Uh 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 re-elected. Okay, just think about this for a moment. That we have not seen, I think, this level of understanding the media. And how to the he understands the media better than the media understands the media uh here. So if there's somebody who can recover his presidency, even with all these liabilities. I believe it is President Trump.

Um he can sell this deal as an actual victory to at least his base. 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 that's gone. See, that's space. He needs space for the PR. This PR is not something he can jin up overnight. Let's talk about The because temperamentally I wonder, you know, your assessment of seventy five percent just from it just judging characters.

I imagine he would be quite tempted to go with the hard option, potentially. Well, sure,'cause he he he he he 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 um the ethnic cleansing in Gaza in September. Uh and um I was one of the people um 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 and Netanyahu may think.

But I didn't think it was in Israel's interest and I was on podcasts in this city uh Uh Norm Dorfman does the uh comedy seller here and so he he's I'm sorry I said the name. Uh Norm's now now now he's gonna get mad at me. No. Um but No, yeah, no, please no. Um but uh you can go and listen and and and he uh Uh he and I had a let's call it a feisty hour and a half discussion about this in August. And I kept saying, uh, that no what you're not seeing is I believe that in fact, um

Uh, President Trump himself may see the wisdom of going down this road. And uh I don't know if that it all you know, I'm not saying there was any uh connection here whatsoever. Um, but what I am saying is that I do think that um that the President Trump has uh ha he has the power and I think he he may well have the interest. He may see that what I'm saying here is is the best for a the country, the world, the region, and his own presidency.

Uh 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. Yep. 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, I imagine likely the other uh 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. So let me let me um uh to to give you your your you and the listeners some uh framework here. For the last thirty years, my scholarship has been about air power. economic sanctions, lots of books, you know, books on air books, not articles on sanctions, and suicide terror.

And we have not talked 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. Uh they had attacks a database who was attacking them that was 20% wrong, and I showed them and they fixed it. Um so the um uh 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 ninety five percent of all suicide attacks are not due to religion. There's a half of them at that point in two thousand one were by secular folks, the Tomil 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 twenty times. just to give you a sense. Many, many cases of this. Well, I um

Uh I knew Paul Wolfwoods, he was our deputy secretary of defense. I knew him from the nineties. I had other connections with the uh with the Pentagon. I gave Secretary Wolfwood. here, um, uh, the studies here. Um, 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, you know, possibly going down that road here.

Well, this is why I never went down that road. It's because um 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 of 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.

Uh they were not stopping the next nine eleven. They were assuring things like that would happen in the future. Came back. This is in um November 2002 from the uh and again, nothing classified here, but it was it's not been widely known. Um, from Andy Marshall, and some of the listeners here will know who that person is, highly credible uh conduit.

that um we're we're we're not gonna take Iraq off the table, Bob. Uh but what we are gonna do is pull our forces out of uh Saudi Arabia. That's how we opened IUD and 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 um 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 just as I was explaining here. And who started my center, the Chicago Project? Uh this was in February two thousand and four. I had uh the 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 CPOST, but I've morphed it to Chicago Project on Security and Threat. So to expand it a little bit, but I've kept C. It's so ironic, but it was the 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 were 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

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 once you go down these these roads, notice that no nobody's really gonna wanna wan wanna hire you because there you can't you you're I'm not a card carrying Democrat. I'm not a card carrying Republican.

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. So what are the escalation dynamics if President Trump's pursues the marine Again, the ground force risk. So the number one risk.

uh here to produce large amounts of anti-American terrorism. Uh and we've seen little bits now, but with nothing like could happen is going to be ground military presence and and especially the idea that it would lead to regime change. So so even if we try to take that off the table, the other side's not gonna believe that. And that also means the 92 million people in Iran aren't gonna believe that. Some will be hopeful, some will be opposed to that.

Uh here, that's gonna mean uh others in the region here. You're gonna see all all what we call the uh tentacles of Iran, you know, the all the groups that they're the the uh proxies, so to speak. Uh here, um, you're you're going to stir up a hornet's nest of terrorism, not on day one. It took about five months before it really got going here with uh uh and so we we can't meet 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 polymarket or whatever. All right. But the bottom line is we know the direction. It's like moving a super tanker. Uh, and it's, you know, five months, you know, seven, eight months down the road, you can expect a pretty good amount of um and this and this terrorism could be pretty serious. So just coming on this flight here, I didn't have to take my shoes off. Okay. Um we didn't do that on night after nine eleven until the first shoe bond.

You see. So so we're talking uh we're not talking about the the the shooting sprees of, you know, ten or fifteen people being killed. So if this goes down this road, the kind of indiscriminate terrorism we're talking about here, um uh we're we're talking about uh 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 that, who did those kinds of attacks here. ISIS was a group of just 30 or 40,000. Well, the uh Revolutionary Guards uh and also the Baji, that's a million. Okay, so already. Um 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 uh we don't even know, I think, how a a state as powerful as Iran would be able to use the internet and propaganda to inspire a

And that's why I think it will happen. I I I think mu there may be some sleeper cells and some command directed, 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 you can give them some ideas for how to prepare, but once ISIS started to explain, you should take some time and prep. This is 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. 8,000 suicide attacks one 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

Um the attacker in uh in Texas here on uh was quick, just right off the bat, killed two, wounded about another dozen here. Um, but that didn't that's not somebody who spent a week or two preparing. Okay, Crooks the guy who went after Trump here, he looks like he spent a week or two and look how much closer he got. uh here. Unfortunately he he he missed. Unfortunately Trump turned his head. But what I'm what I'm saying is that it's the preparation that's the issue.

And the longer the preparation of, you know, certainly two weeks here, if you have a two-week period of time, somebody's willing to put that much time in. 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. Just a very quick aside uh before Francis takes back over. Uh you said it uh it's not really about religion and it's about ground troops.

But why aren't Ukrainians blowing themselves up killing Russia? Because they don't need to. It's success. So there have been a couple of instances that that um 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 this. So the issue here is last resort.

So if it's all about religion, what should be happening is these all these Islamic groups, they should be uh I I kind of put it as uh looking for the first excuse to get the quick trick trip to heaven. So any old excuse, they should all be committing uh doing this, uh, that's not what you see as the patterns of these suicide campaigns. That's not what Hezbollah's pattern was. That's not what Hamas's pattern was.

So in my books, I glay out the pattern over time. That's what these big books are doing. They're studying the trajectories of the campaigns and also how they begin with non-suicide. And then they often begin with political protests, like the first inafada leads to which was which was more like throwing Molotov cocktails. That is the beginning of Hamas, not suicide.

So Hamas right off the bat is Islamic fundamentalists. So they want that all the stuff that you hear, they want the end of Israel. Well, that was all true in 1987 and the Charter. Their suicide attacks don't start till years later. And then it's not really going until you get to the second entifada, which is after 2000. So what you see here is that what it's uh what this what the trajectory of the terrorism is is the tactics get more desperate and more deadly.

uh over time. So Ukraine. Um they are uh they've held the Russians so uh except for the first like three days of the war. Okay, so go back to the first three days of the war. Th this is, by the way, the the smart bomb trap from the Russian side. They they fell into the escalation trap um uh and and it's uh very parallel to what's happened to us.

So stage one, they thought they had a quick and decisive victory strategy. Uh it's with air and ground power, so not just air power. Um, and um uh they get right to the uh airport in Kiev. Uh here, so right to the gates of Kiev so they got very, very close.

But the fact is they they don't have they couldn't get over the edge here. Um And then within just a few days and and I'm by the way, I said this to some some Congress folks who came literally right out of a briefing, a classified briefing, telling me that they had just been told the Kiev's gonna fall in three days, I said it's not gonna fall.

It's 90% like it. I'm not, but Bob, you haven't been in the briefing. I'm telling you, they've got too much wherewithal here. Um, and and so the bottom line is they 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 milit you know, 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 two thousand and two. You're talking about a handful of miles. Twenty two. Twenty two. Yeah. Yeah. Oh I'm sorry. Yeah. Twenty two. I've yeah, thank you. Uh since June two thousand twenty two.

uh three and a half years plus here, barely any movement of the line of contact. So why would Ukraine do so? And what they had is they've come up with other ideas like drones. You know, and you've got um uh uh donors, some of them from Chicago. Um uh Jennifer Pritzker is one, um, uh who has given all this money to you the Ukrainians to build these drone factories. And uh the drones are are really making it uh difficult for

uh 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. Uh this isn't this would make it's not, it's a s 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 conversation.

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? I I call it the illusion of precision control, Francis. So I've been in the rooms when very, very senior, super smart people. um and there's no cameras on, uh are getting these briefings about what air power can hit and from people with stars uh 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 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. immediately the mind goes to that because the briefer is explaining and and again these can be

many stars, generals, um, that the bombs will hit within, you know, five to fifteen feet. They'll talk about them 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 decapitations idea really.

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 I don't think it's any deeper than that. which is the illusion of control of the escalation after that. Because if I can have this exquisite opening, it's like a chess game where I have the exquisite opening in chess. It 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 and 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 um uh uh in chess, you can study end games, but you can't really think about what end game strategy to have until you get through the middle. You see, so strategy here with the smart bombs, I I call this in with the smart bombs in particular a smart bomb trap.

Because what happens is it's like an opening in chest. 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 m the middle game. You can control the escalation from that point on. And even if the the the briefer here and and and I I've no reason to think General Kane would not have been uh cautioning President Trump.

uh starts to give caution about what might don't don't overread that opening, sir, and, you know, there's the middle game. Even if they do that, the the seeing that And and seeing it so close and believing it's true. here. Um, I think it creates the illusion of control. And that's why I think you've seen this with uh when President Reagan dropped bombs to assassinate Qaddafi in April nineteen eighty six. Um we the bombs hit their that was the very first precision uh decapitation campaign.

Uh we uh hit his tent, uh uh 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. Um, and uh but two years later he brought down Pan Am Flight 103, killed 271 uh civilians, 190 Americans as his retaliation. Um

President Clinton, let me pick a Democrat, uh, March 1999. President Clinton wants to negotiate for the pro-democracy movement in Kosovo. Um, and he wants to tilt the talk and the dove balance in the Serbian government, who's the on the other side. So uh he launches a a three-day, what was supposed to be a three-day air campaign, uh hitting 51 targets in and around Belgrade uh in order to shift the hawks and doves, shake, if not degrade, if not topple the Milosevic uh regime.

Um 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. uh from the country. That's fifty percent of all the civilians from that province. Um and we had to fight seventy-eight days and put a ground army there to

We didn't we 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 um uh it was a disaster that we only pulled out at the end by putting in the ground. So um this is what we're up against with the smart bomb trap. Now I talked to on the NSC.

um uh 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 Um the 400-page briefing, this was in um a year later, because I interviewed Adasari, the president of film, I I spent a lot of time studying these, not just kind of casual.

Um and so uh he he showed me the briefing of still marked top secret. Well he wrote it so he could show somebody didn't have a clearance. Um and he he s he just said to me, said Bob, uh I 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.

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. If we agree I don't know if we agree, but I imagine we agree that Iran shouldn't get nuclear weapons. Yeah. What should President Trump Uh he should have gone back to um the JCPOA, the Obama deal, um, because if you can push this problem off 10, 15, 20 years. Uh it's not the best. It's still a problem deal, but it is

uh that deal. What one once President Trump broke the deal and withdrew, we saw that Iran put pedal to the metal and it took years, not just a month, a day or two. It took years before it could start to really rebuild its um enrichment program. So the deal actually with all its warts was actually a good deal. And it also provided twenty four seven camera level inspection of everything.

uh here and I think this is what he should have done. He should have um uh 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 uh he'd find a way to say it's better than Obama's deal and and people a lot of people just believe him. 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 if we we effectively cannot use air power or indeed ground power for the reasons you've articulated to deal with the nuclear threat. Wouldn't it be perfectly logical for them to pursue nuclear weapons irrespective of any deal that we do? Well, now we're teaching them. very strongly that they they must have nuclear weapons. Um, I think that's why the I I want to come back to what I said is the offset with uh Israel.

So if you can offer Iran um the possibility that Israel will be contained, containing Israel. That's worth quite a bit. That's worth quite a bit. Um, 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 so you are if I was advising Iran. uh here, I would say if you can get the containment of Israel, you take it. And what does that mean?

Okay, you keep your three point five enriched uranium, but you open yourself back up to the IEEA. You open yourself up to twenty-four-seven inspection. You're gonna get some tit for tat, where you're gonna get some inspection of Israel now too. So this is not just you who's up uh for this, but this what I would say is if you want to maximize your survival. here and you're 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. JD 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 um there's no way that Iran can really be sure we're not gonna come at them with some multi division uh

uh attack down the road and that they'll be able to offset that. So I would still say that the bottom line here is um containing Israel for Iran That that's something I think they would be foolish to give that up, to surrender that, because this is an uncertain world.

Professor Robert Pape, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys. Man, great questions. Thank you so much. 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? Uh we we still haven't talked as much as we should have about the enriched uranium that's floating now, dispersing. Uh 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 um that dispersed uranium finding its way into bad things happening here. So so I I see a lot of bad things. possibilities here that get worse. That's why I've been putting out images on X of the funnel getting worse here over time.

Um and I and I think that uh uh I'm hoping we won't have to have those Sunday briefings where I go through those in hours. I'm hoping we can talk we can stop it here. That's us. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. Appreciate it. Relax, relax. This is not an ad. We know ads are incredibly annoying and that's why I wanted to let you know that you can watch this video.

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