Consider This from NPR - What happens when democracies use military force to occupy their own territory?

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Over the weekend, President Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a character from the war film “Apocalypse Now” and, in that same post, seemingly threatened “WAR” in Chicago; later, the president indicated that sending in troops would be to clean up cities, not to go to war. But weeks of talk of sending federal troops into Chicago has set the city on edge.NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Dr. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, and who worries his city could be a powder keg.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] episode was produced by Henry Larson and Avery Keatley. It was edited by Sarah Handel. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On Saturday, President Trump posted an image of himself on social media as a character from the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of night pump in the morning. This is a character played by Robert Duvall who orders an airstrike that kills civilians and Viet Cong alike. Trump wrote in that same social media post, quote, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. The president has promised for weeks now to deploy federal troops in the National Guard in Chicago. Here he is in the Oval Office on Tuesday. There's no place in the world, including you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of.

They don't even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now. This post was a dramatic escalation of rhetoric against the country's third largest city. And it comes just days after Trump signed an executive order to restile the Department of Defense. We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense. So we're going to Department of War.

In Saturday's social media post with the Apocalypse Now image, Trump wrote, quote, Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker responded by saying, quote, the President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Trump backtrack just a bit on Sunday afternoon. We're not going to war. We're going to clean up our city.

We're going to clean them up so they don't kill five people every weekend. That's not war. That's common sense. Consider this. The city of Chicago is on edge as it repairs for the possible deployment of federal troops. With Chicago's residents in the spotlight, some now worry their city could be a powder kick. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. Here at Life Kit, we take advice seriously.

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Robert A. Pape is a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies how democratic countries use their militaries domestically. I asked him how it feels to be an expert in that field and talking about his own city. It is really a surprise. I never would have thought in my 30-year career that we would be talking about the use of heavy military forces in an American country. city, let alone the city I've been living in for over 25 years, when there's not an emergency. Are there typical patterns that you see play out when a leader threatens to occupy territory within his or her own country and uses the military to do that? Yes. So I have been studying not just political violence for 30 years, Scott, but my specialty is studying military occupations. And by democracies, looking at cases that existed around going

from 1980 to the present. And so a good example of this, for example, would be British troops in northern Ireland. So once you have political leaders start to talk about this, especially the president or the leader here, you can usually expect some real action. So the idea this is all just a hoax or that President Trump is trolling us and so forth, we can all hope that's the case. But since L.A. where President Trump sent the Guard, federalized Guard, and Marines into an American city, unfortunately, this has already set off a chain of events. And so go ahead, Scott. I just want to ask a counterpoint. I'm talking to you from Washington, D.C., where there's been a National Guard deployment for several weeks now. You have certainly seen tension points with federal law enforcement agencies, either.

arresting people on the street or carrying out deportation actions. But the National Guard aspect of this, I mean, by and large, there hasn't really been attention points. You've seen a lot of guardsmen carrying around. There's been pictures of them picking up trash on the National Mall. It doesn't really seem to have escalated. And I'm wondering if that surprises you. That's the normal honeymoon period of how these go. In fact, the British, when they sent troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, they went on a de-escalation mission. And for the initial period, you know, initial weeks and even several months, it looked like that was actually panning out. But in fact, what happens over time is the heavy military deployments end up impinging on political liberties, civil

liberties. In the case of Chicago, for example, we will, in March, we have our primary elections. Well, that means that the election season for those primaries has already effectively begun. It will be ramping up even more. So as time goes on, there is a shift of balance between the original purpose of what the troops were going in to do with the problem that you can't just yank them out or else that the original, the gains kind of disappear. When you look at the patterns you've studied over the years, what are the moments that you'll be looking out for? You know, I'm thinking about somebody attacks an occupying a soldier in one way or another, and that leads to a much more intense crackdown, right?

An escalation of force. Northern Ireland is an example of that, right? Like, what are the other things that you look for that you see play out? There's several things to look for is, number one, the rise of peaceful protests, and you would expect them to be initially peaceful. and Governor Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson have definitely stressed that. But the problem I'm going to be looking for in the weeks to follow after that is, are there any incidents that start to escalate?

What I'm really concerned about, one of the key flashpoints, would be an incident where a member of the Guard or U.S. military were to kill a protester under any circumstances whatsoever. And that would be caught on tape. that could be incredibly inflammatory. And we need to harken back to Kent State. So what happened in Kent State is that there was a deployment of National Guard on a college campus. And in just 13 seconds, four people were killed.

And that created an enormous uproar. Well, this could be even worse. What, if anything, can you tell us about the way that these end? Are there trend lines? Is it overreach that leads to political backlash? Is there anything that you could look for to kind of get out of these scenarios? Well, the biggest thing that we see is that things tend to get a lot worse before they come to an end. What you saw in the case of, say, Northern Ireland is that things didn't come to an end for decades.

So this went on for quite a period of time. That is, the initial British troops went into Northern Ireland. after four months. It didn't happen right away. The provisional IRA was formed. And the purpose of the provisional IRA was to use military force against the British troops to get them out. Well, that then created its own cycle of violence that went on for a long period of time. I think that the most important thing is to keep the presence of the troops as small as possible, as limited as possible and as short duration as possible, because as the weeks and months go on, and as this inevitably starts to impinge on political liberties, this will tend to escalate. And the exact

trajectory of where this is heading after, say, four to six months is just not clear. That's Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you, Scott. That was Professor Robert A. Pape at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. His essay, Chicago, could be a powder keg, appeared in the New York Times. This episode was produced by Henry Larson and Avery Keatley. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Sarah Robbins. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider This Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.