The Iran War Expert: I Simulated The Iran War for 20 Years. Here’s What Happens Next

You've been running simulations on a war with Iran.

Yep, every strategy for 20 years and it's laying out right now,

so I can tell you that we are losing control of the situation.

Like, we don't know where that nuclear material is,

but they have the material for 16 nuclear buttons.

And we've given them every incentive to develop them.

The Professor Robert Pape might be the single most important,

credible person we all need to listen to right now.

The Supreme Leader that we took out was against nuclear weapons.

The new Supreme Leader, and he's way more aggressive.

He's advised two decades of presidents in the White House.

President Trump is really stuck, but he thrives in chaos.

And spent 30 years building the curriculum

that trains the air force for the exact type of war that's taking place now in Iran.

And one of the most mind-blowing things I've learned is that there are three stages

to this conflict.

Unfortunately, Professor Robert Pape,

who has two decades of been correct with his predictions,

gives a 75% chance that Trump is about to escalate to stage three.

In this episode, we're going to explain exactly what this means.

Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

Two things I wanted to say.

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Thank you.

Professor Robert Payne.

What the hell is going on in the world?

Now, I should ask first, who are you?

And what have you spent the last several decades of your life studying and doing?

And how does that relate to what's happening in the world right now?

We are going through a crisis,

more and very intense right now,

but it's a crisis that we have been through before.

20 years ago with the Iraq War,

even before that, we saw the bombing of Qaddafi.

We saw the reactions there.

Now, I have been studying military strategy,

air power, international terrorism, now terrorism inside the United States,

and also political violence in the United States.

It's not related to particular groups.

So I've been studying political violence for 40 years.

What is the headline that people need to be aware of when you've looked at 30 years of these types of wars?

That bombs don't just hit targets.

They change politics.

What does that mean?

That means that before the bombs fall, and even as the bombs are falling now,

we tend to focus on the tactical success of bombing.

We tend to ask, did the bombs hit the targets?

And it's with the smart bomb age, it's almost mesmerizing.

They hit the target and destroy the target crater, crater, crater concrete,

destroy buildings, 90% of the time.

The problem is wars are not just about the hardware.

They're not just about the military operation of putting a bomb on a target.

They're about politics.

And when the bombs start to fall, the politics in both the target, the enemy, change,

and the politics in the attacker, the initial change.

And that threshold is the beginning of what I'm calling the escalation trap.

Because you get at stage one, tactical success often.

What's missing here is the next consideration, which is politics.

Who, if you advised, and at what level have you advised them on strategy, war, etc., etc.

In the, when I finished my PhD, right away, we started to fight the first Gulf War,

which was an all-air power war.

And I found my work, from the 1980s, suddenly more relevant than ever.

I was in the Washington Post, USA Today, Frontline, designing the stories,

we didn't have the talking military heads at the time.

And then I get a call from the US Air Force.

And they're asking me to come in and help not just teach,

but to build the curriculum.

Then what happens is time goes on.

I end up advising every White House from 2001 to 2024, including the first Trump White House.

I also heard that you've been running simulations on a war with Iran.

Yep, the last class of every strategy for 20 years.

In fact, we did it just last May just before we started the bombing.

And 90 minutes. So the class goes a whole quarter,

strategy in all kinds of different ways.

We ended with the bombing of Iran.

And what did that mean?

That meant we took out the whole tarot.

We have the target set laid out.

We have the attack plans.

We really go through the bombing of Natanz for Doh,

Estefan. There's a number of these facilities and so forth.

And then we play, and then we look at what's going to happen.

And what you see right away is 90 plus percent.

Those B2s are going to destroy those targets.

B2s being the aircraft.

The stealthy aircraft that can penetrate the aerospace.

Very small risk of loss.

And then you see, but we don't know where the nuclear material is.

The whole point of this is not to destroy a building.

It's to get at the 5 percent, 20 percent,

60 percent enriched uranium.

That's the material for bombs.

And last May, it was very clear.

They had the material for 16 bombs.

Now, not 60 nuclear bombs.

One six.

New nuclear bombs.

Yes, nuclear bombs.

Not to produce them all in a single week,

but over a period of months.

And then after we did that simulation,

we didn't know where a single ounce was.

And we weren't going to know for months after.

So at the end of every, I make some predictions, I say,

what's going to happen?

What's going to happen is after about a year,

we are going to panic because that material could be dispersed

anywhere in Iran, anywhere in that country.

And that country, look how big that is compared to the United States,

could be dispersed anywhere now.

And how many of those are actually developing toward a bomb?

We will not know.

So what will we do?

Regime change.

From all of you years, in 31 years old,

you start teaching about air power and war in this regard.

And you are 65 now.

Yeah.

What is that?

From everything you know, 30 plus years studying this stuff,

around running simulations and around,

advising the White House, being a master,

and probably arguably the most informed person in the United States right now

about air attacks like the one the US performing on Iran.

What is the headline that you're trying to send to the world at this moment in time?

Like, what is it we're missing?

Because we're seeing Trump come out and Trump say,

it's going well, everything's amazing.

We've taken out all their guys.

What are we missing?

We're missing that we're stuck in a trap of our own making.

I'll explain what that trap is.

But the key consequence of the trap is we're losing control.

We are losing control of the situation.

And what you were seeing with President Trump is he's trying to regain control.

Now, the problem is that starting not just a week of Saturday,

but starting back in June, when we took out Nathana's for dough,

we started to lose control.

And what are we losing control of knowing where that nuclear material is?

And we now have civilian satellites.

And you can see them moving things.

What would they be moving around the nuclear areas?

I wonder, you think they're moving the,

what are they moving here?

It's most likely going to be that nuclear material.

Because they're planned, you can see they have prepared for this war

just as we have, except they've been preparing for how to be resilient,

how to now lash back in increasingly aggressive ways.

They are winning the escalation part of the war.

And that's not an accident.

This you can see coming in stages.

For anyone that doesn't know, we've got leaders that have different levels of sort of

information and knowledge here.

I'm going to try and summarize this and butcher it in the most

indelicate way I possibly can.

So earlier last year, last year, the United States suspected that Iran were very close to enriching

uranium. They're at 60 percent. They're at 60 already.

If they get to 90 percent, they have a bomb.

Yes, but possibly even with the 60 percent, Stephen, it depends on just how good their

scientists are and we're not really sure. So there's somewhere where at 60 percent,

we're already very worried. You go to 90, it's a gimmie.

And then the United States dropped these big bunker-boster bombs. They flew those B2

airplanes in, dropped these bombs, smashing up the site, and then it felt like it was over.

And then the United States went into negotiations with Iran to try and get some kind of deal done.

To get the material we didn't get.

Oh, you see, why are we even talking to them?

If this has really obliterated the program, why are we bothering to talk to them?

What exactly are we talking about here? Do you notice the inconsistency here?

So when you say we thought it was over, that's the public.

Now the public need to understand. They're very busy people. They're to pay them for the price of

eggs. So they're not supposed to be able to be up on us.

It's a good point. I've never thought about it.

Yeah, why would we be talking to them?

Why are we talking to them? You see, so right from the get-go.

And by the way, all of the Israelis, we have a thing called the Defense Intelligence Agency,

their reports that were done after the bombing were leaked.

And they all say the same thing, which is we created holes.

We probably shook these underground chambers.

We're not sure because we had no eyeballs on that.

But we have no idea where that enriched uranium is.

And we have good reason to worry they got them out because we actually have a satellite picture

that shows two days before we bomb 4-0, there's a bunch of trucks moving stuff out.

Gee, what do you think you might move out if America's about to bomb your site?

Again, I don't think they're moving out the popcorn.

So and it's pretty, this material can be moved in what look like large scuba tang.

They call them scuba tangs, but I try to show pictures of this too.

They're actually like as large as this table.

So you need basically trucks, trucks like that satellite photography shows they took out.

So we can't say for sure, but what you see is these are the indications that you worry they've

dispersed the material even before we hit the site.

And then we attack.

Yeah, the United States attacks in February, February 2026, which is...

Yep, February 2026, February 2028, we start again.

This time with regime change, notice we don't go even after the nuclear material.

We don't know where it is.

So for the average person, the average person would think if you take out the supreme leader,

then the war is over, jump the bomb on the person and the war is complete.

Yeah, so let's talk about your jinga thing here because what I find, Stephen, so keep in mind,

I am advising, teaching, some of the most brilliant minds in the country.

Now, a lot of these smart people, though, they don't know that they've been given like one inch

deep briefings, maybe even one sentence briefings.

So their image is often like this and it's wrong.

This is what they think the regime looks like.

And they think that because they've been given...

They basically have been consuming probably for years.

One or two sentences about the structure, they know there's a supreme leader,

they might know there's nuclear facilities, missiles, command.

And so it looks like, oh my goodness gracious, that if you could just simply take out the right

node, you would be able to make this whole thing fall down, okay?

But that's the wrong image, Stephen.

This is the way smart people think.

The problem is this is a false image of most regimes, even the bad ones, and certainly the

Iranian regime. Let me just focus on the Iranian regime.

The Iranian regime is more like a matrix.

It's more, it's not brittle the way this is.

So you can keep trying to pull things out, but with a matrix, or I think the corporate structures

now are built to be adaptive, to change, because you have so many changes that happen,

the structure needs to adapt to change.

That is basically the structure of revolutionary regimes going back to before World War One.

Okay, I want to ask a dumb question.

Yep.

When they took out the supreme leader in Iran, who's going to give out the instructions?

The adaptive system adapts and fills in the holes.

It fills in the holes usually with what's left.

And in this case, the supreme leader that we took out, this particular hole,

this was the guy who had too fought was, they're called, these are religious edicts.

It's like a people edict against nuclear weapons.

It's a religious, he's the leader of essentially the religion, a little bit like the Shia Pope.

He is actually issuing religious doctrine, and as, and that's called a Fatwa,

and as a religious doctrine, he issued two that said Iran should not have nuclear weapons.

The guy we killed was one of the guardrails against nuclear weapons.

How does that, he was, he was developing them.

No, no, he's developing the enriched material.

They hadn't been fashioned yet that we know of as nuclear weapons, okay?

So we're worried about, again, this enrichment going from 5% to 20%, to 60%,

but they hadn't actually taken that next step, which is more of an engineering step to develop

the nuclear weapon. Now, we took out the person who at the very tippy top was balancing the

hawks and doves, and he had decided for decades to issue these fought was. He did it not just once,

but twice. His son, who took over the new supreme leader, no fought well, yeah, that fought what

died with this guy. So will the new leader come in? It's not clear he's got the religious authority

to do anything like what his father did. This is, this is a very different world, and he's known

to be way more aggressive than his father. He's been in charge of the, the, the, the, the, the,

the police that like to go and kill the protesters. He's been the guy who's, who's been very,

very strongly supporting, if not leading that particular effort. And last night it was announced

that he has been appointed as the new leader. He's the new supreme leader. Did Trump expect this?

I think that he expected it because he kept trying to talk the Iranians out of it. This is what

he meant by a last week when President Trump was saying that he wanted not this guy. He specifically

said not the son. And then he had a problem because people kept pushing him and they said,

okay, well, if you don't like the son, who, who would you pick? And he said, well, it is a problem

because when we killed the supreme leader, we killed around the leader 20 or 30 others who we

actually thought were better. So we actually took out the best alternatives when we killed the

when the supreme leader was killed. And every, and so everybody scratched in their heads.

Well, what are we talking about here? So, so we actually helped the, by killing the competitors

to the son. We made it more likely the son. And so what I'm trying to explain, Stephen, is this

daps. Okay. So that you're not really taking these pieces out. You're rearranging them. And you

are moving up. In this case, you're moving up the next supreme leader. Well, it's, there's the

supreme leader. But what we're not showing here, you're, you're seeing the target sets that are

being discussed. You're not seeing the revolutionary guard. What is that? That is part of the army.

Iran has a million men in arms, a million. That's as many as we have in our 300 million people.

They have 92 million. They have a million in arms. And about 150 or 200,000 of them are what are

called the revolutionary guards. These are the most aggressive, the most well-trained. These are the

most dedicated to the regime. The news, the son who just, we just, just took over is the prime

candidate for that group. So when we took out a link here, it's not just being replaced by another

cock. It's being replaced by a very aggressive individual who's backed by some of the most aggressive

part of that million man army. So this is what I was trying to explain in my sub stacks, where when

you take out the leader, you may kill the leader, but you get in its place a harder regime, a more

resilient regime, a tougher regime that wants to lash back even more aggressively. Because you killed

that. If you killed dad, and also if you don't lash back, how does the new leader get his credibility

with everybody else? If he's a wimp, why doesn't he get a bullet in the back of the head? You see,

the new, just because he's appointed a new leader, he's still just, just like when you're the head of

a new company, like let's say you take over a, there's a company that's in shambles and they get rid

of their CEO and they bring you on. Okay, well, you got to have a plan. You see, and if you don't have

a plan to turn that thing around pretty soon, you know, you want must have to have the big plan.

If you don't have that plan, guess what? You're out. Same here. So you have incentive structure here

for not just replacing, not just wimpy replacements, certainly not pro-American replacements.

You have incentives for lashing back against the attacker, which is why when we tried to kill

Kadoffi in 1986, he lashes back and takes out Pan Am Flight 103, killing 271 civilians, 190 Americans.

When we tried to take out the Milosevic regime to degrade it in March 99, Milosevic lashes back

sending 30,000 ground forces into cleanse that is get rid of a million civilians in Kosovo.

This over and over. I mean, you have written books about suicide terrorism. That's right.

I've got one of them in front of me here called dying to win. So I mean, you know a load about

this subject. And this is one of the concerns that actually my fiancee said to me. She said,

I explained to her. I was like, you know, Iran, they really just have drones at the moment. So I

think that's fine. And then she posed a question to me. She was like, yeah, but what about suicide

terrorism? Let me just explain. So here we are. It is, here is of course, Iran. And imagine it's

back in June. So I'm going to start the story in June. This is the beginning of the smart bomb,

the escalation trap, stage one. We hit for doe, which is right around there. And then we hit

Natanz and some other sites right around here. And what does Iran do here? They lash back. And

who were they lashing back against Israel here? They have their missiles focused on Israel. They're

not really hitting our bases here. They're hitting Israel. And they send 3,000 Israelis to the hospital.

The most since the 73 war. So long time that is stage one. Okay. Now what happened when in February

28, February 28, they're lashing back a bit against Israel for sure. But now they're at stage two.

This is why I published this piece today in foreign affairs about how Iran's winning the escalation

war. So it just came out just a few hours before we came on. And what's happening here is called

I call it horizontal escalation. Because what they're doing now is they're using drones mostly a

few missiles, but mostly drones. This was almost all missiles. No drones. And they're using their

drone capacity, which they have a lot of. And it's precision. These drones are like precision guided

weapons. They go right to the target. And what they're trying to do is break this coalition.

For you and that can't see at the moment that they counted with horizontal escalation against

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the coalition that had been formed against them. They're trying to break

the coalition, you see. And they may well do that. Why would they want to break that? Why?

Because the friends are escaping to buy at the moment. I've got friends staying in my house and

keep down because he doesn't want to be because they want these countries to kick the Americans out

of their country. Get rid of the embassies. Get rid of the bases. If you can, then we don't have

the platforms to plaster them. You see, these are our basically ground-based aircraft carriers.

I thought they were attacking Saudi Arabia, for example, because that will make Saudi Arabia

call Trump and say, listen, stop, please, we're losing our tourism. We're shutting our airport.

Well, they do want to they are threatening the tourism, hitting the economic nodes. They're

hitting hotels. They're hitting the airports. What they are trying to do is by threatening tourism,

which varies from 5% to 10% of the GDP of these countries. This is not trivial amounts here.

They're basically trying to drive wedges between these countries and America. And America,

right now, I don't see any movement through Congress. Where is this $100 billion going to the

region to make up for their lost tourism? I don't remember seeing that bill come through Congress

last week. So I'm just putting a little humorously to point out, these countries are losing a fair

bit right now. And that tourism may not come back for a while. I've got friends that have moved.

I've got friends that one of my friends was thinking about leaving is now in my house in Cape Town

and he's been there for five years. He's leaving and he's going to move to America. I've got so

many friends that I've called you in. And imagine that we have 500,000 American citizens here.

And we have the State Department on CNN call this number. We'll help you escape. It's good.

Even the media in the UK, you see it. It's like it's showing like the BBC showing like evacuations

of UK citizens as they've been created in the Apple putting microphones. So this is putting a lot

of pressure here. And there's something else that's not widely known, which is there's a big gap

between what the leaders of the countries want, willing to support the US and Israel and their

publics. You see this coalition that's been built against Iran here is not clearly going down

well with publics. These are publics. They may not like Iran. They may be Sunni and Iran Shia.

But they don't want to be part of an Israeli expansion plan where Israel is going to conquer more

and more territory and so forth. And so this is this is this is where the soft underbelly here

of this. This isn't just about the tourism. That's the short term. The longer term is

bottom-up pressure Sadat. He was a leader of Egypt in the 1970s. He cut a deal with Israel. It's

called the Camp David Accords piece for land. There was but it was very favorable. Well after

Sadat did that, the president of Egypt in 1981 in a military parade. His own security guards

at the military parade marched with their guns, came up to his place and they shot him dead.

So you don't this is the real world here. So this is very, very dangerous for these leaders.

Now that's stage two. Now what what happens if we decide to have one of these limited ground

uh deployments here because after all we still don't know where this material is. What does that

mean? So if anyone that doesn't know anything about the what does a ground deployment mean?

Because I saw Trump being asked about this from the plane yesterday and he didn't seem to deny

it was going to happen. It means you try to control a limited amount of space say the space around

fordo or the nuclear facility that you bombed in June and you would send the say 82nd airborne in

to control the space service. I don't know what any of this I see. So 82nd airborne is a division

that we have that's especially equipped to uh go into hostile area and land and control say

airports control space think about controlling all the size of LAX. So if you want to control LAX,

you bring in the 82nd airborne. They will have 5,000 men and women not just guys now and they

will come in and they will control that space LAX but they will also be doing this probably not

for a day not for even a week. They're going to have to spend weeks and weeks to search for that

material because we don't know where it is and it's all deeply buried and a lot of the stuff has been

the the entrances have been blown up. So this means this means long term presence there. You might

also take some of the oil fields to cut off some of the money here for the for the regime.

That is where that book comes in. Do you think that's likely that America will put boots on the

ground? American soldiers in Iran. I think it's at least 50, 50 if not immediately. So people keep

expecting the escalation to be continuous and then when there's a pause as there was between June

and February, they think, oh, it's over. I'm going to go now worry about something else and

they're believing there's plenty else to worry about. So we got Minneapolis. We got plenty to

worry about here even with violence. But that's not how escalation operates. Escalation can have

have a ratchet effect that has that spaced out by months of what seems like peace only to come

back and you're stuck in that escalation momentum, which is what we've seen, which is exactly

what we've seen. And for the reason I'm telling you, we don't know where that nuclear material is.

That has been the $64,000 weakness in this entire idea of using air power, not just in the last

10 days, going back to June. It's not just even about the regime change. It's about how are you going

to get that nuclear material out? We had a deal, this deal with Obama. Trump did not like it, but

with that deal, that held and Iran took out almost all virtually just only a tiny bit was left.

They were not enough for a bomb all out of the country. And we watched it. We monitored it. We had

24 seven cameras to monitor this. We had human onsite inspections to monitor this.

2018, Trump just ripped it up, walked away unilaterally, and from that point on, it's been

pedal to the metal by Iran in upgrading that enriched uranium. And that's how you got to that

material that would be enough for the 16 bombs. And right now, we don't know where that is.

So yeah, stage one is, okay, stage one, you are beginning the escalation trap. In this case,

it's a smart bomb trap, because it's with smart bombs, where you have tactical success

near perfect. Call it 100%. Because it really is. But that doesn't mean you have strategic success.

Tactical success plus strategic failure. Then that strategic failure weighs on you over time,

because the enemy still got the thing that you wanted to get in the first place. Now you do stage

two, which is regime change. Because after all, you've already hit the targets. You can make the

rubble bounce, but that's why we didn't bomb them in the last 10 days. We might go back and bomb

for dose some more. Okay, but we already bombed it. So there's more we watch in the bubble.

But now we're at stage two, because what are your options? The only other option is, well,

let me get rid of the regime. Because then the regime, I will control, and the next regime will

just give us the material. That's not working now. And you hear today, Trump is dancing,

trying to figure out what to say. He doesn't want to say the words over. Okay, he doesn't want to

say the words going on. But the bottom line is, we don't even, he won't even be clear about why

we're fighting the war anymore. And I'm telling you, there's a real problem. A new clear material

is still there. And it can still be fashioned into those 16 bombs over time. So this is where then

you get this horizontal escalation where now they've really, really working on this, because now

it's a long war. They start attacking their neighbors. And try to make it out. The consequences

go on for months. So just imagine, when are your friends exactly going to move back? So let's say

the war is over tomorrow. Are they moving back tomorrow? And when was the last time, have you started

to plan for your next vacation in Dubai? I've been to Dubai. I was, I was planning speaking there

in a month's time, but it's been canceled already. Well, just, yeah, just start to think about that.

And you know, minor thing like a drone attack could suddenly come out of nowhere. You know,

you're not even, you think it's, yeah, I'm just trying to point out that this is, this is the world

now that a lot of people. This was a luxury market. This was the playground of the rich and famous

here. This is really now changing. And it may come back a year or two from now. But it took two

years for air travel to come back after 9, 11. Just think about that. Just now, we haven't gotten

to stage three yet, which gets to your girlfriend's point. How do we move from stage two to stage two?

Oh, well, because you still don't know where the, the nuclear material is. And we don't have to move

to stage beyond to stage three this week. We could do it a month from now, six months from now.

The problem is we've now put in place a much more aggressive leadership, much more aggressive regime.

We've taken away some of the, what may have been guard rails. We can't say for sure for the

nuclear weapon. This new regime, much more likely. And we've given them every incentive to develop

the nuclear bomb. We're killing them. So, so what exactly is their incentive? They're, they're,

their best way to survive is to have a nuclear weapon. And you'll say, well, we're going to kill

them. Well, we're already killing them. So we've taken away their incentive not to have a nuclear

weapon. So we will start to worry as each week goes by. Not because we have great intel,

not because our human, well, it's because of the opposite. We don't have the exquisite intelligence

we had with the Obama deal to know we had frozen the program. Now that we have Swiss cheese at best.

And what we will see in the holes of the Swiss cheese are indications of nuclear development.

And that will make us worry because what happens with the nuclear weapon? Is it going to go to

Hezbollah and it's Hezbollah going to help put it in Haifa? What's going to happen with the,

are we going to give, is, are they going to give it to the Houthis? So these are the kind of worries

we will have that will push us to the ground options. And that, that is, with stage three,

the retaliation approaches the homeland. That is stick. If ISIS with its 30 to 40,000, remember,

ISIS was not a state. Iran is an actual state with 92 million people. So if ISIS can

foam that command erected, inspired suicide attacks and other attacks and San Bernardino just to

kind of bring it a little bit closer to home here across the United States. Paris, remember,

the big Paris attack. So why exactly is Iran not, I mean, ISIS was a lot weaker than Iran.

Do you think it Iran at the moment they're working on that? They're working on a terrorist attack?

Well, I don't, I think that my work tells me that it's most likely to come with the presence

of the ground forces by us. It doesn't mean it's, it's a necessary condition, but it's just most

likely. Russia, 96, with our help, we played a trick on them, assassinated the Chechen leader,

it's a leader of its Republican in Russia called Chechnya, do die of only a million people.

And Russia killed the guy and we actually have pictures of him seeing the missile hitting him

because we can put the cameras right in the nose count. Then the new guy took over. His name was

Basiaf. And he launched within three months, not the next week, Operation G-Hod. And his operation

G-Hod was much more vicious tactics. Kicked the Russian forces, Russia is a big country.

You know, 100, almost 200 million people compared to this little province of a million.

Kicked the Russians out after three months, launches waves of suicide attacks, massive

kidnappings here. This really went on for years and years. So when you say, are they planning it?

I don't think it's quite right, Stephen. It's not like they have the detailed plan they're about

to execute. They have the next wave of possibilities, which would come, I think most likely

with stage two. So, stage three. So as this is expanding, as the war expands, it will go global.

Really, you are already seeing it global with the supply chain and you're seeing it with the oil.

So that's already happening. So what Iran said today, the response to Trump's press conference

today, they just literally happened before we came on is, okay, we will allow Gulf states,

your oil tankers to come through if you kick the Americans out. So kick the Americans out and

we'll let you pass. If you don't, if you don't, we got drones. So they didn't put that in there,

but everybody knows they got drones. And again, for if you were explaining this to a 16-year-old,

yeah, just to keep it super simple, there's this passageway across the water where a lot of the oil

tankers go. Yeah, it's straight of Hormuz. Hormuz? Yeah. And it sounded like the tankers are refusing

to go through their hands. Oh, sure, because one has been hit, but it only takes one to be hit,

but the drone, only one, because the people driving those tankers here, they're doing it for a paycheck,

not a bullet. They're not really wanting to die for this. This isn't a nationalist cause to

ship the oil. It's been oil matters to the world. If oil doesn't go through this straight of

Hormuz, what matters? What happens? Yeah, well, we can talk about it in like technical terms,

but the big thing to say is this is what's going to increase the price of gas at the pump. And it's

already gone up. When you cut the flow of the oil, it has global effects. It doesn't just affect

this little region here. It doesn't just affect China over here. It affects everybody. And that's

why the Europeans are starting to freak out, because every government worries about, we talk about

affordability. That's about to change. And this is your point about how it changes the politics

at home, because people go to the pump today. They go, why is the oil higher? That's right.

Why is the, we just came, we now have 4.4% unemployment. If we, and President Trump was trying

to say it's all getting better, the interest rates are going down, well, that all predicated on us

not having inflation. You see, when the oil is cut, the inflation goes up, the affordability

becomes a problem. That is what is panicking a lot of the businesses right now, because they're

going to lose business. And, and it's a problem of risk. It's not just about the damage. So a

little, a few of these drones can have an inordinate effect on risk. Now, let's bring in another piece,

which is Russia, we find out is providing targeting intelligence to Iran, much the way we provide

targeting intelligence to Ukraine to hit targets in Russia. And what does that mean? That means

those drones, which are precision guided, now can more easily find exactly which ship to hit.

So we know that Russia doing that, because we've got it pretty well confirmed. Yeah, it's,

you would hear much more pushback here. And what you're hearing from Secretary Higgseth is not,

it's not happening here saying, well, no, well, it's not over. No, it's happening. And they're worried

because that's the, that's the again, the dancing around. They're not denying the fact that it's

actually happening. I think Trump actually when asked said something, what's to the effective,

I wouldn't blame them, because that's what we do to them. Exactly. Exactly. And why is he talking

to Putin today? He's not talking, he was just on the phone with Putin before he did his press conference.

What's he talking to Putin about bad intel? I'm sure. And maybe cut in a deal, which is Will

deny the Ukrainians the intel if you deny you see this is the this is this is the the cascading

effects of the politics dominates the tactics. And that's exactly what Trump said. He said on

March the 7th, when asked about Russia teaming up with Iran on intelligence, he said, if we asked

them that say we do it against them, wouldn't they say that we do it against them?

It's almost justifying it. Trump often just speaks his mind. Sometimes he kind of hides things,

but some often he speaks his mind. And what you're seeing here is, this is the natural thing,

Russia is what's good for the goose, good for the gander. They're doing the same thing to us that

we've done to them and they have and they're doing it to hurt us. You see, so rather than just

spasmatically or spasm response here, which we often think the the foes were up against are stupid.

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if you had to predict what you think happens next, what would you predict?

Well, I say this at the end of the Foreign Affairs article that just literally came out a couple

hours ago, which is President Trump is on the horns of a dilemma. And he has no golden

off-ram. He's looking for off-rams, but there's no golden one where he comes out politically ahead.

So he's got a choice, sometimes called a Hobbsian choice, a Hobbsian choice, where you

cut your losses except political loss now. And right now, if he pulls back and what does it mean

to pull back? You got to pull your forces back. It's not enough to say you're just doing a pause.

If you want to stop, if you want to stop for real, you take those aircraft carriers and you send

them out somewhere. You send them to Asia, you send them here. You got to actually make, you

have to do something here. So choice one is you stop your bombing campaign. You cut your losses.

You do your best to say we just wanted to destroy missiles, even though nobody will believe it.

Okay. But that means you accept a modest loss now or the other is you double down and you go on

for more weeks. Go on for more weeks hoping you'll kill this leader and maybe the next one won't be

so bad. Or you'll have some other sort of outcome that you can't imagine. And Trump is nothing.

I call him a chaos kid. He thrives in chaos. And he often comes out of this with something

happening like when, you know, sort of down the road, you didn't expect it. He probably didn't

expect it. But in this case, the price is more likely going to be a political failure of the

first order because we have the midterms coming. So if he's got a choice, stop now. Cut your losses

except a limited political defeat or double down, go on for a few months, go through more stages of

this smart bomb trap I'm explaining. And you're really now in Lyndon Johnson territory. Remember,

I mentioned before we're in Vietnam. He kept escalating, kept moving up the escalation ladder

every wrong. He said, well, no, we have escalation dominance. We're just going to double down. We're

going to hit him harder the next time. We're going to do this the next time. Sound familiar. And

then what happened is it became absolutely clear that this was going nowhere. And the 68 election

came was coming. And Lyndon Johnson's own Democrat said, Mr. President, we can't ride your horse

into that. We got to do something. And the problem is they didn't pull the plug fast enough here.

That's how they lost. They don't they don't pull the plug fast enough. So you end up having a

bigger was later when you talk about the so the underbelly that the United States has where

they can't prolong these wars. Am I right in thinking this is basically a function or a consequence

of living in a democracy? Well, everything is I think it's a function of a war of choice. So

when we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, we were attacked. We were reluctant to get in World War

too. And we were we didn't get in until we were actually struck at Pearl Harbor. That was

enough to really make us angry. We were pissed off as a country. Okay. And we were going to get payback

not just for a month, but we were getting some real payback here. And that's how vicious that

island hopping campaign was and why it was so vicious here. And that went on and on. And when

we ended the war in dropping those atomic bombs, 22% of the American public wanted

us to forget the Japanese surrender and drop more atomic bombs. 22%. We were that angry.

So when we are attacked first, we have the politics and our advantage. When we do a war of choice,

we can make up all the reasons why it was a good idea to start throw the first punch. They were

going to hit us. We were going to, but when we throw that first punch first, that's a war of choice.

And this puts the politics in the other camps advantage. And that's the problem that we're facing

here. Iran didn't hit us first. They didn't hit us first in June. They didn't hit us first before

that. So on this point of war of choice, yeah. And there's really two questions I front of mind.

One is was Trump writes that if he didn't attack, then they would have enriched uranium,

they would have made a nuclear weapon and that would have put not just the region, but the world

at danger in your view. And then the second one is this sort of ongoing debate around the role

of Israel in this war. And I think it was Marco Rubio that came out and I think maybe accidentally

said that the reason why they attacked Iran was because they heard that Israel were about to attack

Iran. So let's go back to the Friday, the day before we start the bombing campaign. This is

February 27, literally 315 Washington time. That's when Trump makes the go decision. But what's in his,

what is he choosing between? He has an offer on the table from Iran for a better deal than the Obama

deal for America. And it is, it's not absolutely perfect. They still want to have some minor enrichment

but the verification lots of things here. Now, maybe it's still not perfect, but President

Trump has a choice on that Friday afternoon. He can go back and he can work this deal. He can,

you know, after all, deal maker, right? Let's, let's assume he's good at deal making. So he can go

back and work the deal. But that's not what he does. What he does is he throws that deal away.

And also the Supreme Leader, when he killed, that's the Supreme Leader was on board with that deal,

too. And what do we do instead? We, we go through regime change. So the choices here, Steven,

were before we got to stage two, we were in stage one, stage one, we had hit 4-0. It, it,

with their, we're negotiations and Iran's coming up with a better deal than the Obama deal. And

what does he do? He goes to stage two instead. So I don't think this is, this, this story you're

hearing, they were going to do X, Y or Z is, there was a deal on the table. And why did Rubio say

that then? Why did he say that they attacked because Israel were going to attack? Okay, I want

to play this video, which is what I'm referring to. Okay. If we stood and waited for that attack

to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the president made

the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that

would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go

after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even

hire those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and

didn't act. So what that shows you is that it's the tail wagging the dog that Israel is going to

attack. As I'm saying, just happen in June, it's a replay of what happened in June. Israel may well

have, we don't know why Israel decided to attack and kill the Supreme Leader. It was actually

Israeli bombs who killed the Supreme Leader. And also those other replacement leaders as well.

But Israel may well have been thinking that my goodness, Trump is getting too close to a deal.

That's what happened in June. Trump was on the edge of a deal with Iran. And then Israel goes and

kills the negotiators, you see. So just think about that for a moment. Trump is negotiating with

the Iranians. And then they say, well, okay, come back the next day. And what is there the next day?

Israeli bombs killing them. So I mean, that's not a great way to handle a partnership.

Well, it's just showing you we had another choice. We could have told Israel not to do it. We could

have told Israel if you do this, we're going to cut off all your military aid for the next three

years. That would be put some pressure on Israel. Now, then Trump would have to pay a price

politically. So I'm not saying that's an easy thing to do. Don't get me wrong. But we need to

understand that that Trump, these are the, these are the pressures for escalation in the escalation

trap. So I'm trying to explain why this isn't just randomly happening, Steve. And it's not like,

oh, my goodness, I can't follow what's occurring. So that's why when Trump says in today's briefing,

talks about stopping the air campaign. Is he going to stop Israel's campaign? That's the question

it did not come up today. It's in my, I put it on my accident. Though one of the big questions

it did not come up is President Trump, are you going to call Netanyahu and tell him to stop

bombing Iran? Does Trump control Netanyahu and your view? Well, again, it's about pressures here.

It's about what are the, what are the ways you, you, you don't, it's not about a matter of like

a personal loyalty relationship. This is politics of the first order. That's what I'm trying to explain.

So for President Trump to stop Netanyahu from doing this, this will be paying a price. He will have a,

there are a big part of his mega constituency is very pro not just Israel, pro Netanyahu version

of Israel. So this is the tension and, and the politics that I'm trying to explain, which is why

you don't really want to start the trap in the first place. And I lost your second to go,

no fence sitting. What happens next in this will base on everything you've studied for the

last 30 years, the 20 years of doing. I think it's more likely than not that maybe not in the next

week or two. I've said on my sub-sac it's more likely than not. We will get to a limited ground

deployment here because of the fizzle, because of the, I'm skipping because of the enriched material

that is floating around. And we know it's dispersing. We know it's dispersing. We don't know where it is.

And there could be literally hundreds of rooms, not much bigger than this size, maybe two or three

times this size that we're in that could be used to fashion an a fat man style a bomb. Not to

miniaturize it to put on a warhead. That would be more sophisticated. But if what you want to do is

you want to have a Hiroshima bomb that can kill 75,000 people in a second or 10 seconds,

that is what they are in the, that's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about

can they put miniaturize the bomb to put it on the nose cone of a war of a missile. This is,

they don't need it. That's very sophisticated stuff. We couldn't do that for 10 years.

So I guess there's two, there's two questions that come to mind. The first is to understand

someone's behavior, you have to like understand their motivations. And I think a lot about like where

Trump is in his career legacy, how much that matters to him. It appears from what I've seen,

the whole thing around him wanting to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the, the Peace Board,

being the president, that stops all the way. It appears that he's thinking about how he's

going to be remembered. And when I'm looking at some of his interviews recently, he's saying things

like, I don't want it to be the case that in 10 years time, we're in five years time, the US

have to go back in again because like I didn't do a good job. And it made me start to believe that

actually one of his, one of the reasons why we might escalate this war further from a United

States perspective is because legacy changes in hindsight. And if we think about George W. Bush,

you're putting your finger on it, Steven. George W. Bush's legacy now is like completely

tarnished because of this war and actually how it ended. Yeah, but also now mirror image

that to the Iranians. Why aren't they thinking about their legacy? Think about that for a moment.

Sure. Why would the Supreme Leader 86 years old decide he's not going to take too many more

precautions? How many more months does he had cancer apparently? How many more months does he

got? How's he want to go out? How does he really want to go out? What's he want to be remembered for?

A coward or does he want to be remembered as somebody who stood up for Iran, the revolution,

the whole thing he built his whole life for? You talk about Trump. So when I get into behind,

when the cameras go off and I get a chance to, again, let's just say go to the West Wing,

I'm not seeing people being picky, minor, petty. I see them worried about their legacy.

The national security advisors, their assistants, they're worrying about their legacy. Do they want

to go down in the history of American history as X, Y, or Z? And this is how humans are. It doesn't

stop with like how much money do you have. It's what's going to happen with your legacy.

So with that in mind, if you think Trump is legacy motivated, does that increase in part?

I want to be careful in part. It's always a bad thing. He can't be reelected. So I'm like,

that's not motivating him because you know, you play differently if you think you can win a second

term, which I know would be an important term. But if he is legacy motivated now, when you think

about which direction he's going to grow it, go in, it does appear on the balance of things that

he's not going to want it to be left a mess. And the biggest mess they could really embarrass him in

his legacy with international is if Iran has a nuclear bomb and they detonate a test, say next

September, let's just imagine what would happen next September. So people need to think about,

see, the discussion of Iran and nuclear bombs here is not very strategic. It's to scare you. It's,

oh, they're going to get a bomb. And the first one's going to go on Tel Aviv. The second one's

going to go on New York. I don't think that's the sequence. Why would they, if they're willing to

commit suicide to take out Tel Aviv, they don't need 16 bombs. Okay. If they're willing to have

their entire population destroyed, but they just need one bomb, take out Tel Aviv, they're done,

right? That's not what's going on. They're following the North Korea plan. The North Korea plan,

the North Korea figured out when we went through this with North Korea in the 90s. Okay, the very

same thing, except we didn't do the bombing because it was not going to, we didn't get, we avoided

the trap. What they want is multiple bombs at the same time. So what they want to do, if they can

do this, is have, say, five bombs working at the same time. And the first bomb goes off as a test

in the mountains, in the mountains. And then what do we say? Oh, they blew it, they're stupid,

they blew their one test, and then they do a second test. Still in their mountains. Okay. When we

dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, wasn't clear we had anymore. When we dropped the second one,

nobody needed to wait for a third or four. Nobody really, they knew more would come. You see what I

mean? So with Iran, the, this is, again, we're talking about now, you know, let's, let's call it the

brown belt or black belt strategy here that they are, and notice they are been very smart in their

escalation. What you would do is the North Korea strategy, which is again, you want multiple bombs,

and then you want to do some tests. And even if one doesn't quite work, you want to have another,

you want to have multiple bombs so that you can do multiple tests, you say, and that is how North

Korea basically stopped Trump trying to kill the leader. So notice that Trump wants to say it was

just his winning personality, because Trump is so charming here. But North Korea now has 60 working

nuclear weapons as, you know, best we can tell. And the idea that we're going to start killing

leaders in North Korea anytime soon, I'm not sure that's going to happen. It kind of immune now,

right? Well, and notice that Ukraine had a bunch of nuclear weapons in the 90s gave

them up. And there's a lot of people in Ukraine right now are saying, boy, I wish we had those

nuclear weapons back or else we wouldn't be fighting this war. So you start to look at the history.

Why does America have nuclear weapons here? Are we an evil country? And the reason we have is because

we're evil, we want it for our security. So why doesn't Iran want it for their security? So this

is the strategy part that we have to, the politics, Steve, and I keep trying to talk about.

So you're saying your prediction is that we're going to move to stage three where Trump puts

OK, I'll go 75, 25, 75% which way that we will put, we will send in some ground forces to get

that dispersed material. The only 25% would be if somehow magically the Iranians gave it to us.

So that's where the 25% comes from, because here is some chance that there's some, I don't want to,

I mean, we live in the real world here. So I, but I think the problem we're going to face is it's

going to become more, and if you're in Iran right now, exactly why aren't you fashioning the

nuclear weapon? We're already killing you. We can pause for months and say, we won't kill you and

then you wake up one day and you're dead. This, we've done this movie now several times on Iran.

Your best chance of survival is a nuclear weapon. And so we now know that our Intel knows that,

Israel now knows that we've taken these options. So unless Trump will make a deal, that's that 25%.

So I think if he makes a deal, then there's a chance that Iran will go forward here.

If the 75% path plays out, we put boots on the ground. Yep. What happens then?

Now we're at stage three. Now we've moved to stage three because we have to search very not just,

so we will start by deploying ground forces in a very limited area. Say we're going to go to

Esophon, it's called. That's, that's the, do we have a, I mean, you could try and run that,

does that work? The thing I'm trying to explain, yeah, assume this is Iran, okay. We will start by

putting in a small footprint. And again, we have several options here to do it. And so the hunt

will be for the enriched material. But let's say that we even find it, Stephen, how do we know

that in the intervening almost a year since the bombing, 10 months since the bombing,

how do we know they haven't enriched more somewhere else? Because this is what happened with

the WMD and Iraq and Sodom Hussein in the 90s through 2003. We had inspectors in. We could

never be sure. There wasn't material. And the problem was over time, the fear got worse,

and worse, and worse. And the fear is a nuclear handoff or the radiological handoff. You hand off

some of that material to Hezbollah, to the Houthis. They, who are Hezbollah and the Houthis? They

are. We call them terrorist groups. And the, at Hezbollah, which is this famous terrorist group,

started in 1982, how did Hezbollah start? Where to come from? Is it the CIA again? No, it is real.

Israel invades southern Lebanon in June of 82 with 78,000 combat soldiers, 3,000 tanks in our

vehicle. So think about that. That's like invading Chicago with 78,000. So just, or LA with 78,000.

So they invade southern Lebanon with 78,000 Israel does. One month later, Hezbollah is born as

resistance movement. So Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel. They have hated Israel

from the beginning, because that's how they were born, you see. So what you have is you have a

group that's been radical since, and since 82, this has been going on since 82, Israel just can't

put that country, that Hezbollah group out of business. And what are they doing literally this

week? They're trying to depopulate this bay route, the city of bay route. Because what happens when

you go up against terrorist groups, which we haven't described. But the terrorist group here is like

a group that's in a sea of people. And you keep saying, all I want to do is get rid of that

terrorist group. The problem is that in all that military effort to get rid of the terrorist group,

you do kill them, but they regenerate, and they regenerate, and they regenerate just as Hezbollah

has for got 45 years, almost. And so what do you then push to do? Get rid of all the people.

So you think I'll just genocide. I don't want to use those terms because I've written about that,

that has certain, very specific, so that's a whole conversation here. But I just want to point out,

how is it that Israel got itself into the idea they were going to cleanse, expel large portions

of the two million out of Gaza? That happened because they got into stage three of the escalation

trap in Gaza. So this isn't just about America. So we're only talking about the escalation

frameworks with respect to this one conflict, really. It applies much more broadly. I've developed

these since I taught for the Air Force because I needed to find a way to help our government,

our military understand how the transition from the bombing or the military piece

to the outcome. And what's in the middle is the military, the bombs change politics. They change

politics in the enemy. They change politics for us. For us, we don't want to lose. And that's why

we got stuck in a for in two forever wars. And now we may well just get right back into another

not because Trump wants to be being sucked into it. So what happens off to stage three?

After stage three, this is what America has faced in Vietnam and President Biden faced this in

spades here. When you try to pull out after you're in stage three and end these ongoing conflicts here,

usually it ends poorly for your legacy. And you saw that with Lyndon Johnson. And you saw that

with President Biden. President Biden is actually President Trump is the one who was negotiating with

the Taliban to pull out. But President Trump wouldn't leave. Not leave. He didn't leave before.

Who did he hand it off to? He handed it off to Biden. Biden pulled out. And what has Biden's

legacy been? It's been negative ever since. If you look at his opinion polls, President Biden,

you will see he was riding high until he withdrew from Afghanistan and he never recovered. Yes,

inflation hurt too. The bigger hit was the Afghanistan problem. And this is where this is why President

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connection and still habit change in your company, head to the diary.com to inquire and our team will

be in touch. I have to ask then, you know, you said when you're in the White House, they're very smart

people. Yeah, pretty smart. Presumably, Trump knew this stuff or someone around him knew that,

by the way, when you drop bombs, these sort of very specific bombs we have now that can hit her,

hit a very narrow target and take out a leader. You get into an escalation trap. Surely he

knew this. I believe, I believe, you know, Kane told him almost this in so many words. I believe

it. I don't have the exact evidence for it, but we have some inklings of it. What do you think he

thought was going to happen? I think he, I've described Trump as the ultimate chaos kit.

There are people who thrive in chaos. They feel the best when they're in a chaotic situation.

And I think that he believes he can navigate the chaos better than anybody else.

So what I want to, the answer to the question I was looking for is, what did he think was going to

happen? Did he think I'll drop these bombs? How many will be out? Someone else will come in,

then we'll negotiate with that guy and then we'll get a better deal. I think that's not quite,

I think that's too specific. People keep looking for that. In my experience here, it also is,

that's too narrow of a way to understand what I think happened here. And again, we're reading

quite a bit into very few tea leaves here because it will come out over time. But I believe that

what you're seeing with President Trump is he likes to do what's called mixing it up. He wants to get

the chaos going. And then he reads the chaos very well. And when it's a media storm, man, there's

very few people that have beaten him. Just think about that. That's why he's president twice. He's

beaten quite a few black belts at this, right? But this is a different story. So if you take that same

MO and you apply it to political violence, now you have these other actors. You have this other

settlement. You have Israel playing this big role. You have the Iranians playing a big role.

You're suddenly now have more players that can trap you in the chaos. And this is I think what

is happened now with Venezuela. He also went through the first stage of the trap and noticed that

with Venezuela, he just said, Oh, yeah, we're just going to forget about developing the oil. No

second stage. Okay. So in with Venezuela, there's a reason why that has paused. It's because he didn't

go to stage two, because the oil company said, we're not going to die for you to build that oil.

So he is basically, he took out one person, just literally one person. That person's not even dead

yet. And he's not really developing any of those oil fields in Venezuela. They're just not being

developed. He said he has a good relationship with the Venezuelan government now that is long as

because he's not doing any, the Venezuelan government. He's leaving them in place. He's basically

declaring victory and moving on. He removed Madurai kept the others in and it sounds like the regime.

It sounds like that might have somewhat inspired his move to bomb around because it appears on

the surface that Venezuela kind of didn't go too badly. Kind of was a political victory. Chaos kid.

Chaos chaos. Snatched him out. That was his match. But then he stopped. So this would be the

equivalent would be last June. So last June. Okay. He went through stage one and he tried to stop.

What made the difference here? It wasn't Trump. It was the intel he got from Netanyahu, the phone call

from Netanyahu, which is President Trump getting ready. We're about to assassinate the supreme leader

in about 20 of his associates and other leaders here. You decide how you want to handle this, but we're

taking off. And so that did not happen with the Madurai regime. So just imagine that there was

another country that had after Trump took out Madurai decided they were going to keep assassinating

the regime in Venezuela. Now you would be in a different story. You made a quite famous prediction

professor. You predicted in 2009 that America's era as the world's only superpower was ending.

Oh, yeah. And I think that is true. We haven't talked about China, but I believe that since Trump

has come into office, he's making China number one. His tariffs have done nothing, but

help China. China's been on charm offensive since the tariffs have been and they're picking up

all the pieces. I was just spent two weeks in China in June while we were bombing Iran. I said,

I had to learn how to do social media. I toured advanced industries in China for two solid weeks.

One of the most amazing visits trips I've ever had in my whole career. And it was stunning.

So Steven, since COVID, almost nobody has gone to China. Now if they have, they've gone to Beijing

or Shanghai. They haven't gone to Wuhan. They haven't gone to San Chen. Visited the BYD

electric car factories, seen the robots that are now doing the metallurgy. And you can't see it

very well on the web because China's keeping it to themselves. They don't want to brag about it.

They're going, they're motoring ahead. So Wuhan, to give you an example, Wuhan is kind of like

Pittsburgh. It's a bigger version of Pittsburgh. It's an old steel area. That's not Wuhan today.

Wuhan today is the AI. It's developing not just a robotic company. They're uplifting 9 million

people in Wuhan. Their medicine is improved. Their infrastructure is improved. They have more

construction jobs than ever before because they have to build so much to uplift the whole 9 million

people. This is what Pittsburgh should have been and hasn't been. And I know I'm from Western

Pennsylvania. It's heartbreaking to me to watch what's happened to Pittsburgh over the last 30 or 40

years. Wuhan, exactly the same trajectory, an old steel city, is now one of the lead errors here

in they have a robotic silicon valley there that I visited and so forth. And what does this matter?

What is it matter if the US and no longer the world superpower? What then does history tell us

is the consequence of that? The consequence is, first of all, you get enormous tension here

for violence. So when you see big hegemonic shifts, that means when one leader, the world's number one

becomes replaced by another, bad things happen. This is what happened, how you got the wars between

Britain and France. When they were fighting, there's wars. This is how you got essentially World

War One because of the rise and fall of Germany versus Russia versus Britain. So these rising and

fall, they make a huge difference. Doesn't always happen. The one time it was peaceful was when America

replaced Britain as number one. So just think about that. But other times have been very tense.

So how does trying to feel that the US and now at will with the Middle East? So what's interesting is

to get ready for coming on here, I listen to the all-in podcast and I hope that's okay to talk about

I think they're brilliant. By the way, I love it. But what they said, just in the most recent,

is that Trump's playing a game for China. What they said is China shaking in its boots and that

what this is about is it's kind of Venezuela plus Iran is all about to cause she to be shaking in

his boots in April so that he will somehow make some bigger deal with Trump. I think this is

just wrong. I think that it may be that there's some China does absolutely by 90% of Iran's oil.

We're not disagreeing with the facts of the matter. It's the interpretation and the consequences

for who's going to be number one down the road. So my assessment here is China is probably thrilled

that we're on the verge of getting into another quagmire in the Middle East and that they would

gladly give up. They have about 20% of their GDP that turn energy, not GDP, 20% of their energy.

It's a much smaller fraction of their GDP that turns on the oil issue. Most of their energy is not

generated through oil. I think they would really, if they had to give all of the Middle Eastern oil

up to suck us in to another forever war with Iran that would go on for years and years,

oh my goodness gracious because they see themselves as growing through Asia and spreading their

wings through Asia. And so to get us pinned down in the Middle East with an even bigger problem

than we had with Iraq, this is mana from heaven from China. If I was Putin or if I was running

China based on everything you've said and based on everything I know, I would really want this war

to go on for a long time. For sure. So I'd really be helping Iran prolong this thing and also

because Russia and their own situation at the moment with Ukraine. So it's quite a distraction

from whatever Putin's objectives are in Ukraine. No one's really talking about Ukraine this week.

And it's bad for the Ukrainians because what's happening is by the little bit that Putin has

gotten himself involved here, there is a chance he's set the stage for a deal which is again,

America stops the intel to the Ukrainians, if Russia will stop the intel to Iran. That is much,

much, much to Putin's advantage with Ukraine. So I think that you have a situation here, Steven,

where Putin, it's not so much he's itching to get in the fight is he's trying to do it in ways

that he gets something out of it in his relations war with Ukraine. Think about that with President

Xi. I don't think the Chinese want to get in the fight. I think in fact right now, if I'm

if I'm assessing this correctly, they're probably not wanting to get in the way of an enemy

who's shooting himself in both feet. So right now, America's damaging itself a lot more than

China could. And if China inserts itself, there's a very good chance then that would help Trump.

Again, pull a rabbit out of a hat. I don't think they want to do that. I think right now you

just look at this from we're running out of what's called standoff PGM. Remember Secretary

Higgs said, well, yeah, okay, we're running out of standoff PGMs. What we're going to do

something from the it from the the the bombs that we can drop more over country. Well, that's the

problem for a problem for Taiwan. If we're going to defend Taiwan, we've got to do this with long

standoff precision weapons. And we all everybody who studies this knows that. So if we're really

running low on standoff precision weapons, she's just licking his chops. They in my goodness,

how much better does this get? If Trump was listening, probably in the case, I think you just

watch CNN and yeah, folks news. But if Trump was listening, what would you say to him? What I would

tell him is take the deal. I would say stop right now and do everything possible to go back to the

deal you rejected the day before you started bombing. And what your goal should be is to get as much

of the 60% enriched uranium out of the country as possible. If you could also get the 20% enriched

uranium out, that would be good too. But you're probably not going to get as good a deal because the

supreme leader you were dealing with is gone. And you now have a much tougher so you might have to

accept President Trump a worse deal. Are we just kicking the can down the road here? Because if

you're an Iranian, like you've said, you've watched bombs drop, you've realized that the reason why

you are such a target is because you don't have these nuclear weapons. So is there not an element

where around getting nuclear weapons is inevitable in some way? So Steven, this is the myth of 100%

security. So we see this in not just America, but in lots of conflicts in history where the idea

that you don't have 100% security leads you to essentially do things that look like suicide for

fear of death. So we know that there is a long-term problem out there. And sometimes a really good

solution is to freeze it for 20 years. Just freeze it for 20 years. And you know what? You're right.

You didn't permanently take it off the table. But if you could freeze a problem for 20 years,

that's actually a lot of you might get lucky. You might get something good like the Soviet Union

might just fall apart on you. You know, out of the blue if I just fall apart on you. And not because

you did anything, it's just because something else changed in the world. So the way to think about

this, Steven, is not this idea that we're going to take an action and have 100% security. This is how

big powers lose wars. Big powers are up against these little countries. And think about how often

they lose. We lose to Vietnam. That's how I got into this business in the first place. I wanted

to understand that. And so this idea of the search for perfect security is often getting us into

trouble. Kick a can down. You're right. It's only 20 years. I'll take that. That's better than

where we are right now. Professor Robert Pape of all the things that we've talked about.

Which has been a wonderful conversation, by the way. And very diverse. But really focused on

this subject of what's going on in the world at the moment with Iran and Trump and America as

divine. What is the thing that we should have talked about that we didn't talk about?

The big thing, well, we're finally getting to it at the end is the real consequence of what

President Trump has done since coming into office. The real consequence of the tariffs, the real

consequence of not just threatening discussion of Greenland, but becoming very aggressive with our

European allies on Greenland, being very aggressive to the point of taking out a leader from Venezuela,

which is in our Western hemisphere. So it's creating what this is really doing is it's threatening

America's primacy. So I am a big believer that America should be the strongest, most secure state

on the planet. I think that is good for us. That means that it is valuable to be the top dog,

to be the number one strongest economic military power. But in order to do that, you have to be the

world's number one economy for real. And with $40 trillion in debt, with us pushing away our

trading partners, with us engaging in hostile actions here, which are scaring the rest of the world

to further drift away from us and maybe not side with China, but be neutral. Oh my goodness,

and again, as I said before, China is motoring ahead on the AI revolution. We're talking AI,

but are we really doing Wuhan? Are we up to Wuhan? I think it would be interesting for folks to go

to Wuhan and actually visit or go to San Chen and visit or go to Hangzhou and visit and see

where Alibaba is and see that it's not just one company here. It's not just deep-seek that

there's clusters that are being built that are uplifting 10 million people at a swath.

And my goodness, why aren't we doing that in America? We certainly need that in the rest.

We're too distracted. We're too distracted, which is what I'm trying to say is to China's

advantage. And I think this is the real long-term price, which is, are we actually eroding our

position as the world's number one? And I think our primacy is in danger.

Professor Robert Pape, we have a closing tradition in this podcast where the last guest leaves

a question for the next guest. We're not knowing who they're leaving it for. Ah, the question left

for you is, what is the prediction you have for the future that most people do not want to hear?

Well, this is going to lead into the conversation. So I have a book coming out in September called

Our Own Worst Enemies. As bad as all this problem is, Steven, as bad as it is, I have spent

the last several years focusing on what's happening with political violence in the United States

and its normalization. And the biggest danger that we face, even bigger than Iran and all the

problems we've just talked about, is the normalization of political violence in our own country.

And by political violence, you mean? I'm talking about, in the last 10 years,

we have seen a surge of violent riots. We have seen a surge of political assassinations.

That we haven't seen since the 1960s. On top of that, we've just had Operation Midway Blitz in

my city, Chicago. That is the surge of militarized immigration enforcement, which surged ice,

which surged into neighborhoods over over almost 300 times, not just a small. And then what happened

after they left Chicago is they did even more of that in Minneapolis. So these, this trajectory,

Steven, that we're on, where we are seeing the incredible normalization of political violence.

And it's happening on both the right and the left. I'm not trying to make moral equivalents,

but it is, in the book, we'll explain this, is probably the greatest danger that we face,

because if we are our own worst enemies, think of what that means for us being that great power

that is so important for us, and the great future we want for our families and our communities here,

we are in danger of becoming our own worst enemies, not for a day, not for a month, but for years.

Professor, thank you so much. If anyone wants to go and read more about many of the things we've

talked about today, where do they go? Substack. I would go, you read my books on it. You can get

them from Amazon. I would go to Substack. And then, and that's the escalation trap. And I would also

just be aware that there will be more discussion on political violence. So it's not just political violence

abroad, and it's not just political violence at home. It is both happening at the same time. Professor,

thank you so much. Thank you very much. Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. It's fantastic.