This War Will FAIL" - Military Expert Prof Robert Pape

25:23So the idea that you're not taking, I don't know if we have any idea how many thousand they have. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying the idea that you wouldn't think they would have a lot of thousands here for themselves and they've just given everything to Russia. I think this is kind of foolish. But then put the radiological material on the tip of a drone. Yes. Now that's going into Doha. That's going into Dubai. Now take some of that material and hand it off to Houthis, Hezbollah. Now you have the possibility of radiological bombs in Tel Aviv. These are radiological. They're not the same as in nuclear.

26:06But this will probably, if these things happen, you're going to see evacuations like you have not seen. You think it's been, you know, people have panicked now? Well, this is probably one of the things that's becoming, it's very concerning as what I'm saying as this intel spreads. And I've been saying this too in the assessment for 20 years. These are the ways that we, that this is the politics of the situation, not just the mechanics of the. So my work is looking at the mechanics of things as it intersects with politics. and the politics is what's left out here in these discussions of escalation dynamics and was when I taught for the Air Force as well.

26:51Again, pilots in the Air Force, best in the world, putting bombs on target. They're told, I want political end state victory. How do you get there? You got to go through politics. And the politics is what I'm laying out in the escalation trap stage by stage. And so I'm fusing, I'm discussing the interaction. Understood.

27:12Francis Foster:So stage two is you didn't get all the nuclear material. You go back for regime change. And why can't you just keep bombing or try and use intel? I said you'll do the negotiate. Well, how are you going to get a grip on that material, the nuclear material that is now, you're worried, is going to have some nefarious purpose? And I've given you a number of them. You only have two choices. One, the Iranian regime will negotiate it away. That's what happened with the Obama deal. But once we went through the—and I always argued for something. I didn't know it was the Obama deal, but I was arguing that that would be the best thing we could do, even before we had a thing called the Obama deal.

27:57And there's a whole story about the kind of linkages there that when I was on Obama's primary team, I was recommending for that. So if you're interested in that— But I mean, the point is that the reason you go for regime change, Constantine, is because you're desperate. And you think, well, OK, the negotiations aren't giving me a big enough deal. They still want to keep their 3.5 enriched uranium. They're not giving the whole thing up like they did for Obama. So what are you left with? You're left with trying to take out the regime. And it's not because it's a great option. It's not. History will show it's not.

28:33But the fact of the matter is you're getting more and more desperate here. And I think that's really what led to stage two. And that's what I said. This is how you will get the regime change war by the United States. It will be an air war. And it will also fail. It will fail because in 100 years, air power alone has never toppled a regime. I always went through the modeling of the regime itself. I do this on my substack. Glad to do it here. There is nothing special about this regime. that makes it more likely to collapse with their, in fact, it's the other way around. And I'm glad to explain all that.

29:09But the fact of the matter is you're going down this road. And then the trigger, when would you push the go-to-go for regime change? Well, in history, this was in 2003 as well and other cases, America typically goes the hour it has eyeball sighting of the leader it wants to kill. not general idea okay not vague idea but often eyeballs on the target and then there's a gap because you have eyeballs on the target maybe a sat phone here well it takes about six or eight hours to get those bombers there f-117s b-2s whatever it's going to take a little bit of time to get there no matter how fast you think you can make that happen uh in 2003 this is when cia Director Tenet ran into the Oval Office with George Bush somewhere around the 20th or 22nd of March 2003.

30:07And he writes this in his book. So there's nothing classified here. This has all been made public. And he says to President Bush, we've got Saddam in our sights. He's at Tarnak Farms. He's right there. We've got our human agent in the basement. And Saddam is going to have dinner there tonight again. He was there last night for dinner. He's coming again for dinner. And we have our agent there with a satellite phone and he is telling us this is happening. So that's when George Bush, March 2003, orders the F-117s to go. And it takes about, you know, but they timed it right for the dinner. And also just so you know, we didn't tell the human agent so that we left the human agent in the basement and we bombed the farm, destroy that, kill the agent as well.

30:57And it just so turned out that Saddam just decided not to go there. Not for any, you know, it's just the randomness of history of luck here. So that's why we didn't kill him at that time. But this is, and I said, the most likely reason you would, what would trigger the regime change in a very tactical sense is you'd have some, probably human, eyeballs on the leader that you want to kill. And I didn't know it would be the supreme leader, but that makes perfect sense. under this. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but that's what they, I can see the tactical reasons for this. And I think that's what happened.

31:32I think what you had is you had this pressure here of essentially fear of what was happening with Iran's dispersing nuclear material and what could happen with that over time, mixed with this very exquisite intelligence about this day, this hour, this leader, this group is right there. And it's not one or the other. It's all of those coming together. And I'm fusing it here for your listeners, because I can understand why they're confused. They're getting soundbites of six seconds here, six seconds there. This is why I

32:08Francis Foster:wanted to talk to you to give a fuller picture of why. So we are now in the regime change war. Yep. Yep. What's next? Well, the regime change war is failing. And it's failing strategically, not tactically. Just want to be super clear. Again, our smart bombs are hitting their targets 90 plus percent of the time. Our military is hyper professional at making those bombs hit those targets. The military is not failing here. The strategy is failing. That we have to be super clear. And why is the strategy failing? It's because at this stage, stage two, the goals are, number one, topple the regime, meaning positive regime change, where this regime goes away and new leaders come in who are more amenable to what President Trump wants.

33:01That's what I mean by positive regime change. Well, that's not happening, and it's not happening because what you're seeing is the pattern of history. over 100 years, this has never happened, just to be super clear. Not rarely, it's never happened. And that's what my books show and so forth. But why not? It's because when you kill the leaders, as we did here, and as we've done before, as we kill the leaders, the replacement leaders, all the incentives are for the replacement leaders to come in more aggressive than before. Some of its age, just because they're younger, it's like my graduate students are more aggressive than I am.

33:45Okay, that's all true. Okay. But some of it is just plain organizational. So just imagine that when you have a situation where there's a two-actor game, the society versus the regime, society versus the regime. Now you bring in this third outside actor, the foreign military power that's a Godzilla. This isn't some little pipsqueak. We're the Americans. We're the omnipowerful American military. And on top of that, in 1953, a long time ago, but still historically will be remembered, it was the United States that toppled a democratic leader with the CIA controlling pieces of the Iranian military.

34:32It was a military coup that we orchestrated. So it didn't use air power. It literally made the military do it. Well, that's when we put in the Shah, a dictator, not Democratic, and the Savak. The Savak was the secret police. And the secret police were right up there with Joe Stalin's secret police. So this is not a nice situation. So this is what this Godzilla is over here. This changes the politics here. And it changes the politics because suddenly whatever the tensions were here, the gap, which is which is real, just like, you know, 40 percent of America supports Donald Trump today. There's a gap between America and our government.

35:15Well, does that mean that if Iran assassinates Trump and we know they're trying that you're going to get the Democrats here in Times Square? They're going to come out. We're going to have they're going to have a party in Times Square and they're going to invite the Iranians to come on over for the party. That's not going to happen. You see, same dynamics here. So the government, you can see the leaders who are taking over now, much more likely to be hawkish because of the issue here with the foreign.

35:44Francis Foster:We have to fight Godzilla. You've got to fight Godzilla, and the Godzilla is going to eat us here if we either fight him now or fight him later, but we've got to fight Godzilla. But even the pro-democracy movement starts to create problems because now you are a traitor to your country. You're not getting self-determination. And when President Trump says, well, we will pick who will be your leader. The former Shah's son, not good enough. Well, that's probably a good, I'm not saying he would be a good choice. What I'm saying is that notice that it's the president of the United States who's picking who the leader of Iran is again.

36:24So no matter how we describe this, no matter how much we try to put a velvet glove over this, this is the use of force to dominate Iran's society. And that is what then takes away self-determination. It shrinks the pro-democracy movements here. It builds nationalism, which confused parts of this. And not instantly, I want to make it clear, that politics takes time to work itself out. So now, what is this going to mean in stage two? Lashback. Lashback. So you are likely going to see not just a hardened regime, but a regime that's still very capable. They'll take more risks. And that's what you saw with the horizontal escalation.

37:12I published a piece in Foreign Affairs literally days after the moment. How could I do that? Because I had it ready to go. That this was very likely going to be Iran's lashback because they had drones. They have mines. Those drones have precision on them. This was always likely coming. Could I be 100 % sure? Of course not. That's why I didn't publish before. But once it started and I saw on the Saturday that the Pentagon was saying, well, these aren't serious attacks by Iran. These are just the spasms of the dying body. That's when I knew that there was a lot of, I thought, misunderstanding of what the politics and the way this would work itself out.

37:53So history, there's a lot of cases that are similar to this in history I could explain to you, not with drones, but with the lashing back in an orchestrated way. And I had a sense of what Iran's capabilities were because, again, I'm focused on air power and Iran had a lot of precision drones they were giving to Russia. Why wouldn't they use them in their own defense here? And this was the regional escalation strategy is a reasonable lash back for them. That's a rational approach. And now we're coming to the end of stage two here or starting to move to a new stage because that horizontal escalation strategy hasn't just been a retaliation strategy.

38:35Iran has gained power with that horizontal escalation strategy. So let me explain that, which is that, so we are now in a situation where before the war, Iran controlled 4 % of the world's oil, 4 % of the world's oil. Today, it controls 20 % of the world's oil. So five times more of, that's a big increase. By closing the Strait of Hormuz? Well, by controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, because they still let Chinese and Indians through, right? No, they let their oils through. So just to also be clear, when I say control, there's actually quite a bit of control. You see, it's not just damage. It's controlled damage.

39:20Controlled disruption is probably a better phrase. What they're doing is they are hitting about 20 tankers so far, almost one a day, that are coming from Dubai, I'm sorry, from UAE or Saudi Arabia or some of the other Gulf states. And that has totally scared that. So that traffic is almost down to zero. But they have had about at least 14 tankers. These are the ones you're describing that are flagged by India or China. And these are carrying Iranian oil. Iran is actually exporting slightly more oil now than before the war started, slightly more. And so now that's somewhere around 15 million barrels of oil, which is about a billion and a half dollars at today's prices.

40:12So they are making money on this war. That money is sitting in Chinese banks. That money can be used as collateral for all kinds of bad purposes here, and all kinds of, it could be used for reconstruction, but also a lot of other things. And so this is what I mean. Now, let me also put this in a little more of a historical context, which is since the 1970s, the number one goal of America in the Middle East, what was the number one goal of America since the 1970s? Not Israel. Preventing an oil hegemon. What is an oil hegemon. One state controlling all the oil that would come out of the Middle East.

40:56For all that time, 50 years, the Soviet Union never became an oil hegemon. We prevented that in different ways. Iraq never became an oil hegemon. That's why we fought the 91 war over Kuwait. Iran, up until now, never been an oil hegemon. These puddles of oil, there are four puddles of oil here. It's Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. These four puddles of oil have been set, compartmentalized, essentially. Now, they've been unified under the control of Iran, who's now got a more dangerous regime, and not just an enemy, but an arch enemy now of the United States. Say nothing of an arch enemy of Israel, of course, but arch enemy of the United States.

41:43we have caused the number one enemy here to now become an oil hegemon. So think about that for a moment. This is what, this is part, and notice that the trap gets, it's not just stages of escalation. I call this trap for a reason. Every stage, it has been harder for President Trump to walk away.

42:17Francis Foster:If you want to understand the language, you need to hear how people speak it, not work through textbooks. I grew up speaking Russian, and what makes a language stick isn't grammar drills, it's immersion. The rhythm of how people actually talk, the slang, the way a sentence lands in a real conversation, rather than on a printed page. That's the whole logic behind Lingopi. It's a language learning platform built around watching real TV shows and films in your target language. The subtitles are interactive. Click any word for an instant translation, your vocabulary saves automatically, and you review it later with flashcards, quizzes, and pronunciation tools.

42:54Francis Foster:You can replay lines and slow dialogue down until it clicks. LingoPy turns watching into learning without feeling like either. It has over 3 ,000 shows and films across 14 languages on your phone, laptop, or TV. Consistency is key when it comes to language learning, and this makes that significantly easier. For 55 % off the annual plan, click the link in the description or go to learn.lingopi.com slash trigonometry. That's learn.lingopi.com slash trigonometry. Let me ask one more quick question before Francis takes over. I guess the key discussion in relation to the closure of the Strayer from us is how permanent or long-term this is.

43:36Francis Foster:Oh, absolutely. Before we started, I was looking at the calciots, and the calciots for it being opened by 1st of May are very low. It's like the low 30s, I think, as we sit here today. But June, I think July, I think, July 1st is like 78 % or something. Yeah, these are all the smart money here, and I deal with the smart folks all the time, and they make all the smart mistakes. So you just got to understand, I definitely understand people with 120, 150 IQs are super smart and they go through lots of calculations. Their computers and their brains move very, very quickly and they can make an enormous amount of money really fast.

44:17So I got that. That's not strategy. OK, so this is, again, leaving out a whole lot of different stages here. And I don't do I don't have any money in those markets. I'm not playing the money game here because that's not what I do. I do risk assessment. I'm not, now, you're quite right, though, about the, but let me just back up one stage here, because you're trying to get to, again, this calculation like you would bet on it, all right? But let's just back up for a second. Notice that at stage one and stage two, America is losing control. And we've had the illusion of control going through. You see, at each stage, I call it the illusion of precision control because the precision weapons, they're so precise.

45:06You can marry that with this hyper precise intelligence. We can do it now on our phones, really, with, you know, signal chat and everything. I mean, we can do this so exquisitely. It's not just creating tactical success. It creates the illusion of escalation control when it's actually slipping away. Now, why is it slipping away? It's because you could see why when President Trump does the bombing last June, he, I think for his own political purposes and from what he just said, I think he really did just want to walk away. OK. But he himself is continuing the negotiations. He knows he can't walk away because tactical obliteration does not equal strategic stopping of the nuclear material.

45:53just doesn't. And I suspect he knows that because he said as much as that. And now we're at the stage where after the regime changed, stage two of the escalation trap, now Iran is an oil hegemon. So the idea that he's going to walk away when all this enriched material is now dispersing and all those problems on top of that, now it's an oil hegemon and that billion and a half dollars will come in every two weeks. Every two weeks. You see what I mean? So now you're getting a bigger and bigger. There won't be a Godzilla, okay? But they're going to be bigger than Bambi. Maybe there'll be a bear versus Godzilla.

46:36But there won't be Godzilla. I just want to be super clear. But you've changed this. This is now, Iran is gaining power here, relative power. That is that's the pull here for President Trump to go to stage three, which is likely coming in the next week or two, not three months from now, but now in the near term, which I called before the war started the limited territorial option. And what I mean by that is we would take ground forces and they would be limited ground force. That's how it will be called. And they will be limited. here at first. Sorry to interrupt, Professor. When you say limited, what's the number?

47:22What does that mean in terms of? No, I do weigh all this out. And I also did it in a video briefing afterwards on March 8th that your listeners can go find on the substack. So what we're talking about are the, if once you know that your opponent has become more powerful and it's about oil and gas in this transit here, you're going to try to take that power away. But your options of air power, if you could do it with air power, this would not even have happened. So you're going to be forced to go to ground power options. Same with also the nuclear material. So what is that going to look like? That's going to look like taking Karg Island.

48:05That's going to look like taking coastal areas right on the Iranian coast, right on the other side of the UAE here. So if we had a map, you would see that the Strait of Hormuz is here. That's kind of a narrow point. Dubai is here. Iran is here. But then there's the larger part of the Persian Gulf. Well, you are going to want to control this whole, at least big parts of this coast, because that's where a lot of missiles are coming from. Not all, as I'll explain, but this will make perfect sense to start talking about as we're dealing. And then CARG is up here. And it's because if you're really going to open these straits in a way that you can have the flow of the UAE, Saudi, and all the other Gulf states, not just oil, but food, other things coming through here, you're going to need a fair bit of control.

48:57And these are marine missions. So we have one marine division. This is about a marine division sort of problem here in terms of the size of the territory to control. That's why we're moving marines. So I'm not at all surprised we're moving the marines. This is exactly what you would do here. There's nothing secret or classified about this. This is just if you know about operations, you know that this would happen. The Iranians, I think, are well prepared for this. And why do I say that? It's because they hit Azerbaijan on day two. Now, why did they hit Azerbaijan? When that happened, I didn't hear anybody on any of the cable channels be able to explain this.

49:38OK, well, once you would look at a map as from this perspective, which is assume that if you're Iran, you're studying this for 20 years, you're planning that if they do regime change, we're going to do something like this. We're going to become an oil hedge fund. Okay. What is the next move in the chess game? It's the ground. Where would you stage the ground from? Well, you're going to come, you're going to have to come on the, on the sea. Azerbaijan is a great staging place. It's a great staging place. And once I saw that they hit Azerbaijan here as a brushback pitch. That told me they were right on it.

50:18That told me they are studying this appropriately. It's like people studying old chess games for 20 years. They're going down the natural routes because they're persuading, they're telling Azerbaijan, don't even think about letting American ground forces use you as an aircraft carrier, as a staging area. Here in Azerbaijan got the message. Yes, sir, Iran. No, we're not doing that. Okay, we got the message, and so far that's been the way it is. So you start to see right away that the stage three of these limited territorial conquests here, these options lead to military control routes that start to become pretty predictable, and that is what we're facing right now.

51:05So we're now at the cusp of moving into stage three. And as we move into stage three, this will be another sort of a shock to the public and to the world because ground force, oh my goodness gracious, this was the one thing that President Trump was never supposed to have done. And of course, we've just come out of these forever wars. And there's still more issues with ground forces I'll describe. But in this situation, the amphibious assaults that we're talking about, these are some of the most dangerous military operations ever here. And the fact we're a Godzilla, this big, huge, we're still talking about exposure here.

51:55So what I am explaining, I just did a sub stack last night on this where I'm trying to explain that we're about to transition from disruption costs that are temporary. Relatively quickly, you can reverse them to damage costs, which are much more difficult to reverse. And that's what this stage three is really about. It's not just military operations. We're moving to a different equilibrium of the escalation. This is a whole threshold we're crossing, and it's a threshold of the type and length of the costs that we're talking about. So, Professor, saying all that, I mean, what you're saying in layman's terms is effectively boots on the ground are inevitable.

52:4775%. I've said this before. When I, there's nothing mechanistic, Francis, just so you know. And I know people, and I'm talking very, very directly as much as I can. And so it's fair for people to say, oh, Professor Pape's being just too mechanistic about the world. I do want to qualify even myself and say, I'm not saying anything is 100 % inevitable. Of course. But what you're seeing is the trap, and it's 75 % likely. That's the way I would think.

53:16Francis Foster:Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East. Oh, yeah. They're halfway there and they should be there, you know, sort of end of next week. So this is a Friday here, the 20th. I would expect by the 27th they'll be there. They might need a few more days. We don't know exactly here. But we're not far from the cusp of a decision point by the president. At this point, he's planning, putting pieces in place. again, after being in sort of West Wings here, four different administrations, I don't believe presidents really commit in advance. I believe what they do is they bring pieces together.

53:54And then only at the very last second do they actually know what they're going to do. OK, because I think this is just the way presidents are. I don't think it's just Donald Trump. And I think he is coming to a pretty clear point of decision called a D-Day here. And I don't know when that'll be exactly, but it's going to be in the next week or two. But that's going to be a political catastrophe for Trump, isn't it? Because he ran on a platform of there's going to be, there's going to be no more wars. There's going to be no more forever wars. I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to sacrifice any more American lives in the Middle East.

54:29Well, if he does that, he's going back against every one of his promises. And that means that he will potentially not only alienate voters, but also the base itself. Yeah, so he is on the horns of a dilemma, Francis, where there is no golden off-ramp here. The idea of the golden off-ramp here, we're long past that. So what President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices, and he's going to have to choose between two terrible choices. They're terrible for the world. They're terrible for his presidency. So these are not like one is good for the world. And I would argue one is better, but they're not golden.

55:15The one that you're describing is he goes forward and crosses the threshold of phase three. And you're explaining this, what people will be talking about next week. There will be a four and five to the escalation trap. I have not even put on the subs deck yet that I'll be talking about on my next live briefing on Sunday. So there's more coming here. We're not done with the stages of the escalation trap. But you're right. He is going to be creating an enormous political liability for himself. Right now, you know that Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, others, he's just had the first recognition from his administration of a very high level here, breaking away from this.

55:58These are pro-Trump people. These are people who campaigned for President Trump. These are not, you know, loosely. These are, and so you're seeing this fracture here. But he's got another problem on the other side. And I think this is why he's going back and forth, which is if he doesn't go forward, then Iran is going to be an oil hegemon. And 20 % of the world's oil. It's going to keep it. So it's not as if President Trump has an out where, okay, Iran, I'm going to declare victory and now I'm going to pull all my forces out. I'm going to take, I'm going to cancel the marine amphibious. I'm going to send that back to Japan.

56:47I'm going to take the aircraft carriers, put them back over to Venezuela. I'm going to do Cuba. OK, so I'm going to go get myself pinned down in Cuba. And so let's say he does that option, which I think is he's been thinking that over. Iran is not going to look at that and simply say, here's your oil back, UAE. Here's your oil back there. What the Supreme Leader's statement here is has been quite was quite clear. It's it's I grade people every year. And I did this in the Air Force as well, Air Force officers on their coercive strategies, the logic and quality of their coercive strategy. The leader's statement is a is a B plus A minus.

57:31OK, it's not perfect, but this is not a C student. This and I'm not saying he wrote it either. OK, but I've seen C students. OK, this is not a C student. They really understand the pressure points here and how they're using. And I'm glad that I can unpack that for you. But what I'm trying to tell you is there is no sign, I see, that if President Trump picks up the Armada and says, I'm just going to now get bogged down in a different war over here with Cuba, that Iran's going to say, oh, man, glad that's over. And so here's all the oil back. I don't think that's happening here. And so you're going to have a situation where these are the two choices here that he's facing.

58:16So and Iran will start to make a real geopolitical hay out of this. You see, the oil hegemon, if it's only been a few weeks that they've had this control, we're not seeing yet how this is going to play out with. We see the beginning, but not fully with China, India, Russia, other Gulf of the Gulf states here. This has the capable, the potential to fracture the GCC coalition that Trump and Jared Kushner have been spending years to build with the Abraham Accords against Iran. This has, I'm not saying that they will all fracture all at once, but you just saw the first fracturing in President Trump's orbit in Washington.

59:11So what I'm expecting here is these multiple different Gulf states, they're going to start to go their own way. You see, they're going to have slightly different interests here. And also, Iran has been very, very smart in that what they're effectively doing with their propaganda, and this can be turned up many notches, is they're telling the GCC and not just the leaders, but the publics, this is all a war for Israel. And what it means to be a war for Israel is Israel's conquest of you. You see, so you're going to just sit back for a second and people are going to start scratching their heads and saying, why exactly am I paying costs here to help Israel take me later.

59:56You see, this is what Iran has seen. And that's why I say it's a B plus, A minus in terms of the coercive strategy. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty strong approach. And there's no reason to think they're just going to give up 20 % of the world's oil because there's real geopolitical hate to make. It's somehow March. I don't know how that happened either. But here we are. And I still have the same goals I had in January, which is the good news. The bad news is I'm absolutely the person who looks up at 1pm and realizes the only thing I've consumed since waking up is coffee. Just coffee, no breakfast, no lunch, pure caffeine and good intentions.

1:00:37So lately I've been keeping Huel Black Edition around to stop myself doing that. That's H-U-E-L. On the days I'm out the door before I've had a chance to think, I grab a Black Edition ready to drink. It's a complete meal, 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, and it's under$5, which is cheaper than a coffee shop coffee that will actively make things worse. My go-to is the chocolate flavor, which is so good. I'd drink it even if it wasn't a sponsor. Then when I'm home and want something more substantial, I use the Black Edition powder.

1:01:12Blend it with ice and milk if you want a proper smoothie, or just shake it with water when I'm keeping it simple. 40 grams of protein, same complete nutrition, you just have more control over it. The RTD Plus Powder Duo has basically become my insurance policy against chaotic days. Right, here's the offer. For a limited time, you can get 15 % off online for new customers with code TRIGGER15 at Huel.com slash TRIGGER15 or click the link in the description. New customers only and thank you to Huel for supporting Trigonometry. But if you take your point about Israel and the propaganda, well, look at what happened to Qatar, the gas field of Ras Lafhan, which produces around 15 to 20 percent of the liquid natural gas that the globe needs in order to continue functioning.

1:02:04I mean, that got bombed and effectively shut down for between three to five years. And Qatar are furious. I mean, they're not going to be pro-Iran at this point, are they? Oh, well, let's talk about this. So first of all, that was in retaliation for Israel. Right. And what happened here, the Qataris said their statement exactly is we're mad. But just so you know, everybody, we're not getting in this fight. We're going to stay diplomatic just so you know. So so they reinforce neutrality here as a result of this. Even President Trump said he's not happy with what Israel did.

1:02:42Francis Foster:And it's and baby promised not to do it anymore. Well, yeah, I wouldn't count on, I don't think anybody's counting on that. What I'm trying to get at is your point, which is this was a retaliation for Israel striking Iran's gas facilities, which even President Trump didn't want to happen. That's right. And so that means President Trump can't end this war on his own. He can pull out on his own. But that's not going to end the war because it's not going to end Israel's attacks. It's not going to end Russia's intelligence to Iran. And it's not going to end Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz and therefore 20 percent of the world's oil.

1:03:19So what you have is a situation where, as I'm getting back to this, President Trump is on the horns of a real dilemma because it's lose here, lose there. And so it's a matter not of where is there a gain versus a loss. It's a matter of assessing where, which loss are you. It's pick your poison. which loss you want to take.

1:03:42Francis Foster:And just to be clear, Bob, option one, which you've described in quite a bit of detail, is you pull out now, you leave Iran with control of the Straits of Hormuz, you leave the current regime in place, you still haven't got control of their nuclear material, and that doesn't seem like a win. Well, it's actually hugely risky. Of course. Of course, there's all kinds of risks related to that. The other option, The other option is what we started talking about, which is you put Marines on Karg Island, you put Marines on the coast of the Persian Gulf to try and control it. Can that work? It's going to have that.

1:04:21That's what I was talking about earlier, Constantine, about we're shifting from disruptive costs that we're paying to damaging costs that are not reversible. You're taking casualties. Well, you're going to take the amphibious operations. this is saving Private Ryan. So let's talk about that military dimension. So the principle here, because I know you have a very smart audience here, is exposure. That's the key thing. And I'm sure you're used to risk exposure. So same thing with the military tactics. The attacker, in order to take ground, always has to get up and expose themselves over the ground they want to take.

1:05:01The defender can be in foxholes and be behind things and camouflage and so forth. So that's why the defender always has a three-to-one advantage at the tactical level. It has to do with this issue of exposure. Well, that issue of exposure is at its maximum in amphibious operations because the water is, there's no cover on the water, okay? And you've got the now Russian intelligence even exacerbating that, you see what I mean? And then when you get up to the territory, there's some of the shows I've been on here, the cliffs, the actual terrain. This is some of the most difficult terrain to try to control because you've got mountains, you've got stretches of beach.

1:05:46So for the defender, there's all kinds of crevices and crannies and things like that here. But for the attacker here, the side that has to actually take the territory, the exposure is at its maximum. Now, we will absolutely have the best professionals in the world working this problem. I spoke to the Army War College about a week before this kicked off. I have military officers coming in, their PhDs under me. I really have nothing but the greatest respect for our military, really. They're really quite good at what they do. That said, there's only so many, let's take Karg Island, for example. There's only so many ways you can approach Karg Island.

1:06:30And that will have been assessed not just by the U.S. military for decades, but by the Iranian military. And they will know their terrain better than anybody else. As much as we think we will be able to assess their terrain, they will know their terrain. So if there's a possibility, I'm not saying there is for surprises here, we will have some tricks up our sleeve. They may have tricks up their sleeve, but overall it's about length of time of exposure. The longer the time of exposure, the transit time to go from like the straight of Hormuz up to CARG is going to be, I don't know, somewhere between a dozen and 20 hours here for the amphibians, those big, and they're big hunks of metal.

1:07:16These are the things that you're going to be able to eat the most easy targets to find are big hunks of metal in open water. So they're going to be exposed for long periods of time. You will do everything possible to defend them, without a doubt. But that's a lot of time. And then when they get there, there's going to be hours to get on and actually control before they can get undercover. So if you watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan, it's very similar. You've got to cross the open area and be exposed. Then when you get on the other side, now you can go pillbox to pillbox and you got some cover too.

1:07:55So it's not as if you can't. And so I'm fully expecting we're going to win. I'm not saying we won't take the ground. It's really a matter of the cost. And I can't give you a number. We this in so long, up against really this kind of a determined enemy, it's going to be very difficult to put numbers on this. I think this will be hard for General Cain, our Joint Chief. He will be asked by President Trump how many are going to die. And I think it's going to be hard for him, not because he's going to be, you know, sort of a dovish or not want to give the numbers. It's just going to be hard because he's going to have to go back to, well, when we did this in World War II.

1:08:35I mean, where are you going to go to find the good, actual, deep analysis of this, you see?

1:08:41Francis Foster:And part of the calculus, I imagine, in any president's mind at this point is what happens afterwards, at least I hope it is, which is we will take hundreds of Marines as casualties, God forbid. Now what? Well, and then let me say the next piece. So we've only focused on the military casualty piece. As this is happening, from Iran's perspective, this is now a much bigger threat to actually achieve. Now we're bringing ground forces in. So remember, I've said air power alone has never toppled a regime. That's over 100 years. Sometimes you put ground forces in, you can do that. Okay, so Iran's going to know that, and they're going to, even if they don't know it, they're certainly going to feel it right away.

1:09:24So once this even starts, even though it'll be described as limited, they're not going to Tehran. We'll say all that, I'm sure. OK, that's not how the other side is going to see this. They're going to see this as the beachhead like Normandy to the end of Germany, you see, which even though that was a year later or 10 months later, so did the Germans. Everybody understood, even though there's a lot of miles to cover. Once you get the Americans, especially, but the Americans and the British are on shore here, Germany is in real trouble. Same here with Iran. So what's going to happen is they're likely to be very willing to destroy the oil infrastructure in response, just to be very blunt.

1:10:08So why would they destroy the oil infrastructure? It's because they're going to want to impose long-term damage here. And they're not going to be concerned that they would want to use it for themselves because for them, they may be dead. I mean, as a regime in six months. So this isn't They're not even probably worrying about that. Once you go down this road, you are increasing pressure on the regime. Chances you may actually topple it, not in a day, but over time. And also then more risky strategies by them here, which will have costs on us. There'll be damaging costs because when you destroy the infrastructure, these are special made pipelines.

1:10:55regs. In the 90s, where I really got into this was when I was teaching for the Air Force and the leadership decapitation crowd in the Air Force, who were my bosses. Okay, they're literally my bosses, the actual architects of all of this. So I know all their arguments really, really well. They really liked the idea of electric power targeting. So they brought in people from the electric power industry to teach us how to take down electric power plants and grids and so forth and and nothing classified so there's nothing this was not a secret briefing or anything and and so we and I had students here who wrote master's theses on how to destroy electric power plants that are still available that you could still say the big thing I learned is that in an electric power grid, you can take out the transformers, which are like the fuse boxes in your house.

1:11:53And that knocks out, it causes a brownout, like when you overload the system, when there's too much, you know, it's too hot and there's too many electric, I'm sorry, air conditioners. And that is a problem for a week or two, because you can fix the fuses. Okay. But if you go after the actual infrastructure, which is the generating halls and you destroy the generator halls, they're out for a minimum of six months, maybe a year, because those larger pieces of equipment that are the actual infrastructure, this would be the equivalent of these transmission pipelines that are going from the land to the tankers and things like that.

1:12:34These are special design. There's not bunches of them laying around. So when you start to destroy that, and that's what's happening in Qatar. So what happened in Qatar is they didn't just hit a little LNG. They went after some of the infrastructure. And this is, again, moving up the escalation ladder to damage. And that's why the Qataris are mad, because that is out for a minimum of a month, maybe three months. And that assumes they're even going to fix it. Because if they fix it, Iran could do it again. So you've got a situation where the damage here is not reversible. Like the shipping could be reversed because Iran will just simply say, ah, you can pass.

1:13:15Once you start not taking out and destroying the actual big pieces of the infrastructure, this is months. And that starts to dovetail with what the economists are now telling us in the newspaper, which is you don't have to worry about the price of oil until it stays that way for a month or two. then you'll get a recession and everybody's oh that's so comforting because we know it could go right back down right not if you destroy the infrastructure once the infrastructure is taken out now you're in that month's period and i can't give you a more precise estimate because i don't know exactly what the damage will be but i'm trying to lay out the principles here there's nothing.

1:13:58You just need to have spent 30 years to figure out how to take down economies and what that looks like for real. And this is what this looks like here. And this is also, by the way, not something that you do when you're a pilot in the Air Force. You don't spend six months, a year, five years studying the enemy oil and gas grid and so forth. What happens is once you get in the crisis, you bring in people to give you advice and you try to do your best by staying up and pulling all-nighters. So again, I've spent long periods of time thinking about how air power and other military instruments actually interact with economies.

1:14:43And this is what I'm trying to explain, which is we're about to move from what I call disruption to lasting damage. And that is going to put us in the OPEC 73 territory. So that's why you see me really, really genieing up coming on your show. I've been on, I think, you know, why am I, you know, spending 18, 19 hours a day doing this? I'm extremely concerned because as much as this has been dangerous so far, we're going to cross the next threshold, which will be much more difficult. I'm worried. And so I'm going to do everything I can to explain that here, because crossing this threshold, I think, is going to lead to now the beginning of truly lasting, reversible over several months at quickest cost, not just a day or two where Iran will just simply decide, oh, sure, your ships can pass.

1:15:42Because what you're essentially talking about is economic warfare. And then the knock on effect of that is that it's going to affect not only economies, it's going to also affect politics right the way through the West. It's going to change how people vote. It's going to change how people see particular leaders, how people see the right, the left. Now you see why the Europeans don't want to touch us with a 10-foot pole. Because as these costs start to accumulate in this way, if they're part of the coalition causing it, they then face being toppled by their own people. Because as if this goes down in this trajectory here, those costs are going to be—Bidenomics, where we had 9 % inflation, this is going to be nothing.

1:16:29OK, we're we're we're we're we're and it's going to be that way. The ground war is not just something that you can do and then take back. You're what you're doing is you are sending the most credible signal that you intend to use ground forces to topple this regime. You can say all you want. You're never going to do that. OK, if you're on the other side and it's your survival that's on the state, you don't believe this from just like when we laughed about Netanyahu promising not to bomb. So you're really going to take President Trump at his word that he would never think about using, never think about doing it.

1:17:11No, you're not going to do that. you are going to see that what's coming at you is not just one hand of the gorilla, which was the air power, but now it's the other hand and both legs of the gorilla starting to get really, again, D-Day, save in Private Ryan, Normandy, you know, June 1944 leads to May 1945. And it's also not only going to affect the reputations of certain politicians at home, This is really going to damage Israel's international reputation because there's a lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum who are looking at Israel and going, you started it. This is your fault.

1:17:55Do you agree with that? I think the blame game has already started because when, you know, a victory has a thousand fathers, you know, defeat is an orphan. Well, that's what you're seeing here. So everybody's now starting to try to tack to what they should. because they're seeing which direction this is going. And who are you going to blame? Well, I don't think you can easily blame the U.S. military. I mean, there may be some people that will try to do that, but I don't see how you blame them. They've been like tactically superb through this. They've saluted when the president has said jump. They said, yes, sir, and so forth.

1:18:32So I don't see how you blame the military. I don't see how you blame the Democrats here. They have no power. And they were blindsided by this whole thing. So I don't see how you say, well, they are the ones who wrecked the whole thing. So I don't see how you blame them. So I think it's going to basically start to come down to Israel and President Trump and the Republicans, which have there's always been this this this division inside of MAGA, you know, about half against foreign wars and the other half, you know, more on the other side. And that you saw that with Ukraine. Well, this is the same thing.

1:19:11It's the same split within MAGA. MAGA is holding together at the moment in the opinion polls only because they're supporting Trump, you know, and that's but as this unfolds and as you get into the midterms and in the summer, I the way I say this is that I think Trump is going to start to have an LBJ problem. So if he crosses this Rubicon and he goes down this road, I see that this stage is going to go on for quite some time. And I think that's why the$200 billion request is coming through. They want to put that request through now because if you cross this Rubicon, I'm not saying he's going to do it, but I think it's 75 % likely, you're going to need to spend$200 billion and more.

1:19:53This is going to be very expensive. So you're going to have this war is going to go on. And as that war goes on, this is where the real problems for the senators and the House members are going to face when they run for reelection in the midterms. And so you already had a situation before this where there was a likely a blue, modest blue wave coming where the Democrats would win the House and maybe a few seats in the Senate. not quite clear, they would take the Senate. Here, in this situation, you could see a much bigger blue wave coming. And why do those House members and those senators want to just go home?

1:20:34I don't think they're going to. And so I don't know what they will each make, just like the Gulf states, this will fracture the coalition of MAGA. And it won't be necessarily cleanly in a division. It'll be more like what I'm describing when coalitions fracture. Typically, what happens is the actors that are part of it start to go their own way. And it's not clear that it'll all break in one way. I'm not saying they'll all break against Trump either. It's going to be probably seat by seat, state by state, but it's not going to be the unified situation it is today. it's going to be this more fractured situation.

1:21:15And so those are the real political costs that are coming. And I would say by June 1st, June, you know, now we're going through the primaries here and we haven't crossed the Rubicon yet of stage three. But as that were to unfold, I would say it won't take long. You won't have to wait till August for this. This will LBJ when when the bottom fell out of LBJ's presidency, it was March 1968. So he had promised that we're very much in a similar like escalation trap here where LBJ had been promising that just one more rung up the escalation ladder would get him out of the escalation trap. Everybody realized by end of 67, we were in an escalation problem because the VC were getting stronger and stronger and taking territory, actually literally taking territory.

1:22:04And then what happened is he kept promising it, and there was a spectacular event called the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was at the end of January 1968. And what the VC did is they, over a period of just a few days, they did a parallel attack across multiple different fronts at the same time, multiple different of our bases at the same time. And they lost each and every one of the individual battles. 25 ,000 of them died, apparently, in just this week or so to do this offensive. This led to the political bottom falling out of the Vietnam War. So, as I've often said, we won every battle in the Vietnam War, including in the Tet Offensive.

1:23:01We lost the war because what they did was a political strategy, similar to the horizontal escalation strategy that Iran is doing. This is a strategy where the endpoint is political fracture, not gain territory. And the political fracture is the soft underbelly of America. That's how our enemies beat us. Remember I said I wanted to know how we lost the Vietnam War. it was because we didn't understand the politics of the situation. It wasn't we didn't understand the military. It's we didn't understand how militaries and politics fit together. And that's what I've been doing for the last 30 some years.

1:23:41Francis Foster:So coming back to the military side of it, I get the sense that you certainly feel that even though it's a terrible option, pulling out and not continuing the escalation would be the right thing. Is that fair? Well, it's fair, but I want to pose a third, at least a variant of that, So what I think, once you see these terrible choices here, then you're quite right, Constantine, that you're going to want to take your losses now because you might be able to recover your presidency. If you wait, then you're in Lyndon Johnson where it's unrecoverable. Your presidency is just gone. You're a lame duck with two years to go.

1:24:22So you're right. This is where I would advise the West Wing here. But what I would say is that the price you're going to have to pay, the politics price here, is it's not enough to just pull out because then you're leaving this behind. If you really want to take option one, you're going to have to cut a deal with Iran. You're going to have to go back and you're going to have to cut a deal with Iran. Now, before the bombing started, here's what the deal looked like at 3.15 Eastern time in the Oval Office with Whitcoff and Kushner. And we know this because this is exactly what they said, which is that Iran will not give up its its enrichment.

1:25:05It wants to keep its 3.5 percent and it's promising to meld together the 60 and 20 percent to 3.5. And President Trump said just just not good enough. Well, in order to cut a deal now with Iran, you're going to have to accept that right away. OK, so that's number one. Number two, you're going to have to probably accept the oil sanctions coming off. And given the price of oil is going up, notice that Besson is already talking about doing that. OK, so they're already doing that. That issue is already on the table. But number three, there's a very good chance that you're going to have Iran will not reopen the straits here on a consensual basis, will not reopen the Straits unless there's pressure put on Israel.

1:25:52Because Israel is that bombing card. Israel has been, remember the 12-day war wasn't started by the United States bombing Fordow. That happened in the middle. It was started by Israel. This war, the tactical intelligence for killing the supreme leader and the bombs that killed the supreme leader were Israeli. So we need to understand that I don't think we're in a situation anymore where you're going to get a deal here without pressure on Israel. To do what? I think the most likely thing, just to be very specific, is that Trump would have to force Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Right now, what Israel wants is Iran to have no nuclear weapons and to have all this on-site inspection.

1:26:45Well, Israel has all these nuclear weapons and no on-site inspection because it's not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So I think that what is likely going to be the thing that will be discussed will be that Trump will force Israel to sign the NPT, which means tit-for-tat on-site inspection. If there's on-site inspection in Fordow, there's on-site inspection in some of the nuclear sites in Israel. So think about that. So Israel would have to give up its nuclear weapons? No, no, no, no, no, no. It would have to say, so just be in mind, we are a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and we still have nuclear weapons.

1:27:22Here's the way that works, Constantine. This has been going on since 1970, which is when you sign, you promise you will eventually give up your nuclear weapons. And notice how America has signed and we still got a lot of nuclear weapons.

1:27:37Francis Foster:Just like everyone else. So that part is not real. The real part is the on-site inspection, which is intel. That is the actual teeth in the NPT, you see. So that's the part that Israel is not actually giving up its nuclear. It may say that, but it's not the reality. The reality is that there will then be tit for tat. And President Trump, this is going to be a big political cost. I was going to say, I mean, you started a war because you wouldn't do a deal that you now have to do a worse deal. That's a humiliation. I mean, there's no two ways. That is the political. That's what I'm saying. You pick your poison.

1:28:18Francis Foster:So it's either that, but what I also would like to explore - And you can possibly save your presidency, or you don't, and you can't save your - What I'm saying is, there's no option here to come out the victor here, like gladiator, where everybody's cheering, okay, for the new general. That's not happening in this situation. And if we keep waiting for that, then what it is, is Lyndon Johnson. These are the real choices, I think, in front of the president. And what I'm saying is you're absolutely right. But this is why we have to put this bluntly out here, because people from your program will be listening.

1:28:58People in the West Wing will be listening. And this means very directly that they will have to put pressure on Israel. And that pressure will be threatening to cut off the military aid for real. Not just kind of. Now, he can try to gussy it up. And by the way, President Trump, I do believe, just to put something here about why he might be able to do this, it's not just because of his relationship with Israel, but President Trump is the best PR politician we've had, certainly at the equal of Obama, certainly the equal of Reagan. Some of my friends who don't like Trump don't like it when I say this.

1:29:39I think he's better. Just think about this. He did January 6th and got reelected. elected. Just think about this for a moment. We have not seen, I think, this level of understanding the media and how to, he understands the media better than the media understands the media here. So if there's somebody who can recover his presidency, even with all these liabilities, I believe it is President Trump.

1:30:09Francis Foster:He can sell this deal as an actual victory to at least his base. And enough time will pass. They'll find other things. We have time. He has time to recover. You take this down where we're still talking about this, not just talking, but fighting this war in July. That's gone. See, that's space. He needs space for the PR. The PR is not something he can ginny up overnight. Let's talk about that, because temperamentally, I wonder, you know, your assessment of 75 percent just from it, just judging characters. I imagine he would be quite tempted to go with a hard option, potentially. Well, sure, because he's faced with these horns of a dilemma and he has some hope.

1:30:53But I also think he put pressure on Netanyahu to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza in September. and I was one of the people who was thinking that he might well do that and it's for the good of Israel because I didn't believe that it was in Israel's interest to cleanse the Netanyahu may think that but I didn't think it was in Israel's interest and I was on podcasts in this city Norm Dorfman does the comedy seller here and so yeah yeah he's I'm sorry I said the name Norm, now he's going to get mad at me. But no, please, no, no. But you can go and listen. And he and I had what's called a feisty hour and a half discussion about this in August.

1:31:42And I kept saying that, no, what you're not seeing is I believe that, in fact, President Trump himself may see the wisdom of going down this road. And I don't know if that at all, you know, I'm not saying there was any connection here. whatsoever. But what I am saying is that I do think that President Trump has the power, and I think he may well have the interest. He may see that what I'm saying here is the best for the country, the world, the region, and his own presidency.

1:32:19Francis Foster:Bob, I want to come back to the other option, which we haven't followed up, the military option, the Marines on Kargah, controlling the coast. You've hinted that there is more stages to this if that option is pursued. So, so far we got to, let's say they get the Marines, dangerous operation, very high risk. Let's say it's successful with casualties. The Iranians begin to destroy their own oil facilities. I imagine likely the other Gulf states as well at the same time. At this point, I'm not a great strategist, but I imagine the temptation from Israel and America is to say, well, look how terrible these Iranians are.

1:32:56Francis Foster:We've got to go harder. So let me, to give you and the listeners some framework here. For the last 30 years, my scholarship has been about air power, economic sanctions, lots of books, articles on sanctions, and suicide terrorism. And we have not talked about the third shoe, terrorism. So after 9-11, I compiled the first database of all suicide attacks around the world. Israel did not have this database. They had a database who was attacking them that was 20 % wrong, and I showed them and they fixed it. So I compiled this database and it produced a finding. And I've published two books on this, lots of articles.

1:33:42But it produced a finding, which is that 95 % of all suicide attacks are not due to religion. There was half of them at that point in 2001 were by secular folks, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But 95 % were in response to foreign ground forces, ground forces. It's not that you didn't have any of those attacks before. It's that when you put the military, the foreign ground forces in, they went up 20 times, just to give you a sense. Many, many cases of this. Well, before this was even published, I knew Paul Wolfowitz. He was our deputy secretary of defense. I knew him from the 90s. I had other connections with the Pentagon.

1:34:27I gave Secretary Wolfowitz here the studies here. And this was somebody coming from me. I'm basically a liberal Republican. I had all these friends in the NSC. You could imagine that I was possibly going down that road here. Well, this is why I never went down that road. It's because I was showing them rather directly that if they invaded Iraq, and I said this in so many words to them, if they invaded Iraq, they would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times. They would produce more attacks on Western targets. I didn't know London was coming a few years later, but things like that.

1:35:05They were not stopping the next 9-11. They were assuring things like that would happen in the future. Came back, this was in November 2002, from the, and again, nothing classified here, but it's not been widely known, from Andy Marshall, and some of the listeners here will know who that person is, highly credible conduit, that we're not going to take Iraq off the table, Bob, but what we are going to do is pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia. That's how we opened IUD in Qatar. So that's how that happened. Because of this analysis, that's what led to IUD being open. That's what Marshall told me.

1:35:45Well, then we did launch the war in Iraq. And six months after the war, five months after the war, the largest suicide terrorist campaign of modern times actually happened, just as I was explaining here and who started my center, the Chicago Project. This was in February 2004. I had the Wolfowitz Rumsfeld Defense Department reached out. They wanted more work on suicide terrorism. I had to create a center. So my center at the University of Chicago was at first called the University of Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. Over the years, I've kept the acronym Seapost, but I've morphed it to Chicago Project on security and threats.

1:36:28So they expanded a little bit, but I've kept Seapost. So it's so ironic, but it was the very people that I was telling were doing exactly the wrong thing that started the center. And then Wolfowitz left and Egland became the next deputy. And there was all these interactions because, as he said, the NSC really We wanted to know how good was PAPE's data because there were other places we were thinking of putting armies in and we never put those armies there. So there's a whole set of stories about that. So when I say advised and so forth, this is some of the this is this was my experience. So so I've had experience where people that I have disagreed with here and this was public.

1:37:10So I knew then I was never being hired by an NSA here. And once you go down these roads, notice that nobody's really going to want to hire you because I'm not a card-carrying Democrat. I'm not a card-carrying Republican. I'm a professor who's laying out the escalation dynamics and willing to talk to anybody to try to get the better outcome for the country.

1:37:31Francis Foster:So what are the escalation dynamics if President Trump pursues the Marines? Again, the ground force risk. So the number one risk here to produce large amounts of anti-American terrorism. and we've seen little bits now, but nothing like could happen, is going to be ground military presence, and especially the idea that it would lead to regime change. So even if we try to take that off the table, the other side's not going to believe that, and that also means the 92 million people in Iran aren't going to believe that. Some will be hopeful, some will be opposed to that. Here, that's going to mean others in the region here.

1:38:06You're going to see all what we call the tentacles of Iran, you know, all the groups, the proxies, so to speak, here, you're going to stir up a hornet's nest of terrorism, not on day one. It took about five months before it really got going here. And so we can't put a time, we can't do it to the day. That's what everybody would like. They'd like to precisely time it so they can put money on Polymarket or whatever. But the bottom line is we know the direction. It's like moving a super tanker. Uh, and it's, you know, five months, you know, seven, eight months down the road, you can expect a pretty good amount of, um, and this, and this terrorism could be pretty serious.

1:38:50So just coming on this flight here, I didn't have to take my shoes off. Okay. Um, we didn't do that on not after nine 11 until the first shoe bomb, you see. So, so we're talking, we're not talking about the, the, the shooting sprees of 10 or 15 people being killed. So if this goes down this road, the kind of indiscriminate terrorism we're talking about here, we're talking about malls, airplanes. We're talking about those are the targets that will come up immediately. Think about it as ISIS potentially on steroids, because ISIS was a group who did those kinds of attacks here. ISIS was a group of just 30 or 40 ,000.

1:39:33Well, the Revolutionary Guards and also the Bajji, that's a million, okay, so already. Iran is already very good at propaganda. They're a state. They're not a group. And they will have plenty. They already do cyber. They'll have plenty of ability to go on Telegram. They'll have plenty of ability to do things that we're not even. So we don't even know, I think, how a state as powerful as Iran would be able to use the Internet and propaganda to inspire attacks. And that's why I think it will happen. I think there may be some sleeper cells and some command directed, but what ISIS showed is the power of what you can do when you inspire attacks and you explain that the attacker should take one or two weeks to prepare.

1:40:27And you can give them some ideas for how to prepare, but once ISIS started to explain you should take some time and prep. They did this better than al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda tried to do this, but that's what ISIS really did. It wasn't so much the tactics of the car ramming. I don't believe that. I've been studying terrorism here in detail. 8 ,000 suicide attacks, one by one by one with research teams at my center. So I've looked at quite a few of these over time. I believe that the issue is preparation. How much time does the would-be attacker put into it? The attacker in Texas here was quick, just right off the bat, killed two, wounded about another dozen here.

1:41:12But that's not somebody who spent a week or two preparing. Crooks, the guy who went after Trump here, he looks like he spent a week or two. And look how much closer he got here. And fortunately, he missed. Unfortunately, Trump turned his head. But what I'm saying is that it's the preparation that's the issue. And the longer the preparation of, you know, certainly two weeks here, if you have a two-week period of time, somebody's willing to put that much time in, there's just a lot more possibilities here of the bad things happening. And that is what I'm worried about as we go forward.

1:41:46Francis Foster:Just a very quick aside before Francis takes back over. You said it's not really about religion and it's about ground troops. But why aren't Ukrainians blowing themselves up and killing Russian troops? Oh, because they don't need to. It's success. So there have been a couple of instances that were reported in the news as suicide attacks, and we've drilled into it, and we don't think so. So my books explain all this. So the issue here is last resort. So if it's all about religion, what should be happening is all these Islamic groups, they should be, I kind of put it as looking for the first excuse to get the quick trip to heaven.

1:42:25So any old excuse, they should all be committing, doing this. That's not what you see is the patterns of these suicide campaigns. That's not what Hezbollah's pattern was. That's not what Hamas's pattern was. So in my books, I lay out the pattern over time. That's what these big books are doing. They're studying the trajectories of the campaigns and also how they begin with non-suicide campaigns. And then they often begin with political protests. like the first inifada, which was more like throwing Molotov cocktails. That is the beginning of Hamas, not suicide attacks. So Hamas, right off the bat, is Islamic fundamental.

1:43:05So they want all the stuff that you hear, they want the end of Israel. Well, that was all true in 1987 in the charter. Their suicide attacks don't start until years later, and then it's not really going until you get to the second inifada, which is after 2000. So what you see here is that what the trajectory of the terrorism is, is the tactics get more desperate and more deadly over time. So Ukraine, they've held the Russians, except for the first three days of the war. Okay, so go back to the first three days of the war. This is, by the way, the smart bomb trap from the Russian side. They fell into the escalation trap, and it's very parallel to what's happened to us.

1:43:54So stage one, they thought they had a quick and decisive victory strategy. It's with air and ground power, so not just air power. And they get right to the airport in Kiev here, so right to the gates of Kiev. So they get very, very close. But the fact is they couldn't get over the edge here. and then within just a few days, and by the way, I said this to some Congress folks who came literally right out of a classified briefing telling me that they had just been told that Kiev's going to fall in three days. I said, it's not going to fall. 90 % like it. But Bob, you haven't been in the briefing.

1:44:29I'm telling you, they've got too much wherewithal here. And so the bottom line is they don't fall. And what do they do? They lash back. They take back So from March, April, May 2022, they're recovering, lashing back. And who's holding on by their fingernails? It's Putin, you see, until he then fires all his military. You know, this is when he's doing all the rearranging of his staffs and so forth to go to stage three. So stage one had the quick and decisive. Stage two, the lash back. Stage three for Putin was the war of attrition. And right now there's barely been any movement since June of 2002.

1:45:16You're talking about a handful of miles. 22. 22. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. 22. Yeah. Thank you. Since June 2022, three and a half years plus here, barely any movement of the line of contact. So why would Ukraine do? And what they had is they've come up with other ideas like drones, you know, and you've got donors, some of them from Chicago. Jennifer Pritzker is one who has given all this money to the Ukrainians to build these drone factories. And the drones are really making it difficult for Russia to gain any territory. And so what does Russia do? They've got their drone factories in Iran and they've made it difficult for the Ukrainians to take territory.

1:46:01So you've got basically a stalemate like Korea that's occurring. So they don't need suicide. This isn't this would make it's not it's a my book is called Dying to Win the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. And it's explaining it's not a religious logic the way most people think. It's strategic. And that explains the ebbs and the flows, the origins and the ends of the campaigns. Religion, everything should just be a constant. Look, there's going to be a lot of people who are listening to you, Professor, who are thinking to themselves. They're looking at the strategies, particularly that the Americans have pursued straight off Hormuz.

1:46:40and they're thinking to themselves, why is it that they haven't predicted what is going to happen? They've got some of the most intelligent people. They've got access to some of the most brilliant military minds in the world, military strategists, et cetera. Why is it that they haven't predicted what's going to happen? I call it the illusion of precision control, Francis. So I've been in the rooms when very, very senior, super smart people, and there's no cameras on, are getting these briefings about what air power can hit and from people with stars on their shoulders. It is amazing to watch, and this can be Republican, Democrat.

1:47:27This is not about party. This is about human beings. You put people in these rooms here, and I show you, and you really believe, not just maybe these bombs will hit their targets 90, 95 % of the time, but it's going to be the reality. Two things are inescapable. Number one, immediately the mind goes, what leader can I kill? Even if the briefer is not talking about that, by the way, immediately the mind goes to that because the briefer is explaining, and again, these people, many stars, generals, that the bombs will hit within, you know, five to 15 feet. They'll talk about the winds and they'll talk about all these different conditions.

1:48:12And you will, then it'll be immediately, well, that's about the size of this room. And who would I like to take out from this on the other side here? So number one, that's where the leadership decapitations idea really come from. But there's the second thing that the mind goes to that I've seen. And again, I think this is just human nature. I don't think it's any deeper than that, which is the illusion of control of the escalation after that. Because I can have this exquisite opening. It's like a chess game where I have the exquisite opening in chess. It may be the absolute perfect exquisite opening in chess, but it's still just the opening.

1:48:51It's not the middle game, which is really where all the strategy in chess is all about. Here it's like territory and the moves and the feints and so forth. And then it's not the end game. So you can't, and so just like in chess, you can study end games, but you can't really think about what end game strategy to have until you get through the middle. You see, so strategy here with the smart bombs, I call this with the smart bombs in particular a smart bomb trap, because what happens is it's like an opening in chess. You are so absolutely mesmerized by the accuracy of what you're about to do and the perfection of that opening that you're really imagining you can totally control the middle game.

1:49:37You can control the escalation from that point on. And even if the briefer here, and I have no reason to think General Cain would not have been cautioning President Trump, starts to give caution about what might, don't overread that opening, sir, and there's the middle game. Even if they do that, the seeing that and seeing it so close and believing it's true here, I think it creates the illusion of control. And that's why I think you've seen this with when President Reagan dropped bombs to assassinate Gaddafi in April 1986. The bombs hit there. That was the very first precision decapitation campaign.

1:50:20We hit his tent, killed his family, some of his family. He just stepped out of his tent, literally. He was sleeping in a tent, literally, just for a second. But two years later, he brought down Pan Am Flight 103, killed 271 civilians, 190 Americans as his retaliation. President Clinton, let me pick a Democrat. March 1999, President Clinton wants to negotiate for the pro-democracy movement in Kosovo. And he wants to tilt the hawk and the dove balance in the Serbian government, who's on the other side. So he launches a three-day, what was supposed to be a three-day air campaign, hitting 51 targets in and around Belgrade in order to shift the hawks and doves, shake, if not degrade, if not topple the Milosevic regime.

1:51:11And the bombs hit their targets perfectly. But what happened is the Serbian regime did not fall. It was hardened. And Milosevic countered by ordering 30 ,000 troops into Kosovo. And he expelled, that is ethnically cleansed, a million Kosovars from the country. That's 50 percent of all the civilians from that province. And we had to fight 78 days and put a ground army there to, we didn't have to actually conquer it, but to take it if he didn't back off. And that's what led Milosevic to give up. It was a disaster that we only pulled out at the end by putting in the ground forces here. So this is what we're up against with the smart bomb trap.

1:52:02Now, I talked to, on the NSC, President Clinton's briefer, the person on the NSC, I won't say the name, whose job it was to give all the worst-case scenarios. And he showed me the 400-page briefing. This was a year later because I interviewed Adesari, the president. I spent a lot of time studying these, not just kind of casually. And so he showed me the briefing. It was still marked top secret. Well, he wrote it so he could show somebody who didn't have a clearance. And he just said to me, he said, Bob, it never occurred to me that the Serbs would be that vicious. Even though they described it as one of the most vicious regimes ever.

1:52:46He said, it just never occurred to me or to us. We just couldn't imagine that level of evil.

1:52:54Francis Foster:Professor, so all of that being the case, the one question we haven't asked you, strikes me as kind of important is it's academic, but also kind of important. If we agree, I don't know if we agree, but I imagine we agree that Iran shouldn't get nuclear weapons. Yeah. What should President Trump have done? He should have gone back to the JCPOA, the Obama deal, because if you can push this problem off 10, 15, 20 years, do it. It's not the best. It's still a problem deal, but it is that deal. Once President Trump broke the deal and withdrew, we saw that Iran put pedal to the metal, and it took years, not just a day or two.

1:53:35It took years before it could start to really rebuild its enrichment program. So the deal, actually, with all its warrants, was actually a good deal, and it also provided 24-7 camera-level inspection of everything here. And I think this is what he should have done. He should have, I think, taken versions of the deal that's been on offer as imperfect as it was. And he would have to sell it as he found a way to say it's better than Obama's deal. And people, a lot of people just believe him.

1:54:09Francis Foster:I'm just thinking from a strategic perspective, and there's probably gaps in my thinking about it. But if Iran and other countries know that we effectively cannot use air power or indeed ground power for the reasons you've articulated to deal with the nuclear threat. Wouldn't it be perfectly logical for them to pursue nuclear weapons irrespective of any deal that we do? Well, now we're teaching them very strongly that they must have nuclear weapons. I think that's why I want to come back to what I said is the offset with Israel. So if you can offer Iran the possibility that Israel will be contained, containing Israel.

1:54:53That's worth quite a bit. That's worth quite a bit. Because you really, as much as I'm laying all this out, notice I'm saying things are 75, that means there's still 25 % over here. And that's, so you are, if I was advising Iran here, I would say, if you can get the containment of Israel, you take it. And what does that mean? Okay, you keep your 3.5 enriched uranium, but you open yourself back up to the IAEA. You open yourself up to 24-7 inspection. You're going to get some tit for tat where you're going to get some inspection of Israel now too. So this is not just you who's up for this. But what I would say is if you want to maximize your survival here and your Iran, that's what I would do, because there is some chance that we're going to go down these roads.

1:55:43And as much as we're saying, we'll never put 100 ,000 troops in Iran. Think about this right now. J.D. Vance said, we're never putting ground troops in Iran. And what are we talking about doing next week? Is ground troops here at the beginning. Now, still limited, but there's no way that Iran can really be sure we're not going to come at them with some multi-division attack down the road and that they'll be able to offset that. So I would still say that the bottom line here is containing Israel for Iran, that's something I think they would be foolish to give that up, to surrender that, because this is an uncertain world.

1:56:27Professor Robert Pape, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, guys. Man, great question. Thank you so much. No worries at all. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? We still haven't talked as much as we should have about the enriched uranium that's floating now, dispersing. We think it's dispersing at least some inside of Iran. It could be dispersing outside of Iran. And so we've talked about stage one, two, and three. I told you stage four, I'm worried about the terrorism. There is a stage five in the fall, which is that dispersed uranium finding its way into bad things happening here.

1:57:08So I see a lot of bad possibilities here that get worse. That's why I've been putting out images on X of the funnel getting worse here over time. and I think that I'm hoping we won't have to have those Sunday briefings where I go through those in hours

1:57:26Francis Foster:I'm hoping we can stop it here That's us Thank you so much Thank you I appreciate it Relax, relax This is not an ad We know ads are incredibly annoying and that's why I wanted to let you know that you can watch this video without any advertising at all No pop-ups, no interruptions, nothing Go to triggerpod.co.uk and join thousands of our supporters who watch all our interviews with bonus content ad-free.