4/22/26: Iran Fires On Ships In Hormuz Strait, Ryan Debunks Laura Loomer, Robert Pape On Iran War

22:12And then moments later, Trump goes nuclear on Twitter and says, no, you know, we're keeping our military blockade in place and the naval blockade in place. And then the Iranians say, OK, we go back to the status quo before this right now. What I had been told was that this had been choreographed via the Pakistanis, that Arachi was going to say X, Trump was going to say Y, things were going to calm down a bit, and then the talks were going to proceed. It all gets entirely blown up. And I suspect that there's a combination of the Pakistanis playing some dirty games to an extent here and the fact that Trump is erratic and he does say things that he doesn't mean.

22:50I mean, just look at the last 72 hours, all these interviews he did with the New York Post, with PBS, with CNBC. He's saying, I might go to Islamabad. Jared and Steve are on their way. No, actually, JD is on his way. Oh, actually, they're not going now. We're going to bomb them back to civilization. Oh, I'm going to extend the ceasefire. Imagine, forget that it's Iran. Let's talk about any country. Imagine having to deal with that when it's actually like war and peace, where you have two nuclear powers attacking another country, where they are a nation of institutions. And they're just basically trying to say, let's figure out our red lines here.

23:24I mean, it's crazy making. And Pakistan has a long history of dirty tricks. So this whole cocktail is really insane that we're looking at right now.

23:35Emily Jashinsky:Let's put A5 on the screen just to the point Jeremy was making. This is a Barack Ravid tweet from yesterday, 12.08 p.m. Eastern time. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are also still in the U.S., Ravid reported at the time. The DHS plane that was supposed to take them this morning from Miami to Europe and to Pakistan didn't leave until several minutes ago and is making its way now to Washington, D.C. Maybe they are going to see Trump. That was shortly after Barack Rafeet had posted that Vice President Vance was also still in Washington. And a White House official had told him, quote, additional policy meetings are taking place at the White House today in which the vice president will participate.

24:13Emily Jashinsky:So this is all happening around noon yesterday. There's the deadline looming. So, Jeremy, is there any, I guess, what is the truth as far as you can tell about whether the Iranian side, Jesse Waters was on primetime last night saying that there had been a coup in Iran. But what truth is there, if any, to the idea that the Iranian side is also kind of in shambles, nobody knows who's in charge, that we've started to hear come from Trump and others in MAGA world in the last 24, 48 hours particularly? I don't think there's any doubt that there has been ferocious debate within Iran. In fact, I was speaking yesterday to Hassan Ahmadiyan, one of the best connected and most respected Iranian academics, and he's one of the most prominent people now in Al Jazeera Arabic.

25:04His appearances go viral because of his debating tactics, but also his ability to sort of predict what's going to happen. And what he said is that there was great debate over Iran's decision to accept this two-week pause because some factions within Iran believed that Iran had its best leverage by not backing down from the war and forcing Trump to agree to softer terms in any kind of a negotiation framework. And so there's no doubt that there is very intense debate. I'm sure there are shouting matches. I'm sure that there is a lot of animation to it. But I really do get the sense that these stories are primarily aimed at propaganda.

25:50It's information warfare against the Iranians. And it also is a kind of cover story for the utter chaos of the Trump administration that has played out in public. You know, Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, is an IRGC veteran. He's a multi-decade player in Iranian politics. But I'm told that there is no chance that he would be leading this delegation or staking out the positions that he has unless it was signed off on by the Supreme National Security Council of Iran. I mean, I think that we often or that Western media and commentators cartoonize the institutions of other countries.

26:26This is not, you know, Libya and this is not Syria. This is a nation that for 47 years has recognized that the U.S. at any moment could wage a war against it. They built up institutions and they built up parallel institutions. They have an official armed forces and then they have the IRGC. They have an official ministry of intelligence and then they have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence. They have religious and judicial and political institutions that run in parallel checks and balances in the same way that the United States does. It is true that the Supreme Leader has the right to veto these decisions, but I really think that it is sort of counter-intellectual and really oversimplified, and it does a disservice to the American public to imply that Iran is sort of a banana republic.

27:11If anything, I think it's a highly centralized state. And I would be very shocked if any of what is being said in the MAGA media ecosystem turns out to even be minimally true. I would just say that on this program, we cannot call into question the intellect of Jesse Waters. I mean, that's just I think that's just beyond the.

27:30Emily Jashinsky:Well, it's White House Correspondents Dinner Weekend. So Ryan's reminiscing on his. I want to I want to just strongly denounce any violence between journalists. However, I wouldn't call Jesse Waters a journalist. So anyone can Google Ryan Grimm 2016 bar fight with Jesse Waters. Fair game. Yeah, counter intellectual indeed. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for this update. Really appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Discover a spectacular island destination with crystal blue seas, endless sunshine and the cool Bahamian breeze. Baja Mar, located in Nassau, Bahamas, offers your choice of three luxury hotels, the richly refined Rosewood, the playfully hip SLS, and the stylishly modern Grand Hyatt.

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28:55Baja Mar, life spectacular. When it comes to advancing your education, you have more options than you think. At Rasmussen University, we find ways to remove barriers, not build them. Like a new laptop if you're eligible and enroll in select online or on-campus programs. That means flexible and engaging online courses and resources, tuition savings options if you qualify, exceptional student support, and much more. Online nationally or check out their 20 campuses across six states. Start when you're ready and get the support you need. Visit rasmussen.edu. Go on, get a little out there into the big heart of Nevada, where you can go off road and off the map on two lakes or on horseback.

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29:59Emily Jashinsky:Ryan has some original reporting for us this morning. Ryan, take it away. This is an interesting one. All right. So on April 4th, the State Department celebrated a new set of arrests, issuing a statement headlined, Secretary Rubio revokes green cards of foreign nationals with ties to Iranian terror regime, announcing that, quote, the niece and grandniece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani were arrested by federal agents, unquote. So the two women are Hamada Soleimani Afshar, she's 47, and her daughter, Serena Hosseini, who is 25. And they are, or they were, legal permanent residents with green cards living in Los Angeles like a lot of the rest of our Iranian-American population.

30:45Now, the idea that it's okay to punish two women for being related to a man who previously did battle with the United States when he was alive is itself absurd. None of us are responsible for what our uncles do. God help us all if we are. But because Rubio made such a big deal about these arrests and this claim, it's worth asking whether it's even true. So we reviewed Iranian birth records, identification papers, and other personal documents, including wills and other records, and we can reveal that no, these women have no connection to Qasem Soleimani whatsoever. It is entirely a case of mistaken identity sparked by right-wing activist Laura Loomer and also some fans of the Shah.

31:30So birth certificates from Iran collected by the family lay out a documented family tree spanning multiple generations with no connection to Soleimani or even to relatives of the late general. So at DropSite News, my colleague Murtaza Hussain and I also reviewed other personal identifying documents, including passports, family photographs, and work documentation from both Iran and the U.S. that strongly contradict the allegations that the two women were connected to the late Iranian commander, or that they were living lavishly from any connection to the Iranian government. So I spoke to both women yesterday from their South Texas ICE detention facility, which is privately run by the GEO Group, and they remain shocked at the situation they find themselves in.

32:15Hamada, she told me, had actually previously been imprisoned by the Iranian government for protesting it. When she got to the United States, the thing she told me that she was most looking forward to was being able to freely speak her mind. Serena told me that, yes, her mother is highly opinionated, but what they are not is related to Qasem Soleimani. Now, in order for Soleimani to be Hamada's uncle. Based on her last name, he would need to be the brother of Hamada's father. Hamada's father, Ali Soleimani Afshar, was born in Tehran in 1947. Yet according to the documents, he had no brothers at all, let alone ones corresponding to the identity of General Soleimani, who was born 10 years later in a small village in the southern province of Kerman.

33:01Ali Soleimani Afshar's parents died in his childhood. Historical passport documents also show that Soleimani Afshar's family origins go back generations to the city of Yazd in central Iran, a province away from the roots of General Soleimani. The late general is also known to have two brothers, Saurabh and Hossein, who have previously given interviews about their upbringing in Roel Kerman that identify themselves as his only brothers. They have no connection to Ali Soleimani Afshar. The State Department, though, is standing by its entirely false claims. They He told me in a statement, quote, hello, the following is on the record attributable to Assistant Secretary Dylan Johnson.

33:44While we do not comment on matters of classified intelligence, we remain certain of the Secretary's determination. If Dropsite News, scare quotes, is aware of anti-American green card holders with ties to terrorists present in the United States, we would gladly investigate those individuals for possible termination of legal status and deportation, unquote. Now, one of Serena's friends has set up a GoFundMe to help cover legal bills, which I verified is authentic, and we'll put a link to it in the description. And so, Emily, what we'll do is we'll also put up a Google Drive that has all of these records.

34:25So we've got, you know, passports, birth certificates, all kinds of other verified documents, like even wills from her grandparents. And the wills list all of the relatives. And so by doing that, you can say, OK, here are the here are the possible people that could be her uncle. And they're saying Uncle Qasim is their uncle. Then if you look at Qasim Solani, here are his brothers and sisters. There's no overlap between them. And also separately, they're from completely different areas. So he is, and also politically you can understand this, the fact that she was in prison for protesting against the government, of which Soleimani was a leading figure, means it's completely absurd to think that they'd be related.

35:17Like, there's no world in which the rural conservative family of Qasem Soleimani has a niece who's protesting Soleimani and going to prison for it. Like, maybe in America you have those kinds of things happening. And maybe there's some weird case of that happening in Iran. In any event, it didn't happen. Like, here are the family trees. They are hundreds of miles apart.

35:37Emily Jashinsky:What was it like trying to verify those documents from the other side of the world? Well, huge ups to Maz, who speaks Persian. Of course he does. You guys know my colleague Martazu Zane speaks like seven languages or something. Like, hey, Maz, I got a whole bunch of Persian documents. Can you read these? He's like, yeah, of course. Wow. Here you go. So once you have them, they're pretty straightforward. Right. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was the State Department's on the record comment to you, which is interesting to me because they say anti-American green card holders, I think is the phrase that they use in that.

36:16Emily Jashinsky:They say they're standing by the designation. But that's interesting because it's kind of a shifting of the goalposts from related to Soleimani to anti-American. Now, you can see how maybe they're using that in overlapping terms. That's a good point. They're kind of backing off that claim. They're saying we stand by the determination. Right. And by determination, I think what they mean, that's a good point. They mean our determination, basically, that we want to kick them out of the country. That you could be a Ramesa Ozturk, basically. But they don't comment on whether they're standing by the original claim, which was the reason for the arrest.

36:53Emily Jashinsky:It's slippery. That they're related to Soleimani. And calling them anti-American is, well, first of all, Serena, the daughter, seems to be completely apolitical. like she's just caught up in this her mom is constantly fighting on instagram and other other places with supporters of reza palavi she does not want the king the shah going back to iran being brought back to iran by a war like many iranians yeah yeah but now there's many rabid iranians iranian americans who love the shah and what seems to have happened is that they saw her last name and they whipped up this frenzy that she was related to Soleimani and then told Loomer.

37:40And Loomer then went with what she was told by these Iranian Americans who hate her. They don't hate her because she's anti-American or anything. They hate her because she's anti-Shah. And of the different groups who come to this country, to me, the ones that are more offensive are the ones who come here and then agitate to use American service members in the American military to then carry out other grudges in their home country.

38:07Emily Jashinsky:Yep. 100%. Hate that. Yeah. Whether you're Cuban, Israeli, whatever, like that's not America first. Like our military is not your play thing to go like exercise your grudges. Right. Like I'm sure like Maybe that's the argument you make to Laura Loomer. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of Somalians have different grievances with other clans in Somalia. We don't want the U.S. military to go in and settle those scores. That's not what we're here for. Nobody signed up for that. So in a way, Loomer is just, I mean, you can see how in that sense, the cause of Laura Loomer is almost undermining the America First mentality, as you just explained.

38:50Yeah, I think so. So we also looked into their asylum claim. So we'll roll through that. So on to the other State Department claim, namely that the two arrested women had filed a false claim for asylum, which was undercut, they say, by the fact that they had visited Iran in subsequent years. So friends of the family and the family themselves say that they had indeed been forced to leave Iran under duress. And it happened after Serena had taken part in a public dance performance in 2012 when she was about 12 years old. What happened is that she was in Turkey on vacation and she competed in this dance competition for the satellite channel TV Persia.

39:33It's illegal to watch TV Persia in Iran, but people can get it anyway. and it's the kind of soft cultural influence that the U.S. government funds. I don't know if they funded TV Persia at the time, but either way, when it aired back in Iran, it went viral and not in a good way. All hell came down on her and her mom. She was expelled from her public school, then not long after that, expelled from her next school, a private school, when the scandal resurfaced. Her mother was attacked on occasion, and they continued getting death threats. So here's one of the performances that went viral and aired on TV Persia.

40:20So under continuous pressure, they came to the U.S. when she was 14 and filed for asylum. They won and they have since become legal permanent residents. Now, Rubio's argument that the women don't deserve asylum is odd because one of the top U.S. complaints about the Iranian government is that they don't respect women's rights. Now, in general, a grant of asylum is called into question if the asylum seeker travels back to the country where they claimed they feel unsafe. And that honestly makes sense in general. But in the case of the two women, the threats they faced were indeed real, and they were in fact representative of what American authorities say about the repressive nature of the government in Iran.

41:05Yet you can also understand that visits home to family would still be relatively safe in their circumstances. You go to the airport, you visit the cousins, you go to the market, you walk in the park, whatever, you're going to be fine, especially if you're covered up. Serena told me she went back to Iran and visited her cousins and her father, but stayed away from those she knew were mad at her and told nobody she was coming. When she returned to the U.S., she was honest with customs officials, was questioned for about 45 minutes, and let back in. It never came up again until now. If the Trump administration insists that their asylum claim is bogus and deports them to Iran, Rubio will be simultaneously saying that Iran is in fact safe for such women, undercutting decades of American claims to the contrary, while we also are waging a war on Iran partly because we say those women are not safe in Iran.

42:00So which is it? Serena's friends also disputed characterizations in the press and that were put forward by the State Department that the family had been living lavishly in the United States, pointing out that they had been behind on mortgage payments, that they had been relying on the support of friends to pay for legal support in ICE detention. In reality, the Los Angeles residents had assimilated to the culture of their new country. The jewelry and handbags flaunted on Instagram and highlighted by the U.S. government were, they said, like much else in North Hollywood, entirely fake. Now, worse still, the mother's address was doxed and her house was ransacked and attacked by what appears to be an Iranian-American who believed she truly was related to Soleimani.

42:46Here is ring camera footage that they presented to me. And so this was April 8th, and they got in and they really trashed her house.

42:57Emily Jashinsky:Did it say one in the morning, four in the morning? Yes. Yes. Yes. And so what really does appear to have happened is that, and there's a lot of kind of Shah supporters in Iran, Shah's a sunset takes his name from in the LA area. I didn't mean Iran. There's a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of supporters in Iran, just not as many as the shop supporters in the US want us to believe there. There's a lot of there's a lot of Shah supporters in Los Angeles. Yes, they're constantly doing these weird protests and whatever. They're very excitable. They're very fervent and passionate believers in their cause.

43:35And the cause is going terribly. Trump himself agrees with Hamada that the Shah should not. He said the Shah is not really up for this.

43:45Emily Jashinsky:The Shah himself has kind of said that. The Shah himself, when he goes to bed at night, knows he's not up for this. Yes. I think he's up for exactly what he's doing, pretending to be, pretending to go back and going on Fox News and urging people to go out in the streets and get killed. So she's against him. She's also against the Iranian government. that is supposed to be a position that you're allowed to take in the United States. So talking to them last night, it was wild. And Serena would translate for her mom. And it was a very kind of, you could feel the mother-daughter relationship. She's like, yeah, my mom is pretty fiery.

44:29She's pretty passionate about stuff. And she was really excited when she got to the US that she could finally speak her mind

44:36Emily Jashinsky:without the mullahs telling her what she can and can't do. Now Serena too. And it's the enemies of the mullahs, the self-declared enemies of the mullahs who are then putting them in a situation. Yeah, she's like, she went to prison for speaking out on politics. This is how they describe it. She went to prison for speaking out on politics back in Iran. Now she's back in prison for speaking out on politics here, But she said, it's worse here. In Iran, it was one week. Here, it's three weeks and counting. And yesterday was the first day she was really able to speak because she has an autoimmune disorder, which requires kind of regular blood transmissions.

45:21She has a hemoglobin level that was down to six, which people can look that up. That's not good. She got some pills finally from the GeoGroup ICE Detention Center. which apparently pushed her hemoglobin levels back up to eight, which is still not high enough. But they do not seem to have any interest in offering her the blood transfusions that are regularly required with her condition. But you arrest somebody, accusing them of being related to this guy, you're responsible for her health care at this point. So it's a dire situation for them. I reached out to Loomer and said, if, you know, if I can prove to you that these women are not related to Soleimani, would you call for them to be released?

46:11She said no. Her direct quote was something like, I can even pull it up, but it said something like, I want all Islamic immigrants, migrants deported.

46:23Emily Jashinsky:So, which she doesn't even know that they're, she doesn't even know that they're Muslim. Yeah. She doesn't. Not that it matters, but she doesn't even know that. Here's her quote. I want all Islamic immigrants deported. I don't support any of their asylum claims. And she said, and they are related. She still believes that they're related. Because she was told, I think she was given a bunch of evidence by these Shah supporters that they're related to Soleimani. It's untrue. It's bad evidence. It's bunk. But I think she genuinely believes that she are. But as she's saying, she also doesn't care. Right.

47:02Emily Jashinsky:You know, if I don't think Rubio and Trump are particularly worried about the media backlash that getting these cases wrong causes them. But legally, I mean, I have to imagine that the higher you go up at the State Department, they're looking at the shoddy work in the Oster case, the Khalil case, where you then had the administration working backwards from their determination gone by to try and come up with reasons that people were threats to make their case in the court of public opinion. With Khalil, they thought he was on a student visa. And yeah, exactly. That's right. So they had to like, oh, shoot, he's a green card holder.

47:43Now we need to make something up. Right.

47:44Emily Jashinsky:And then they were going back to Instagram posts from like groups that he was affiliated with. Right. That he didn't have current affiliations with. And it seems like there's a similar situation here where Laura Loomer has a direct line to somebody of some power at the State Department. I doubt to Rubio himself, but probably somewhere in the middle that can make these decisions. And then the secretary signs off on them. They put it in front of you. Yeah, maybe Trump. And then they put it in front of the secretary. You have to trust your deputies of your secretary of state. And then you go back and you're like, who the hell got us from point A to point B on this?

48:21Emily Jashinsky:And so I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing them work backwards. Their statement saying, for example, anti-American green or anti-American asylum claims people. Asylum claims from anti-American people. That is, again, moving the goalposts. It's very different than saying this person is related to Soleimani. So it seems like maybe another. It really doesn't apply to Serena. If you really want to say her mom is anti-American because she was against the war as it related to bringing the Shah back to power, if you want to make that claim, I think that's insane. I think you're pro-American if you're against this war, frankly.

49:00Because I think this war is anti-American. It is damaging to America. And if we listened to Serena's mom instead of to Netanyahu, America would have made a better decision. Setting that aside, Serena doesn't even have, as far as I can tell, much of an opinion on this.

49:16Emily Jashinsky:They might find something, but who knows? They don't have it in front of us right now. That's for sure. But she seems mostly like apolitical. Like a normal 25-year-old person in Los Angeles who just wants to like dance and... No, she's a 25-year-old version of the 12-year-old you saw on stage there. And then you get into these protracted legal battles where the State Department, whether or not... Again, I don't think Rubio and the State Department and the Trump administration overall are particularly concerned about the fallout in public opinion. I think they feel confident they can make these cases and it's not going to be a big deal to voters.

49:54Emily Jashinsky:But they do then have to make these cases in court. And it's a pain in the ass when you have to work backwards and start coming up with reasons that you had, you know, evidence in the first place. And the best they're going to have for them is the fact that they went back to Iran. Immigration attorneys will tell you that's bad for your case because you said you're not safe there. You went there. Yeah. I think they have an extremely credible point to make. Like, yes, it was very dangerous and it would still be dangerous to live there. but flying back not telling anybody visiting your father and your cousins um if that's all you do that actually is safe but again that's just about the asylum and she told she and Serena says she told the government ahead of time yeah um that's that's also still just like yeah it's fine your green card holder because at that point they weren't asylum pending they were green card holders and like which is again different than whether or not they're anti-american right and Also, they had a chance when they flew back and said, hey, we were just in Iran.

51:02This is our situation. And we're like, cool, come on back in. To then, years later, on a false claim that you're related to a dead guy, arrest them is, I would like to say, un-American.

51:20Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. It was a great drop site reporting, Ryan. Well, thank you. Let's go ahead. Well, hopefully it does something. Anyway. It probably will. We'll see. Let's go ahead and bring in Professor Pate.

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53:12Climb a mountain or make your best effort. See thousands of stars in some of the darkest skies, stake out haunted hotels. Can you make it to sunrise? There's always something new to see because we've got plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelMevada.com.

53:31Emily Jashinsky:We're happy to be joined once again by friend of the show, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago and of course the Escalation Trap Substack. Make sure to subscribe to that if you haven't yet. Professor Pape, thank you so much for joining us once again. Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoy these discussions. You guys are just the best. So thank you so much for having me. Well, we appreciate you for being here. Yeah. Keep the compliments flowing and we'll stay happy. It'll be part of the escalation promise. Yes. In fact, I've been noticing, and I don't know, tell me if you've noticed this at all.

54:07It feels like Iranian officials have actually been following some of your analysis, particularly the argument that they're becoming a major power. I've seen them sort of that may be right. And so just so listeners know, so Russian television wants me on and has for a long time. Iranian media, various kinds wants me on. I just won't do that here. So I'm laying out what to expect for the world here. And I'm not trying to, you know, certainly not help the bad guys here or something like that. You're not seeing somebody who's in any way other than an American supporter here. And also, just so everybody knows, my ideal world is where America remains number one.

55:00We're the strongest, richest country in the world. We want everybody to come here because we're the best place on the planet to be. And I think we need to get back to being the best place on the planet to be here. But we're not going to get there if we don't understand the world that's coming at us.

55:19Emily Jashinsky:Well, let's just start by getting your reaction to the whirlwind of events yesterday where the deadline was looming, where J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, Steve Whitcoff were supposed to go to Islamabad and everybody was waiting, trying to figure out if the plane had taken off. They ended up, of course, not going, and Trump extended the deadline. We woke up this morning to news that there were ships fired on in the Strait of Hormuz. So Professor Pape, wild 24 hours. What do you make of it? Yes, but fully in line, if you're following the Substack post here, this is just in line with the expectations I've been laying out on both sides.

55:59And what you are seeing, number one, And as I've been saying, you know, from my early post about how Trump has the illusion of control, Trump's just lost control. So the bottom line is America's not winning. Trump is not in control. And what you are seeing is a rising trajectory for Iran. It's just growing, you know, sort of bit by bit. It's not exactly linear. There are some pauses, but it is growing, just as I've been saying. And Iran has cards to play. They are more in control as each day passes. And since the first hour of the bombing, America has been less in control and has less cards to play.

56:40And that's actually playing itself out. Now, in detail, let me just shift over to the details here, because I did post these here, these longer articles about what's happening with why is the ceasefire breaking down? Well, the ceasefire is breaking down not because this is not a case of misunderstanding where you need to have negotiators get to the table, talk to each other face to face to clarify things. Now, that's not what's occurring here. What's occurring is a zero-sum problem. We have two zero-sum problems, and that's what's breaking us in the negotiations to break down. You see, we have two issues, the nuclear enrichment and Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz.

57:22And these are classic zero-sum issues. Iran cannot both control and not control the Strait of Hormuz. There's no middle ground here. Iran cannot both have enriched uranium to make a bomb and not have enriched uranium to make a bomb. So there's no real way to cut this pie evenly, you know, 50-50, 60-40. That's just not what's occurring. One side has to give up, essentially. And what you're seeing is both sides, rather than give up, prefer to escalate. Now, Donald Trump is also trying to find a third way. So I've been arguing this for some time and explaining this. I just explained more in detail that we're at a fork in the road.

58:04Either we pull back here from escalation and Iran becomes the fourth center of world power, or we go forward with escalation. Well, Donald Trump is trying so hard to get a third way, which is, can't you just give me the fig leaf of a cover, Iran, so that I can declare victory? And then I'll maybe even give you the Strait of Hormuz or something here under the table. We'll just kind of, let me just have my victory, okay? They're not doing that, folks. They're not doing that. And there's, I think, a very simple reason they're not doing that, which is they want to torpedo Donald Trump's presidency.

58:43I think this has got the classic earmarks here where they want Donald Trump to become the lamest of lame ducks. Now, he's hurt right now. He's a wounded animal as it comes to his presidency. That's why he's squirming trying to get out of this thing. But he's not unrecoverably wounded. So I think what you're seeing on the part of Iran is they're going to want to string this out. Now, I don't know exactly how far they can string it out. But I can tell you they're going to want to string it out at least to November. Now, that's horrible for the economy. Think about that. I'm about to do a new substat.

59:22I did this one on the economy. I'm about to do a new one projecting out even further here because what's happening is everybody wants this to be over. Well, that's because they are not Iran. Okay. All right. That's the bottom. And what Iran now wants is they want to become that emerging power. Okay, so how do you do that? You keep the Strait of Hormuz and you make sure everybody knows you're in control, which is what they just did this morning with demonstration. Number two, in about a year, you want nuclear weapons. They're going to want nuclear weapons here. And number three is you want to go down in history as the country that torpedoed Trump's presidency when the Democrats couldn't.

1:00:10Just think about that on their legacy, you see. This would now establish them in this powerful way. And you're going to, if that happens, if they torpedo Donald Trump's presidency, oh my goodness, the kowtowing that's going to come to them from UAE, because the governments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they're going to start to be fearful. Well, if you can torpedo Trump's presidency, what are you going to do to me? So this is what the game we're in is power politics of the first order. This is not real estate negotiation. This is not, you know, this idea of just getting to yes. I knew Roger Fisher's son here, so I'm familiar with all of this.

1:00:53this is now power politics of the first order, and we are not playing up to, Iran's just beating us at power politics, and they're doing it almost every single day. So Joe Kent, the former top Trump official who resigned in protest, has put out a version of another third way that he sort of presented, which is similar to what you were talking about, but not exactly. He was saying what Trump should do is just walk away. Um, and, but, and slash, but leave sanctions in place. Uh, and you then leave Iran in this situation where they are then left to negotiate bilateral or multilateral deals around passage through, uh, the Strait of Hormuz.

1:01:43But they, it's very difficult for them to then fire on, um, Israel or anybody else at that point, if they're not fired on themselves because then they become the aggressor rather than defending themselves. But if sanctions continue to choke them, yes, they'll be getting revenue. Yes, they'll have control of the Strait of Hormuz, but without the ability to kind of engage with the kind of international economy, they'd be slowly choking out. Well, yeah, so Joe Ken's plan is a version actually of you walk away and Iran becomes the fourth center of world's power, maybe a little more slowly because he's trying to slow it down a little bit.

1:02:28It's not really a third way. That's not a third approach because there's no actual way to stop Iran from exerting more power in Kent's plan. And what I'm specifically referring to in the hole in Kent's plan is the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So if we follow Kent's plan here, and okay, we keep the blockade even going here, the U.S. blockade going, what that's going to do is it's still going to open the door for Iran, not necessarily in a week, but in several months, to topple the governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia over time. You can never really put a time clock on how you topple governments and so forth, but they have a lot more powerful ways because they're in the region.

1:03:23There are different groups inside of the UAE and Saudi Arabia that they don't like to talk about who are minorities, who they try to keep a close eye on, of course. But Iran, if you can penetrate Iran, they can penetrate you. So this whole game here will change. And so the idea that Kent has is, well, we'll have a stable equilibrium that will keep a containment band around Iran. And that's just not what's going to happen. This is not Iraq. This is not a situation like Iraq. It's worse than Iraq. I mean, some similarities, of course, but it's worse than Iraq. And so what he's doing is he's saying there's a fork in the road.

1:04:08His paper is saying, I want to take this fork over here, back away, you know, slow down this rise of Iran becoming the fourth center of world power. And notice in Kent's plan, they still get nuclear weapons. They can still process all that material and become a nuclear weapons state in Kent's plan. So this will, you know, and that's really the hole in the plan. And I'm not saying, I'm telling you what the choices are in front of us, okay? And in this situation, one final point with Ken's plan is just recognize the world still, the economy still goes over the cliff or the dips here. So he's not actually stopping, he's not opening the Strait of Hormuz for the UAE and Saudi Arabia to have its oil exports come out here.

1:05:00So just be aware. This is the fork in the road. He's choosing clearly SOT A, and then there's B, escalation. He doesn't want to do that. And I can appreciate that. I'm not really happy about escalation either. So I'm not really fundamentally saying that the choice he wants is necessarily wrong. I just think we need to go into this with open eyes, and I'm not going to sell the country a bill of goods and say, oh, sure, this will all be fine over here. And this is what people are frustrated with me, because they want me to be the happy guy who says, well, if only we would not do X and only do this over here, everything's working out.

1:05:43And I'm sorry, Donald Trump has doomed us to a trap. and what you're seeing is Joe Kent choosing one side of that trap, but he's not getting out of the trap. Because the move would be a U-turn at the fork and go backwards. Pardon me? The move would be to pull a U-turn at the fork in the road and go backwards. Well, the move would be to go to Star Trek and we go back in time. We don't do this at all. I mean, come on, we're not. That's the third way. I mean, we're just not in a situation where we can have these magical ideas and go back to February 27. Iran has learned something, I think even more than their material gains, they learned something in the last eight weeks they did not know before, which is they can beat America, not just survive.

1:06:35They can actually beat America. And they're not just beating Donald Trump. Nobody in America is coming up with this brilliant plan where you're going to use escalation dominance that we're all going to be happy with to win. And I'm saying this is not good. This is not good. When a major rival in the world really understands they can beat you here, this is different. And this is what Donald Trump has done more than anything else. He's given Iran actual knowledge they did not have before. They had uncertainty before. And they thought, well, could they survive? This is way beyond survival. And this is why this is what's happened here is Trump will go down as the worst president probably ever that we've had, worse than Jimmy Carter, worse than Lyndon Johnson.

1:07:25And this catastrophic disaster will probably go down, certainly the worst since Vietnam. And it won't have necessarily the military casualties of Vietnam, but Vietnam did not wreck the world's economy. And the 2003 Iraq war did not wreck the world's economy. We didn't have gas prices shooting up like this in that. That's why Donald Trump, this is all on his back. And Iran is not letting him off the hook with some face-saving gesture. And that's going to frustrate people. But now, come January, so as bad as I'm painting it, I'm saying it's going to possibly get much worse here because I think they want to torpedo Trump's presidency more than the Democrats want to do it.

1:08:13I mean, imagine that. They want to do it worse than the Democrats. So what you're getting here is maybe by January here, when Trump's presidency is thoroughly wrecked, unrecoverable, the Republicans want to get him out of Dodge, not just simply the Democrats here, then you might actually have a situation where they want to, because they will be around for decades, okay? And the U.S. will be around for decades. But I really think this is this missing ingredient that I'm not hearing in the media, that Iran, I think, has a true interest in wrecking Trump's presidency. And send me emails, folks. Listen, you know, if I'm missing this on all these other channels, you just let me know.

1:09:02I'm on those channels. I'm watching them on TV. I'm listening to them on podcasts. I'm just not hearing people explain that Iran wants to wreck Trump's presidency. And that's going to take some time. I mean, if you're really going to do this for real, you see, and make it so he can't come back. After January 6th, the Democrats let him back in office. I mean, think about that. They weren't. You want to wreck a president, you got to do worse than what happened here. And I think they're trying to do that.

1:09:32Emily Jashinsky:Now, I wanted to get you to respond to a very influential popular historian, Neil Ferguson, who's, of course, at the Hoover Institute. Now, he posted a viral X, I guess, tweet yesterday. And it's super interesting. Now, back when the war began, Professor Pape, you were already warning of the escalation trap. Neil Ferguson's first column on this was tepid, but I would say bullish on the US. Now, as of yesterday, he's saying, his point seven in this was, the Iranians have survived regime change and discovered that closing the strait is just as powerful a lever in economic warfare as they had always hoped.

1:10:14Emily Jashinsky:It's not despite the Russian quip, a quote, economic nuke, because unlike a nuclear weapon, you can use it. Then he says, where we go from here is fairly predictable. I would be surprised if Trump now deploys ground forces. There will be more negotiations. So Islamabad, here we come. There may have to be more bombing. If the Iranians dust down the North Vietnamese playbook of stringing the U.S. negotiators along, Neil is actually the Kissinger's biographer. He continues to say the final compromise will take longer to be agreed upon than Mr. Market currently believes. What's your response to this, Professor Pate?

1:10:49Emily Jashinsky:Because in a way, he's come around to your perspective. Yeah, that's right. One thing that your listeners would not be surprised about but won't know is I do more than talking to the media. I talk to very important people outside of the media. These are people in government. These are people not in government. And we have more lengthy back and forths. And you're willing to give me quite lengthy back and forth. I really appreciate that. Most of the media won't do that. But we have your audience gets more informed. And so you can actually have that intelligent conversation. And you see right away that he's directly on the pay path.

1:11:30Right. That is I mean, there's no gap. There's no daylight anymore. Well, I'm just pointing out, and I won't talk about these private conversations, who they are and so forth, but it is the case that there are very, very smart people. I highly respect people, even people that may seem to disagree with me. There are people I highly respect in that way. And I will have lengthy conversations with them offline so we can talk about things that they really want to hear about, which might appear to the ordinary person to be, you know, sort of off track or in the weeds. But when you get the experts together, this is what the talk is like, I'm sorry to say, that we get to into the weeds.

1:12:12We get to certain things. And it really does matter here. And I value that tremendously here. And I think that for me is quite an honor that Ferguson, and whether it's an honor to me or he just come out with his own view, I don't really, that's not real. That's neither here nor there. What it really means is the world is coming around and these frameworks that I've been playing out, super smart people. Everybody is, I think I get so much email here about the benefits of the frameworks, the actual frameworks. You see what I mean? not just simply commenting on yesterday's news. And I think that's what you see here.

1:12:51And I'm really glad I started the Substack. I could not be happier.

1:12:55Emily Jashinsky:And we're glad to have you here, Professor Pape, to talk about the Substack. Hope everybody goes over and subscribes to the Escalation Trap. Yeah, I think that people need to be aware just before we leave here that so yesterday I published a trajectory on the Substack here. And this was, I said, the ceasefire is about to end in just a few hours. Don't be surprised if you see the next stage would be demonstration attacks. And what you're seeing, and I don't think Iran could have read it and responded in time. It's just not possible. But what you're seeing is the validation of this. When Iran took those ships, and then the other thing you didn't mention is they had a parade where they brought in the missiles.

1:13:37I don't know if your listeners can see or your viewers can see the missiles. This is just like with North Korea. This is just like with Russia, just like with China. And what they're doing with those missiles is they're saying, you mess with us, we're going to go beyond demonstration. And those missiles have American city names on them. Now, they can't really reach American cities, so I don't want America to freak out over this. But what they are doing is they're moving up a ladder of escalation that other countries have done. This is just, you know, if you studied this for 30 years, demonstration, there's whole articles on this.

1:14:14You would see they're moving up a standard rung themselves. And the fact that they're having those missiles out there, that tells me that this is not going to be over anytime soon. The idea that they're simply now going to kowtow here and just surrender that power, I don't think so. They're feeling their oats here, and they're sending a direct signal. Maybe most Americans don't understand it, but those people in the White House get it, which is, America, you're next. You keep targeting us in our homeland?

1:14:48Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. So maybe Joe Kent's not necessarily all bad. Right. Well, I think he's trying to speak Trump's language and be persuasive. Well, he's trying to speak Trump's language, but Trump wants a clear victory. He wants the fig leaf of victory. And the reason is because that way he can recover his presidency. I don't think Iran is going to be if Iran was going to give him the fig leaf of victory, they would have met with J.D. Vance. And I don't and I think that's a clear sign that they understand what Trump wants. And he and he's begging them for this. And I think that this is just not, I don't think they're going to play that game because this is signaling to me, intel to me, that they're revealing their preference.

1:15:34They would rather wreck his presidency than give the fig leaf of cover for him to declare victory. That's why he can't declare victory now. What's he going to say? You know, they took a ship and now we won? I mean, this is just not, yeah, they're making it impossible for Trump to declare victory. and walk away. He can still walk away. He just can't walk away with a victory. He can declare it. He can try it, but they're going to say, they're going to do the next thing and say, sure, they're going to have the big image. Trump declare victory, we take ship. Trump declare victory, we topple UAE. That's what they want.

1:16:11That's what they're doing. And I'm just saying, this is power politics of the first order. Trump's playing domestic politics. Okay. Iran is playing power politics. And you can see that when our CIA goes in to topple governments, as we have done, including in Iran, okay, we're playing hardball for real. We may paper it over with we're Mr. You know, Trump said we're Mr. No, we're rarely Mr. Nice. When we topple governments here, we're pretending to have the fig leaf of this. We topple. It took us 15 years to topple the Syrian government. So over time, you might be able to topple a government like 15 years, you see.

1:16:53So you keep at it for 15 solid years, you might be able to topple the Syrian government. But in that 15 years versus Iran, you can see Iran has a lot of cards to play in that period of time.

1:17:04Emily Jashinsky:Professor Pape, thank you so much for being so generous with your time once again. We really appreciate it. Well, and thank you. It's just a great pleasure and honor to be on with you in every possible way. And I just wish your folks in the audience is here all the best. No, they love to hear that. All right. We'll talk to you later.

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