3/12/26: New Ayatollah Breaks Silence, Trump Escalation Trap, Iron Dome Failures, California FBI Warning

11:09Krystal Ball:I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

11:42Krystal Ball:I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

11:49Saagar Enjeti:Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him.

11:56Krystal Ball:If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.

11:59Saagar Enjeti:But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.

12:12Robert Pape:The media is here.

12:13Saagar Enjeti:This case has gone viral.

12:15Robert Pape:The dating contract.

12:16Saagar Enjeti:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant.

12:21Robert Pape:This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

12:24Saagar Enjeti:I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***ing bachelor! Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

12:50Robert Pape:Joining us now is Professor Robert Pape. He is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, but he is also the author of The Escalation Trap, which is a sub stack where there will be a link down in the description. All of you should go and subscribe right now. Thank you very much for joining us, sir. We appreciate it.

13:07Krystal Ball:Thank you for having me.

13:08Robert Pape:Absolutely. So, sir, you are an expert, particularly in air power and in what you call the escalation trap. You studied, I think, every, what, every U.S. bombing campaign going back all the way to World War II? And you've talked to us.

13:20Krystal Ball:World War I. So my book, Bombing to Win, goes back to World War I. I've spent years teaching for the U.S. Air Force, conventional targeting strategy in particular. I have spent 20 years modeling the bombing of Iran. So this is something I know quite a bit about. I also study economic sanctions, terrorism. So all of that is why I built the escalation trap, because those frameworks I've been using for so long for chiefs of staff of the Air Force, for White Houses and so forth, I thought really time to bring them to everybody.

13:53Robert Pape:Right, which is why you're such an important guest for us. And we do have some latest news before we get into some of your theory about the escalation trap we want your reaction to. Guys, let's go and put D1 up there on the screen. We have now seen an expansion of Iran declaring that U.S. and Israeli economic banking interests in the region are targets. We have seen this now repeatedly, sir, where we've moved from initial military targets to then the striking of either civilian infrastructure by the United States or Israel inside of Iran, now an expansion to the banking sector. So it does appear as if your theory about escalation in air power continues to spiral as this war now enters what's its 13th day now so far.

14:31Robert Pape:So your reaction to this particular piece?

14:34Krystal Ball:Yeah, this is confirmation of what I've been saying. So when states try to use air power alone to topple regimes, it has never, and I'm choosing my words carefully, never worked in over 100 years. And we've tried many, many times. I'm glad to go through the cases. But what you get is often this lash back effect that you're not prepared for because you're overconfident. You think you're going to win quick and decisively. So you don't prepare for the worst cases. And now the worst cases are coming. And so we're always behind. Now, what Iran is specifically doing, and this lashing back is a horizontal escalation concept.

15:16Krystal Ball:It's actually a concept called parallel attack that we developed in the 1990s in the Air Force to use with precision targeting. And so with precision targeting, and they have precision drones, so we're effectively seeing two precision air campaigns collide for the first time in history. So their precision air campaign against us is parallel bombing at the same time, multiple nodes, not one at a time like we did in World War II. They're hitting multiple nodes in a network. They're treating their enemy as a system like we taught in the 90s to treat others as a system. You see, this is what their intel has been scooping up.

15:59Krystal Ball:They've been learning from us and studying how to do this. And now what they're doing is they're widening that horizontal escalation and those nodes because the more nodes you can attack at the same time in parallel, the more system shock you produce. So what you are seeing is Trump has triggered a lashing back that is now producing system-level shock. This is one of the things I explained. And that system-level shock is not just in Iran. It's not even just in the region. It's now going global. And so this is really probably going to go down as the most disastrous air campaign in history. Not quite there yet.

16:47Krystal Ball:But we're heading to major system shock and the panic that everybody's talking about with trade-off-or-muth. This is just the beginning here. You see, there's no control. The biggest thing I want to say, and then I'll stop, is that we've lost control of escalation. You see, one of the things I'm trying to explain in these writings is that there's the illusion the attacker has control. And now you see each time President Trump says he's about to stop the war, nobody listens anymore. Prices are going up. Nobody's paying attention because we all now know whether we say it or not. He's losing control more and more to Iran and also more and more to the system shock.

17:30Krystal Ball:You see, actors are going their own way. And that's part of the system level shock that is occurring.

17:39Saagar Enjeti:Well, let me get your reaction to some of what President Trump is specifically saying, because he paints a very different portrait. I would say that what you're painting here for us, Professor, put D2 up on the screen. He spoke with Axios. He told them in a phone interview yesterday, the war with Iran will end soon because, quote, there is practically nothing left to target. Little this and that. Anytime I want it to end, it will end, he said during the five-minute call. What is your reaction to his presentation of how this is all going?

18:11Krystal Ball:Well, this is what I call the victory narrative, but it's meeting escalation reality. And the reality is that he's one actor in the system now, but Iran is another actor who's actually driving the escalation pretty strongly. So if he's want to shut this war down, he's got to shut down the attacks on Iran. Well, he's already tried to break Iran. That's not working. So what's he going to give Iran to get them to stop? You see, he had a deal on the table the Friday before he started the bombing. He can't, I'd be very surprised and go back to that deal now. And then on top of that, imagine he could even get the Iranians to come back to a third round of negotiators.

18:55Krystal Ball:Keeping in mind, we've killed the previous negotiators twice now. But keep in mind, Let's say he pulls that out. How is he going to get Israel to stop killing the leaders the next time? You see, so is he going to slap sanctions on Israel and say, you kill more Iranian leaders? So he's got, and these are just, and I haven't even talked about the Gulf states and others and Russia. Oh, my goodness gracious. So as this has become a system-level problem, those actors multiply who have control and increasingly more control than the United States. So just imagine, I just named Iran, Israel, and Russia that he has to get to call this thing off.

19:40Krystal Ball:How's he going to do that exactly? What's the plan here? Again, this is victory narrative. we're in now the midst of escalation reality. And that victory narrative, we're just going to find fewer and fewer people paying any attention. They may listen. Trump loyalists may say they verbalize it, but that's like as if, you see, it's not real. And it's, we all know that because the prices are going up. And then when the price of the gas is going up, everybody's going to know victory narrative is meeting escalation reality.

20:14Robert Pape:Very, very true. So let's turn to some of your own points here about the risk, guys. Can we put his slideshow, D4, up there on the screen? So you start with multiple risks that we are now seeing. Energy shock, about 20 % of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. If that flow is disrupted even partially, the economic shock would hit, obviously, the entire globe. Energy market's watching that. Risk number two is horizontal escalation, which I believe you've just talked about. Risk three is global infrastructure vulnerability. Risk four is military and economic strain. And risk five is strategic distraction.

20:48Robert Pape:Can you just break some of that stuff down for us so we can get into it?

20:52Krystal Ball:Yeah. So what you are seeing is not this disaster that is unfolding is multidimensional. Now, Now, we've had disasters in the past, but they have been more uni or single dimensional. The reason I'm laying this out in threads here is because the threads allow us to see the different dimensions of the risk. And there are dimensions like a layer cake that are intersecting in real time, you see. And it's becoming and the point on you've laid out the risk. And I'll just mention the point on the distraction. As the risks come together, they overload us. We get overwhelmed. Well, that's why I put out these frameworks in the escalation trap and then tie them to the events that are occurring.

21:43Krystal Ball:Because as I have over the years, I started to develop these when I taught for the U.S. Air Force, because I saw that in war, in crisis, people are overloaded. And that's when the frameworks, believe it or not, become the most important because they need those to make sense of this complex chaos. Otherwise, they're just bouncing all around, you see. So what you're seeing with that distraction is one of the most difficult challenges right now. It's not just that we have a lot coming in our Twitter feeds, our X feeds. That's not quite it. It's that there's multi-dimension. So let's break them apart.

22:24Krystal Ball:Let's talk about them. Let's see how they're unfolding in stages. the post I'm about to put out on Substack pretty soon after this interview is going to help tie those together so people can see that and then help see where this thing is heading, you see. And what is really in front of us now is probably the worst disaster that's unfolding here that's been triggered by air power, certainly in most of our lifetimes. And we'll see how far this this goes, but it's no longer just President Trump, as I'm saying, oh, yeah, he's just going to wake up. Well, he can try it. He can announce today, right now, this second, you know, Professor Pape, you're wrong.

23:09Krystal Ball:I announced today the war is over. Let's see if it stops the next hour. You see, because he's got all those other actors here who are, you know, he had chances to stop this in June. He could have negotiated. He's now touched off the escalation trap. He's in it. It's not something that he controls.

23:31Saagar Enjeti:And what does the next level of escalation look like? We already have a broadening of the war. Obviously, the GCC countries have been hit pretty significantly. They seem quite upset. Israel's getting hit. They're saying they may set up some positions in the Horn of Africa. We have reported involvement of the Russians and the Chinese What does the next level of escalation look like?

23:53Krystal Ball:The next level is going to be about the dispersal of the enriched uranium that you're hearing quietly, you know, these briefings on Capitol Hill, the senators coming out ashen-faced and so forth. We have to keep in mind that for 25 years, not just Donald Trump, this whole militarized crisis with Iran has been about Iran's enriching uranium. Well, they have 1 ,000 pounds of 60 % enriched uranium that was in Fordow, Natanz, Esophon, other places. And when Trump bombed that in June, he destroyed buildings and functioning of buildings. He didn't get that enriched uranium. And we have satellite photography of likely the dispersal of that material, and that's on my sub stack.

24:42Krystal Ball:So people can go and watch a video. They do have to subscribe. It's free, but you can see the actual satellite photography of this. And we also have more photography from satellites, and this is civilian satellites, by the way, in February in Eszaphan. So this is now happening, you see, and it's coming out. President Trump himself a couple days ago in one of his discussions mentions this dispersal happening. This is very worrisome. That material can be, yes, down the road fashioned into bombs, but it can be used for radiological weapons. So imagine that sprinkled on those cones of some of those precision drones going into Doha.

25:21Krystal Ball:How, you know, we already, you know, when's the next time a billionaire is going to show up there? So you end up with, so there's a lot of real capability here that Iran has not used yet. And this image of Iran as a beaten down, you know, tiny little, you know, pipsqueak of a country with no capability that we've been hearing for years. This has never been true. OK, so what's happening is Iran is is a fairly strong country, 92 million. It's, as you reported, exporting oil when the rest of the world can't get is just think about this for a moment. So they have a lot of capability here yet to go.

26:01Krystal Ball:And this is where the real danger is down the road. We're only at the beginning of the dangerous part of the escalation trap.

26:11Robert Pape:Professor, I am very worried about the breaking of a nuclear taboo, not necessarily just in the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, but an atmospheric nuclear test. Where would that fit into your escalation line? Am I being crazy? I'm going to be writing.

26:26Krystal Ball:Yeah, so I give lectures on this. So again, this is now going to come forward. I will put these as lectures and video online. So every two weeks for some part of my sub stack, I do these video briefings now. And so we can talk about these serious issues. So what people have been saying is Iran is so radical, irrational, that what they're going to do is they're going to fashion a bomb. And the very first thing they're going to do is they're going to drop one on Tel Aviv and maybe a second one on New York here. here. And then what this is, is an image of Iran. They're painting an image of an irrational state that spasmodically reacts without thinking.

27:08Krystal Ball:That's not what Iran has been doing for 25 years. So I'm not trying to paint them as 10 feet tall, but they've been pretty strategic. I would say I'd give them at least a B plus, if not an A. So they've been pretty strategic in how they've behaved. And what you would do with nuclear weapons is the very first thing is you don't just set off when you have one. You want to follow the North Korea pattern, which is you want many nuclear weapons. Notice North Korea has got 60 plus nuclear weapons. And we're suddenly saying that, well, okay, we're not going to tickle that tiger. Well, Iran saw that. So Iran is what, But that's why in their material, all that material, that thousand pounds and everything I'm describing, that's enough for between 10 and 16 bombs.

27:59Krystal Ball:So what Iran really wants, if they're going to go the nuclear route, is not one bomb. They want five or six bombs because the very first use of that bomb is probably going to be, quote, a test. And then what are we going to say? We're going to say, oh, that's not good enough. They only had one. They only had one. So then they're going to have to do a second test, probably on their own territory. Once they do two, they're not going to need to do three or four, and people are going to panic. And then we're going to see the real consequences of what's occurring here, you see. So the way to understand this is the politics of strategy, the politics of escalation.

28:42Krystal Ball:That's my forte. So I taught the best pilots in the Air Force. Those folks weren't coming to me to learn how to put a bomb on a target. They want to know when they're generals and they're four-star generals and they're chief of staff, what's going to happen here after the bombs hit the target, you see. And that's why quite a few folks, I've even received emails here from my former military students saying, my God, Professor Pape, you were teaching this 20 years ago here. You must be hitting your head about what's occurring because it's unfolding just as you told us it was going to unfold in your frameworks.

29:19Krystal Ball:Yeah. And they're appreciating now those frameworks are becoming more available so people can understand this. And that's why I think you saw the military being much more reluctant to get on this board with regime change. You saw that, right? There's a gap here. And the military, they're very professional. They're going to do what they are ordered to do. They will give advice. But if the president says, that's all fine and good, but I'm going to ignore your advice, they will do that because they are professionals. They are loyal to the Constitution as they see it. here. But that's the real danger, sir.

29:59Krystal Ball:So I hope I explain that this is where the scariness here could get worse. And we have big midterms coming up. So why wouldn't they time this around the midterms? I mean, that would really just think about what that would do for Trump's. They really, the soft underbelly that we know and our enemies know is our politics. That's why they've gone the long war strategy. And what you're seeing is they're having all different dimensions of the long war. And more and more, Trump is looking like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, where he just lost control.

30:35Saagar Enjeti:Wow. And my last question for you is, there's been a bunch of reporting about how Israeli interests and goals may diverge from U.S. interests and goals. And I'm curious your thoughts on that. And also, while you see this as going catastrophically for the U.S., is it going catastrophically for Israel, because it seems to me that, you know, just having Iran's capabilities degraded and the possibility of, you know, sort of chaos on the ground in Iran serves Israeli interests fairly well. And certainly it's been a goal of theirs for a long time to get us in the Gulf states, et cetera, embroiled directly in this war.

31:12Krystal Ball:Yeah. So I want to separate what Israel and Netanyahu may think their interests are. And I understand they have the right to define their own interests from what I think is their actual security interests. And what I think is happening here is that Israel's security is getting worse with the passage of time, not better. And I think they too have been mesmerized by the hyper accuracy of precision weapons. They can bomb targets and so forth. And then they can actually destroy buildings with precision weapons. As As you're seeing, they've learned in Gaza that you can actually mass coordinate those bombs and say you're not targeting civilians while you wreck the civilian infrastructure for anybody to live anywhere.

31:56Krystal Ball:So they're learning this. But the bottom line is that this is those things I'm talking about, like, let's just pick the nuclear, the dispersal of nuclear material. Trump's bombing of Fordow did not contain the nuclear problem in Iran. it triggered the dispersal of nuclear material. And as that material disperses, that's a danger not just to America, that's not just a danger to say Basra, that's a danger to Tel Aviv as well. And what is Netanyahu exactly going to do here? Are they seriously going to put ground troops in? Are they seriously going to think about nuclear escalation? I mean, this is the kind of things you've got to scratch your head and say, what are they actually thinking?

32:38Krystal Ball:Because this dispersal of this material, none of those options are guaranteed to protect. So this really is not, I would say, in Israel's interest, but they've got their stated views and they may disagree. And as they disagree, then the real divergence here is between their stated or thinking and the actual reality that they are facing. That's the real issue here.

33:05Robert Pape:Last question for you, sir. You said this is close to the most disastrous campaign. What is the most disastrous campaign?

33:11Krystal Ball:Yeah, the most disastrous campaign was probably Bill Clinton's campaign in March 1999, when he had a three-day bombing campaign, he thought it would be three days, to hit 51 regime targets in and around Belgrade, including Milosevic, the leader's home. Now, the idea was to wreck the crony regime of Milosevic. We had this model of cronyism in Serbia. And what happened was that triggered a lashing back where Milosevic sent 30 ,000 troops in a horizontal escalation way to cleanse a million, 980 ,000 Kosovar civilians from Kosovo. That's 50 % of the population. Now, what do we have here comparing that so far?

34:05Krystal Ball:We have 50 ,000 Americans who've run away. So that's not a million who've run out of the region, but still, that's 50 ,000. And as time goes on, the economic consequences here are going to reach not just millions, but probably hundreds of millions of people. That's only at the beginning stages now. So that's why I say we're entering that. But if, you know, this goes on for three or four weeks, as it well could, and we're going to discover that putting out those oil reserves are one time. You use it once and it's gone. And then that's all going to start to get priced into everything. As those price surges continue to go up by April, you're going to start to see the real pain come in.

34:53Krystal Ball:And it's going to start to make Kosovo look like a small hill. So this is where we're really heading. And notice we haven't even talked about the most scary stuff that we were just talking about before. So as this thing unfolds, we need to understand that we really, really have touched off the escalation trap in a way. And the biggest problem is that President Trump just is losing control. And he's going to try to get the control back. But so, too, did Lyndon Johnson. I was going to say that's the LBJ trap.

35:25Robert Pape:We can call it the LBJ.

35:26Krystal Ball:It's the same. This is the LBJ didn't think he was going to lose. I guarantee you did wake up one day and say, oh, yeah, how can I actually become probably the worst president in history and then beg for other presidents to come in like Jimmy Carter or so forth to bail him out? I mean, this is really they don't wake up that way. I guarantee you what they're waking up is they're they're, I think, mesmerized by this illusion of control of escalation. And you even hear President Trump saying, when will Iran reach the breaking point? That was exactly the rhetoric of LBJ. How can we break the back of the North Vietnamese?

36:07Krystal Ball:and that search for the breaking point. There's actually articles with those titles, the search for the breaking point, you see. And that language, I mean, I don't think Trump probably went back to the speeches of LBJ. This is the reality of the frameworks. The frameworks force this, you see. And so that's why those frameworks matter.

36:31Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, well, he's out right now saying that oil, high oil price is actually good for the US. So I think to your point about how people are not going to be listening to him, they have their own interests when they see those prices. Yeah, we're just enjoying eating.

36:43Krystal Ball:But, you know, we eat, you know, we're eating three meals a day and most of us probably should just be having one. And boy, that's going to be. No, this isn't going to work.

36:52Robert Pape:Great, great, great tactic. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Escalation Trap. Substack link is down in the description. Also, I just ordered your book on Amazon while you were talking. Oh, my God. Bombing to win. It's on my way to my house. And I'll do a review here on the show.

37:05Krystal Ball:Yeah, well, I really appreciate what you're doing for the country here to kind of bring these frameworks out so they can see that there's some some way to understand what's happening to us. It's our honor.

37:17Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, it's our privilege. We hope you'll join us again.

37:19Krystal Ball:Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much. My pleasure.

37:23Saagar Enjeti:This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones.

38:03Saagar Enjeti:Start your show today at Spreaker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour,

38:10Krystal Ball:you might as well publish it. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy?

38:18Robert Pape:Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.

38:21Krystal Ball:Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

38:36Saagar Enjeti:Okay, I don't think that's true.

38:38Krystal Ball:I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

39:11Krystal Ball:I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

39:18Saagar Enjeti:Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him.

39:25Krystal Ball:If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.

39:28Saagar Enjeti:But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral.

39:43Robert Pape:The dating contract.

39:45Saagar Enjeti:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant.

39:49Robert Pape:This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

39:53Saagar Enjeti:I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

40:03Robert Pape:I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***ing bachelor!

40:08Saagar Enjeti:Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

40:19Saagar Enjeti:So guys, we're getting some new video out of Israel showing a significant Hezbollah attack on northern Israel. You can put these images up on the screen. These are fairly extraordinary. Of course, it's pretty rare to get any sort of video out of Israel because they have severe censorship. And you can see the significance of this attack. I mean, some of these are being intercepted, and some of them are clearly striking targets in the area. You know, this after the idea that have been projected. I think that the Israelis maybe even believed that Hezbollah had been severely degraded after their top leadership had been taken out after the infamous Beeper attack.

40:57Saagar Enjeti:And yet clearly here they are able to fully join this war in a way that is fairly sophisticated. And at the same time, it appears that the Iron Dome is failing to intercept a sizable number of the missiles at this point that are being fired towards Israel. We can put this next one up on the screen. This is pretty extraordinary. This reporter says that the Iron Dome could not stop about half of the 100 rockets that Hezbollah launched at Israel just a few hours ago. We can also put E3 up on the screen. Haaretz has some reporting about the quote-unquote hole in Israel's early warning system, and its missile defense batteries are at risk as well.

41:41Saagar Enjeti:And so basically what this article lays out in detail is that when you have these missile defense systems, they also have to be protected. And so that has created tremendous vulnerability. And obviously, it has been a strategy of Iran to target these defense systems. And they've been pretty effective, at least at our batteries in the region, in effectuating that target. That's why we had to pull the THAAD battery system from South Korea and bring it over because some of the damage that had been incurred. And so their strategy was to take out those capabilities or degrade those capabilities early.

42:19Saagar Enjeti:And then that would enable them to be able to strike stronger blows using, you know, fewer rockets, missiles and drones, et cetera. And based on what we can see in terms of the degrading capability of the rocket interception here from the Iron Dome, that strategy seems to be working fairly successfully.

42:37Robert Pape:Let's put E4 just to give you an example. This is from the Jerusalem in post. So again, everything we're showing you is from Israeli media. After 11 days of fighting, Israel has received 9 ,000 missile damage claims, 6 ,500 buildings, 1 ,044 contents and equipment, 1 ,485 vehicles. So that is just the private claims now so far. That does not factor in the Hezbollah attack that just happened yesterday. Keep in mind also that this now means an opening of the front with Lebanon. Let's put E5 up there on the screen. I can talk a little bit over it. These are some of the strikes that were happening all across Lebanon in immediate retaliation.

43:19Robert Pape:Immediate reports out of Israel, at least some, said that only about 50 % or so of those rockets were even intercepted by the Iron Dome, combine that with what Crystal just talked about in terms of the holes in the targeting system. So they are now being struck in a coordinated attack by Hezbollah and by Iran. Also, the fact is, is that clearly Hezbollah has much more strength than they let on. Remember the pager attack and the war and often bombing that they had launched. Now, what this shows is not only their strength, but the retaliation that Israel is now going for. And already they're basically doing the Israeli playbook, floating ethnic cleansing.

43:57Saagar Enjeti:It's right

43:58Robert Pape:there on the, it's on the books.

43:59Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. Let's put E6 up on the screen. This is Amit Segal, who is a regime propagandist in Israel, closely tied to the government. And what he is saying is, quote, what needs to be done in Lebanon is very simple. Advance to Latani River and announce, we will not leave until Hezbollah is disarmed. But this time, unlike the old security zone, not a single resident returns, aka ethnic cleansing. And at the same time, a severe and devastating strike on Dahiya. So this is the, you know, what is being floated and very much, you know, part of the greater Israel project, this would be, you know, accomplishing some of their additional goals.

44:39Saagar Enjeti:I think Sagar made the point earlier, part of why we're getting that video out of Israel's being allowed out of the rocket attacks from Hezbollah is to try to justify exactly this type of military incursion and take over. And ultimately, you know, what's floated here is an ethnic cleansing, removing all of the existing residents and not allowing them to return and de facto taking over more territory in the region. That is what they're trying to use this war as cover to do. So, you know, they're taking damage, but they're also using the opportunity in an attempt to further some of their greater regional goals.

45:18Robert Pape:Yeah, exactly. And you actually literally, as we were taping, I can read the latest from Amit Segal and the IDF. The IDF spokesperson has now directed all residents of southern Lebanon to move beyond a border checkpoint, which is a river inside southern Lebanon. So, I mean, I don't know what the population is. Probably a lot. Right. And basically a evacuation order, a.k.a. Gaza level one. And as he floated there, we're going to tell him to leave and that you're never going to come back until we dismantle all of Hezbollah. And, oh, and actually that's basically an impossible task. And so that will mean that we'll just get to take over and annex, de facto annex, in another part of another country.

45:59And this is all happening under our auspices.

46:02Robert Pape:It also shows you this thing that Professor Pape talked about, about their actual security interests. Now they're fighting a war with Iran. Now they're fighting a war with Hezbollah. They're fighting a war or they're technically annexed like parts of Syria. They're literally on a seven front war. What is the eighth front? It's the United States, the propaganda war against people like us. You are watching them expand in territory at this very moment. But also, they can't do any of this without the explicit backing of the United States. And you already see holes in their military interceptors. And the longer this goes on leads you to what Professor Pape talked about, the escalation trap.

46:37Robert Pape:And what they may not have interceptors, but what do they have? Nuclear weapons. They have ground forces which could invade Lebanon. They can pressure the United States to continue going and, you know, all in with our entire military. That's the really scary part about watching this happen.

46:52Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. No, that's absolutely the case. And, I mean, with regard to Israel, right, the whole raison d 'etre is to be a safe haven for Jews. Yeah. How safe is this haven right now? I mean, you know, Shil has been talking about how many how many people in Israel have been leaving the country, have been, you know, that their level of out migration is really significant because, yeah, you want to be in a bomb shelter every, you know, every other month. You're having to huddle with your family in a bomb shelter and have sirens go off in Tel Aviv and worry about your apartment building being struck or your car being destroyed or, you know, or God forbid you, you know, losing your life or your children being threatened, etc.

47:33Saagar Enjeti:So, of course, a lot of a lot of normal people who are not down with the like, you know, hardcore religious end times and the greater Israel project and the whole bit. They're going to say, OK, we're out of here. They're you know, we're going to go to greener pastures. So I think that is absolutely the case. But there is I also want to be really clear. The population of Israel is fully on board with this war. I mean, I said the polling here is, you know, overwhelming opposition in Israel. It's like 87 percent that are absolutely in favor of this war with Iran. Netanyahu is not an outlier. His government is not an outlier.

48:08Saagar Enjeti:They are representative of the wishes of the people of Israel. So, you know, so this is the direction they're going to continue to push in. And I think it, you know, once again demonstrates the divergence between the global goods or even the U.S. good and what the Israelis want. Yet they seem to be very effective at getting their way.

48:26Robert Pape:Yep. So don't let this go unnoticed. We've got a full blown, you know, ethnic, possible ethnic cleansing watch right here happening again now in Lebanon. It's going to be crazy. It's going to tie them down. It's going to escalate stuff for us. They're going to lean even more heavily on us to give them more types of weapons or who knows and unleash what else potentially on Iran is some sort of retaliation. Really pay close attention.

48:48Saagar Enjeti:And Hezbollah is surprisingly fierce. Yeah. I think for everybody. I did not know that they continued to maintain this level of capacity. And so yet another, you know, factor that was not anticipated because when you have Iran and Hezbollah striking inside Israel at the same time, that is going to overwhelm their defensive capabilities.

49:07Robert Pape:Because the narrative was we already dealt with Hezbollah with the pager attack. We're finished. We're over. It's done. And so we don't have to wait out. We're just fighting with you. And, oh, oops. All of a sudden, 100 rockets come over. And you're like, okay, this is not good. And it turns out not nearly as depleted as we thought. I also think Hezbollah is not stupid. They knew they were under immense pressure from the Lebanese government to not do anything like this. But for them, they're like, look, if Iran gets wiped out, then we're going to get wiped out one way or the other. We're going to lose our benefactor and or they're going to come and they're going to get us next.

49:37Robert Pape:So it's existential. We've got to fight to the death. So we have multiple people now fighting to the death on this front. And don't underestimate them. Look at what they did in Syria. Real battle-tested force. A lot of them are willing to die. So, yeah, just another front that's opened here in the war. Okay, let's get to California and the drone threat. Turning now to a very strange incident, which we have to keep you all updated. So there's this big piece of news from ABC that broke yesterday. Let's put it up here on the screen. What do we have? We have the FBI is warned that Iran aspired to attack California with drones in retaliation for the war.

50:17Robert Pape:The warning came in a bulletin that was sent to police departments in recent days that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast. We recently acquired information. As of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the U.S. homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California in the event that the U.S. conducted strikes against Iran. We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack. Obviously, a lot of hackles were raised at that one.

50:54Robert Pape:What exactly is going on here? Is it a way to try and inspire fear in the American public in order to try and support some of what's going on right now with the war? And local police and others, including those briefed on the matter. Let's put F3, please, up on the screen. LAPD sources, this is from Fox News, by the way, just to show you how little credence that even these people are giving in. They say, I've talked to you today, say there is not a known credible drone threat, and this may fall under the general death to America umbrella. So not really something that was worth, I think, a full-blown bulletin to the LAPD.

51:33Robert Pape:Let's think about logistics here, Crystal. So the current range, I believe, of the drone would make it so that, what is it, like three to four times anything that is even in their theoretical maximal range for their longest range drone that they may have. They would have to put it on a unmanned aircraft carrier, which would have to sail thousands of nautical miles to off the coast of California. So via, you know, across various different sea channels and other things which are highly monitored. And then it would have to take off from said aircraft carrier, unmanned carrier, allegedly, and then come and hit a site in California.

52:14Robert Pape:Just personally a little skeptical of that.

52:17Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, I would say so. I would say so. There was another uncorroborated report, they say, from 2025 that suggested unidentified Mexican cartel leaders had authorized attacks using drones carrying explosives against U.S. law enforcement. They said this type of attack against U.S. personnel or interest inside the U.S. would be unprecedented but exemplifies a plausible scenario, although cartels typically avoid actions that would result in unwanted attention or responses from U.S. authorities. Again, think of how nonsensical this is. you think the Mexican cartels want to start a war? Like, you think that's going to go well with them?

52:52Saagar Enjeti:You think that's an intelligent scenario? So they're clearly trying to gin up all of these, you know, frightful scenarios of what could unfold. And they've got the sequencing all wrong here, Sokka. You've got to manufacture the consent before the war starts. You've got to do the false flag before you get into this thing. You've got to generate all the fear and the anxiety and the, oh, my God, they're like terrible people who are coming to attack California. You got to do that before you launch the war, guys, because now it just reads as like, OK, well, if there's all this risk, why are you doing this?

53:23Saagar Enjeti:Why are you creating more risk? How is this creating any sort of like sense of safety for the American people? No, instead, what you're doing with these fake bulletins is establishing that what you have done in the Middle East is just creating actually more risk and more danger for Americans here and abroad. I mean, I don't put any stock. There's all this like Iranian sleeper cell conversation now, too. I don't put any stock in that as well either. But it is true that we are making a lot of people around the world absolutely hate our guts. We just murdered 168 schoolchildren. How do you think that, you know, their parents feel about us now?

53:58Saagar Enjeti:How do you think that their siblings who are going to grow up? How do you think they're going to feel about us now? How do you think all of the orphans in Gaza or the children who are amputees now, largest amputee population in the world in Gaza, how do you think that they feel about it? So, yes, we are creating more danger for our own population and our own service members and our own assets in the region. Do I believe this particular story about drones striking L.A.? Absolutely not. And one other thing to keep in mind here is, you know, I mean, what we've seen from Iran in terms of their attacks on any sort of U.S.

54:34Saagar Enjeti:personnel or bases in the region has always been we or Israel attack them first. We have not seen them, you know, trying to come over here and drone strike us. We have not seen them out of the blue attacking our assets in the region either. It has always been in retaliation for something that we started. So it does not fit their pattern of behavior whatsoever. So, of course, we already have law enforcement officials who are like, this is ridiculous.

54:58Robert Pape:The drone thing, I'm not worried about. The sleeper cell thing, I'll put it to you this way. Do I think that there are intentionally designed terror sleeper cells? We didn't see any of that usually during the global war on terror. Although there were a few, like Al-Qaeda plots. You couldn't really call it sleeper cell. It would be an Al-Qaeda cell, right? Like people who were inspired, there would be like a small set of teams. You have the London attacks that happened in 05. You had the Times Square plot. Some of these other things that happened here in the United States. That's very unlikely.

55:25Robert Pape:But what did we see a lot of? San Bernardino, a lot of these, what are they like? You know, these so-called lone wolf inspired by blah, blah, blah. I'm actually pretty worried about that. Yeah, that could definitely happen. I mean, listen, we only have tens of millions of people here illegally. We have no idea who most of these people are. We have no registry or any of that, not to mention a massive Muslim population. It's like, yeah, that's scary. And it couldn't even just be them. It could also be, I mean, who knows? Far left anarchists, far right people.

55:51Saagar Enjeti:You also have an FBI that's very interested in creating false, like ginning up terror, radicalizing people themselves and then setting them off and, you know, so that they can disrupt. Oh, my God, we disrupted the terror attack. But no, I mean, listen, undocumented immigrants, that's one thing. But you also have plenty of Americans who are going to be disgusted and radicalized by what's going on, who, you know, are looking at the atrocities abroad. And so it's a very volatile mix. Obviously, we're a population that is chock full of guns and weapons and very violent society to begin with. We were just talking about the fact that a bunch of these white South Africans that came over here are going back home because they find our society to be too violent, dangerous and chaotic.

56:32Saagar Enjeti:They're right. So, you know, that is the landscape. And then you add on top of that this disgusting illegal war of choice where innocent civilians are being slaughtered. And we can see, you know, not only the schoolgirls, we see what happened in Tehran when the Israelis reportedly bombed this oil depot. And you had, you know, a massive ecological disaster, acid rain raining down from the sky. Health effects that we can only, you know, scarcely imagine what the reverberations of that have been. Many civilians have been killed. And, yeah, it creates more risk for us is the bottom line. But this particular thing, total and complete bullshit.

57:10Saagar Enjeti:Don't worry about that one.

57:12Robert Pape:As I said, I'm really not worried about some state-sponsored attack. I think that's some sort of blowback-style attack that could happen here. By the way, I mentioned all these illegal. What about all these Iranians who are currently living here? We got, like, you know, how many massive Iranian populations? Polling, which you've seen, Crystal, if you watch the media, you would think 90 % of American Iranians are for the war. Not true. A recent poll just came out. They're 50-50 on it. So like you just said, maybe there's some guy who's got some family over there. They get killed. You could see it happening.

57:44Robert Pape:Are we excusing it? No. We're just living in reality. Like, yeah, hope that there's no violence. But having lived through the entire global war on terror and seeing some of these attacks all happen in real time, you really have to be careful, which is why it's a better idea to just not get involved in the war in the first place. Okay. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. We'll have a great Friday show for everybody tomorrow. We'll see you all then.

58:21Saagar Enjeti:Peace to the planet. Charlamagne Tha God here. And listen, we are back. The Black Effect Podcast Festival is back in Atlanta on April 25th at Pullman Yard. And the full lineup is nuts. We got the Grits and Eggs podcast, Deontay Kyle and Big Ice Cup Cat. We got Club 520 with Jeff Teague and the gang. Don't call me white, girl. Mona will be there. Keep it positive, sweetie, with Crystal Renee. We got Reality with the King with Carlos King. And yes, Drink Champ will be in the building. Plus, you know, we're going to have a lot of guests. So you need to join us. And we got the Black Effect Marketplace, the picture podcast, and everything you expect from the Black Effect Podcast Festival.

59:00Saagar Enjeti:Tickets are on sale right now. Go get yours at blackeffect.com slash podcast festival. Don't play yourself, okay? Pull up.

59:36Krystal Ball:Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

59:46Saagar Enjeti:But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him.

59:50Krystal Ball:If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.

59:52Saagar Enjeti:That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral.

1:00:02Robert Pape:The dating contract.

1:00:03Saagar Enjeti:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

1:00:07Robert Pape:This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

1:00:09Saagar Enjeti:I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.