Angry Planet - Iran Won Because America Is Stuck in the ‘Smart Bomb Trap’

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Recorded in May. Join angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes early and commercial free.America’s war against Iran has gone on for more than two months and the United States has achieved none of its political objectives. American power has diminished, its munitions stockpile is low, and Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz.Tehran has all the cards.To hear Robert Pape tell it, this was all predictable. Pape is a political scientist who teaches at the University of Chicago and specializes in the use of violence to achieve political goals. He’s the author of Bombing to Win and a scholar of air power failures. On this episode of Angry Planet, Pape walks us through the uses of air power, why it never achieves victory on its own, and why the Pentagon keeps promising it will.How you become an air power expertLosing Vietnam after such perfect precisionMan as meme“You don’t learn this by real estate deals.”There has not been a single case in history where air power alone has succeeded.“Our power is declining as a result of this.”The persistent myth of winning through air powerDumb bombs to precision weapons“It’s a dismal record of failure.”NATO in KosovoWhat are America’s definable political goals?Iran’s political goalsIran says seized tanker in Gulf of Oman, as US ‘disables’ two shipsPunishment, denial, and decapitationThe fragmenting GCCPape as CasandraBreaking Trump in the Strait of Hormuz“This will end up being America’s worst defeat since Vietnam.”A grim predictionThe Escalation TrapThe Gulf States Just Voted on American PowerFrom Kosovo to Iran: The Smart Bomb Trap and the Risk of Catastrophic EscalationBuy Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in WarSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galtz, and I am here with Professor Robert. It's Pape, right? That's right.

That's right. Matthew, thanks for asking. I am here with Professor Robert Pape, and I'm very excited about today's episode. we're going to be talking about traps, escalation traps, smart bomb traps. But first, sir, can you kind of introduce yourself and give the audience an idea of what your work is about? Sure. My name is Robert Pape. I'm a professor at the University of Chicago. I have been studying air power escalation dynamics for well over 30 years. The subject of air power was the subject of my dissertation in the 1980s when this was not a hot topic.

I thought I was going to get a Ph.D. go off into the Foreign Service. So I wanted to learn something I thought would be useful getting a PhD, such as how we lost the Vietnam War with all the power we had, all the technology we had, all the air power we had. I went to the library at the University of Chicago. that's where I got my Ph.D. And I wanted to get the book that was laying out all the air campaigns in history and told me to tell me, well, how do they succeed? How do they fail? Couldn't find that book. Well, that ended up becoming a dissertation. That ended up leading to when the Cold War ended, was hired by the U.S. Air Force to teach about essentially my book and the frameworks in my book. And that became bombing to win air power and coercion of war, which lines up all the air

campaigns in history and starting in World War I, of course, and has I have published on every air war since, including just about, geez, middle of March here on the most recent air war in Iran. So I'm somebody, I give talks on this all the time. I help stand up the school of advanced air power studies. Now it's air and space studies. This was a school that the Air Force began in the early 1990s specifically because the leaders of the Air Force, including the chief of staff, Larry Welsh, thought that airmen lost the Vietnam War because they did not know enough about air strategy. I know that sounds a little hard for folks that don't have much military experience. How can that be that the Air Force doesn't know air strategy? But it's important to know

that we have the best pilots in the world at putting bombs on targets. Air strategy is about how bombing or military activity in general impacts the politics. The politics in the target state. That's how you get a coercive outcome where they surrender, they give up, they bend the knee, or politics in our home country. So my specialty, and I do know a lot about how to put bombs on targets. But my specialty is really about the impact of military force and politics. And that's all just kind of telescope all the way forward that went through how to deal with international terrorism, how to deal with many, many cases. Bosnia, Kosovo, we'll probably talk about a lot of these cases in the next bit. But all the way up then to advising of

White House from 2001 to 2004. That's two Republican, two Democrat, and they're not bringing me in to redesign how to put a bomb on a name point. This is about the impact of military force and politics,

and that is why just a few days before this war kicked off, I decided to start a substact called the escalation trap. I have, for 15 years now, had a half-gun book called The Smart Bomb Trap, and I realized this was about to happen. So I published the very first

piece on the escalation trap is called the Smart Bomb Trap. And that's not something I just magically came up with three days before the, this was a book. I was going to publish this book 15 years ago. And then I just got way late. If you ever saw what I do, I tend to focus on my academic research on the issues that matter to decision makers in the near term. So my books tend to be quite relevant, and that's not an accident. And so it just turns out that I actually have about six different half-done books. I hope we don't need the ball, but they are there. And as the world turns, you may see me turning to more subjects in the coming years as well. The smart bomb trap piece is the one that really caught my eye and made me, I wouldn't have, you know, I've read bombing Dwayne. I know,

you know that you're a meme online. Right. No, I don't. No, actually. So this is one of the things, Matthew, I spend so much time putting out stuff online. I have some, my students actually tell me different things that, because I, and this afternoon, I'll be teaching students about, I give giant lectures here. We're going to do this in a telescoped way. And so no, tell me, Matthew, because this is the problem. When you're doing as much as I'm doing,

and you're already this morning, the second one, and we're at 9 a.m. My time. So this is that busy, and it's really quite an honor for me to have so much interest in this. So I know what it mean is, but what do you see?

It would be, I'll have to send it to you because it's like when you describe a meme to someone, it kind of loses its potency. Send me the meme. Somebody showed me that one of my students sent me a video. This was a couple weeks ago now, that apparently there's AI-like versions of me speaking, but they're putting other text in. And so far, it hasn't been very, I guess I haven't heard about it because it's not been

embarrassing, which, you know, hopefully who knows what's going to happen. But what they were doing was like smoothing out. You hear the little ums here. They were just smoothing it out. It was really interesting to see that apparently somebody was editing this to make it a little smoother. And that's helpful because I have no editor. I have no. This is just us talking.

See, I like the, not to get off on a tangent, but I like the ums and the human stops and pauses. I find that. I do too. We know we're talking to each other. when we're interacting directly. But, you know, look, we're moving into the online world, and I'm really delighted that I did this with the substack. It has opened a whole new vista of people for me to reach out to all around the world.

I mean, it's stunning the ability to reach out, and I would have done this sooner had I, well, it's like a lot of things you hear. Once you go down a road, and it turns out to be so better than you saw it, you wish you had done it sooner, and that's what I feel. To tell you about the meme very quickly, very briefly, the gist is there's a little girl. It's from an old cartoon. She's standing outside of a door. She sees bombing to win on the door.

She's like, that's not for me. She's kind of ignoring the implication being that she's ignoring the lessons of the book. It's just going to keep doing whatever she wants to do anyway. And it's a popular meme that I see recirculate in national security circles online. line before the current war in Iran, but also a lot now. And it seems to me, and you can please tell me if I'm wrong, that America is very good at getting bombs on targets. We're excellent at that. We are less good at achieving political goals using our amazing ability to get bombs on targets.

Oh, that's absolutely right. And that's partly what, not partly, that's mostly what inspired my work a long time ago in the 1980s. I wanted to know how we lost the Vietnam War. And what I discovered, and I just distinctly remember running into my dissertation advisor and so forth when I really made some initial discoveries. So in the mid-1980s, we were steeped with the Rambo movies. They wouldn't let us win. And I had not really studied the Vietnam War to any depth. Of course, I knew a kind of superficial understanding. And as I got into it, I was stunned at the extent to which we hit targets with our force, because I was just assuming, well, this is before the precision age. We hadn't even had in the mid-80s the precision age. And I was just assuming I was going to get in and I was going to discover all these execution issues and so forth. It was really quite remarkable. It was really quite remarkable as I got into it, that this was not the issue. We actually destroyed just about all the 242 targets on the JCS target list, it was called, all but five, all but five. And now it took a few

years. It wasn't all in a day. But the bottom line is, you can't look at that and say, oh, bombing was held back. It couldn't hit target. And that is what then led me. And it took a while, because, again, I came in with a certain set of presumptions that the reason we failed is we didn't hit the target. Well, that took a while. I had to persuade myself once I had the initial finding that that was really true. And then once I was persuaded, that was true, it was like, okay, now I got to start from square one. So why did we fail? You see?

So that opened up a whole new vista, and it really opened my eyes. But I think this is really, I teach, I said I taught for the U.S. Air Force. These were 35-year-olds. These were not 22-year-old kids in the Air Force. I taught at Maxwell Air Force Base School Advanced Air. These were people who were the best pilots in the world. When I got them in summer of 1991, they had just come from bombing Baghdad. So these were the best of the best.

You think about top gun? This was top gun. Okay. So they were the best of the best. best already in putting bombs on targets. But that didn't mean they understood why when they were hitting all these leadership bunkers against Saddam Hussein, it wasn't mattering here. That was, they really were sort of in a similar situation. They knew they had executed 10 out of 10, at least, or 9.5 out of 10. That wasn't the issue. The issue was, okay, given all that,

what is and is not strategically impactful with that error power? And so right away, even though I was a true civilian, heroes right on the same page with them. Well, that issue of is it the problem with air power doesn't hit the target, that's the same with what I call the civilians of my undergrads and graduate students and PhD students at the University of Chicago. Or I would even say the professors at the University of Chicago. And these folks, and they all have not just triple-digit IQs, Matthew, these are people who are way, way, way smart. It's, I have been blessed for decades to be surrounded by teaching smart people. So I know when I'm talking to them, I'm not talking about mistakes dumb people make. I'm talking about issues that smart people don't really understand.

And I have a pretty deep understanding of how they come in because they all come in, really, with very similar preconceptions. And then over time, and this is what I teach in my course on strategy at the University of Chicago, we walked through over nine weeks we probably spend three and a half on air power. So we really, really go through these cases in detail. And that's what I was doing for the U.S. Air Force. And then I update it to the current day. And what they come out with is a much deeper understanding of what is and is not working. And I mean politically.

and they do learn about putting bombs on targets too, but this is really the big issue. The big issue is, number one, people think that the reason the air power is not working is we just haven't put the bomb on the target. Well, with the precision age, they think, ah, well, we can put bomb on targets, so we must be, you know,

I'm able to do anything. That's just not true here because there is a problem. Tactical success does not equal strategic success. And then there's a second problem here, which is once they get through that, they think, well, okay, I'll tell you, Professor Pape, why we're not succeeding. We're not, we're too Mr. Nice Guy. You even saw President Trump. This was my line for decades. Okay. And President Trump used it in his post here, which is he's not going to be Mr. Nice Guy anymore. That's one of my titles of my lectures here I give. And the problem here is that people think that punishment of civil. is going to work. That is, if you hurt them, either with economic pressure, you see this with the blockade, or with bombing, what you're going to do is cause them to put bottom-up pressure on their government.

You're going to create fissures with the regime. You're going to shift the balance of hawks and doves. I've been dealing with these arguments from the CIA. I mean, the smartest people in the world, whether they have clearances or not, CIA. the target, you know, targeteers in the Air Force, the actual pilots in the Air Force, Army officers, Navy officers, everybody you can imagine in the U.S. The Treasury Department in the government, and then also in the civilian world, people who want to go on to become national security advisors and so forth. And this is a common thing, Matthew. And what they need to understand is there is rarely the case when punishment, even quite severe, punishment causes the target government to change its behavior. And then once they understand that,

okay, okay, okay, I got you, Professor Pape, I'm just going to target the regime. So what we're going to do now is we've got these weapons that can have three meter accuracy. And as soon as, and I've seen this, and I won't name the leaders, but let me put it hypothetically this way. Imagine Matthew, you're speaker of the house, okay? And imagine, uh, some of the, uh, somebody with Stars on comes in to give you the PowerPoint presentation, and they explain that these bombs have three meter accuracy. And even if that general does not say they're going to do leadership decapitation, within 10 minutes, okay, the speaker's hand goes up, can I kill that leader over there? They have triple digit IQs, Matthew. They are connecting the dots here. And so they

see right away. And the problem is, and this is one of the other big areas I've studied for decades, is that even when you, the bombs hit the target, even when they kill the leaders, it rarely produces that outcome. It, in fact, never has produced the outcome of toppling the government alone. What you get is lashing back. And there's a set of reasons for that. And so what you end up with is you go through the punishment strategies. They're not going to work with air power or blockade. So it's not really about the instrument. It's about the mechanism here. And then also you go through the regime change, excuse me, options, and it's not about whether it's blunt or targeted air power or targeted economic sanctions. These are basically two sides of the same coin. I go through

all of this for decades. You end up having a strategy that works that's called denial, where the only way you can really coerce with any confidence whatsoever is if you can thwart the opponent's actual strategy for achieving the goal. I call it denial. Usually you end up with air power. If it's a territory that's in dispute, you have to thwart the enemy's actual strategy. So just bombing targets isn't enough destroying the Navy didn't matter. whatsoever here. I don't care how many times Secretary Hedgesad brags about it. This was totally irrelevant to this campaign, and it's irrelevant because Iran's not using its conventional, you know, surface ship navy to control Hormuz. It's just not relevant. That's like saying that in Vietnam,

the air power hit tanks. That didn't stop the VC from controlling the villages. The VC weren't using tank, so you go destroy all those over there all you want. You're not, the BC's gaining territory. You say, same thing happened here. So there is a set of technology, which we can't really take out very well, just like in Vietnam, the drones. And we all know about that now, the drones and mines. But this is all foreseeable ahead of time. It's all completely foreseeable, Matthew. And it's what I've been, in fact, my students from the Air Force here, we weren't dealing with Iran at time in the 90s. We were dealing with Iraq and North Korea. They've been emailing me saying, oh, Professor Paid, you must be hitting your head against the wall. This is exactly the lectures

you gave us in the 1990s, of course applied to the other countries, not Iran. And it is true. So these are these issues that people just don't know. And you don't learn this by real estate deals. So this is not a matter of, oh, okay, I bought and sold a home or a car, a sports car. So I love the sports car analogy, Matthew, because a lot of the people I'm dealing with have bought and sold sports cars. Not all of them are guys, but a lot of them are guys. And they have bought and sold sports cars. So they all have their stories about how they got the best car at the best deal and their tough negotiators and so forth. This is just not a story about that.

This is not a bargaining over a car. a piece of real estate. This is not the art of the deal here, the way this is laid out. This is great power politics of the First Order, and it's its own animal. So if you don't come in with this background, you are going to end up making a tremendous amount of mistakes.

You're going to end up hurting people for no good purpose in the target. You're going to end up getting your own people killed for no good purpose here. And it's not because people in the military are, disloyal. In fact, they're unbelievably loyal and supportive here. It's not because they're not smart. It's because the leaders really are out of sync with the reality of what they're dealing with here. And this is the problem that we have right now. That's why you can't hear from President Trump or Secretary Hedgeset. A single example, after we're now 70 days in, we just think about this. A single case in history going, let's, you know, ever, basically, where air power alone

has done what they said it was going to do, or the naval blockade alone has done what it said it's going to do. And the only cases that they could come up with, they say, oh, no, it's not going to be like Iraq. We're not putting in a ground army too. So the only thing that when they bring up historical examples are when those instruments alone were not sufficient, and they went to the ground forces. And that tells you right away that there just is no there there, you see, and they may not have, they're learning on the job, kind of, but this is the problem. We're now in a very, very, not just a trap of escalation, but our power, Matthew, is declining as a result of this. I'm tracking this, if you're following me, on X or the substack, almost daily now. I'm trying to post at least short little things because so many people in the

substand are telling me to post so many short little things. And I'll probably post this too. But the fact is it's it really is you can track this in real time. They're real indicators for this. We don't have to just simply follow, you know, the thing you see on the legacy media, bring them the same people who just talked about an election to talk about how to win a war. Sorry, I mean, you could bring me on to talk about how to turn out the vote. I don't know how good that's going to do. But the bottom line is this is not a matter of whether you're just a smart journalist or, you know, you have inside, you have the phone number of Donald Trump. That's just not going to matter here.

What matters is knowing about great power politics and military force. and this is the lack, the problem we face. There's not many who are running the show that do. I'm going to cut them just a little bit of slack, even though I know I shouldn't. But this idea that you can win a war with air power alone or that it can be the predominant thing that helps you win a war has been like stuck in our brains for decades and long before them, right? But we've known, I think, at least since, you know, after the blitz in, during World War II, Germany's air campaign against Britain, like, we know how that affected the British population.

And we've got, we've had good case studies about why this doesn't work for a long time. Yeah, so here's, here's what's happening, Matthew, which is, so when the Cold War ended in 1990, and that's now a long time ago, a lot of the listeners to this podcast won't even have been born. by 1990, and that's certainly true of my students at the University of Chicago. I definitely got that. But what happened in 1990 wasn't just the end of the Cold War. There was a simultaneous technology shift. That technology shift was the coming of precision air power. The idea that you had before that, you had dumb bombs. And with dumb bombs, that hit the best dumb bombing. The most accurate was, the American Air Force in World War II, where with the Norden bomb site, we could put a bomb within a 500-pound bomb within a thousand feet of a target 50% of the time. Think about that.

A thousand feet of the target. So had we tried to bomb Auschwitz, we'd have killed probably 20, 30,000 Jews in that course of doing that, even with the best precision. And I've given lectures on that. That's what we're talking about. So now, with precision weapons, you have what's called three meter accuracy, which means that 80 to 90% of the time, even in moderately heavy winds, so even when we take the atmosphere into account, you hit the target within three feet, I'm sorry, three meters. So it's about 10 to 15 feet. That's plenty because a 500-pound bomb has a blast radius in, say, open dirt of about 25,

to 30 feet at minimum. So that's plenty to obliterate the room, the target, the tank, and so forth. So that change here. Now, your average person who's a civilian, of course, just, you know, they don't really know that, but they know on their phone they have GPS. And they don't know the true details of the bombing accuracy. but what they do know is the accuracy of technology that they use every single day. And so they just realized that something has fundamentally changed.

Well, what that's done is it means that history then just gets thrown away. It's just literally, first of all, they weren't born, so they don't want to, it's too much trouble anyway. And now you've got a really good reason to ignore all that. You see what I mean? Because we've got this fundamental change, the Cold War ended, now we got new technology. So they start from scratch. You see what I mean? Well, now it's been 35 years since the end of the Cold War.

So we actually can say here, okay, fine, we'll start from scratch. Let's forget all about that pre. And we'll only focus on the last 35 years. Okay. No, it's a dismal record of failure. Dismal failure. And then we'll say, okay, we're going to update this with economic pressure because, of course, you can take all this hyper accuracy, you can zero out bank accounts, and we can go after the yachts.

And we have all this precision weaponry with economics, you say. And that also created a bubble. So what you effectively got, Matthew, were bubbles. The idea that we had this brand new, wonderful silver bullet set of tools, and you could now win these wars where before you needed a ground army, now you don't need any military, any army, no messy ground battles here. You're just going to win this with a few buttons now with drones. You could even imagine doing this from the basement of the Pentagon. So you really have a world in which you have a new technology, but the truth is there's people like me, a bit like

the accountant who comes in and tells the business owner. What the reality is in the books. They may think a certain thing, but here's the reality. And I'm keeping up to date with all the technological changes, Matthew. So it's really the, so I, I, I, I, I, true, I don't come into this thinking that the, the folks I'm talking with are dumb. That, that's not it. They're pretty smart. They're very savvy.

But there is a depth of experience and knowledge that just doesn't come on their phones. You can't yet with chat GBT or so forth recreate the stuff that I'm doing because it just doesn't know. It's not. This is, these are Professor Pape's frameworks with the data I've been collecting over this long period of time. Now, it's all pretty much available on the web. It's not that it's not out there here. The problem here is that you really need this. kind of black belt guidance here, or else the white belt stay white belts forever.

You say you can move them up. Actually, within a few months, you can move up from white belt to even lower level brown belt within just two or three months. Here, within about a year, you become a black belt here, at least the first degree. But you're not able to do that in the space of like an NSC meeting where you're going to take five minutes and look at your phone and say, okay, what's the history of air power? That's not going to work.

Well, let's get into a little bit of history then, because, you know, when you bring this up in casual conversation, if someone knows a little bit, they'll say, well, what about NATO in 1999? Didn't air power succeed in Kosovo? So let me talk about that, because that's one of the cases where I was brought into the media in a really big way. So the media, you come in, and the media focuses on you, and then they move on to something else a year later,

and then they forget about you. Well, that's happened to me since 1991, a half dozen times. So I'm very familiar with the cycle. It's going to happen again, because that's just what the media does here. But anyway, so 1999. I'm a professor at the University, I'm sorry, at Dartmouth, and I just published Bombing to Win.

And mid-March comes 1999. and we are building up at Aviano Air Base in Italy a strike force here. And so I know it's coming. I see it's coming. And then in the first days of the war, it's clear we're hitting and it becomes 51 targets in and around Belgrade, which is the capital of Serbia. And we're trying to weaken, if not topple, the Milosevic regime because we're trying to support the pro-democracy movement in an area.

called Kosovo, which is a republic, a section of Serbia to the south. Well, right away, I am deeply concerned because we have no army. We didn't even bring in hundreds of tactical air power. We were doing this on the fly with only a handful of F117s and aircraft. So I started to be concerned, and I didn't quite have the reach, but believe it or not, ABC News, there was a guy who's very famous at the time, Peter Jennings, the most famous journalist in the world, he heard my argument that air power alone has never toppled a government here, sound familiar here, and then he brought me on on ABC News live in the second day of the bombing,

because I said, and what we need to understand is there's a deep risk that Milosevic will send tens of thousands of troops to do great ethnic cleansing in Kosovo kill lots of people and we need to put 600 aircraft in it Europe right now to change that. Well, he brought on to debate me Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's National Security

Advisor and this is live, okay? And Berger is saying a professor Pape is wrong. He knows nothing about what he's talking about. We couldn't put another aircraft in Europe if we wanted to. And I said, what do you mean? I don't just mean Aviano Air Base in Italy. I'm talking about Europe. There are 30 to 50 airfields you could use instantly if you need to to put forces in Europe. Well, that became the blah, blah, as I call it. Okay. And exactly what I was predicting, Milosevic sent those troops in. Over 800,000 civilians

were cleansed in Operation Horseshoe here. That then caused Sandy Berger and the Clinton administration to put in the hundreds of aircraft too late. They couldn't get there in time because they weren't ready to go. And so what happened over 78 days? Over 78 days, they finally put in 40,000 ground troops in Albania, ringing Kosovo, to attack, and that is when Milosevic gave up. So that is exactly the Pape argument. That is where, now, it was the ground threat, so I don't mean you must always go in on the ground. I'm not just taking the Army's position in the Air Force versus Army battle here. I'm saying there's a middle

ground where sometimes air power can be the dominant instrument and ground power, the threat, the supporting instrument here. So that Army doesn't really want to hear that. They want to hear, no, no, air power never matters whatsoever. It's only Army and you have to. So I'm in the middle here, but this is what the reality is. And that case, which I, and in fact, I was on Chris Cuomo. Your folks could listen early in this war debating a military guy.

And the military guys, you know, now they hate it when a civilian like me comes on here. Okay. And so he said, ah, professor, again, Professor Fave doesn't know what he's talking about. it was Kermit, General Kermit, who's been on a ton of a ton, and he said, I was there. I was, I was there. And I said, well, okay, let me just explain what I mean, General. And so I explained exactly what I met. And then what did he say?

Well, yeah, Professor Pape is right. I was one of the people in the Army doing the threat. So once we get, you see, once you peel the onion over the headline one liner for clickbait, you can actually understand what's going on. But you need to peel it because we have all these issues. You know, you've got politics on the right and the left. You've got military folks and hate the idea of civilians coming in to talk about their topic, which is the war. Well, the problem is they're the experts and tactics in the war.

This is not the same thing as winning a war. They might want to say that, but it's not the same thing here. And if so, we would never have lost all these wars or had all these problems. because we're actually quite good at the tactics. And so that's the Kosovo case in detail here. And I went to, by the way, my research, I never published this, but I have the tapes. President Finland Addisari was the guy negotiating with Milosevic at this point in time.

And I have the tapes. I went to Helsinki. He gave me three days, and I have all the tapes, and I was going to publish something on this, but then 9-11. happen and I decided to do suicide terrorism instead. But the thing is, it was quite clear that Milosevic knew the ground war was coming. There was no way he was going to be able to stand up to it. And so he took the, you know, once that's denial. That's my logic of denial. Once he doesn't

think he can win, what's the point of fighting to a finish when you're just going to lose the army you need later? What's the point? That's my argument about how airplanes, how coercion works in that case. And he lost the support of Russia as well. Oh, yeah, over this, over this, because this was going to be initially Russia was right there. But the problem here, so these are not unconnected dots. So what you end up with is Russia seeing this ground war coming here

and they're starting to bat pedal because do they really want to get in this big ground war situation? Because we're talking about NATO going in on the ground. This is not we're sending Albanians. It's not a proxy war. It's not sending Albanians to go in. We're talking about 35 to 40,000 NATO forces here. This is U.S. forces, British forces, etc. They're going to go in and they're going to take that territory from the 30,000 Serbian troops.

here. And this is going to be in mountains. We actually had the corridors already marked. I spent time with Wesley Clark. He was then the commander to go over the details of how this was going to work. And I'm pretty sure we would have won here. It would have been maybe a little messier because it was sort of trees and that kind of forested situation. But the fact of the matter is that ground pressure plus our air pressure, I don't think there was a chance that the Serbs were going to be able to stand up to that, and I think that's why they gave up. All right. Well, all of that is groundwork. Let us now really focus in on what's going on today, if we can. And my first question is very basic. What are America's political objectives for this campaign as you see them? I think they're actually less mysterious here.

It's true that President Trump doesn't make it easy for us to understand what they are, but it's not true that there aren't through lines here. So number one has been from the get-go getting the enriched uranium out of Iran. That's what President Trump means by they can't have a nuclear weapon. What he's defining this in an operational term is that Iran surrenders. the 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium, the 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20% enriched uranium, and it all physically comes out of the country. Now, he wants more than that inspections, but that's number one.

Then now that the war has led to Iran seizing Hormuz, he wants number two, Hormuz to go back to the pre-war status quo ante. That is the way it was on February 27 before the first bulls. bomb fell. And then he also wants number three, U.S. forces to remain in the region. So this is not something that he's talking up and jumping up and down about. But one of the things that I think even a Democratic president right now would have a very hard time doing is truly doing what you hear Democrats in Congress calling for, which is literally leaving 100 percent and pulling all the forces out and the bases out. The problem here is that there is just so many ways that this is going to be for years and

years detrimental. So those are the three big interests right now for the United States. And then Iran has the mirror image opposite of these. They want number one, they want to keep their enriched uranium in their country. Number two, they don't want inspections. Number two, they want to keep control or the strait of Formoos. And in fact, bit by bit by bit, they're just literally taking it. They're organizing the authority right now. They're seizing a ship just before we got on this morning. Here, they're just doing it. And then number three, they want all American bases and U.S. forces out of the region. Well, these are zero sum. You can't really cut these in like a salomeg judgment where you're going to cut the baby in two.

You can't cut. These are bait. You can't cut them. So this is why. you can't have this negotiated solution like you can with a real estate deal. So look, you're selling a house, you want a half million dollars for your house. I'm willing to offer you $400,000 for the house. We can bluster and we can talk smack, but, you know, a lot of time just settle on $450. Well, that's the, that's the real estate deal is. It's a bargain where you're cutting the differences here, or maybe you get a little better deal.

The other side gets a little worse. that's not what's happening with great power politics. You can't really cut this territory. You can't divide it in the way you can real estate deal. So that's why I'm saying being a real estate businessman, you can be a great businessman, by the way, and that doesn't really prepare you for great power of politics. You think it is here because you're so used to going into those rooms with these mega billionaires and so forth here. But the bottom line is you're not dividing the pies in great power politics, how are you going to divide the straight of Hormuz? In fact, notice President Trump even said that. Let's split it. No, that's not split. No, that's not

going to be, no, that's a real estate deal. That's not great power politics. Tell me about the seizure of this tanker. Yeah. So what happened this morning, I put it on my ex account here. It's been verified by other sources now. And so what you're seeing is we are trying to go back to this this idea of protect freedom operation here that we started and then we pulled back on and we're trying to do it again. What we're effectively trying to do, Matthew, is send ships. We're trying to run the Iranian blockade. We're going to send ships through it. There's a narrow passage, which apparently is free of minds here, and we're trying to run that narrow passage.

Well, the Iranians just aren't having it. They can attack that. That's not far away. They can attack. They can seize. And they're just shutting that down. And moreover, then when they shut it down, they can use drones, fastboats. Then we attack the fastboats.

Well, then they fire back at our ship. So that's this sort of tumult that's been going on in the last few days here. And Iran is sending a very clear message with not so much their words, but their action, which is Iran, the message from Iran is Iran controls Hormuz, America, take it if you can. So they're really standing up here, and they're not buckling under all this so-called pressure that I'm telling you is not real. here. Not real in a sense of political pressure. It's real economically. But the fact of the matter is there's no reason to think that they're just going to stop, allow this Hormuz to be transited

without them having it on America's terms. It's going to be on their terms. Because the truth is that without a ground force forcing them, at the barrel of a gun to do what we want. That's exactly right, Matthew. Let me say a word putting it in constant. You read bombing to win. So in bombing to win, you know, I explain there's punishment strategies, decapitation strategies, and denial strategies.

Punishment fails almost all the time, decapitation all the time, to coerce, okay? Denial works. Well, let's map, as I just did from my class at the University of Chicago, Wednesday, Let's map those three strategies onto the Iran war. The United States is using leadership decapitation failure. The United States is using punishment, air power, and naval force failure. Who's using denial, area denial, and it's working?

Iran, check the box. So, look, I don't know who all's reading bombing to win. Okay. I can't tell you that, but what I can tell you is that I think we need. to understand that that framework in bombing to win, which, by the way, was developed initially in the 80s before there was even precision air power, then published in 1996 here. Here's been a ton. There's all this technology here. The framework is still working very, very well because you can adjust the technology to the framework. The framework, the technology doesn't

overcome the framework. So that framework helps you to understand why, who's got coercive leverage here? Iran. Why? They have denial. And we can't thwart their denial and sinking their surface navy did nothing because it's, as I explained, denial isn't just about bombing any old military target and claiming you've got military pressure. You've got to actually undermine the strategy of the bad guys here, and we're just not able to undermine their strategy. And at the same time, while that's happening, America is taking major political blows, a lot of them in the region. We're fragmenting here.

What's happening, and this was also very predictable. I explained this before it was going to happen here. So as Iran, as we did the leadership decapitation, Iran, this would face. Iran would lash back. That's the different stages of the smart mom trap here. And when they lash back, it's because we also don't anticipate it. So we're really not have, we didn't, it's not just that we did leadership decapitation. We were so confident this would just be a couple day war, just like Bill Clinton was.

There wasn't the backup plans to deal with all the problems. So they just easily were able to do horizontal escalation here and control, Hormuz. And so that problem here then creates a problem for the coalition, the GCC. These are the Gulf states who went along with this. MBS, that's the leader of Saudi Arabia, apparently was pushing to do the leadership decapitation. The UAE is supporting this. Other countries are going along. Well, now this has gone belly up. It's a colossal disaster. Everybody knows it. And who's then paying the price? Well, the economies of the Gulf states. They've lost their luxury tourism as a result of this already.

That's 5 to 7% of their GDP due to that. Now they've lost another 20 to 25% of their GDP due to the lost oil and gas and other shipments here through Hormuz. And as time goes on, the tightening of Hormuz is It's not Iran's grip is loosening. It's tightening. So on Monday, when President Trump tried to run the Hormuz the first time, what did Iran do? They responded by attacking a facility that was a UAE facility on the coast of the Gulf of Omont.

So if you look at the geography, you would see that this was the one place. It was a pipeline bypass of Hormuz. that was getting UAE oil out. Well, that suddenly was put at risk. So now that's why Saudi Arabia, who's got another pipeline, they don't want their pipeline hit, suddenly Saudi Arabia, you know, puts up, calls up and says, stop, we're not letting you use.

Kuwait says the same thing. That's why President Trump did an about face on Monday night. And I laid all this out here. And now it's all been confirmed, by the way. And what you're seeing is it's the fratting. fragmentation of the GCC, the coalition that Trump was putting together as the counterbalancing coalition against Iran, it's fragmenting and it's going to be difficult to keep together because as Iran's power grows, as, as I say, it becomes the fourth center of world power, those neighboring states look more and more like small states compared to Iran. and they've got to decide, where's their best survival prospect? Is it siding with America who doesn't seem to be able to turn the tide, or is it siding with Iran?

So, and all this, by the way, Matthew, completely predictable here. And this is what's so tragic. These are not surprised. They may be surprising to the public, to the business leaders in our country. They may be surprising even to the GCC leaders. That doesn't mean it's an actual surprise. That just means that they're just not really going down these roads deeply here. And once you do, these are all, this is the default is what we're seeing.

So let me ask you two questions then here at the end. Is there anything America can do here to turn things around? and how do you think this is actually going to go? Like, what do you see as the next year of this conflict, if it lasts a year? How is this going to play out? I gave a lot of advice early on here in the opening days to the Trump administration.

I told them, first of all, the first few days, they should just get out now. Say you killed the Supreme Leader and go home and stop. They didn't do that. Then once we got in a little deeper into the air, where I said, okay, now develop a military containment strategy of Israel. So at least now you've got something to trade, something to talk to Iran about. So now, because you've got to talk, you have to have something you're bringing to the table

that Iran would respect here. Well, they're not doing that. And what is Israel doing? They're clobbering Lebanon. I mean, if you just let that's not happening. So that's not a very good, that's not, that's, they've decided to ignore that advice too. here. So the real truth is between now

and probably November, Iran has the cards and probably the goal to wreck the Trump presidency, not to get him kicked out of office, but to have him so hobbled here that he will be,

this will be so the weakest American president we've had ever probably, maybe ever here, but certainly in our lifetimes, much weaker than Jimmy Carter, worse than LBJ, because he'll still have two more years. So the idea, and this could then turn into gigantic internal conflict inside the United States because Trump's shown he's willing to use force with January 6th.

This is just mana from heaven for the Russians, for Iran, for China to watch America turn inward and tear itself apart. So I really don't think there's much, you don't see any like, you know, of pressure here to stop this. Now, once you come to, and that's horrible, that means my gas outside was 519 here in Chicago. This easily be six bucks by the end of the month and seven bucks by July. So this is not, there's no, just because it's hurt in America, no, this is, everybody's screaming, they can scream all they want, but this is working to Iran's interest, this is working to Russia's interest, and this is working to China's interest. And I don't think

they're going to ignore that. Now, by January, this could be a different thing. They may be willing to lighten up a little bit because they know they'll be in America going forward. They'll already be thinking past Trump. What can they do with the next set of, you know, between 2027 and 2028 and 2029? So you might get a little bit more willingness here to come up, but this will be on their terms. This is not going to be on America's terms here.

And also, I think a year, year and a half from now, there's a very good chance Iran will have a nuclear weapon and they'll test it. Because how else are they going to prevent the United States from deciding to just bomb them again in the future? And Rubio said so just a couple days ago. In his speech, he said, this was an hour speech. I understand people if they didn't hear it. But he said, imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon. What they're going to do is drive it up to $9 gas and we can't do anything about it. Now, hear that phrase.

Rubio is saying, once Iran has a nuclear weapon, they can drive up gas to $9 a gallon and we can't do anything about it. Well, if that's Rubio's assessment, what do you think the IRCG is thinking? Oh, sure, we're just going to give that up? No, this is why this was the worst, this will end up being America's worst defeat since, you know, not just Vietnam, but even including Vietnam, with the possible exception of ground casualties. This will end up being that bad. And it is, it was, it's because Iran is the most difficult adversary we faced since World War II. Germany was bad in World War II. Iran, so it wasn't as bad as Germany, but Iran is that tough of an actor.

And what we're seeing is that reality is playing out right in front of our faces, despite all this optimism, all of this set of ideas that we're somehow this can't really be happening. We're still in denial. So I expect one more thing. I would expect in June, Matthew, you're going to see the biggest freakouts ever when in the economy. So if this does go the way I'm saying, June is when this is all really going to hit the fan, because by July, U.S. inventories, right now the world's running down their inventories. America's not. America's running them down, but the rest of the world's running down faster.

That's why they're freaking out. Okay. What's going to happen in June is we're going to start to freak out because we're going to see this reality right in the face. And I don't think there's a deal. what exactly is the deal that President Trump can offer Iran right now to get them to surrender or move? What exactly are we going to get? So I think we'll probably end up bombing them again.

We'll probably go down the escalation track. And maybe you're already hearing on CNN this morning before I came on, you got analysts saying on CNN that we should be taking Carg Island, we should be taking these islands back to the basically ground power, ground war. And the reason is because we are stuck in the trap that I laid out before the war and everybody wants to now shoot the messenger. Believe me, being the messenger never ends up working out for the messenger. It just doesn't. Well, thank you for coming on to Angry Planet and delivering the message.

I would say that that's kind of the down note that we usually like to end the show on. Yeah, I wish I had the optimistic side of this. if there's optimism coming, it's probably going to be starting in January here when you could really think about some alternative strategies here. But even just imagine, you know, President Trump trying to come up with a three-year plan to take Hormuz back. So I'm actually thinking along those lines, what would be the three-year plan to take back Hormuz? I just can't imagine I'm going to get that phone call from President Trump. Oh, yeah, Professor Pave. I want to know your three-year plan to help my successor look really good.

I just, so I can't really imagine what's the two-week plan that President Trump wants here to turn this around. I just don't have it. I have a two- or three-year plan here, and if you want it, I'm all down for, I'm there, okay? I'm absolutely pro-America here. But that's the problem. I can't come up with a genie out of a bottle. a magical solution that not, we have how many people are talking about this? What, probably on the media, we've got 30,000 people on a daily basis talking about this.

Not a single one of them can come up with a solution to fix this in two weeks. That tells you something. Two or three years, you give us some space to actually work with President Trump. Now we might be able to do something. But you put us in this bind that we've got to fix your problem. in two weeks because you got a midterm to run? Sorry, sorry, this is just not real. This is delusional.

This is not happening. Professor, where can people find your work? Go to the escalation trap substack here. It turns out, Matthew, because I was such clumsy with my substack. I actually started two substacks, Matthew. There's the Professor Pape's substack and the escalation. trap, and it took me two weeks to understand I really had done that, okay? And I thought they were just seamlessly meshing together. So I knew I had done it, but I didn't realize this was going to be an issue.

So I'm trying to navigate that right now. I'm actually trying to produce more content for Professor Paid that's bigger picture stuff here. And then content for the escalation trap that is more nitty-gritty on the escalation of the war, and then give each of them a live briefing every two weeks so they can ask questions in the chat so that they really are. I'm trying to give them deep engagement here as we go forward, but that's really the thing. And at this point, if I try to merge everything at this point in time, this is going to create another set of, no. So I understand everybody thinks that we can magically solve every problem in two seconds here. Or if I just hired you, Matthew, to come in and fix all this. No, you're going to see the same thing. Oh,

Pape was a duncoff. He didn't even understand the platform for the first two weeks. He thought it was seamless and it didn't matter. And then he discovers, oh, it actually, the platforms have rules, that's like I'm in a trap, you see? Just like President Trump's in the trap, he didn't know the rules? Well, that happened to me too. And I just got to live with it because I can't fix it in the middle of a war where people want me to comment like, you know, this is, you know, multiple, multiple times a day.

Well, try not to escalate too bad. Exactly. I'm not going to escalate. I'm just going to figure it out. At some point, things will calm down in a few months. I'll sort it out then, but I can't fix it in the near term. Thank you, sir, so much for coming on the show. Okay.

Thank you for having me, Matthew. I really look forward to talking maybe again where things are better. That is all for this episode. So, Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell, was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, Angry PlanetPod.com, sign up, get access to life during Trump time, get access to all of the mainline episodes, commercial free and early. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Stay safe until then.