Robert Pape: The Most Dangerous Stage Begins Now @DOAC (Transcript)

It’s undamaged, and then they can carry on their process.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right. And Steven, they might even anticipate the bombs coming because they might get some indications, we’re building up, and then disperse in advance.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And at the end of last year, they did Operation Midnight Hammer where they bombed the sites. With these incredible—

ROBERT PAPE: Exactly as we did in class. Literally, I had just modeled it for the students 3 weeks before and almost exactly the platforms. The B-2s, the MOAB. Every single thing we talked about unfolded just as we had modeled in class.

What Is Really Going On Now?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is going on now? I want you to help me cut through all of this noise and all of this propaganda.

ROBERT PAPE: What’s going on now is we’re not weakening Iran in a sense where Iran will be weaker a year from now, 2 years from now. We have strengthened Iran and we’re strengthening Iran in multiple ways. So far, we’ve just been talking about bombs on target.

My real specialty, Steven, is the interaction of military action and politics. You are not just hitting an industrial target. People in the country, the population, the regime, they’re reacting to that politically. And that reaction is tremendously important. And that’s what I discovered in my work studying Vietnam in the 1980s, why the bombing campaign was failing. The political reactions by the population often are overwhelming the tactical military effects.

So you can hit the target, you can destroy the industrial facilities, and in fact, you can energize the population to work even harder to overcome all that damage. And sometimes they have tremendous geographic advantages. In Vietnam, there was an area called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was where the logistics, where the ammo for the Viet Cong guerrilla fighters in the south were getting their ammo. And in the 1960s, we knocked out 80-plus percent of the throughput of that pipeline, of that trail.

You know what? It wasn’t enough. And we ended up not being able to stop that little itty-bitty bit of throughput that still could get through and incentivize even more to get it through because they knew we couldn’t stop it. And that is what fueled the Viet Cong, the guerrillas that we were really up against in Vietnam. That is what ultimately bolstered their morale. They knew we couldn’t beat them, even though we whittled them down by 80%. We couldn’t get that last 15 or 20%, and that was what was energizing their morale.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how does that apply to what’s going on now? In simple terms, what’s going on?

ROBERT PAPE: Iran has figured out that we can’t beat them. That’s what’s going on, Steven. They are figuring out that we can’t beat them. We can bomb them, we can attack them. We could even threaten to murder all 92 million of them, which is the civilization threat by President Trump. And the bottom line is that we can’t get to that final 10, 20% of drones and missiles that Iran has. And it’s probably bigger than that that we can’t knock out.

We’re able to knock out anything that’s above ground. If there’s a launcher and it’s above ground, we can see it. We can see it with satellites. We can see it with other sensors as well. That thing is going to be gone in a few days. And that’s what the air campaign that you’ve watched for 40 days is doing. When Secretary Hagel or General Cain talk about hitting 11,000, 12,000 targets, these are targets, most of them, almost all of them, that are very clearly visible and above ground. This is true of the Navy ships as well.

Guess what? The Iranians knew that was always going to be vulnerable. So what they’ve been doing is they have been not just deeply burying their industrial enrichment facilities, they’ve been deeply burying their arsenals of drones, deeply burying their arsenals of missiles. And so they are in a position where even though we are unleashing enormous amounts of air power against them and we are technically superior, we can’t stop their drone attacks against the ships in the Strait of Hormuz. They know it. They can use that to their advantage. And boy, are they using it to their advantage enormously.

The Question of Centralized Leadership in Iran

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yesterday, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, did a press conference, and one of the reporters said to him, there’s been a ceasefire announced, but it appears that Iran is still attacking neighboring countries. Hegseth’s response to the reporter was, “Iran would be wise to find a way to get their carrier pigeon to the troops out in remote locations to let them know not to shoot any longer. It can sometimes take time for ceasefires to take hold,” which was really alarming to me because it suggests that there is actually not a centralized leadership structure in Iran. And actually, if there’s not a centralized leadership structure, how does one negotiate a ceasefire if there’s lots of different factions doing lots of different things? Now, is that true?

ROBERT PAPE: I would say it’s probably decentralized. I think he’s probably right about that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m trying to figure out who in Iran is negotiating with America and why it doesn’t seem to be the case that whoever’s negotiating controls the fact that people are still firing drones.

ROBERT PAPE: Decentralization means chaotic and they can’t actually make decisions. That’s just not the case. The more you move up the chain of command, the more the leader can give pre-delegated orders. “If X happens, do Y.” Those can hold for hours and days. And that’s true in every organization. That’s why leaders can go on vacation for a week and come back, and they’re worried, of course, when they come back. But the bottom line is that the leaders are setting the strategic direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who is the leader?

ROBERT PAPE: It’s definitely the Supreme Leader, the son of the one we just killed. Without a doubt. I think this idea that he’s not there, there’s absolutely no evidence of that. Yes, it’s decentralized in the sense it’s hard to find them, to target them. But I think the reason that we’re trying to talk smack about the Supreme Leader — is he alive, is he dead — is we’re trying to goad him into revealing his location so we can kill him. But that’s not working.

And it’s also not stopping Iran from putting out 10 points to Pakistan in the negotiations. It’s not stopping Iran from having messages that go through Pakistan to the White House. President Trump is then agreeing to the 10 points that are coming from Iran. And then later on, of course, President Trump is taking it back. But the bottom line is what you’re seeing in terms of chaotic decision-making — far more chaotic decision-making is happening in the White House in the United States than is happening in the government of Iran. They’re a rising power in the region as our power is declining precipitously.

What Happens Next: The Fork in the Road

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think happens next?

ROBERT PAPE: We are at a fork in the road. When I was here last time, I was walking you through the three stages of the escalation trap, and you kept pushing me, “Tell me more, tell me more.” I was a little bit reluctant to do that. Well, there is a stage 4.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone that didn’t hear that episode, could you give us a one sentence on stage 1?

The Three Stages of Escalation

ROBERT PAPE: Yes. Stage 1 is America bombs, does leadership change bombing. We hit targets, kill leaders, but the regime actually evolves and is stronger than before. Stage 2 is that then stronger regime lashes back with horizontal escalation, and takes the Strait of Hormuz, at least initially takes the Strait of Hormuz. And then Stage 3 is that’s the ground option to start to take the Strait of Hormuz back. And that’s exactly what you saw play out in the first several weeks of the war.

Stage 3 was about the Marines. The Marines hadn’t even moved yet. And I’m telling you, the Marines are likely going to move. There’s going to be movement to ground options in Stage 3, here very rapidly in this war.

At that point in time, when we had our first discussion, you wanted to push for the future. I said, no, we need to wait. And the reason, Stephen, is because what you’re not seeing with me is throwing random darts at the future. I’m doing risk assessment out about as far as you can have stable predictions. And in war, that usually means 2, 3, 4 weeks. It doesn’t mean we can say where we’ll be a year from now.

Here though, now that we’re in 40 days, we’re at a different point. We’ve clearly passed Stage 1. We’re past Stage 2 where they control the Strait of Hormuz. We’ve bellied up to Stage 3, the ground operations. Now we’re at a branch, a fork in the road. There’s no way to go back to February ’27, which is the pre-war period that many people would love to go back to. I too would like to go back to February 27th. That’s not the future.

What happens at this point on in the modeling is a branch. Either we go through with the ground war, or Iran becomes an emerging — not right away — fourth center of world power. That is the branch that we face. Now this branch is becoming more evident hour by hour.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Explain that to me.

Iran’s Growing Geopolitical Power

ROBERT PAPE: So everybody now knows that Iran is controlling the Strait of Hormuz and controlling shipping. That’s selective blockade. I’m taking it a step further. That’s not just about insurance rates of shipping. That’s generating political power for Iran to get other states to kowtow to it, to accept its objectives.

What are those objectives? So let’s talk about how this affects, say, Asia. The shipping that goes through the Strait of Hormuz, 80 to 90% of it is going right to Asia. The power that comes with that is with, say, India. India is not siding with the United States. India is at best neutral and maybe even a little bit more edging toward Iran. Well, before this, you could imagine that the United States and India would be much more cooperative here. That’s not what’s occurring. And why is that? It’s because that oil that’s going into Asia for India — this isn’t just about the price of oil. This is about the supply of oil. When you lose literally all the supply, that is a greater cost than simply having to pay more for it. So India is in a much more difficult situation than Europe and the United States right now.

Now look at Japan. Notice in the Oval Office, President Trump brought in the leader, the head of state of Japan, and basically browbeat her. And she still wouldn’t budge. She still would not kowtow to Trump and actually provide military support. What did she do? She’s distancing herself from the United States. That’s exactly what Iran wants out of America’s Asian allies. This is geopolitical power, and it’s rooted in the control of Hormuz. It’s rooted in the selective military blockade. That selective military blockade produces vulnerability to India, vulnerability to Japan. And that is what we call the leverage — but the leverage is not enough of a, I think, a full description. This is reorienting America’s allies in Asia.

Now let’s talk about what’s happening in the Persian Gulf itself. Before the war, February 27th, there was essentially a balance in the Persian Gulf where you had Iran on one side, and you had this growing collection of Gulf states that were part of an emerging web. They’re cooperating with Israel more and more on different issues. President Trump is bringing in his AI billionaires to sort of grease this cooperation so that there’s some material benefits. Well, that was effectively a counterbalancing coalition to Iran.

Now what’s happened after 40 days is this is breaking down fast. America has military bases in Qatar, has military bases in Bahrain, has military bases in Kuwait — I’m just picking a few — and a military base, of course, in Saudi Arabia. These military bases are producing little leverage here against Iran. In fact, our aircraft carriers are not anywhere near the Persian Gulf. They’re 1,000 miles away. These bases are big fat targets. They are above ground. Iran’s precision drones can hit things above ground, and they’re doing it on those bases. That was their immediate retaliation.

What’s happening, number one, is the anchor — the military anchor of this coalition — started to disappear within hours of the bombing on February 28th.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by the military anchor?

The Collapse of the Gulf Coalition

ROBERT PAPE: In order to have this coalition work — which includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait — somebody has to be the guarantor of protection. It’s like the mob boss who protects everybody else. That is the United States. And that is what our military bases were supposed to do. They become the military anchor that allows then for there to become political counterbalancing against Iran. That was the Kushner idea in the first Trump administration. And it seemed to work, and it seemed to bring some of these states together who wouldn’t necessarily think you would cooperate with Israel.

Well, this war has torpedoed this whole idea. President Trump is not even willing to do much to actually defend our own bases, much less Saudi Arabia, much less UAE. What he’s telling them is, “You go out there and start defending yourself.” Well, that’s not a guarantor of security.

The next thing that’s happening is these states, which were operating more in concert, are starting to break down and operate in three pools. You have Iraq, which is now complaining more and more about U.S. military presence there. They’re distancing themselves from American military presence. And remember, we installed that government in 2003, so they’re not siding with us — they’re distancing themselves from us.

Then you have Qatar and you have Oman. What Iran’s doing is saying, “We should share some of these tolls with Oman.” They’re moving Oman into their camp. So you have Iraq moving closer to Iran, Oman moving closer. Qatar is trying to keep its head down as much as possible. They’re not trying to get their nose in this anymore.

And what’s the third pool? The third pool is Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These are the states that are most under threat. And what has Saudi Arabia done just in the last week? They’ve gone to cooperate more with Pakistan. They have a security deal with Pakistan. What does that mean? They’re looking to Pakistan as much, or maybe even more than, the United States as their guarantor of security. So all of this coalition — it’s not all siding with Iran right now. It’s fragmenting, and that’s weakening America.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what happens next?

The Risk of a Rising Iran-Russia-China Axis

ROBERT PAPE: As President Trump wants to do — call the war off — that’s not going to put us back to February 27th. Iran has 20% of the world’s oil. It’s going to be able to have $75 billion, $100 billion of revenues here over the next year. And also those deeply buried caves and tunnels where they have their drones — that can be used to fashion nuclear weapons. Within a year, Iran could have nuclear weapons and we can’t stop it.

So if we pull back, you can start to see that Iran’s power is going to grow internally. And even more than that, its relationships with Russia, its relationships with China will start to move closer together against America. And you see this happening from almost the first several days of the war. Russia almost immediately offered Iran military targeting information to target U.S. ships. That’s why our carriers are so far away. It’s because Russia has the ability to see those carriers, tell Iran where they are, and if those carriers get too close, they’re going to be smashed.

But it can get worse than that, Stephen, because as this power grows over time, as these incentives for China, Russia, and Iran to cooperate against America grow over time — Iran has control now of 20% of the world’s oil, Russia has 11% of the world’s. That means there can be either formal or tacit cooperation to take 30% of the world’s oil off the global market, let China soak up a whole lot of that, and that can truly produce mega economic consequences for America, for Europe.

And why are they not going to do that? They’re nice guys? Is that really what we’re counting on now? Russia, Putin is not going to want to wreck America’s economy because he has a bond with Donald Trump?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think the fundamental flawed assumption was at the start of all of this from the United States?

ROBERT PAPE: That Iran was weak, on its last legs, and all we had to do was push it over the edge of a cliff. And it was just a matter of just one more push.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then the people would rise up and—

Underestimating Iran

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, we have painted a picture of Iran as beaten down, as the reason it’s not retaliating very much is they have no capability to retaliate. And I tell you this, Stephen — I’ve been in big debates here at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where I’ve literally been the only person on the stage to stand up and warn that this picture of Iran is way too negative.

There was a widespread, I think, false assumption across the foreign policy community — no one willing to really stand up and challenge it very strongly — that Iran was basically collapsing on its own. This was always, in my view, underestimating the power of Iran. And you say, well, where does my view come from? It came from the modeling of the bombing. What would happen as this went forward? And none of these elements of Iran’s power were ever knocked out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I looked through the response to the last conversation, the audience had lots of different types of questions. So I’m going to try and represent some of the audience’s questions to try and bring them into the conversation. One of them was about Israel’s role in this, and I thought it might actually link to what you just said about where we get our intelligence from that informs the decisions we make, because there are some people that are skeptical that the intelligence is coming from Israel and that therefore it might not be as accurate as if it was coming from our own sources.

Israel as Diplomatic Spoiler

ROBERT PAPE: I would say Israel has been playing the role of diplomatic spoiler. So in the 12-day war, last June, when the U.S. bombed Fordow — we’ve been focusing on that — that happened in the middle of the 12-day war. Donald Trump said he was going to negotiate with a certain set of Iranians. And literally the next day, 36 hours later, Israeli air power killed them — killed the negotiators we were set to negotiate with. This was totally spoiling the idea of a diplomatic outcome because they were dead. So you couldn’t have a negotiated outcome.

Now, if we come to February 28th — who dropped the first bombs that killed the Supreme Leader, that killed those other several dozen doves that he was meeting with? Donald Trump, as many of our governments have, describes that you had a balance of hawks and doves inside of the Iranian government. And the idea with leadership decapitation is, well, if you kill the hawks, then the doves will just be the ones left. We did the opposite.

Or more correctly, the bombing was started by Israel on February 28th. We came in behind. And in fact, Secretary Rubio — our Secretary of State — explained a few days later that Israel basically backed us into a corner, because Israel said, “We’re going to kill that Supreme Leader whether you like it or not. And that is going to maybe lead to attacks on your military bases. So you better prepare an air campaign to come behind.”

And Rubio said that’s what happened, because again, just before the February 28th bombing, we’re negotiating with Iran — and we’re killing the very people that Trump wanted to negotiate with, the ones who were going to help move Iran closer to the American position. That was Israel as spoiler.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So there’s this individual called Ali Larijani, the former secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and he was killed in an Israeli-led airstrike on March 17th, 2026. Trump claimed on Truth Social that Larijani was the primary contact for a 10-point peace proposal that Trump had called “workable, and a basis for a real agreement.” Trump suggested that the strike was poorly timed when Israel killed him, and complained that Israel’s lone wolf actions were complicating his ability to wrap up the war on his own terms. He famously posted that he was “inches away from the biggest deal in history” before the assassination reset the clock.

Israel as Diplomatic Spoiler and the Path to Stage 3

ROBERT PAPE: So this would be the third instance then of Israel as diplomatic spoiler. What you’re hearing from Trump’s own mouth is he thought he was close to a working relationship, maybe not a full deal, with a certain set of individuals, in this case Oajani. And what did Israel do when they found out about it? They killed that person. And yes, I understand there’s issues of intelligence, but most of us don’t have a clearance, so we can’t talk about that.

So let’s talk about the actual public description that we’ve heard from Prime Minister Netanyahu over the last several years. The public description is that Iran is simply a paper tiger, that Israel has been dominating Iran, knocking out its air defenses, launching other attacks here in 2024. The rhetoric that’s coming publicly has been painting the picture of Iran as a weak— and not just weakened, but basically crippled. It’s down on its last legs. And all you need is a final coup de grâce. That has been Prime Minister Netanyahu’s language.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing that the audience wanted to know is they wanted more specifics on stage 3.

ROBERT PAPE: Yes. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is stage 3 happening? We talked last time about ground troops.

Stage 3: Ground Power and the Routes Into Iran

ROBERT PAPE: It’s very important. And I’ve been saying this on the Substack and my X — follow the key indicators here of deployment, not just what’s occurring with the rhetoric of our leaders. And the key thing to know is that if you’re going to weaken Iran with ground power, there’s only a few ways you can get that ground power into Iran.

You could try to come through Pakistan, but Pakistan actually is Iran’s ally who gave Iran the 600 centrifuges in 2002 to start developing its enrichment program. And Pakistan has 100 nuclear weapons or so, so I don’t think we’re doing this here. You could try to do it with Afghanistan, but notice you’d have to get all the troops in Afghanistan. That’s not working.

You could also go to Azerbaijan. That’s up there. Notice on the first day of the war, there was a missile that hit Azerbaijan, and people on CNN weren’t sure — what’s going on here? It’s just a random— in fact, I think our public statement on that day was, “This shows how incoherent the Iran leadership is.” That’s not what I saw. What I saw is they understood that Azerbaijan was always thought to be a staging area to go to Tehran. And so if you’re going to take Tehran with a division or two, you would really want to have your forces start here from Azerbaijan.

Now, so far though, that’s not happening. Azerbaijan said, “Nope, don’t count on us, we’re not getting in the middle of this.” Now we’re back to why would you start to think about Marines to take territory here on the coasts inside Iran, where the Strait of Hormuz is. That’s the beginning of it. You would start there, around inside Iran, around the Strait of Hormuz as a beachhead.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s some photos which I’ll throw up on the screen showing what the terrain around the Strait of Hormuz looks like. And it is quite shocking.

ROBERT PAPE: It’s a moonscape. And what you can see is that this is the most difficult terrain for amphibious operations to operate in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is amphibious operations?

ROBERT PAPE: Where you have troops that are on ships, on landing vessels, just like Saving Private Ryan — they go from the water onto the beach. You would also then have some air power with some Ospreys, but they’re doing essentially the same thing. They’re coming onto the same beach.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s an Osprey?

ROBERT PAPE: An Osprey is a special-made plane that we’ve made for the Marines, and it’s a plane that is a hybrid between a helicopter and a jet. The propellers on the plane are able to rotate. So they can fly as a propeller plane here, or a cheap man’s jet, or they can actually hover like a helicopter. And that’s really great if you want to fly fast to a beach and then go straight down.

Boots on the Ground and Iran’s Oil Fields

STEVEN BARTLETT: So are you saying that you think they will put boots on the ground in the Strait of Hormuz?

ROBERT PAPE: Let me just fill out this a little bit more. The other big thing that folks need to know is where is Iran’s oil. Here I’m drawing a circle — Iran’s oil is all in this southwestern part, almost all of it is in the southwestern part of Iran. Kuwait’s oil is all right here. Iraq has a couple puddles of oil. It has a big puddle of oil right here. Saudi’s oil is all right here.

You might try to land forces, a division here in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, and come around this way. This is why knocking out these bases as truly platforms here — this was why they, I think, started on day one. This wasn’t just to hit the bases in retaliation. They are weakening our ability. They’re taking away different axes of attack. And this is why in the Substack, I published 3 days before the war, I’m specifically talking about Marines moving in limited areas to take coastal regions as beachheads.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s a beachhead?

ROBERT PAPE: A beachhead is where you have a foothold, a toehold, where you’re going to funnel in more forces after that. And you are going to very likely want to control an area that’s at least about 100 miles by 20 miles in order to get behind all this mountainous terrain.

And what does that look like? The oil fields, Stephen. This is what President Trump is almost surely talking about when he says he’s going to take Iran’s oil fields. What he is probably being given options for is how you could start in a limited way with an amphibious, a Marine, a limited assault to take a small stretch of coast. And then you would want to follow and take — if you’re going to start this at all, you’re almost surely going to want to just start to take the oil fields. And President Trump’s been talking that way for years, really.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He also said in a recent interview that if it was up to him, he would go and take the oil. But he said the American people won’t like that. And he said it once and then he said it again and then he said it again. This was during a press conference on Monday, April 6th. He said, “If it were up to me, I would take the oil. I would keep it all for ourselves and make a lot of money because to the victor belong the spoils. But people in the country sort of say, just win and come home. And I’m okay with that too.”

And he said that from the interview that I was watching twice, which made me think that he really wants to go take the oil. But if he does put troops on the ground in Iran, it just creates a clearer target for those drone strikes.

The Political Consequences of American Casualties

ROBERT PAPE: It creates a clear target for those drone strikes. But what people maybe are not fully understanding is the political consequences of the deaths of those Marines.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

ROBERT PAPE: Most people are assuming if those Marines go in and die, this will make America run away. It’ll be like a punch in the face and we’ll run away. That’s not likely to be what happens. Again, this is my area — what happens when you have military force and politics come together.

You need to understand that when those Marines go in and say hundreds die or so over time, there will be 36% of the public that will have supported that. That 36% is going to see those Marines died for them. That 36% is likely to double down in their commitment because otherwise they realize they died for nothing.

Now, the 59% — excuse me — who’s opposed to the war, they’ll still be pretty hotly opposed to the war. I’m not saying they’re going to move toward the war, Stephen. What I’m saying is you have a Republican president supported by 36% of the Republicans here, almost no Democrats. If you start to actually have deaths here, this is going to lead to a bigger version of “we can’t withdraw now. We must finish the job, otherwise they will have died for nothing.”

This is what happened in Vietnam. In Vietnam, in the early stages, you will see that the support for the war is sticky up. It takes a while to go down. And why does it take so long to go down? It’s because of exactly what I’m saying. The politics of the death of our troops in battle does not lead to “we cut and run.” It leads to “we double down for the honor of the troops.”

That’s why I’m saying we start this even in a small way — even Kharkiv, it doesn’t really matter where you start it. But once you have those ground forces go in and they start to take casualties, you’re probably in for a 6-month ground war minimum.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it looks like they’re going to try and avoid that outcome. It looks like they’re doing everything in their power — America — to avoid a scenario where they have to send troops in. The threats that have come out of Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts really talk about — I mean, look, I’ll read this one here. It says, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t know what will happen, but it probably will.” And a lot of the tweets are—

Trump’s Threat to End a Civilization: Genocidal Intent and Nuclear Power

ROBERT PAPE: Can we just focus on that one? Yeah, the civilization, because it’s much — that was a few days ago. A lot of people are already trying to move past it. This has much more importance and endurance than I think we’re understanding now.

First of all, that statement that President Trump said — that he will end an entire civilization in one night — we need to understand this is not a drunk at a bar. This is the President of the United States who has at his disposal thousands of nuclear weapons that could in fact achieve that. And let me just explain how much bigger these are. We have 500 Minutemen III missiles. They have warheads between 100 kilotons and 300 kilotons, which is multiple times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each one of them. And they can be retargeted within 45 minutes. That’s what it takes to retarget the gyroscopes. And then it takes about 25 minutes for them to hit Iran.

So when the President of the United States is saying this, he’s only one of a handful of people in the world who could actually make this credible.

Second point is that is the most declared statement of genocidal intent we’ve ever seen from an American president. No American president has threatened to end a civilization before, which is at the heart of the genocide treaties in 1948 — the intent to commit genocide. Harry Truman — people say, “What do you mean? We had Harry Truman, we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Go and look at his statement on Hiroshima. Truman did not say he was ending Japan as a civilization. He pulled back and said it was about to destroy Japan’s military power.

What President Trump has done by making those statements is he’s persuading all 92 million Iranians that he is willing to kill them, and he has the power to kill them. And yes, he pulled back from killing them on Tuesday, and yes, he may not have used nuclear weapons on Tuesday. But if any other leader had said that — if imagine Vladimir Putin stands up and says he’s going to end American civilization tonight, he’s got the weapons to be able to do that — are we just going to sit back and say, “Oh yeah, he didn’t do it, he must not have meant it?” No, that would mobilize enormous anger against Vladimir Putin in the United States, even among Democrats.

The Collapse of Iran’s Pro-Democracy Movement

And my point here, Stephen, is before this war started, we had a real pro-democracy movement in Iran. And on your show, I told you this was going to fade. This was one of the predictions I made to you. I said this is going to fade over time. You’re going to see nationalism bonding the society and the regime closer together.

President Trump is bonding them together like never before. If you’re one of the pro-democracy individuals in the movement in Iran, where are you going to go for protection? Are you going to go to Donald Trump, who’s threatening to kill you with essentially nuclear weapons, or are you going to go to your own government? This is going to hasten the support, increase the support for Iran developing nuclear weapons. The pro-democracy movement is now likely to support this.

The Human Cost: Iran’s 90 Million People

STEVEN BARTLETT: On that point, one of the questions and one of the points raised by the audience last time we had the conversation was really we didn’t spend enough time talking about the 90+ million people that live in Iran that are often, many of them, caught amongst all of this absolute chaos.

And I was looking at a bunch of messages from people that are living in Iran. I’ll read some of them from ordinary citizens. “I’m not great at math, but where will the money, the resources, and the experts come from to build a country that ordinary people spent decades trying to build? Rebuild.”

From a different person: “From the beginning of the war until today, we have been bombarded. Not only are we not one step closer to freedom, from what I can see, we are miles away from it.”

From another person in Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. This has deeply terrified me.”

It raises really the question, a lot of this discourse doesn’t speak much to 90-plus million people that are living there and that are having to exist under this terror. And the best way that I could conceptualize it is I imagined if I’d woken up one day and Vladimir Putin or some other leader around the world had said that they were potentially going to end the civilization that I live in, the country that I live in, tonight, how would I be feeling? And if I was hearing bombs go off all the time, how would I be feeling? And if things were escalating where me and my family lived, how would I be feeling? And it is chilling to think about.

ROBERT PAPE: It is truly chilling because this is now moving the needle inside of Iran to make the ordinary person on the street, even the pro-democracy movement, willing to tolerate Iran killing Americans because we’re killing them. And we’re saying we’re going to do it even worse. And we’re even beyond that. We’re saying at the whim of a president who wakes up thinking maybe this will help save his presidency, he is willing to kill the entire civilization of a country because he thinks maybe this is going to be his golden off-ramp to get out of this problem for himself personally.

And by the way, in our country, when Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, there was tremendous fear there would be more attacks by Al-Qaeda in the weeks afterwards. There was just so much fear. And I’ve done the studies of the American public opinion on this. It’s the fear of Muslims killing Americans that’s driving the support for the Iraq War. If this is happening to Americans, you can only imagine what’s going to happen to the ordinary Iranians. And they’ve been subjected not to just one attack, but 40 days of attack.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So for the average Iranian person that opposes the regime in Iran and has been living under terror and oppression for many, many decades, what do you think happens next for them? They’re the group of people that I think about and care about the most in this equation. We spend a lot of time talking about U.S. power and we talk about lots of these other regional partners, but there’s like 90-odd million people stuck right in the heart of this that often don’t really have a voice.

The Devastating Impact on Infrastructure and Life Expectancy

ROBERT PAPE: Their life expectancy will go down in measurable years. So if we had taken out the electric power — this is something I know quite a bit about. In the 1990s, I was working for the Air Force. Literally under my boss was John Warden, the leader of the Leadership Decapitation School. And he brought in — not classified at all — he brought in engineers of electric power plants to teach us how to take down electric power.

The electric power grid in Iran, it looks like a network. And that network has big nodes. That’s what President Trump said. He’s going to take out the big power plants that produce in the tens, 20, 30 megawatts range. And there are probably about 130 nodes altogether. But if you just take out the top 10, you’re probably going to take down the entire network because the top 10 nodes are distributed in the right places to support electric power in different regions of the country.

You have two choices in a targeting sense. You can take out the transformers, in which case you knock it out for a week or two, and it is inconvenient. And yes, there will be some people who will die. There were human chains around those targets, by the way. Those people would die. But if you took out the hulls, the generating hulls —

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

ROBERT PAPE: That’s the giant turbines that are huge. There is no backup to those. Each of those is specially made. You will be knocking out that generation for 6 months, 12 months, maybe 18 months at a minimum.

What that’s going to do is stop all dialysis in the country. That’s going to stop all heart surgeries and other life-saving surgeries. It’s going to take out all the food refrigeration in the country. When power goes out in your house and goes out for 10 minutes or an hour, it’s not so bad. You don’t really notice it. But when it goes out for 2 days or 3 days or a week, all the food in your refrigerator spoils and you can’t eat it fast enough. You can’t give it away fast enough because it’s happening to everybody on your block.

Well, that’s what would happen across the country. So there’s going to be an enormous amount of spoilage of food, and that refrigeration then is not going to be available to come back. And so you’re going to have enormous hunger problems here. So people that were already malnourished, they are going to be susceptible to more disease. So you will end up lowering the life expectancy in a measurable way of that population.

The Ceasefire and What Comes Next

STEVEN BARTLETT: So there’s been a lot of talk in the recent days about a ceasefire, and Trump said he tweeted these horrific things about ending a whole civilization tonight, and then at the final hour said that they had proposed a 10-point plan and that there was going to be a 2-week ceasefire. What do you think was actually going on there?

ROBERT PAPE: The collision of stages 3 and 4. So what you are now seeing is we are now in it for the long haul, which means we can’t go back to February 27th. We can’t undo the last 40 days. It’s just not going to be possible. So there’s only 2 futures going forward. Future number one is that ground war option, and we’ve talked about how terrible that is, and of course that’s obviously a bad cost. But future number two is Iran as an emerging fourth center of world power, and that is incredibly damaging to America’s power, and that is going to be damaging to President Trump’s legacy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there not another option where Iran, their leadership says, “Okay, we won’t make nuclear weapons. Okay, we’ll be friends. Okay, it’s all over. Please stop bombing us. Let’s go for peace.”

ROBERT PAPE: My response to that is I’ve been studying the history of international politics for over 35 years. I know quite a bit about great power politics and regional power politics going back 300 years. I have never seen a country at the regional level or at the great power level surrender power.

Did America after World War II decide, “Well, yes, we have the capability to build nuclear weapons, but we want to get along with the Russians who helped us defeat Germany. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to actually have a deal, an arms control agreement.” In fact, this was proposed, by the way, and we rejected it. Which is, we’re just going to not go down that road. We’re going to surrender the power advantage that we have here so that we can be cooperative with the Soviets who had just worked with us to defeat Nazi Germany.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s not going to happen.

ROBERT PAPE: There’s no evidence in history. In our history, we’ve never surrendered power even when it might have been a good idea. They’re not going to do this.

You already see this in why the ceasefire is breaking down so fast. It’s breaking down so fast because essentially President Trump didn’t just declare victory — he said that Iran’s not going to have all this power that I’m explaining to you. And what Iran did is almost immediately assert, “Oh yes we are.” They’ve come right back right away.

If President Trump is expecting that Iran is saying that out of the goodness of their heart, they’re going to surrender emerging world power — this is just a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. He wouldn’t surrender power. Why is he going to expect Iran’s going to surrender power?

Iran’s 10-Point Proposal

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m looking at this apparent 10-point proposal submitted by Iran. And you’ve got to take this with a pinch of salt because there are different reports about what this 10-point proposal looks like. But it says that based on official releases from the Iranian state news agency, the IRNA, and international reporting, the 10-point proposal from Iran to the United States was:

1. A permanent ceasefire. 2. End attacks on allies — a complete halt to Israel and US strikes across the region, specifically Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. 3. Reopen the Strait of Hormuz — Iran will allow safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. 4. Collect tolls — Iran will charge a fee, reportedly $2 million, for each ship passing through the strait. 5. Revenue sharing with Oman — toll revenues will be split with Oman as custodians of the strait. 6. Lift the sanctions — the complete removal of all U.S. primary and secondary sanctions. 7. Release assets — the immediate return of all frozen Iranian funds held abroad. 8. The right to enrich uranium — U.S. acceptance of Iran’s right to domestic uranium enrichment while Iran commits to not seeking nuclear weapons. 9. War reparations — full compensation paid to Iran for reconstruction costs from the bombing. 10. The termination of all UN resolutions against the regime and a new binding UN Security Council resolution to enforce this deal.

Now listen, I don’t know a lot about what I’m talking about, so that’s a disclaimer. However, it sounds like a good deal for Iran in many respects.

The Global Balance of Power

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, on every single point. And it also validates Iran as an emerging world power. So all of those points in the details, if you think of them as a flow diagram, all 10 of them are adding up to validation of Iran as top in the hierarchy in the Persian Gulf.

So why is it so important to be the number one strongest state in the world? It’s because in the last 300 years, whether it was Britain, United States or whether it’s China in the future, the number one state typically dictates the rules of how the world systems operate. Well, what you’re seeing with Iran is they want to dictate the rules in the Persian Gulf, and that’s what that is.

Now, if we pull this over, which I love your props here, that is good. So right now you see that even though it’s the United States is just that lone flag, it has this higher weight. And what this is reflecting is the United States as the number one country in the world, the most powerful. Now, if you also then add this over here, so this would be Israel, you can see this is the world that Netanyahu is depicting before on February 27th.

But the actual world, I just want to point out, is a little bit different. The actual balance of power is closer to this. It’s closer to the United States, and then we have China, and we have Russia. There are 3 centers of world power. And in 1990, it used to be, by the way, just the United States and the Soviet Union, then Russia. The Soviet Union collapses. This is when the United States is the sole superpower, the unipolar moment. Immediately shifts like this from 1989 to 1992. Dramatic shift.

However, along the way in the last 30 years, you see this changing. And what’s changing? Russia actually still is weak. It’s still about 2% of the world’s GDP. That’s not really what’s changing. What’s really changing is China is now much, much, much more powerful. It’s still not as powerful as the United States. But notice that we were here in 1990, and now the balance is starting to come like this.

Well, if we start to add Iran as a center of world power, now we’re starting to change this in a much different way. Now these three powers are starting together in concert to become more powerful than the United States, especially with respect to energy. And energy matters so much because it’s an underlying component for our economic growth, that GDP.

The way we measure great power, Stephen, for decades and decades we’ve used static indicators— GDP, how big is your military, how many nuclear weapons you have. That all rests on the productive capacity of your country, which is why the productive capacity is so important. What does that turn on? It turns very heavily on oil. Oil today is the commodity. If you lose access to oil within weeks or a month and a half, this has dramatic cliff effects on your economy.

Now, if you lose access to semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, that’s bad. And it’s bad over time. In particular, you lose access to oil. This is a cliff that we go off over 6 weeks, 8 weeks, because there’s not enough storage capacity of anybody in the world to make up for 20%, 30% loss of world oil.

Oil, Energy, and Economic Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: So on this point of oil, the US don’t get their oil from the Strait of Hormuz.

ROBERT PAPE: We don’t, but it’s a global market and a lot of the price of oil that we’re going to pay is going to be determined by the global price of oil, because oil is a fungible commodity. It’s like water that runs through the whole system. When there’s a shortage, it drives the price of all of us up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I’ve got a graph here showing the price of oil, and you can see— I’ll throw it up on the screen— you can see it’s been climbing ever since the 27th of February. So this will impact Americans at the pump as—

ROBERT PAPE: Oh my gosh. And you see it in the pump already. Where I am in Chicago, I was paying something like $3.10 a gallon. Now, the last time I filled up, it was $4.60. It’s a bit of a misnomer to think that we can, as America, get away scot-free with everybody else losing oil and we’re not going to pay a price. Now, to be clear, we will have supply of oil, the price will go up. This will increase inflation. This will probably increase bond prices over time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s a bond price?

ROBERT PAPE: The bond is the loans that essentially any corporation, companies, or the University of Chicago takes out to borrow money to operate. So the University of Chicago borrows, has 10-year bonds. This is essentially we’re borrowing money and then we have to pay back that money plus an interest rate. That’s what the bond rate is. It’s an interest rate on borrowed money. Well, if that interest rate goes from 4% on a 10-year bond to 5% or 6% or 7%, the cost of the interest just goes up massively.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And everybody will feel that in various ways.

ROBERT PAPE: The U.S. government right now, the biggest budget item in the U.S. government of the budget is the cost of interest for the debt of the $40 trillion in debt. We’re going to have to shrink Social Security. You’re going to have to shrink Medicaid. This is not notional, Stephen. Iran and Russia together could have a tremendous impact on America’s economy. This is the real thing.

What Should Trump Do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So with your balance of power analogy, this is where we could get to.

ROBERT PAPE: This is where we could get to within the next several years. I would say probably 2 years out, I would say that America has an edge, and I’m trying to depict it as it’s like about a 25 or 30% edge from the combination of China and Russia today. And China is gaining, but still it’s actually slow year by year. So you’ll see a little bit of an uptick. So maybe going— I’m trying to depict from, say, a third advantage for the United States to maybe 30%, 28% in the next 4 or 5 years.

You add Iran to this and then especially these combinations I’m describing where they can do things together. Now, in the next several years, you’re actually talking about the scales where these three are much stronger than America, where I’m not talking about just America losing incrementally. You’re getting abrupt changes in the world balance of power.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what happens now if Trump just pulls out?

ROBERT PAPE: This is the world. Iran is an oil hegemon in the Persian Gulf. Within a year or so, they’re very likely to have nuclear weapons. I’m saying the pro-democracy movement is going to be pounding the table to get nuclear weapons. They’re going to want to deter any idea from Trump of hitting them again. And then I’m saying beyond that, you have the possibility of Iran and Russia deciding to cooperate here to strangle and coerce the United States. And if the United States doesn’t kowtow to them, then they can pull that oil off the market.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what should Trump do, do you think? If you were president of the United States, what would you do right now?

ROBERT PAPE: So when I was here 40 days ago, we had the same question, and what I said was we needed to accept that there would be a deal, and we were going to have to accept that the deal that Iran was offering us on February 27th, where they would get to keep their 3.5% enriched uranium, wasn’t going to be good enough. We were going to have to lift oil sanctions. We’re going to have to do various things to sweeten the deal, so to speak.

Well, notice actually Scott Bessent did some of that. He did lift that. But the power of Iran has grown so much, Stephen, that’s not good enough. And that’s what you’re seeing with why this deal is— the ceasefire is starting to break down from Iran’s side.

So what would you offer for Iran? I think an enforced military containment of Israel would be a serious card that America could play that I think would get Iran at least in a serious discussion. I don’t know if it would be enough. I want to be careful here that I don’t say, well, this will certainly be the deal Iran will take. But we have to imagine if Iran has world power, what is it going to take to get Iran to surrender some of that? Well, one thing would be to have confidence that Israel is not going to keep attacking it or its allies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But then they’re not going to believe that after what’s happened.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, it would have to go through— you’d have to make it enforceable. It’s not going to be good enough to try to promise that. One thing President Trump could do, since the Republicans control both houses of Congress, is President Trump could push through a bill through Congress that says if Israel attacks Iran, or could even extend to Lebanon, but let’s at least start with Iran, all funds for Israel, both military and economic, will be cut off through the end of Trump’s presidency. Now, that passes through both chambers of Congress, President Trump signs it, now you’re talking. Now we actually have as much teeth as you could ever have of a military containment of Israel.

The Nuclear Question and a Possible Off-Ramp

STEVEN BARTLETT: So presumably in such a scenario, Iran would continue to enrich uranium because they’ve now had a taste of what can happen to them if they’re powerless.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, let me extend this a little bit more. So let’s talk about Article 2 of the deal that’s going to go through the Congress. Israel joins the NPT, and that is the quid pro quo for getting Iran to accept the on-site inspections of its 3.5% enriched uranium. Plutonium. So Israel gets to have its Dimona nuclear power plant where it has plutonium for its nuclear weapons that’s measured by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA. Those are the inspectors. And Iran will have onsite inspections at the various locations we’re talking about.

But the second part of this, Stephen, would be quid pro quo. If Iran is going to be subject to onsite verification, onsite monitoring, Israel, which is now not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, already has nuclear weapons. It’s going to have to accept that this can’t be a one-sided deal going forward. It’s going to have to be a more balanced situation when it comes to monitoring nuclear weapons capabilities.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what does that mean specifically, that Iran would be able to monitor Israel’s nuclear weapons through the IAEA?

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right. And it would be the material for the weapons, not the weapons themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they already have weapons. So what’s there to monitor?

ROBERT PAPE: Oh, no, no, no. Right now, the number of Israel’s nuclear weapons is not known. We have vague counts. The reason Israel’s not part of the NPT is not because it doesn’t matter. It provides the kind of detailed information through the IAEA that would be useful for estimating the size of Israel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Israel, Netanyahu is going to want to give that information to Iran.

ROBERT PAPE: This isn’t about want to anymore, Stephen. What we’re talking about is what are the offers— you’ve asked me the hard question. What is an off-ramp to this trade-off between the ground war and Iran as the fourth center of world power? And I said, okay, there is an actual off-ramp here. But notice that the hesitation now is politics. And that’s what I’m trying to explain, that I study the interaction of military action and politics. And I’m with you. I don’t think Israel will— they’ve been trying to spoil these other deals. I don’t think Israel is going to allow this to occur. But now then we’re right back to the tradeoff that nobody wants to confront.

Bouncing Between Stage 3 and Stage 4

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you think is going to happen?

ROBERT PAPE: What I think is that we are going to go back and forth between stage 3 and stage 4 for months.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s stage 3 and stage 4?

ROBERT PAPE: So stage 3 are preparations for the ground war. And Iran emerging as a fourth center of world power. I think both of these are likely to go on for months. I think that for stage 3, the ground war option, to truly be taken off the table, you would need to see America withdrawing its military forces. You would need to see all the carriers leave the region and go back to other parts of the world. You need to see the Marines that have been moved to the Gulf go back to Camp Pendleton in California, go back to Japan. You need to see the hundreds of aircraft like the F-35s, for example, that have been moved to the region— they all need to go back to their pre-war location.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So we’re going to bounce between Stage 3 and Stage 4.

The Ground War Trap

ROBERT PAPE: Yep, that’s the diagram. So the new diagram I’m— we just, I think there’s still, if you pushed me on this last time, I still say there’s a 70% chance that we’re going to start a ground operation. And it’s not because President Trump wants it. It’s not because he’s not trying to avoid it. It’s because there’s a trap. And the trap that he’s going to face is, is he really willing to be the president where under his presidency, Iran detonates a nuclear weapon to demonstrate that it has nuclear power.

STEVEN BARTLETT: From his rhetoric— and listen, these are just the tweets— it seems like the alternate option he’s considered when he talks about bombing the infrastructure and bridges and roads and power plants is just completely decapitating the country. And I think in his own words, sending it back to the Stone Ages.

ROBERT PAPE: This will come back, but it would be, as I believe, the precursor to more ground operations. So I don’t think that this will be a case where you do the electric power targeting and then it’s done. Finally, he’s satisfied, he’s pounded them enough and walk away because you do the electric power targeting, you have further incentivized 92 million. They still have the enriched uranium. You have 92 million people desperate now for not just getting a nuclear weapon for deterrence, but for payback. And so you will find the pressure for the ground war will be even more intense, intense in the aftermath of all of that.

This idea they’re going to be bombed back to the Stone Ages where we won’t worry about them anymore, they’re going to be this minor country that we will just ignore— as long as they have 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium, 10,000 pounds of 5% and 20% enriched uranium, this will just not be the case.

The Two Objectives: Uranium and the Strait of Hormuz

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think the most plausible probable outcome is that Trump ends up sending ground troops in specifically to do two things. I think I remember you saying last time one of them is to go and get the uranium.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the second, I believe, is to defend the Strait of Hormuz.

ROBERT PAPE: Yep, yep, yep, yep. I think that— I think these are the two things that are on the table.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think it’s going to— it’s probably going to take several months.

ROBERT PAPE: I think it could go on, yes, for months, because I think that you are going to see that there’s going to be this back and forth. And the way to monitor this so you can see, is the timeline speeding up or slowing down? Is literally the movement of the deployed troops. Don’t track this by what the negotiations are. Don’t track this by what comes out of President Trump’s mouth or even the Iranians’ mouth. Track this by the movement of forces. That is the best indicator of what’s going to come.

Iran’s Nuclear Strategy: The North Korea Playbook

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this point where you said you don’t think Trump would want to be the president that presided over Iran releasing a nuclear weapon, is that because if he pulled out now, they would enrich the uranium and then maybe demonstrate it under his—

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right. So the scenario that I have laid out, I’ve laid this out to my classes for years, the idea of what Iran would do with nuclear weapons. A lot of people have an image, and it’s coming from the public, so I understand why they have it. A lot of people have said this image where Iran gets a nuclear weapon or two, and what they do immediately is they blow up Tel Aviv with the first one and maybe New York with the second one. This is just highly unlikely because what would happen is we would retaliate with nuclear weapons under that scenario.

Much more plausible, and everything I’m seeing from Iran has been completely supporting the idea that they’re thinking this through strategically, is you would want not to just have one working nuclear weapon or even two, you want five. Ideally, you want 10, maybe even 15. This is what happened with North Korea. Because once you have, let’s even say, five, the most rational thing to do is you detonate the first one as a detonated test. You test it on your own territory. And then you listen for a week where everybody says, “Well, they only had one. They were stupid. They don’t have—” and you detonate the second one. And once you detonate the second one, just like when we hit Nagasaki after Hiroshima, everybody will assume there’s a lot more there. And that is how you actually deter the United States from attacking you.

And by the way, that’s what effectively North Korea did. When President Trump took office in 2017, 2016, North Korea was a major problem. We were talking about bombing North Korea and so forth. And there’s multiple reasons, but the big issues are that North Korea has a lot of nuclear weapons. We’re not going to be able to get them all. They have some other things they can do too, like artillery on Seoul. But this isn’t just North Korea and Trump decided to be sort of best buds here.

All Roads Lead to a Deal

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the other route that played out in my mind was that Trump would keep bombing Iran to keep them weak. But again, that doesn’t solve the Strait of Hormuz problem.

ROBERT PAPE: Doesn’t solve the uranium problem and doesn’t solve the Strait of Hormuz problem. Because if we knew where that material was and we could just bomb it out of existence— I’m talking about the enriched uranium material— we would have done this already.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which leads all roads to really the only solution being some kind of deal.

ROBERT PAPE: Absolutely. That’s why the best thing to do is a deal with the military containment of Israel. That’s the deal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The problem you have with such a deal, when you’re going into that deal, is the enemy know that you don’t really have a plan B. You don’t have a good plan B.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so your negotiation position is very weak.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s why they’re going to keep their 3.5% enriched uranium no matter what. The problem we face here is if we were ever going to get the 3.5% enriched uranium to go away, we should never have ripped up the Obama nuclear deal by Trump in 2018. They’ve been developing ever since. The Biden administration— he, Trump, one, couldn’t figure out how to stop the enriched uranium by Iran. Biden couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Trump now has been trying to figure out how to stop it. And you know what? It’s not stoppable. It’s not stoppable short of these options I’m laying out. There’s no way to get that material without ground forces, Stephen. And you’re not going to send those ground forces in, just 1,000 guys to be at some postage stamp of an area for a month or two trying to find that enriched uranium. This is just not realistic. I think it’s going to be a bigger option.

Trump’s Big Mistake

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it’s clear to me— I do this podcast and ask these questions and have people on because I’m actually really trying to find answers for myself. And I think if I’ve arrived at any conclusion from everything I’ve learned over the last couple of episodes, it’s that I think Trump made a really big mistake. And that mistake probably started when he ripped up Obama’s deal.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But it’s clear that—

ROBERT PAPE: Fordow was the really, really big one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think he’s stuck.

ROBERT PAPE: He is stuck.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think he’s stuck. I think he’s facing several bad options going forward. So I really have no idea what’s going to happen.

Trump’s Declining Power and the Unstable Balance

ROBERT PAPE: And what you will also want to watch, Stephen, back to politics here, is Trump right now— it’s not just Pape anymore who’s saying he’s lost control, he’s losing power. The world is saying that. And this is going to start to become— the Republican Party is going to say that. And what this is going to do is it’s going to incentivize Trump even more, probably to become more belligerent, not to become calmer.

So as Trump is becoming the lamest of lame ducks going forward, because it’s evidence he’s losing power, and as he loses power here on the international scene, this will mean he will lose power domestically as well and will never go to zero, but it will be a slow decline. This is where the real sort of future is here, why this is not simply a steady state now. This is why I won’t make a prediction of what’s going to happen in September. We are not at a steady state. It is an unstable balance here between 3 and 4.

The Death of NATO

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think happens with Europe? I feel like Europe aren’t on either side of your scale here. You’ve got Iran, Russia, and China on one end of the scale. You’ve got the US on the other. Europe and NATO, what happens? Are they going to form NATO?

ROBERT PAPE: NATO is, for all practical purposes, dead. Dead, we’re just writing its obituary. It’s a body in the morgue already. Most people don’t think that NATO is a political alliance. NATO is much more than that. If there’s an Article 5, what that means, Stephen, is there’s a military operation with an American general at the top. And with Article 5, the American general tells the other countries’ militaries, including their nuclear weapons, what to do. Now, if you’re Britain and you have nuclear weapons, or even if besides the nuclear weapons, if you’re Germany— are you going to follow General Cain’s orders on anything at this point? I don’t think so.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Article 5 is the document that all the NATO countries have signed.

ROBERT PAPE: No, it’s the part of the NATO treaty which says if there’s a NATO operation like in Afghanistan, it’s an American general who orders all the other countries’ militaries what to do. It’s a hierarchy. So it’s not a collection where the countries get together and they have these big cooperative decisions. No, the Americans run the plan. They are the ones who organize the military operation. They run the plan, and they just assign the other countries roles the way as they would the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force inside of the Pentagon.

What I’m saying is what you just saw with Iran is such a horrible, catastrophic failure within just weeks. The idea that any Europeans are going to follow the orders of an American general— and I don’t even think this is going to be just under Donald Trump. I mean, I think for years, I think this is just inevitable.

NATO, European Politics, and the Path Forward

STEVEN BARTLETT: Trump was quite angry and scathing with his words about NATO. He said it’s a paper tiger and referred to them as cowards. And as we’ve been sat here today, you might be aware that NATO were meeting with Trump today in Washington, DC. And the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said when it came time to provide the logistical and other support to the United States needed in Iran, some allies were a bit slow, to say least. In fairness, they were a bit surprised. To maintain the element of surprise for the initial strikes, President Trump opted not to inform us ahead of time. But what I see when I look across Europe today is allies providing a massive amount of support. Nearly without exception, allies are doing everything the United States is asking. They have heard and are responding to President Trump’s request.

So it sounds a little bit like an apology tour coming from NATO. And the German chancellor has also made a comment saying that they do not want to split NATO.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, they don’t want American troops to leave the European continent because that provides some deterrent to Russia. That’s what you’re hearing there. But NATO was always— had an anchor. Remember we talked about anchors? The anchor in NATO was America’s protection of European security. What you’re seeing when President Trump creates a problem, a catastrophe for the world, and says he won’t send American forces into the Strait of Hormuz, but he wants the Europeans to send their forces into the Strait of Hormuz, this is the opposite of protection. He’s making NATO countries or European countries vulnerable, and they’re reacting to that by saying they won’t do it.

The Strait of Hormuz and Ground Operations

STEVEN BARTLETT: According to diplomats, NATO Secretary briefed member capitals today that Trump is demanding concrete commitments within the next few days from NATO to help to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which would only make sense if you were doing phase 3, the ground operation.

ROBERT PAPE: So you cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz only with air power. If we could, we already would. You can’t secure it only with naval power. If you could, we already would. We have a much bigger Navy, much bigger air forces than any of those countries individually or even combined. The only reason you would really want those forces from NATO is because you’re planning on a bigger ground operation, and that’s what you’re seeing right there.

And I don’t think Europeans— let’s not even talk about the word NATO— I don’t think the Europeans are likely to do it because you’re seeing why would— if they’re ever going to do it, Stephen, they would want Trump out of office. The number one thing that I don’t think is going to happen here is anybody’s going to bail out Trump.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s political suicide, really, for a lot of the European leaders.

ROBERT PAPE: It’s political suicide for the Democrats to bail out Trump in our country. It’s going to start to become political suicide for even Republicans to bail out Trump. That’s what you’re going to start to see in the fall. And it’s going to be political suicide for the Japanese, for the Indians. This is the problem. Trump caused the problem. He’s, as I said on your show last time, he’s going to become LBJ if he doesn’t take a deal soon. Well, that was 40 days ago, Stephen, and he still hasn’t taken the deal. Not really. And he’s becoming LBJ. Nobody’s going to want to be associated with him.

European Leaders and Political Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: Here in the UK, we have Keir Starmer as the Prime Minister, and it appears to me that since he’s come out and started saying that he won’t support Trump’s war, we won’t send troops to the Middle East, it appears that that’s actually driven up his favorability among certain people. And it makes me think that actually, as we say, it’s political suicide for European leaders to send troops there because they will lose the next election in their country.

ROBERT PAPE: I think you put it exactly— excellent, Stephen. I really can’t improve on that. Let me just say that a year ago with the tariffs, I started to do a study of tracking how European support for America was starting to go into the tank. And that was with tariffs. Now what Trump has done is he’s driven up the price of oil. He’s hurting their economies in a serious way.

And as that actual damage occurs, and it’s still in the pipeline, it hasn’t hit as strong as it likely will in the next month, you are likely going to see that the publics in Europe are going to become anti-American. And it’s not just going to be can’t support Trump anymore. Coming here, I had to pay the visa, the ETA, and it took forever. And what’s happening here — we’re getting some payback here on Americans. I think next time I come to London, I’m not going to be surprised that the price of that visa is doubling or tripling.

Closing Thoughts: What the Average Person Needs to Know

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is your closing high-level remark about all this stuff? And I guess I really want to focus it on the average person who is going about their life as a normal civilian in any of these countries that are affected. What is the high-level point of view here that we need to close upon?

ROBERT PAPE: The high-level point of view is we’re about to start thinking seriously about the election. And what we need to do is not just choose, but bounce back and forth between Republican and Democrat. And actually, Britain is a case study of what can happen if you bounce back and forth here. We need to start to really support strong, stable policies that will empower the middle.

The problem that we face, Stephen, is we’re moving back and forth from really ideas here that one year we really don’t like what Biden’s doing. And now we have the radical wing on the other side and we certainly don’t like that. Well, if we keep going back and forth here between two extreme alternatives, we’ll just get different versions of bad outcomes. And it’s not making things better. It’s a cycle that’s making it worse.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the solution?

ROBERT PAPE: The solution is the public needs to hear that every election, every choice, we have an opportunity here to focus on the more centrist candidates. And this is something that we really can make decisions about. And it’s just simply the case that if we don’t do that, what you’re going to get is you’re going to get back and forth bouncing around.

And I don’t think a third party here— these ideas are really very meaningful. This really comes down to talking to the public. And it’s one of the big reasons, Stephen, I’m going to the podcast world, because remember, I’ve advised every White House and so forth. So we’ve got to get beyond that. We’ve got to actually talk to real people. And this is what you do, and increasingly I’m doing it. And I really believe that the podcast network is an opportunity to do that.

But it doesn’t mean that it forces people to vote Democrat or Republican. We’ve got to understand that we can’t just keep thinking about, well, okay, now we’re really mad at Donald Trump and we’re going to get the independents and now they’re going to vote with the Democrats. If all we do is end up getting another extreme on the other side, what you’re going to do is you’re going to keep pissing off the middle and they’re going to keep bouncing back and forth. And round after round, we’ve been doing that now for years in the United States. And what does it look like? It keeps getting worse. It keeps getting worse.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are you suggesting the solution is? Vote for the centrist candidate all the way through?

ROBERT PAPE: Yes. Yes. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s not going to happen unless we talk about this, because it does mean that sometimes the centrist candidate is the person, the woman on the other side. And if we’re not willing to do that, then we’re really condemning ourselves to this cycle. I’m going to explain more about it. It’s a version of the escalation trap gone domestic. It’s called the legitimacy shock cycle, and I’ll be talking more about this in September. So the trap I’m talking about here with violence and politics isn’t just international, and you end up with traps here domestically in history as well.

A Thought for the People of Iran

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’d like to close with a few thoughts for the people in Iran. I think ever since I’ve put myself mentally in a situation where there was a world leader saying that they were going to annihilate my civilization and there was bombs going off— you know, we’re currently filming this in our London studio, but if there was bombs going off around the studio and there was a threat that someone was going to annihilate civilization, it’s quite unthinkable for me how I would be functioning.

And yes, it immediately, I think, shines a light on the mental health and psychology of the people in Iran right now and how they must be feeling. So I think that’s probably an important message to share because we can sometimes get a little bit caught up in hypotheticals of war and strategy and all these kinds of things. But at the end of the day, there’s 90-plus million people in Iran that are right in the middle of this, and we’re sat in this very warm, cushy London studio.

ROBERT PAPE: So, well, there’s a bond that is occurring between the middle 60% of the American Republic and the 92 million in Iran. They don’t like the radicalism on either side. And what you were vocalizing, Stephen, is the frustration that our politics has been locked up by the extremes. And I suspect the 92 million in Iran are feeling almost exactly the same thing. Their choices now are being locked into extremes.

And that is the bond here that you’re trying to vocalize. I believe it’s valuable to vocalize it because this is what it means to empower the people. And this is what it means to be a democracy, which is that we actually talk about not just the other side is bad and we’re always good, but we talk about where the future really should go. And the idea that we’re even imagining the possibility of a $40 trillion in debt country getting rocked by Iran and Russia here, who have their own reasons for wanting to hurt us. We may not fully realize that, but we really hurt Russia in the ’90s here with our ideas of shock therapy. And we may not like bandits, by the way. So we really do have some real growing bonds at the social level.

Final Remarks

STEVEN BARTLETT: Professor Robert Pape, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to speak to you once again. And this is such an evolving situation, so I feel like we might end up talking again at some point in the future when things play out. Hopefully, one can only hope, for peace for everybody.

ROBERT PAPE: Oh my gosh, every day, that’s my number one thing. Just ask my wife. And by the way, will you stop being so charismatic? Because my wife, when we listen to this, she turns my voice off. All she wants to do, Stephen, is listen— is she American?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think Americans like British accents. I’m just—

ROBERT PAPE: You have made me up my game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s so funny. Well, thank you so much for your time, and you’ve put a lot of time into explaining this to laymen like me, and it’s really helped turn the lights on to some degree. I’ll be honest, it’s turned the lights on, and with the lights on, I am confused. I’m confused about which path is productive and most beneficial to society and humanity. And even though I can see more clearly now about the dynamics of all of these potential pathways, none of them seem that great. So that’s where I’m going to leave it for today. But we’ll pick up this conversation again soon when more information comes in.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right. And let’s hope it’s not as much of a trap as I’m painting it. But if it is, then it’s really even more important that when we get to the fall, we don’t mislead ourselves into thinking that this is just temporary, that it’s all going to be solved quickly. We need to understand that we’re going down some major, major roads here.

And this situation, as bad as it is, notice that it’s actually worse than it was a month ago when we were here. It’s worse, Stephen. And the reason it’s worse is we didn’t head it off enough at the pass. When I was here 4 weeks ago, if President Trump had taken some of the deals that we were talking about then, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today. So as bad as that negotiating position, I say, of military containment of Israel, I realize people are saying, oh my God, could never happen. Well, think about the things that could never happen that are happening right now. This is the better pathway now. And if we don’t take this pathway now, it’s bad now. We come back in a month or two, it will be worse.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you, Robert. We’re done.

ROBERT PAPE: Thank you very much.

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