Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Iran War Expert: I Simulated The Iran War for 20 Years. Here’s What Happens Next About this episode White House war advisor ROBERT PAPE reveals why Trump is trapped in a war with Iran, the risk of a nuclear breakout, the role of China in the conflict, and how the US is losing control of the Middle East.
Robert Pape is a renowned political scientist and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He has advised every White House since 9/11 on military strategy and is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.
He explains:
▪️The 3 stages of the escalation trap locking the US into war
▪️Why precision smart bombs trick leaders into strategic failure
▪️The hidden reality of Iran's 400kg enriched uranium stockpile
▪️How killing the Supreme Leader made the Iranian regime more resilient
▪️The pattern that connects Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran
(00:00) Intro
(02:01) What’s Really Happening In The World Right Now
(04:01) I’ve Worked With The White House For The Last 20 Years
(04:48) What Iran War Simulations Reveal About The Next Conflict
(08:56) What Really Happened When The U. S. Bombed Iran’s Nuclear Sites
(11:57) Does Removing A Leader Actually Collapse A Regime?
(16:05) Iran’s New Supreme Leader May Be Even More Hostile To The U. S.
(26:04) The Escalation Scenario Most People Aren’t Paying Attention To
(41:12) Ads
(43:11) What The Next U. S.–Iran War Could Actually Look Like
(47:31) What Happens If The U. S. Hadn’t Bombed Iran - Would War Be Worse?
(52:06) Does Trump Really Influence Netanyahu’s Decisions?
(54:02) Are Trump’s Global Decisions Driven By Legacy?
(1:04:30) Could The World Be Heading Toward Another Genocide?
(1:05:52) What Happens After “Stage 3”
(1:07:14) Ads
(1:12:11) China’s Quiet Strategy For Global Dominance
(1:13:15) Is America’s Superpower Era Ending?
(1:16:29) Why China May Benefit From A U. S. Conflict With Iran
(1:22:51) The Real Long-Term Prize The U. S. Is Fighting For
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Transcript 15,313 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? You've been running simulations on a war with Iran.
0:02 Robert Pape? Yep, every strategy for 20 years and it's playing out right now. So I can tell you that we are losing control of the situation. Like, we don't know where that nuclear material is. But they have the material for 16 nuclear bugs. And we've given them every incentive to develop them.
0:21 Steven Bartlett? Professor Robert Pape might be the single most important credible person we all need to listen to right now.
0:27 Robert Pape? The supreme leader that we took out was against nuclear weapons. The new supreme leader, and he's way more aggressive.
0:34 Steven Bartlett? He's advised two decades of presidents in the White House.
0:37 Robert Pape? President Trump is really stuck, but he thrives in chaos.
0:41 Steven Bartlett? And spent 30 years building the curriculum that trains the air force for the exact type of war that's taking place now in Iran. And one of the most mind blowing things I've learned is that there are three stages to this conflict. Unfortunately, Professor Robert Pape, who has two decades of being correct with his predictions, gives a 75% chance that Trump is about to escalate to stage three. In this episode, we're going to explain exactly what this means.
1:12 Steven Bartlett? Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.
1:55 Steven Bartlett? Professor Robert Pape.
1:59 Steven Bartlett? What the hell is going on in the world? Now, I should ask, I should ask first. Who are you and what have you spent the last several decades of your life studying and doing? And how does that relate to what's happening in the world right now?
2:11 Robert Pape? We are going through a crisis more and very intense right now, but it's a crisis that we have been through before. 20 years ago with the Iraq war, even before that, we saw the bombing of Gaddafi. We saw the reactions there. Now, I have been studying military strategy, air power, international terrorism, now terrorism inside the United States and also political violence in the United States. It's not related to particular groups. So I've been studying political violence for 40 years.
2:44 Steven Bartlett? What is the headline that people need to be aware of when you've looked at 30 years of these types of wars?
2:50 Robert Pape? That bombs don't just hit targets, they change politics.
2:54 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
2:55 Robert Pape? That means that before the bombs fall, and even as the bombs are falling now, we tend to focus on the tactical success of bombing. We tend to ask, did the bombs hit the targets? And it's with the smart bomb age, it's almost mesmerizing. They hit the target and destroy the target, crater dirt, crater concrete, destroy buildings 90% of the time. The problem is wars are not just about the hardware. They're not just about the military operation of putting a bomb on a target. They're about politics. And when the bombs start to fall, the politics in both the target, the enemy, change.
3:40 Robert Pape? And the politics in the attacker, the initiator, change. And that threshold is the beginning of what I'm calling the escalation trap. Because you get at stage one, tactical success often. What's missing here is the next consideration, which is politics.
4:01 Steven Bartlett? Who have you advised and at what level have you advised them on strategy, war, et cetera, et cetera?
4:07 Robert Pape? So in the, when I finished my PhD, right away, we started to fight the first Gulf War, which was an all air power war. And I found my work from the 1980s suddenly more relevant than ever. I was in the Washington Post, USA Today, frontline designing the stories because we didn't have the talking military heads at the time. And then I get a call from the US Air Force and they're asking me to come in and help not just teach, but to build the curriculum. Then what happens as time goes on, I end up, I end up advising every White House from 2001 to 2024, including the first Trump White House.
4:48 Steven Bartlett? I also heard that you've been running simulations on a war with Iran.
4:53 Robert Pape? Yep, the last class of every strategy for 20 years. In fact, we did it just last, last May, just before we started the bombing and 90 minutes. So we, the, the class goes a whole quarter, strategy in all kinds of different ways. And we ended with the bombing of Iran. And what did that mean? That meant we took out the whole target. We have the targets that laid out, we have the attack plans. We really go through the bombing of Natanz, Fordo, Esafon. There, there's a number of these facilities and so forth. And then we play, and then we look at what's going to happen. And what you see right away is 90 plus percent, those B2s are going to destroy those targets.
5:37 Steven Bartlett? B2s being the aircraft?
5:38 Robert Pape? The stealthy aircraft that can penetrate the airspace, very few risk of, small risk of loss. And then you see, but we don't know where the nuclear material is. The whole point of this is not to destroy a building. It's to get at the 5%, 20%, 60% enriched uranium that's the material for bombs. And last May, it was very clear they had the material for 16 bombs.
6:09 Steven Bartlett? 16 nuclear bombs.
6:11 Robert Pape? One six.
6:12 Steven Bartlett? Nuclear bombs.
6:13 Robert Pape? Yes, nuclear bombs, not to produce them all in a single week, but over a period of months. And then af- after we did that simulation, we didn't know where a single ounce was. And we weren't going to know for months after. So at the end of every, I make some predictions, I say, what's going to happen? What's going to happen is after about a year, we are going to panic because that material could be dispersed anywhere in Iran, anywhere in that country. And that country, look how big that is compared to the United States. Could be dispersed anywhere now. And how many of those are actually developing toward a bomb? We will not know. So what will we do? Regime change.
6:58 Steven Bartlett? From all of your years in, I mean, thirty one years old, you start teaching about air power and war in this regard. And you are sixty five now.
7:07 Robert Pape? Yeah.
7:08 Steven Bartlett? What is that, from everything you know, thirty, thirty plus years studying this stuff? Iran, running simulations on Iran, advising the White House, being a master and probably arguably the most informed person in the United States right now about air attacks like the one the US performing on Iran. What is the headline that you're trying to send to the world at this moment in time? Like, what is it we're missing? Because we're seeing Trump come out and Trump say, it's going well, everything's amazing, we've taken out all their guys. What is, what are, what are we missing?
7:36 Robert Pape? We're missing that we're stuck in a trap of our own making. I'll explain what that trap is, but the key consequence of the trap is we're losing control. We are losing control of the situation. And what you were seeing with President Trump is he's trying to regain control. Now, the problem is that, starting not just a week of Saturday, but starting back in June, when we took out Natanz Fordo, we started to lose control. And what are we losing control of? Knowing where that nuclear material is. And we now have civilian satellites and you can see them moving things.
8:21 Robert Pape? What would they be moving around the nuclear areas? I wonder, you think they're moving the, the, the, you know, what are they moving here? It's most likely going to be that nuclear material. Cause their plan, there, you can see they have prepared for this war just as we have. Except they've been preparing for how to be resilient. How to now lash back in increasingly aggressive ways. They are winning the escalation part of the war. And that's not an accident. This you can see coming in stages.
8:56 Steven Bartlett? But for anyone that doesn't know, and we've got leaders that have different levels of sort of information and knowledge here. I'm going to try and summarize this and butcher it in the most indelicate way I possibly can. So earlier last year, last year, the United States suspected that Iran were very close to enriching uranium. They're at 60%.
9:17 Robert Pape? They're at 60 already.
9:18 Steven Bartlett? If they get to 90%, they have a bomb.
9:21 Robert Pape? Yes, but possibly even with the 60% Stephen. It depends on just how good their scientists are and we're not really sure. So there's somewhere where it's 60%, we're already very worried. You go to 90, it's a gimme.
9:35 Steven Bartlett? And then the United States dropped these big bunker buster bombs. They flew those B2 airplanes in, dropped these bombs, smashing up the site.
9:44 Robert Pape? Yep.
9:44 Steven Bartlett? And then it felt like it was over. And then we, the United States went into negotiations with Iran to try and get some kind of deal done.
9:51 Robert Pape? To get the material we didn't get. You see, why are we even talking to them? If this has really obliterated the program, why are we bothering to talk to them? What exactly are we talking about here? Do you notice the inconsistency here? So when you say we thought it was over, that's the public. Okay, now the public need to understand, they're very busy people. They're to playing for the price of eggs. Okay, so this is, they're not supposed to be able to be up on us.
10:16 Steven Bartlett? It's a good point I've never thought about. Why would we be talking to them?
10:20 Robert Pape? Why are we talking to them, you see? So, right from the get go. And, and by the way, all of the, um, it's the Israelis. We have a thing called the Defense Intelligence Agency. Their reports that were done after the bombing were leaked. And they all say the same thing, which is we created holes. We probably shook these underground chambers. We're not sure because we had no eyeballs on that. But we have no idea where that enriched uranium is. And we have good reason to worry. They got them out because we actually have a satellite picture that shows two days before we bombed Fordo, there's a bunch of trucks moving stuff out.
11:04 Robert Pape? Gee, what do you think you might move out if America's about to bomb your site? Again, I, I don't think they're moving out the popcorn. So, um, and it's pretty, this material can be moved in what look like large scuba tanks. They call them scuba tanks, but I, I, I, I try to show pictures of this too. They're, they're, they're actually like as large as this table. So you need basically trucks, trucks like that satellite photography shows they took out. So, so we can't say for sure, but what you see is these are the indications that you worry they've dispersed the material even before we hit the site.
11:41 Steven Bartlett? And then we attack.
11:43 Robert Pape? Yep.
11:43 Steven Bartlett? The United States attacks in February, February 2026, which is.
11:47 Robert Pape? Yep, February 2026, February 2028, we start again, this time with regime change. Notice we don't go even after the fizzle, the nuclear material. We don't know where it is.
11:57 Steven Bartlett? So for the average person, the average person would think if you take out the Supreme Leader, then the war is over. Drop the bomb on the person and the war is complete.
12:07 Robert Pape? Yeah, so let's talk about your, your Jenga thing here because what, what I find, Stephen, so keep in mind, I am advising, teaching some of the most brilliant minds in the, in the country. Now, a lot of these smart people though, they don't know that they, they've been given like one inch deep briefings, maybe even one sentence briefings. So their image.
12:29 Robert Pape? is often like this, and it's wrong. This is what they think the regime looks like. And they think that because they've been given, they basically have been consuming, probably for years, one or two sentences about the structure. They know there's a supreme leader. They might know there's nuclear facilities, missiles command. And so it looks like, oh, my goodness gracious, that if you could just simply take out the right node, you would be able to make this whole thing fall down. Okay. But that's the wrong image, Stephen. This is the way smart people think. The problem is, this is a false image of most regimes, even the bad ones,
13:12 Robert Pape? and certainly the Iranian regime. Let me just focus on the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime is more like a matrix. It's more, it's not brittle the way this is. So you can keep trying to pull things out, but with a matrix, or I think the corporate structures now are built to be adaptive, to change, because you have so many changes that happen. The structure needs to adapt to change. That is basically the structure of revolutionary regimes going back to before World War I.
13:49 Steven Bartlett? Okay, I want to ask a dumb question.
13:50 Robert Pape? Yep.
13:51 Steven Bartlett? When they took out the supreme leader in Iran, who's going to give out the instructions?
13:57 Robert Pape? The adaptive system adapts and fills in the holes. It fills in the holes, usually with what's left. And in this case, the supreme leader that we took out, this particular hole, this was the guy who had two fatwas, they're called, these are religious edicts. It's like a people edict.
14:23 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
14:23 Robert Pape? Against nuclear weapons. It's a religious, he's the leader of essentially the religion, a little bit like the Shia Pope. And he is actually issuing religious doctrine. And as, and that's called a fatwa. And as a religious doctrine, he issued two that said Iran should not have nuclear weapons. The guy we killed was one of the guardrails against nuclear weapons.
14:51 Steven Bartlett? How does that, he was, he was developing them?
14:53 Robert Pape? No, no, he's developing the enrichment material. They hadn't been fashioned yet that we know of as nuclear weapons. Okay, so we're worried about again, this enrichment going from 5% to 20% to 60%. But they hadn't actually taken that next step, which is more of an engineering step to develop the nuclear weapon. Now, we took out the person who at the very tippy top was balancing the hawks and doves. And he had decided for decades to issue this, these fatawas. He did it not just once, but twice. His son, who took over the new supreme leader? No fatawa yet, that fatawa died with this guy.
15:36 Robert Pape? So, will the new leader come in? Uh, it's not clear. He's got the religious authority to do anything like what his father did. This is, this is a very different world and he's known to be way more aggressive than his father. Uh, he's been in charge of the, the Bazi, the, uh, basically the, uh, the, the police that like to go and kill the protesters. He's been the guy who's, who's been very, very strongly, uh, supporting, if not leading that particular effort.
16:05 Steven Bartlett? And last night it was announced that he has been appointed as the new leader.
16:09 Robert Pape? He's the new supreme leader.
16:12 Steven Bartlett? Did, did Trump expect this?
16:14 Robert Pape? I think that he, uh, expected it because he kept trying to talk the Iranians out of it. This is what he meant by, uh, of last week when President, um, Trump was saying that he wanted, um, uh, not this guy. He specifically said, not the son. And then he, he had a problem because people kept pushing him and they said, okay, well if you don't like the son, who, who would you pick? And he said, well, it is a problem because when we killed the supreme leader, we killed around the leader, 20 or 30 others who we actually thought were better. So we actually took out the best alternatives when we killed this, when the supreme leader was killed. And so everybody's scratching their heads going, what are we talking about here?
16:57 Robert Pape? So, so we actually helped the, by killing the competitors to the sun. We made it more likely the sun. And so what I'm trying to explain, Stephen, is this adapts, okay? So that you're not really taking these pieces out. You're rearranging them and you are moving up. In this case, you're moving up. The next supreme leader? Well, it's, there's the supreme leader, but what we're not showing here, you're, you're seeing the target sets that are being discussed. You're not seeing the revolutionary guard. What is that? That is part of the army. Iran has a million men in arms, a million.
17:39 Robert Pape? That's as, that's as many as we have in our 300 million people. They have 92 million, they have a million in arms. And about 150 or 200,000 of them are what are called the revolutionary guards. These are the most aggressive, the most well-trained. These are the most dedicated to the regime. The news, the sun who just, we just, just took over is the prime candidate for that group. So when we took out a link here, it's not just being replaced by another cock. It's being replaced by a very aggressive individual who's backed by some of the most aggressive part of that million man army.
18:22 Robert Pape? So this is what I was trying to explain in my sub stacks where when you take out the leader, you may kill the leader, but you get in its place, a harder regime, a more resilient regime, a tougher regime that wants to lash back even more aggressively. Cause you killed dad. If you killed dad and also if you don't lash back, how does the new leader get his credibility with everybody else? If he's a wimp, why doesn't he get a bullet in the back of the head? You see the new, just because he's appointed a new leader, he's still, just, just like when you're the head of a new company, like, let's say you take over a There's a company that's in shambles and they get rid of their CEO and they bring
19:06 Robert Pape? you on, okay? Well, you gotta have a plan, you see? And if you don't have a plan to turn that thing around pretty soon, you know, Elon Musk had to have the big plan. If you don't have that plan, guess what? You're out. Same here. So you have incentive structure here for not just replacing, not just wimpy replacements, certainly not pro-American replacements. You have incentives for lashing back against the attacker, which is why when we tried to kill Gaddafi in 1986, he lashes back and takes out Pan Am Flight 103, killing 271 civilians,
19:46 Robert Pape? 190 Americans. When we tried to take out the Milosevic regime to degrade it in March 99, Milosevic lashes back, sending 30,000 ground forces in to cleanse, that is, get rid of a million civilians in Kosovo. This over and over.
20:06 Steven Bartlett? I mean, you have written books about suicide terrorism.
20:10 Robert Pape? That's right.
20:11 Steven Bartlett? I've got one of them in front of me here called Dying to Win. So, I mean, you know a lot about this subject. And this is one of the concerns that actually my fiance had said to me. She said, I explained to her, I was like, you know, Iran, they really just have drones at the moment, so I think that's fine. And then she posed a question to me. She was like, yeah, but what about suicide terrorism?
20:27 Robert Pape? Let me just explain. So here we are. It is, here is, of course, Iran. And imagine it's back in June. So I'm going to start the story in June. This is the beginning of the smart bomb, the escalation trap. Stage one. We hit Fardel, which is right around there. And then we hit Nataan and some other sites right around here. And what does Iran do here? They lash back. And who are they lashing back against? Israel here.
20:57 Robert Pape? They have their missiles focused on Israel. They're not really hitting our bases here. They're hitting Israel and they send 3,000 Israelis to the hospital, the most since the 73 war. So a long time. That is stage one, okay? Now, what happened when in February 28th? February 28th, they're lashing back a bit against Israel for sure. But now they're at stage two. This is why I published this piece today in Foreign Affairs about how Iran's winning the escalation war. So it just came out just a few hours before we came on. And what's happening here is called, I call it horizontal escalation.
21:38 Robert Pape? Because what they're doing now is they're using drones, mostly a few missiles, but mostly drones. This was almost all missiles, no drones. And they're using their drone capacity, which they have a lot of, and it's precision. These drones are like precision-guided weapons. They go right to the target. And what they're trying to do is break this coalition.
22:00 Steven Bartlett? For anyone that can't see at the moment, they counted with horizontal escalation against Saudi Arabia, the UAE.
22:06 Robert Pape? The coalition that had been formed against them, they're trying to break the coalition. You see, and they may well do that.
22:15 Steven Bartlett? Why, why would they want to break that? Why? My friends are escaping Dubai at the moment. I've got friends staying in my house in Cape Town because he doesn't want to be.
22:20 Robert Pape? Because they want these countries to kick the Americans out of their country.
22:25 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
22:26 Robert Pape? Get rid of the embassies, get rid of the bases. If you can, then we don't have the platforms to plaster them. You see, these are our basically ground-based aircraft carriers.
22:37 Steven Bartlett? I thought they were, they were attacking Saudi Arabia, for example, because that will make Saudi Arabia call Trump and say, listen, stop, please, we're losing our tourism. We're shutting our airports.
22:47 Robert Pape? Well, they do want to, they are threatening the tourism, hitting the economic nodes. They're hitting hotels, they're hitting the airports. What they are trying to do is by threatening tourism, which varies from 5% to 10% of the GDP of these countries. This is not.
23:07 Robert Pape? Trivial amounts here. They're basically trying to drive wedges between these countries and America. And America, right now, I don't see any movement through Congress. Where is this $100 billion going to the region to make up for their lost tourism? I don't remember seeing that bill come through Congress last week. So I'm just putting it a little humorously to point out, these countries are losing a fair bit right now, and that tourism may not come back for a while.
23:36 Steven Bartlett? I've got friends that have moved. I've got friends that, one of my friends was thinking about leaving, is now in my house in Cape Town, and he's been there for five years, he's leaving, and he's gonna move to America. I've got so many friends that have called.
23:49 Robert Pape? And imagine that we have 500,000 American citizens here, and we have the State Department on CNN, "Call this number, we'll help you escape."
23:59 Steven Bartlett? Even the media in the UK, you see it, it's like, they're showing, like, the BBC is showing like evacuations of UK citizens as they're being greeted in the airport, putting microphones.
24:06 Robert Pape? So this is putting a lot of pressure here, and there's something else that's not widely known, which is, there's a big gap between what the leaders of the countries want, willing to support the US and Israel, and their publics. You see, this coalition that's been built against Iran here, is not clearly going down well with publics. These are publics, they may not like Iran, they may be Sunni and Iran Shia, but they don't want to be part of an Israeli expansion plan where Israel's going to conquer more and more territory, and so forth. And so this is, this is, this is where the soft underbelly
24:46 Robert Pape? here of this, this isn't just about the tourism, that's the short term. The longer term is bottom-up pressure. Sadat, he was a leader of Egypt in the 1970s, he cut a deal with Israel, it's called the Camp David Accords, peace for land, but it was very favorable. Well, after Sadat did that, the president of Egypt, in 1981, in a military parade, his own security guards, at the military parade, marched with their guns, came up to his place, and they shot him dead. So you don't, this is the real world here. So this is very, very dangerous for these leaders. Now that's stage two.
25:31 Robert Pape? Now, what happens if we decide to have one of these limited ground deployments here? Because after all, we still don't know where this material is.
25:40 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean? So for anyone that doesn't know anything about the war, what does a ground deployment mean? Because I saw Trump being asked about this on the plane yesterday, and he didn't seem to deny it was gonna happen.
25:49 Robert Pape? It means you try to control a limited amount of space, say, the space around Fordo or the nuclear facility that you bombed in June. And you would send the, say, 82nd Airborne in to control the space.
26:04 Steven Bartlett? What's this? I don't know what any of this stuff means.
26:05 Robert Pape? Oh, I see. So 82nd Airborne is a division that we have that's especially equipped to go into hostile area and land and control, say, airports, control space. Think about controlling all the size of LAX. So if you want to control LAX, you bring in the 82nd Airborne. They will have 5,000 men and women, not just guys now, and they will come in and they will control that space, LAX. But they will also be doing this probably not for a day, not for even a week. They're gonna have to spend weeks and weeks to search for that material because we don't know where it is. And it's all deeply buried.
26:48 Robert Pape? And a lot of the stuff has been, the entrances have been blown up. So this means, this means long-term presence there. You might also take some of the oil fields to cut off some of the money here for the, for the regime. That is where that book comes in.
27:06 Steven Bartlett? Do you think it's likely that America will put boots on the ground, American soldiers, in Iran?
27:12 Robert Pape? I think it's at least 50/50, if not immediately. So people keep expecting the escalation to be continuous. And then when there's a pause, as there was between June and February, they think, oh, it's over. I'm gonna go now worry about something else. And then, believe me, there's plenty else to worry about. So we got Minneapolis. We've got plenty to worry about here, even with violence. But that's not how escalation operates. Escalation can have a ratchet effect that has spaced out by months of what seems like peace, only to come right back and you're stuck in that escalation momentum. Which is what we've seen. Which is exactly what we've seen.
27:57 Robert Pape? And for the reason I'm telling you, we don't know where that nuclear material is. That has been the $64,000 weakness in this entire idea of using air power, not just in the last 10 days, going back to June. It's not just even about the regime change. It's about how are you going to get that nuclear material out? We had a deal, this deal with Obama. Trump did not like it, but with that deal, that held. And Iran took out almost all, virtually just only a tiny bit was left, not enough for a bomb, all out of the country.
28:37 Robert Pape? And we watched it, we monitored it, we had 24/7 cameras to monitor this. We had human onsite inspections to monitor this. 2018, Trump just ripped it up, walked away unilaterally. And from that point on, it's been pedal to the metal by Iran in upgrading that enriched uranium. And that's how you got to that material that would be enough for the 16 bombs. And right now, we don't know where that is. So, stage one is... Okay, stage one, you are beginning the escalation trap. In this case, it's a smart bomb trap, because it's with smart bombs,
29:16 Robert Pape? where you have tactical success, near perfect, call it 100%, because it really is. But that doesn't mean you have strategic success. Tactical success plus strategic failure.
29:32 Robert Pape? Then that strategic failure weighs on you over time because the enemy's still got the thing that you wanted to get in the first place. Now you do stage two, which is regime change. Because after all, you've already hit the targets. You can make the rubble bounce, but what more? That's why we didn't bomb them in the last 10 days. We might go back and bomb Firdo some more. Okay, but we already bombed it. So, so there's more we're watching the bubble. But now we're at stage two because what are your options? The only other option is, well, let me get rid of the regime. Because then the regime I will control and the next regime will just give us the material. That's not working now. And you hear today, Trump is dancing, trying to figure out what to say.
30:17 Robert Pape? He doesn't want to say the war is over. Okay. Doesn't want to say the war is going on. But the bottom line is, we don't even, he won't even be clear about why we're fighting the war anymore. And I'm telling you, there's a real problem. The nuclear material is still there and it can still be fashioned into those 16 bombs over time. So this is where then you get this horizontal escalation where now they've really, really working on this because now it's a long war.
30:43 Speaker 02 They start attacking their neighbors.
30:45 Robert Pape? And tried to make it over. The consequences go on for months. So just imagine, when are your friends exactly going to move back? So let's say the war is over tomorrow. Are they moving back tomorrow?
30:54 Speaker 02 No.
30:55 Robert Pape? And when was the last time, have you started to plan for your next vacation in Dubai? I've been to Dubai.
31:00 Speaker 02 I was, I was planning to speaking there in a month's time, but it's been canceled already.
31:03 Robert Pape? Well, just, yeah, just start to think about that. And, you know, minor thing like a drone attack could suddenly come out of nowhere. You know, you're not even, you think it's, I'm just trying to point out that this is, this is the world now that a lot of people, this was a luxury market. This was the playground of the rich and famous here. This is really now changing and it may come back a year or two from now, but it took two years for air travel to come back after 9/11. Just think about that.
31:28 Speaker 02 Crazy.
31:29 Robert Pape? Now, we haven't gotten to stage three yet, which gets to your girlfriend's point. How do we move from stage two to stage? Oh, well, because you still don't know where the the nuclear material is. And we don't have to move to stage beyond to stage three this week. We could do it a month from now, six months from now. The problem is, we've now put in place a much more aggressive leadership, much more aggressive regime. We've taken away some of the what may have been guardrails. We can't say for sure for the nuclear weapon. This this new regime, much more likely, and we've given them every incentive to develop the nuclear bomb. We're killing them. So so what exactly is their incentive?
32:12 Robert Pape? Their their their best way to survive is to have a nuclear weapon. And you'll say, well, we're going to kill them. Well, we're already killing them. So we've taken away their incentive not to have a nuclear weapon. So we will start to worry as each week goes by. Not because we have great intel, not because our human, it's because of the opposite. We don't have the exquisite intelligence we had with the Obama deal to know we had frozen the program. Now that we have Swiss cheese at best. And what we will see in the holes of the Swiss cheese are indications of nuclear development. And that will make us worry because what happens with the nuclear weapon? Is it going to go to Hezbollah?
32:56 Robert Pape? And is Hezbollah going to help put it in Haifa? What's going to happen with the if we're going to give is are they going to give it to the Houthis? So these are the kind of worries we will have that will push us to the ground options. And that that is with stage three.
33:17 Robert Pape? The retaliation approaches the homeland. It's not realistic. If ISIS with its 30 to 40,000. Remember ISIS was not a state. Iran is an actual state with 92 million people. So if ISIS can foment command directed, inspired suicide attacks and other attacks in San Bernardino, just to kind of bring it a little bit closer to home here across the United States, Paris, remember the big Paris attack? So why exactly is Iran not if I mean ISIS was a lot weaker than Iran? Do you think in Iran at the moment?
33:55 Steven Bartlett? They're working on that. They're working on a terrorist attack.
33:57 Robert Pape? Well, I don't, I think that my work tells me that it's most likely to come with the presence of the ground forces by us. Doesn't mean it's, it's a necessary condition, but it's just most likely. Russia in 96, with our help, we played a trick on them, assassinated the Chechen leader, it's a leader of its republic in, in Russia called Chechnya, Dudaev, only a million people. And Russia killed the guy. And we actually have pictures of him seeing the missile hitting him, because we can put the cameras right in the nose cone. Then the new guy took over. His name was Baziev. And he launched, within three
34:40 Robert Pape? months, not the next week, Operation Jihad. And his Operation Jihad was much more vicious tactics, kicked the Russian forces, Russia's a big country, you know, hundred, almost 200 million people compared to this little province of a million, kicked the Russians out after three months, launches waves of suicide attacks, massive kidnappings here. This really went on for years and years. So when you say, are they planning it? I don't think it's quite right, Stephen. It's not like they have the detailed plan they're about to execute. They have the next wave of possibilities, which would come, I think,
35:25 Robert Pape? most likely with stage two, so stage three. So as this is expanding, as the war expands, it will go global.
35:32 Steven Bartlett? Really?
35:33 Robert Pape? You are already seeing it global with the supply chain, and you're seeing it with the oil. So that's already happening. So what Iran said today, the, the response to Trump's press conference today, that just literally happened before we came on, is, okay, we will allow Gulf states, your oil tankers to come through if you kick the Americans out. So kick the Americans out, and we'll let you pass.
35:58 Steven Bartlett? If you don't.
35:58 Robert Pape? If you don't, we got drones. So they didn't put that in there, but everybody knows, they got drones.
36:03 Steven Bartlett? And again, for, if you were explaining this to a 16 year old.
36:06 Robert Pape? Yep.
36:06 Steven Bartlett? Just to keep it super simple, there's this. Passageway across the water where a lot of the oil tankers go.
36:13 Robert Pape? Yep, it's straight of Hormuz.
36:15 Steven Bartlett? Hormuz?
36:15 Robert Pape? Yep.
36:16 Steven Bartlett? And it sounded like the tankers are refusing to go through there.
36:19 Robert Pape? Oh, sure, because one has been hit. But it only takes one to be hit with a drone, only one, because the people driving those tankers here, they're doing it for a paycheck, not a bullet. They're not really wanting to die for this. This isn't a nationalist cause to ship the oil.
36:37 Steven Bartlett? Explain why it matters to the world. If oil doesn't go through this strait of Hormuz, what matters? What happens?
36:42 Robert Pape? Yeah, well, we can talk about it in like technical terms, but the big thing to say is this is what's going to increase the price of gas at the pump. And it's already gone up. When you cut the flow of the oil, it has global effects. It doesn't just affect this little region here. It doesn't just affect China over here. It affects everybody. And that's why the Europeans are starting to freak out. Because this, they're already, every government worries about, we talk about affordability. That's about to change.
37:15 Steven Bartlett? And this is your point about how it changes the politics at home? Because people, someone goes to the pump today, they go, why is the oil higher?
37:22 Robert Pape? That's right. Why is the, we just came, we now have 4.4% unemployment.
37:29 Robert Pape? If we, and President Trump was trying to say it's all getting better, the interest rates are going down. Well, that all predicated on us not having inflation. You see, when the oil is cut, the inflation goes up. The affordability becomes a problem. That is what is panicking a lot of the businesses right now because they're going to lose business. And, and it's a problem of risk. It's not just about the damage. So a little, a few of these drones can have an inordinate effect on risk. Now, let's bring in another piece, which is Russia. We find out is providing targeting intelligence to Iran,
38:14 Robert Pape? much the way we provide targeting intelligence to Ukraine to hit our targets in Russia. And what does that mean? That means those drones, which are precision guided, now can more easily find exactly which ship to hit.
38:28 Steven Bartlett? Do we know that Russia are doing that?
38:31 Robert Pape? We've got it pretty well confirmed from, yeah, it's, you would hear much more pushback here. And what you're hearing from Secretary Hegseth is not, it's not happening. You're saying, oh, no. Well, it's not over worry. No, it's happening and they're worried because that's the, that's the, again, the dancing around. They're not denying the fact that it's actually happening.
38:52 Steven Bartlett? I think Trump actually, when asked, said something, words to the effect of, I wouldn't blame them because that's what we do to them.
38:58 Robert Pape? Exactly, exactly. And why is he talking to Putin today? He's not talking, he was just on the phone with Putin before he did his press conference. What's he talking to Putin about? That intel, I'm sure. And maybe cutting a deal, which is, we'll deny the Ukrainians the intel if you deny, you see, this is the, this is, this is the cascading effects of the politics dominates the tactics.
39:24 Steven Bartlett? And that's exactly what Trump said. He said on March the 7th, when asked about Russia teaming up with Iran on intelligence, he said, if we asked them, they'd say, we do it against them. Wouldn't they say that? We do it against them? It's almost justifying it.
39:41 Robert Pape? Trump often just speaks his mind. Sometimes he kind of hides things, but some, often he speaks his mind. And what you're seeing here is of, this is the natural thing. Russia is, what's good for the goose, good for the gander. They're doing the same thing to us that we've done to them and they have, and they're doing it to hurt us, you see. So rather than just spasmodically or spasm response here, which we often think the, the foes we're up against are stupid. We essentially think they're dumb. We call that irrational. But what's really happening, Stephen, is since the Vietnam War, we have been up against foes that have understood something about America, which is the way to get
40:23 Robert Pape? at us is politico, politically. Make it a long war. Play the politics. You can't go toe to toe with us on the battlefield. We'll just clean their clock over and over. They don't often try. They don't go toe to toe with us. We lost the Vietnam War with never losing a battle. How did we lose? We lost the long game. 58,000 dead, no end in sight, a forever war. What are we doing this for? That is how the North Vietnamese won. And that's how the Afghan Taliban won. That's how the bad guys typically beat us. They don't always win, but the bottom line is we have a soft underbelly.
41:08 Robert Pape? It's not the military.
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43:11 Steven Bartlett? What do you think happens next? If you had to, no fencing, if you had to predict what you think happens next, what would you predict?
43:18 Robert Pape? Well, I say this at the end of the Foreign Affairs article that just literally came out a couple of hours ago, which is President Trump is on the horns of a dilemma. And he has no golden off ramp. He's looking for off ramps, but there's no golden one where he comes out politically ahead. So he's got a choice, sometimes called a Hobbesian choice, a Hobson choice, where you cut your losses, accept political loss now. And right now, if he pulls back, and what does it mean to pull back? You got to pull your forces back. It's not enough to say you're just doing a pause. If you want to stop, if you want to stop for real, you take those aircraft carriers and you send them out somewhere. You send them to Asia, you send them here. You got to actually make, you got to do something.
44:03 Robert Pape? So choice one is you stop your bombing campaign, you cut your losses, you do your best to say we just wanted to destroy missiles, even though nobody will believe it. Okay. But that means you accept a modest loss now. Or the other is you double down and you go on for more weeks. Go on for more weeks, hoping you'll kill this leader and maybe the next one won't be so bad. Or you'll, you'll have some other sort of outcome that you can't imagine. And Trump is nothing. I call him a chaos kid. He thrives in chaos. And he often comes out of this with something happening like when, you know, sort of down the road, you didn't expect it. He probably didn't expect it.
44:47 Robert Pape? But in this case, the price is more likely going to be a political failure of the first order because we have the midterms coming. So if, if he, he's got a choice. Stop now, cut your losses, accept a limited political defeat, or double down, go on for a few months, go through more stages of this smart bomb trap I'm explaining. And you're really now in Lyndon Johnson territory. Remember I mentioned before, where in Vietnam, he kept escalating, kept moving up the escalation ladder, every rung. He said, well, no, we have escalation dominance. We're just going to double down. We're going to hit them harder the next time. We're going to do this the next time. Sound familiar? And then what happened is it became absolutely clear that this was going nowhere and the
45:32 Robert Pape? 68 election came, was coming. And Lyndon Johnson's own Democrats said,
45:39 Robert Pape? Mr. President, we can't ride your horse into that. We gotta do something. And the problem is they didn't pull the plug fast enough here. That's how they lost. They don't, they, they don't pull the plug fast enough. So you end up having a bigger loss later.
45:52 Steven Bartlett? When you talk about the, the underbelly that the United States has where they can't prolong these wars, am I right in thinking this is basically a function or a, a consequence of living in a democracy where every four years?
46:04 Robert Pape? I, I think it's a function of a war of choice. So when we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, we were attacked. We were reluctant to get in World War II. And we were, we didn't get in until we were actually struck at Pearl Harbor. That was enough to really make us angry. We were pissed off as a country. Okay. And we were going to get payback, not just for a month, but we were getting some real payback here. And that's how vicious that island hopping campaign was and why it was so vicious here. And that went on and on. And when we ended the war in, in dropping those atomic bombs, 22% of the American public wanted us to forget the Japanese surrender and drop more atomic bombs. 22%. We were
46:49 Robert Pape? that angry. So when we are attacked first, we have the politics in our advantage. When we do a war of choice, we can make up all the reasons why it was a good idea to start, throw the first punch. They were going to hit us. We were going to, but when we throw that first punch first, that's a war of choice. And this puts the politics in the other camp's advantage. And that's the problem that we're facing here. Iran didn't hit us first. They didn't hit us first in June. They didn't hit us first before that.
47:25 Steven Bartlett? So on this point of war of choice.
47:28 Robert Pape? Yep.
47:32 Steven Bartlett? There's really two questions I have front of mind. One is, was Trump right that if he didn't attack, then they would have enriched uranium? They would have made a nuclear weapon and that would have put not just the region, but the world at danger, in your view? And then the second one is this sort of ongoing debate around the role of Israel in this war. And I think it was Marco Rubio that came out and I think maybe accidentally said that the reason why they attacked Iran was because they heard that Israel were about to attack Iran.
48:04 Robert Pape? So let's go back to the Friday, the day before we start the bombing campaign. This is February 27, literally 3:15 Washington time. That's when Trump makes the go decision. But what's in his, what is he choosing between? He has an offer on the table from Iran for a better deal than the Obama deal for America. And it is, it's not absolutely perfect. They still want to have some minor enrichment to, but that verifies lots of things here. Now, maybe it's still not perfect, but President Trump has a choice on that Friday afternoon. He can go back and he can work this deal. He can, you know, after all, deal maker, right?
48:48 Robert Pape? Let's, let's assume he's good at deal making. So he can go back and work the deal, but that's not what he does. What he does is he throws that deal away. And also the Supreme Leader, when he killed, that's the Supreme Leader was on board with that deal too. And what do we do instead? We, we go through regime change. So the choices here, Stephen, were before we got to stage two, we were in stage one. Stage one, we had hit Fordo. It, it, there were negotiations and Iran's coming up with a better deal than the Obama deal. And what does he do? He goes to stage two instead.
49:29 Robert Pape? So I don't think this is, this, this story you're hearing, they were gonna do X, Y, or Z. There was a deal on the table and-
49:39 Steven Bartlett? Why did Rubio say that then? Why did he say that they attacked because Israel were gonna attack? Okay, I want to play this video, which is what I'm referring to.
49:46 Robert Pape? Okay.
49:49 Speaker 03 If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't act.
50:16 Robert Pape? So what that shows you is that it's the tail wagging the dog, that Israel is going to attack, as I'm saying, just happened in June, it's a replay of what happened in June. Israel may well have, we don't know why Israel decided to attack and kill the supreme leader. It was actually Israeli bombs who killed the supreme leader, and also those other replacement leaders as well. But Israel may well have been thinking that, my goodness, Trump is getting too close to a deal. That's what happened in June. Trump was on the edge of a deal with Iran, and then Israel goes and kills negotiators, you see. So just think about that for a moment.
50:56 Robert Pape? Trump is negotiating with the Iranians, and then they say, well, okay, come back the next day. And what is there the next day? Israeli bombs killing them.
51:05 Steven Bartlett? So I mean, that's not a good, that's not a great way to handle a partnership.
51:09 Robert Pape? Well, it's just, it's just showing you, we had another choice. We could have told Israel not to do it. We could have told Israel, if you do this, we're going to cut off all your military aid for the next three years. That would be, put some pressure on Israel. Now, then Trump would have to pay a price politically. So I'm not saying that's an easy thing to do, don't get me wrong. But we need to understand that, that Trump, these are the, these are the pressures for escalation in the escalation trap. So I'm trying to explain why this isn't just randomly happening, Stephen. It's not like, oh my goodness, I can't follow what's occurring. So that's why when Trump says, in today's briefing, talks about stopping the air campaign, is he going to stop Israel's campaign?
51:54 Robert Pape? That's the question that did not come up today. It's in my, I put it on my accent. The, one of the big questions that did not come up is President Trump, are you gonna call Netanyahu and tell him to stop bombing Iran?
52:06 Steven Bartlett? Does Trump control Netanyahu, in your view?
52:09 Robert Pape? Well, again, it's about pressures here. It's about what are the, what are the ways you, you, you, you don't, it's not about a matter of like a personal loyalty relationship. This is politics of the first order. That's what I'm trying to explain. So for President Trump to stop Netanyahu from doing this, this will be paying a price. He will have a, there are a big part of his MAGA constituency, he's very pro, not just Israel, pro Netanyahu version of Israel. So this is the tension and, and the politics that I'm trying to explain, which is why you don't really want to start the trap in the first place.
52:44 Steven Bartlett? And I asked you a second ago, no fence sitting, what happens next in this war based on everything you've studied for the last 30 years, the 20 years of doing simulation?
52:53 Robert Pape? I think it's more likely than not that, maybe not in the next week or two. I've said, on my subsegment, it's more likely than not, we will get to a limited ground deployment here because of the fizzle, because of the, I keep saying, because of the, the enriched material that is floating around. And we know it's dispersing, we know it's dispersing, we don't know where it is, and there could be literally hundreds of rooms, not much bigger than this size, maybe two or three times this size that we're in, that could be used to fashion an, a fat man style A-bomb. Not to miniaturize it to put on a warhead, that would be more sophisticated.
53:35 Robert Pape? But if what you want to do is you want to have a Hiroshima bomb that can kill 75,000 people in a second, or 10 seconds, that is what they are in the, the, the, that's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about can they put, miniaturize the bomb to put it on the nose cone of a war of a missile. This is, they don't need to, that's very sophisticated stuff. We couldn't do that for 10 years.
54:02 Steven Bartlett? So I guess there's two, there's two questions that come to mind. The first is, to understand someone's behavior, you have to like understand their motivations. And I, I think a lot about like where Trump is in his...
54:16 Steven Bartlett? Career, legacy, how much that matters to him. It appears, from what I've seen, the whole thing around him wanting to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Peace Board, the being the president that stops all the... It appears that he's thinking about how he's going to be remembered. And when I'm looking at some of his interviews recently, he's saying things like, "I don't want it to be the case that in 10 years' time or in five years' time, the US have to go back in again because I didn't do a good job." And it made me start to believe that actually, one of the reasons why we might escalate this war further from a United States perspective is because legacy changes in hindsight. And if we think about George W. Bush...
54:55 Robert Pape? I think you're putting your finger on it, Stephen.
54:57 Steven Bartlett? George W. Bush's legacy now is completely tarnished because of this one war, and actually how it ended.
55:03 Robert Pape? Yep.
55:04 Steven Bartlett? It's a mistake in hindsight.
55:05 Robert Pape? But also now, mirror image that to the Iranians. Why aren't they thinking about their legacy? Think about that for a moment. Why would the Supreme Leader, 86 years old, decide he's not going to take too many more precautions? How many more months does... He had cancer, apparently. How many more months does he got? How's he want to go out? How does he really want to go out? What's he want to be remembered for? A coward? Or does he want to be remembered as somebody who stood up for Iran, the revolution, the whole thing he built his whole life for? You talk about Trump. So when I get into behind, when the cameras go off, and I get a chance to, again, let's just say go to the West Wing,
55:46 Robert Pape? I'm not seeing people being picky, minor, petty. I see them worried about their legacy. The national security advisers, their assistants, they're worrying about their legacy. Do they want to go down in the history of American history as X, Y, or Z? And this is how humans are. It doesn't stop with like, how much money do you have? It's what's going to happen with your legacy.
56:16 Steven Bartlett? So with that in mind, if you think Trump is legacy motivated... Does that increase the probability?
56:22 Robert Pape? In part, I want to be careful, in part. It's always a balance.
56:24 Steven Bartlett? He can't be re-elected, so I'm like, that's not motivating him. Because you know, you play differently if you think you can win a second term, which I knew would be important to him. But if he is legacy motivated now, when you think about which direction he's going to grow, go in, it does appear on the balance of things that he's not going to want it to be left a mess.
56:42 Robert Pape? And the biggest mess that could really embarrass him in his legacy with international is if Iran has a nuclear bomb and they detonate a test, say, next September. Let's just imagine what would happen next September. So people need to think about, see, the discussion of Iran and nuclear bombs here is not very strategic. It's to scare you. It's, oh, they're going to get a bomb and the first one's going to go on Tel Aviv, the second one's going to go on New York. I don't think that's the sequence. Why would they, if they're willing to commit suicide to take out Tel Aviv, they don't need 16 bombs, okay?
57:23 Robert Pape? If they're willing to have their entire population destroyed, they just need one bomb, take out Tel Aviv, they're done, right? That's not what's going on. They're following the North Korea plan. The North Korea plan that North Korea figured out when we went through this with North Korea in the 90s, okay, the very same thing, except we didn't do the bombing because it was not going to, we didn't get, we avoided the trap. What they want is multiple bombs at the same time. So what they want to do, if they can do this, is have, say, five bombs working at the same time. And the first bomb goes off as a test in the mountains, in the mountains. And then what do we say?
58:04 Robert Pape? Oh, they blew it, they're stupid, they blew their one test, and then they do a second test. Still in their mountains, okay? When we dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, it wasn't clear we had any more. When we dropped the second one, nobody needed to wait for a third or fourth. Nobody really, they knew more would come, you see what I mean? So with Iran, the, this is, again, we're talking about now, you know, let's, let's call it the brown belt or black belt strategy here, that they are, and notice, they have been very smart in their escalation.
58:41 Robert Pape? What you would do is the North Korea strategy, which is, again, you want multiple bombs, and then you want to do some tests. And even if one doesn't quite work, you want to have another. You want to have multiple bombs so that you can do multiple tests, you see? And that is how North Korea basically stopped Trump trying to kill the leader. So notice that Trump wants to say it was just his winning personality, because, you know, Trump is so charming here. But North Korea now has 60 working nuclear weapons, as, you know, best we can tell. And the idea that we're going to start killing leaders in North Korea anytime soon, I'm not sure that's going to happen.
59:23 Speaker 02 They're kind of immune now, right?
59:24 Robert Pape? Well, and notice that Ukraine had a bunch of nuclear weapons in the 90s, gave them up. And there's a lot of people in Ukraine right now who are saying, boy, I wish we had those nuclear weapons back or else we wouldn't be fighting this war. So you start to look at the history. Why does America have nuclear weapons here? Are we an evil country? And the reason we have is because we're evil? We want it for our security. So why doesn't Iran want it for their security? So this is the strategy part that we have to... The politics, Stephen, I keep trying to talk about.
59:55 Speaker 02 So you're saying your prediction is that we're going to move to stage three, where Trump...
1:00:01 Robert Pape? Okay, I'll go 75, 25.
1:00:03 Speaker 02 75% which way?
1:00:05 Robert Pape? That we will put... We will send in some ground forces to get that dispersed material. The only 25% would be if somehow magically the Iranians gave it to us. So that's where the 25% comes from, because there is some chance...
1:00:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, maybe.
1:00:20 Robert Pape? There's some... I don't want to... I mean, we live in the real world here. So I... But I think the problem we're going to face is it's going to become more... And if you're in Iran right now, exactly why aren't you fashioning the nuclear weapon? We're already killing you. We can pause for months and say, we won't kill you. And then you wake up one day and you're dead. This... We've done this movie now several times on Iran. Your best chance of survival... Is a nuclear weapon. And so we now know that our intel knows that Israel now knows that we've taken these options. So unless Trump will make a deal, that's that 25%.
1:01:02 Robert Pape? So I, I think if he makes a deal, then there's a chance that Iran will go forward here.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 If the 75% path plays out.
1:01:11 Robert Pape? Yep.
1:01:12 Speaker 02 We put boots on the ground.
1:01:14 Robert Pape? Yep.
1:01:15 Speaker 02 What happens then?
1:01:16 Robert Pape? Now we're at stage three. Now we've moved to stage three because we have to search very not just so we will start by deploying ground forces in a very limited area. Say we're going to go to Esafon, it's called. That's, that's the, the, do we have a?
1:01:36 Speaker 02 I mean, you could try and write on that. Does that work?
1:01:38 Robert Pape? Um, the thing I'm trying to explain, yeah, assume this is Iran.
1:01:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:42 Robert Pape? Okay. We will start by putting in a small footprint. And again, we have several options here to do it. And so the hunt will be for the enriched material. But let's say that we even find it, Stephen. How do we know that in the intervening almost a year since the bombing, 10 months since the bombing? How do we know they haven't enriched more somewhere else? Because this is what happened with the WMD and Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the 90s through 2003.
1:02:20 Robert Pape? We had inspectors in, we could never be sure there wasn't material. And the problem was over time, the fear got worse and worse and worse. And the fear is a nuclear handoff or the radiological handoff. You hand off some of that material to Hezbollah, to the Houthis, they.
1:02:45 Speaker 02 Who are Hezbollah and the Houthis? They're like terrorist groups?
1:02:48 Robert Pape? They, we call them terrorist groups. And the, and Hezbollah, which is this famous terrorist group started in 1982. How did Hezbollah start? Where did? Come from.
1:02:59 Steven Bartlett? Is it the CIA again?
1:03:00 Robert Pape? No, it's Israel. Israel invades southern Lebanon in June of eighty-two with seventy-eight thousand combat soldiers, three thousand tanks and armored vehicles. So, think about that. That's like invading Chicago with seventy-eight thousand. So, just, or LA with seventy-eight thousand, okay? So, they invade, uh, southern Lebanon with seventy-eight thousand, Israel does. One month later, Hezbollah is born as a resistance movement. So Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel. They have hated Israel from the beginning because that's how they were born, you see. So, what you have is, you have a group that's hot, been
1:03:41 Robert Pape? radical since, and since eighty-two. This has been going on since eighty-two. Israel just can't put that country, that Hezbollah group out of business. And what are they doing literally this week? They're trying to depopulate this Beirut, the city of Beirut. Because what happens when you go up against terrorist groups, which we haven't described, but the terrorist group here is like a group that's in a sea of people, okay? And you keep saying, "All I want to do is get rid of that terrorist group." The problem is that in all that effort, military effort to get rid of the terrorist group, you do kill them, but they regenerate, and they regenerate, and they regenerate, just as Hezbollah
1:04:22 Robert Pape? has for, God, forty-five years, almost. Okay? And so, what do you then push to do? Get rid of all the people.
1:04:30 Steven Bartlett? So, you think, "Oh, just genocide."
1:04:32 Robert Pape? I don't want to use those terms because I've written about that. That's a, that has certain, very specific, so that's a whole conversation here. But I just want to point out, how is it that Israel got itself into the idea they were going to cleanse, expel, um, large portions of the two million out of Gaza? That happened because they got into stage three of the escalation trap in Gaza. So, this isn't just about America. So, we're only talking about the escalation frameworks with respect to this one conflict, really. It applies much more broadly. I've developed these since I taught for the Air Force because
1:05:11 Robert Pape? I needed to find a way to help our government, our military, understand how the transition from the bombing or the military piece. To the outcome. And what's in the middle is the military, the bombs change politics. They change politics in the enemy. They change politics for us. For us, we don't want to lose. And that's why we got stuck in a for in two forever wars. And now we may well just get right back into another one. Not because Trump wants to. He's being sucked into it.
1:05:51 Speaker 02 So what happens after stage three?
1:05:55 Robert Pape? After stage three, this is what America has faced in Vietnam and President Biden faced this in spades here. When you try to pull out after you're in stage three and end these ongoing conflicts here, usually it ends poorly for your legacy. And you saw that with Lyndon Johnson. And you saw that with President Biden. President Biden, it was actually President Trump is the one who was negotiating with the Taliban to pull out. But President Trump wouldn't leave. Not leave. He didn't leave before. Who did he hand it off to? He handed it off to Biden. Biden pulled out and what has Biden's legacy been? It's been negative ever since.
1:06:37 Robert Pape? If you look at his opinion polls, President Biden, you will see he was riding high until he withdrew from Afghanistan and he never recovered. Yes, inflation hurt too. The bigger hit was the Afghanistan problem. And this is where, this is why President Trump is really stuck. You see, he's on that horns of the dilemma. Does he want to accept the short term price, which is real? Or does he want to go and double down? And then you face the potential long term price of becoming LBJ and President Biden.
1:07:13 Steven Bartlett? This company that I've just invested in is growing like crazy. I want to be the one to tell you about it because I think it's going to create such a huge productivity advantage for you. Whisperflow is an app that you can get on your computer and on your phone on all your devices. And it allows you to speak to your technology. So instead of me writing out an email, I click one button on my phone. And I can just speak the email into existence and it uses AI to clean. Up what I was saying. And then when I'm done, I just hit this one button here and the whole email is written for me. And it's saving me so much time in a day because Whisper learns how I write. So on WhatsApp, it knows how I am, a little bit more casual, on email, a little bit more professional. And also, there's this really interesting thing they've just done. I can create little phrases to automatically do the work for me. I can just say Jack's LinkedIn and it copies Jack's LinkedIn profile for me because it knows who Jack is in my life.
1:07:58 Steven Bartlett? This is saving me a huge amount of time. This company is growing like absolute crazy. And this is why I invested in the business and why they're now a sponsor of this show. And Whisperflow is frankly becoming the worst kept secret in business productivity and entrepreneurship. Check it out now at Whisperflow, spelt W I S P R F L O W dot A I slash Stephen. It will be a game changer for you. We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards with the 1% diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO and then I ask that question to the next guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible conversation cards.
1:08:41 Steven Bartlett? These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have the 1% diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time. And if you want to drive connection and instill habit change in your company, head to the diary dot com to inquire and our team will be in touch. I have to ask then, you know, you said when you're in the White House, they're very smart people. Yeah, pretty smart. Presumably Trump knew this stuff or someone around him knew that, by the way, when you drop bombs, these sort of very specific bombs we have now that can hit a
1:09:25 Steven Bartlett? hit a very narrow target and take out a leader. You get into an escalation trap. Surely he knew this.
1:09:32 Robert Pape? I believe General Kane told him almost this much, this in so many words. I believe it. I don't have the exact evidence for it, but we have some inklings of it.
1:09:41 Steven Bartlett? What do you think he thought was going to happen?
1:09:43 Robert Pape? I think he, I've described Trump as the ultimate chaos kid. There are people who thrive in chaos. They feel the best when they're in a chaotic situation. And I think that he believes he can navigate the chaos better than anybody else.
1:10:01 Steven Bartlett? So what I want to, the answer to the question I was looking for is, what did he think was going to happen? Did he think, I'll drop these bombs, Hermione will be out, someone else will come in, then we'll negotiate with that guy, and then we'll get a better deal?
1:10:12 Robert Pape? I think that's not quite, I think that's too specific. People keep looking for that. In my experience here, it also is, that's too narrow of a way to understand what I think happened here. And again, we're reading quite a bit into very few tea leaves here, because this will come out over time. But I believe that what you're seeing with President Trump is, he likes to do what's called mixing it up. He wants to get the chaos going. And then he, he reads the chaos very well. And when it's a media storm, man, there's very few people that have beaten him. Just think about that. That's why he's president twice. He's, he's beaten quite a few black belts at this, right? But this is a different story. So if you take that
1:10:55 Robert Pape? same MO and you apply it to political violence, now you have these other actors, you have this other set of momentum. You have Israel playing this big role, you have the Iranians playing a big role. You're suddenly now have more players that can trap you in the chaos. And this is, I think, what has happened. Now with Venezuela, he also went through the first stage of the trap and noticed that with Venezuela, he just said, oh yeah, we're just going to forget about developing the oil. No second stage. Okay. So in, in with Venezuela, there's a reason why that has paused. It's because he didn't go to stage two with, because the
1:11:38 Robert Pape? Oil companies said, we're not going to die for you to build that oil. So he is basically, um, he took out one person, just literally one person. That person's not even dead yet. And he's not really developing any of those oil fields in Venezuela. They're just not being developed.
1:11:54 Steven Bartlett? He said he has a good relationship with the Venezuelan government now that.
1:11:57 Robert Pape? As long as because he's not doing any, the Venezuelan government, he's leaving them in place. He's basically declaring victory and moving on.
1:12:06 Steven Bartlett? He removed Maduro, kept the others in, and it sounds like.
1:12:10 Robert Pape? And kept the regime.
1:12:11 Steven Bartlett? It sounds like that might have somewhat inspired his move to bomb Iran because it appears on the surface that Venezuela kind of didn't go too badly. It kind of was a, a political victory.
1:12:22 Robert Pape? Chaos kid.
1:12:23 Steven Bartlett? Chaos kid.
1:12:24 Robert Pape? Chaos.
1:12:24 Steven Bartlett? Snatched him out of bed with his wife.
1:12:26 Robert Pape? But then he stopped. So this would be, the equivalent would be last June. So last June, okay, he went through stage one and he tried to stop. What made the difference here? It wasn't Trump. It was the intel he got from Netanyahu, the phone call from Netanyahu, which is President Trump getting ready. We're about to assassinate the Supreme Leader and about 20 of his associates and other leaders here. You decide how you want to handle this, but we're, we're taking off. And so that is, that did not happen with, with, uh, with, um, uh, the Maduro regime. So just imagine that there was another country that had, after Trump took out Maduro,
1:13:06 Robert Pape? decided they were going to keep assassinating, uh, the regime in Venezuela. Now you would be in a different story.
1:13:15 Steven Bartlett? You made a quite famous prediction, Professor. You predicted in 2009 that America's era as the world's only superpower was ending.
1:13:22 Robert Pape? Oh, yes, and I think that is true. We haven't talked about China, but I believe that since Trump has come into office, he's making China number one. His tariffs have done nothing but, um, uh, help China. China's been on charm offenses since the tariffs have, have been, and, and they're picking up all the pieces. I was just spent two weeks in China in June while we were bombing Iran. I said, I had to wear. How to do social media. I toured advanced industries in China for two solid weeks. One of the most amazing visits trips I've ever had in my whole career. And it was stunning.
1:14:02 Robert Pape? So Stephen, since COVID, almost nobody has gone to China. Now, if they have, they've gone to Beijing or Shanghai. They haven't gone to Wuhan. They haven't gone to Shenzhen, visited the BYD electric car factories. Seeing the robots that are now doing the metallurgy. And you can't see it very well on the web because China's keeping it to themselves. They don't want to brag about it. They're going, they're motoring ahead. So Wuhan, to give you an example, Wuhan is kind of like Pittsburgh. It's a bigger version of Pittsburgh. It's an old steel area. That's not Wuhan today. Wuhan today is the AI.
1:14:45 Robert Pape? It's, it's developing not just a robotic company. They're uplifting nine million people in Wuhan. Their medicine is improved. Their infrastructure is improved. They have more construction jobs than ever before because they have to build so much to uplift the whole nine million people. This is what Pittsburgh should have been and hasn't been. And I know I'm from Western Pennsylvania. It's heartbreaking to me to watch what's happened to Pittsburgh over the last 30 or 40 years. Wuhan, exactly the same trajectory, an old steel city is now one of the leaders here.
1:15:27 Robert Pape? And they have a robotic Silicon Valley there that I visited and so forth.
1:15:32 Steven Bartlett? And why does this matter? Why does it matter if the US are no longer the world's superpower? What, what then does history tell us is the consequence of that?
1:15:39 Robert Pape? The consequence is. First of all, you get enormous tension here for violence. So when you see big hegemonic shifts.
1:15:51 Speaker 02 Hegemonic.
1:15:51 Robert Pape? That means when one leader, the world's number one, becomes replaced by another, bad things happen. This is what happened, how you got the wars between Britain and France. When they were fighting their wars, this is how you got essentially World War I because of the rise and fall of Germany versus Russia versus Britain. So these rising and fall, they make a huge difference. Doesn't always happen. The one time it was peaceful was when America replaced Britain as number one. So just think about that. But other times it's been very tense.
1:16:29 Speaker 02 So how does China feel that the US are now at war with the Middle East?
1:16:33 Robert Pape? So what's interesting is to get ready for coming on here, I listened to the All In Podcast, and I hope that's OK to talk about.
1:16:39 Speaker 02 Oh, I love that.
1:16:40 Robert Pape? I think they're brilliant, by the way. I love it. But what they said, just in the most recent, is that Trump's playing a game for China. What they said is China's shaking in its boots. And that what this is about is it's kind of Venezuela plus Iran is all about to cause Xi to be shaking in his boots in April so that he will somehow make some bigger deal with Trump. I think this is just wrong. I think that it may be that there's some, you know, China does absolutely buy 90% of Iran's oil. There's no, and we're not disagreeing with the facts of the matter. It's the interpretation and the consequences for who's going to be number one down the road.
1:17:20 Robert Pape? So my assessment here is China is probably thrilled that we're on the verge of getting into another quagmire in the Middle East. And that they would gladly give up. They have about 20% of their GDP that turn, the energy, not GDP, 20% of their energy. It's a much smaller fraction of their GDP that turns on the oil issue. Most of their energy is not generated through, through oil. And so I think they would really, if they had to give all of the Middle Eastern oil up to suck us in to another forever war with Iran that would go on for years and years.
1:17:58 Robert Pape? Oh my goodness gracious, because they see themselves as growing through Asia and spreading their wings through Asia. And so to get us pinned down in the Middle East with an even bigger problem than we had with Iraq, this is manna from heaven for China. And that's what I, they told, and that's what I saw when I was there.
1:18:21 Steven Bartlett? If I was Putin, or if I was running China, based on everything you've said and based on everything I know, I would really want this war to go on for a long time.
1:18:28 Robert Pape? Oh, for sure.
1:18:29 Steven Bartlett? I'd really, so I'd really be helping Iran, you know, prolong this thing. And also because Russia are in their own situation at the moment with Ukraine. So it's quite a distraction from whatever Putin's objectives are in Ukraine. No one's really talking about Ukraine this week.
1:18:44 Robert Pape? And it's bad for the Ukrainians because what's happening is by, by, by the little bit that Putin has gotten himself involved here, there is a chance he set the stage for a deal, which is again, America stops the intel to the Ukrainians if Russia will stop the intel to Iran. That is much, much, much to Putin's advantage with Ukraine. So I think that you have a situation here, Stephen, where Putin, it's not so much he's, he's itching to get in the fight, is he's trying to do it in ways that he gets something out of it in his, in his relations, war with Ukraine. Think about that with President Xi. I don't think the Chinese want to get in the fight. I think, in fact, right now, if I'm assessing this correctly,
1:19:28 Robert Pape? they're probably not wanting to get in the way of an enemy who's shooting himself in both feet. So right now, America's damaging itself a lot more than China could. And if China inserts itself, there's a very good chance then that would help Trump, again, pull a rabbit out of a hat. I don't think they want to do that. I think right now, you just look at this from, we're running out of what's called standoff PGM. Remember Secretary Hagseth said, well, yeah, okay, we're running out of standoff PGMs, but we're gonna do something from the bombs that we can drop more over country. Well, that's a problem for Taiwan. If we're gonna defend Taiwan, we've got to do this with long standoff precision weapons. And everybody who studies this knows that.
1:20:13 Robert Pape? So if we're really running low on standoff precision weapons, she's just licking his chops, saying, my goodness, how much better does this get?
1:20:24 Steven Bartlett? If Trump was listening, probably not the case. I think he just watches CNN and Fox News. But if Trump was listening, what would you say to him?
1:20:33 Robert Pape? What I would tell him is take the deal. I would say, stop right now and do everything possible to go back to the deal you rejected the day before you started bombing. And what your goal should be is to get as much of the 60% enriched uranium out of the country as possible. If you could also get the 20% enriched uranium out, that would be good too. But you're probably not gonna get as good a deal, because the supreme leader you were dealing with is gone. And you now have a much tougher... So you might have to accept President Trump a worse deal.
1:21:07 Steven Bartlett? Are we just kicking the can down the road here? Because if you're an Iranian, like you've said, you've watched bombs drop, you've realized that the reason why you are such a target is because you don't have these nuclear weapons. So is there not an element where... Iran getting nuclear weapons is inevitable in some way?
1:21:23 Robert Pape? So Stephen, this is the myth of 100% security. So we see this in not just America, but in lots of conflicts in history where the idea that you don't have 100% security leads you to essentially do things that look like suicide for fear of death. So, so we know that, that there is a long-term problem out there. And sometimes a really good solution is to freeze it for 20 years. Just freeze it for 20 years. And you know what? It's, you're right. You didn't permanently take it off the table. But if you can freeze a problem for 20 years, that's actually a lot of, you might get lucky. You might get something good, like the Soviet Union might just fall apart on you.
1:22:07 Robert Pape? You know, out of the blue, it might just fall apart on you. And not because you did anything, it's just because something else changed in the world. So the way to think about this, Stephen, is not, this idea that we're going to take an action and have 100% security. This is how big powers lose wars. Big powers are up against these little countries. And think about how often they lose. We lose to Vietnam. That's how I got into this business in the first place. I wanted to understand that. And so this idea of the search for perfect security is often getting us into trouble. Kick a can down, you're right, it's only 20 years. I'll take that. That's better than where we are right now.
1:22:51 Steven Bartlett? Professor Robert Pape, of all the things that we've talked about.
1:22:58 Robert Pape? Which has been a wonderful conversation, by the way.
1:23:00 Steven Bartlett? And very diverse, but really focused on this subject of what's going on in the world at the moment with Iran and Trump and America's decline. What is the thing that we should have talked about that we didn't talk about?
1:23:09 Robert Pape? The big thing, well, we're finally getting to it at the end, is the real consequence of what President Trump has done since coming into office. The real consequence of the tariffs, the real consequence of not just threatening discussion of Greenland, but becoming very aggressive with our European allies on Greenland, being very aggressive to the point of taking out a leader from Venezuela, which is in our Western Hemisphere. So it's creating, what this is really doing is it's threatening America's primacy. So I am a big believer that America should be the strongest, most secure state on the planet.
1:23:53 Robert Pape? I think that is good for us. That means that it does make, it is valuable to be the top dog, to be the number one strongest economic military power. But in order to do that, you have to be the world's number one economy, for real. And with $40 trillion in debt, with us pushing away our trading partners, with us engaging in hostile actions here, which are scaring the rest of the world to further drift away from us, and maybe not side with China, but be neutral, oh my goodness gracious. And again, as I said before, China is motoring ahead on the AI revolution.
1:24:37 Robert Pape? We're talking AI, but are we really doing Wuhan? Are we up to Wuhan? I think it would be interesting for folks to go to Wuhan and actually visit, or go to Shenzhen and visit, or go to Hangzhou and visit and see where Alibaba is and see that it's not just one company here, it's not just DeepSeek, that there's clusters that are being built, that are uplifting 10 million people at a swath. And my goodness, why aren't we doing that in America? We certainly need that in the rest world. We're too distracted. We're too distracted, which is what I'm trying to say, is to China's advantage.
1:25:22 Robert Pape? And I think this is the real long-term price, which is, are we actually eroding our position as the world's number one? And I think our primacy is in danger.
1:25:37 Steven Bartlett? Professor Robert Pape, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
1:25:44 Robert Pape? Ah.
1:25:46 Steven Bartlett? The question left for you is, what is the prediction you have for the future that most people do not want to hear?
1:25:56 Robert Pape? Well, this is going to lead into the conversation. So I have a book coming out in September called Our Own Worst Enemies. As bad as all this problem is, Stephen, as bad as it is, I have spent the last several years focusing on what's happening with political violence in the United States and its normalization. And the most, the biggest danger that we face, even bigger than Iran and all the problems we've just talked about, is the normalization of political violence in our own country.
1:26:31 Steven Bartlett? And by political violence, you mean?
1:26:32 Robert Pape? I'm, I'm talking about in the last 10 years, we have seen a surge of violent riots. We have seen a surge of political assassinations that we haven't seen since the 1960s. On top of that, we've just had Operation Midway Blitz in my city, Chicago. That is the surge of militarized immigration enforcement.
1:27:00 Steven Bartlett? Oh, ICE.
1:27:01 Robert Pape? Which surged ICE, which surged into neighborhoods over, over almost 300 times.
1:27:08 Steven Bartlett? Crazy.
1:27:09 Robert Pape? Not just a small. And then what happened after they left Chicago is they did even more of that in Minneapolis. So these, this trajectory, Stephen, that we're on, where we are seeing the incredible normalization of political violence, and it's happening on both the right and the left. It's not, I'm not trying to make moral equivalence, but it is, and the book will explain this, is probably the greatest danger that we face. Because if we are our own worst enemies, think of what that means for us being that great power that, that is so important for us and the great future we want for our families
1:27:54 Robert Pape? and our, our communities here. We are in danger of becoming our own worst enemies, not for a day, not for a month, but for years.
1:28:05 Steven Bartlett? Professor, thank you so much. If anyone wants to go and read more about many of the things we've talked about today, where do they go? Substack?
1:28:12 Robert Pape? I would go, you can read my books on it, you can get them from Amazon. I would go to Substack and then, and that's The Escalation Trap. And I would also just be aware that there will be more discussion of political violence. So it's not just political violence abroad, and it's not just political violence at home. It is both happening at the same time.
1:28:32 Steven Bartlett? Professor, thank you so much.
1:28:33 Robert Pape? Thank you very much, really. Really enjoyed it.
1:28:35 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much. It was fantastic.
Previous No.1 Christianity Expert: The Truth About Christianity! The Case For Jesus (Historian's Proof) Next Most Replayed Moment: The Antibiotic Alternative Big Pharma Doesn't Want You To Know! Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
