Transcript of Robert Pape Interview: Diary Of A CEO – Mass Casualty Attack

And they had that agreement. J.D. told me that it was about to be signed. A couple weeks later, here we are. They’re back to bombing each other.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, there’s really 2 big issues with this, Steven, with the MOU, the Memorandum of Understanding. I do believe that Vice President Vance sincerely thought it had a good chance of ending the war. But there’s a big problem here, Steven, which is when you listen to Vice President Vance, he approached this as a business deal. So he kept talking about all the benefits that were going to come to Iran if they performed a fee-for-service. “We want the strait open, and we’re going to offer you money in different ways if you will open the strait.” Well, this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of international politics. This may work great in real estate. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But in a major war like this, what’s at stake is the balance of power.

Now, I want to explain that before the war started, there was a balance of power where America was ascendant, Israel was the rising power, and Iran was actually the declining power in the region. What happened almost within, again, 2 weeks of the war starting is the balance of power was shifting dramatically. When Iran became in control of Hormuz, this represents tremendous power in the future. That wealth, all of the potential that, even though it hadn’t been realized yet, equates to not just money to put in coffers, but equates to military power. It equates to the ability to influence other states in the region to build a sphere of influence.

This is power in terms of major power politics that was shifting here. And so with the MOU, J.D. Vance appears to have thought this was a business deal. So he appears to have thought, “We’re going to hold up the promise of, say, $300 billion that will eventually fall on you if you will just agree to do what we want and behave.” Those aren’t the clauses that matter to Iran. The clauses that matter to Iran were the clauses which directly relate to the balance of power in solidifying Iran, its control of Hormuz. And essentially, this MOU is fundamentally a roadmap to Iran becoming the regional hegemon.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hegemon? What does that mean?

ROBERT PAPE: The most dominant state in the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wait, so you’re saying that this agreement would make them the most dominant state in the Middle East?

ROBERT PAPE: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So why wouldn’t they sign it within a heartbeat?

ROBERT PAPE: They did. They did. Iran signed it. In fact, most of these points were exactly the points that President Trump said he would never sign in April when Iran presented the initial 14-point plan in April. And the key—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why are we back at war then?

Breaking Down the MOU: What the 14 Points Actually Mean

ROBERT PAPE: Well, let me just explain. The key things that happened here is that number one, notice in Article 5, it says that Iran will make the arrangements with Hormuz, that is the ships with Hormuz, and it will not charge for 60 days. It doesn’t say it will never charge. It says only 60 days. So think about that, that this is already written into the agreement that President Trump is signing.

And then if you say, well, what’s going to happen down the road? It’s going to be Iran and Oman who are going to determine the future fees. There’s no mention here of the United States. There’s no clause to even let the United States wiggle itself in. This is a perfectly clearly written clause, and this basically gives Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz and also the discretion to set the fees for as far as the eye can see with no constraint whatsoever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know that this is the actual document?

ROBERT PAPE: Because both the Iranian government and the White House put out exactly the same document word for word so that we can actually compare them literally word for word. So this is exactly the document that President Trump signed. There’s no question that we have like an earlier draft. Now, there were some earlier drafts leaked by Bloomberg. That’s not what this is. This is the final one.

But let me go a little bit further here, Steven. So here we’re talking about the strategic base of Iran. And keep in mind, controlling Hormuz means controlling 20% of the world’s oil. That’s a fantastic amount of wealth and strategic power to build on in the future. No limit says nothing about you can’t spend it on missiles, anything else. But up here with Lebanon, the first article, so here—

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you say article, this document contains— is it 10 points?

ROBERT PAPE: 14.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 14 different points.

ROBERT PAPE: And when you say articles, I mean tools. 14 different points. And there’s 3 points that are really the critical action points that matter here. This promise of $300 billion down the road, this is so far, this is like holding out funny money to the Iranians. These are the things that are actually short-term because this is happening now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So point 1, you’re saying—

ROBERT PAPE: Point 1, I want to come back to, Steven, because I want to explain. This is Iran’s strategic base.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Point number 5.

ROBERT PAPE: Point number 5. But what happens to become the dominant power in the region, you need more than a strategic base. You want a sphere of influence. You want a sphere of influence here. And can I just— can we—

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ll hold this up here. Is that—

Iran’s Strategic Goals and the Strait of Hormuz

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Point number 5 is controlling the Strait of Hormuz. But many of the different countries, including Saudi Arabia, the US, have already started to have pipelines to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. There were plans to this for years. They were too expensive. But almost immediately they started to do that.

So Saudi Arabia started to put out 4 to 5 million barrels of oil a day starting in mid-March into the Red Sea on a pipeline that had already been built and hadn’t been used. There’s a little area here called Fujairah, which is where the UAE had a pipeline that’s almost 2 million barrels a day. So 20 million barrels a day were going through Hormuz. Almost immediately, 7 million were being bypassed. Then there’s all this discussion that Iraq might build some pipelines. There might be other pipelines here going through Syria.

So what if you’re Iran, you now control this, but notice it’s a declining asset that way. If you only control Hormuz within 5 years, good chance your power’s going to be whittled away. What you want to do is you want a sphere of influence. So what Iran started to talk about is their security resistance belt where they wanted to control. And they said from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea to the Gulf — this was the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard.

And why would you do that? Because you want to prevent all of those bypasses to Hormuz, and they’re already happening. And where’s the key one? You know, you already have the Houthis down here. You have Hezbollah here, but you want to make sure the Houthis are pretty secure right here.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So just again, for the people that can’t see — so you’re saying the Houthis are pretty secure where?

ROBERT PAPE: The Houthis are pretty secure down here in Yemen. They’ve been fighting with the Saudis for quite some time. They’ve held their own. We fought a war with the Houthis in May 2025 to try to get them to pull back from a temporary shutdown of the Red Sea. And we lost essentially. So we couldn’t beat them.

But the big one that was at issue was Lebanon. And it’s — and my point is, it’s not so much that they love Hezbollah. They do, of course. They’ve had longtime decades of relationships with Hezbollah ideologically. There’s good reasons for that. But there’s something else that’s a power reason that’s being ignored here, which is you want Hezbollah to have drones right here in Lebanon. So if there’s a pipeline that comes out here through Syria, if you’ve got some other pipelines that are coming out here, you’ve got Hezbollah here that can act as your Houthis. They can actually attack the shipping.

So now you have a — you’re Iran, you’re a major power, you’re the dominant power in the region. You don’t just control this area here and the Strait of Hormuz and Iran itself. You have an arc, a security arc here that is a sphere of influence, but it’s an operational sphere of influence. This is not just a piece of paper or something to talk about. This is what’s guaranteeing you, you control all of that oil, whether the oil from the Persian Gulf comes out through Hormuz, whether it comes out through Syria, or whether it comes out through the Red Sea. And that’s what Article 1 is about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how come —

The MOU and Its Violations

ROBERT PAPE: That’s what I’m saying is not — When I listen to Vice President Vance, which I’ve listened to your interview and other interviews, super smart guy, okay? This is not a matter of that, okay? But he’s thinking of it as a business deal. “We want Hormuz open. What’s it going to take to pay?” They’re not looking at that. They’re looking at — they want to be a regional hegemon. This is their roadmap, and that’s why they stuck to those goals.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But they signed this document, but then the war has kicked off anyway again.

ROBERT PAPE: Because what happened is President Trump signed the document. He owned the document for it for a day. He explained that he signed the document because — this was literally 4 weeks ago — because the world was going to run out of oil in 4 weeks, and he wanted to open Hormuz. So President Trump saw this as a way to try to open Hormuz.

But what happened immediately after President Trump signed the document, literally starting in the next 48 hours, is President Trump started to, and his administration started to undermine the document, violate the clauses in that document.

So issue number one was Secretary Rubio establishing a framework accord agreement in Lebanon, which essentially would lock in Israel’s military presence in Lebanon as far as the eye could see. Whereas Article 1 in the document says that the United States would guarantee the territorial integrity of Lebanon, which everybody would realize would mean Israel is violating the territorial integrity of Lebanon. It’s not ensuring it. So that would mean Israel can’t be locked in there and still be faithful to Article 1. So the framework agreement immediately violates Article 1.

The second thing that happened, and this happened shortly after the framework accord, is President Trump started to encourage passage through the Strait of Hormuz through the southern — there’s 3 routes through the Strait of Hormuz. The central route, which used to be in existence, the main route before the war, now that’s where the 80 mines are, so nobody’s using the central. They’re either passing through the southern avenue, which is the one close to Oman, or they’re passing through the Iranian Passage, which is of course near the coast of Iran.

And what President Trump did is he started to encourage ships to bypass or pass through Hormuz on the southern passageway, but with no coordination with Iran, even often with their transponders turned off. In fact, President Trump was bragging about this as his secret way to sort of bypass Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. He literally bragged about this on multiple posts on Truth Social. Well, that directly contravenes Article 5.

And then the third thing that happened is if you look at Article 11, you would see that Iran was due to have some of its frozen assets, some of its assets that were seized by the United States and have been held for decades, unfrozen. And there’s a specific sentence which gives Iran the exclusive right to determine what’s going to happen with that money. And what President Trump said is they can have their money, but only if they give it to the farmers, the US farmers, and buy American grain. That’s the 3rd violation of the MOU.

So what happened here, Steven, is President Trump owned the MOU and was faithful to it for at least a day, maybe 2. And this represented a strategic defeat for the United States. And he even explained why he accepted that strategic defeat very clearly and forthrightly. I call that owning the loss. He owned the loss for about a day or two, but then he tried to reverse the loss almost immediately, Steven.

And that’s how we’re back at war because the big miscalculation that happened in this period was assuming that if President Trump didn’t restart the war, the war would be over. Who started the war? Who started to shoot the ships in the Strait of Hormuz? It was the Iranians. Why did they do that? Because we were violating the MOU, bypassing their control of the Strait of Hormuz, and that means preventing Iran from becoming the regional power, the rising regional power, ultimately the regional hegemon.

So this is why they violated. It wasn’t so much a legal understanding. This is great power politics, Steven. Iran wants to be the dominant state in the region. The United States does not want Iran to be the dominant state in the region. That is what this war has been about since the first week in March, and now it’s 5 months later and we’re still at war.

Iran’s Military Capabilities and Drone Arsenal

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did Iran charge people to go through the Strait of Hormuz before this?

ROBERT PAPE: No, never did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did they control the Strait of Hormuz at all?

ROBERT PAPE: Well, before the war started, not at all. Before February 28th, Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz. What Iran did is it moved from survival to ambition. So Iran saw there was an opportunity with the bombing because the United States had no — we didn’t even have our Navy here. There was no means whatsoever to sort of offset Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, nothing at all. Iran took this as an opportunity. And the opportunity was to seize power.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, is it fair to hypothesize that actually this war might have strengthened Iran because now it has this control over energy on a global basis that it didn’t have before?

ROBERT PAPE: Without a doubt. Without a doubt, Steven. I don’t say this with any happiness. There’s really no question at this point that Iran is stronger today than it was before the war started on February 28th. And that’s because it controls the Strait of Hormuz, meaning that it can threaten at will virtually any ship that goes through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s demonstrated this over and over and over again. Even when the ships turn off their transponders, they are still able to threaten ships as they go through. And every time a ship tries to run the gauntlet, they run into a drone, a mine, they run into basically Iran’s barrier, and that is Iran’s power.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There was a tweet that went viral this week about this. I’m going to read the tweet here. It says, “I’m confused. The US has the most powerful military on Earth. We’ve bombed the hell out of Iran for 4 months. Trump says their Air Force, Navy, and nearly all of their missile capabilities are destroyed. So how is Iran still capable of hitting US bases right now?”

ROBERT PAPE: Because only a small fraction of its drone arsenal is necessary, and missile arsenal, in order to inflict that damage. Iran entered this war with thousands, we think tens of thousands of drones, ballistic missiles, anti-shipping missiles, which are lower sea-skimming cruise missiles. And even though we have destroyed large fractions of their missiles, they have plenty left over to hit these targets because they’re doing saturation attacks. They’re essentially doing swarms. They’re saturating our defensive capability and the drones and missiles that get through, plenty enough to damage it to the point we can barely use it, if at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So is it mainly drones that they’re using at the moment to conduct these attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and on US bases?

ROBERT PAPE: It’s been a combination. In March, it was mostly intermediate-range ballistic missiles and then drones. Since about the middle of March until just quite recently, it’s mostly been drones except for Israel. When Israel’s been attacked, it’s been very heavily with ballistic missiles.

But what you’re seeing now, just in the last week, is you’re starting to see the use of ballistic missiles. You’re seeing the use of cruise missiles. These are these sea-skimming missiles, and they’re being used against multiple targets. So the full arsenal that Iran has, the full range of the arsenal, it appears to be fully there, stocked very well, and they’re showing no signs of running out of ammo. If anybody’s running out of ammo, it might be America running out of interceptors to shoot things down, but we don’t know that as a fact. And I think that what you’re seeing is Iran has been highly intelligent about how it has deployed its missiles.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Trump said, “They have no Navy, it’s been knocked out. They have no Air Force, that’s been knocked out. They have no air detection, that’s been knocked out. Their radar has been knocked out. And just about everything’s been knocked out. Virtually everything they have has been knocked out.” He said that on Truth Social in May 2026. If everything has been knocked out, then how come there’s no safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz? How come this weekend we saw more Americans tragically die because of Iranian attacks?

ROBERT PAPE: Because what they have left, we can’t knock out and is plenty to do the damage. That’s the fundamental problem. We took out the easy stuff to hit. They didn’t need it in order to seize control of Hormuz and keep Hormuz and start to defend themselves against more aggressive pressure. And the bottom line is, that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate that capability. We would do it in a heartbeat if we could right away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Explain to me in just simple terms why it’s so difficult to remove that capability. I was looking at this picture here, which shows the size of a drone relative to another object, which is a car. So I guess there were 2 questions, which is like, where do they hide these and how easy is it to make one of these drones?

ROBERT PAPE: So, they hide those drones, Steven, everywhere.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

The Scale of the Drone and Missile Threat

ROBERT PAPE: Okay? They can— they’re in drone caverns, they’re in warehouses, they’re everywhere. They could be— so that drone, just to kind of give you a sense here, would easily fit in this room. But the reason this is so difficult is notice how small that is here, that drone, compared to the scale of where it could be.

And this is what I really want to show you because this is, I think, the hardest part to explain to people as I’m talking in whatever format I’m talking is it’s the scale of eliminating the drone and missile threat is much bigger than people realize because they’re hearing measurements. Well, we’ve destroyed X% and Y%, and that’s why you’re getting the question.

But if you look at this, this is what they— where these drones, these Shahed-136, could literally be anywhere in this radius, 500-mile area. And notice how huge this area is. This area, this area like this, is bigger than California. It’s 1.5 times the size of California.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I guess it’s like trying to find a truck in California.

ROBERT PAPE: It’s like trying to find a truck in California. These little things here are the Shahed drones.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

ROBERT PAPE: Okay. And what we’re doing in this area, which is mountainous— so this is why we have a 3-dimensional— it’s not just a 2-dimensional problem, it’s a 3-dimensional problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ll show some of these visuals on screen now just to show what the terrain where they’re hiding these drones might be like.

ROBERT PAPE: Could be anywhere in these mountains. There’s all kinds of— and if we kind of imagine this as a visual, so this is the general problem here we have, which is just this stuff could be anywhere. And now these are the drones and this is the terrain that the drones are going to hide in. And notice I’ve just sprinkled some here, but now I’m going to cover these up with more terrain. And notice you can’t see those drones anymore.

And now I’m going to put in some more drones somewhere else. And now we’re going to put another layer in. And this is, this is again, it’s the 3-dimensional part of the problem, meaning hard to find from the air. Now, if I get my people out and I start going in, now I could start to dig them out. But let’s just keep doing this for a while. So now I’m putting in another, say, 20 drones. And I’m going to cover it yet again. And then I’m going to put in another set of drones, and I’m covering it yet again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess you could pour all the drones in there, and you would still be able to cover them.

ROBERT PAPE: You would, yes, but you wouldn’t do it in— you’d do it in layers. So they’re going to make it so that if you find one, you’re going to have to work really hard. You’re going to have to get them drone by drone by drone, or at least in clusters of them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess also an important point of context is they’re also making new ones this whole time.

ROBERT PAPE: Exactly. So our estimates that we have leaked from the Pentagon are in April. That’s months ago. These drones, they were making 55,000 a year and giving them to Russia. So just think about that. That’s thousands every single month. Why haven’t they made another 5,000 or 10,000 drones since April? If you want this to open, so let me just—

STEVEN BARTLETT: The Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Looming Economic Crisis

ROBERT PAPE: The Strait of Hormuz. So now let me just explain. So this is our problem. If you want the Strait of Hormuz to open, it’s not good enough to say, oh, look, I’ve found dozens or hundreds of these drones. You’ve got to persuade the shipping companies that their ships are safe. They don’t obey orders from the Pentagon. You can’t order the shippers to go through.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because the ships are expensive.

ROBERT PAPE: The ships are expensive. How expensive? And the crews don’t want to die. Oh, in the many millions. Millions and millions of dollars. I don’t know the exact amount of these tankers, but each tanker will carry between 700,000 and over a million barrels of oil. And so they have quite a— just, and you can do the math right there to see how much each ship is worth carrying that much oil.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was looking at the cost here. It says when you combine a brand new vessel with a full tank of oil, a single tank crossing the Strait of Hormuz is a floating asset worth $300 million.

ROBERT PAPE: Oh wow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: See, I didn’t—

ROBERT PAPE: I learned something from you every time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s not even the lives on board, which again are going to cause an insurance problem, but also no one wants people to die.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, and they don’t want to die, so you’re going to have mutinies. They’re not going to— so this is why you’re seeing more ships leaving than you’re seeing ships come in. And the ships that are coming in are very heavily coming to Iran’s ports. That’s one of the reasons President Trump put the blockade back on.

It’s because what happened here is the MOU, this whole idea, is not opening up the Strait of Hormuz, it’s not preventing what’s going to come in the next few weeks, maybe month, which is the world economic crisis. We are knocking on the door of what President Trump told us he was trying to avoid, which is the world literally running out of oil.

And just today before we started, the Houthis, which are a big ally of Iran, so just to come back here and reshow the map, remember I said that once the Strait of Hormuz became shut down, there was 2 million barrels coming out every day for the UAE coming out through Fujairah, and then 4 to 5 million coming out from Saudi Arabian oil going out to the Red Sea. And this is the port there at the Red Sea. Well, the Houthis have just shut this down literally today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, really?

ROBERT PAPE: Literally before we came on. It happened about 6 hours ago. This has been escalating for several weeks. Iran’s been asking for this. This is part of the general escalation that we’re seeing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so we’ve got the Strait of Hormuz closed, we’ve got the Houthis closing the Red Sea, so there’s no oil flowing through there.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So are we on the verge of an economic crisis if things don’t change quickly?

Depleting Oil Reserves and Refining Capacity

ROBERT PAPE: Yes, yes. This is literally the nightmare scenario that we’ve been worrying about. And the reason is this. Go back and let’s think about this from the 20 million barrels of oil that was going through the Strait of Hormuz. So when Iran gained control of the Strait of Hormuz, what happened immediately is Saudi Arabia and the UAE started to bypass Hormuz with 7 million barrels a day. So that means only 13 million at issue, right? That’s helpful.

The next is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the United States. And we started to release about 5 or 6 million barrels a week through the Strategic Oil Plan. When we started to do this, it’s right around the middle of March. I can’t remember the exact date, but notice that you put a big dent in that. And so that’s one of the reasons the oil markets did not go crazy right away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ve got some data here then. It says President Trump authorized the emergency release of 172 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve designed to be pumped out over roughly 120 days. This wasn’t just a US issue or the US acting alone. The US drawdown was part of a massive coordinated effort by 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency who collectively agreed to release 400 million barrels from their emergency stockpiles.

Because these massive releases were done to offset the Hormuz blockade, the US strategic reserve has been heavily depleted. And as of July 2026, the reserve has dropped down to roughly 300 million barrels, which marks the lowest level the reserve has since 1983, a more than 40-year low.

ROBERT PAPE: They’re being depleted. Once you spend your reserve, you don’t get it refilled. And that’s what I think President Trump was talking about when he said we’re about to run out of oil in 4 weeks. That was exactly the date because we’ve just run to the date of that quote, what you just read is we’re coming to about the 120th day. And so what that means is all of that cushion that we had in the system to protect the price of gas already went up. Now you have even more risk.

And then on top of that, Steven, we have another set of problems besides the oil itself, which is refining capacity in the world. We don’t put crude oil in our cars. We put gasoline in our cars, diesel as well. Well, how do you get the gas and the diesel? You refine the crude. So that means the refineries need to work. Well, where are much of the world’s refineries? In the Persian Gulf. Not just oil comes through the Persian Gulf, refined product. They’re called distillates. They come through the Persian Gulf as well.

Now, so that means you’ve shut down something like 25% or a third of the world’s refining capacity. Now let’s marry this to what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine’s blasting Russia refineries in Russia. So what’s happening, Steven, is you are getting not just the decline of crude itself is about to run out, but the refining capacity now has been heavily strained and limited. It might be down 40%. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s something on that order.

And what you’re seeing then is what I think President Trump was seeing a month ago, which is he wanted the Strait of Hormuz to open, but he also didn’t want to own the L. And what President Trump has decided is he’d rather take the risk with the world’s economy than own the L, own the loss. And maybe he’ll change his mind.

The Escalation Trap: Owning the Loss or Taking It Back

STEVEN BARTLETT: He’d rather take the risk with the world’s economy than just own the L. So what would owning the L look like in this scenario?

ROBERT PAPE: Owning the L would allow Iran to follow through with Article Five. So if we go back to Article Five, to control the strait, to control the strait on its terms.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But that would set a precedent for all of these straits around the world.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s exactly right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you can’t have that.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, these are the choices we have, Steven. So the choices: Do we have a global economic crisis, possibly recession, possibly worse, or do we let Iran control the Strait of Hormuz?

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is not a good place to be.

ROBERT PAPE: Well, that’s the fork in the road that I was telling you was the stage 3 dilemma. So that’s exactly where we were in March. So Steven, just to explain to your audience, because they’re trying to figure out how are we getting here, this is what the 20 years of modeling was really showing. We would very quickly get to this fork in the road. It wouldn’t take months and months. It would happen right away.

And President has been trying to avoid the escalation trap. This is called an escalation trap. And he’s been trying to avoid that trap. He tried to avoid it with bombing for 6 weeks. He tried to avoid it with the blockade. He tried signing the MOU. He let J.D. Vance offer money, and that— none of those were actually working.

And what he— where he is now is still at this fork in the road, the dilemma of the escalation trap. Either he owns the loss, which means everything you just said, and becomes known as the president who allowed not just the Strait of Hormuz to be controlled, but set a precedent for other countries and other non-state actors to control their choke points. Or we take it back physically. Are we going to physically take it back?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So we’ll go through the stages in the escalation trap straight away after this, after we move on from this point around oil, because I think some of my audience might not know that this escalation trap is historically predictable and that you’ve been talking about this a long time, and it also allows us to understand exactly what happens next.

I was quite shocked when you just said that Trump said recently that the US would run out of oil within 4 weeks. So I just looked down at some research here, and it says that during a recent press conference at the G7 summit in June 2026, President Trump made a blunt admission about how dangerously low global energy oil stockpiles have become due to the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. His direct quote was: “We run out of reserves at about four weeks. You know there are reserves all over the world, and we would run really, really low. We would run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. It would be bedlam.”

ROBERT PAPE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why is he saying that? Doesn’t that make him look bad?

The Escalation Trap and the Midterm Election Pressure

ROBERT PAPE: It makes him. He’s being, I think, forthright in why he signed the MOU, which is to avoid that bedlam, the world economic crisis. However, the problem for President Trump is in order to avoid the bedlam, he has to let Iran control the Strait of Hormuz, establish that sphere of influence I was explaining.

And he almost immediately after he said that statement, within 48 hours, undermined that MOU that would’ve avoided that. Had the MOU just been implemented as written, we may not be sitting here today talking about the impending world crisis.

And I believe one of the reasons we’re knocking on the door of more escalation right now is because President Trump is desperate to open the Strait of Hormuz. I think he’s taking low-risk, high-risk military options. I think he’s pursuing military options he likely knows are unlikely to work, but they’re his best chance to open Hormuz before the crisis literally hits.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But there’s also another before, which is the midterm elections.

ROBERT PAPE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking that this midterm election takes place in 3 months’ time? And if his approval rating is low at that point because of what’s going on with the war, because when Americans go to the pump to fill up their cars, they notice the prices are way higher than usual, that means those Americans in the election, in the midterm elections, will vote for the Democrats, which means he will lose the Congress. So he basically needs to make sure Americans are happy in 3 months’ time.

ROBERT PAPE: He needs to take the best chance he can to make that happen. And I think that what happened here, Steven, is he — his quote, you just quoted him, I think it was June 17th. He’s saying that within a month, those reserves are going to run out and we’re heading to that bedlam, that economic crisis, and that is already happening. 4 weeks later, we’re right on that trajectory. That trajectory has not changed.

Maybe we’ve bought an extra week or 2 of time because some oil did get out from the Persian Gulf, not that much, but enough for a few weeks here. So maybe it’s going to now not fall on August 1st, maybe it’ll be August, say, 15th through 17th. But it will hit.

And that’s what he was — and now I think he sees when it hits, he’s going to lose. There’s a good chance that the Republicans will lose more seats in the House and in the Senate. That will make him the lamest of lame ducks for his last 2 years. It may not be that he would be removed from office. That’s probably not going to happen. But it could be that he’ll be impeached again. He’ll be tied in knots by the Democratic-controlled House or Democratic-controlled House and Senate.

And this is what he’s trying to offset. But he knows something that most of us, I think, are not really taking seriously, which is that the world is like — we’re like on the Titanic and we’re about to hit the iceberg. And maybe that iceberg moved a little bit further away, but we’re still right on the trajectory to hit that iceberg and it’s coming. And when the iceberg hits, there’s not enough lifeboats for everybody. And who’s going to be short of lifeboats? The Republicans.

And that’s why I think people made the mistake when they said, well, President Trump couldn’t possibly escalate before the midterms. Couldn’t possibly. For weeks, Steven, I’ve been on shows talking about why President Trump will escalate maybe after the midterms, maybe next year, but he certainly — and I kept trying to explain, that’s probably not right. And that’s what you’re seeing now. You’re seeing that President Trump is desperate to try to open the Strait of Hormuz.

He’s, I think, being told probably directly from his military, these options are very low risk. They’re very high risk. They’re very unlikely to succeed. But now that the Titanic is going to hit the iceberg, his only other choice is to completely walk back and say, “You’re right, Iran. You control Hormuz. You set the fees. You don’t have to make any limits on your nuclear program. You are the 4th center of world power. And I, Donald Trump, it happened under my watch.” That’s a big L to wear on your chest, Steven. And that would be true, I think, for any president.

The LBJ Parallel: Escalation Despite Knowing It Won’t Work

This is what Lyndon Johnson faced in Vietnam. We now have the tapes that Johnson was making in the White House in conversations. It wasn’t just Nixon making tapes here. Johnson was making tapes, and we now have tapes of Johnson as he’s making decisions to escalate the Vietnam War, explaining that he knows this is very unlikely to end the war. It’s likely to make it worse. And why is he doing it? He’s doing it because he’s trying to hold on to his Great Society program just for another 4 or 5 months.

And what he’s hoping is that even though the escalation is likely not to work, there’s some tiny chance it will. And in 4 or 5 months, he’ll be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat. It failed domestically. Lyndon Johnson had to pull back from running for reelection because of the escalations in the Vietnam War.

And President Trump is running the same risk that even though I believe that he’s doing this because he’s trying to give himself and the Republicans the best chance to win in November, it may not work. That’s why I think President Trump already planted the seed of China meddling in the elections. He’s already started the conversation that there’s another possible stolen election in our future, this time possibly by a foreign country, possibly China.

The Escalation Ladder Explained

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this point of the escalation trap, it has several stages to it. The escalation trap, as far as I understand.

ROBERT PAPE: Yes, I think you have the picture. Do we have the picture?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have the escalation ladder.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah. So I made this. I think it was something like March 2nd or March 3rd.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So for people that can’t see the visual, we’ll also explain what we’re showing here, but we will put it on the screen for those that can see.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah. So what I did is I was trying to find a way to graphically show the escalation trap. And what this looks like for those who can’t see is an upside-down pyramid. So basically it starts small at the bottom and gets worse and worse and more and more red as you get through more and more stages as you go to the top.

In the beginning, you start with a limited strike. That’s the bombing of leadership. You kill the leader, you try to topple the regime with leadership top, and that leads to retaliation, stage 2. Stage 2 retaliation is Iran takes Hormuz, and that then leads to us doing some retaliation. I would still call it stage 2, by the way. That’s why I kind of kept it the same color where we’re doing the 6 weeks bombing. That’s also where the blockade is.

And notice then you get to this red stage here. Notice it’s where economic crisis is. This is where stage 3 really starts. Now, we were able to offset that economic crisis. So when we talked in March and April, it wasn’t clear, especially China — they were still buying. So that economic crisis was a lot closer in March and April than it became after the summit with Xi, because Xi stopped buying 5 million barrels of oil a day. I want to underscore that. And what did Xi get for that? President Trump last week just blamed him for meddling in our election. So I’m not sure Xi thought that was a good deal.

But still, we’re at this point now, and this is where stage 3 is, or the choice is — if you want to get off of the escalation trap, you then have to let Iran gain power, become the rising power in the region, the regional hegemon, and essentially the 4th center of world power. Because once it gains power with Hormuz, has a sphere of influence, a year or 2 from now, Steven, they’re very likely to have nuclear weapons. So this is what it means to let Iran win. It’s not Iran will win and be nice. Iran is going to become a very powerful state in the region.

If we go further, and this we actually do escalate — and with the other map, I’ll explain what I think the real issues are going to be between now and the midterms — then we’re going to head into 2027 into the deep red, which is the actual forever war. So many people this week and next week, they’re going to — I’m going to be on a lot of shows, Steven, talking about, are we in a forever war? Well, that’s coming, possibly. But right now we’re coming into the stage 3 question, which is, are we going to physically use force for the first time for real to seize back control of at least part of Hormuz and so forth?

And that is the big question, because if we do that — and that’s why I think the real issue on the table right now is, can the United States physically open Hormuz between now and the midterms? I think that question, Steven, is the most important question in the world, for the world, for the world’s economy, for international terrorism against Americans, for whether or not we truly will be in a forever war. This is going to be decided between now and the midterms. And the key issue is, can we physically open the Strait of Hormuz between now and the midterms? And I think sadly the answer is almost surely not.

LBJ’s Words and Their Eerie Resonance Today

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s funny because you mentioned LBJ. So I was looking at some of his quotes around the time to see how they link, because everybody knows the Vietnam War as being a war that just lasted forever and really achieved nothing. I mean, that’s generally the consensus that you read about.

And LBJ said at the time, “I know we ought not be there, but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender.” And by this, he knew that the current strategy was a mistake, but he felt politically paralyzed because backing down would be like a humiliating defeat, which again links to Trump’s situation.

He also said, “Let’s get somebody that wants to do something besides drop a bomb, but that can go in and take in after these damn fellas and run them back where they belong.” And by that he meant relying entirely on overwhelming American air power wasn’t actually solving the unconventional ground-level problem, which again links to Trump’s situation as you’ve described.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s the transition from air power, Rolling Thunder, to the heavier use of ground forces. And both of those, of course, ultimately failed.

The Strait of Hormuz and US Military Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: He also said — and this is again LBJ’s comments as president during the Vietnam War — “I don’t think that we fight them 10,000 miles away from home and get anywhere in that area. It’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw.” By this, he meant trying to project military power halfway across the globe against an enemy fighting in their own backyard is incredibly difficult and likely futile, which again links to the Iran situation.

And lastly, LBJ said, “A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a single bit.” And by this, he meant that there was no realistic achievable endpoint or path to victory for its military strategy. That also links to how, when political pressures change and Trump’s recent admission at the G7 that the world is about to run out of their energy reserves, it is a stark realization that the current strategy is hard, it has a deadline, and there’s no clear solution in sight.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, it’s so tragic. It’s so tragic that we’re essentially replaying the Vietnam War. Trump is replaying the decisions that Lyndon Johnson made and coming to very similar decisions, which is he believes, as Lyndon Johnson did, that even though the military escalation would be a likely loser on the battlefield, that loss would take months and months to play out. So there was some chance he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. But if he accepted immediate abrupt defeat, that would totally undermine and destroy his domestic political agenda.

The Internet’s Top Questions on the Iran War

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ve got — I basically, before you came, I looked at the top 20 questions that the internet currently wants to know about the Iran War.

ROBERT PAPE: Oh, great.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’ve knocked off a few of them already.

ROBERT PAPE: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ve got a couple of them left.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, I love it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of them is, can the United States actually force the Strait of Hormuz fully open with our current strategy, or does Iran now hold lasting leverage over this critical choke point?

ROBERT PAPE: The answer is, it — the United States cannot do it. And this would be an opportunity, Steven, could I have the map back? Let me explain. Let me show you what I think is really in the offing here.

So a lot of people are wondering, what are we going to do with 8,000 ground troops? We have somewhere around 4,500 to 5,000 Marines, somewhere around 4,000 or so troops from the 82nd Airborne. What are these troops actually going to do?

And I think that what President Trump is doing here — and I think we can really see this if I explain it — is what we are doing is we are concentrating our forces, our naval forces, here into the Gulf of Oman. We are not moving them through the Strait of Hormuz. Our carriers are in the Gulf of Oman, and also our Marine Expeditionary Unit is in the Gulf of Oman. Now, previously, these had been further away, way off the board in the Indian Ocean. We move them here closer.

And this is important because these guns have range to be able to hit the shore within about 12 miles. So what are you doing with these ships and what are you doing here is you are building a force that might be able to take a piece of territory at Chabahar, or — right in between Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, there is a little port town called Jask. And this would be exactly the kind of armada you would build in order to take one of those objectives, either Chabahar or Jask.

And the reason that you would do it politically for President Trump is because this could possibly be a symbolic victory. You could possibly take the territory and hold it for weeks. Now, why would you be able to take the territory and hold it for weeks? It’s because this is Pakistan. We haven’t even shown the rest of Iran here. Tehran is over here.

So what we have done, Steven, is we have concentrated our forces here in the Gulf of Oman. This is our carriers, our destroyers, our battleships, and they can provide some air cover here for ships that might pass through the southern part here. So I’m not saying this is the only possible mission, but those Marines and the 82nd Airborne — they’re not really there to help ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but they’re here. At least the Marines are here.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What?

ROBERT PAPE: They’re somewhere in the Gulf of Oman. We don’t know exactly where they are. That would not be good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m just saying that because some people can’t hear.

ROBERT PAPE: Yeah, that’s right. So they’re in the Gulf of Oman here, which is to the east of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf is to the west of Hormuz. So Hormuz is the true choke point between these two gulfs. And the Gulf of Oman here — what’s north of it is the southeastern coast of Iran, which is the least populated part. Iran’s population is mostly up here around the word Iran.

Could the US Take Ground in Iran?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying that the US might take a small part of Iran from here?

ROBERT PAPE: A small part of Iran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With ground troops?

ROBERT PAPE: With ground troops, that’s right. And literally hold it here in order to get a symbolic victory. And in order for Iran to knock us out, they have to redirect all of their attention to this. And this is why I don’t think it’s going to work — ultimately they will do this. But in the short term, in a period of say a few weeks or so, there’s a chance. And I say it’s a low chance. I’m not trying to tell you I would advocate for this. I would not advocate for this. I’m trying to explain what these forces are doing here, because otherwise there’s no point in having these forces here.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so some questions on this then. If the US do, I guess, invade Iran from —

ROBERT PAPE: Capture Iran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Capture Iran.

ROBERT PAPE: One of these port towns.

STEVEN BARTLETT: From the sort of southeast here.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This would mean that Iran have a target to kill American soldiers.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the cost of losing American soldiers, especially back home in America, would be tremendous.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re talking about hundreds dead over a period of at least weeks.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this would be just terrible politically for boots to be on the ground and be dying in Iran?

ROBERT PAPE: Well, it will be divisive politically. So for people that are opposed to the war, this will make them even more opposed to the war. But for people that are supporting the war — and this is the part of the politics that I study, Steven — it’s important to understand that there’s a large part of MAGA that is incredibly supportive of this war. In fact, the opinion polls tend to show that more MAGA supports regime change for Iran than oppose it.

So this is not like MAGA has become Tucker Carlson country or something. This is still Trump country here, and they want Trump to win. What you are seeing here is that if there are troops that are killed, you are likely going to see — and you’re seeing this on Fox News this morning after 3 more died over the weekend — you’re seeing a tremendous amount of support for our troops and therefore —

Public Support for the Iran War

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I’ve got some numbers here about public support. Based on recent polling from mid-2026, the ongoing military conflict with Iran remains highly unpopular with the general American public, but support is sharply divided along political lines. Overall, roughly 27 to 34% of Americans support the war, while a solid majority of 53 to 57% oppose it. But then when you look at MAGA, it says that 77% to 85% of MAGA support the war — those are MAGA Republicans — and only 5% to 14% of MAGA Republicans oppose the war.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right. So what you are seeing is the divisions in our country, which have been building for years, are still in existence with this war, and they’re becoming hardened in this war. And as deaths occur, this is likely to harden the division, not shift — at least not shift much of MAGA to the anti-war position.

And the reason is because, just as Trump complained when President Biden pulled out from Afghanistan, this is going to be not just a loss for Trump if he pulls out. This will be viewed as an insult to the people who died. And so people will say, if we leave, did those people die as a mistake? Was it a mistake? Were their deaths worthless? That’s a hard thing.

And that’s one of the reasons why when troops die in war for months, this can harden support for a war, possibly even grow it over time. Yes, it tends to whittle down, but in the near term, deaths can actually harden support for the war. And that’s a thing that most people aren’t really fully grasping yet.

The Risk of a Ground Operation in Iran

STEVEN BARTLETT: How real is the risk that the US will do some kind of limited ground operation with boots on the ground in Iran?

ROBERT PAPE: Well over 50%. I think it’s bordering on 70% now. And the reasons are that, number one, the economic crisis that President Trump was trying to prevent — and therefore the economic costs that will hurt him later — is already starting to become baked in.

What you’re hearing this morning with the Houthis closing the pipeline area around Yanbu — it’s called that, this port city in the Red Sea where the 4 to 5 million barrels of Saudi oil is coming out — what that is going to do is make the economic crisis even more baked in, even more likely. Unless it’s immediately reversed. And even if it was immediately reversed tomorrow, that could be reversed again the next day after that.

This is starting to spiral out of control because it’s not just up to President Trump now to put this genie back in the bottle. President Trump can actually still withdraw. But right now, Iran has to stop the escalation. It has to let the Red Sea oil flow. It has to allow ships to flow from Hormuz. And Iran is in a mood for revenge. There are emotions coursing through Iran, but it’s not causing Iran to pull back. It’s causing Iran to want revenge.

And the Supreme Leader’s statement just a couple of days ago — this was Saturday, when 2 US soldiers were tragically killed in Jordan — he used the phrase that he’s going to deliver “unforgettable lessons” to America. “Unforgettable lessons” is the exact phrase used by the Supreme Leader over the weekend.

What you are seeing here, Steven, is that as Iran started to shoot at ships here to try to reinforce the MOU, President Trump upped the ante. Now we’re in our 9th day of bombing in a row. Now Iran is upping the ante, and Iran is upping the ante in multiple ways. It’s attacking our base in Jordan, which it has only rarely done since March, actually. It’s now with the Houthis closing the Red Sea.

And we haven’t yet talked about Kuwait. We should talk about what happened here over the weekend in Kuwait, because this is a harbinger of what’s to come. It shows how ferocious the anger is by Iran and how hard it’s going to be to stop this spiral of escalation. And that is what is going to lead to President Trump thinking long and hard about putting those ground forces in, because we’re not making an independent decision now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you said there’s a 70% chance that troops could be put on the ground in Iran?

ROBERT PAPE: Yes. I think probably within the next month, maybe even shorter than that. It could even be by the end of this week.

The Risk of Mass Casualty Attacks

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve shown me on the graph that you’ve just shown the escalation ladder, you can call it, and where we are now, what is the most probable next thing that you think happens with this war?

ROBERT PAPE: The biggest thing I’m worried about is a mass casualty attack against American troops or American civilians.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

ROBERT PAPE: Against American troops in the Middle East, but I’m specifically worrying about a barrage of ballistic missiles against our naval ships in the Gulf of Oman. So Iran is showing through the targeting that it’s already been doing in the last week and a half, an exquisite ability to precisely target. And we don’t know for sure they’re able to track the movement of our naval ships in the Gulf of Oman, or they’re getting help from either the Chinese or the Russians in doing that.

But I’m specifically worried that as this escalates, they’ve just closed the strait, they’ve just closed the Red Sea, if we keep going forward, and we’ll find out if Trump will pull back or not, but if we keep going forward, one of the big things I’m concerned about this week, next week, would be an attack on a ship. And I think it would be a barrage attack.

The second thing I’m concerned about is because we are now literally threatening ground occupation, that’s the biggest risk factor for suicide terrorism in my 25 years of including suicide attacks. We haven’t talked about that, Steven. And the reason we haven’t talked about it is because we were pretty far away from the big risk factor of how you start a big suicide terrorist campaign. That is now changing. I’ve talked to my Substack about this. Glad to talk to you about it now.

But I’m concerned about a mass casualty attack against Americans. This could be against an American airliner. It could be against Americans on a commercial airliner. This could be against Americans, say businessmen in Aqaba. So you might know there have been attacks recently in Aqaba, which is this really lovely resort town. I’ve never been there. And the fact is there are American businessmen moving all around the Middle East now. Build these pipelines. And so I can imagine there being terrorist attacks against the hotels that they’re staying at. The German and British embassies have just ordered their evacuation. America State Department has issued an advisory over the weekend for Americans to start leaving the region.

But I’m concerned about terrorist attack because threatening or actually doing ground control, controlling pieces of homeland land territory is the biggest risk factor for suicide terrorism. That’s what causes people more than anything else to strap on bombs to kill others while they’re killing themselves.

So before we explain in detail, so when you say, Steven, what I’m looking for in the next few weeks, I’m seeing the spiral of escalation now occurring. It’s a two-sided spiral. It’s not just President Trump. Iran is escalating here as much as Trump if not more. And in this spiral of escalation, there could be a mass casualty attack either against our troops or against American civilians. And the American civilian attack could be anywhere in the world. It could be in Indonesia, it could be London, it could be anywhere.

And if that mass casualty event happens, I think what you’re going to see is that this is likely going to cause that division we just discussed here in America, support for the war, to harden in even more. And you’re going to get, though, intense support for continuing the war now to stop mass casualty attacks by Iran in the future.

Understanding Suicide Terrorism

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you have spent some of your career studying terrorist attacks and I guess suicide terrorist attacks.

ROBERT PAPE: Specifically, yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me a view into the research, the work you’ve done there. You’ve written a book on it. 2 books on it. And then ladder me up to how that’s relevant to the moment we’re in now.

ROBERT PAPE: So shortly after 9/11, this was, remember, America was hit with a terrorist attack here in New York, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. Nearly 3,000 Americans died that day. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to understand more. The more I studied it, I noticed that 9/11 was a suicide attack. It wasn’t just a terrorist attack. So I started to collect what became the first complete data set of all suicide attacks around the world. I did this at the University of Chicago. I did this with a few research assistants, basically work-study students.

The suicide terrorism — the reason I studied it, Steven, was because it’s the lung cancer of terrorism. Suicide attacks kill more people in the category of terrorism than all the other different kinds of terrorism combined. The suicide attacks are the biggest killer. It’s like lung cancer. We have other kinds of cancers, but lung cancer is the biggest killer. And what is the key risk factor for the lung cancer of suicide terrorism? It’s military combat presence on territory the terrorists prize.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So with suicide terrorism, is it to stop? Because, you know, we can intercept missiles that are coming over pretty well, it seems, but suicide terrorism seems to be a completely different type of challenge.

ROBERT PAPE: Suicide terrorism is like a precision-guided — it’s like turning a person into a precision-guided weapon, because literally nothing can better identify the most vulnerable point in a crowd, the most vulnerable point in a building, the exact split second to set off the explosive better than a human.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does the US, for example — you’re saying 2 things. You’re saying that that attack could happen in the United States, but also it doesn’t have to. It could happen anywhere in those regions where there’s a high density of Americans or Westerners, theoretically.

ROBERT PAPE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because, you know, the Americans could say, well, we’re not going to let in anybody from those regions, we’re going to get more diligent with passport checks, whatever.

ROBERT PAPE: That will happen after the first — let’s, God forbid, I hope I’m wrong, Steven, but if and when that first attack happens, you’re going to see all that come out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re going to see what come out?

ROBERT PAPE: You’re going to see all the idea of what can we do? Can we do passport checks? Can we do X or Y? This is right after 9/11, similar thing happened. Let’s hope nothing that large would happen. But let me just further explain that when I compiled that database, and it made a specific prediction. It predicted then that if we invaded and occupied Iraq, we would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times.

Ground Occupation and the Trigger for Suicide Terrorism

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it about invading their country in particular versus bombing their country in particular that causes suicide terrorist attacks from your research? Like, what is it? Because bombing them from the sky is killing people.

ROBERT PAPE: That — it’s not the killing people part of this that matters. It’s the political control part that comes with the ground forces. So the reason to use the ground forces is to impose political control. So that’s not just killing people, Steven. So the reason why America put in ground forces is to get political control, and that political control means the group controlled doesn’t control its way of life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s just sort of seen as a deeper violation. Is that ultimately what it is?

ROBERT PAPE: It’s a deeper violation that is not in control of the local population. So when we put in ground forces in Afghanistan after we toppled the Taliban, we toppled the Taliban with air power, by the way, but we don’t get much suicide attacks in Afghanistan till we start pouring in ground forces in Afghanistan. That comes after we topple the Taliban. So we topple the Taliban in fall 2021, and then we get the suicide terrorism starting several years later in Afghanistan. It’s because that’s when we’re putting in the ground forces.

Is There an Off-Ramp?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Donald Trump has just posted on Truth Social a few hours ago saying “every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over. This directive has been passed on to the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his other military leader.” And obviously this is in response to losing an American life. And he’s very actively tweeting as we speak about the war, tweet after tweet after tweet after tweet on Truth Social. It begs the question, I mean, I just don’t know, is there an achievable endgame or off-ramp here that restores the free shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, but also allows the United States to retract without appearing to have suffered a strategic defeat?

ROBERT PAPE: No, Steven, there’s not an achievable off-ramp. That ship sailed first when President Trump decided in the first week in March not to declare. He could have declared. My advice at that point, first week in March, was to declare victory and walk away. To say all you wanted to do was teach Iran a lesson. You’d killed the Supreme Leader, a bunch of other leaders. Now let’s go back to negotiate about Iran’s nuclear program. He did not do that.

When I was with you in April, I was giving different advice. That advice then was to militarily contain Israel. That advice was to keep a lid — Israel was moving into Lebanon, doing other things, keep a lid on Israel militarily. President Trump has taken these ideas, and I’m not saying because I said them, but he’s taken those ideas months too late. If you look at what I think President Trump might think, he is trying to militarily contain Israel right now. With the MOU, I do think he tried to declare victory and walk out.

But the problem here, Steven, is that these are now a day late and a dollar short. They’re just not good enough. So if you wanted to get back to the negotiating track, what exactly are you going to offer Iran to come back to the table at this point. The same MOU say, “oh sure, we’re going to now just, we’re going to honor the MOU that we already signed and then we violated over and over and over.” That’s not credible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So is this the forever war?

ROBERT PAPE: No, we’re not yet in the forever war stage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you said there’s no way out.

ROBERT PAPE: The way out would be if the midterms come, and the Democrats win either the House or the House and the Senate, and they shut down the money for the war. Oh, that is a way out. Oh, they can do that? Yes, that’s what happened in Vietnam.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They can shut down the money for the war?

ROBERT PAPE: They can shut down the — that’s what Congress did. Yes, Congress has the power. It doesn’t use it very often. The last time it did this was in 1973, ’74. The reason I, as I showed you on that escalation ladder, I said there is a stage 5, a forever war. We’re not at a forever war yet.

What would be a forever war would be where that will come. And the reason I’m defining the escalation period between now and the midterms as the most crucial period right now, this is going to determine everything. And what’s going to determine the outcome of the next few months is can America open the Strait of Hormuz physically.

What could easily happen between now and the midterms is President Trump tries to open the Strait of Hormuz, or he allows Iran, by the way, to — he pulls back. He could actually pull back either way at this point, Steven. There’s a good chance he will lose in the midterms, meaning that the Republicans will lose one or both houses in Congress. And if that happens, then whoever takes over control will be a Democrat. They’ll be hotly anti-war, and there will be great efforts here to shut down the war, meaning shut down the money for the war. So it’s always about the money.

The Role of Congress and the Midterms

STEVEN BARTLETT: I need to get an understanding of the role. So this sort of link between the midterms, the money, and then the war. So the midterms are going to change who’s in Congress. Yes. And then the people controls it. And the people in Congress, they decide how much money the military get?

The Constitutional Crisis and the Midterms

ROBERT PAPE: They decide whether or not they can pass laws. And this is what happened in 1974 to prevent money from being spent on the war.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And Trump can’t overdo that.

ROBERT PAPE: He can try to work around it. There can be then Supreme Court cases and so forth and so on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So even if Democrats win the midterms and try to halt the war, Trump could bypass them because he holds massive constitutional advantages as commander-in-chief. He can simply veto any war powers resolution or funding restriction passed by Congress, which would then require an incredibly difficult 2/3 supermajority in both chambers to override. Furthermore, mirroring the arguments of almost every president since Richard Nixon, Trump could evoke his Article II constitutional authority, claiming he has the inherent power to defend America’s interests and troops without needing legislative approval. Finally, even if Congress refuses to authorize new funding, the president can use emergency transfer authorities and creative accounting to shuffle existing Pentagon budget funds to keep the military operations running in the short term.

ROBERT PAPE: You’ve just defined a constitutional crisis. Congress will think it has the power. President Trump will think he has the power. That is what is a constitutional crisis. And that’s why these midterms, as my— don’t mean to say it quite in this context, but as you know, I have a book coming out, Our Own Worst Enemies. The preface is called “The Most Dangerous Elections in Our Lifetimes.” That is why this election coming up will be the most dangerous election in our lifetime, because the tensions now are growing on top of all that.

They’re not calming down those waters. The Iran war is making all these worse. And what you just read is the tension here that could well come because the Democrats are not going to want there to be a forever war. And they were going to likely fight really hard once they control one or both houses of Congress. President Trump will want to fight really hard for his legacy and his domestic agenda, including deportations, including ICE.

So this will all come together. These will not be compartmentalized separate issues as we get into the midterms. That’s why I’m saying that we’re coming— the midterms, the midterms, the midterms. We’re not heading to a future where it’s just about what happens to military bases overseas. Just about what happens to ships overseas and what’s happening in Hormuz.

These lines, the domestic political violence in the United States, I call this the era of violent populism, and the growing tensions in the country over the Iran War. These 2 lines, the domestic crisis and the international crisis, are about to come together. And as I told my research team in the summer of 2024, in talks I gave in Chicago, my nightmare— they asked me what my nightmare scenario was. This was in the fall of 2024. And I said, my nightmare scenario is we have an international crisis at the same time as we have an election. In the fall of 2024, we really didn’t have that. Now we do. And this is— we’re heading into the fall of 2026. And this was always my nightmare scenario.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? What does that mean? What are those 2 things colliding?

ROBERT PAPE: Those 2 things colliding start to look like the 1960s.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what happened in the 1960s?

The Parallels to the 1960s

ROBERT PAPE: The 1960s, we had mass demonstrations. We had anti-war violence. We had anti-war terrorism with the Weather Underground. We had multiple assassinations that occurred. Martin Luther King, it was Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the convention in Chicago. Chicago, there was just mass demonstration. Mayor Daley in Chicago gave a shoot-to-kill order. I already mentioned to you the Weather Underground string of bombs that they set off. So what we faced in the 1960s was the collision of domestic political tension with an unpopular war. That’s how you got the chaos of the 1960s. I have a whole chapter in the book about the 1960s and why it was particularly intense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think that Trump is likely to lose the midterms as things stand? Do you think the Republicans are likely to lose?

ROBERT PAPE: Here’s the thing. If we have a mass casualty attack, this will increase the odds of Trump and the Republicans winning in the midterms. And I think if we have a world economic crisis without the mass casualty attack, then I think it’s likely that the Republicans will lose in the midterms.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

ROBERT PAPE: So I think we have— the reason I can’t give you a clean answer to this, which I know people want, they would, because we have multiple specific issues here that are now as part of the spiraling violence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And 3 months isn’t awful long.

ROBERT PAPE: It’s a long time because that mass casualty attack could happen in October, and it doesn’t have to be committed and directed by Iran. It can occur, the mass casualty attack against Americans can occur because it’s an inspired attack. The Supreme Leader is issuing statements that sound almost like Baghdadi, that was the leader of ISIS, issuing statements to encourage inspired attacks. That was the suicide attack in Paris in November 2015 that killed over 100 people. That was San Bernardino. So we saw leaders inspire attacks before, and the Supreme Leader’s statements are just eerily close to the same words.

The Sustainability of the US Air Campaign

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is the current US air campaign sustainable? You hinted at this earlier on, that actually the US might be running out of some of their weapons. It’s estimated that the daily cost of this war for America is around $2 billion a day. And Iran’s ability to continue these sort of asymmetric attacks with drones and other things doesn’t come at such a high cost and seems from the example you gave with the bowl earlier on to be more sustainable. So is there actually a risk here that the US will run out of weapons?

ROBERT PAPE: I think that there’s a risk we’ll run out of interceptors to shoot down missiles, but even that’s pretty low because what’s really happening in our arsenal of weapons, Steven, is we are using a lot of interceptors, especially say Patriot missile interceptors to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, but we’re drawing from stocks in Asia and in Europe. This is one of the reasons Zelensky can’t get Patriot missiles, at least not very many of them. It’s because we’re now moving most of the stocks here for the Persian Gulf.

So I think that there’s some chance we’ll run out of those interceptors, but even there, I think it’s low. But literally in terms of the bombs, it’s a gross exaggeration to expect that we are going to run out of bombs to drop from aircraft. And there’s 2 reasons for that. In order to make a precision bomb, most people don’t know what it takes these days. And it’s true, we can spend a lot of money making a precision bomb, but we can literally take dumb bombs, 500 dumb bombs and strap a backpack on them that will connect with GPS and have little cords to the fins of the bombs in order to turn a dumb bomb into a precision bomb. Those fanny packs are about $20,000, maybe $25,000. So we can make them much more easily than people think.

Trump’s Objectives and the Escalation Trap

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you think the United States/Trump’s objective is at this particular point? What is the goal, the real goal? Because there’s lots of press conferences I see where they say it’s nuclear weapons, it’s this, that, and the other.

ROBERT PAPE: I think President Trump’s goal between now and the midterms is very simple, a symbolic victory.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what would that look like?

ROBERT PAPE: That would look like a victory that would hold for a week, maybe 2 weeks. And that would be an opportunity to show that President Trump fought back. I think that’s how this would be framed by President Trump’s supporters and those who support the war. And it would be, I think President Trump would say, “and this shows what we can do if you let us win.” I think his words would be a little different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he’s stuck?

ROBERT PAPE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he knows he’s stuck?

ROBERT PAPE: I’ve never met President Trump. My research here, Steven, has always looked at the actual words by decision makers. What I can tell you is what his incentives look like, and the incentives that I’ve laid out have been quite predictive of his behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you want him to call you? Yes. And if he calls you, what is the advice you would give him on what to do next?

ROBERT PAPE: What I would do is try to design a several-year strategy to build a better balance of power in the region that we could over a period of time stabilize the world and stabilize the region. And I think that is the big issue that’s being missed right now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if he says, “Listen, Robert, what do I do in the next 3 months? Because I’ve got these midterms coming up.”

ROBERT PAPE: Then the answer is don’t call me. I want to help President Trump, but I want to help America for real. These are not necessarily at odds. But the bottom line here is that everything I have to say to President Trump about the next 3 months, we’ve just done on this podcast, Steven.

But I am absolutely delighted to talk about how to actually build a more secure future for America and for the Gulf. And I just don’t think that’s happening. And I think the pressure that this must lead to an electoral victory for President Trump is likely to make the true security for America and the Gulf more likely. In fact, it’s going to go the other way around. It will encourage the escalation trap.

So that’s why I’m stuck by my own logic of the escalation trap here. It’s literally, we have to move past the idea that the only acceptable option is an option that guarantees political success for an individual, even if it means the president of the United States.

Russia, China, and the Global Implications

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think Russia and China, who are often positioned as adversaries of the United States, what do you think they’re thinking right now? And what do they want to happen? I guess China’s being hurt by the oil situation. Russia’s got their own situation going on with the Ukraine. What are they thinking?

ROBERT PAPE: I think China does not want there to be global instability, but at the same time, they don’t want this to be a situation where Iran comes out smashed. I think that’s simply not in the cards. I also don’t think China is going to insert itself in a very forceful way. I think the idea that Iran might come out and militarily support the United States here or militarily support with its own forces, Iran is not likely to happen. So I think that what you are—

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t they want Iran smashed, China?

ROBERT PAPE: For President Xi, he explained quite a bit of this at the summit. He said to President Trump, “You’re a declining power. Are you going to fall into what he called the through a liquidity trap, meaning are you going to launch a preventive war against China in Asia?” And that’s what President Xi said.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about Russia?

ROBERT PAPE: What Russia is seeing is an opportunity to squeeze Europe economically. So I believe that what has been happening in the last few weeks here, the last month, is that Ukraine has actually been gaining not just strength with drones, but in a specific area called Crimea, which Russia took and Putin took in 2014. There’s been a mass exodus out of Crimea in the last weeks. Ukraine is putting more and more pressure on the supply lines coming into Crimea and also coming into Ukraine from Russia.

And what Putin, I think, wants to have happen is that he will likely escalate more, put more pressure on Europe at exactly the time in the fall when the world economic crisis is growing because of Iran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that is going to squeeze Europe, make it hard for Europe to fulfill the commitment they just made to Zelensky of $80 billion more. I guess my last question then, before I go to the diary, is if you were to predict how the next couple of months play out, what would your prediction be? And this is on probability, 51% probability of outcomes. What happens next?

Predicting What Comes Next

ROBERT PAPE: I think we’re going to, in the next few months, cross the threshold with ground operations into either one of the islands or part of the coast of Iran because the world economic crisis is going to grow. The price of gasoline in the United States is likely to grow. And President Trump is going to be even more desperate to try to find a way to look, make it at least appear as if he has a plan to open Hormuz. It may not be real. It may only be symbolic.

But I think, Steven, that where we are heading is the more the crisis, the world economic crisis increases, and if there’s a mass casualty attack, the more that crisis increases, the more President Trump is under pressure to demonstrate he has a way to open Hormuz, even if it’s far off, and he needs a down payment on that. He needs something to show tangibly. And I think that’s where the pressure will come from for crossing into stage 3.

The Human Cost of War

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it’s worth saying in these conversations as well that there are 90-plus million Iranians who currently live in Iran and who are caught in the midst of this craziness and chaos. And sometimes in these conversations, we kind of don’t really think about the fact that there’s a nation that’s just bigger than the nation I come from, the United Kingdom, who are right in the heart of this.

And so every time Trump says he’s bombed more people over the weekends or he’s firing bombs, I always think about the real families that are caught right in the midst of all of this, that didn’t choose this war, that are living in an environment where bombs are dropping on their heads.

And I think for everybody all around the world that listen to this show, whether you’re in the UK or the United States or Australia or Canada or wherever you are, South America, Asia, wherever, Africa, it’s worth taking a second just to imagine what it would be like to know that the United States are dropping lots of bombs on the nation in which you live, and how that would feel psychologically, how that would feel for your children, how that would feel for you yourself, how that would impact your day-to-day life.

And also, I guess, the uncertainty of not knowing when it’s going to end, if it’s going to end, and also hearing this term escalation trap and thinking that this is actually going to escalate and troops are going to come into my country. And so there’s a real human cost to this, which sometimes we leave out of these conversations.

ROBERT PAPE: And I have students at the University of Chicago who are Iranian. They have families in Iran. And they ask me questions about this all the time. And sadly, what I have to tell them is that real hope for the Iranian people is 5 or 10 years away. And as this war escalates, it pushes closer to 10 than 5.

Closing Question: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next. The question left for you is, “If you could go back to a certain time and see something occur or ask someone something you’ve always wondered about, what/who would that person/place be and why?”

ROBERT PAPE: I think the key person I would ask would be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died before we dropped the atomic bombs. I would want to know from him, when he was developing and supporting the atomic bombs, did he imagine the world that would be created by the atomic bombs?

Because in my lifetime, war has been a defining feature of my work, but the prospects of nuclear war have always overhung quite a bit of our work. We never want to get to anything like that. But I’d like to know from the person who had the most authority, power, in order to make that future happen, who never even saw it, didn’t even see it happen, but knew it was coming.

I’d like to know from him, what did he think was truly going to come? Because I think that this would be extremely useful to know whether or not our leaders truly, truly how far out can really see and understand how much their decisions today shape the world for decades to come.

Closing Remarks

STEVEN BARTLETT: Robert, thank you. We’re very excited for your book, September 22nd. So do we have a preorder link yet?

ROBERT PAPE: It’s just up, actually. Literally, it’s just up. So, yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have to say, when we first sat down, you said a bunch of things in terms of what would happen next, and I’m not sure I believed them all because I don’t know anything about war. And you never really think about the psychology changes both at home, but also where the bombs are dropping.

And it does appear that you’ve been largely correct about what you said would happen, this escalation that happens across all wars that has happened also in Ukraine and Russia at the same time, but now we’re seeing play out in Iran. So I have to give you your credit because you have been, unfortunately you’ve been right, I should say.

ROBERT PAPE: I would agree with the word unfortunately. So part of me would like to be happy about this, but the truth is, and this is what I just was talking to my 97-year-old mother-in-law about, is I told her that you had invited me. Again, she’s 97 years old, can’t even get out of bed, Steven. And I told her that it was one of the saddest things I had to agree to. And it’s because of what it really means. The reason you’re having me here is because things are bad for our country and I want nothing more than for things to be better for our country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, Robert, thank you so much for coming back. If we do come back again and convene, I hope next time it’s on better terms because we’re analyzing how it all resulted in peace for everybody, especially the people that are living in Iran right now. Robert, thank you.

ROBERT PAPE: Thank you.

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