The Iran War Expert: The Most Dangerous Stage Begins Now

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2a1b2dcb9a10f09b

Iran has figured out that we can't beat them. We're not weakening Iran. We have strengthened Iran, and we can't stop.
There
drone attacks and what you're seeing is far more chaotic decision making is happening in the White House than's happening in the government of Iraq. And it's evidence Trump
is losing power. So when I look through the response to the last conversation, the audience had lots of different types of questions. Like there's ninety odd million people stuck right in the heart of this that often don't really have a voice. What do you think happens next for them? And what is Israel's role in this? Well, Israel's playing two roles here that have not helped us correctly assess the situation. And we'll talk about that.
And then what do you think happens with Europe? NATO is for all practical purposes dead. And what happens next? So for 21 years, I laid out what a hypothetical bombing campaign of Iran would look like. And when I was here last time, every single thing we talked about unfolded in the first several weeks of the war.
So when you did this 21 years of modeling these attacks, how did America come out of this situation? So there was a consistent set of findings and America can bomb them, attack them. We could even threaten to murder all 92 million of them. But the bottom line is
That is the real danger for us.
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Uh
Professor Robert Pabe.
Good to see you again. Great to see you again, Steven. It's been four weeks since we sat down and talked about everything that was happening in the war, and it's all moved at light speed.
You made some predictions then, many of them have come true already, and many of them still unfolding, but I wanted to get you back to talk about
What the hell is going on? And I think that's kinda how I started last conversation.
But there's so much.
That's being said. And I get the sense
That there's a truth that sits underneath there somewhere.
Because when you look at what the Iranians are saying, when you look at what the Israelis are saying, when you look at what Trump and America are saying, and then you look at reality, at some level, I feel like we're not being told the truth. My first question to you, Professor.
Is who are you and who are you to speak on this subject matter?
I am a professor at the University of Chicago. I have been there for twenty six years, almost twenty-seven years. And before that, I was a professor who taught at for the US Air Force. I taught conventional targeting. And I thought I was gonna go into the Foreign Service. I wanted to understand
How we lost the Vietnam War. And this became the origins of bombing to win. Which is your book I have here in front of me. That's bombing to win. And nineteen eighty five, I've just finished all my classes and I have to pick a topic for my PhD. I wanted to find the book that laid out all the air campaigns and that explained why Vietnam was a loser.
Where did that L come from?
When you say air campaigns, for someone that knows nothing about military conflict, what do you mean by air campaigns? What I mean with an air campaign is when you have military aircraft who were not just doing a single raid bombing one target one day, but doing a campaign over days, weeks, months.
In the case of Vietnam over years. And you wanted to figure out why
countries that do these military campaigns, which is pretty much w what's going on now in the Middle East.
Why they don't tend to win.
Why they don't win when they're so strong.
Why is it
that when a strong power
Really gets its act together. It's not careless. It's really thinking hard.
It then applies this c force a campaign over time.
And comes out a loser.
And you modeled for twenty years.
A war with Iran versus the United States.
That's exactly right. I
Imagine uh in class for 90 minutes, I laid out what a hypothetical bombing campaign of Iran would look like, starting with the bombing of its nuclear enrichment sites. There's multiple sites. There's uh Fourdeaux, which is an industrial enrichment where there are centrifuges.
There's Natans also centrifuges. There's Essiphon, where you have gasification of the ore, so you can make the centrifuges more efficient. So it's not just one target. There's a whole target set, a complex of targets. And so what I would do is I would lay out here are the aircraft that could be used.
Uh here are the likely results at a tactical level.
Ah yes, just for context, so we're looking at a map of Iran and we're looking at the Persian Gulf and um Iran, of course, is to the east of the of the Persian Gulf, and Tehran is up to the north middle. Right in the middle are a whole series of these nuclear sites.
You have Sagand, which is where the uranium ore actually comes from. They don't have to bring in ore. They have plenty of ore. But the ore has to be distilled so that you can get the tiny bits of uranium 235 you need for uh enriching the uranium for either nuclear reactors or bomb grade uranium.
That's first done at Esophon to gasify the ore so that when it spins in the centrifuge uh facilities at Natans and Fourdeaux, you can
You can get the purity of the uranium two thirty five. That's what we're talking about here when we say it's enriched. So when you did this twenty-one years of modeling these attacks, how did the
model show.
America.
There was a consistent set
of findings you just couldn't ignore, Steven, which is our bombers would always be able to destroy the target, the industrial facility that was enriching the uranium. The problem always was, no matter uh which year we did this, you wouldn't
be able to destroy the enriched material, the actual gold. So if you're panning for gold, you see what I mean, and you've got the gold, uh you can destroy the pan, you can even destroy the river. You can't get the gold. So let me repeat that back to you in layman's terms and you tell me if I'm correct.
So they they could bond these sites where they're making the enriched uranium, but it wouldn't destroy the enriched uranium, it would just
Put it underneath a bunch of rubble. That's right. So you can bomb it, but you're basically just kicking the can down the road because at some point they can go back and get it. It's undamaged, and then they can carry on their process. That's right. And and Steven, they might even anticipate the bombs coming because they might get some indications, you know, we're building up.
And then disperse in advance. And the at the end of last year, they did Operation Midnight Hammer, where they bombed the sites with these incredible. Exactly as we did in class. Literally, I had just modeled it for the students three weeks before, and almost exactly the platforms. I mean, um you know, the B twos, the Moab, I mean
Every single thing we talked about.
It unfolded just as we had modeled in class.
Is going on.
Now I want you to help me cut through all of this noise and all of this propaganda. What's going on now is uh we're not weakening Iran in a sense where Iran will be weaker a year from now, two years from now.
We have strengthened
Oh.
And we're strengthening Iran in multiple ways.
So far we've just been talking about bombs on target.
My real specialty, Steven, is the interaction of military action and politics. You are not just hitting an industrial target. People in the country, the population, the regime, they're reacting to that politically.
And that reaction is tremendously important. And that's what I discovered in my work studying Vietnam in the 1980s, the why the bombing campaign was failing, the political reactions by the population.
Often are overwhelming the tactical military effects. So you can hit the target, you can destroy the industrial facilities, um, and in fact, you can
energize the population to work even harder to overcome all that damage. And sometimes they have tremendous geographic advantages. In Vietnam, there was an area called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
which was a where the logistics, where the ammo for the um Viet Conn guerrilla fighters in the South were getting their ammo.
And in the nineteen sixties, we knocked out eighty plus percent of the throughput of that pipeline of that trail. You know what? It wasn't enough.
And we ended up not being able to stop that little ity bitty bit of throughput that can't still could get through and incentivized even more to get it through because they knew we couldn't stop it.
And that is what fueled the V C and ultimately uh the Viet Cong the guerrillas that we're uh we're really up against in Vietnam. That is what ultimately bolstered their morale.
They knew.
We couldn't beat them, even though we whittled them down by 80%, we couldn't get that last 15 or 20%. And that was what was energizing their morale. So how does that apply to

Uh we can't beat them.
That's what's going on, Steven. They are figuring out
That we can't beat them, we can bomb them.
We can um attack them. We could even threaten to murder all ninety two million of them, which is the civilization threat by uh by President Trump. And the bottom line is that we can't get
to that final ten, twenty percent of um drones.
And missiles. Okay. Okay. That Iran has and it's probably
bigger than that that we can't knock out.
See, we're able to knock out anything that's above ground. If there's a launcher.
And it's above ground.
We can s we can s with satelits, we can s with other sensors as well.
That thing is gonna be gone in a few days. And that's what the air campaign that you've watched for forty days is doing. When Secretary Hageth or General Kane talk about uh h hitting eleven, twelve thousand targets, these are targets.
Most of almost all of them, that are very clearly visible and above ground. This is true of the Navy ships as well. Well, guess what? The Iranians knew that was always gonna be vulnerable. So what they've been doing is they have been not just deeply uh burying their industrial enrichment facilities.
They've been deeply burying their arsenals of drones, deeply burying their arsenals of missiles. And so they are in a position.
Where even though we are unleashing enormous amounts of air power against them, and we are technically superior, we can't stop their drone attacks against the ships in the Strait of Hormuz. They know it.
They can use that to their advantage, and boy are they using it to their advantage enormously. Yesterday
The secretary of war, Pete Hegsath, did a press conference.
And one of the reporters said to him
There's been a ceasefire announced.
But it appears that Iran are still attacking neighboring countries.

response to the reporter was
Iran would be wise to find a way to get their
Carry a pigeon.
to the troops out in remote locations.
To let them know not to shoot any longer.
It can sometimes take time for ceasefire to take hold. Which was really alarming to me because
It suggests that there is actually
Not a centralised leadership structure in Iran. And actually, if there's not a centralized leadership structure, how does one negotiate a ceasefire if there's lots of different factions doing lots of different things now? Is that
True. I would say it's probably decentralized. I think he's probably right about that. I'm trying to figure out who in Iran is negotiating with America. And while it doesn't seem to be the case that whoever's negotiating control the fact that people are still firing. Oh I see. I see. Yeah. Decentralization means chaotic and they can't actually make decisions.
That's just not the case. The more you move up the chain of command.
The more the leader
can give pre-delegated orders if X happens, do do do Y. Those can hold for
Hours and days. Uh and that's true in every organization. That's why leaders can go on vacation, uh, for a week and come back and they're worried, of course, when they come back. But the bottom line is that the leaders are setting the strategic direction.
Who is the leader?
Oh it's definitely the supreme leader, the son of the one we just killed. Oh without a doubt. I think this idea that that he's not there, there's
Absolutely no evidence of that. Yes, it's decentralized in the sense it's hard to find them to target them. But by the way, Steven, I think the reason that we're trying to talk smack about the supreme leader, is he is he alive, is he dead, is we're trying to goad him into revealing his location so we can kill him.
But that's not working. So and it's also not stopping Iran from putting out ten points to Pakistan.
uh in the negotiations. It's not stopping Iran from having uh messages that go through Pakistan to the um the White House. President Trump is then agreeing to the ten points that are coming from Iran, you see. And then um later on, of course, President Trump is taking it back.
But the bottom line is, um, what you're seeing in terms of chaotic decision making.
Far more chaotic decision making is happening in the White House in the United States than's happening in the government of Iran. They're rising power in the region as our power is is declining precipitously.
What do you think happens next?
We are at a fork in the road. When I was here last time, uh I was walking you through the three stages.

And you kept pushing me, tell me more, tell me more.
Notice I I was a little bit reluctant to do that. Well, there is a stage four.
For anyone that didn't hear that episode, could you give us a one sentence on stage one is stage one is America bombs, does leadership change bombing? We hit targets, kill leaders, but the regime actually evolves in a stronger than before. Uh stage two is that then stronger regime lashes back.
with horizontal escalation and takes the straight of hormous, at least initially takes the straight of hormones. And then stage three is that's the ground option to start to take the straight of hormuz back.
And that's exactly what you saw play out in the first several weeks of the war. Stage three was about the Marines, the Marines hadn't even moved yet. And I'm telling you, the Marines are likely going to move. There's going to be movement to ground options in stage three.
uh here very rapidly in this war. At that point in time when we had our first discussion, you wanted to push for the future. And I said no, we we need to wait. And the reason, Steven, is because what you're not seeing with me is throwing random darts at the future. I'm doing risk assessment out about as far as
you uh you can have stable predictions and in war that usually means two, three, four weeks. It doesn't mean we can say where we'll be a year from now. Here, though, now that we're in forty days.
We're at a different point.
We've clearly passed stage one. We're past stage two, where they uh control the Strait of Four Moves. We've bellied up to stage three, the ground operations.
Now we're at a branch, a fork in the road.
There's no way to go back to February twenty seven, which is the pre-war period that many people would love to go back to. I too would like to go back to February twenty seventh.
That's not the future.
What happens at this point on
In the modeling and the is a branch.
Either.
We go through with the ground war.
Or Iran becomes
An emerging, not right away, fourth center of world.
Power.
That is the branch.
That we face
Now this branch is becoming more evident.
Hour by hour.
Explain that to me. So
Everybody now knows.
That Iran is uh controlling the Strait of Four moves and controlling shipping. That selective blockade. I'm taking it a step further.
That's not just about insurance rates of shipping.
That's generating political power.
For Iran to get other states.
Two
Kowtow to it, to accept its objectives.
What are those objectives? So let's talk about how this affects, say, Asia. So I'm gonna get into global and then we'll come back to the Gulf itself.
So
The shipping that goes through the Strait of Hormos, eighty to ninety percent of it is going right to Asia.
The power that comes with that is with say India.

India's at best neutral and maybe even a little bit more uh uh edging toward Iran. Well, before this.
you could imagine that the United States and India would be much more cooperative here.
That's not what's occurring. And why is that? It's because
That oil that's going into Asia.
For India. This isn't just about the price of oil. This is about the supply of oil. When you lose literally all the supply.
That is a greater cost than simply having to pay more for it.
So India is in a much more difficult situation than Europe and the United States right now. Now look at Japan.
Notice in the Oval Office, President Trump brought in uh the leader of the head of state of Japan and basically browbeat her, and she still wouldn't budge. She still would not kowtow to Trump here, uh, and actually provide military support.
What did she do? She's distancing herself from the United States. That's exactly what Iran wants out of America's Asian allies. This is geopolitical power, and it's rooted in the control of hormones. It's rooted in the selective military blockade.
That selective military blockade produces vulnerability to India, vulnerability to Japan. And that is what the we call it the leverage, but the leverage is is not enough of a
I think a full description. This is reorienting America's allies in Asia. Now let's talk about what's happening in the Persian Gulf itself.
before the war, February twenty seventh, there was essentially a balance in the Persian Gulf, where you had Iran on one side and you had this growing collection of Gulf states
That we're part of an emerging web. They're cooperating uh with Israel more and more on different um on different issues. President Trump is bringing in his AI billionaires to sort of uh grease this uh cooperation so that there's some material benefits. Well, that was effectively a counterbalancing
Coalition to Iran. Now what's happened after 40 days is this is breaking down fast.
America has military bases in Qatar, has military bases in uh Bahrain, has military bases in Kuwait. I'm just picking a few, and military base, of course, in in Saudi Arabia.
These military bases
They are producing little leverage here against Iran.
In fact, our aircraft carriers.
are not n anywhere near the Persian Gulf.
They're a thousand miles away.
These bases are big fat target.
They are above ground.
Iran's precision drones can hit things above ground, and they're doing it on those bases. That was their immediate retaliation.
What is what's happening, number one, is the
anchor the military anchor of this coalition
Started to disappear within hours of the bombing on February twenty eighth. What do you mean by the military anchor?
In order to have this coalition work.
Which is like Saudi Arabia, Qatar. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait. Somebody has to be the la the the guarante of protection.
It's like the mob boss who protects everybody else.
That is the United States.
And that is what our military bases.
we're supposed to do.
They become the military
anchor that allows then for there to become
political counterbalancing against Iran. That was the Kushner idea in the first Trump administration. And it seemed to work.
And it seemed to uh bring some of these states together who wouldn't necessarily think you would cooperate with with Israel.
Well, this is now this war.
His torpedoing.
This whole idea.
President Trump is not even willing uh to do much to actually defend our own bases, much less Saudi Arabia, much less UAE. What he's telling them is you go out there and start defending yourself.
Well, that's not a guaranteer of security. The next thing that's happening is the three these states, which were operating more in concert, are starting to break down and operate in three pools. You have Iraq.
which is now complaining more and more about milit US military presence there. They're distancing themselves from American military presence. And remember, we installed that government in two thousand and three. So they're not siding with us, they're distancing themselves from us.
Then you have Cutter and you have uh Oman. Uh what Iran's doing is saying, you know, we should share some of these uh ta these tolls with
Oh my.
They're moving Oman into their camp. So you have Iraq moving closer to Iran.
Oman moving closer. Cutter is trying to keep its head down as much as possible. They're not they're they're not trying to get their uh nose in this anymore. And who is what's the third pool? The third pool is Saudi Arabia, uh the UAE. These are the states that are most under threat.
And what has Saudi Arabia done just in the last week? They've gone to cooperate more with Pakistan. They have a security deal with Pakistan. What does that mean?
They're looking to Pakistan.
As much, or maybe even more than the United States.
as their guaranteor of security. So all of this coalition
It's not all siding with Iran right now.
It's fragmented.
And that's the weakening America.
So what happens next?
you know, as President Trump wants to do, call the war off.
That's not gonna put us back to February twenty seven. Iran has twenty percent of the world's oil.
It's going to be able to have uh seventy five billion, a hundred billion dollars of of revenues here over the next year. And also those deeply buried caves and tunnels where they have their drones, uh, that can be used to fashion nuclear weapons. Within a year, Iran could have nuclear weapons and we can't stop it. So
If we pull back, you can start to see that Iran's power is going to grow internally, uh, but then even more than that.
Its relationships with Russia, its relationships with China will start to put move closer together against America.
And you see this happening from the moment almost the first several days of the war, Russia almost immediately offered Iran military targeting information to target US ships. That's why our our carriers are so far away. It's because Russia has the ability to see those carriers.
Tell Iran where they are, and if those carriers get too close, man, they're gonna be smashed.
But it can get worse than that, Stephen.
Because as this power grows over time, as these incentives for uh China, Russia, and Iran to cooperate against America grow over time.
Iran has control now of twenty percent of the world's oil.
Russia has eleven percent of the world's oil.
That means
There can be
either formal or tacit cooperation to take thirty percent of the world's oil off the global market.
What.
China soak up a whole lot of that.
And that
Contruly.
produce.
Mega.
Economic
consequences for America.
For Europe and why are they not gonna do that? Because they're nice guys?
Is that really what we're counting on now? Russia Putin is not gonna want to wreck America's economy because he has a a a a bond with
Donald Trump.
What do you think the fundamental
flawed assumption was at the start of all of this.
from the United States. That Iran was uh was was weak on its last legs, and all we had to do was uh push it over the edge of a cliff and it was just a matter of just one more push. And then the people would rise up and Yeah, we have painted a picture of Iran.
Yeah.
um as beaten down, as the reason it's not retaliating very much is they have no capability to retaliate. And I tell you uh tell you this, um Steven. So I've I've been in big debates here at uh the Council on Foreign Relations in New York where
I've literally been the only person on the stage to stand up and warn that this picture of Iran is is is way too negative. There was a a widespread, I think, false assumption across the foreign policy community. No one willing to really stand up and challenge it very strongly that Iran
was uh basically collapsing on its own. This was always uh in my view underestimating the power of Iran. And you say, well, where does my view come from? It came from the modeling of the bombing. What would happen as this went forward and none of these
elements of Iran's power were ever knocked out.
When I look through the response to the last conversation, the the audience had lots of different types of questions. So I'm gonna try and
represent some of the audience's questions to try and bring them into the conversation. One of them was uh about Israel's role in this. And I I thought it might actually link to what you just said about where we get our intelligence from that informs the decisions we make, because there are some people that are skeptical that the intelligence is coming from Israel and that therefore that it might not be as accurate
As if it was coming from our own sources. I would say Israel has been playing the role of diplomatic spoiler. So in the twelve day war when last June when the US bombed Fourdeaux, we've been focusing on that. That happened in the middle of the twelve day war. Donald Trump said he was going to negotiate with a certain set of Iranians and literally
The next day.
Uh thirty six hours later, Israeli air power
Killed them.
killed the negotiators we were set to negotiate with.
This was
totally spoiling the idea of a diplomatic outcome because they were dead. So you couldn't have a negotiated outcome. Now if we come to February twenty eight.
Who dropped the first bombs that killed the Supreme Leader? That uh killed those other several dozen doves that he was meeting with? Dove.
Donald Trump, um, as as many of our governments have, um describes that you had a balance of hawks and doves inside of the Iranian government. And uh the idea here is with leadership decapitation is well if you kill
uh the hawks, then the doves will just be the ones left.
We did the opposite, or more correctly, the bombing was started by Israel on February twenty-eight. We came in behind, and in fact, Secretary Rubio, our secretary of state, explained uh a few days later that um uh Israel basically backed us in a corner.
Because Israel said, We're gonna kill that supreme leader, whether you like it or not, and that
is gonna maybe lead to attacks on your military bases. So you better prepare an air campaign to come behind. And Rubio said that's what happened. So again, just before the twenty February twenty eighth bombing, we're negotiating with Iran and we're killing
The very people that Trump was saying are the ones we wanted to negotiate with, the ones who were gonna help move Iran closer to the American position. That was Israel as spoiler.
So there's this individual called Ali
Larigani?
Former secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, and he was killed in an Israeli led airstrike on march seventeenth, two thousand twenty six. Trump claimed on True Social that Lun
I can't say his name, but I'm gonna try.
Larjani was the primary contact for a ten point peace proposal that Trump had called workable and a basis for a real agreement. Trump suggested that the strike was poorly timed when Israel killed him and complained that Israel's lone wolf actions were complicating his ability
to wrap up the war on his own terms.
He famously posted
That he was inches away from the biggest deal in history before the assassination reset the clock.
So this would be the third instance then of Israel as diplomatic spoiler. What you're hearing from Trump's own mouth is he thought he uh was close to a working relationship, maybe not a full deal, with a certain set of individuals, in this case Oajani.
And what did Israel do when they found out about it? They killed that person. And yes, I I understand there's issues of intelligence, but you know, most of us don't have a clearance, so we can't talk about that. So let's talk about the actual public description that we've heard from um Prime Minister Netanyahu over the last several years.
The public description is that Iran is simply a paper tiger, that that um Israel has been dominating Iran, knocking out its air defenses, launching other attacks here in 2024. The rhetoric that's coming publicly
has been painting the picture of Iran as a weak and and not just weekend, but basically cripple. It's down on its last legs, and all you need is a final coup de gras. That has been print Prime Minister Netanyahu's language.
The other thing that the audience to know is they wanted more specifics on stage three.
Yes.
Yes. And is stage three happening. We talked last time about ground troops. It's very important, and I I've been saying this on the Substack and my and my ex, to follow the key indicators here of deployment, not follow just what's occurring with the rhetoric of our leaders. Um and the key thing to to know is that
If you're going to um weaken Iran with ground power.
There's only a few ways you can get that ground power into Iran.
You could try to come through Pakistan, but Pakistan actually is Iran's ally who gave Iran the six hundred centrifuges in two thousand and two to start developing its enrichment program. So and Pakistan has a hundred nuclear weapons or so. So I don't think we're doing this.
Uh here. You could try to do it with Afghanistan, but notice you'd have to get all the troops in Afghanistan. That's not working. You could also go to Azerbaijan. That's up there. Notice on the first day of the war, there was a missile that hit Azerbaijan and people on CNN there weren't what what's going on here? It's just a random in fact, I think
Uh our our our uh public uh statement on that day was this shows how how incoherent uh the Iran leadership is.
That's not what I saw. What I saw is they understood that uh Azerbaijan was always thought to be a staging area to go to Teraq.
And so if you're going to take Tearon
With a division or two.
You would really want to have your forces start here from Azerbaijan. Now so far, though, that's not happening. Azerbaijan said, Nope, don't count on us. We're not getting in the middle of this. Now we're back to
Why would you start to think about Marines?
Uh to take
Territory here on the coasts of Iran.
So inside Iran.
Where the Strait of Hamoose is. That's the that's the beginning of it.
You would start there around inside Iran around the Strait of Hormuz.
as a beachhead. There's some photos which I'll throw up on the screen showing what the terrain around the Strait of Four News looks like. And it's it is quite shocking. It's it's a moonscape and what you can see is that this is the most difficult terrain for amphibious operations to operate in. What is amphibious operation?
Operations. Uh where you have troops that are on ships, on landing vessels, uh just like saving Private Ryan. They go from the water onto the beach. You would also then have um some air power with some Ospreys, but they're doing essentially the same thing. They're coming onto the same beach. What's an Osprey? Uh an Osprey is a special made plane.
that we've made for the Marines. And it's a plane that is a hybrid between a helicopter and a jet. And so the propellers on the plane are able to rotate.
So they can fly as a propeller plane, um here, or a uh a cheap man's jet, or they can actually um like a helicopter, and that's really great if you wanna fly fast to a beach and then go straight down.
So are you saying that you think
They will put
Boots on the ground.
in the street of Kamoose.
Let me just fill out this a little bit more. Okay.
So the other big thing that
the the folks need to know is where is the oil?
Iran's oil and here I'm drawing a circle here, Iran's oil is all in this uh southwestern part, almost all of it is in this southwestern part.
of um of Iran.
Kuwait's oil.
Is all right.
Hier a Iraq has couple puddles of oil.
It has a big puddle of oil right here. Saudi's oil.
Is all right.
Here. You might uh try to land forces a division here in Iraq.
in Kuwait, uh in Saudi Arabia, and come around this way.
This is why knocking out these bases as truly platforms here. This was why they st I think they start on day one. This wasn't just to hit the bases in retaliation. They are weakening our ability. They're taking away different axes of attack. And this is why in the uh sub stack I published
Three days before the war.
I'm specifically talking about Marines moving in limited areas to take coastal regions as beachheads.
A beachhead is where you have a uh foothold, a toe hold, where you're gonna funnel in more forces after that.
And you are going to very likely want to control an area that's at least about a hundred miles.
by twenty miles in order to get behind all this uh this this mountainous terrain. And what does that look like?
The oil fields, Steven. This is what President Trump is almost surely talking about when he says he's gonna take Iran's oil fields. What he is probably um being given options for.
is how you could start in a limited way with an amphibious, a marine, a limited assault to take a a small set of stretch of beach. And then you would want to follow and take if you're going to start this at all, you're almost surely going to want to just start to take the oil fields and
President Trump's been talking that way for years, really.
He also said in a recent
Interview.
that if it was up to him, he would go and take the oil. But he said the American people won't like that. And he said it once, and then he said it again, and then he said it again. This was during a press conference on Monday, April sixth. He said if it were up to me
I would take the oil.
I would keep it all for ourselves and make a lot of money.
Because to the victim.
Along the spoils. But people
In the country.
sort of say just win and come home.
And I'm okay with that too.
And he said that I uh from the interview that I was watching twice, which made me think that he really wants to go take the oil.
But if he does put troops on the ground in Iran, it just creates a
Clear a target for those drone strikes.
It creates a clear target for those drone strikes, but what people maybe are not fully understanding is the political consequences of the deaths of those Marines. Yeah. Most people are assuming
If those Marines go in and die, this will make America run away.
It'll be like a punch in the face and we'll run away.
That's not likely to be what happens. Again, this is my area.
Of what happens when you have military force.
in politics come together
You need to understand that when those Marines go in and say hundreds die or so over time, there will be thirty six percent of the public.
that will have supported that.
That
Thirty six percent.
Is gonna see those Marines died.
for them.
That thirty six percent is likely to double down.

They died.
For nothing.
Now the
fifty percent, fifty nine percent, excuse me, who's opposed to the war.
They'll still be pretty hotly opposed to the war. I'm not saying they're gonna move toward the war, Steven.
What I'm saying is you have a republican president supported by
Thirty six percent of of the Republicans here, almost no Democrats, if you start to actually have deaths here, this is going to lead to a bigger version of
We can't withdraw now. We must quote finish the job, otherwise they will have died for nothing.
This is what happened in Vietnam.
In Vietnam in the early stages.
You will see that it's sticky up. The support for the war, it takes a while to go down. And why does it take so long to go down? It's because of exactly what I'm saying.
The politics of this, of the death of our troops in battle, does not lead to we cut and run.
It leads to we double down for the honor of the troops.
That's why I'm saying we start this even in a small way.
Even car uh it doesn't really matter where you start it, but once you have those ground forces go in and they start to take casualties, you're probably in for the six month ground war.
So it looks like they're going to try and avoid that outcome. It looks like they're doing everything in their power, America, to avoid a scenario where they have to send
troops in. The the threats that have come out of uh Donald Trump's truth social posts really talk about
I mean, look, I'll read this one here. It says a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought brought back again. I don't know what will happen, but it probably will.
Um and all a lot of the tweets are. Can we just focus on that one? Yeah. The civilization, because it's much y that was a few days ago. A lot of people are already trying to move past it.
This has much more importance and endurance than I think we're understanding now.

So first of all
That statement that President Trump said that he will end an entire civilization in one night.
Uh we need to understand this is not a drunk at a bar.
This is the president of the United States.
Who has at his disposal thousands of nuclear weapons that could, in fact, achieve that. And let me just explain how hair triggered these are. We have 500 Minutemen three missiles. They have warheads between 100 um kilotons and 300 kilotons, which is multiple times.
more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each one of them. And they can be retargeted.
Within forty five minutes, that's what it takes to retarget the gyroscopes, and then it takes about twenty five minutes for them to hit
Iran. So when the president of the United States is saying this, he's only one of a handful of people in the world who could pull who could actually make this credible.
Second point is
That is the most declared statement of genocidal intent.
we've ever seen from an American president.

No American president.
has threatened to end a civilization before, which is at the heart of the genocide treaties in nineteen forty eight, the intent to commit genocide.
Harry Truman. People say what do you mean? We had Harry Truman. We bombed we we bombed Hiroshima Nagasaki. Go and look at his statement on Hiroshima, Harry Truman. He did not say he was ending Japan as a civilization. He pulled back and said it was about to destroy Japan's military power.
Yeah.
What President Trump has done
By making those statements is he's persuading all ninety two million
Iranians.
That he is willing to kill them.
And he has the power to kill them. And yes, he pulled back from killing them on Tuesday. And yes, he may not have used nuclear weapons on Tuesday.
But
If any other leader had said that, if imagine Vladimir Putin stands up and says he's going to end American civilization two nights.
He's got the weapons to be able to do that. Are we just gonna sit back and say, Oh yeah, he didn't do it, he must not have met it. No, that would mobilize.
Enormous anger against Vladimir Putin in the United States, even among Democrats. And my point here, Steven, is before uh this war started, we had a real pro-democracy movement in Iran. And on your show, I told you
This was going to fade. This was one of the predictions I made to you. So this is gonna fade over time. You're gonna see nationalism bonding the society and the regime closer together.
President Trump is bonding them together like never before. If you're one of the pro-democracy individuals here movement in Iran, where are you gonna go for protection? Are you gonna go
to Donald Trump, who's threatening to kill you with essentially nuclear weapons? Or are you gonna go to your own government
This is going to hasten.
the support, increase the support for Iran developing nuclear
weapons the pro democracy movement is now likely to support this.
On that point.
One of the questions and one of the points raised by the audience last time we had the conversation was really we didn't spend enough time talking about the ninety plus million people that live in Iran. Yeah that are
Often many of them caught amongst all of this absolute chaos.
And I I was looking at a bunch of messages from people that are living in Iran.
Um I'll read some of them.
From ordinary citizens. Mm-hmm.
Um I'm not great at math.
But where will the money, the resources, and the experts come from to build a country that ordinary people spent decades trying to build? From the this is a different person. From the beginning of the war until today.
We have been bombarded. Not only are we not one step closer to freedom, from what I can see, we are miles away from it.
From another person in Iran.
A whole civilization will die tonight.
Never to be brought brought back again.
This has deeply terrified me.

It's it's it raises the really the question a lot of this
Dis discourse doesn't
speak much to ninety plus million people that are living there.
And that are having to exist under this terror. And like the best way that I could conceptualize it is I I I imagined if I'd woken up one day.
And Vladimir Putin or some other leader around the world had said
That they were potentially gonna end
The civilization that I live in.
The country that I live in.
Tonight.
How would I be feeling?
And if I was hearing bombs go off all the ta time.
How would I be feeling?
Um and if things were escalating where me and my family lived.
How would I be feeling?
And
It it is
Chilling to think about.
It is traditional chilling because
This is now moving the needle.
Inside of Iran.

ordinary person on the street, uh, even the pro democracy movement willing to tolerate
Iran killing Americans.
Because we're killing them.
And we're saying we're gonna do it even worse, and we're s even beyond that. We're saying
At the whim of a president who wakes up thinking maybe this will help his save his presidency, he is willing to uh uh kill the entire civilization of a country because he thinks maybe this is gonna be his off his golden uh off ramp.
to get out of this problem for himself personally.
And by the way, we we've in our country when Al Qaeda
Attacked us on nine eleven.
There was tremendous fear there would be more attacks by Al Qaeda in the weeks afterwards. There was just much fear. And I've done the studies of the American public opinion on this it's the fear of Muslims killing Americans that's supp
driving the support for the Iraq war. If this is happening to Americans
You can only imagine what's gonna happen to the ordinary Iranians, and they've been subjected not to just one attack.
Forty days of attack. So for the average Iranian person.
That opposes the regime in Iran.
And has been living under
terror and oppression for
Many, many decades.
Wha wh what do you think happens next for them? They're they're the group of people that I that I think about and care about the most in this equation. We spend a lot of time talking about US power and
We talk about lots of these other regional partners, but there's like ninety odd million people stuck right in the heart of this that often don't really have a voice. Their life expectancy will go down in measurable years. So if we had taken out the electric power, so this is something I know quite a bit about in the nineteen nineties.
I was uh uh working for the air force literally under uh my boss was John Warden, the leader of the leadership decapitation school. And he brought in not classified at all, he brought in engineers of electric power plants to teach us how to take
down electric power. The electric power grid in Iran. It looks like a network.
And that network has big nodes. That's what President Trump said. He would he's gonna take off the big power plants that produce uh in the tens, twenty, thirty uh megawatts uh range. And they're probably about a hundred and thirty nodes altogether, but if you just take out the top ten
you're probably gonna take down the entire network because the top ten nodes are distributed in the right places to support different uh electric power, different regions of the country. You have two choices in a target in targeting sense. You can take out the transformers, in which case you knock it out for a week or two.
And it is inconvenient and yes, there will be some people who'll die. There were human chains around those targets, by the way. Those people would die. But if you took out the halls.
The generating hulls. What's that? That's the giant turbines that are huge. There is no backup to those. Each of those is specially made. You will be knocking the out that generation for six months.
twelve months, maybe eighteen months at a minimum.
What that's gonna do is stop
all dialysis in the country. That's gonna stop all um the uh s heart surgeries and other life saving surgeries that are happen in the country. It's gonna take out all the food refrigeration in the country. So
You know, when power goes out in your house and goes out for
10 minutes or or or an hour, it's not so bad. You don't really notice it, but when it goes out for two days or three days or a week, all the food in your refrigerator spoils. And you can't eat it fast enough. You can't give it away fast enough because it's happening to everybody on your block.
Well, that's what would happen across the country. So there's gonna be an enormous amount of spoilage of food, and that refrigeration then is not gonna be available to come back. And so you're gonna have enormous hunger problems here. So people that were already malnourished.
they are gonna be e uh susceptible to more disease. So you will end up lowering the life expectancy
In a measurable way.
of that population.
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So there's been a lot of talk.
In the recent days about a ceasefire.
And
Trump said he was going to
He said tweet these horrific things about h ending a whole civilization.
Tonight.
And then at the final hour said that they had
proposed a ten point plan and that there was going to be a two week ceasefire.
What do you think
What's actually going on there? The collision of stages three and four. So what you are now seeing is we can we we are now understand we're in it for the long haul.
Which means we can't go back to February twenty seven. We can't undo the last forty days. It's just not gonna be possible. So there's only two futures going forward. Future number one is that ground war option, and we've talked about how terrible that is. And of course, that's obviously bad bad cost. But future number two
Is Iran as an emerging fourth center of world power. And that is incredibly damaging to America's power. And that is going to be damaging to President Trump's legacy. Is there not another option where
Around
Their leadership says
Okay, we won't make nuclear weapons. Okay, we'll be friends.
Okay, it's all over
Please stop bombing us.
Let's go for peace. So so my response to that is I've been studying the history of international politics for over thirty five years.
I know quite a bit about uh great power politics and regional power politics. Going back 300 years, I have never seen.
A country at the regional level or at the great power level surrender power.
Did America after World War Two decide, well, yes, uh we uh we have the capability to build nuclear weapons.
But you know, we wanna get along with the Russians who helped us defeat Germany. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually have a a a deal, an arms control agreement. In fact, this was proposed, by the way, um, and we rejected it, which is we're just gonna not go down that road. We're gonna surrender the power advantage that we have.
Uh here so that we can be cooperative with the Soviets who had just worked with us to defeat Nazi Germany. So that's not gonna happen. In our history.
We've never surrendered power. Even when it might have been a good idea for haven't done that, they're not gonna do this. They're not gonna do that.
No, they're not gonna do this. You already see this in the and why the uh the ceasefire is breaking down so fast. It's breaking down so fast because essentially President Trump, he didn't just declare victory. He said that Iran's uh not gonna have all this power that I'm explaining to you and what Iran
did is almost immediately assert, oh yes we are. They they they've come right back right away. If President Trump is expecting that out of the goodness of their heart they're gonna surrender emerging world power.
Th this is uh this is just a fantasy. Uh it's not gonna happen. Uh he wouldn't surrender power. Why is he gonna expect Iran's gonna surrender power?
So I'm looking at this.
A parent.
Ten point proposal.
Submitted by Iran.
Mm-hmm. Um and you you gotta take this with a pinch of salt because there's different reports about what this ten point proposal looks like. But it says that based on official releases from the Iranian state news agency, the IRNA, and international reporting, the ten point proposal from Iran
The United States was for a permanent ceasefire number one.
And attacks on allies.
A complete halt to Israel and US strikes across the region, specifically Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Number three, reopen the Strait of Hong Mus. Iran will allow safe passage through through the Strait of Hong Mus.
collect tolls around will charge a fee, reportedly two million dollars, for each shiping through the straight. Revenue sharing with a man
Which is toll revenues will be split with Amman.
As custodians of the straight.
Number six, lift the sanctions.
The complete removal of all US primary and secondary sanctions, release assets.
Number seven. The immediate return of all
frozen Iranian funds held abroad. Number eight.
The right to enrich
Uranium.
US acceptance of Iran's right.
To domestic uranium enrichment.
while Iran commits to not seeking nuclear weapons. Number nine, war reparations, full compensation paid to Iran for reconstruction costs from the bombing. And lastly, number ten
Determination of all UN resolutions against the regime and a new
binding UN Security Council resolution to enforce this deal. Now, listen, I don't know a lot about what I'm talking about.
So that's in his way. However,
It sounds like a good deal for Iran in many respects. On every single point.
And it also validates Iran as an emerging world power. So all of those points in the details, if you think of them as a flow diagram, all ten of them are adding up to validation of Iran as uh
Top in the hierarchy in the Persian Gulf. So why is it so important to be the number one strongest state in the world? It's because in the last three hundred years, whether it was Britain, the United States, or whether it's China in the future, the number one state typically dictates the rules of how the
world systems operate. Well what you're seeing with Iran is they want to dictate the rules in the Persian Gulf. And that's what that is. Now if we'll this over
Which I love your props uh here. That is good. So right now you see that even though it's the United States is just um uh that lone flag, it has this higher weight. And what this is reflecting is
Uh, the United States as uh the number one country in the world, the most powerful. Now if you also
Then add um this over here. So this would be Israel. You can see this is the world that Netanyahu is depicting um before on February twenty seventh.
But the actual world, I just want to point out, is a little bit different. The actual balance of power is closer to this. It's closer to the United States, and then we have China, and we have uh Russia. There are three centers of world power.
And in nineteen ninety, um it used to be, by the way, uh just the United States and uh the Soviet Union. Then Russia, the Soviet Union collapses. This is when the United States is the sole superpower, the unipolar moment. It immediately shifts like this from nineteen.
eighty nine to nineteen ninety two. Dramatic shift.
However.
Along the way.
in the last thirty years, you see um this changing. And what's changing Russia actually still is weak. It's still about two percent of the world's GDP. That's not really what's changing. What's really changing is
is China is now much, much, much more powerful. It's still not as powerful as the United States. But notice that we were here in nineteen ninety, and now the balance is starting to be uh to come like this. Well
If we start to add Iran as a center of world power, uh now we're starting to change this in a much different way.
Now these three powers are starting together.
in concert to become more powerful than the United States, uh, especially with respect to energy.
And energy matters so much because it's an underlying component for our economic growth, that GDP. The way um uh we measure uh great power, Steven, for
decades and decades we've used static indicators, GDP, how big is your military, how many nuclear weapons you have. That all rests on
the productive capacity of your country, which is why the productive capacity is so important.
What does that turn on? It turns a lot very heavily on
Oi, ó.
Oil today.
Is the commodity.
If you lose access to oil
Within weeks or a month and a half.
This has dramatic
cliff effects on your economy. Now if you lose access to semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, that's bad. And it's bad over time in particular, you lose access to oil.
This is a cliff that you we go off over six weeks.
eight weeks because there's not enough uh storage capacity of anybody in the world to make up for twenty percent, thirty percent loss of world oil. So on this point of oil
The US don't get that oil from the Strait of Humuz.
We don't, but it's a global market and a lot of the uh price of oil that we're going to pay is going to be determined by the global price of oil because oil is a fungible commodity. It's like a
uh water that runs through the whole system. When there's a shortage, it drives the price of
All of us up.
Okay, so I've got a graph here showing the price of oil. And you can see I'll throw it up on the screen. You can see it's been climbing ever since
The twenty seventh of February. So this will impact Americans at the pump as well. Oh my gosh. And you see it in the pump already. Where I am in Chicago, I'm paying some I was paying something like three ten a gallon. Now the last time I I filled up it was four sixty.
It's a bit of a misnomer to think that we can as America get away scot free
with everybody else losing oil and we're not going to we're not gonna pay a price.
Now to be clear, we will have supply of oil.
The price will go up. This will increase inflation. This will probably increase bond prices over time. The bond is the loans that essentially any uh corporation, companies,
or the University of Chicago takes out to borrow money to operate. So the University of Chicago borrows uh has has 10 year bonds. This is essentially we're borrowing money, and then we have to pay back that money plus an interest rate. That's what the bond rate is. It's an interest rate on on borrowed money.
Well, if that interest rate goes from four percent on a 10 year bond um to five percent or six or seven percent.
The costs of the interest.
just goes up massively.
And everybody will feel that in various ways.
uh budget item in the US government budget.
Is the cost of interest for the debt.
of the forty b trillion dollars in debt. We're gonna have to shrink social security. You're gonna have to shrink Medicaid. This is not notional, Steven. Iran and uh Russia together could have a tremendous impact on America's economy. This this is the real thing.
So c with your balance of paranormality, this is where we where we could get to. This is where we could get to with the next several years. I would say um probably two years out. I would say that America has an edge, and I'm trying to depict it as it's like about a twenty-five or thirty percent edge from the combination of
China and Russia today. And China is gaining, but still it's actually
slow year by year. So you'll see a little bit of an uptick. So maybe going I'm trying to depict from say a third advantage for the United States to maybe uh thirty percent, twenty-eight percent in the next four or five years.
You add Iran to this. And then especially these combinations I'm describing where they can do things together. Now in the next several years, you're actually talking about uh the scales where these three are mut are stronger than America, where I'm not talking about just America's losing it incrementally.
You're getting abrupt changes in the world balance of power. So what happens now if Trump just pulls out?
This is the world.
Iran is an oil hegemon in the Persian Gulf.
uh within a year or so, they're very likely to have nuclear weapons. I'm saying the pro-democracy movement is gonna be pounding the table to get nuclear weapons. They're gonna want to deter any uh idea from Trump of hitting them again. Um and then I'm saying beyond that
You have the possibility of Iran and Russia deciding to cooperate here to strangle uh and coerce the United States. And if the United States doesn't kowtow to them, then
W they can pull that oil off the market. So what should
Trump, do do you think if you were president of the United States, what would you do right now? So when I was here forty days ago, we had the same question and what I said was we needed to accept uh that there would be a deal.
And we were going to have to accept that the deal that Iran was offering us on February twenty seventh, where they would get to keep their three point five percent enriched uranium, wasn't gonna be good enough. We were gonna have to lift oil sanctions, we're gonna have to do various things to sweeten the deal, so to speak.
Well, notice actually Scott Desson did some of that. He did lift the but the power of Iran has grown so much, Steven, that's not good enough.
And that's what you're seeing with why this deal is the ceasefire is starting to break down from Iran's side. So what would you offer?
I wrong.
I think a enforced military containment of Israel would be a serious uh card.
That America could play that I think Iran would get Iran at least in a serious discussion. I don't know if it would be enough. I want to be careful here that I don't say, well, this will certainly uh be the deal Iran will take. But we have to imagine if Iran has world power,
What is it going to take to get Iran to surrender some of that? Well, one thing would be to have confidence that Israel is not gonna keep attacking it or its allies. But then they're not gonna believe that after what's happened.
Well it would have to go through you'd have to make it enforceable. It's not gonna be good enough to try to promise that.
What thing President Trump could do, since the Republicans control both houses of Congress, is President Trump could push through a bill through Congress that says if Israel attacks Iran or uh could even extend to Lebanon, but let's at least start with Iran, um, all funds for Israel, both military and economic.
will be cut off through the end of Trump's presidency. Now that passes through uh both chambers of Congress, President Trump signs it.
Now you're talking. Now we actually have as much teeth as you could ever have of a military containment of Israel.
So presumably in such scenario, Iran would continue to enrich
Uranium.
Because they've now had a taste of what can happen to them if they're powerless. Well, let me extend this um a little bit more. So let's talk about Article Two of the deal that's gonna go through the uh Congress. Israel joins the NPT, and that is the quid pro quo for getting Iran to accept the on-site inspections.
of its three point five percent enriched uranium. So Israel gets to have um its Domona nuclear power plant where it has plutonium for its nuclear weapons that's measured by the non-proliferation treaty, the IAEA. Those are the inspectors.
And Iran.
We'll have on site inspections at the various locations we're talking about. But the second part of this, Steven, would be quid pro quo. If Iran is going to be subject to on site verification, on site monitoring.
Israel, which is now not part of the non proliferation treaty, already has nuclear weapons.
It's gonna have to accept that this can't be a one sided deal going forward. It's gonna have to be a more balanced situation when it comes to monitoring um nuclear weapons capabilities. So what does that mean specifically that Iran would be able to monitor Israel's nuclear weapons?
Uh through the IAEA, that's right. It would be the material for the weapons, not the weapons themselves. So they have weapons. So what's that to monitor? Oh no, no, no. Right now the number of Israel is uh Israel's nuclear weapons is not known. We have vague counts. The reason Israel's not part of the N P T is not because it doesn't matter. It provides
the kind of calcul the kind of detailed information through the IAEA that would be useful for estimating the size of Israel. He's gonna want to give that information to Iran. This isn't about want to anymore, Steven. What we're talking about is what are the offer you've asked me the hard question
What is an off ramp to this trade-off between
The ground war.
And Iran as the fourth center of world power. And I said, Okay, there is an actual offramp here, but notice that the hesitation now is politics.
And that's what I'm trying to explain, that that I study the interaction of military action and politics, and I'm with you. I I don't think Israel will like they've been trying to spoil these other deals. I don't think Israel is gonna allow this to occur, but now then we're right back to
The trade off that nobody wants to confront. So what do you think is gonna happen?
What I think is that we are going to go back and forth between stage three and stage four for months. What stage three and stage four? So stage three are preparations for the ground war.
Yeah.
And Iran emerging as a force center of world power. I think uh both of these are likely to go on for months. I think that uh for stage three, the ground war option to truly be taken off the table, you would need to see America withdrawing its military forces. You would need to see all the carriers
leave the region and go back to uh other parts of the world. You would need to see the marines that have been moved to the Gulf go back to Camp Pendleton in California, go back to uh Japan. You would need to see the hundreds of aircraft like the F thirty fives, for example.
that have been moved to the region, they all need to go back to their pre war location. So we're gonna bounce between stage three and stage four. Yep. That's the diagram. So the new diagram I'm trying to
We just um I think there's still if you pushed me on this last time, I still say
There's a seventy percent chance that we're gonna start a ground operation. And it's not because President Trump wants it. It's not because he's not trying to avoid it. It's because there's a trap.
And the trap that he's gonna face is is he really willing to be the president where under his presidency Iran detonates a nuclear weapon to demonstrate it has nuclear power.
From his rhetoric and listen.
These are just the tweets. It seems like
The alternate option he's considered when he talks about
bombing the infrastructure and bridges and roads and power plants.
is just completely decapitating the coun country and I think in his own words sending it back to the Stone Ages. This will come back, but it would be as I believe the precursor to more ground operations, Steven. So I don't think that this will be a case where
You do the electric power targeting, and then it's done. Finally he's satisfied. He's pounded them enough.
and walk away because you do the electric power targeting, you have further incentivized ninety two million. They still have the enriched uranium. You have ninety two million people desperate now
For not just getting a nuclear weapon for deterrence, but for payback.
And so you will find the pressure for the ground war will be even more intense in the aftermath of all of that. This idea they're gonna be bombed back to the stone ages where we won't worry about them anymore. Um they're gonna be this minor country that we will just ignore.
As long as they have a thousand pounds of sixty percent enriched uranium, ten thousand pounds of five and ten and twenty percent enriched uranium, um, this is this will just not be the case. So you still think the most plausible probable outcome is that
Trump ends up sending ground troops in specifically to do two things. I think I remember you saying last time. One of them is to go and get the uranium.
Yep.
And the second, I believe, is to defend the straight of her moves. Yep, yep, yep, yep. I think these are the two things that are on the table. And you think it's gonna
It's probably gonna take several months.
I think it could go on, yes, for months because I think that you were going to see that there's going to be uh this back and forth. And the way to monitor this so you can see is the timeline speeding up or slowing down is literally the movement
of the deploy troops. Don't track this by what the negotiations are. Don't track this by what comes out of President Trump's mouth or even the Iranian's mouth.
Track this.
by the movement of forces
That is the best indicator of what's going to come.
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On this point where you said
You don't think Trump would want to be the president that presided over Iran releasing a nuclear weapon. Is that because if he pulled out now?
They would enrich the uranium and then maybe demonstrate it under his
That's right. So the scenario that I have laid out, I've laid this out to my classes uh for years, the idea of what Iran would do with nuclear weapons. A lot of people have an image
And it's coming from the public, so I understand why they have it. Uh people have been s a lot of people have said this image, where Iran gets a a nuclear weapon or two, and the what they do immediately is they blow up Tel Aviv with the first one and maybe New York with the second one. This is just highly unlikely because what would happen is
We would retaliate with nuclear weapons under that. Uh here. Much more plausible.
And everything I'm seeing from Iran has been completely supporting the idea that they're thinking this through, um
uh uh strategically is you would want not to just have one working nuclear weapon or even two, you want five.
Ideally you want ten.

Maybe even fifteen. This is what happened with North Korea. Because once you have let's even say five, the most rational thing to do is you detonate the first one as a detonated test. You test it on your own territory.
And then you listen for a week while everybody says, Well, they only had one, they were stupid, they don't have dot and you detonate the second one.
And once you detonate the second one?
Just like when we hit
Nagasaki.
After Hiroshima?
Everybody will assume there's a lot more there.
And that is how you actually deter the United States from attacking you. And by the way.
That's what effectively North Korea did. When President Trump took office in two thousand sixteen, North Korea was a major problem. We were talking about bombing North Korea and so forth.
And there's multiple reasons, but the big issues are that North Korea has a lot of nuclear weapons. We're not gonna be able to get'em all. They have some other things they can do too, like like uh artillery on Seo, but this isn't just North Korea and Trump decided to be, you know, sort of best buds here.
So
The other route that played out in my mind was that Trump would just keep bombing Iran to keep them weak. But again, that doesn't solve the Strait of Hormuz problem. Doesn't solve the uranium problem and doesn't solve the Straight of Hormuz problem because if we knew where that material was and we could just bomb it out of a existence, I'm talking about the enriched uranium material.
We would have done this already. Which leads all roads to
Really the only solution being some kind of deal.
Absolutely. That's why the best thing to do is a deal with the military containment of Israel.
There's a deal. The problem you have with such a deal if when you're going into that deal is the enemy know that you don't really have a plan B.
You don't have a good plan B. That's right. And so your negotiation position is very weak. That's why you that's why you're they're gonna keep their three point five percent enriched uranium, no matter what. The problem we face here is if we were ever going to get the three point five percent enriched uranium um to go away.
We should never have ripped up.
the Obama nuclear deal by Trump in two thousand eighteen.
They've been developing ever since the Biden administration. He Trump one couldn't figure out how to stop the enriched uranium by by Iran. Biden couldn't figure out how to stop it.
Trump now has been trying to figure out how to stop it and you know what?
It's not stoppable. It's not stoppable short of these options I'm laying out. There's no way to get that material without ground forces, Steven. And you're not gonna send those ground forces in just a thousand guys to s be it some postage stamp of an area for a month or two.
trying to find that enriched uranium. This is just not realistic. I think gonna be a bigger option.
I think it's clear to me, you know, I do this podcast and ask these questions and have people on because I I'm actually really trying to find answers for myself. And I think if I've arrived at any conclusion from everything I've learned over the last couple of weeks.
It's that I think Trump made a really big mistake.
Um
Pro and that mistake probably started when he ripped up Obama's deal. That's right.
But it's clear that
Four dudes was the m really, really big
I think I think he's stuck.
He is stuck. I think he's stuck. I think he's facing
To several bad options.
going forward. So I really have no idea what's gonna happen. And
But what you're gonna what you will also watch, Stephen, so back to politics here is
Uh, Trump right now, we're not it's not just Pape anymore who's saying he's lost control. He's losing power. The world is saying that. And this is gonna start to become
The Republican Party is gonna say that.
And what this is gonna do is it's going to incentivize Trump even more, probably to become more belligerent, not to become calmer.
So as Trump is becoming the lamest of lame ducks going forward because it's
Evident he's losing power.
And as he loses power here on the international scene, this will mean he will lose power domestically as well. And we'll never go to zero, but it will be a d slow decline.
This is where
the real sort of future is here why this is not simply a steady state now. This is why I won't make a prediction of what's gonna happen in September. We are not at a steady state. It is an unstable balance here between three and four.
Three and four. What do you think happens with Europe? I feel like Europe, you know, Europe aren't on either side of your scale here. You've got Iran, Russia, and China on one end of the scale scale, you've got the US on the other. Europe and NATO.
What happens are they gonna be able to do it? NATO is for all practical purposes dead. We're just writing its obituary. It's a body in the morgue already. Most people don't think that NATO is a political alliance.
NATO is much more than that.
If there's an Article five, what that means, Steven, is there's a military operation with an American general at the top.
And with Article five, the American general tell the other countries' militaries, including their nuclear weapons, what to do.
Now if you're Britain and you have nuclear weapons and or even if besides the nuclear weapons, if you're Germany you don't have are you gonna follow uh
Uh General Kane's orders on anything at this point?
I don't think so. So Article five is the document that all the NATO countries have signed?
No, it's the part of the NATO treaty which says if there's a NATO operations like in Afghanistan
It's American general who orders all the other countries' militaries what to it's a hierarchy. So it's not a um a collection where the countries get together and they have these big like uh
cooperative decisions. No, the Americans run the plan. They are the ones who organize the military operation, they run the plan, and they just assign the uh other countries uh roles the way they would um the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force inside of the Pentagon.
What I'm saying is what you just saw with Iran.
It's such a
Uh horrible.
Catastrophic failure within just weeks. The idea that any Europeans are going to uh follow the orders of an American general.
And and I don't even think this is gonna be just under Donald Trump. I mean, I think for years, I think this is just laughable.
Trump was quite angry and scathing with his words about NATO.
He said
It's a paper tiger and referred to them as cowards and as we've been sat here today, you might be aware that NATO were meeting with
Trump today in Washington, DC.
And the NATO Secretary General Mark Root.
said when it came time to provide the logistical and other support to the United States needed in Iran
Some allies were a bit slow.
To say the least.
In fairness,
They were a bit surprised.
To maintain the element of surprise for the initial strikes, President Trump opted not to inform us
Ahead of time.
But what I see when I look across Europe today
is allies providing a massive amount of support, nearly without exception.
Allies are doing everything the United States is asking.
They have heard.
And our responding
So it sounds a little bit like
An apology tour coming from NATO. Um and the German chancellor's also made made a comment saying that they do not want to split.
Well they well, they don't want American troops to leave the um
uh the European continent because that provides some deterrent
to Russia. That's what you're hearing there.
But
NATO was always at had an anchor. Remember we talked about anchors?
The anchor in NATO was America's protection of European security.
What you're seeing when President Trump creates a problem, a catastrophe for the world, and says he won't send American uh forces in to the Strait of Hormuz, but he wants the Europeans to send their forces into the Strait of Hormuz, this is the opposite of protection.
He's making NATO countries or European countries vulnerable, and they're reacting to that by saying, We won't do it. According to diplomats, NATO secretary.
Briefed member.
capitals today that Trump is demanding.
concrete commitments within the next few days from NATO to help to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
Which would only make sense if you were doing phase three, the ground operation. So you cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz only with air power. We if we could, we already would. You can't secure it only with naval power. If you could, we already would. We have a much bigger navy, much bigger air forces than any of those
countries individually or even combined. The only reason
You would really want
those uh forces from NATO is uh because you're planning on a bigger ground operation and you're that's what you're seeing right there. And I don't think Europeans let's not even talk about the word NATO. I don't think the Europeans are likely to do it because you're seeing why would if they're ever going to do it, Steven
They would want Trump out of office. The number one thing that I don't think is gonna happen here is anybody's gonna bail out Trump.
It's political suicide, really, for a lot of the European leaders. Political suicide for the Democrats to bail out Trump in our country. It's gonna start to become political suicide for even Republicans to bail out Trump. That's what you're gonna start to see in the fall. And it's gonna be political suicide for the Japanese, for the Indians. This is the problem. Trump
caused the problem
He's as I said on your show last time, he's gonna become LBJ if he doesn't uh take a deal soon. Well, that was forty days ago, Steven, and he still hasn't taken the deal. Not really, and he's becoming LBJ. Nobody's gonna want to be associated with him.
Here in the UK we have
Kirst Almer is the Prime Minister. And
It appears to me that since he's come out and started saying that he won't support Trump's or he we won't send troops to the Middle East,
It appears that that's actually
driven up his favorability amongst certain people. And it makes me think that actually, as we say, it's it's political suicide for European leaders to send troops there because they will be
They will lose the next election in their country.
I I think you put it exact excellent, Steven. I I really can't improve on that. Let me just say that
A year ago.
with the tariffs, um, I started to do a study of tracking how European support for America was starting to go into the tank. And that was
With tariffs.
Now what Trump has done is he's driven up the price of oil. He's hurting their economies in a serious way. And as that actual damage occurs, and it's still in the pipeline, it hasn't hit as strong as it likely will in the next month.
You are likely gonna see that the publics in Europe are gonna become anti-American. And it's not just gonna be can't support Trump anymore. Coming here, I had to pay the the visa, the ETA, and it it took forever. And what's happening here?
We're getting some payback here in Americans. I think this uh next next time I come to London, I'm not gonna be surprised that the price of that visa is doubling or tripling.
What is your
closing high level remark about w all this stuff.
And I guess I really want to focus it on on the average person who is going about their life as a normal civilian in any of these countries that are affected. What is the high level point of view here that we we need to close upon? Th the high level point of view is we're about to start think think seriously about the election.
And what we need to do is not just choose, but bounce back and forth between uh Republican and Democrat, and actually Britain is a is a case study of what can happen if you bounce back and forth here. We need to start to really support
Strong stable

that m will empower the middle.
The problem that we face, Steven, is we're moving back and forth from really uh ideas here that uh one year we we really don't like what Biden's doing, and now we have the radical wing on the other side, and we certainly don't like that. Well if we keep going back and forth here between two
uh extreme alternatives will just get different versions of bad outcomes. And it's not making things better. It's a cycle that's making it worse.
The solution is the public needs to hear that
Every election.
Every choice we are uh we have an opportunity here to
Focus on the more centrist candidates.
And this is something that we really can make decisions about. And it's just simply the case that if we don't do that, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get back and forth bouncing around. And I don't think a third party here, these ideas are really very meaningful.
This really comes down to talking to the public. And it's one of the big reasons, Steven, I'm going to the podcast world because uh you remember I've advise every White House and so forth. So we've got to get beyond that. We've got to actually talk to real people. And this is what you do.
And increasingly I'm doing it. And I really believe that
the podcast network is an opportunity to do that, but it doesn't mean that it m forces people to vote Democrat or Republican. We've gotta understand that we we can't just keep thinking about
Uh well, okay, now we're really mad at Donald Trump and we're gonna get the independents and now they're gonna vote with the Democrats if all we do is end up getting another extreme on the other side. Because what you're gonna do is you're gonna keep pissing off the middle and they're gonna keep bouncing back and forth. And round after round, we've been doing that now.
Um, for years in the United States. And what does it look like? It keeps getting worse. It keeps getting worse. What are you suggesting the solution is? Vote for the census candidate.
All the way through. Yes. Yes. It's a very simple thing, but it's not gonna happen unless we
Talk about this because it does mean that sometimes the centrist candidate
Is the
Person, the woman on the other side.
And if we're not willing to do that
Then we're really condemning ourselves to this cycle. I'm gonna explain more about it. It's it's a version of the escalation trap, gone domestic. It's called the legitimacy shock cycle. And I'll be talking more about this in September. So the trap I'm talking about here with violence in politics.
isn't just international and you end up with traps here domestically as well.
And I'd like to close with a few thoughts for the people in Iran. I think ever since I've put myself mentally um in a situation where
There was a world leader saying that they were gonna
Annihilate my civilization.
And there were bombs going off. You know, we're currently filming this in our London studio, but if there was bombs going off around the studio and there was threat that someone was going to annihilate civilization,
it's it's quite unthinkable for me how I would fun I would be functioning. And it immediately, I think, shines a light on the the mental health and psychology of the people in Iran right now and how they must be feeling. So I think that's probably an important message to share because we can sometimes get a little bit caught up in the
hypotheticals of war and strategy and all these kinds of things, but at the end of the day there's nineteen
plus million people in around that are
Right in the middle of this, and we we're sat in this very warm, cushy London studio. So Well there's a bond that is occurring.
between the middle sixty percent of the American public
And then ninety two million in Iran.
Yeah.
They don't like
The radicalism.
And on on either side.
And what you were what you were v vocalizing, Steven, is the frustration.
That our politics has been locked up.
by the extremes.
And I suspect the ninety two million in Iran are feeling almost exactly the same thing. Their choices now.
are being locked into extremes. And that is that bond here that you're trying to vocalize.
I believe it's valuable to vocalize it because this is what it means to empower the people. And this is what it means to be a democracy, which is that we actually talk about not just the other side is bad and we're always good.
is we we talk about where the future really should go. And the idea that we're even imagining the possibility of a$40 trillion in debt country getting rocked by um Iran and Russia here, who have their own reasons for wanting to hurt us. We may not fully realize that, but
But we really hurt Russia in the nineties here with our ideas of shock therapy. And we may not like bandits, by the way. Uh so the the we we really do have some uh real growing bonds at the social level.
Professor Robert Pape, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to speak to you once again and uh
This is such an evolving situation. So I feel like we might end up talking again at some point in the future when things play out. Hopefully
You know, one can only hope uh for peace for for every big situation. Every day. That's my number one thing. Just ask my wife. And by the way, will you stop being so charismatic because my wife, when we listen to this, she turns my voice off.
All she wants to do, Steven, is listeners. Is she American? That's so funny. Well, thank you so much for your time and uh you've put a lot of time into explaining this to laymans like me.
And it's really helped turn the the lights on to some degree. I'll I'll be honest. It's turned the lights on and with the lights on, I am
Confused.
I'm confused about
Which path?
Is
Productive.
And most beneficial to society and humanity. And even though I can see more clearly now about the dynamics of all of these potential pathways, none of them seem that great. So
That's where I'm gonna leave it for today, but we'll pick up this conversation again soon. When more information comes in. That's right. And let's hope it's not as much as a trap as uh as I'm as I'm painting it. But if it is, then it's really even more important that when we get to the fall
We don't mislead ourselves into into thinking that this is just um temporary, that it's all gonna be solved quickly. We need to understand that we're going down some major, major roads here. And this situation, as bad as it is, notice that it's actually worse than it was a month ago when we were here. It's worse than
Steven. And the reason it's worse is we didn't head it off enough at the past.
Forty when we when I was here four weeks ago, if President Trump had taken some of the deals that we were talking about then
we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today.
So as bad as that negotiating position I'm saying of can military containment of of Israel, I realize people were saying, Oh my God, could never happen. Well, think about the things that could never happen that are happening right now.
This is the better pathway now. And if we don't take this pathway now, we come back in a month or two.
It will be worse.
Thank you, Robin.
What time.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.