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Do what's natural. Iran has figured out that we can't beat them. We're not weakening Iran. We have strengthened Iran.
And we can't stop their drone attacks. And what you're seeing is far more chaotic decision-making happening in the White House than happening in the government of Iran. And its evidence Trump is losing power. So when I look through the response to the last conversation, the audience had lots of different types of questions.
Like, there's 90 or a million people stuck right in the heart of this. That often don't really have a voice. What do you think happens next for them? And what is Israel's role in this?
Well, Israel's playing two roles here that have not helped us correctly assess the situations. And we're talking about that. And then what do you think happens with Europe? NATO is, for all practical purposes, dead.
And what happens next? So for 21 years, I laid out what a hypothetical bombing campaign of Iran would look like. And when I was here last time, every single thing we talked about unfolded in the first several weeks of the war. So when you did this 21 years of modelling these attacks, how did America come out of this situation?
So there was a consistent set of findings and America can bomb them, attack them. We could even threaten to murder all 92 million of them. But the bottom line is, that is the real danger for us. Guys, I've got a favorite to ask before this episode begins.
The algorithm, if you follow a show will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on the show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's a simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show.
And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the actual listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Professor Robert Pape. Good to see you again.
Great to see you again, Stephen. It's been four weeks since we sat down and talked about everything that was happening in the war. And it's all moved at light speed. You made some predictions then, so many of them have come true already, and many of them still unfolding.
But I wanted to get you back to talk about what the hell is going on. And I think that's kind of how I started last conversation. But there's so much that's being said. And I get the sense that there's a truth that sits underneath there somewhere.
Because when you look at what the Iranians are saying, when you look at what the Israelis are saying, when you look at what Trump and America are saying, and then you look at reality at some level, I feel like we're not being told the truth. My first question to you, Professor, is who are you and who are you to speak on this subject matter? I am a professor at the University of Chicago. I have been there for 26 years, almost 27 years.
And before that, I was a professor who taught for the US Air Force. I taught conventional targeting. And I thought I was going to go into the Foreign Service. I wanted to understand how we lost the Vietnam War.
And this became the origins of bombing to win. Which is your book I have here in front of me? That's bombing to win. In 1985, I just finished all my classes and I have to pick a topic for my PhD.
I wanted to find a book that laid out all the air campaigns and that explained why Vietnam was a loser. Where did that L come from? When you say air campaigns, for someone that knows nothing about military conflict, what do you mean by air campaigns? What I mean with an air campaign is when you have military aircraft who are not just doing a single raid bombing one target one day, but doing a campaign over days, weeks, months, in the case of Vietnam over years.
And you wanted to figure out why countries that do these military campaigns, which is pretty much what's going on now in the Middle East, why they don't tend to win. Why they don't win when they're so strong? Why is it that when a strong power really gets its act together, it's not careless. It's really thinking hard.
It then applies this force a campaign over time and comes out a loser. And you modeled for 20 years a war with Iran versus the United States? That's exactly right. I imagined in class for 90 minutes, I laid out what a hypothetical bombing campaign of Iran would look like, starting with the bombing of its nuclear enrichment sites.
There's multiple sites. There's for dough, which is an industrial enrichment where there are centrifuges, there's the tons, also centrifuges, there's esophon where you have gasification of the ore, so you can make the centrifuges more efficient. So it's not just one target. There's a whole target set, a complex of targets.
And so what I would do is I would lay out, here are the aircraft that could be used. Here are the likely results at a tactical level. Yes, just for context, so we're looking at a map of Iran, and we're looking at the Persian Gulf. And Iran, of course, is to the east of the Persian Gulf.
And Tehran is up to the north middle. Right in the middle are a whole series of these nuclear sites. You have Saagand, which is where the uranium ore actually comes from. They don't have to bring in ore.
They have plenty of ore. But the ore has to be distilled so that you can get the tiny bits of uranium-235 you need for enriching the uranium for either nuclear reactors or bomb-grade uranium. That's the first none at esophon to gasify the ore, so that when it spins in the centrifuge facilities at Natanz and Fordot, you can get the purity of the uranium-235. That's what we're talking about here when we say it's enriched.
So when you did the 21 years of modelling these attacks, how did the model show America came out of the situation? There was a consistent set of findings. You just couldn't ignore Stephen, which is our bombers would always be able to destroy the target, the industrial facility that was enriching the uranium. The problem always was no matter which year we did this, you wouldn't be able to destroy the enriched material, the actual gold.
So if you're panning for gold, you see what I mean, and you've got the gold, you can destroy the pan, you can even destroy the river, you can't get the gold. So let me repeat that back to you in layman's times and tell me if I'm correct. So they could bomb the sites where they're making the enriched uranium, but it wouldn't destroy the enriched uranium. It would just put it underneath a bunch of rubble.
That's right. So you can bomb it, but you're basically just kicking the can down the road, because at some point they can go back and get it, it's undamaged, and then they can carry on their process. That's right, and Stephen, they might even anticipate the bombs coming because they might get some indications we're building up and then disperse in advance. And the at the end of last year, they did Operation Midnight Hammer, where they bombed the sites with these incredible- Exactly as we did in class.
Literally, I had just modeled it for the students three weeks before, and almost exactly the platforms. I mean, the B2s, the Moab. I mean, every single thing we talked about, if unfolded, just as we had modeled in class. So what is going on now?
I want you to help me cut through all of this noise and all of this propaganda. What's going on now is we're not weakening Iran in a sense where Iran will be weaker a year from now, two years from now. We have strengthened Iran, and we're strengthening Iran in multiple ways. So far, we've just been talking about bombs on target.
My real specialty, Stephen, is the interaction of military action in politics. You are not just hitting an industrial target. People in the country, the population, the regime, they're reacting to that politically. And that reaction is tremendously important.
And that's what I discovered in my work study in Vietnam in the 1980s, why the bombing campaign was failing. The political reactions by the population often are overwhelming the tactical military effects. So you can hit the target, you can destroy the industrial facilities. And in fact, you can energize the population to work even harder, to overcome all that damage.
And sometimes they have tremendous geographic advantages. In Vietnam, there was an area called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was where the logistics, where the ammo for the Viet Cong realifiers in the South were getting their ammo. And in the 1960s, we knocked out 80 plus percent of the throughput of that pipeline of that trail. You know what?
It wasn't enough. And we ended up not being able to stop that little, any bitty bit of throughput that still could get through. And incentivize even more to get it through, because they knew we couldn't stop it. And that is what fueled the VC.
And ultimately, the Viet Cong, the guerrillas that were really up against in Vietnam, that is what ultimately bolstered their morale. They knew we couldn't beat them, even though we whittled them down by 80%. We couldn't get that last 15 or 20%. And that was what was energizing their morale.
So how does that apply to what's going on now? In simple times, what's going on? Iran has figured out that we can't beat them. That's what's going on, Stephen.
They are figuring out that we can't beat them. We can bomb them. We can attack them. We could even threaten to murder all 92 million of them, which is the civilization threat by President Trump.
And the bottom line is that we can't get to that final 10, 20% of drones and missiles. Okay, that Iran has, and it's probably bigger than that, that we can't knock out. See, we're able to knock out anything that's above ground. If there's a launcher and it's above ground, we can see it.
We can see it with satellites. We can see it with other sensors as well. That thing is going to be gone in a few days. And that's what the air campaign that you've watched for 40 days is doing.
When Secretary Higgs Seth or General Kane talk about hitting 11,000, 12,000 targets, these are targets. Most of almost all of them that are very clearly visible and above ground. This is true of the Navy ships as well. Well, guess what?
The Iranians knew that was always going to be vulnerable. So what they've been doing is they have been not just deeply burying their industrial enrichment facilities. They've been deeply burying their arsenals of drones, deeply burying their arsenals of missiles. And so they are in a position where even though we are unleashing enormous amounts of air power against them and we are technically superior, we can't stop their drone attacks against the ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
They know it, they can use that to their advantage and boy, are they using it to their advantage enormously. Yesterday, the Secretary of War Pete Higgs Seth did press conference and one of the reporters said to him, there's been a ceasefire announced, but it appears that Iran is attacking neighboring countries. Higgs Seth's response to the reporter was, Iran would be wise to find a way to get their carrier pigeon to the troops out in remote locations to let them know not to shoot any longer. It can sometimes take time for ceasefires to take hold, which was really alarming to me because it suggests that there is actually not a centralized leadership structure in Iran.
And actually, if there's not a centralized leadership structure, I just want to negotiate a ceasefire. If there's lots of different factions doing lots of different things now, is that true? I would say it's probably decentralized. I think you probably write about that.
I'm trying to figure out who in Iran is negotiating with America and why it doesn't seem to be the case that whoever's negotiating control the fact that people are still firing drugs. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah.
Decentralization means chaotic and they can't actually make decisions. That's just not the case. The more you move up the chain of command, the more the leader can give predelegated orders that X happens to do Y, those can hold for hours and days. And that's true in every organization.
That's why leaders can go on vacation for a week and come back. And they're worried, of course, when they come back. But the bottom line is that the leaders are setting the strategic direction. Who is the leader?
Oh, it's definitely the Supreme Leader, the son of the one we just killed. Oh, without a doubt, I think this idea that he's not there. There's absolutely no evidence of that. Yes, it's decentralized in the sense it's hard to find them to target them.
But by the way, Stephen, I think the reason that we're trying to talk smack about the Supreme Leader is he is he alive? Is he dead? We're trying to go to him into revealing his location so we can kill him. But that's not working.
So it's also not stopping Iran from putting out 10 points to Pakistan in the negotiations. It's not stopping Iran from having a message that goes through Pakistan to the White House. President Trump is then agreeing to the 10 points that are coming from Iran, you see. And then later on, of course, President Trump is taking it back.
But the bottom line is what you're seeing in terms of chaotic decision-making. Far more chaotic decision-making is happening in the White House in the United States than it's happening in the government of Iran. Their rising power in the region, as our power is declining precipitously. What do you think happens next?
We are at a fork in the road. When I was here last time, I was walking you through the three stages of the escalation trap, and you kept pushing me. Tell me more. Tell me more.
I was a little bit reluctant to do that. Well, there is a stage four. For anyone that didn't hear that episode, could you give us one sentence on stage one? Yes.
Stage one is, America bombs does leadership change bombing. We hit targets, kill leaders, but the regime actually evolves in a stronger than before. Stage two is, that then stronger regime lashes back with horizontal escalation and takes the straight of hormones, at least initially takes the straight of hormones. And then stage three is, that's the ground option to start to take the straight of hormones back.
And that's exactly what you saw play out in the first several weeks of the war. Stage three was about the Marines, and the Marines hadn't even moved yet. And I'm telling you, the Marines are likely going to move. There's going to be movement to ground options in stage three here very rapidly in this war.
At that point in time, when we had our first discussion, you wanted to push for the future. I said, no, we need to wait. And the reason, Stephen, is because what you're not seeing with me is throwing random darts at the future. I'm doing risk assessment out about as far as you can have stable predictions.
And in war, that usually means two, three, four weeks. It doesn't mean we can say where we'll be a year from now. Here, though, now that we're in 40 days, we're at a different point. We've clearly passed stage one.
We're past stage two where they control the straight of hormones. We've bellied up to stage three of the ground operations. Now we're at a branch, a fork in the road. There's no way to go back to February 27, which is the pre-war period that many people would love to go back to.
I, too, would like to go back to February 27. That's not the future. What happens at this point on in the modeling is a branch. Either we go through with the ground war, or Iran becomes an emerging, not right away, fourth center of world power.
That is the branch that we face now. This branch is becoming more evident hour by hour. Explain that to me. So everybody now knows that Iran is controlling the straight of hormones and controlling shipping.
That's selective blockade. I'm taking it a step further. That's not just about insurance rates of shipping. That's generating political power for Iran to get other states to kowtow to it, to accept its objectives.
What are those objectives? So let's talk about how this affects, say, Asia. So I'm going to get it to global, and then we'll come back to the Gulf itself. So the shipping that goes through the straight of hormones, 80% to 90% of it is going right to Asia.
The power that comes with that is with, say, India. India is not siding with the United States. India is that best neutral, and maybe even a little bit more edging toward Iran. Well, before this, you could imagine that the United States and India would be much more cooperative here.
That's not what's occurring, and why is that? It's because that oil that's going into Asia, for India, this isn't just about the price of oil. This is about the supply of oil. When you lose literally all the supply, that is a greater cost than simply having to pay more for it.
So India is in a much more difficult situation than Europe and the United States right now. Now, look at Japan. Notice, in the Oval Office, President Trump brought in the leader of the head of state of Japan, and basically brow beat her, and she still wouldn't budge. She still would not kowtow to Trump here and actually provide military support.
What did she do? She's distancing herself from the United States. That's exactly what Iran wants out of America's Asian allies. This is geopolitical power, and it's rooted in the control of hormones.
It's rooted in the selective military blockade. That selective military blockade produces vulnerability to India, vulnerability to Japan, and that is what we call it the leverage, but the leverage is not enough of a, I think, a full description. This is reorienting America's allies in Asia. Now, let's talk about what's happening in the Persian Gulf itself.
Before the war, February 27, there was essentially a balance in the Persian Gulf, where you had Iran on one side, and you had this growing collection of Gulf states that were part of an emerging web. They're cooperating with Israel more and more on different issues. President Trump is bringing in his AI billionaires to sort of grease this cooperation so that there's some material benefits. Well, that was effectively a counterbalancing coalition to Iran.
Now, what's happened after 40 days is this is breaking down fast. America has military bases in Qatar has military bases in Bahrain has military bases in Kuwait. I'm just picking a few in military base, of course, in Saudi Arabia. These military bases, they are producing little leverage here against Iran.
In fact, our aircraft carriers are not anywhere near the Persian Gulf. They're a thousand miles away. These bases are big fat targets. They are above ground.
Iran's precision drones can hit things above ground, and they're doing it on those bases. That was their immediate retaliation. What's happening, number one, is the anchor. The military anchor of this coalition started to disappear within hours of the bombing on February 28th.
What do you mean by the military anchor? In order to have this coalition work, which is like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, somebody has to be the guarantor of protection. It's like the mob boss who protects everybody else. That is the United States, and that is what our military bases were supposed to do.
They become the military anchor that allows them for there to become political counterbalancing against Iran. That was the Kushner idea in the first Trump administration, and it seemed to work, and it seemed to bring some of these states together who wouldn't necessarily think you would cooperate with Israel. Well, this is now this war has torpedoed this whole idea. President Trump is not even willing to do much to actually defend our own bases, much less Saudi Arabia, much less UAE.
What he's telling them is you go out there and start defending yourself. Well, that's not a guarantor of security. The next thing that's happening is the three states, which we're operating more in concert, are starting to break down and operate in three pools. You have Iraq, which is now complaining more and more about US military presence there.
They're distancing themselves from American military presence. And remember, we installed that government in 2003. So they're not siding with us. They're distancing themselves from us.
Then you have Qatar and you have Oman. What Iran's doing is saying, you know, we should share some of these these tolls with Oman. They're moving Oman into their camps. So you have Iraq moving closer to Iran, Oman moving closer, Qatar is trying to keep its head down as much as possible.
They're not trying to get their nose on this anymore. And who is what's the third pool? The third pool is Saudi Arabia, the UAE. These are the states that are most under threat.
And what has Saudi Arabia done just in the last week? They've gone to cooperate more with Pakistan. They have a security deal with Pakistan. What does that mean?
They're looking to Pakistan as much or maybe even more than the United States as their guarantor of security. So all of this coalition, it's not all siding with Iran right now. It's fragmented. And that's weakening America.
So what happens next? You know, as President Trump wants to do, call the war off. That's not going to put us back to February 27. Iran has 20% of the world's oil.
It's going to be able to have 75 billion, 100 billion dollars of revenues here over the next year. And also those deeply buried caves and tunnels where they have their drones that can be used to fashion nuclear weapons. Within a year, Iran could have nuclear weapons and we can't stop it. So if we pull back, you can start to see that Iran's power is going to grow internally.
But then even more than that, its relationships with Russia, its relationships with China will start to move closer together against America. And you see this happening from the moment almost the first several days of the war, Russia almost immediately offered Iran military targeting information to target US ships. That's why our carriers are so far away. It's because Russia has the ability to see those carriers tell Iran where they are.
And if those carriers get too close, man, they're going to be smashed. But it can get worse than that, Stephen. Because as this power grows over time, as these incentives for China, Russia and Iran to cooperate against America grow over time. Iran has control now of 20% of the world's oil.
Russia has 11% of the world's oil. That means there can be either formal or tacit cooperation to take 30% of the world's oil off the global market, let China soak up a whole lot of that. And that can truly produce mega economic consequences for America, for Europe. And why are they not going to do that?
Because they're nice guys. Is that really what we're counting on now? Russia Putin is not going to want to wreck America's economy because he has a bond with Donald Trump. What do you think the fundamental floor assumption was at the start of this from the United States?
That Iran was weak on its last legs. And all we had to do was push it over the edge of a cliff. And it was just a matter of just one more push. And then the people would rise up.
And yeah, we have painted a picture of Iran as beaten down as the reason it's not retaliating very much is they have no capability to retaliate. And I tell you tell you this, Stephen. So I've been in big debates here at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where I've literally been the only person on the stage to stand up and warn that this picture of Iran is way too negative. There was a wide spread, I think, false assumption across the foreign policy community.
No one willing to really stand up and challenge it very strongly that Iran was basically collapsing on its own. This was always, in my view, underestimating the power of Iran. And you say, well, where does my view come from? It came from the modeling of the bombing.
What would happen as this went forward? And none of these elements of Iran's power were ever knocked out. One of the three, the response to the last conversation, the audience had lots of different types of questions. So I'm going to try and represent some of the audience's questions, to try and bring them into the conversation.
One of them was about Israel's role in this. And I thought it might actually link to what you just said about where we get our intelligence from, the informed citizens we make, because there are some people that are skeptical about the intelligence that's coming from Israel. And therefore, that it might not be as accurate as if it was coming from our own sources. I would say Israel has been playing the role of diplomatic spoiler.
So in the 12 day war, when last June, when the US bomb for dough, we've been focusing on that happened in the middle of the 12 day war, Donald Trump said he was going to negotiate with a certain set of Iranians. And literally, the next day, 36 hours later, Israeli air power killed them, killed the negotiators. We were set to negotiate with this was totally spoiling the idea of a diplomatic outcome, because they were dead. So you couldn't have a negotiated outcome.
Now, if we come to February 28, who dropped the first bombs that killed the Supreme Leader that killed those other several dozen doves that he was meeting with Donald Trump, as many of our governments have describes that you had a balance of hawks and doves inside of the Iranian government. And the idea here is with leadership decapitation is, well, if you kill the hawks, then the doves will just be the ones left. We did the opposite, or more correctly, the bombing was started by Israel on February 28. We came in behind.
And in fact, Secretary Rubio, or Secretary of State explained a few days later that Israel basically backed us in a corner, because Israel said, we're going to kill that Supreme Leader, whether you like it or not. And that is going to maybe lead to attacks on your military bases. So you better prepare an air campaign to come behind. And Rubio said, that's what happened.
Because again, just before the 20 February 28 bombing, we're negotiating with Iran, and we're killing the very people that Trump was saying are the ones we wanted to negotiate with, the ones who were going to help move Iran closer to the American position. That was Israel as spoiler. So this is individual called Ali Laredjani, the former Secretary of our own Supreme National Security Council. And he was killed in an Israeli-led airstrike on March 17th, 2026.
Trump claimed untrue social. That one, I can't say his name, I'm going to try. Laredjani was the primary contact for a 10-point peace proposal that Trump had called workable on the basis for a real agreement. Trump suggested that the strike was poorly timed when Israel called him and complained that Israel's lone wolf actions were complicating his ability to wrap up the war on his own times.
He famously posted that he was inches away from the biggest deal in history before the assassination reset the clock. So this would be the third instance then of Israel as diplomatic spoiler. What you're hearing from Trump's own mouth is he thought he was close to a working relationship, maybe not a full deal with a certain set of individuals, in this case, Ojani. And what did Israel do when they found out about it?
They killed that person. And yes, I understand there's issues of intelligence, but you know, most of us don't have a clearance, so we can't talk about that. So let's talk about the actual public description that we've heard from Prime Minister Netanyahu over the last several years. The public description is that Iran is simply a paper tiger that Israel has been dominating Iran, knocking out its air defenses, launching other attacks here in 2024.
The rhetoric that's coming publicly has been painting the picture of Iran as a week and not just weekend, but basically crippled. It's down on its last legs and all you need is a final coup to grow. That has been Prime Minister Netanyahu's language. The other thing that the audience wanted to know is they wanted more specifics on stage three.
Yes, yes. And is stage three happening? We talk last time about round troops. It's very important that I've been saying this on the sub stack in my X to follow the key indicators here of deployment, not follow just what's occurring with the rhetoric of our leaders.
And the key thing to know is that if you're going to weaken Iran with ground power, there's only a few ways you can get that ground power into Iran. You could try to come through Pakistan, but Pakistan actually is Iran's ally who gave Iran the 600 centrifuges in 2002 to start developing its enrichment program. So and Pakistan has 100 nuclear weapons or so, so I don't think we're doing this here. You could try to do it with Afghanistan, but notice you'd have to get all the troops in Afghanistan.
That's not working. You could also go to Azerbaijan. That's up there. Notice on the first day of the war, there was a missile that hit Azerbaijan, and people are saying that there weren't what's going on here.
It's just a random, in fact, I think our public statement on that day was this shows how incoherent the Iran leadership is. That's not what I saw. What I saw is they understood that Azerbaijan was always thought to be a staging area to go to Tehran. And so if you're going to take Tehran with a division or two, you would really want to have your forces start here from Azerbaijan.
Now so far though, that's not happening. Azerbaijan said, Nope, don't count on us. We're not getting in the middle of those. Now we're back to why would you start to think about Marines to take territory here on the coasts of Iran?
So inside Iran, where the Straits of Muses, that's the beginning of it. You would start there around inside Iran around the Strait of Hormuz as a beachhead. There's some photos up on the screen showing what the terrain around the straits of Muses looks like. It is quite shocking.
It's a moonscape. And what you can see is that this is the most difficult terrain for amphibious operations to operate in. What is amphibious operations? Where you have troops that are on ships on landing vessels, just like saving private Ryan, they go from the water onto the beach.
You would also then have some air power with some ospreys, but they're doing essentially the same thing. They're coming onto the same beach. What's an osprey? An osprey is a special made plane that we've made for the Marines.
And it's a plane that is a hybrid between a helicopter and a jet. And so the propellers on the plane are able to rotate. So they can fly as a propeller plane here or a a a cheap man's jet, or they can actually like a helicopter. And that's really great.
If you want to fly fast to a beach and then go straight down. So are you saying that you think they will put boots on the ground in the strait of Muses? Let me just fill out this a little bit more. So the other big thing that the folks need to know is where is the oil?
Iran's oil. And here I'm drawing a circle here. Iran's oil is all in this southwestern part, almost all of it is in the southwestern part of Iran. Kuwait's oil is all right here.
Iraq has a couple puddles of oil. It has a big puddle of oil right here. Saudi's oil is all right here. You might try to land forces of division here in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, and come around this way.
This is why knocking out these bases as truly platforms here. This was why they I think they start on day one. This wasn't just to hit the bases in retaliation. They are weakening our ability.
They're taking away different Apsies of attack. And this is why in the sub stack, I published three days before the war, I'm specifically talking about Marines moving in limited areas to take coastal regions as beachheads. A beachhead is where you have a foothold, a toehold where you're going to funnel in more forces after that. And you were going to very likely want to control an area that's at least about 100 miles by 20 miles in order to get behind all this mountainous terrain.
And what does that look like? The oil fields, Steven. This is what President Trump is almost surely talking about when he says he's going to take Iran's oil fields. What he is probably being given options for is how you could start in a limited way with an amphibious, a marine, a limited assault to take a small set of stretch of beaches.
And then you would want to follow it and take if you're going to start this at all, you're almost surely going to want to just start to take the oil fields and President Trump's been talking that way for years, really. He also said in a recent interview that if it was up to him, he would go and take the oil, but he said the American people weren't like that. And he said once, and then he said it again, and then he said it again. This was during a press conference on Monday, April 6th.
He said, if it were up to me, I would take the oil. I would keep it all for ourselves and make a lot of money, because to the victor, belong the spoils. But people in the country sort of say, just want to come home. And I'm okay with that too.
And he said that from the interview that I was watching twice, which made me think that he really wants to go take the oil. But if he does put troops on the ground in Iran, it just creates a clearer target for those drone strikes. It creates a clearer target for those drone strikes. But what people maybe are not fully understanding is the political consequences of the deaths of those Marines.
Most people are assuming if those Marines go in and die, this will make America run away. It'll be like a punch in the face and we'll run away. That's not likely to be what happens. Again, this is my area of what happens when you have military force in politics come together.
You need to understand that when those Marines go in and say hundreds die or so over time, there will be 36% of the public that will have supported that. That 36% is going to see those Marines died for them. That 36% is likely to double down in their commitment, because otherwise they died for nothing. Now the 50%, 59%, excuse me, who's opposed to the war?
They'll still be pretty hot. We opposed to the war. I'm not saying they're going to move toward the war, Stephen. What I'm saying is you have a Republican president supported by 36% of the Republicans here, almost no Democrats.
If you start to actually have deaths here, this is going to lead to a bigger version of we can't withdraw now. We must, quote, finish the job. Otherwise, they will have died for nothing. This is what happened in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, in the early stages, you will see that it's sticky up. The support for the war, it takes a while to go down. And why does it take so long to go down? It's because of exactly what I'm saying.
The politics of this, of the death of our troops in battle, does not lead to we cut and run. It leads to we double down for the honor of the troops. That's why I'm saying we start this even in a small way, even car guy. It doesn't really matter where you started, but once you have those ground forces go in and they start to take casualties, you're probably in for the six month round war.
So it looks like they're going to try and avoid that outcome. It looks like they're doing everything in their power, America, to avoid a scenario where they have to send troops in. The threats that have come out of Donald Trump's chief social posts really talk about. I read this one here.
It says a whole civilization will die tonight. And I don't know what will happen, but it probably will. And a lot of the tweets are, can we just focus on that one, the civilization, because it's much, that was a few days ago, a lot of people are already trying to move past it. This has much more importance and endurance than I think we're understanding now.
So first of all, that statement that President Trump said that he will end an entire civilization in one night. We need to understand, this is not a drunk at a bar. This is the president of the United States who has at his disposal, thousands of nuclear weapons that could in fact achieve that. And let me just explain how hair trigger these are.
We have 500 minute men, three missiles. They have warheads between 100 kilotons and 300 kilotons, which is multiple times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each one of them. And they can be retargeted within 45 minutes. That's what it takes to retarget the gyroscopes.
And then it takes about 25 minutes for them to hit Iran. So when the president of the United States is saying this, he's only one of a handful of people in the world who could pull who could actually make this credible. Second point is that is the most declared statement of genocidal intent we've ever seen from an American president. No American president has threatened to end a civilization before, which is at the heart of the genocide treaties in 1948, the intent to commit genocide.
Harry Truman, people say, what do you mean? We had Harry Truman, we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, go and look at his statement on Hiroshima, Harry Truman. He did not say he was ending Japan as a civilization. He pulled back and said it was about to destroy Japan's military power.
What President Trump has done by making those statements is he's persuading all 92 million Iranians that he is willing to kill them. And he has the power to kill them. And yes, he pulled back from killing them on Tuesday. And yes, he may not have used nuclear weapons on Tuesday.
But if any other leader had said that, if imagine Vladimir Putin stands up and says he's going to end American civilization two nights, he's got the weapons to be able to do that. Are we just going to sit back and say, Oh, yeah, he didn't do it. He must not amend it. No, that would mobilize enormous anger against Vladimir Putin in the United States, even among Democrats.
And my point here, Stephen, before this war started, we had a real pro-democracy movement in Iran. And on your show, I told you, this was going to fade. This was one of the predictions I made to. So this is going to fade over time.
You're going to see nationalism bonding the society and the regime closer together. President Trump is bonding them together like never before. If you're one of the pro-democracy individuals here, movement in Iran, where are you going to go for protection? Are you going to go to Donald Trump, who's threatening to kill you with essentially nuclear weapons?
Or are you going to go to your own government? This is going to hasten the support, increase the support for Iran developing nuclear weapons. The pro-democracy movement is now likely to support this. On that point, one of the questions I'm one of the points raised by the audience last time I had the conversation was really we didn't spend enough time talking about the 90 plus million people that live in Iran.
There are often many of them caught amongst all of this absolute chaos. And I was looking at a bunch of messages from people that are living in Iran. I'll read some of them from ordinary citizens. I'm not great at math, but where will the money, the resources, and the experts come from to build a country that ordinary people spent decades trying to build from this is a different person.
From the beginning of the war until today, we have been bombarded. Not only are we not ones that closer to freedom, from what I can see, we are miles away from it, from another person in Iran. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to brought back again. This has deeply terrified me.
It raises the really question. A lot of this discourse doesn't speak much to 90 plus million people that are living there and that are having to exist under this terror. And the best way that I can conceptualize it is I imagined if I woken up one day and Vladimir Putin or some other leader around the world had said that they were potentially going to end the civilization that I live in, the country that I live in tonight. How would I be feeling?
And if I was hearing bombs go off all the time, how would I be feeling? And if things were escalating when me and my family lived, how would I be feeling? And it is chilling to think about. It is chilling, chilling, chilling, because this is now moving the needle inside of Iran to make the ordinary person on the street, even the pro-democracy movement willing to tolerate Iran killing Americans, because we're killing them.
And we're saying, we're going to do what even worse. And we're saying, even beyond that, we're saying at the whim of a president who wakes up thinking, maybe this will help his save his presidency, he is willing to kill the entire civilization of a country, because he thinks maybe this is going to be his off his golden off ramp to get out of this problem for himself personally. And by the way, we in our country, when al-Qaeda attacked us on 9-11, there was tremendous fear. There would be more attacks by al-Qaeda in the weeks afterwards, which is much fear.
And I've done the studies of the American public opinion on this. It's the fear of Muslims killing Americans that's driving the support for the Iraq war. If this is happening to Americans, you can only imagine what's going to happen to the ordinary Iranians, and they've been subjected not to just one attack, 40 days of attack. So for the average Iranian person that opposes the regime in Iran and has been living under terror and oppression for many, many decades, what do you think happens next for them?
They're the group of people that I think about and care about the most of this equation. We spend a lot of time talking about US power, and we talk about lots of these other regional partners. But there's like 90 million people stuck right in the heart of this that often don't rehab a voice. Their life expectancy will go down in measurable years.
So if we had taken out the electric power, so this is something I know quite a bit about in the 1990s, I was working for the Air Force. Literally under my boss was John Warden, the leader of the leadership decapitation school. And he brought in, not classified at all, he brought in engineers of electric power plants to teach us how to take down electric power. The electric power grid in Iran, it looks like a network.
And that network has big notes. That's what President Trump said. He's going to take off the big power plants that produce in the 10s, 20, 30 megawatts range. And there are probably about 130 nodes altogether.
But if you just take out the top 10, you're probably going to take down the entire network, because the top 10 nodes are distributed in the right places to support different electric power, different regions of the country. You have two choices in a targeting sense. You can take out the transformers, in which case, you knock it out for a week or two. And it is inconvenient.
And yes, there will be some people who will die. There were human chains around those targets, by the way, those people would die. But if you took out the hulls, the generating hulls, that's the giant turbines that are huge. There is no backup to those.
Each of those is specially made. You will be knocking out that generation for six months, 12 months, maybe 18 months, at a minimum. What that's going to do is stop all dialysis in the country. That's going to stop all the heart surgeries and other life saving surgeries that have happened in the country.
It's going to take out all the food refrigeration in the country. So, you know, when power goes out in your house and goes out for 10 minutes or an hour, it's not so bad. You don't really notice it. But when it goes out for two days or three days or a week, all the food in your refrigerator spoils and you can't eat it fast enough, you can't give it away fast enough because it's happening to everybody on your block.
Well, that's what would happen across the country. So, there's going to be an enormous amount of spoilage of food and that refrigeration then is not going to be available to come back. And so, you're going to have enormous hunger problems here. So, people that were already malnourished, they are going to be susceptible to more disease.
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Enjoy. So there's been a lot of talk in the recent days about ceasefire. And Trump said he was going to, he said, tweet these horrific things about ending a whole civilization tonight. And then at the final hour said that they had proposed a 10 point plan and that there was going to be a two week ceasefire.
What do you think was actually going on there? The collision of stages three and four. So what you are now seeing is we are now understand we're in it for the long haul, which means we can't go back to February 27. We can't undo the last 40 days.
It's just not going to be possible. So there's only two futures going forward. Future number one is that groundwork option. We've talked about how terrible that is.
And of course, that's obviously bad, bad cause. But future number two is Iran as an emerging fourth center of world power. And that is incredibly damaging to America's power. And that is going to be damaging to President Trump's legacy.
Is there not another option where Iran their leadership says, okay, we won't make nuclear weapons. Okay, we'll be friends. Okay, it's all over. Please stop bombing us.
Let's go for peace. So my response to that is I've been studying the history of international politics for over 35 years. I know quite a bit about great power politics and regional power politics going back 300 years. I have never seen a country at the regional level or at the great power level surrender power.
Did America after World War II decide? Well, yes, we have the capability to build nuclear weapons. But you know, we want to get along with the Russians who helped us defeat Germany. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually have a deal, an arms control agreement.
In fact, this was proposed, by the way, and we rejected it, which is we're just going to not go down that road. We're going to surrender the power advantage that we have here so that we can be cooperative with the Soviets who had just worked with us to defeat Nazi Germany. So that's not going to happen. There's no evidence in history in our history.
We've never surrendered power, even when it might have been a good idea that they're not going to do this. They're not going to do this. No, they're not going to do this. You already see this in the and why the ceasefire is breaking down so fast.
It's breaking down so fast because essentially President Trump, he didn't just declare victory. He said that Iran's not going to have all this power that I'm explaining to you. And what Iran did is almost immediately assert, Oh, yes, we are. They've come right back right away.
If President Trump is expecting that out of the goodness of their heart, they're going to surrender emerging world power. This is just a fantasy. It's not going to happen. He wouldn't surrender power.
Why is he going to expect Iran's going to surrender power? So I'm looking at this apparent 10 point proposal submitted by Iran. And you've got to take this with a pinch of salt because there's different reports about what this 10 point proposal looks like. But it says that based on official releases from the Iranian State News Agency, the IRNA and international reporting, the 10 point proposal from Iran to the United States was for Appelimency's final one and attacks on allies.
A complete halt to Israel and US strikes across the region, specifically Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Number three, reopen the straight from most around will allow safe history through the straight from most collect tolls around will charge a fee reportedly $2 million for each ship passing through the straight revenue sharing with them a man, which is toll revenues will be split with a man as custodians of the straight. Number six, the complete removal of all US primary and secondary sanctions release assets. Number seven, the immediate return of all frozen Iranian funds held abroad.
Number eight, the right to enrich uranium, US acceptance of Iran's right to domestic uranium enrichment while Iran commits to not seeking nuclear weapons. Number nine, war reparations, full compensation paid to Iran for reconstruction costs from the bombing. And lastly, number 10, the termination of all UN resolutions against the regime and a new binding UN Security Council resolution to enforce this deal. Now, listen, I don't know a lot about what I'm talking about.
However, it sounds like a good deal for Iran in many respects on every single point. And it also validates Iran as an emerging world power. So all of those points in the details, if you think of them as a flow diagram, all 10 of them are adding up to validation of Iran as a top in the hierarchy in the Persian Gulf. So why is it so important to be the number one strongest state in the world?
It's because in the last 300 years, whether it was Britain, the United States, or whether it's China in the future, the number one state typically dictates the rules of how the world systems operate. Well, what you're seeing with Iran is they want to dictate the rules in the Persian Gulf. And that's what that is. Now, if we move this over, which I love your props here, that is good.
So right now, you see that even though it's the United States is just that lone flag, it has this higher weight. And what this is reflecting is the United States as the number one country in the world, the most powerful. Now, if you also then add this over here, so this would be Israel, you can see this is the world that Netanyahu is depicting before on February 27. But the actual world, I just want to point out, is a little bit different.
The actual balance of power is closer to this. It's closer to the United States, and then we have China, and we have Russia. There are three centers of world power, and in 1990, it used to be, by the way, just the United States and the Soviet Union, then Russia, the Soviet Union collapses. This is when the United States is the sole superpower, the unipolar moment.
It immediately shifts like this from 1989 to 1992, dramatic shift. However, along the way, in the last 30 years, you see this changing. And what's changing? Russia actually is weak.
It's still about 2% of the world's GDP. That's not really what's changing. What's really changing is China is now much, much more powerful. It's still not as powerful as the United States, but notice that we were here in 1990, and now the balance is starting to be to come like this.
Well, if we start to add Iran as a center of world power, now we're starting to change this in a much different way. Now, these three powers are starting together in concert to become more powerful than the United States, especially with respect to energy. And energy matters so much because it's an underlying component for our economic growth at GDP. The way we measure great powers even for decades and decades, we've used static indicators, GDP, how big is your military, how many nuclear weapons you have, that all rests on the productive capacity of your country, which is why the productive capacity is so important.
What does that turn on? It turns a lot very heavily on oil. Oil today is the commodity. If you lose access to oil within weeks or a month and a half, this has dramatic cliff effects on your economy.
Now, if you lose access to semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, that's bad. In its bad over time, in particular, you lose access to oil. This is a cliff that you we go off over six weeks, eight weeks, because there's not enough storage capacity of anybody in the world to make up for 20%, 30% loss of world oil. So in this point of oil, the US doesn't get that oil from the straight from use.
We don't, but it's a global market and a lot of the price of oil that we're going to pay is going to be determined by the global price of oil, because oil is a fungible commodity. It's like a water that runs through the whole system. When there's a shortage, it drives the price of all of us up. Okay, so I've got a graph here showing the price of oil, and you can see off or up on the screen, you can see it's been climbing ever since the 27th of February.
So this will impact Americans at the pump as well. Oh, my gosh, and you see it in the pump already, where I am in Chicago, I was paying something like 310 gallon. Now the last time I filled up, it was 460. It's a bit of a misnomer to think that we can, as America, get away scot-free with everybody else losing oil, and we're not going to pay a price.
Now to be clear, we will have supply of oil. The price will go up. This will increase inflation. This will probably increase bond prices over time.
The bond is the loans that essentially any corporation, companies, or the University of Chicago takes out to borrow money to operate. So the University of Chicago borrows has 10 year bonds. This is essentially we're borrowing money, and then we have to pay back that money plus an interest rate. That's what the bond rate is.
It's an interest rate on borrowed money. Well, if that interest rate goes from 4% on a 10-year bond to 5% or 6% or 7%, the cost of the interest just goes up massively. And everybody will feel that in various ways. The US government, right now the biggest budget item in the US government budget is the cost of interest for the debt of the $40 trillion in debt.
We're going to have to shrink Social Security. We're going to have to shrink Medicaid. This is not not notional, Stephen. Iran and Russia together could have a tremendous impact on America's economy.
This is the real thing. With your balance of power, we could get to. This is where we could get to with the next several years. I would say probably two years out.
I would say that America has an edge, and I'm trying to depict it as it's like about a 25 or 30% edge from the combination of China and Russia today. And China is gaining, but still it's actually slow year by year. So you'll see a little bit of an uptick. So maybe going I'm trying to depict from say a third advantage for the United States to maybe 30%, 28% in the next four or five years.
You add Iran to this, and then especially these combinations, I'm describing where they can do things together. Now, in the next several years, you're actually talking about the scales where these three are stronger than America, where I'm not talking about just America's losing it incrementally. You're getting abrupt changes in the world balance of power. So what happens now if Trump just pulls out?
This is the world. Iran is an oil hegemon in the Persian Gulf. Within a year or so, they're very likely to have nuclear weapons. I'm saying the pro-democracy movement is going to be pounding the table to get nuclear weapons.
They're going to want to deter any idea from Trump of hitting them again. And then I'm saying beyond that, you have the possibility of Iran and Russia deciding to cooperate here to strangle and coerce the United States. And if the United States doesn't couch out to them, then they can pull that oil off the market. So what should Trump do?
Do you think if you are president of the United States, what would you do right now? So when I was here 40 days ago, we had the same question, and what I said was we needed to accept that there would be a deal, and we were going to have to accept that the deal that Iran was offering us on February 27, where they would get to keep their 3.5% enriched uranium wasn't going to be good enough. We were going to have to lift oil sanctions, we're going to have to do various things to sweeten the deal, so to speak. Well, notice, actually, Scott Besson did some of that.
He did lift it. But the power of Iran has grown so much, Stephen. That's not good enough. And that's what you're seeing with why this deal is the ceasefire is starting to break down from Iran's side.
So what would you offer, Iran? I think a enforced military containment of Israel would be a serious card that America could play, that I think Iran would get Iran at least in a serious discussion. I don't know if it would be enough. I want to be careful here that I don't say, well, this will certainly be the deal Iran will take, but we have to imagine if Iran has world power, what is it going to take to get Iran to surrender some of that?
Well, one thing would be to have confidence that Israel is not going to keep attacking it or its allies. But then they're not going to believe that after what's happened. Well, it would have to go through it and you'd have to make it enforceable. It's not going to be good enough to try to promise that.
What thing President Trump could do since the Republicans control both houses of Congress is President Trump could push through a bill through Congress that says if Israel attacks Iran or could even extend to Lebanon, but let's at least start with Iran, all funds for Israel, both military and economic will be cut off through the end of Trump's presidency. Now that passes through both chambers of Congress, President Trump signs it. Now you're talking now we actually have as much teeth as you could ever have of a military containment of Israel. So presumably in such scenario, Iran would continue to enrich uranium because they've now had a taste of what can happen to them if they're powerless.
Well, let me extend this a little bit more. So let's talk about article two of the deal that's going to go through the Congress. Israel joins the NPT and that is the quid pro quo for getting Iran to accept the on-site inspections of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium. So Israel gets to have its Desmona nuclear power plant where it has plutonium for its nuclear weapons that's measured by the non-proliferation treaty.
Those are the inspectors and Iran will have on-site inspections at the various locations we're talking about. But the second part of this Steven would be quid pro quo. If Iran is going to be subject to on-site verification, on-site monitoring, Israel, which is now not part of the non-proliferation treaty, already has nuclear weapons, it's going to have to accept that this can't be a one-sided deal going forward. It's going to have to be a more balanced situation when it comes to monitoring nuclear weapons capability.
So what does that mean specifically? Iran would be able to monitor Israel's nuclear weapons? Through the IAEA, that's right. That would be the material for the weapons, not the weapons themselves.
So they would have weapons. So what's that tomorrow? Oh, no, no, no. Right now the number of Israel's nuclear weapons is not known.
We have vague counts. The reason that Israel's not part of the NPT is not because it doesn't matter. It provides the kind of detailed information through the IAEA that would be useful for estimating the size of Israel. He's going to want to give that information to Iran.
This isn't about want to anymore, Stephen. What we're talking about is what are the offerings? You've asked me the hard question. What is an off-ramp to this trade-off between the ground war and Iran as the fourth center of world power?
And I said, okay, there is an actual off-ramp here. But notice that the hesitation now is politics. And that's what I'm trying to explain, that I study the interaction of military action and politics. And I'm with you.
I don't think Israel will, they've been trying to spoil these other deals. I don't think Israel is going to allow this to occur. But now then we're right back to the trade-off that nobody wants to confront. So what do you think is going to happen?
What I think is that we are going to go back and forth between stage three and stage four for months. What stage three and stage four? So stage three are preparations for the ground war. Yeah.