Robert Pape, political scientist, explains his Iran war simulations and what he predicts happens next
Steven Bartlett interviews Professor Robert Pape, a political scientist who has spent decades studying military strategy and air power.
Summary
Steven Bartlett interviews Professor Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has advised every US White House from 2001 to 2024 and spent 20 years running war simulations on Iran. Pape argues that the US bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities has failed to locate or destroy the enriched uranium — enough material for 16 nuclear bombs — and that this strategic failure is driving an escalation trap with three distinct stages. He contends that the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader removed one of the key guardrails against nuclear weapons development, and that the new Supreme Leader is significantly more aggressive. Pape gives a 75% probability that the US will deploy ground forces in Iran to search for dispersed nuclear material, and warns that Iran is following the North Korea model — seeking multiple simultaneous nuclear weapons as a survival strategy. He closes by arguing that America's greatest long-term threat may be the normalization of political violence within its own borders.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and background
Steven Bartlett: Professor Robert Pape, what the hell is going on in the world? 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?
Robert Pape: We are going through a crisis — very intense right now — but it's a crisis that we have been through before. Twenty years ago with the Iraq War. Even before that, we saw the bombing of Gaddafi and the reactions there. I have been studying military strategy, air power, international terrorism, and now terrorism inside the United States and political violence in the United States. It's not related to particular groups. I've been studying political violence for 40 years.
Steven Bartlett: What is the headline that people need to be aware of when you've looked at 30 years of these types of wars?
Robert Pape: That bombs don't just hit targets — they change politics.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean?
Robert Pape: 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? In the smart bomb age, it's almost mesmerising. They hit the target and destroy it — crater, dirt, 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 the target — the enemy — change, and the politics in the attacker, the initiator, change. That threshold is the beginning of what I'm calling the escalation trap, because you get at stage one tactical success. What's often missing is the next consideration, which is politics.
Steven Bartlett: Who have you advised, and at what level have you advised them on strategy, war, and so on?
Robert Pape: 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 — because we didn't have the talking military heads at the time. Then I got a call from the US Air Force asking me to come in and help not just teach but to build the curriculum. Then, as time went on, I ended up advising every White House from 2001 to 2024, including the first Trump White House.
Steven Bartlett: I also heard that you've been running simulations on a war with Iran.
Robert Pape: Yes. The last class of every strategy course for 20 years. In fact, we did it just last May, just before we started the bombing — 90 minutes. The class goes a whole quarter covering strategy in all kinds of different ways, and we ended with the bombing of Iran. That meant we took out the whole target set. We have the attack plans laid out. We really go through the bombing of Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan — there are a number of these facilities. Then we play it out and look at what's going to happen. What you see right away is that 90-plus percent of the time those B2s are going to destroy those targets.
Steven Bartlett: B2s being the aircraft?
Robert Pape: These stealthy aircraft that can penetrate the airspace — very small risk of loss. But then you see: 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%, 20%, 60% enriched uranium. That's the material for bombs. Last May, it was very clear they had the material for 16 bombs.
Steven Bartlett: 16 nuclear bombs?
Robert Pape: One-six. Yes, nuclear bombs. Not to produce them all in a single week, but over a period of months. 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 simulation I make some predictions. What's going to happen is that after about a year, we are going to panic because that material could be dispersed anywhere in Iran — anywhere in that country. Look how big that is compared to the United States. It could be dispersed anywhere. And how many of those are actually developing toward a bomb? We will not know. So what will we do? Regime change.
The escalation trap explained
Steven Bartlett: From all of your years — 31 years old you start teaching about air power and war — and you are 65 now. From everything you know, 30-plus years studying this, running simulations on Iran, advising the White House, being arguably the most informed person in the United States right now about air attacks like the one the US is performing on Iran — what is the headline you're trying to send to the world at this moment? What are we missing? Because we're seeing Trump come out and say it's going well, everything's amazing, we've taken out all their guys. What are we missing?
Robert Pape: 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. What you're seeing with President Trump is he's trying to regain control. The problem is that starting not just a week ago Saturday but starting back in June, when we took out Natanz and Fordow, we started to lose control. And what are we losing control of? Knowing where that nuclear material is. We now have civilian satellites and you can see them moving things. What would they be moving around the nuclear areas? It's most likely going to be that nuclear material, because they planned for this war just as we have — except they've been preparing for how to be resilient, how to lash back in increasingly aggressive ways. They are winning the escalation part of the war, and that's not an accident. You can see this coming in stages.
Steven Bartlett: For anyone that doesn't know, let me try to summarise this. Earlier last year, the United States suspected that Iran were very close to enriching uranium. They're at 60%.
Robert Pape: They're at 60% already.
Steven Bartlett: If they get to 90%, they have a bomb?
Robert Pape: Yes, but possibly even with the 60%, Steven. It depends on just how good their scientists are and we're not really sure. So somewhere around 60% we're already very worried. You go to 90, it's a given.
Steven Bartlett: And then the United States dropped these big bunker-buster 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.
Robert Pape: To get the material — we didn't get it. Why are we even talking to them? If this really obliterated the program, why are we bothering to talk to them? What exactly are we talking about here? Do you notice the inconsistency? When you say we thought it was over, that's the public. The public need to understand they're very busy people. They're worrying about the price of eggs. They're not supposed to be up on all of this.
Steven Bartlett: It's a good point. I've never thought about it. Why are we talking to them?
Robert Pape: Right from the get-go — and by the way, it's 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: 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 it out, because we actually have a satellite picture that shows two days before we bomb Fordow, there's a bunch of trucks moving stuff out. 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. This material can be moved in what look like large scuba tanks — they call them scuba tanks, but they're actually as large as this table. So you need basically trucks, trucks like that satellite photography shows they took out. We can't say for sure, but these are the indications that you worry they've dispersed the material even before we hit the site.
Steven Bartlett: And then we attack. The United States attacks in February 2026.
Robert Pape: February 2026. Yes. This time with regime change. Notice we don't even go after the physical 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. Drop the bomb on the person and the war is complete.
Why regime change doesn't work — the matrix structure
Steven Bartlett: Let's talk about your Jenga analogy here, because what I find, Steven — so keep in mind I am advising and teaching some of the most brilliant minds in the country. A lot of these smart people, though, 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. They know there's a Supreme Leader. They might know there's nuclear facilities, missiles, command. And so it looks like: if you could just simply take out the right node, you would be able to make this whole thing fall down. But that's the wrong image. This is how smart people think, but it's a false image of most regimes — even the bad ones, and certainly the Iranian regime.
The Iranian regime is more like a matrix. It's not brittle the way a Jenga tower is. You can keep trying to pull things out, but with a matrix — and corporate structures now are built to be adaptive to change because you have so many changes that happen — the structure needs to adapt. That is basically the structure of revolutionary regimes going back to before World War I.
Steven Bartlett: When they took out the Supreme Leader in Iran, who's going to give out the instructions?
Robert Pape: 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 — was the guy who had issued what are called fatwas. These are religious edicts. He's the leader of essentially the religion — a little bit like the Shia pope — and he was actually issuing religious doctrine. He issued two fatwas that said Iran should not have nuclear weapons. The guy we killed was one of the guardrails against nuclear weapons.
Steven Bartlett: He was developing them though?
Robert Pape: No, no — he's developing the enrichment material. They hadn't fashioned it yet, as far as we know, into nuclear weapons. We're worried about the 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 top was balancing the hawks and doves, and he had decided for decades to issue these fatwas. He did it not just once but twice. His son, who took over as the new Supreme Leader, has issued no fatwa yet. That fatwa died with this guy. It's not clear the new leader has the religious authority to do anything like what his father did. 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 Basij — basically the police that like to go and kill the protesters. He's been very strongly supporting, if not leading, that particular effort. And last night it was announced that he has been appointed as the new Supreme Leader.
Steven Bartlett: Did Trump expect this?
Robert Pape: I think he didn't expect it, because he kept trying to talk the Iranians out of it. Last week 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 said, "Okay, well, if you don't like the son, who would you pick?" And he said, "Well, it is a problem because when we killed the Supreme Leader, we killed around 20 or 30 others who we actually thought were better. So we actually took out the best alternatives when the Supreme Leader was killed." And everybody's scratching their heads going, "What are we talking about here?" So we actually helped make it more likely it would be the son by killing the competitors to the son.
What I'm trying to explain is this adapts. You're not really taking these pieces out — you're rearranging them. In this case, you're moving up the next Supreme Leader. And there's the Revolutionary Guard.
Steven Bartlett: What is that?
Robert Pape: 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. About 150 or 200,000 of them are what are called the Revolutionary Guards — the most aggressive, the most well-trained, the most dedicated to the regime. The son who 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 link — it's being replaced by a very aggressive individual who's backed by some of the most aggressive part of that million-man army.
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.
Steven Bartlett: Because you killed dad.
Robert Pape: 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? Just because he's been appointed new leader, he's still — it's like when you take over a company that's in shambles and they bring you on. You've got to have a plan. If you don't have a plan to turn that thing around pretty soon, you're out. Same here. So you have an incentive structure for 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 Gaddafi in 1986, he lashes back and takes out Pan Am Flight 103, killing 271 civilians, 190 Americans. When we tried to degrade the Milošević regime in March 1999, Milošević lashes back, sending 30,000 ground forces in to cleanse — that is, get rid of — a million civilians in Kosovo. This happens over and over.
Suicide terrorism and the escalation stages
Steven Bartlett: You have written books about suicide terrorism. I've got one of them in front of me here called Dying to Win. You know a lot about this subject, and this is one of the concerns that my fiancée raised. She said — I explained to her that Iran really just has drones at the moment, so I think that's fine. And then she posed a question: yeah, but what about suicide terrorism?
Robert Pape: Let me explain. Here is Iran. Imagine it's back in June. This is the beginning of the escalation trap — stage one. We hit Fordow and Natanz and some other sites. What does Iran do? They lash back. Who are they lashing back against? Israel. They have their missiles focused on Israel. They're not really hitting our bases. They're hitting Israel and they send 3,000 Israelis to the hospital — the most since the 1973 war. That is stage one.
Now, what happened on February 28? They're lashing back a bit against Israel for sure, but now they're at stage two. This is why I published a piece today in Foreign Affairs about how Iran is winning the escalation war — it came out just a few hours before we came on. What's happening now is called horizontal escalation, because what they're doing is using drones — mostly drones, a few missiles. Stage one was almost all missiles, no drones. 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. What they're trying to do is break this coalition.
Steven Bartlett: For anyone that can't see, they've countered with horizontal escalation against Saudi Arabia, the UAE — the coalition that had been formed against them. They're trying to break the coalition.
Robert Pape: And they may well do that.
Steven Bartlett: Why would they want to break that? My friends are escaping Dubai at the moment. I've got a friend staying in my house in Cape Town because he doesn't want to be there.
Robert Pape: 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 do that, then we don't have the platforms to strike them. These are basically ground-based aircraft carriers. They are threatening tourism, hitting the economic nodes, hitting hotels, hitting airports. By threatening tourism — which varies from 5% to 10% of the GDP of these countries — 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 the hundred billion dollars going to the region to make up for their lost tourism? I don't remember seeing that bill come through Congress last week. These countries are losing a fair bit right now and that tourism may not come back for a while.
Steven Bartlett: I've got friends that have moved. One of my friends was thinking about leaving — he's now in my house in Cape Town. He's been in Dubai for five years. He's leaving and going to move to America. I've got so many friends that have called.
Robert Pape: And imagine we have 500,000 American citizens there, and we have the State Department on CNN saying, "Call this number, we'll help you escape."
Steven Bartlett: Even the media in the UK — the BBC are showing evacuations of UK citizens being greeted at the airport, putting microphones in their faces.
Robert Pape: This is putting a lot of pressure on these countries. And there's something else that's not widely known, which is there's a big gap between what the leaders of these countries are willing to support — the US and Israel — and their publics. This coalition that's been built against Iran is not clearly going down well with those 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. This is the soft underbelly here. It's not just about the tourism — that's the short term. The longer term is bottom-up pressure.
Sadat was a leader of Egypt in the 1970s. He cut a deal with Israel — the Camp David Accords, peace for land. After Sadat did that, in 1981 at a military parade, his own security guards marched with their guns, came up to his place, and shot him dead. So this is the real world. This is very, very dangerous for these leaders.
That's stage two. Now, what happens if we decide to have one of these limited ground deployments? Because after all, we still don't know where this material is.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean? For anyone that doesn't know anything about the war, what does a ground deployment mean? I saw Trump being asked about this on the plane yesterday and he didn't seem to deny it was going to happen.
Robert Pape: It means you try to control a limited amount of space — say the space around Fordow or the nuclear facility that you bombed in June — and you would send in, say, the 82nd Airborne to control that space.
Steven Bartlett: I don't know what any of this stuff is.
Robert Pape: The 82nd Airborne is a division that's especially equipped to go into a hostile area, land, and control space. Think about controlling all the size of LAX. If you want to control LAX, you bring in the 82nd Airborne. They will have 5,000 men and women, and they will come in and control that space. But they will also be doing this probably not for a day, not even for 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 entrances have been blown up. This means long-term presence there. You might also take some of the oil fields to cut off some of the money for the regime.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think it's likely that America will put boots on the ground — American soldiers in Iran?
Robert Pape: I think it's at least 50/50, if not immediately. 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 worry about something else." But that's not how escalation operates. Escalation can have a ratchet effect that's spaced out by months of what seems like peace, only to come right back. You're stuck in that escalation momentum.
Steven Bartlett: Which is what we've seen.
Robert Pape: 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 fundamental weakness in this entire idea of using air power, not just in the last ten days but going back to June. It's not just about the regime change. It's about how are you going to get that nuclear material out.
We had a deal — the Obama deal. Trump did not like it. But with that deal, Iran took out almost all of the enriched uranium — virtually all of it, only a tiny bit was left, not enough for a bomb — out of the country, and we watched it. We monitored it. We had 24/7 cameras. We had human on-site inspections. In 2018, Trump 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 material enough for 16 bombs. And right now, we don't know where that is.
The three stages of the escalation trap
Robert Pape: Stage one is the beginning of the escalation trap. In this case it's a smart bomb trap. You have tactical success — near perfect, call it 100% — 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 has the thing you wanted to get in the first place.
Then you do stage two, which is regime change, because after all, you've already hit the targets. You can make the rubble bounce, but what more? That's why we didn't bomb them again in the last ten days — we might go back and bomb some more, but we already bombed that. So there's only bouncing the rubble. Now we're in stage two because what are your options? The only other option is: get rid of the regime, because then I will control the next regime 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 war's over. Doesn't want to say the war is going on. The bottom line is he won't even be clear about why we're fighting the war anymore. The nuclear material is still there and it can still be fashioned into those 16 bombs over time.
This is where you get the horizontal escalation — they're really working on this now because it's a long war. They start attacking their neighbors and try to make the consequences go on for months. Just imagine: when are your friends exactly going to move back? Let's say the war is over tomorrow. Are they moving back tomorrow? And when did you last plan for your next vacation in Dubai?
Steven Bartlett: I was planning to speak there in a month's time, but it's been cancelled already.
Robert Pape: Just starting to think about that. A minor thing like a drone attack could suddenly come out of nowhere. This was a luxury market. This was the playground of the rich and famous. This is really now changing. 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.
Now, we haven't gotten to stage three yet, which gets to your fiancée's point.
Steven Bartlett: How do we move from stage two to stage three?
Robert Pape: Because you still don't know where the nuclear material is. And we don't have to move 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, a much more aggressive regime. We've taken away some of what may have been guardrails against the nuclear weapon. This new regime is much more likely to pursue it, and we've given them every incentive to develop the nuclear bomb. We're killing them. What exactly is their incentive not to? Their best way to survive is to have a nuclear weapon. We're already killing them. So we've taken away their incentive not to have a nuclear weapon.
We will start to worry as each week goes by — not because we have great intelligence, but 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 we have Swiss cheese at best. And what we will see in the holes of the Swiss cheese are indications of nuclear development. That will make us worry. Is the nuclear weapon going to go to Hezbollah? Is Hezbollah going to help put it in Haifa? Are they going to give it to the Houthis? These are the kind of worries that will push us to the ground options. And that is where stage three comes in — the retaliation approaches the homeland.
Steven Bartlett: Is that realistic?
Robert Pape: If ISIS, with its 30 to 40,000 fighters — remember, ISIS was not a state; Iran is an actual state with 92 million people — if ISIS can foment commander-directed, inspired suicide attacks and other attacks in San Bernardino, across the United States, in Paris — remember the big Paris attack — then why exactly is Iran not capable of the same? ISIS was a lot weaker than Iran.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think in Iran at the moment they're working on a terrorist attack?
Robert Pape: My work tells me it's most likely to come with the presence of ground forces from us. It doesn't mean it's a necessary condition, but it's most likely. Russia in 1996 — with our help, we played a trick on them — assassinated the Chechen leader, the leader of the republic in Russia called Chechnya. Only a million people. Russia killed the guy, and we actually have pictures of the missile hitting him because we can put cameras right in the nose cone. Then the new guy took over — his name was Basayev — and he launched within three months, not the next week, Operation Jihad. His operation was much more vicious tactics. He kicked the Russian forces out — Russia is a big country, almost 200 million people compared to this little province of a million — kicked the Russians out after three months, then launched waves of suicide attacks, massive kidnappings. This really went on for years and years.
So when you say, are they planning it? I don't think it's quite right to say they have a detailed plan they're about to execute. They have the next wave of possibilities, which would come most likely with stage three. As the war expands, it will go global.
Steven Bartlett: Really?
Robert Pape: You are already seeing it go global with the supply chain and with the oil. That's already happening. What Iran said today — the response to Trump's press conference that literally happened before we came on — is: we will allow Gulf States' oil tankers to come through if you kick the Americans out. Kick the Americans out and we'll let you pass.
Steven Bartlett: If you don't?
Robert Pape: If you don't, we've got drones. They didn't put that in there, but everybody knows they've got drones.
The Strait of Hormuz and oil prices
Steven Bartlett: For anyone watching — just to keep it super simple — there's this passageway across the water where a lot of the oil tankers go.
Robert Pape: The Strait of Hormuz. And it sounds like the tankers are refusing to go through there at the moment.
Steven Bartlett: Sure. Because one has been hit, but it only takes one to be hit with a drone. Only one. Because the people driving those tankers are 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.
Steven Bartlett: Explain why it matters to the world if oil doesn't go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Robert Pape: 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 oil, it has global effects. It doesn't just affect this little region. It doesn't just affect China. It affects everybody. That's why the Europeans are starting to freak out. Every government worries about affordability — that's about to change.
Steven Bartlett: And is this your point about how it changes the politics at home? Because someone goes to the pump today and asks why the oil is higher.
Robert Pape: That's right. We now have 4.4% unemployment. President Trump was trying to say it's all getting better, the interest rates are going down. Well, that's all predicated on us not having inflation. When the oil is cut, inflation goes up, affordability becomes a problem. That is what is panicking a lot of businesses right now. It's a problem of risk. It's not just about the damage. 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 Russia is providing targeting intelligence to Iran, much the way we provide targeting intelligence to Ukraine to hit targets in Russia. What does that mean? Those drones, which are precision-guided, can now more easily find exactly which ship to hit.
Steven Bartlett: We know that Russia are doing that?
Robert Pape: It's pretty well confirmed. And what you're hearing from Secretary Hegseth is not a denial — he's saying, "Oh, well, let's not over-worry." No, it's happening. They're not denying the fact that it's actually happening.
Steven Bartlett: I think Trump actually, when asked, said something to the effect of, "I wouldn't blame them because that's what we do to them."
Robert Pape: Exactly. And why is he talking to Putin today? 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 cutting a deal — we'll deny the Ukrainians the intel if you deny Iran the intel. This is the cascading effect where the politics dominates the tactics.
Steven Bartlett: That's exactly what Trump said. He said on March 7th, when asked about Russia teaming up with Iran on intelligence, he said, "If we asked them, they'd say, 'We do it against them.' Wouldn't they say that we do it against them?" It's almost justifying it.
Robert Pape: Trump often just speaks his mind. Sometimes he kind of hides things, but often he speaks his mind. Russia is doing the same thing to us that we've done to them. They're doing it to hurt us. Rather than a spasm response here — which we often think the foes we're up against are stupid, we essentially think they're dumb, we call that irrational — what's really happening is that since the Vietnam War, we have been up against foes that have understood something about America, which is the way to get at us is politically. Make it a long war. Play the politics. You can't go toe-to-toe with us on the battlefield. We'll just clean their clock over and over. They don't often try. We lost the Vietnam War without ever losing a battle. How did we lose? We lost the long game. 58,000 dead, no end in sight, a forever war. What are we doing this for? That is how the North Vietnamese won. And that's how the Afghan Taliban won. That's how the bad guys typically beat us. They don't always win, but we have a soft underbelly. It's not the military.
Trump's dilemma and what happens next
Steven Bartlett: What do you think happens next? If you had to predict — no fence-sitting.
Robert Pape: I say this at the end of the Foreign Affairs article that just came out a couple of hours ago: President Trump is on the horns of a dilemma and he has no golden off-ramp. He's looking for off-ramps, but there's no golden one where he comes out politically ahead. He's got a choice — sometimes called a Hobbesian choice — where you cut your losses and accept political loss now. If he pulls back, what does that mean? You've got to pull your forces back. It's not enough to say you're just doing a pause. If you want to stop for real, you take those aircraft carriers and you send them somewhere — to Asia, somewhere else. You've got to actually do something. So choice one is you stop your bombing campaign, cut your losses, do your best to say you just wanted to destroy missiles — even though nobody will believe it — and accept a modest loss now.
Or the other choice is you double down. You 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 outcome you can't imagine. And Trump — I call him a chaos kid — he thrives in chaos and he often comes out of this with something happening that you didn't expect. 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.
If he doubles down and goes on for a few months, goes through more stages of this smart bomb trap, you're really now in Lyndon Johnson territory. In Vietnam, Johnson kept escalating, kept moving up the escalation ladder. Every rung he said, "Well, we have escalation dominance. We're just going to double down. We're going to hit them harder." Sound familiar? And then it became absolutely clear that this was going nowhere, and the 1968 election was coming, and Lyndon Johnson's own Democrats said, "Mr. President, we can't ride your horse into that." The problem is they didn't pull the plug fast enough. That's how they lost. You end up having a bigger loss later.
Steven Bartlett: When you talk about the underbelly that the United States has where they can't prolong these wars — is that basically a function of living in a democracy where every four years—
Robert Pape: I think it's a function of a war of choice. When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were attacked. We were reluctant to get into World War II and 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 and we were going to get payback — not just for a month, but real payback. That's how vicious that island-hopping campaign was. When we ended the war by 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 in our advantage. When we do a war of choice, we can make up all the reasons why it was a good idea to throw the first punch. But when we throw that first punch first, that's a war of choice. And this puts the politics in the other camp's advantage. Iran didn't hit us first. They didn't hit us first in June. They didn't hit us first before that.
Was there a deal on the table? The role of Israel
Steven Bartlett: On this point of war of choice — there are really two questions I have front of mind. One is: was Trump right that if he didn't attack, Iran would have enriched uranium, made a nuclear weapon, and put not just the region but the world at danger? And the second is this ongoing debate around the role of Israel in this war. I think it was Marco Rubio that came out and — possibly accidentally — said that the reason they attacked Iran was because they heard Israel was about to attack Iran.
Robert Pape: Let's go back to Friday, the day before we start the bombing campaign. This is February 27, literally 3:15 Washington time. That's when Trump makes the go decision. But what is he choosing between? He has an offer on the table from Iran for a better deal than the Obama deal for America. It's not absolutely perfect — they still want to have some minor enrichment — but verification, lots of things here. Maybe it's still not perfect, but President Trump has a choice on that Friday afternoon. He can go back and work this deal. After all, dealmaker, right? Let's assume he's good at dealmaking. But that's not what he does. What he does is he throws that deal away. And also, the Supreme Leader who was killed was on board with that deal too. So the choices here, Steven, were before we got to stage two — we were in stage one, we had hit Fordow, there were negotiations, and Iran was coming up with a better deal than the Obama deal. And what does he do? He goes to stage two instead.
Steven Bartlett: Why did Rubio say that then? Why did he say they attacked because Israel were going to attack?
Robert Pape: Okay, I want to play this video.
Steven Bartlett: Okay.
Marco Rubio (video clip): "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 more killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't act."
Robert Pape: What that shows you is that it's the tail wagging the dog — that Israel is going to attack, as I'm saying just happened 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 that killed the Supreme Leader, and also those other replacement leaders. But Israel may well have been thinking that Trump was 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. Trump is negotiating with the Iranians, and then the next day there are Israeli bombs killing them.
Steven Bartlett: That's not a great way to handle a partnership.
Robert Pape: 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 put some pressure on Israel. Then Trump would have to pay a price politically. I'm not saying that's an easy thing to do. But we need to understand that these are the pressures for escalation in the escalation trap. This isn't just randomly happening. That's why when Trump talks today about stopping the air campaign — is he going to stop Israel's campaign? That's the question that did not come up today. One of the big questions that did not come up is: President Trump, are you going to call Netanyahu and tell him to stop bombing?
Steven Bartlett: Does Trump control Netanyahu in your view?
Robert Pape: It's about pressures. It's about what are the ways you — it's not about a matter of personal loyalty. This is politics of the first order. For President Trump to stop Netanyahu from doing this, he will be paying a price. There are a big part of his MAGA constituency that is very pro-Netanyahu's version of Israel. So this is the tension in the politics that I'm trying to explain, which is why you don't really want to start the trap in the first place.
The 75% prediction: ground forces in Iran
Steven Bartlett: No fence-sitting — what happens next in this war, based on everything you've studied for the last 30 years, the 20 years of doing simulations?
Robert Pape: I think it's more likely than not — maybe not in the next week or two — that we will get to a limited ground deployment. Because of the fizzle, because of the enriched material that is floating around and we know it's dispersing. We don't know where it is. There could be literally hundreds of rooms not much bigger than this size — maybe two or three times this size — that could be used to fashion a Fat Man-style bomb. Not to miniaturise it, not to put on a warhead — that would be more sophisticated. But if what you want to do is have a Hiroshima bomb that can kill 75,000 people in a second, that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about can they miniaturise the bomb to put it on the nose cone of a missile. They don't need to. That's very sophisticated stuff. We couldn't do that for 10 years.
Steven Bartlett: There are two questions that come to mind. The first is: to understand someone's behaviour, you have to understand their motivations. I think a lot about where Trump is in his career, his 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, being the president that stops all the wars — 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 five or ten years' time the US has to go back in again because I didn't do a good job." And it made me start to believe that one of the reasons why we might escalate this war further is because legacy changes in hindsight. If we think about George W. Bush—
Robert Pape: I think you're putting your finger on it, Steven.
Steven Bartlett: George W. Bush's legacy is now completely tarnished because of this one war and how it ended.
Robert Pape: But also mirror image that to the Iranians. Why aren't they thinking about their legacy? Think about that for a moment. Why would the Supreme Leader — 86 years old, had cancer apparently — decide he's not going to take too many more precautions? How many more months does he have? How does he want to go out? What's he want to be remembered for? A coward, or somebody who stood up for Iran, the revolution, the whole thing he built his whole life for?
When the cameras go off and I get a chance to go to the West Wing, I'm not seeing people being petty. I see them worried about their legacy. The national security advisers, their assistants — they're worrying about their legacy. Do they want to go down in American history as X, Y, or Z? This is how humans are. It doesn't stop with how much money you have. It's what's going to happen with your legacy.
Steven Bartlett: So with that in mind, if you think Trump is legacy-motivated, does that increase the likelihood of escalation?
Robert Pape: In part — I want to be careful. He can't be re-elected, so that's not motivating him. But if he is legacy-motivated now, when you think about which direction he's going to go, it does appear on the balance of things that he's not going to want to leave it a mess. And the biggest mess that could really embarrass him internationally is if Iran has a nuclear bomb and they detonate a test, say, next September.
The discussion of Iran and nuclear bombs is not very strategic in the public sphere — it's to scare you. "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. If they're willing to have their entire population destroyed, they just need one bomb. That's not what's going on. They're following the North Korea plan.
The North Korea plan is what North Korea figured out when we went through this with them in the '90s — the very same thing, except we didn't do the bombing because we avoided the trap. What they want is multiple bombs at the same time. If they can do this, have say five bombs working at the same time, the first bomb goes off as a test in the mountains. Then they do a second test, still in their mountains. When we dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, it wasn't clear we had any more. When we dropped the second one, nobody needed to wait for a third or fourth. So with Iran, this is the brown belt or black belt strategy — and notice they have been very smart in their escalation. You want multiple bombs so that you can do multiple tests. That is how North Korea basically stopped Trump from trying to kill the leader. North Korea now has 60 working nuclear weapons, as best we can tell. The idea that we're going to start killing leaders in North Korea anytime soon — I'm not sure that's going to happen.
Steven Bartlett: They're kind of immune now, right?
Robert Pape: And notice that Ukraine had a bunch of nuclear weapons in the '90s, gave them up, and there are a lot of people in Ukraine right now 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? Are we an evil country? We want them for our security. So why doesn't Iran want them for their security? This is the strategy part — the politics — that I keep trying to talk about.
Steven Bartlett: So your prediction is that we're going to move to stage three?
Robert Pape: I'll go 75/25.
Steven Bartlett: 75% which way?
Robert Pape: That 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. There is some chance of that — I don't want to dismiss it. But I think the problem we're going to face is it's going to become more and more clear that 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. We've done this movie now several times on Iran. Your best chance of survival is a nuclear weapon. Unless Trump will make a deal — that's the 25%.
Stage three: ground forces and what follows
Steven Bartlett: If the 75% path plays out — we put boots on the ground — what happens then?
Robert Pape: Now we're at stage three. We will start by deploying ground forces in a very limited area — say around Esfahan. We will start by putting in a small footprint, and the hunt will be for the enriched material. But let's say we even find it, Steven — how do we know that in the intervening almost a year since the bombing, they haven't enriched more somewhere else? Because this is what happened with the WMD and Iraq and Saddam 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. The fear is a nuclear handoff — you hand off some of that material to Hezbollah, to the Houthis.
Steven Bartlett: Who are Hezbollah and the Houthis?
Robert Pape: We call them terrorist groups. Hezbollah, which is this famous group, started in 1982. How did Hezbollah start? Where did it come from? Israel invades southern Lebanon in June of '82 with 78,000 combat soldiers and 3,000 tanks and armoured vehicles. Think about that — that's like invading Chicago with 78,000. One month later, Hezbollah is born as a resistance movement. Hezbollah was born out of resistance to Israel. They have hated Israel from the beginning because that's how they were born. Israel just can't put that Hezbollah group out of business. And what are they doing literally this week? They're trying to depopulate Beirut.
Because what happens when you go up against groups that are embedded in a sea of people — you keep saying all I want to do is get rid of that group. The problem is that in all that military effort to get rid of the group, you do kill them, but they regenerate and regenerate and regenerate, just as Hezbollah has for almost 45 years. And so what do you then push to do? Get rid of all the people.
Steven Bartlett: So you think — genocide?
Robert Pape: I don't want to use those terms because I've written about that — that has certain very specific legal meanings. That's a whole conversation. But I just want to point out how it is that Israel got itself into the idea they were going to expel large portions of the 2 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. The escalation framework 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 and military understand the transition from the bombing or the military piece to the outcome. What's in the middle is: 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 two forever wars. And now we may well just get right back into another one. Not because Trump wants to — he's being sucked into it.
Steven Bartlett: So what happens after stage three?
Robert Pape: After stage three, this is what America has faced in Vietnam. When you try to pull out after you're in stage three and end these ongoing conflicts, usually it ends poorly for your legacy. You saw that with Lyndon Johnson. And you saw that with President Biden. President Trump was the one who was negotiating with the Taliban to pull out.
Steven Bartlett: But he didn't leave. He handed it off to Biden. Biden pulled out. And what has Biden's legacy been?
Robert Pape: It's been negative ever since. If you look at his opinion polls, you will see he was riding high until he withdrew from Afghanistan and he never recovered. Yes, inflation hurt too. But the bigger hit was the Afghanistan problem. And this is why President Trump is really stuck. He's on the horns of the dilemma. Does he want to accept the short-term price, which is real, or does he want to go and double down? And then you face the potential long-term price of becoming LBJ and President Biden.
Trump as the "chaos kid" — Venezuela comparison
Steven Bartlett: You said when you're in the White House, they're very smart people. Presumably Trump knew this stuff, or someone around him knew that by dropping these very specific bombs, you get into an escalation trap. Surely he knew this.
Robert Pape: I believe General Caine told him almost this in so many words. I believe that — I don't have the exact evidence for it, but we have some inklings of it.
Steven Bartlett: What do you think he thought was going to happen? Did he think: I'll drop these bombs, the Supreme Leader will be out, someone else will come in, then we'll negotiate with that guy and get a better deal?
Robert Pape: I think that's too specific. People keep looking for that. In my experience, that's too narrow a way to understand what I think happened here. And again, we're reading quite a bit into very few tea leaves because this will come out over time. But I believe 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. When it's a media storm, there are very few people that have beaten him. That's why he's president twice. He's beaten quite a few black belts at this. But this is a different story. If you take that same MO and apply it to political violence, now you have these other actors. You have this other set of momentum. You have Israel playing this big role. You have the Iranians playing a big role. You're suddenly now having more players that can trap you in the chaos. This is what I think has happened.
Now with Venezuela, he also went through the first stage of the trap. And notice that with Venezuela, he just said, "Oh yeah, we're just going to forget about developing the oil." No second stage. 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." He took out one person — that person's not even dead yet — and he's not really developing any of those oil fields in Venezuela.
Steven Bartlett: He said he has a good relationship with the Venezuelan government now.
Robert Pape: As long as — because he's not doing anything. The Venezuelan government, he's leaving them in place. He's basically declaring victory and moving on.
Steven Bartlett: He removed Maduro, kept the others in. And it sounds like that might have somewhat inspired his move to bomb Iran, because it appears on the surface that Venezuela kind of didn't go too badly. It was a political victory.
Robert Pape: Chaos kid — snatched him out of bed. But then he stopped. This would be the equivalent of last June. He went through stage one and 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 was: "President Trump, we're about to assassinate the Supreme Leader and about 20 of his associates. You decide how you want to handle this, but we're taking off." That did not happen with the Maduro regime. Just imagine if there was another country that, after Trump took out Maduro, decided they were going to keep assassinating the regime in Venezuela. Now you would be in a different story.
America's declining primacy and the rise of China
Steven Bartlett: You made a quite famous prediction, Professor. You predicted in 2009 that America's era as the world's only superpower was ending.
Robert Pape: Oh yes, 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 a charm offensive since the tariffs, and they're picking up all the pieces.
I 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 trips I've ever had in my whole career, and it was stunning. Almost nobody has gone to China since COVID. And if they have, they've gone to Beijing or Shanghai. They haven't gone to Wuhan. They haven't gone to Shenzhen. I visited the BYD electric car factories. I saw 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 motoring ahead.
Wuhan, to give you an example, is kind of like Pittsburgh — a bigger version of Pittsburgh. It's an old steel area. That's not Wuhan today. Wuhan today is AI. They're 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 areas — they have a robotic Silicon Valley there that I visited.
Steven Bartlett: And why does this matter? Why does it matter if the US is no longer the world's superpower? What does history tell us is the consequence of that?
Robert Pape: The consequence is first of all you get enormous tension for violence. When you see big hegemonic shifts—
Steven Bartlett: Hegemonic?
Robert Pape: That means when one leader — the world's number one — becomes replaced by another, bad things happen. This is how you got the wars between Britain and France when they were fighting their wars. This is how you got World War I — because of the rise and fall of Germany versus Russia versus Britain. These rising and falling powers make a huge difference. It doesn't always happen. The one time it was peaceful was when America replaced Britain as number one. But other times have been very tense.
Steven Bartlett: So how does China feel that the US is now at war in the Middle East?
Robert Pape: To get ready for coming on here, I listened to the All-In podcast — and I hope that's okay to talk about somebody else's podcast.
Steven Bartlett: I think they're brilliant, by the way. I love it.
Robert Pape: What they said in the most recent episode is that Trump is playing a game for China — that China is shaking in its boots, and that Venezuela plus Iran is all about to cause Xi to be shaking in his boots so that he will somehow make some bigger deal with Trump. I think this is just wrong. China does absolutely buy 90% of Iran's oil — we're not disagreeing with the facts. It's the interpretation and the consequences for who's going to be number one down the road.
My assessment is China is probably thrilled that we're on the verge of getting into another quagmire in the Middle East. They would gladly give up — they have about 20% of their energy, which is 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 into another forever war with Iran that would go on for years and years — oh my goodness. Because they see themselves as growing through Asia and spreading their wings through Asia. To get us pinned down in the Middle East with an even bigger problem than we had with Iraq — this is manna from heaven for China. That's what I saw when I was there.
Steven Bartlett: If I was Putin or if I was running China, based on everything you've said, I would really want this war to go on for a long time. I'd really be helping Iran prolong this thing. And also because Russia is in their own situation with Ukraine — so it's quite a distraction from whatever Putin's objectives are. No one's really talking about Ukraine this week.
Robert Pape: And it's bad for the Ukrainians because by the little bit that Putin has gotten himself involved here, there is a chance he's set the stage for a deal — America stops the intel to the Ukrainians if Russia will stop the intel to Iran. That is much, much more to Putin's advantage with Ukraine.
Think about President Xi. I don't think the Chinese want to get in the fight. Right now, 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. America is damaging itself a lot more than China could. And if China inserts itself, there's a very good chance that would help Trump pull a rabbit out of a hat. I don't think they want to do that.
Right now, we're running out of what's called standoff PGMs — precision-guided munitions. Secretary Hegseth said, "Well, yeah, okay, we're running out of standoff PGMs, but we've got bombs we can drop more of over the country." Well, that's a problem for Taiwan. If we're going to defend Taiwan, we've got to do this with long standoff precision weapons. Everybody who studies this knows that. So if we're really running low on standoff precision weapons, Xi is just licking his chops thinking, "My goodness, how much better does this get?"
Steven Bartlett: If Trump was listening — probably not the case, I think he just watches CNN and Fox News — but if Trump was listening, what would you say to him?
Robert Pape: What I would tell him is: take the deal. Stop right now and do everything possible to go back to the deal you rejected the day before you started bombing. Your goal should be 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 counterpart. So you might have to accept a worse deal.
Steven Bartlett: Are we just kicking the can down the road here? Because if you're an Iranian, you've watched bombs drop. You've realised that the reason you are such a target is because you don't have nuclear weapons. So is there not an element where Iran getting nuclear weapons is inevitable in some way?
Robert Pape: This is the myth of 100% security. We see this in not just America but in lots of conflicts in history — the idea that you don't have 100% security leads you to do things that look like suicide for fear of death. 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. You're right — you didn't permanently take it off the table. But if you can freeze a problem for 20 years, that's actually a lot. You might get lucky. You might get something good — like the Soviet Union might just fall apart on you out of the blue. Not because you did anything. Just because something else changed in the world.
The way to think about this 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 lost to Vietnam. That's how I got into this business in the first place. The search for perfect security is often getting us into trouble. Kick the can down the road? You're right, it's only 20 years. I'll take that. That's better than where we are right now.
America's greatest long-term threat: political violence at home
Steven Bartlett: Professor Robert Pape, of all the things we've talked about — which has been a wonderful conversation, very diverse but really focused on what's going on in the world at the moment with Iran, Trump, and America's decline — what is the thing we should have talked about that we didn't talk about?
Robert Pape: The big thing — 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 discussing 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. This is really threatening America's primacy.
I am a big believer that America should be the strongest, most secure state on the planet. I think that is good for us. It is valuable to be the top dog, the number one strongest economic and 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 that 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 what Wuhan is doing? It would be interesting for folks to go to Wuhan and actually visit, or go to Shenzhen and visit, or go to Hangzhou and visit and see where Alibaba is. It's not just one company. There are clusters being built that are uplifting 10 million people at a swath. Why aren't we doing that in America? We certainly need that in the Rust Belt.
Steven Bartlett: We're too distracted.
Robert Pape: We're too distracted — which is to China's advantage. And I think this is the real long-term price: are we actually eroding our position as the world's number one? I think our primacy is in danger.
Steven Bartlett: Professor Robert Pape, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is: what is the prediction you have for the future that most people do not want to hear?
Robert Pape: This is going to lead into the conversation. I have a book coming out in September called Our Own Worst Enemies. As bad as all this problem is, Steven, I have spent the last several years focusing on what's happening with political violence in the United States and its normalisation. The biggest danger that we face — even bigger than Iran and all the problems we've just talked about — is the normalisation of political violence in our own country.
In the last ten 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 militarised immigration enforcement.
Steven Bartlett: Which surged ICE into neighbourhoods over almost 300 times.
Robert Pape: Not just a small number. And then what happened after they left Chicago is they did even more of that in Minneapolis. This trajectory, Steven, where we are seeing the incredible normalisation of political violence — and it's happening on both the right and the left; I'm not trying to make moral equivalence, but it is happening — 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, for the great future we want for our families and our communities. We are in danger of becoming our own worst enemies. Not for a day, not for a month, but for years.
Steven Bartlett: 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?
Robert Pape: Substack. I would go to Substack — that's the Escalation Trap. And I would also just be aware that there will be more discussion of political violence. It's not just political violence abroad and it's not just political violence at home. It is both happening at the same time.
Steven Bartlett: Professor, thank you so much.
Robert Pape: Thank you very much. Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you.