TRIGGERnometry - This War Will FAIL＂ - Military Expert Prof Robert Pape

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00:00:45.920 only on paramount plus stage one was of the escalation trap was the bombing tactical success

00:00:54.900 where you do destroy the facility as an industrial uranium enrichment production center.

00:01:01.460 And that then would lead to stage two.

00:01:04.680 That's when you'd get the regime change more.

00:01:06.940 Stage three, which is likely coming in the next week or two,

00:01:11.680 we would take ground forces.

00:01:13.700 Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East.

00:01:15.660 Oh, yeah, they're halfway there.

00:01:17.060 What President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices.

00:01:24.220 They're terrible for the world.

00:01:26.040 They're terrible for his presidency.

00:01:28.520 So we are now in the regime change war.

00:01:31.600 Yep, yep.

00:01:32.380 What's next?

00:01:33.500 There will be a four and five to the escalation traffic.

00:01:38.700 This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College.

00:01:41.880 Right after this episode, go check out their incredible online courses,

00:01:46.380 which are absolutely free at hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:01:50.960 professor robert pape welcome to trigonometry before we get into the war in iran the escalation

00:01:57.500 trap all the rest of the good stuff just tell us who you are your journey through life and how you

00:02:01.780 came to be sitting in this chair uh my name is robert pape a professor at the university of

00:02:06.640 chicago um when i was in high school my mother had this great idea i should spend a summer with

00:02:12.620 a german family uh and i did that in west germany and i came back thinking i should be an interpreter

00:02:18.720 at the UN. So I went to University of Pittsburgh as an undergrad, and I started taking all these

00:02:25.120 language classes. Well, that then I wanted to become a foreign service officer because I thought,

00:02:30.960 well, that might even be better. So then I thought I was actually quite good in school. So I wanted

00:02:36.020 to get a PhD. And I said to myself, I actually want to get a real PhD, as I called it. I didn't

00:02:40.620 want to get a sort of credential. So I ended up going to the University of Chicago to get a PhD

00:02:45.820 in the 1980s, and I was heading to the Foreign Service. I said to myself, what am I going to

00:02:51.380 write on for my dissertation? And I said, well, I'm going to go represent our country. We had

00:02:55.500 just, you know, 15 years ago had this disastrous war in Vietnam. I should find out why we lost.

00:03:01.480 And so I wanted to know, how could we lose the Vietnam War with all this power, all this air 0.95

00:03:06.960 power? So I had no real background in the military. This was not coming from war gaming or anything

00:03:12.320 like that. And so I ended up going to the library and I wanted to find the book that had all the

00:03:18.100 air campaigns in history and explained why the one in Vietnam didn't work out. There was no book.

00:03:23.500 Well, that became my dissertation. And then after I finished, I wanted to do what a lot of people

00:03:31.280 did. I wanted to publish an article before I went to the Foreign Service. So that was just me

00:03:34.420 wanting to do that. The Cold War ended. And what happened when the Cold War ended? The first Gulf 0.56

00:03:39.980 War, which was heavily, I mean, completely different than the Cold War. And suddenly all

00:03:46.060 of this work I had done, and I'm just a young kid at this point, I'm in the front pages of the USA

00:03:52.360 Today because we have no talking heads at that point in time, no generals and so forth. Schwarzkopf

00:03:58.260 was the only one who was really on television. And for six months, really, I was really just

00:04:04.000 amazingly in the media. And that just surprised me because I could help design and structure what

00:04:11.380 was the air power debate even about. And then the U.S. Air Force called me up and I had no idea this

00:04:17.180 was going to happen. Out of the blue. I mean, who would think the U.S. Air Force? They're bombing

00:04:21.180 Baghdad. Literally the month we're bombing Baghdad with the F-117s, I get the phone call.

00:04:27.460 Professor Pape, would you please come down to Maxwell Air Force Base? This is where we do our

00:04:32.040 mid-level officer, not the undergrad, the mid-level officers. We're going to stand up a brand new

00:04:36.840 school that's going to focus on air strategy. So, okay, well, I'll try, I'll go down. And I get there

00:04:43.260 and here, the chief of staff of the Air Force, other four-star generals, what I'm being told is

00:04:48.400 they thought the reason we lost the Vietnam War, again, they're thinking why lose the Vietnam War

00:04:53.940 was because we didn't understand air power. I mean, that was the whole reason I'd been working

00:04:59.320 You know, my dissertation was, I couldn't believe it.

00:05:02.000 It was, and so I'd come back, I'd tell my family, you're not going to believe this.

00:05:05.640 I think we should go to Montgomery, Alabama, Maxwell Air Force Base.

00:05:09.480 I mean, this is, I'm a Northern.

00:05:10.740 I mean, this is just a very, very unusual.

00:05:12.900 And it was tremendous because here I am teaching the best pilots in the world.

00:05:19.040 They know how to put bombs on a target.

00:05:21.520 That's when I really discovered my true contribution was in between what happens when bombs hit targets

00:05:29.260 and the political outcome, which I call mechanisms.

00:05:32.140 In my book, Bombing to Win, that became the frameworks of escalation

00:05:36.760 in the sub-stack I call the escalation trap.

00:05:39.420 I started developing these 30 years ago.

00:05:42.620 I teach them now at the University of Chicago.

00:05:45.780 The University of Chicago, I do have some military students,

00:05:48.740 but I mostly am telling people when you go on the NSC,

00:05:51.560 and I have folks who have been on the NSC,

00:05:53.540 senators, staffs, et cetera, et cetera,

00:05:55.400 these are the frameworks of escalation you need to understand

00:05:58.720 And because it's not a military strategy is not just about putting a bond.

00:06:02.940 That's tactics.

00:06:04.100 What's the real strategy, the actual strategy of strategy is in between the tactics of military force hitting things and political outcomes.

00:06:15.920 And that is these stages.

00:06:18.080 I lay them out, but it's this middle that's very hard to get a grip on.

00:06:23.280 And that's really what I've been doing for the better part of 30 years is focusing on, I call it the escalation dynamics.

00:06:30.860 And that's true in all of my work, really, not just the air power part of my work.

00:06:35.920 And that's one of the reasons I've advised every, when I worked for the Air Force, I got in big debates about bombing strategy to end the Bosnian Civil War.

00:06:44.620 And I was very strongly showing the limits of leadership decapitation, which was becoming the Air Force's favorite way to use precision air power.

00:06:55.520 And the bombing strategy that stopped the Bosnian Civil War had no leadership decapitation.

00:07:00.940 It was almost pure hammer and anvil.

00:07:03.080 It's almost right out of bombing to win.

00:07:05.600 And that was my first time of actually having any real contribution, I would say.

00:07:12.600 And then as time went on, that just continued from 2001 to 2024.

00:07:19.020 I've advised every White House, that includes two Republican, two Democrat.

00:07:23.440 I don't pick a president.

00:07:25.220 I advise about the best way to manage these escalation dynamics for the good of the country.

00:07:32.320 And so I hope that gives you some sense of where I've come from, why I'm here.

00:07:35.740 And I used to joke I was going to, I'm just still studying for the Foreign Service exam.

00:07:40.180 And I'm pretty sure I've aged out of that at this point.

00:07:43.440 So I think I'm sort of stuck as an academic.

00:07:46.220 I love being an academic, by the way.

00:07:47.980 It's the perfect place for me.

00:07:49.840 So, Professor, we've been really looking forward to this conversation.

00:07:54.040 And there's a lot of people in the UK, America, right away around the world who woke up, saw the strikes happening and going, why did this happen?

00:08:03.560 This doesn't seem to make any sense.

00:08:05.160 So could you just explain what you think is the American strategy for this war and why they started it?

00:08:12.660 Well, I can also try to explain why these strikes, I couldn't say the date, but why they were almost inevitable that they were going to happen.

00:08:20.340 So I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years. 0.94

00:08:23.700 And it's important to understand that starting in 2002, the relationship between the United States and Iran fundamentally changed.

00:08:34.080 Now, for decades before that, there was political tension. Absolutely. There was issues of Israel. Absolutely. But what happened in 2002 is that's when we discovered, the American government discovered, that Iran was going to enrich uranium.

00:08:50.600 That became the Natanz issue, and they were getting equipment from Pakistan.

00:08:55.780 So this was 2002.

00:08:58.060 Well, in 2002, these were just holes in the ground.

00:09:01.120 Think of it as giant football fields underneath the ground about 100 feet that were being dug out.

00:09:07.320 Well, by 2005, they actually had some concrete facilities, and they were actually starting to put centrifuges in.

00:09:14.300 That's when I started to model the bombing of Iran. 0.97

00:09:18.580 Right from the get-go, right from the beginning, I do this in my strategy class at the University of Chicago,

00:09:25.000 which I'm about to teach again, and I taught last spring, and I teach every spring.

00:09:28.960 And the last day is 90 minutes simulation of the bombing of Iran and what's going to happen.

00:09:34.620 I've been doing that for, now it'll be 21 years.

00:09:37.840 And also, right from the get-go, I was very familiar with the idea of double-tap attacks.

00:09:44.300 In fact, I think I may be the first person on print to talk about that in a Cy Hirsch article.

00:09:49.460 So Cy Hirsch was a reporter for The New Yorker, did a lot of pieces for The New Yorker.

00:09:55.140 And he called me up one day because we had worked, talked to me on other things.

00:09:59.020 And he said, Bob, I really think that we're going to use a nuclear weapon, attack nuke, to take out Natanz. 0.86

00:10:06.680 And I said, Cy, I realize you're always looking for a controversial angle here because that's what he made his whole living on.

00:10:14.140 And I said, but that's just not what we're going to do.

00:10:16.820 And he said, what do you mean?

00:10:17.640 I said, we're going to do double tap attacks with precision weapon. 0.89

00:10:21.700 He said, what do you mean?

00:10:22.280 I'm calling the Air Force.

00:10:23.100 There's nobody talking about this.

00:10:24.260 And I said, no, let me explain to you, Si.

00:10:26.000 So you know that GPS exists, and that is how we guide our bombs.

00:10:31.000 What you may not know is GPS is not two-dimensional.

00:10:34.540 It's three-dimensional.

00:10:36.300 So even though in history we have never done this, I said, Si, what we're going to do is

00:10:41.700 we're not going to want to use attack nuke, and it's just not where we're going to go.

00:10:46.340 The necessity is going to create the mother of invention, and even though we've never done this

00:10:52.040 in history, and there may be no plans in the Pentagon to do this, we're going to do double

00:10:55.880 tap attacks. And he said, what do you mean, Bob? I said, we're going to take 2,000-pound bombs,

00:11:00.360 which we had at the time, JDAMs are called, and these create radii of blasts, where in dirt,

00:11:09.540 It's about 50 feet in concrete.

00:11:12.240 It's about 25 feet.

00:11:13.520 So just to give you a sense of the radius we're talking about.

00:11:16.600 And what we're going to do is we're going to target Natanz and we're going to have one bomb hit the first top of Natanz.

00:11:24.840 And we're going to time the second bomb to come in 15 to 30 seconds later.

00:11:29.140 We're not going to wait to do bomb damage assessment.

00:11:31.380 We're literally going to plan the double tap and we're going to estimate how deep the first one went.

00:11:37.620 And then we'll have the second bomb hit just about 25 feet or so deeper.

00:11:42.980 Then we'll have a third bomb hit, and we're going to get into those centrifuges.

00:11:46.700 Well, he published that.

00:11:48.020 It's either 2004 or there are rounds in the New Yorker.

00:11:51.220 Your folks and listeners can go find it.

00:11:53.420 Well, that is how I started to model the bombing of Iran. 0.83

00:11:56.980 So I said, we're going to take these B-2s. 1.00

00:12:00.440 Here's the target set.

00:12:02.240 Here's what we can find.

00:12:03.540 Now, as I'm doing this, Iran is developing from Natanz to Fordow, and there's a whole discussion of that I can give you.

00:12:12.920 And then we, too, when Fordow came on, we built the Moab, which is the 30,000-pounder.

00:12:18.640 So all the way along the way, every year I'm updating.

00:12:23.160 Now, that's like the details of this, of the actual on paper.

00:12:30.260 But what does it mean in terms of the attack?

00:12:32.560 What's the what's the strategic reality? So right from the beginning, it was always going to be clear that we, the Americans, would be able to attack Natanz, Natanz and Fordow with 90 plus percent tactical success, meaning the bombs would hit their targets.

00:12:54.040 We would kill scientists.

00:12:55.720 So I went through all the different targets here that we were going to destroy. 0.89

00:13:00.300 But we would and we would be able to do that more effectively by far than the Israelis because we could carry in our bombers bigger payloads than they could. 1.00

00:13:09.140 And so what you would end up with is high degree of tactical success in stage one of the escalation, but very little strategic success.

00:13:19.860 And why is that?

00:13:20.840 because this tactical success would not destroy, disable, melt down the enriched uranium.

00:13:29.300 That is the actual strategic term.

00:13:31.640 Why not?

00:13:32.500 Because you couldn't be sure you would ever, you might be able to disrupt the centrifuges.

00:13:37.220 So just to give you a sense of the way this is set up.

00:13:41.660 So let's just pick Natanz, just for one, here. 0.90

00:13:44.580 So Natanz is like a football field here.

00:13:46.640 So it's 100 meters by 25 meters across.

00:13:50.180 And you've got rows of centrifuges here, which are about the size of us, maybe a little shorter than us, except there's thousands of them in these rows.

00:13:59.340 So when you do the double tap attacks, you are always likely, even if you didn't quite get to the chamber itself, to cause earthquake.

00:14:10.920 And that earthquake would always likely to be.

00:14:14.160 So this is the, you know, having studied bombing for a long time.

00:14:17.680 It's not it's it's the there's a blast effect. You see what I mean? So the blast effect itself was very likely to disable maybe 50, 70, maybe even 90 percent of these centrifuges, in which case you would stop the industrial production enrichment of the uranium.

00:14:38.140 But the problem is that you wouldn't necessarily even cause fires down there.

00:14:45.020 You would be shaking everything up, more or less.

00:14:48.460 Now, maybe you might cause fires.

00:14:50.080 You wouldn't really know for sure.

00:14:52.160 I'm not saying that none of it could have been destroyed.

00:14:54.520 What I'm saying is that what you could be sure of is the shaking of the centrifuges.

00:15:00.120 That would be the BDA.

00:15:01.480 The bomb damage assessment from on far would give us high confidence.

00:15:06.020 We had created the earthquakes.

00:15:07.420 You see what I mean? What you wouldn't be able to see, and this was always the uncertainty, always, was what happened to the enriched uranium. Now, I'm not saying for sure none of it would have been damaged. That's not the problem.

00:15:21.720 The problem coming out of this is that enriched uranium, especially as the quantities grew over time, you see, you would only need portions of that to produce nuclear weapons.

00:15:37.000 You would also need even smaller portions of that for radiological weapons, which I'll say more about down the road.

00:15:44.560 So right from the beginning, there was stage one of escalation.

00:15:49.180 And so in my escalation trap that I published before the war started, I laid out three stages of escalation we were going to go through.

00:15:57.720 And this was days before the war, all three stages.

00:16:00.660 And we're now about on stage three.

00:16:01.980 Stage one of the escalation trap was the bombing tactical success, and we'll go back to June, in Fordow, Natanz, where you do destroy the facility as an industrial uranium enrichment production center, just as I'm describing.

00:16:19.180 OK. And it's 90 percent plus likely that happened. So, well, that is true. But you wouldn't know

00:16:26.140 what happened to the uranium itself. And that then would lead to stage two. And I always said about

00:16:33.220 a year later, two years later, actually, it happened about eight months, a little bit sooner.

00:16:38.020 That's when you'd get the regime change war. And the reason so there had been regime changes called

00:16:43.640 from Israel. How would you actually get America behind the regime change war? You would start by

00:16:51.160 going after Cordeaux and Natanz. Once you did that, you started the trap because you did,

00:16:58.700 you triggered, you did destroy, but you probably triggered, you wouldn't know for sure, but you

00:17:04.180 probably triggered dispersal of that material. You see dispersal. And we saw some satellite evidence

00:17:10.580 of that. And I have that on my substack. So we actually have some civilian. So if we have that

00:17:15.100 in the civilian world, I can guarantee you there is humans, SIGINT, there's a lot of more.

00:17:21.700 And in fact, just thinking logically, given the 12-day war, President Trump said they obliterated

00:17:30.560 everything, destroyed everything. The fact that there is now a follow-up is clear evidence of

00:17:35.300 the fact that President Trump and his team believe that material is still there.

00:17:39.160 And they, and President Trump, it's, I cannot get inside his head. I'm not going to put him on the

00:17:44.360 couch. But notice, even after the 12-day war, what did we do? Right back to negotiating with

00:17:49.820 the Iranians. Now, if we had actually destroyed all that enriched uranium, the 1,000 pounds of 60%, 0.98

00:17:55.800 the 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20%, what are we talking to them about? Okay, I mean, what is

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00:19:48.080 So stage one is the United States hit them.

00:19:51.820 There's no guarantee.

00:19:52.500 Some trigger of dispersal possible.

00:19:55.540 And then over the months, your intel, you have no more IAEA, which was your best intelligence.

00:20:02.160 So people think, oh, it must be the CIA and Mossad who are the best.

00:20:06.620 Well, they can turn individuals James Bond style.

00:20:09.760 But there's nothing like going into, just like you're asking me to come here, there's nothing like being on site and actually looking right across.

00:20:17.080 And if I'm the IAE, I want to actually measure you as the enriched uranium and actually get my measurements out.

00:20:23.280 There's nothing that's going to beat that.

00:20:25.520 You see what I mean?

00:20:26.360 So once you bombed, you were, number one, tactically successful, but you're strategically at a minimum uncertain, likely failed, and it's dispersing.

00:20:39.160 And then number three, your intel is terrible.

00:20:42.740 Terrible.

00:20:43.220 So that's going to put you in a situation of, over time, panic, because you will get little drips and drabs of additional intel of this and that happening with that material, and we will just simply panic.

00:20:59.740 Now, we won't say we're panicking because we want to exude control, but we're losing control here, and that's what then sucks, that I always said would lead to stage two, which was the regime change war.

00:21:13.220 So just, I'm asking questions just to make it very extra simple.

00:21:17.300 Your explanations are brilliant, but I always like to clarify things for our audience even more so.

00:21:21.360 Konstantin, it's perfect.

00:21:22.580 Okay, so what you're saying is stage one, they have nuclear facilities and material.

00:21:27.200 You try and take them out, but it was unlikely to fully work.

00:21:30.720 It clearly didn't work.

00:21:32.440 So stage two is you go, and we know this from some of the things that are being revealed about the negotiations

00:21:38.280 that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had with the Iranians.

00:21:41.000 the Iranians claim to have the ability to make 11, 11, they said, right, they're talking smack 1.00

00:21:46.900 across the table. This is what the Iranians are saying. And they're saying we've got the 0.98

00:21:50.160 nuclear material to make a bunch of bombs. And your argument is, well, that's when everybody

00:21:55.360 basically panics. And so I'm saying they were probably were incrementally panicking along

00:22:00.560 the way because that material in June was enough for between 10 and 16 bombs. Right.

00:22:06.060 And that is with high degree of confidence. That's the IAEA's estimate. We know that the time to make those bombs and so forth, it's not a few days. It's more like finishing the enrichment is a few weeks. That's when President Trump's talking about the few weeks. But then it's probably six months after that to actually fashion the bomb.

00:22:25.620 So we have some idea of this, of the actual dimensions.

00:22:29.900 And so I'm not saying that it's literally the foreign minister of Iran's comment here.

00:22:36.220 But the package of information we're getting from Intel, from the negotiations,

00:22:39.800 altogether that creates a picture.

00:22:41.480 It creates a panicky picture because it's Swiss cheese.

00:22:44.720 Some pieces are hard like this.

00:22:46.540 A lot of it is empty like that.

00:22:48.440 Right.

00:22:48.780 And you are concerned because there's so much of that material now.

00:22:54.740 You see, this isn't just tiny amounts. It's not the 300 kilograms of 5% that was there with the Obama deal. Now we have fantastic amounts more. And so even portions of that can be really, really concerning. And it doesn't even have to be for a nuclear bomb.

00:23:14.120 So you're now seeing the precision drone capabilities of Iran, which I have to say, I'm a bit surprised was not taken more seriously ahead of time because Iran produced 55,000 of those precision drones in 2025 and gave them to Russia. 0.71

00:23:32.960 So the idea that you're not, I don't know if we have any idea how many thousand they have, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying the idea that you wouldn't think they would have a lot of thousands here for themselves and they've just given everything to Russia, I think this is kind of foolish.

00:23:50.360 But then put the radiological material on the tip of a drone.

00:23:56.220 Now that's going into Doha.

00:23:58.860 That's going into Dubai.

00:24:02.080 Now take some of that material and hand it off to Houthis, Hezbollah. 0.99

00:24:09.000 Now you have the possibility of radiological bombs in Tel Aviv.

00:24:13.460 These are radiological.

00:24:15.220 They're not the same as in nuclear.

00:24:16.480 But this will probably if these things happen, you're going to see evacuations like you have not.

00:24:22.900 So you think it's been, you know, people panic now.

00:24:26.060 This is probably one of the things that's becoming it's very concerning as what I'm saying is this intel spreads.

00:24:33.180 And I've been saying this to in the assessment for 20 years.

00:24:36.380 These are the ways that we that this is the politics of the situation, not just the mechanics of it.

00:24:44.400 So my work is looking at the mechanics of things as it intersects with politics.

00:24:51.420 And the politics is what's left out here in these discussions of escalation dynamics and was when I taught for the Air Force as well.

00:25:01.600 Again, pilots in the Air Force, best in the world, putting bombs on target.

00:25:05.740 They're told, I want political end state victory.

00:25:08.680 How do you get there?

00:25:09.820 You've got to go through politics.

00:25:11.320 and the politics is what I'm laying out

00:25:15.380 in the escalation trap, stage by stage.

00:25:19.180 And so I'm fusing, I'm discussing the interaction.

00:25:22.340 Understood.

00:25:22.860 So stage two is you didn't get all the nuclear material.

00:25:26.780 You go back for regime change.

00:25:28.480 And why can't you just keep bombing

00:25:31.680 or try and use intel?

00:25:33.180 Oh, I said you'll do the negotiate.

00:25:36.460 Well, how are you going to get a grip on that material,

00:25:39.840 the nuclear material that is now, you're worried, is going to have some nefarious purpose,

00:25:45.200 and I've given you a number of them. You only have two choices. One, the Iranian regime will 0.99

00:25:50.820 negotiate it away. That's what happened with the Obama deal. But once we went through the,

00:25:56.960 and I always argued for something, I didn't know it was the Obama deal, but I was arguing

00:26:01.700 that that would be the best thing we could do, even before we had a thing called the Obama deal.

00:26:06.620 And there's a whole story about the kind of linkages there that when I was on Obama's primary team, I was recommending for that.

00:26:14.640 So if you want to, if you're interested in that, but I mean, the point is that the reason you go for regime change, Constantine, is because you're desperate.

00:26:22.580 And you think, well, OK, the negotiations aren't giving me a big enough deal.

00:26:27.500 They still want to keep their 3.5 enriched uranium.

00:26:30.940 They're not giving the whole thing up like they did for Obama.

00:26:34.140 So what are you left with?

00:26:35.800 you're left with trying to take out the regime. And it's not because it's a great option. It's

00:26:41.040 not. History will show it's not. But the fact of the matter is you're getting more and more

00:26:47.120 desperate here. And I think that's really what led to stage two. And that's what I said. This

00:26:52.480 is how you will get the regime change war by the United States. It will be an air war and it will

00:26:59.100 also fail. It will fail because in 100 years, air power alone has never toppled a regime. I always

00:27:05.780 went through the modeling of the regime itself. I do this on my substack, glad to do it here.

00:27:10.800 There is nothing special about this regime that makes it more likely to collapse with

00:27:15.240 there. In fact, it's the other way around. And I'm glad to explain all that. But the fact of

00:27:20.360 the matter is you're going down this road. And then the trigger, when would you push the go

00:27:25.600 to go for regime change? Well, in history, this was in 2003 as well and other cases,

00:27:32.460 America typically goes the hour it has eyeball sighting of the leader it wants to kill.

00:27:41.060 Not general idea. Okay. Not vague idea, but often eyeballs on the target. And then there's a gap

00:27:51.220 because you have eyeballs on the target, maybe a sat phone here. Well, it takes about six or

00:27:56.680 eight hours to get those bombers there. F-117s, B-2s, whatever. It's going to take a little bit

00:28:01.800 of time to get there, no matter how fast you think you can make that happen. In 2003, this is when

00:28:07.500 CIA Director Tennant ran into the Oval Office with George Bush, somewhere around the 20th or

00:28:15.460 22nd of March, 2003. And he writes this in his book. So there's nothing classified here. This

00:28:21.240 has all been made public. And he says to President Bush, we've got phenomena sites. He's at Tarnak

00:28:27.740 Farms. He's right there. We've got our human agent in the basement and Saddam is going to have dinner 0.93

00:28:34.520 there tonight again. He was there last night for dinner. He's coming again for dinner. And we have

00:28:40.720 our agent there with a satellite phone and he is telling us this is happening. So that's when

00:28:46.620 George Bush, March 2003, orders the F-117s to go. And it takes about, you know, but they timed it

00:28:53.440 right for the dinner. And also, just so you know, we didn't tell the human agent. So we left the

00:29:00.020 human agent in the basement. And we bombed the farm, destroyed that, killed the agent as well. 0.82

00:29:07.140 And it just so turned out that Saddam just decided not to go there. Not for any, you know, 0.82

00:29:13.520 it's just the randomness of history of luck here. So that's why we didn't kill him at that time.

00:29:20.120 But this is, and I said, the most likely reason you would what would trigger the regime change in a very tactical sense is you'd have some probably human eyeballs on the leader that you want to kill.

00:29:32.980 And I didn't know would be the supreme leader, but that makes perfect sense under this.

00:29:36.700 I'm not saying it's a good idea, but that's what they I can see the tactical reasons for this.

00:29:41.480 And I think that's what happened.

00:29:42.540 I think what you had is you had this you had this pressure here of essentially fear of what was happening with Iran's dispersing nuclear material and what could happen with that over time, mixed with this very exquisite intelligence about this day, this hour, this leader, this group is right there.

00:30:01.400 And it's not one or the other. It's all of those coming together. And I'm fusing it here for your

00:30:09.760 listeners because I can understand why they're confused. They're getting sound bites of six

00:30:15.200 seconds here, six seconds there. This is why I wanted to talk to you to give a fuller picture

00:30:20.120 of why. So we are now in the regime change war. What's next? Well, the regime change war is

00:30:28.060 failing, and it's failing strategically, not tactically. Just want to be super clear. Again,

00:30:34.120 our smart bombs are hitting their targets 90-plus percent of the time. Our military

00:30:41.600 is hyper-professional at making those bombs hit those targets. The military is not failing here.

00:30:49.300 The strategy is failing. That we have to be super clear. And why is the strategy failing? It's

00:30:56.040 because at this stage, stage two, the goals are, number one, topple the regime, meaning positive

00:31:03.160 regime change, where this regime goes away and new leaders come in who are more amenable to what

00:31:10.640 President Trump wants. That's what I mean by positive regime change. Well, that's not happening,

00:31:15.580 and it's not happening because what you're seeing is the pattern of history over 100 years. This has

00:31:21.660 never happened, just to be super clear. Not rarely, it's never happened. And that's what my books show

00:31:29.340 and so forth. But why not? It's because when you kill the leaders, as we did here and as we've done

00:31:37.580 before, as we kill the leaders, the replacement leaders, all the incentives are for the replacement

00:31:45.960 leaders to come in more aggressive than before. Some of its age, just because they're younger,

00:31:52.600 it's like my graduate students are more aggressive than I am. Okay, that's all true. Okay. But some

00:31:58.640 of it is just plain organizational. So just imagine that when you have a situation where

00:32:06.000 there's a two-actor game, the society versus the regime, society versus the regime. Now you bring

00:32:12.800 this third outside actor, the foreign military power that's a Godzilla. This isn't some little

00:32:20.080 pipsqueak. We're the Americans. We're the omnipowerful American military. And on top of

00:32:27.300 that, in 1953, a long time ago, but still historically will be remembered, it was the

00:32:33.380 United States that toppled a democratic leader with the CIA controlling pieces of the Iranian

00:32:41.620 military. It was a military coup that we orchestrated. So it didn't use air power,

00:32:46.320 literally made the military do it. Well, that's when we put in the Shah, a dictator, not democratic, 0.81

00:32:53.400 and the Savak. The Savak was the secret police, and the secret police were right up there with 0.93

00:32:58.900 Joe Stalin's secret police. So this is not a nice situation. So this is what this gorilla,

00:33:05.480 this Godzilla is over here, this changes the politics here. And it changes the politics

00:33:12.160 because suddenly whatever the tensions were here, the gap, which is real, just like 40% of America

00:33:19.700 supports Donald Trump today, there's a gap between America and our government. Well, does that mean

00:33:26.120 that if Iran assassinates Trump, and we know they're trying, that you're going to get the 0.69

00:33:30.720 Democrats here in Times Square, they're going to come out, they're going to have a party in

00:33:34.800 Times Square, and they're going to invite the Iranians to come on over for the party.

00:33:38.980 That's not going to happen, you see. Same dynamics here. So the government, you can see

00:33:46.000 the leaders who are taking over now, much more likely to be hawkish because of the issue here

00:33:53.520 with the... We have to fight Godzilla. You got to fight Godzilla, and the Godzilla is going to eat

00:33:58.180 us here if we either fight him now or fight him later, but we got to fight Godzilla. But even the

00:34:03.280 pro-democracy movement starts to create, it starts to create problems because now you are a traitor 0.92

00:34:10.820 to your country. You're, you're, you're not getting self-determination. And when President

00:34:16.920 Trump says, well, we will pick who will be your leader. The former Shah's son, not good enough. 0.99

00:34:23.680 Well, that's probably a good, I'm not saying he would be a good choice. What I'm saying is that

00:34:28.440 notice that it's the president of the United States who's picking who the leader of Iran is

00:34:33.460 again. So no matter how we describe this, no matter how much we try to put a velvet glove

00:34:40.040 over this, this is the use of force to dominate Iran's society. And that is what then takes away 0.89

00:34:49.900 self-determination. It shrinks the pro-democracy movements here. It builds nationalism, which

00:34:56.680 confuse parts of this, and not instantly, I want to make it clear, that politics takes time to work

00:35:03.500 itself out. So now, what is this going to mean in stage two? Lashback. Lashback. So you are likely

00:35:12.060 going to see not just a hardened regime, but a regime that's still very capable. They'll take

00:35:18.580 more risks. And that's what you saw with the horizontal escalation. I published a piece in

00:35:23.900 foreign affairs literally days after the moment. How could I do that? Because I had it ready to go,

00:35:29.820 that this was very likely going to be Iran's lashback because they had drones. They have

00:35:36.860 mines. Those drones have precision on them. This was always likely coming. Could I be 100 percent

00:35:43.080 sure? Of course not. That's why I didn't publish before. But once it started and I saw on the

00:35:48.100 Saturday that the Pentagon was saying, well, these aren't serious attacks by Iran. These are just the

00:35:54.560 spasms of the dying body. That's when I knew that there was a lot of, I thought, misunderstanding of

00:36:00.520 what the politics and the way this would work itself out. So history, there's a lot of cases

00:36:06.060 that are similar to this in history I could explain to you, not with drones, but with the

00:36:10.540 lashing back in an orchestrated way. And I had a sense of what Iran's capabilities were, because 0.99

00:36:16.240 again, I'm focused on air power and Iran had a lot of precision drones they were giving to Russia.

00:36:22.220 Why wouldn't they use them in their own defense here? And this was the regional escalation

00:36:27.720 strategy is a reasonable lash back for them. That's a rational approach. And now we're coming

00:36:34.940 to the end of stage two here or starting to move to a new stage because that horizontal escalation

00:36:41.140 strategy hasn't just been a retaliation strategy. Iran has gained power with that horizontal 0.93

00:36:49.220 escalation strategy. So let me explain that, which is that, so we are now in a situation where before

00:36:56.720 the war, Iran controlled 4% of the world's oil, 4% of the world's oil. Today, it controls 20% 0.91

00:37:05.480 of the world's oil. So five times more of that. That's a big increase.

00:37:12.200 By closing the Strait of Hormones?

00:37:13.500 Well, by controlling the Strait of Hormones.

00:37:15.600 Yes, because they still let Chinese and Indians through, right?

00:37:17.860 No, they let their oils through.

00:37:19.580 Yeah.

00:37:19.820 So just to also be clear, when I say control, there's actually quite a bit of control. You see,

00:37:26.260 it's not just damage. It's controlled damage. Controlled disruption is probably a better

00:37:32.800 phrase. What they're doing is they are hitting about 20 tankers so far, almost one a day,

00:37:39.560 that are coming from Dubai, I'm sorry, from UAE or Saudi Arabia or some of the other Gulf states.

00:37:46.940 And that has totally scared that. So that traffic is almost down to zero.

00:37:51.720 But they have had about at least 14 tankers. These are the ones you're describing that are

00:37:59.140 flagged by India or China. And these are carrying Iranian oil. Iran is actually

00:38:05.080 exporting slightly more oil now than before the war started, slightly more. And so now that's

00:38:14.400 somewhere around 15 million barrels of oil, which is about a billion and a half dollars at today's

00:38:21.960 prices. Okay. So they are making money on this war. They are, that money is sitting in Chinese 0.97

00:38:30.540 banks. That money can be used as collateral for all kinds of bad purposes here and all kinds of,

00:38:36.580 could be used for reconstruction, but also a lot of other things. And so this is what I mean. Now,

00:38:41.720 let me also put this in a little more of a historical context, which is since the 1970s,

00:38:48.880 the number one goal of America in the Middle East. What was the number one goal of America

00:38:53.920 since the 1970s? Not Israel. Preventing an oil hegemon. What is an oil hegemon? One state 0.78

00:39:01.960 controlling all the oil that would come out of the Middle East. For all that time, 50 years,

00:39:09.520 the Soviet Union never became an oil hegemon. We prevented that in different ways. Iraq never 0.72

00:39:15.420 became an oil hegemon. That's why we fought the 91 war over Kuwait. Iran, up until now, 0.95

00:39:22.420 never been an oil hegemon. These puddles of oil, there are four puddles of oil here.

00:39:28.140 It's Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. These four puddles of oil have been set,

00:39:33.960 compartmentalized, essentially. Now, they've been unified under the control of Iran,

00:39:42.000 who's now got a more dangerous regime and not just an enemy but an arch enemy now of of the

00:39:48.760 united states uh say nothing of an arch enemy of israel of course but arch enemy of the united

00:39:53.460 states uh we have caused the number one or uh one of the number one enemy here to now become an oil

00:40:04.040 hegemon so think about that for a moment is this is what this is part and notice that the trap

00:40:10.360 It's not just stages of escalation.

00:40:13.360 I call this trap for a reason.

00:40:16.680 Every stage, it has been harder for President Trump to walk away.

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00:41:33.780 Let me ask one more quick question

00:41:35.480 before Francis takes over.

00:41:37.260 um i i guess the key discussion in relation to the closure of the stray from us is how permanent

00:41:45.380 or long-term this is oh absolutely before we started i was looking at the calci odds and

00:41:50.260 uh the calci odds for it uh being opened by first of may are very low it's like low 30s i think

00:41:56.680 as we sit here today but june i think july i think july 1st is like 78 or something yeah these

00:42:04.020 are all the smart money here and i deal with um the smart folks all the time and they make all

00:42:09.300 the smart mistakes okay so so you just got to understand i i definitely understand people with

00:42:15.000 120 150 iqs are super smart and they go through lots of calculations their computers and their

00:42:22.480 brains move very very quickly and they can make an enormous amount of money really fast

00:42:27.180 so i got that that's not strategy okay so this is again leaving out a whole lot of different

00:42:33.600 stages here. And I don't do, I don't have any money in those markets. I'm not playing the

00:42:39.100 money game here because that's not what I do. I do risk assessment. I'm not, now, you're quite

00:42:46.500 right though about the, but let me just back up one stage here because you're trying to get to,

00:42:52.680 again, this calculation like you would bet on it. All right. But let's just back up for a second.

00:42:57.520 notice that at stage one and stage two america is losing control and we've had the illusion of

00:43:07.060 control going through you see at each stage i call it the illusion of precision control because the

00:43:14.020 precision weapons they're so precise you can marry that with this hyper precise intelligence

00:43:19.300 we can do it now on our phones really with you know signal chat and everything i mean we can do

00:43:24.520 this so exquisitely, it's not just creating tactical success. It creates the illusion of

00:43:30.600 escalation control when it's actually slipping away. Now, why is it slipping away? It's because

00:43:36.920 you could see why when President Trump does the bombing last June, I think for his own

00:43:45.520 political purposes and from what he just said, I think he really did just want to walk away.

00:43:49.960 OK, but he himself is continuing the negotiations.

00:43:54.020 He knows he can't walk away because tactical obliteration does not equal strategic stopping of the of the nuclear material.

00:44:03.240 Just doesn't. And I suspect he knows that because he said as much as as that.

00:44:08.660 And now we're at the stage where after the regime change, stage two of the escalation trap.

00:44:14.880 Now, Iran is an oil hegemon.

00:44:17.780 So the idea that he's going to walk away when all this enriched material is now dispersing and all those problems, on top of that, now it's an oil hegemon, and that billion and a half dollars will come in every two weeks.

00:44:34.600 Every two weeks.

00:44:36.080 You see what I mean?

00:44:36.920 So now you're getting a bigger and bigger.

00:44:40.180 There won't be a Godzilla, okay?

00:44:42.560 But they're going to be bigger than Bambi. 0.76

00:44:44.520 Maybe there'll be a bear versus Godzilla.

00:44:46.340 But it's there. There won't be Godzilla. I just want to be super clear. But you've changed this. This is now Iran is gaining power here. Relative power. That is that's the pull here for President Trump to go to stage three, which is likely coming in the next week or two. 0.88

00:45:06.700 not three months from now, but now in the near term, which I called before the war started the

00:45:13.900 limited territorial option. And what I mean by that is we would take ground forces and they would

00:45:22.340 be limited ground forces. That's how it will be called. And they will be limited here at first.

00:45:28.840 Sorry to interrupt, Professor. When you say limited, what's the number? What does that mean

00:45:33.900 in terms of...

00:45:34.740 No, I do weigh all this out.

00:45:36.540 And I also did it in a video briefing afterwards

00:45:39.800 on March 8th that your listeners can go find

00:45:42.440 on the Substack.

00:45:43.800 So what we're talking about are the...

00:45:46.940 If once you know that your opponent

00:45:49.780 has become more powerful,

00:45:51.360 and it's about oil and gas in this transit here,

00:45:54.440 you're going to try to take that power away.

00:45:59.280 But your options of air power,

00:46:01.260 if you could do it with air power,

00:46:02.580 this would not even have happened. So you're going to be forced to go to ground power options.

00:46:08.180 Same with also the nuclear material. So what is that going to look like? That's going to look

00:46:12.980 like taking Karg Island. That's going to look like taking coastal areas right on the Iranian coast,

00:46:20.300 right on the other side of the UAE here. So if we had a map, you would see that the Strait of

00:46:26.940 Hormuz is here. That's kind of a narrow point. Dubai is here. Iran is here. But then there's

00:46:31.740 the larger part of the Persian Gulf. Well, you are going to want to control this whole, at least 1.00

00:46:37.720 big parts of this coast, because that's where a lot of missiles are coming from. Not all,

00:46:42.520 as I'll explain, but this will make perfect sense to start talking about as we're dealing. And then

00:46:48.200 Karg is up here. And it's because if you're really going to open these straits in a way that

00:46:56.140 you can have the flow of the UAE, Saudi, and all the other Gulf states, not just oil, but food,

00:47:03.220 other things coming through here, you're going to need a fair bit of control. And these are

00:47:08.320 marine missions. So we have one marine division. This is about a marine division sort of problem

00:47:14.800 here in terms of the size of the territory to control. That's why we're moving marines. So I'm

00:47:21.220 not at all surprised we're moving the Marines. This is exactly what you would do here. There's 0.98

00:47:26.560 nothing secret or classified about this. This is just if you know about operations, you know that

00:47:32.060 this would happen. The Iranians, I think, are well prepared for this. And why do I say that? 1.00

00:47:37.460 It's because they hit Azerbaijan on day two. Now, why did they hit Azerbaijan? When that happened, 0.54

00:47:44.140 I didn't hear anybody on any of the cable channels be able to explain this, okay?

00:47:49.040 Well, once you would look at a map from this perspective, which is assume that if you're

00:47:56.740 Iran, you're studying this for 20 years, you're planning that if they do regime change, we're 0.64

00:48:02.120 going to do something like this.

00:48:03.560 We're going to become an oil hegemony, okay?

00:48:06.400 What is the next move?

00:48:08.020 In the chess game, it's the ground.

00:48:10.540 Where would you stage the ground from?

00:48:12.420 Well, you're going to have to come on the sea.

00:48:15.620 Azerbaijan is a great staging place. It's a great staging place. And once I saw that they hit 1.00

00:48:23.660 Azerbaijan here as a brushback pitch, that told me they were right on it. That told me they are 1.00

00:48:29.920 studying this appropriately. It's like people studying old chess games for 20 years. They're

00:48:35.380 going down the natural routes because they're persuading, they're telling Azerbaijan, don't 0.98

00:48:42.020 even think about letting American ground forces use you as an aircraft carrier, as a staging area

00:48:48.960 here in Azerbaijan, got the message. Yes, sir, Iran. No, we're not doing that. Okay, we got the

00:48:54.540 message. And so far, that's been the way it is. So you start to see right away that the stage three

00:49:02.520 of these limited territorial conquests here, these options lead to military control routes

00:49:09.420 that are start to become pretty predictable. And that is what we're facing right now. So we're now

00:49:15.840 at the cusp of moving into stage three. And as we move into stage three for this, this will be a

00:49:25.400 another, you know, sort of a, you know, sort of a shock to the public and to the world because

00:49:30.960 ground force, oh my goodness gracious, you know, this was the one thing that President Trump was

00:49:35.180 never supposed to have done. And of course, we've just come out of these forever wars.

00:49:41.200 And there's still more issues with ground forces I'll describe. But in this situation,

00:49:46.860 the amphibious assaults that we're talking about, these are some of the most dangerous

00:49:53.600 military operations ever here. And the fact we're a Godzilla, this big, huge, we're still

00:50:01.920 talking about exposure here. So what I am explaining, I just did a sub stack last night

00:50:10.320 on this where I'm trying to explain that we're about to transition from disruption costs that

00:50:17.680 are temporary, relatively quickly, you can reverse them to damage costs, which are much more difficult

00:50:25.820 to reverse. And that's what this stage three is really about. It's not just military operations.

00:50:32.640 We're moving to a different equilibrium of the escalation. This is a whole threshold we're

00:50:40.480 crossing. And it's a threshold of the type and length of the costs that we're talking about.

00:50:48.080 So, Professor, saying all that, I mean, what you're saying in layman's terms is effectively

00:50:54.080 boots on the ground are inevitable and 75 i've said this before i'm when i you there's nothing

00:51:01.440 mechanistic francis just so you know yeah and i know people when i and i'm talking very very

00:51:06.600 directly as much as i can and so it's it's fair for people to say oh professor papes being just

00:51:12.100 too mechanistic about the world i i do want to qualify even myself and say i'm i'm not saying

00:51:17.740 anything is 100% inevitable. Of course. But what you're seeing is the trap and it's 75% likely.

00:51:25.680 That's the way I would. Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East. Oh yeah,

00:51:28.820 they're halfway there and they should be there, you know, sort of end of next week. So this is

00:51:33.120 a Friday here, the 20th. I would expect by the 27th, they'll be there. They might need a few

00:51:38.280 more days. We don't know exactly here, but we're not far from the cusp of a decision point by the

00:51:46.760 president. At this point, he's planning, putting pieces in place. Again, after being in sort of

00:51:54.760 West Wings here, four different administrations, I don't believe presidents really commit in

00:52:01.500 advance. I believe what they do is they bring pieces together. And then only at the very last

00:52:06.600 second do they actually know what they're going to do. OK, because I think this is just the way

00:52:11.220 presidents are. I don't think it's just Donald Trump. And I think he is coming to a pretty clear

00:52:16.440 point of decision called a D-Day here. And I don't know when that'll be exactly, but it's going to

00:52:23.100 be in the next week or two. But that's going to be a political catastrophe for Trump, isn't it?

00:52:27.400 Because he ran on a platform of there's going to be no more wars. There's going to be no more

00:52:32.760 forever wars. I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to sacrifice any more American lives

00:52:38.260 in the Middle East. Well, if he does that, he's going back against every one of his promises.

00:52:42.920 And that means that he will potentially not only alienate voters, but also the base itself.

00:52:49.340 Yeah. So he is on the horns of a dilemma, Francis, where there is no golden off-ramp here.

00:52:56.140 The idea of the golden off-ramp here, we're long past that.

00:53:01.320 So what President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices.

00:53:08.780 and he's going to have to choose between two terrible choices. They're terrible for the world.

00:53:14.820 They're terrible for his presidency. So these are not like one is good for the world. I would argue

00:53:22.540 one is better, but they're not golden. The one that you're describing is he goes forward and

00:53:28.540 crosses the threshold of phase three. And you're explaining this, what people will be talking about

00:53:35.900 next week, there will be a four and five to the escalation trap. I have not even put on the

00:53:40.220 sub stack yet that I'll be talking about on my next live briefing on Sunday. So there's more

00:53:45.360 coming here. We're not done with the stages of the escalation trap. But you're right. He is going to

00:53:50.840 be creating an enormous political liability for himself. Right now, you know that Tucker Carlson,

00:54:00.560 Megyn Kelly, others, he's just had the first recognition from his administration of very

00:54:05.400 high level here, breaking away from this. These are pro-Trump people. These are people who

00:54:12.840 campaigned for President Trump. So you're seeing this fracture here, but he's got another problem

00:54:23.120 on the other side. And I think this is why he's going back and forth, which is if he doesn't go

00:54:29.320 forward, then Iran is going to be an oil hegemon. 20% of the world's oil. It's going to keep it. 1.00

00:54:39.600 So it's not as if President Trump has an out where, okay, Iran, I'm going to declare victory 0.76

00:54:48.020 and now I'm going to pull all my forces out. I'm going to take, I'm going to cancel the marine

00:54:55.380 amphibious. I'm going to send that back to Japan. I'm going to take the aircraft carriers, put them 0.98

00:55:00.220 back over to Venezuela. I'm going to do Cuba. Okay. So I'm going to go get myself pinned down

00:55:05.160 in Cuba. And so let's say he does that option, which I think is, he's been thinking that over.

00:55:12.160 Iran is not going to look at that and simply say, here's your oil back UAE. Here's your oil back

00:55:18.440 What the Supreme Leader's statement here has been quite, was quite clear.

00:55:24.060 It's, I grade people every year, and I did this in the Air Force as well, Air Force officers, on their coercive strategies, the logic and quality of their coercive strategy.

00:55:38.440 The Leader's statement is a B plus, A minus, okay?

00:55:42.000 It's not perfect, but this is not a C student.

00:55:45.200 And I'm not saying he wrote it either, okay?

00:55:48.440 But I've seen C-students. This is not a C-student. They really understand the pressure points here

00:55:56.660 and how they're using. And I'm glad that I can unpack that for you. But what I'm trying to tell

00:56:02.200 you is there is no sign I see that if President Trump picks up the armada and says, I'm just going

00:56:10.360 to now get bogged down in a different war over here with Cuba, that Iran's going to say, oh,

00:56:15.140 man, I'm glad that's over. And so here's all the oil back. I don't think that's happening here.

00:56:21.620 And so you're going to have a situation where these are the two choices here that he's facing.

00:56:27.280 So, and Iran will start to make a real geopolitical hay out of this. You see, the oil hegemon,

00:56:38.180 if it's only been a few weeks that they've had this control, we're not seeing yet how this is

00:56:45.080 going to play out with, we see the beginning, but not fully with China, India, Russia,

00:56:52.700 other Gulf of the Gulf states here. This has the potential to fracture the GCC coalition that

00:57:04.920 Trump and Jared Kushner have been spending years to build with the Abraham Accords against Iran.

00:57:11.720 This has, I'm not saying that they will all fracture all at once,

00:57:15.700 but you just saw the first fracturing in President Trump's orbit in Washington.

00:57:21.580 So what I'm expecting here is these multiple different Gulf states,

00:57:25.720 they're going to start to go their own way.

00:57:27.720 You see, they're going to have slightly different interests here.

00:57:30.820 And also Iran has been very, very smart in that what they're effectively doing 0.96

00:57:36.920 with their propaganda, and this can be turned up many notches,

00:57:40.340 is they're telling the GCC and not just the leaders, but the publics, this is all a war for

00:57:46.580 Israel. And what it means to be a war for Israel is Israel's conquest of you. You see, so you're 0.55

00:57:54.840 going to sit back for a second and people are going to start scratching their heads and saying,

00:57:59.000 why exactly am I paying costs here to help Israel take me later? You see, this is what Iran has 1.00

00:58:09.360 seen. And that's why I say it's a it's a B plus, A minus in terms of the coercive strategy. It's not

00:58:14.900 perfect, but it's a it's a pretty strong approach. And there's no reason to think they're just going

00:58:20.780 to give up 20 percent of the world's oil because there's real geopolitical hate to make.

00:58:25.860 It's somehow March. I don't know how that happened either. But here we are. And I still have the same

00:58:31.760 goals I had in January, which is the good news. The bad news is I'm absolutely the person who

00:58:37.440 looks up at 1 p.m. and realizes the only thing I've consumed since waking up is coffee.

00:58:43.180 Just coffee, no breakfast, no lunch, pure caffeine, and good intentions.

00:58:47.500 So lately, I've been keeping Huel Black Edition around to stop myself doing that. 0.93

00:58:51.960 That's H-U-E-L. 1.00

00:58:53.860 On the days I'm out the door before I've had a chance to think,

00:58:56.700 I grab a Black Edition ready to drink.

00:58:58.760 It's a complete meal, 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and minerals,

00:59:05.260 no artificial sweeteners and it's under five bucks which is cheaper than a coffee shop coffee that

00:59:11.000 will actively make things worse my go-to is the chocolate flavor which is so good i'd drink it

00:59:16.860 even if it wasn't a sponsor then when i'm home and want something more substantial i use the black

00:59:21.480 edition powder blend it with ice and milk if you want a proper smoothie or just shake it with water

00:59:26.760 when i'm keeping it simple 40 grams of protein same complete nutrition you just have more control

00:59:32.900 over it. The RTD Plus Powder Duo has basically become my insurance policy against chaotic days.

00:59:39.680 Right, here's the offer. For a limited time, you can get 15% off online for new customers with

00:59:46.220 code TRIGGER15 at Huel.com slash TRIGGER15 or click the link in the description. New customers

00:59:54.300 only and thank you to Huel for supporting Trigonometry. But if you take, so if you take

01:00:00.680 your point about israel and the propaganda well look at what happened to qatar the gas field of

01:00:06.500 ras la fan which produces around 15 to 20 percent of the liquid natural gas of all the globe needs

01:00:12.740 in order to continue functioning i mean that got bombed and effectively shut down for between three

01:00:17.520 to five years and qatar are furious i mean they're not going to be pro-iran at this point oh well

01:00:23.120 let's talk about this so first of all that was in retaliation for israel right um and what happened

01:00:30.100 here. The Qatari said their statement exactly is, we're mad, but just so you know, everybody,

01:00:37.280 we're not getting in this fight. We're going to stay diplomatic, just so you know. So they

01:00:44.140 reinforce neutrality here as a result of this. Even President Trump said he's not happy with

01:00:51.760 what Israel did. And it's because- And Bibi promised not to do it anymore. 0.81

01:00:54.840 Well, yeah, I wouldn't count on, I don't think anybody's counting on that.

01:00:58.120 What I'm trying to get at is your point, which is this was a retaliation for Israel striking Iran's gas facilities, which even President Trump didn't want to happen.

01:01:09.080 That's right. And so that means President Trump can't end this war on his own. He can pull out on his own.

01:01:15.620 Yeah. But that's not going to end the war because it's not going to end Israel's attacks. 0.87

01:01:20.700 It's not going to end Russia's intelligence to Iran.

01:01:24.340 And it's not going to end Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz and therefore 20 percent of the world's oil. 0.86

01:01:30.160 So what you have is a situation where, as I'm getting back to this, President Trump is on the horns of a real dilemma because it's lose here, lose there.

01:01:40.100 And so it's a matter not of where is there a gain versus a loss.

01:01:44.720 It's a matter of assessing where, which loss are you, it's pick your poison, which loss do you want to take.

01:01:52.060 And just to be clear, Bob, option one, which you've described in quite a bit of detail, is you pull out now, you leave Iran with control of the Straits of Hormuz, you leave the current regime in place, you still haven't got control of their nuclear material, and that doesn't seem like a win to me.

01:02:11.520 Well, it's actually hugely risky.

01:02:13.260 Of course.

01:02:13.480 Of course, there's all kinds of risks related to that.

01:02:15.880 The other option, the other option is what we started talking about, which is you put Marines on Carg Island, you put Marines on the coast of the Persian Gulf to try and control it.

01:02:28.020 Can that work?

01:02:29.940 It's going to have that. That's what I was talking about earlier, Constantine, about we're shifting from disruptive costs that we're paying to damaging costs that are not reversible.

01:02:40.840 We are taking casualties.

01:02:41.820 Well, you're going to take the amphibious operations.

01:02:45.900 This is Saving Private Ryan.

01:02:47.800 So let's talk about that military dimension.

01:02:50.680 So the principle here, because I know you have a very smart audience here, is exposure.

01:02:56.840 That's the key thing.

01:02:57.840 And I'm sure you're used to risk exposure.

01:02:59.880 So same thing with the military tactics.

01:03:02.660 The attacker, in order to take ground, always has to get up and expose themselves over the ground they want to take.

01:03:11.380 the defender can be in foxholes and be behind things and camouflage and so forth so that's why

01:03:16.880 the defender always has a three-to-one advantage at the tactical level it has to do with this issue

01:03:21.240 of exposure well that issue of exposure is at its maximum in amphibious operations because the water

01:03:29.600 is there's no cover on the water okay um and um you've got the now russian intelligence kind of

01:03:37.060 even exacerbating that. You see what I mean? And then when you get up to the territory,

01:03:43.060 there's some of the shows I've been on here, the cliffs, the actual terrain. This is some of the

01:03:50.740 most difficult terrain to try to control because you've got mountains, you've got stretches of

01:03:55.900 beach. So for the defender, there's all kinds of crevices and crannies and things like that

01:04:02.000 here. But for the attacker here, the side that has to actually take the territory,

01:04:10.400 the exposure is at its maximum. Now, we will absolutely have the best professionals in the

01:04:15.720 world work in this problem. I spoke to the Army War College about a week before this kicked off.

01:04:21.400 I have military officers coming in, their PhDs under me. I really have nothing but the greatest

01:04:26.240 respect for our military, really. They're really quite good at what they do. That said, there's

01:04:32.400 only so many, let's take Karg Island, for example. There's only so many ways you can approach Karg

01:04:39.180 Island, and that will have been assessed not just by the U.S. military for decades, but by the Iranian

01:04:46.480 military, and they will know their terrain better than anybody else. As much as we think we will be

01:04:51.520 able to assess their terrain. They will know their terrain. So if there's a possibility,

01:04:57.120 I'm not saying there is for surprises here, we will have some tricks up our sleeve. They may

01:05:03.920 have tricks up their sleeve, but overall it's about length of time of exposure. The longer

01:05:10.640 the time of exposure, the transit time to go from like the Strait of Hormuz up to CARG is going to

01:05:18.700 be, I don't know, somewhere between a dozen and 20 hours here for the amphibians. And they're

01:05:24.620 big hunks of metal. These are the things that you're going to be able to eat. The most easy

01:05:30.680 targets to find are big hunks of metal in open water. So they're going to be exposed for long

01:05:37.800 periods of time. You will do everything possible to defend them without a doubt. But that's a lot

01:05:43.920 of time. And then when they get there, there's going to be hours to get on and actually control

01:05:49.900 before they can get undercover. So if you watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan, it's very

01:05:55.000 similar. You've got to cross the open area and be exposed. Then when you get on the other side,

01:06:01.580 now you can go pillbox to pillbox and you got some cover too. So it's not as if you can't.

01:06:07.100 And so I'm fully expecting we're going to win. I'm not saying we won't take the ground. It's

01:06:13.080 really a matter of the cost. And I can't give you a number. We haven't done any amphibious

01:06:19.020 landing like this in so long up against really this kind of a determined enemy. It's going to

01:06:24.700 be very difficult to put numbers on this. I think this will be hard for General Cain,

01:06:29.320 our Joint Chiefs. He will be asked by President Trump how many are going to die. And I think it's

01:06:35.460 going to be hard for him, not because he's going to be, you know, sort of a dovish or not want to

01:06:40.180 give the numbers. It's just going to be hard because he's going to have to go back to, well,

01:06:44.200 when we did this in World War II. I mean, where are you going to go to find the good,

01:06:48.700 actual, deep analysis of this, you see? And part of the calculus, I imagine,

01:06:53.980 in any president's mind at this point is what happens afterwards, at least I hope it is,

01:06:58.920 which is we will take hundreds of Marines as casualties, God forbid. Now what?

01:07:05.900 Well, and then let me say the next piece. So we've only focused on the military casualty piece. As this is happening, from Iran's perspective, this is now a much bigger threat to actually achieve. Now we're bringing ground forces in. So remember I've said air power alone has never toppled a regime. That's over 100 years. Sometimes you put ground forces in, you can do that. 0.89

01:07:29.120 OK, so Iran's going to know that and they're going to, even if they don't know it, they're certainly going to feel it right away.

01:07:34.720 So once this even starts, even though it'll be described as limited, they're not going to Tehran, we'll say all that, I'm sure. 0.93

01:07:43.320 OK, that's not how the other side is going to see this.

01:07:45.640 They're going to see this as the beachhead like Normandy to the end of Germany, you see, which even though that was a year later or 10 months later, so did the Germans.

01:07:56.760 Everybody understood, even though there's a lot of miles to cover.

01:08:00.340 Once you get the Americans, especially, but the Americans and the British are on shore here, Germany is in real trouble.

01:08:07.640 Same here with Iran. 0.64

01:08:08.880 So what's going to happen is they're likely to be very willing to destroy the oil infrastructure in response, just to be very blunt.

01:08:18.420 So why would they destroy the oil infrastructure?

01:08:21.300 It's because they're going to want to impose long-term damage here.

01:08:24.860 And they're not going to be concerned that they would want to use it for themselves because, for them, they may be dead, I mean, as a regime, in six months.

01:08:33.960 So this isn't even—they're not even probably worrying about that.

01:08:37.580 Once you go down this road, you are increasing pressure on the regime.

01:08:44.120 Chances you may actually topple it, not in a day, but over time.

01:08:47.940 And also then more risky strategies by them here, which will have costs on us.

01:08:55.540 There'll be damaging costs because when you destroy the infrastructure, these are special made pipelines, rigs.

01:09:05.560 In the 90s, where I really got into this was when I was teaching for the Air Force and the leadership decapitation crowd in the Air Force, who were my bosses.

01:09:18.220 Okay, they were literally my bosses, the actual architects of all of this.

01:09:23.060 So I know all their arguments really, really well.

01:09:26.100 They really liked the idea of electric power targeting.

01:09:29.600 so they brought in um people from the electric power industry to teach us how to take down

01:09:34.680 electric power plants and grids and so forth and and um nothing classified so there's nothing this

01:09:40.420 was not a secret briefing or anything um and um uh and so we uh and i had students here who wrote

01:09:47.360 master's theses on how to destroy electric power plants that are still available that you could

01:09:52.360 still say the big thing i learned is that in an electric power grid you can take out the

01:09:59.100 transformers which are like the fuse boxes in your house and that knocks out it causes a brownout

01:10:07.200 like when you overload the system when there's too much uh you know it's too hot and there's too

01:10:11.480 many electric i'm sorry air conditioners and that is a problem for a week or two because you can fix

01:10:17.340 the fuses okay but if you go after the the actual infrastructure which is the generating halls

01:10:24.400 and you destroy the generator halls they're out for a minimum of six months maybe a year because

01:10:31.920 those larger pieces of equipment that are the actual infrastructure this would be the equivalent

01:10:38.200 of these transmission pipelines that are going from the land to the tankers and things like that

01:10:43.940 these are special design there's not bunches of them laying around so when you start to destroy

01:10:51.040 that and that's what's happening in Qatar so what what happened in Qatar is they didn't just hit a

01:10:56.280 little a little LNG they went after some of the infrastructure and this is again moving up the

01:11:02.080 escalation ladder to damage and that's why the Qataris are mad because that is out for a minimum 1.00

01:11:07.900 of a month maybe three months because and that assumes they're even going to fix it because if

01:11:13.200 they fix it, Iran could do it again. So you've got a situation where the damage here is not 0.96

01:11:19.820 reversible. Like the shipping could be reversed because Iran will just simply say, ah, you can

01:11:24.540 pass. Once you start not taking out and destroying the actual big pieces of the infrastructure,

01:11:30.980 this is months. And that starts to dovetail with what the economists are now telling us in the

01:11:37.260 newspaper, which is you don't have to worry about the price of oil until it stays that way for a

01:11:42.920 month or two then you'll get a recession and everybody's oh that's so comforting because we

01:11:49.820 know it could go right back down right not if you destroy the infrastructure once the infrastructure

01:11:56.040 is taken out now you're in that month's period and I can't give you a more precise estimate because

01:12:03.000 I don't know exactly what the damage will be but I'm trying to lay out the principles here there's

01:12:07.580 nothing. You just need to have spent 30 years to figure out how to take down economies and what

01:12:14.380 that looks like for real. And this is what this looks like here. And this is also, by the way,

01:12:21.360 not something that you do when you're a pilot in the Air Force. You don't spend six months,

01:12:27.460 a year, five years studying the enemy oil and gas grid and so forth. What happens is once you get

01:12:35.380 in the crisis, you bring in, you know, people to give you advice and you try to do your best by

01:12:39.480 staying up and pulling all-nighters. So again, I've spent long periods of time thinking about

01:12:47.440 how air power and other military instruments actually interact with economies. And this is

01:12:54.820 what I'm trying to explain, which is we're about to move from what I call disruption to lasting

01:13:01.200 damage. And that is going to put us in the OPEC 73 territory. So that's why you see me really,

01:13:10.500 really genie-ing up coming on your show. I've been on, I think, you know, why am I, you know,

01:13:17.520 spending 18, 19 hours a day doing this? I'm extremely concerned because as much as this

01:13:24.260 has been dangerous so far, we're going to cross the next threshold, which will be much

01:13:31.140 more difficult. I'm worried. And so I'm going to do everything I can to explain that here,

01:13:36.720 because crossing this threshold, I think, is going to lead to now the beginning of truly

01:13:42.380 lasting, reversible over several months at quickest cost, not just a day or two,

01:13:49.800 where Iran will just simply decide, oh, sure, your ships can pass.

01:13:53.400 Because what you're essentially talking about is economic warfare. And then the knock-on effect of

01:13:59.240 that is that it's going to affect not only economies, it's going to also affect politics

01:14:04.280 right the way through the West. It's going to change how people vote. It's going to change

01:14:08.620 how people see particular leaders, how people see the right, the left.

01:14:13.380 Now you see why the Europeans don't want to touch us with a 10-foot pole, 1.00

01:14:17.320 because as these costs start to accumulate in this way, if they're part of the coalition causing it,

01:14:26.180 they then face being toppled by their own people because over because as if this goes down is in

01:14:32.820 this in this trajectory here those costs are going to be bidenomics where we had nine percent

01:14:38.640 inflation this is going to be nothing okay we're we're we're we're we're and it's going to be that

01:14:43.860 way the ground war is not just something that you can do uh and then take back you're what you're

01:14:52.120 doing is you are sending the most credible signal that you intend to use ground forces to topple

01:15:00.540 this regime. You can say all you want. You're never going to do that, okay? If you're on the

01:15:07.060 other side and it's your survival that's on the state, you don't believe this for a moment. Just

01:15:10.660 like when we laughed about Netanyahu promising not to bomb. So you're really going to take 0.72

01:15:15.260 President Trump at his word that he would never think about using ground, never think about doing

01:15:20.860 No, you're not going to do that. You are going to see that what's coming at you is not just one hand of the gorilla, which was the air power, but now it's the other hand and both legs of the gorilla starting to get really, again, D-Day, save and private Ryan, Normandy, you know, June 1944 leads to May 1945.

01:15:46.740 And it's also not only going to affect the reputations of certain politicians at home.

01:15:52.340 This is really going to damage Israel's international reputation because there's a lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum who are looking at Israel and going, you started it.

01:16:03.660 This is your fault.

01:16:05.140 Do you agree with that?

01:16:06.240 I think the blame game has already started because when, you know, a victory has a thousand fathers, you know, defeat is an orphan.

01:16:16.420 Well, that's what you're seeing here.

01:16:17.520 So everybody's now starting to try to tack to what they should because they're seeing which direction this is going and who are you going to blame?

01:16:26.300 Well, I don't think you can easily blame the U.S. military.

01:16:29.300 I mean, there may be some people that will try to do that, but I don't see how you blame them.

01:16:33.980 They've been, like, tactically superb through this.

01:16:37.400 They've saluted when the president has said jump.

01:16:40.540 They said, yes, sir, and so forth.

01:16:42.760 So I don't see how you blame the military.

01:16:44.640 I don't see how you blame the Democrats here.

01:16:46.840 They have no power, and they were blindsided by this whole thing.

01:16:50.740 So I don't see how you say, well, they are the ones who wrecked the whole thing.

01:16:54.780 So I don't see how you blame them.

01:16:56.280 So I think it's going to basically start to come down to Israel and President Trump and the Republicans, which have there's always been this this this division inside of MAGA, you know, about half against foreign wars and the other half, you know, more on the other side.

01:17:17.660 And that you saw that with Ukraine.

01:17:19.700 Well, this is the same thing.

01:17:20.960 It's the same split within MAGA.

01:17:24.140 MAGA is holding together at the moment in the opinion polls only because they're supporting Trump, you know, and that's but as this unfolds and as you get into the midterms and in the summer, I the way I say this is that I think Trump is going to start to have an LBJ problem. 0.55

01:17:40.100 So if he crosses this Rubicon and he goes down this road, I see that this stage is going to go on for quite some time.

01:17:47.800 And I think that's why the 200 billion dollar request is coming through.

01:17:51.640 They want to put that request through now, because if you cross this Rubicon, I'm not saying he's going to do it, but I think it's 75 percent likely you're going to need to spend 200 billion and more.

01:18:03.200 This is going to be very expensive. So you're going to have this war is going to go on.

01:18:07.660 And as that war goes on, this is where the real problems for the senators and the House members are going to face when they run for reelection in the midterms.

01:18:18.780 and so you you already had a situation before this where there was a likely a blue uh modest

01:18:26.200 blue wave coming where the democrats would win the house and maybe a few seats in the senate not

01:18:31.060 quite clear they would take the senate here in this situation you could see a much bigger blue

01:18:38.440 wave coming and why do those house members and those senators want to just go home i don't think

01:18:44.780 And so I don't know what they will each make, just like the Gulf states, this will fracture the coalition of MAGA and it won't be necessarily cleanly in a division.

01:18:56.360 It'll be more like what I'm describing when coalitions fracture.

01:19:00.500 Typically, what happens is the actors that are part of it start to go their own way.

01:19:05.740 And it's not clear that it'll all break in one way.

01:19:09.840 I'm not saying they'll all break against Trump either.

01:19:12.340 It's going to be probably seat by seat, state by state, but it's not going to be the unified situation it is today.

01:19:21.340 It's going to be this more fractured situation.

01:19:25.460 And so those are the real political costs that are coming.

01:19:29.620 And I would say by June 1st, June, you know, now we're going through the primaries here and we haven't crossed the Rubicon yet of stage three.

01:19:37.440 But as that were to unfold, I would say it won't take long.

01:19:41.300 you won't have to wait till august for this this will lbj when when the bottom fell out of lbj's

01:19:47.540 presidency it was march 1968 so he had prompt that we're very much in a similar like escalation trap

01:19:56.200 here where lbj had been promising that just one more rung up the escalation ladder would get him

01:20:02.720 out of the escalation trap everybody realized by um end of 67 we were in an escalation problem

01:20:09.600 because the V.C. were getting stronger and stronger and taking territory, actually literally taking territory.

01:20:15.460 And then what happened is he kept promising it, and there was a spectacular event called the Tet Offensive.

01:20:23.940 The Tet Offensive was at the end of January 1968.

01:20:28.760 And what the VC did is they, over a period of just a few days, they did a parallel attack across multiple different fronts at the same time, multiple different of our bases at the same time.

01:20:44.680 And they lost each and every one of the individual battles.

01:20:51.200 25,000 of them died, apparently, in just this week or so to do this offensive.

01:20:58.200 This led to the political bottom falling out of the Vietnam War.

01:21:04.360 So as I've often said, we won every battle in the Vietnam War, including in the Tet Offensive.

01:21:11.680 We lost the war because what they did was a political strategy,

01:21:16.840 similar to the horizontal escalation strategy that Iran is doing.

01:21:20.820 This is a strategy where the endpoint is political fracture, not gain territory.

01:21:26.800 and the political fracture is the soft underbelly of America. That's how our enemies beat us.

01:21:35.260 Remember I said I wanted to know how we lost the Vietnam War. It was because we didn't understand

01:21:40.000 the politics of the situation. It wasn't we didn't understand the military. It's we didn't

01:21:45.440 understand how militaries and politics fit together. And that's what I've been doing for

01:21:50.180 the last 30 some years. So coming back to the military side of it, I get the sense that you

01:21:55.440 certainly feel that even though it's a terrible option, pulling out and not continuing the

01:22:00.580 escalation would be the right thing to do. Is that fair? Well, it's fair, but I want to pose

01:22:04.520 a third, at least a variant of that, which is, so what I think, once you see these terrible

01:22:12.760 choices here, then you're quite right, Constantine, that you're going to want to

01:22:18.560 take your losses now because you might be able to recover your presidency.

01:22:25.440 If you wait, then you're in Lyndon Johnson where it's unrecoverable.

01:22:29.180 Your presidency is just gone. 0.99

01:22:30.520 You're a lame duck with two years to go. 0.99

01:22:32.620 So you're right. 0.99

01:22:33.880 This is where I would advise the West Wing here.

01:22:39.140 But what I would say is that the price you're going to have to pay, the politics price here,

01:22:44.320 it's not enough to just pull out because then you're leaving this behind.

01:22:50.620 If you really want to take option one, you're going to have to cut a deal with Iran. 0.92

01:22:57.900 You're going to have to go back and you're going to have to cut a deal with Iran. 0.97

01:23:00.800 Now, before the bombing started, here's what the deal looked like at 3.15 Eastern time in the Oval Office with Whitcoff and Kushner.

01:23:08.840 And we know this because this is exactly what they said, which is that Iran will not give up its enrichment. 0.66

01:23:15.100 It wants to keep its 3.5 percent, and it's promising to meld together the 60 and 20 percent to 3.5.

01:23:22.420 And President Trump said, just not good enough.

01:23:25.000 Well, in order to cut a deal now with Iran, you're going to have to accept that right away. 0.74

01:23:29.560 OK, so that's number one.

01:23:31.540 Number two, you're going to have to probably accept the oil sanctions coming off.

01:23:36.220 And given the price of oil is going up, notice that Besson is already talking about doing that.

01:23:41.180 OK, so they're already doing that.

01:23:43.780 that issue is already on the table. But number three, there's a very good chance that you're

01:23:50.540 going to have, Iran will not reopen the straits here on a consensual basis, will not reopen the

01:23:59.200 straits unless there's pressure put on Israel. Because Israel is that bombing card. Israel has 0.92

01:24:07.640 been, remember the 12-day war wasn't started by the United States bombing Fordow. That happened

01:24:13.400 in the middle. It was started by Israel. This war, the tactical intelligence for killing the 0.94

01:24:19.320 supreme leader and the bombs that killed the supreme leader were Israeli. So we need to 0.85

01:24:24.440 understand that I don't think we're in a situation anymore where you're going to get a deal here

01:24:31.940 without pressure on Israel. To do what? I think the most likely thing, just to be very specific,

01:24:38.440 is that Trump would have to force Israel

01:24:43.280 to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

01:24:46.220 Right now, what Israel wants is Iran to have no nuclear weapons

01:24:53.240 and to have all this on-site inspection.

01:24:56.100 Well, Israel has all these nuclear weapons and no on-site inspection

01:24:59.480 because it's not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

01:25:02.120 So I think that what is likely going to be the thing that will be discussed

01:25:06.960 will be that Trump will force Israel to sign the NPT,

01:25:11.860 which means tit-for-tat on-site inspection.

01:25:14.740 If there's on-site inspection in Fordow,

01:25:17.140 there's on-site inspection in some of the nuclear sites in Israel.

01:25:20.560 So think about that.

01:25:21.920 So Israel would have to give up its nuclear weapons?

01:25:24.020 No, no, no, no, no, no.

01:25:25.080 It would have to say, so just keep in mind,

01:25:27.820 we are a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,

01:25:30.100 and we still have nuclear weapons.

01:25:32.200 Here's the way that works, Constantine.

01:25:34.020 And this has been going on since 1970, which is when you sign, you promise you will eventually give up your nuclear weapons.

01:25:42.700 And notice how America has signed, and we've still got a lot of nuclear weapons.

01:25:46.840 Just like everyone else.

01:25:47.860 Just like everyone else.

01:25:48.620 So that part is not real.

01:25:50.500 Right.

01:25:50.780 The real part is the on-site inspection, which is intel.

01:25:55.260 That is the actual teeth in the NPT, you see.

01:25:59.640 So that's the part that Israel is not actually giving up its nuclear.

01:26:03.080 It may say that, but it's not the reality.

01:26:05.900 The reality is that there will then be tit for tat.

01:26:09.960 And President Trump, this is going to be a big political cost.

01:26:13.620 I was going to say, I mean, you started a war because you wouldn't do a deal that you now have to do a worse deal.

01:26:22.260 That's a humiliation. I mean, there's no two ways.

01:26:24.940 That is the political. That's what I'm saying. You pick your poison.

01:26:28.440 So it's either that. But what I also would like to explore.

01:26:30.840 You can possibly save your presidency, or you don't, and you can't save your—what I'm saying is, there's no option here to come out the victor here, like gladiator, where everybody's cheering, okay, for the new general.

01:26:47.320 That's not happening in this situation.

01:26:50.320 And if we keep waiting for that, then what it is is Lyndon Johnson.

01:26:54.220 These are the real choices, I think, in front of the president.

01:26:57.640 And what I'm saying is you're you're absolutely right. But I'm this is why we have to put this bluntly out here, because people from your program will be listening to people in the left wing will be listening.

01:27:10.180 And and this means very directly that they will have to put pressure on Israel and that pressure will be threatening to cut off the military aid for real, not just kind of.

01:27:23.800 now he can try to gussy it up. And by the way, President Trump, I do believe, just to put

01:27:29.060 something here about why he might be able to do this, it's not just because of his relationship

01:27:34.680 with Israel, but President Trump is the best PR politician we've had, certainly at the equal of

01:27:43.280 Obama, certainly the equal of Reagan. Some of my friends who don't like Trump don't like it when I

01:27:49.260 say this, I think he's better. Just think about this. He did January 6th and got reelected.

01:27:56.320 Just think about this for a moment. We have not seen, I think, this level of understanding the

01:28:03.740 media and how to, he understands the media better than the media understands the media here. So if

01:28:11.080 there's somebody who can recover his presidency, even with all these liabilities, I believe it is

01:28:17.620 President Trump. He can sell this deal as an actual victory to at least his base. And enough

01:28:24.200 time will pass. They'll find other things. We have time. He has time to recover. You take this down

01:28:31.840 where we're still talking about this, not just talking, but fighting this war in July. That's

01:28:38.100 gone. See, that's space. He needs space for the PR. This PR is not something he can ginny up

01:28:44.320 overnight. Let's talk about that, because temperamentally, I wonder, you know, your

01:28:49.820 assessment of 75 percent, just from it, just judging characters, I imagine he would be quite

01:28:55.700 tempted to go with a hard option, potentially. Well, sure, because he's faced with these horns

01:29:01.720 of a dilemma and he has some hope. But I also think he put pressure on Netanyahu to stop

01:29:08.080 um, the ethnic cleansing in Gaza in September. Uh, and, um, I was one of the people, um, who

01:29:15.160 was thinking that he might well do that. And it's for the good of Israel, because I didn't believe 0.80

01:29:21.360 that it was in Israel's interest to cleanse the Netanyahu may think that, but I didn't think it

01:29:27.300 was in Israel's interest. And I was on podcasts in this city. Uh, uh, Norm Dorfman does the, uh,

01:29:33.020 comedy seller here and so yeah yeah he he's i'm sorry i said the name norms now now now he's

01:29:39.700 gonna get mad at me no uh but dome yeah no please no no um but uh you can go and listen and and and

01:29:45.960 he uh uh he and i had a let's call it a feisty hour and a half discussion about this in august

01:29:52.500 and i kept saying uh that no what you're not seeing is i believe that in fact um uh president

01:29:59.920 Trump himself may see the wisdom of going down this road. And, uh, I don't know if that at all,

01:30:05.680 you know, I'm not saying there was any connection here whatsoever. Um, but what I am saying is that

01:30:10.220 I do think that, um, that the president Trump has, uh, he has the power and I think he, he may

01:30:18.000 well have the interest. He may see that what I'm saying here is, is the best for the country,

01:30:24.020 the world, the region, and his own presidency.

01:30:29.380 Bob, I want to come back to the other option, which we haven't followed up,

01:30:34.060 the military option, the Marines on Kargah Island controlling the coast.

01:30:38.760 You've hinted that there are more stages to this if that option is pursued.

01:30:43.040 So far we got to, let's say they get the Marines, dangerous operation, very high risk.

01:30:48.140 Let's say it's successful with casualties.

01:30:50.740 The Iranians begin to destroy their own old facilities. 1.00

01:30:53.340 I imagine likely the other Gulf states as well at the same time.

01:30:58.040 At this point, I'm not a great strategist, but I imagine the temptation from Israel and 1.00

01:31:03.700 America is to say, well, look how terrible these Iranians are. 1.00

01:31:06.020 We've got to go harder.

01:31:07.260 So let me, to give you and the listeners some framework here.

01:31:13.160 For the last 30 years, my scholarship has been about air power, economic sanctions,

01:31:19.440 lots of books, articles on sanctions, and suicide terrorism. And we have not talked about the third

01:31:27.620 shoe, terrorism. So after 9-11, I compiled the first database of all suicide attacks around the

01:31:35.860 world. Israel did not have this database. They had a database who was attacking them that was 0.51

01:31:41.540 20% wrong, and I show them, and they fixed it. So I compiled this database, and it produced a

01:31:49.580 finding. And I've published two books on this, lots of articles. But it produced a finding,

01:31:54.200 which is that 95% of all suicide attacks are not due to religion. Half of them at that point in

01:32:00.860 2001 were by secular folks, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But 95% were in response to foreign

01:32:10.080 ground forces, ground forces. It's not that you didn't have any of those attacks before. It's

01:32:17.540 that when you put the military, the foreign ground forces in, they went up 20 times,

01:32:21.520 just to give you a sense. Many, many cases of this. Well, before this was even published,

01:32:29.720 I knew Paul Wolfowitz. He was our deputy secretary of defense. I knew him from the 90s.

01:32:34.500 I had other connections with the, uh, with the Pentagon. I gave Secretary Wolfowitz here, um, uh, the studies here. Um, and this was somebody coming from me. I'm basically a liberal Republican. You could, I had all these friends at the NSC. You could imagine that I was, you know, possibly going down that road here.

01:32:53.460 Well, this is why I never went down that road. It's because I was showing them rather directly that if they invaded Iraq, and I said this in so many words to them, if they invaded Iraq, they would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times. 0.87

01:33:08.520 They would produce more attacks on Western targets. I didn't know London was coming a few years later, but things like that. They were not stopping the next 9-11. They were assuring things like that would happen in the future.

01:33:23.180 Came back, this was in November 2002, from the, and again, nothing classified here, but it's not been widely known, from Andy Marshall, and some of the listeners here will know who that person is, highly credible conduit, that we're not going to take Iraq off the table, Bob, but what we are going to do is pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia.

01:33:46.280 That's how we opened IUD in Qatar.

01:33:47.980 So that's how that happened. Because of this analysis, that's what led to IUD being open. That's what Marshall told me. Well, then we did launch the war in Iraq. And six months after the war, five months after the war, the largest suicide terrorist campaign of modern times actually happened, just as I was explaining here.

01:34:08.180 and who started my center, the Chicago Project, this was in February 2004. I had the Wolfowitz

01:34:16.900 Rumsfeld Defense Department reached out. They wanted more work on suicide terrorism. I had

01:34:22.600 to create a center. So my center at the University of Chicago was at first called the University of

01:34:28.260 Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. Over the years, I've kept the acronym CPOST, but I've

01:34:34.640 morphed it to Chicago Project on security and threats. So they expanded a little bit,

01:34:40.200 but I've kept CPOS. So it's so ironic, but it was the very people that I was telling were doing

01:34:47.340 exactly the wrong thing that started the center. And then Wolfowitz left and Eglin became the next

01:34:53.980 deputy. And there was all these interactions because, as he said, the NSC really wanted to

01:34:59.980 know how good was Pape's data because there were other places we were thinking of putting armies

01:35:04.240 And we never put those armies there. So there's a whole set of stories about that. So when I say advised and so forth, this is some of the this is this was my experience.

01:35:14.300 So so I've had experience where people that I have disagreed with here and this was public.

01:35:20.340 So I knew then I was never being hired by an NSA here. And once you once you go down these these roads, notice that nobody's really going to want to want to hire you because you can't you you're I'm not a card carrying Democrat.

01:35:32.760 I'm not a card-carrying Republican.

01:35:34.600 I'm a professor who's laying out the escalation dynamics

01:35:37.800 and willing to talk to anybody

01:35:39.660 to try to get the better outcome for the country.

01:35:41.800 So what are the escalation dynamics

01:35:43.540 if President Trump pursues the Marines?

01:35:45.580 Again, the ground force risk.

01:35:47.800 So the number one risk here

01:35:50.080 to produce large amounts of anti-American terrorism,

01:35:53.640 and we've seen little bits now,

01:35:55.140 but nothing like could happen,

01:35:56.940 is going to be ground military presence

01:35:58.780 and especially the idea that it would lead to regime change.

01:36:02.800 So even if we try to take that off the table, the other side's not going to believe that.

01:36:07.440 And that also means the 92 million people in Iran aren't going to believe that.

01:36:11.160 Some will be hopeful.

01:36:12.020 Some will be opposed to that.

01:36:13.580 Here, that's going to mean others in the region here.

01:36:16.520 You're going to see what we call the tentacles of Iran, you know, all the groups, the proxies, so to speak. 0.96

01:36:24.500 Here, you're going to stir up a hornet's nest of terrorism, not on day one.

01:36:30.200 it took about five months before it really got going here with uh uh and so we we can't met we

01:36:37.800 can't put a time we can't do it to the to the day that's what everybody would like they'd like to

01:36:42.400 precisely time it so they can put money on polymarket or whatever all right but the bottom

01:36:47.780 line is we know the direction it's like moving a super tanker uh and it's you know five months

01:36:53.340 you know seven eight months down the road you can expect a pretty good amount of um and this

01:36:58.640 and this terrorism could be pretty serious so just coming on this flight here i didn't have to

01:37:03.160 take my shoes off okay um we didn't do that on not after 9-11 until the first shoe bomb

01:37:08.720 you see so so we're talking we're not talking about the the the shooting sprees of you know

01:37:14.660 10 or 15 people being killed so if this goes down this road the kind of indiscriminate terrorism

01:37:20.060 we're talking about here um uh we're we're talking about uh malls airplanes uh we're talking about

01:37:27.660 Those are the targets that will come up immediately.

01:37:31.560 Think about it as ISIS potentially on steroids, because ISIS was a group who did that, who

01:37:37.960 did those kinds of attacks here.

01:37:40.140 ISIS was a group of just 30 or 40,000.

01:37:43.880 Well, the Revolutionary Guards and also the Bajji, that's a million.

01:37:49.780 OK, so already, Iran is already very good at propaganda. 0.67

01:37:54.960 They're a state.

01:37:55.900 They're not a group.

01:37:56.780 and they will have plenty, they already do cyber.

01:38:00.660 They'll have plenty of ability to go on Telegram.

01:38:04.100 They'll have plenty of ability to do things

01:38:05.460 that we're not even, so we don't even know, I think,

01:38:09.100 how a state as powerful as Iran would be able to use

01:38:14.040 the internet and propaganda to inspire attacks.

01:38:18.340 And that's why I think it will happen.

01:38:20.080 I think there may be some sleeper cells

01:38:22.800 and some command directed, but what ISIS showed

01:38:26.240 is the power of what you can do when you inspire attacks and you explain that the

01:38:32.980 attacker should take one or two weeks to prepare. And you can give them some ideas for how to

01:38:39.580 prepare, but once ISIS started to explain you should take some time and prep, they did this

01:38:47.340 better than al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda tried to do this, but that's what ISIS really did. It wasn't so much

01:38:52.320 the tactics of the car ramming. I don't believe that. I've been studying terrorism here in detail.

01:38:58.280 8,000 suicide attacks, one by one by one with research teams at my center. So I've looked at

01:39:03.740 quite a few of these over time. I believe that the issue is preparation. How much time does the

01:39:11.260 would-be attacker put into it? The attacker in Texas here was quick, just right off the bat,

01:39:18.940 killed two, wounded about another dozen here. But that's not somebody who spent a week or two

01:39:24.940 preparing. Crooks, the guy who went after Trump here, he looks like he spent a week or two,

01:39:29.940 and look how much closer he got here. And fortunately, he missed. Unfortunately, Trump

01:39:34.940 turned his head. But what I'm saying is that it's the preparation that's the issue. And the longer

01:39:41.660 the preparation of, you know, certainly two weeks here, if you have a two-week period of time,

01:39:46.820 somebody's willing to put that much time in, there's just a lot more possibilities here of

01:39:52.140 the bad things happening. And that is what I'm worried about as we go forward.

01:39:56.260 Just a very quick aside before Francis takes back over. You said it's not really about religion

01:40:01.680 and it's about ground troops. But why aren't Ukrainians blowing themselves up and killing 0.98

01:40:07.580 Russian troops? Because they don't need to. It's success. So there have been a couple of instances 0.99

01:40:11.260 that were reported in the news as suicide attacks, and we've drilled into it, and we don't think so.

01:40:16.820 So my books explain all this.

01:40:19.400 So the issue here is last resort.

01:40:23.300 So if it's all about religion, what should be happening is all these Islamic groups, 1.00

01:40:29.120 they should be, I kind of put it as looking for the first excuse to get the quick trip to heaven.

01:40:35.980 So any old excuse, they should all be committing, doing this.

01:40:40.160 That's not what you see as the patterns of these suicide campaigns.

01:40:43.740 That's not what Hezbollah's pattern was.

01:40:45.500 That's not what Hamas's pattern was. So in my books, I lay out the pattern over time. That's 0.73

01:40:50.720 what these big books are doing. They're studying the trajectories of the campaigns and also how

01:40:56.660 they begin with non-suicide campaigns. And then they often begin with political protests, like

01:41:02.760 the first Anifada leads to, which was more like throwing Molotov cocktails. That is the beginning

01:41:09.400 of Hamas, not suicide attacks. So Hamas right off the bat is Islamic fundamental. So they want 0.92

01:41:16.080 all the stuff that you hear, they want the end of Israel. Well, that was all true in 1987 in the 1.00

01:41:21.440 charter. Their suicide attacks don't start until years later, and then it's not really going until

01:41:27.420 you get to the second Enifada, which is after 2000. So what you see here is that what the

01:41:35.040 What the trajectory of the terrorism is, is the tactics get more desperate and more deadly over time.

01:41:43.240 So Ukraine, they are they've held the Russians. 0.91

01:41:48.060 So except for the first like three days of the war.

01:41:51.300 OK, so go back to the first three days of the war.

01:41:54.420 This is, by the way, the smart bomb trap from the Russian side. 0.92

01:41:57.960 They fell into the escalation trap.

01:42:00.800 And it's very parallel to what's happened to us.

01:42:03.680 So stage one, they thought they had a quick and decisive victory strategy. It's with air and ground power, so not just air power. And they get right to the airport in Kiev here, so right to the gates of Kiev. They get very, very close. But the fact is, they couldn't get over the edge here.

01:42:22.980 And then within just a few days, and by the way, I said this to some Congress folks who came literally right out of a briefing, a classified briefing, telling me that they had just been told that Keeve's going to fall in three days.

01:42:34.820 I said, it's not going to fall.

01:42:36.220 90% like I'm not.

01:42:37.820 But, Bob, you haven't been in the briefing.

01:42:39.620 I'm telling you, they've got too much wherewithal here.

01:42:43.580 And so the bottom line is they don't fall.

01:42:46.420 And what do they do?

01:42:47.460 They lash back.

01:42:49.460 They take back over.

01:42:50.720 So from March, April, May 2022, they're recovering, lashing back.

01:42:59.700 And who's holding on by their fingernails?

01:43:02.200 It's Putin, you see, until he then fires all his military.

01:43:07.100 You know, this is when he's doing all the rearranging of his staffs and so forth to go to stage three.

01:43:14.060 So stage one had the quick and decisive stage to the lash back.

01:43:17.860 Stage three for Putin was the war of attrition. And right now there's barely been any movement

01:43:24.000 since June of 2002. You're talking about a handful of miles. 22. 22. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. 22.

01:43:31.380 Yeah. Thank you. Since June 2022, three and a half years plus here, barely any movement of

01:43:38.740 the line of contact. So why would Ukraine do? And what they had is they've come up with other ideas

01:43:43.920 like drones, you know, and you've got donors, some of them from Chicago. Jennifer Pritzker is one 1.00

01:43:52.360 who has given all this money to the Ukrainians to build these drone factories. And the drones 0.96

01:43:59.220 are really making it difficult for Russia to gain any territory. And so what does Russia do?

01:44:05.900 They've got their drone factories in Iran, and they've made it difficult for the Ukrainians to 0.98

01:44:10.560 territory so you've got basically a stalemate like korea that's occurring so they don't need 0.92

01:44:16.080 suicide uh this isn't this would make it's not it's a my book is called dying to win the strategic

01:44:22.800 logic of suicide terrorism and it's explaining it's not a religious logic the way most people

01:44:29.520 think it's strategic and that explains the ebbs and the flows the origins and the ends of the

01:44:36.540 campaigns. Religion, everything should just be a constant. Look, there's going to be a lot of

01:44:41.720 people who are listening to you, Professor, who are thinking to themselves, they're looking at

01:44:46.160 the strategies, particularly that the Americans have pursued, the Strait of Hormuz, and they're

01:44:51.540 thinking to themselves, why is it that they haven't predicted what is going to happen?

01:44:59.180 They've got some of the most intelligent people. They've got access to some of the most brilliant

01:45:03.240 military minds in the world, military strategists, etc. Why is it that they haven't predicted what's

01:45:09.380 going to happen? I call it the illusion of precision control, Francis. So I've been in the

01:45:16.840 rooms when very, very senior, super smart people, and there's no cameras on, are getting these

01:45:25.260 briefings about what air power can hit and from people with stars on their shoulders.

01:45:32.560 It is amazing to watch. And this can be Republican, Democrat. This is not about

01:45:38.480 party. This is about human beings. You put people in these rooms here and I and I show you and you

01:45:45.620 really believe not just maybe these bombs will hit their targets 90, 95 percent of the time,

01:45:52.080 but it's going to be the reality it's two things are inescapable number one immediately the mind

01:46:00.760 goes what leader can i kill i mean even if the briefer is not talking about that by the way

01:46:05.640 immediately the mind goes to that because the briefer is explaining and again these people

01:46:11.240 many stars generals um that the bombs will hit within you know five to 15 feet they'll talk about

01:46:18.960 the winds, and they'll talk about all these different conditions, and you will, then it'll

01:46:23.660 be immediately, well, that's about the size of this room, and who would I like to take out from

01:46:28.260 this on the other side here? So number one, that's where the leadership decapitations idea really

01:46:33.620 come from. But there's a second thing that the mind goes to that I've seen, and again, I think

01:46:38.140 this is just human nature. I don't think it's any deeper than that, which is the illusion of control

01:46:44.380 of the escalation after that, because I can have this exquisite opening. It's like a chess game

01:46:51.100 where I have the exquisite opening in chess. It may be the absolute perfect exquisite opening in

01:46:59.340 chess, but it's still just the opening. It's not the middle game, which is really where all the

01:47:04.820 strategy in chess is all about. Here, it's like territory and the moves and the feints and so

01:47:09.880 forth. And then it's not the end game. So you can't. And so just like in chess, you can study

01:47:17.680 end games, but you can't really think about what end game strategy to have until you get through

01:47:22.760 the middle. You see, so strategy here with the smart bombs, I call this in with the smart bombs

01:47:29.100 in particular, a smart bomb trap, because what happens is it's like an opening in chess. You are

01:47:34.980 so absolutely mesmerized by the accuracy of what you're about to do and the perfection

01:47:41.180 of that opening, that you're really imagining you can totally control the middle game.

01:47:47.820 You can control the escalation from that point on.

01:47:50.860 And even if the briefer here, and I have no reason to think General Cain would not have

01:47:56.880 been cautioning President Trump, starts to give caution about what might, don't overread

01:48:02.300 that opening, sir. And, you know, there's the middle game. Even if they do that, the seeing

01:48:07.780 that and seeing it so close and believing it's true here, I think it creates the illusion of

01:48:16.320 control. And that's why I think you've seen this with when President Reagan dropped bombs to

01:48:22.180 assassinate Gaddafi in April 1986. We the bombs hit there. That was the very first precision 0.99

01:48:28.820 decapitation campaign. We hit his tent, killed his family, some of his family. He just stepped 0.59

01:48:36.660 out of his tent, literally. He was sleeping in a tent, literally, just for a second.

01:48:41.560 But two years later, he brought down Pan Am Flight 103, killed 271 civilians, 190 Americans,

01:48:49.020 as his retaliation. President Clinton, let me pick a Democrat. March 1999, President Clinton

01:48:56.260 wants to negotiate for the pro-democracy movement in Kosovo. And he wants to tilt the hawk and the

01:49:02.480 dove balance in the Serbian government, who's on the other side. So he launches a three-day,

01:49:08.780 what was supposed to be a three-day air campaign, hitting 51 targets in and around Belgrade in

01:49:15.180 order to shift the hawks and doves, shake, if not degrade, if not topple the Milosevic regime.

01:49:20.820 And the bombs hit their targets perfectly. But what happened is the Serbian regime did not fall. It was hardened. And Milosevic countered by ordering 30,000 troops into Kosovo. And he expelled, that is ethnically cleansed, a million Kosovars from the country.

01:49:41.240 That's 50 percent of all the civilians from that province.

01:49:46.320 And we had to fight 78 days and put a ground army there to we didn't we we didn't have to actually conquer it, but to take it if he didn't back off.

01:49:58.140 And that's what led Milosevic to give up.

01:50:00.320 It was it was a disaster that we only pulled out at the end by putting in the ground forces here.

01:50:07.900 So, this is what we're up against with the smart bomb trap.

01:50:12.460 Now, I talked to, on the NSC, President Clinton's briefer, the person on the NSC, I won't say the name, whose job it was to give all the worst case scenarios.

01:50:24.680 And he showed me the 400-page briefing.

01:50:28.440 This was a year later, because I interviewed Adesari, the president.

01:50:32.360 I spent a lot of time studying these, not just kind of casually.

01:50:36.460 And so he showed me the briefing.

01:50:39.380 It was still marked top secret.

01:50:40.700 Well, he wrote it so he could show somebody

01:50:42.340 who didn't have a clearance.

01:50:43.780 And he just said to me, he said,

01:50:46.260 Bob, it never occurred to me

01:50:48.640 that the Serbs would be that vicious.

01:50:52.640 Even though they described it

01:50:54.160 as one of the most vicious regimes ever,

01:50:57.140 he said, it just never occurred to me or to us.

01:51:00.540 We just couldn't imagine that level of evil.

01:51:04.120 Professor, so all of that being the case,

01:51:06.220 the one question we haven't asked you

01:51:07.860 strikes me as kind of important is

01:51:10.140 it's academic, but also kind of important.

01:51:12.920 If we agree, I don't know if we agree,

01:51:15.180 but I imagine we agree that Iran

01:51:16.440 shouldn't get nuclear weapons.

01:51:18.700 What should President Trump have done?

01:51:21.220 He should have gone back to the JCPOA,

01:51:24.440 the Obama deal,

01:51:25.440 because if you can push this problem off

01:51:28.160 10, 15, 20 years, do it.

01:51:31.160 It's not the best.

01:51:32.300 It's still a problem deal, but it is that deal.

01:51:36.160 Once President Trump broke the deal and withdrew, we saw that Iran put pedal to the metal, and it took years, not just a day or two.

01:51:45.920 It took years before it could start to really rebuild its enrichment program.

01:51:51.640 So the deal, actually, with all its warts, was actually a good deal, and it also provided 24-7 camera-level inspection of everything.

01:52:01.300 here. And I think this is what he should have done. He should have, I think, taken versions

01:52:07.360 of the deal that's been on offer as imperfect as it was. And he would have to sell it as

01:52:13.600 he'd find a way to say it's better than Obama's deal. And people, a lot of people just believe

01:52:18.160 him. I'm just thinking from a strategic perspective, and there's probably gaps in my

01:52:22.680 thinking about it. But if Iran and other countries know that we effectively cannot use air power or 0.80

01:52:29.700 indeed ground power, for the reasons you've articulated, to deal with the nuclear threat.

01:52:34.080 Wouldn't it be perfectly logical for them to pursue nuclear weapons, irrespective of

01:52:38.540 any deal that we do?

01:52:39.660 Well, now we're teaching them very strongly that they must have nuclear weapons.

01:52:46.500 I think that's why I want to come back to what I said is the offset with Israel. 0.79

01:52:52.580 So if you can offer Iran the possibility that Israel will be contained, containing Israel, that's worth quite a bit. 1.00

01:53:04.940 That's worth quite a bit because you really, as much as I'm laying all this out, notice I'm saying things are 75.

01:53:12.380 That means there's still 25 percent over here.

01:53:14.840 And that's so so you are if I was advising Iran here, I would say if you can get the containment of Israel, you take it. 0.96

01:53:24.060 And what does that mean? OK, you keep your three point five enriched uranium, but you open yourself back up to the IAEA.

01:53:31.620 You open yourself up to 24 seven inspection. You're going to get some tit for tat where you're going to get some inspection of Israel now, too.

01:53:38.740 So this is not just you who's up for this, but this, what I would say is if you want to maximize your survival here and your Iran, that's what I would do. 0.96

01:53:49.320 Because there is some chance that we're going to go down these roads and as much as we're saying, we'll never put 100,000 troops in Iran.

01:53:58.060 Think about this right now.

01:53:59.720 J.D. Vance said, we're never putting ground troops in Iran.

01:54:02.760 And what are we talking about doing next week is ground troops here at the beginning.

01:54:07.140 Now, still limited, but there's no way that Iran can really be sure we're not going to come at them with some multi-division attack down the road and that they'll be able to offset that. 0.99

01:54:21.900 So I would still say that the bottom line here is containing Israel for Iran, that's something I think they would be foolish to give that up, to surrender that, because this is an uncertain world. 0.98

01:54:37.580 Professor Robert Pape, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:54:40.140 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:54:41.840 Thank you, guys.

01:54:42.680 Man, great question.

01:54:43.940 Thank you so much.

01:54:45.460 No worries at all.

01:54:46.360 Final question is always the same.

01:54:47.680 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:54:50.960 We still haven't talked as much as we should have about the enriched uranium that's floating now, dispersing.

01:54:58.880 We think it's dispersing at least some inside of Iran.

01:55:02.540 It could be dispersing outside of Iran.

01:55:04.600 And so we've talked about stage one, two and three. I told you stage four, I'm worried about the terrorism. There is a stage five in the fall, which is that dispersed uranium finding its way into bad things happening here. So so I see a lot of bad possibilities here that get worse.

01:55:23.440 That's why I've been putting out images on X of the funnel getting worse here over time.

01:55:30.280 And I think that I'm hoping we won't have to have those Sunday briefings

01:55:35.540 where I go through those in hours.

01:55:37.240 I'm hoping we can stop it here.

01:55:40.480 That's us.

01:55:41.320 Thank you so much.

01:55:42.040 Thank you.

01:55:42.460 I appreciate it.

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TRIGGERnometry - March 25, 2026

This War Will FAIL＂ - Military Expert Prof Robert Pape

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