Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/13/26 Robert Pape on How His Escalation Trap Model Stands Up to Recent History

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Scott brings Robert Pape back on the show. They discuss the difficult situation Trump is in as he tries to find a face-saving way out of his war with Iran. But first, Scott and Pape look back at Pape���s career and previous conflicts like Iraq War I and Bosnia to assess how reliable the model he’s using to analyze this current war is. Discussed on the show: Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by Robert A. Pape The Escalation Trap Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats and the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Follow him on Twitter @ProfessorPape  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Porton. All right, you guys, introducing Robert A. Pape. Of course, he is a professor at the University of Chicago. He wrote dying to win and bombing to win and bombing to lose.

And he's got this great substack, the escalation trap. And I forgot to hit this share screen button, but it won't take long here. Yes, I will. allow, and this is this great substack here, the escalation trap, which you can subscribe to. And the escalation trap, I think if I remember right, Bob, this actually comes from your book from back in the 90s, bombing to win, the study of air power and its efficacy in coercing foreign regimes into complying with American wishes. Is that right? That's right. And then also 20 years of modeling the bombing of Iran.

20 years of modeling the bombing of Iran. And so now, so did your, did the, the concept of the escalation trap that pre-existed your turning your attention to Iran? Or this is something that you really developed while you were looking at Iran and saying, oh, I know what's going to happen here kind of thing or both. So I started modeling Iran in 2005. And then I started to develop this concept, which I initially called the smart bomb trap. And then I kept developing chapters, this and that, but I never published the book.

Well, come February, I was really concerned we were about to truly launch this major war against Tehran even bigger than we had done in the 12-day war. I was expecting that might happen. Glad to tell you the backstory there. So that was not a surprise to me. And so a few days before the bombs fell, I started the escalation trap substaff. And I deliberately called it not the escalation ledger, the trap. And my very first post on February 25th is called the smart bomb trap, where I went through the three stages. I explained what would happen when the first bombs fell, how then Iran they would kill leaders, they would hit targets, but we would become America strategically weaker.

That's the escalation trap and weaker because Iran would very likely take Hormuz. They almost went down that road in the 12-day war, but the 12-day war ended just as they were knocking on that door. And I thought, this is going to happen much quicker. And sure enough, it did. And once they took Hormuz, we would have a devil of a time trying to take it back. And that was then became stage three. So I laid out three stages.

I said we would quickly get to a ground power dilemma. We would probably try to circumvent it through punishment bombing, maybe even other things. And sure enough, we did a six-week air campaign, then we two-month naval blockade, and we're back and forth at these air and naval options. But we're fundamentally stuck in this dilemma that I identified. And it wasn't just I did this a few days before.

This was exactly what came out of the modeling that I had been doing for 20 years, which itself came out of bombing to win, which itself came out of teaching for the U.S. Air Force and my work as a graduate student. So there's a long history here how this came to. I could even say, you know, in my head that on the outline, it would be Roman numeral one would be, Gareth Porter's book on Vietnam, The Perils of Dominance.

And you would be the ABC under that with your, you know, more kind of detailed thing. But his theory there, and I'm sorry if I'm repetitive from when I interviewed you before. His theory was that the Americans absolutely knew the reality of how much more powerful the USA was than the Soviet Union and China combined, despite all the hype about the missile gap and whatever. They knew that America was far more powerful. And so then they got it in their head that nobody can do nothing about anything that we tell them to do ever, and especially not some barefoot cuck in black pajamas with an AK-47 can stand up to the likes of the 100-foot-tall American technological empire. If the Soviet Union is no match for us, then Ho Chi men and his men

sure as hell aren't. And then that was how they got their asses kicked in Vietnam for 10 years. Well, Not theirs, but a bunch of young guys instead. And a bunch of Vietnamese killed, too. And then so that was the perils of dominance is, yeah, you're so powerful, but you're just Gulliver getting yourself into situations where the Lilliputians can tie your ass down. Well, and that's really, Vietnam was really where I got my start studying these problems in the 1980s. I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I wanted to do a dissertation.

I thought I was going to go into the Foreign Service. So I wanted to do a dissertation, Scott, about it would really be helpful to American foreign policy. And I thought, well, what better than to understand how we lost the Vietnam War, how we lost with so much power in the Vietnam War, how we lost with so much air power in the Vietnam War. And that became my dissertation called coercive air power in the 1980s. And then it just grew from there, Scott. So the Cold War ended. What did we do?

We fought an air war in Saddam Hussein, mostly in air war, of course. And then this was the whole question of the precision revolution. Well, there were very few people really teed up to study such a problem. This was not, the Vietnam War had so scared away people in security studies, from studying air power convention, because you couldn't really think about getting a job in the 1980s. if you were going to go discuss a thing about Vietnam. And I wasn't even thinking about getting an academic job.

So anyway, the Cold War ends. We have the first Gulf War, which is hugely, hugely focused on air power. Suddenly, I find myself in the media, helping to design three-day stories for USA Today. Oh, my goodness, because we had no talking heads. So we had, I mean, no generals. They weren't yet there. In fact, you remember, it wasn't until the opening day of the Air War. in January 17th, 1991, that the Pentagon went out and got all the TVs.

So the whole issue of the media, all of that came as a result of that first war. Well, that was my baptism by fire in the media. And then what happened in the middle of that war, I get a call from the U.S. Air Force. They want to start up a brand new school in the Air Force on Air Strategy. And I go down an interview for this, and what did they mean by Air Strategy? how they lost the Vietnam War. That's what the four-star generals were explaining to me. That was the impetus behind the School Advanced Air Power Studies,

which was to study actual air strategy and pretty much the way my dissertation, they came to me because they couldn't find any other civilians who had studied air power in the way they understood it as strategy. Okay, so now, I mean, what we all hear from you here and recently is all about the hard limits of what air power can accomplish. So I'm curious about Iraq War I there

because, you know, as Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable. It's just flat desert plains. They're driving old Soviet junk that Saddam's predecessor had bought, these old T-72 tanks and all that. They're just essentially stranded out there in the broad daylight.

And so air power was, in fact, I think, incredibly effective, even dumb. It was. That's right. And you're telling the terrain part of the story, but that's only part of the story. It's really important to understand.

Yeah, how applicable are those lessons? Because what happened, I think, was they thought that whatever PAPE's warnings are, are wrong, because we proved in Iraq War I that we softened them up with our air power so badly that then our ground war only took famously 100 hours and then we had our way. And so air power does work after all, just like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. It does work. And Pates wrong, right? Well, yeah, so that was the big fight I had with the Air Force in the 1990.

So ironically, they hire me, and I engage in some of the biggest battles of my career against the U.S. Air Force, and the chief of the staff of the Air Force allowed it to go on. And he did not shut it down. They didn't fire me for disagreeing, which they thought about several times, by the way. There's stories about that. Back one day I called my wife up in the afternoon. I'm in Maxwell Air Force Base, have no other job. And I said, there may not be a job here by the end of the day.

There's a bunch of generals talking about this right now. And it's because I pushed back pretty hard on the idea that it was truly airpower alone and specifically the air power of leadership decapitation that was at issue, which was how the Air Force, many parts of the Air Force, came out. of the first Gulf War, John Warden. There's a whole lot of stories underneath this. But bottom line is that this was the big battle in the 1990s was not that we won.

It was why we won. What were the key dynamics? And the Air Force, John Warden, others in the Air Force, Debtula went on to become a key, he's a key general to this day, we're arguing that it was really leadership decapitation that created the power. to win so easily in the first Gulf War. Well, I went toe to toe with them.

I had just maybe not every single clearance they had, but pretty close. And so we had classified debates. This was an extensive thing. This went on for years. And what I showed, and you see this in Chapter 7 in bombing to win, is a very, very powerful case that even John Warden had to a, admit in reviewing the book, it's a very powerful case, that it really was air power combined with the ground threat, which held the Iraqi army together like a hammer and anvil that allowed us

to have that stunning victory. Of course, with precision enabling, the terrain enabling. But that model, that model was a key model for day. decades, Scott. And what you're seeing in the, in the 2006, Iran War, is that model has finally been replaced. So we have argued for 35 years that the model of 1991 was the right model. There's been a disagreement. Is it leadership decapitation? Do you need an army to make it possible for air power to have its effects? And what? What you see in this war in 2026 is that that model has come unglued in all kinds of ways. And I saw this coming.

So this was, again, these are, you know, this is now a surprise to people because they haven't really been studying this. They're not going toe to toe with John Warden and the other folks here, you know, sort of in, you know, not just an hourly debate, like on a podcast. but John Warden was literally my boss, Scott, for two years. And there was a day when we were at MIT. I was invited to MIT to give a talk to the folks at MIT kept thinking, oh, there's nothing really to this idea of leadership decapitation. Bob's just overreacting. So they decided to have a big conference on this subject.

And they brought me and Warden, and then they started to really see that leadership decapitation has been taken much more seriously. than the folks in the civilian world realized. And Warden and I, Worden gave a talk, and then he sat down, and then I stood up and I gave my 45-minute lecture on why leadership decapitation didn't win the 91 Gulf War, wasn't going to win future wars.

And he got up and walked out in the middle of it. And then that was a time when I had to call my wife, Because that was something, Scott. And there was no other backup job. There was just going to, I lived in Montgomery, Alabama. The only backup job at that point would have been going to McDonald's. I published books, lots of them, 20 so far. Okay, five of them are mine, but 15 of them are not.

And they're all so good. You should go to libertarian institute.org slash books and check them out. We got more coming soon, too. I'll blow your mind away. Okay, guys, me here for Matt Sersely, your new tax lawyer. and he's not just an accountant, he's a lawyer, and he knows exactly how to protect your neck. He serves small businesses and high-salary professionals to help you structure your money so that you pay as absolutely little in income tax to the revenues as possible.

No gimmicks here. You have to follow the law, but he knows it backwards and forwards, and we'll do a great job for you. Your new tax lawyer, Matt Sersely, at agoristtaxadvice.com. But then so, I mean, you know, W. Bush and his men had their own doctrines and all this. But, I mean, did you win the fight in the 90s? Or they really had the narrative? You're saying their narrative. Well, we're going to head, Scott.

The real place it came to a head. And this happened. There was an Easter debate on Easter in April 19 to 1995 where the chief staff of Air Force history was going after me pretty hard. And I wrote back to the chief of Air Force history. the chief of staff of the Air Force, that I wanted a clear, basically a try. Let's just, let's go toe to toe. Because I've always believed, Scott, in what I call intellectual Darwinism. That is the survival of the fittest idea.

So I've never hidden from our, you know, debate, I don't hide. I make everything as transparent. That's what you see on the escalation trap substack. These are lengthy, detailed analyses. These are not just quick op-eds with one line. And that is what I've done for my whole career, and I've done this with the West Wings of the White House. Went away back to the story. So in 1995, the chief of staff of the Air Force had a meeting and agreed that there should be a trial on this.

And the reason this mattered, Scott, was Bosnia. How are you going to end the Bosnian Civil War? What is the air strategy that's going to end that war? Okay. And think about this. Spring of 1995, that war had been going on three years. You got 100,000 dead Bosnia. I mean, you got a lot of, you know, we don't have a lot of memory in our, you know, as we go back, but you know how incredible that war was. And so my argument was, a papal, Pamaranville. You want to work with a Muslim Croatian ground defense. if you could. You want to marry that with Hammer Anvil targeting. John Meersheimer and I published a version of this strategy in the New Republic in the summer of 1993. I was making the case inside on this, going through Checkmate in the Pentagon.

That's a very big strategy shop in the Pentagon. And so this came to a head in April 1995, but it actually was in. interesting, Scott, it came to a head in discussion and analysis of still the 91 Gulf War. That was the actual battleground to decide the strategy for Bosnia, because it really does matter. Does leadership decapitation win the 91 war or was paper right? It was denial and a version of a hammer anvil campaign. And so come out of that. And I can't really talk about that.

That was a classified debate. I can only tell you that this involved two-star generals giving up their Easter with their families. And I thought I was sunk right there. I just couldn't believe that that was the way this was going to go down. So, man, I'm sorry to, because I know you're making a broader point. But on the question of Bosnia, I mean, are you telling me that you were the inspiration for Operation Storm? No, it was deliberate course. I can't tell you, so what I can tell you.

Storm was the cleansing of all the serves from Croatia before. That was Operation Horseshoe in 99. So there's Operation Horseshoe in Costco 99. But there's also the Operation. Oh, you mean Storm. You mean the Muslim Croatian ground offensive. I can't tell you I was the inspiration for the ground defensive. What I can tell you is that if you,

that this is a very compatible idea. So I really think what happened with the Muslim Croatian Ground Defensive is that this emerged. I don't think exactly from our inspiration. I don't think we triggered it. I think we allowed it to happen. And then we married the right air campaign on top of it, which was a Pay Pamor and Anvil campaign. And now, but I can't even tell you that that I was sort of, it wasn't in the chaos, I wasn't dictating this.

This is not that way. What I was doing, Scott, was laying out these strategies. What would work, what wouldn't work. And this was happening over and over again and debated. And it was fiercely debated. I would say even more the debate focused on the 91 War, because that was the true intellectual background for how to use air power. in the 90s. It wasn't just what's the terrain of Bosnia. This was a, this was a, this,

these things matter, but they're secondary. What was primary was the debate on air strategy, which was the point of the school that I helped stand up and was also the point of bombing to win. And that's why here I am at, you know, 22, 23 years old. I'm writing a thick of this with all these folks. I've never served in the military. I'm teaching for the military. But basically, it's about these arguments about what to do with the current ongoing wars. And the key war at that point was Bosnia. And there was a real question how we were going to, where are we going to end the Bosnian civil war or just let it run its course for year after year after year? And I made a case that we could do something,

but it would be more of a hammer anvil campaign. But I can't tell you, Scott, I wasn't in the rooms when they actually made the final decisions because I'm not a general. I'm not serving in the military. So I am literally an advisor, advisor.

So I was going to say, like on the surface, it actually looks like your policy was proven right whether they implemented it on your advice or not, in the sense of that. That's the way I treat it. They didn't kill them, but they marginalized the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs,

and they let Milosevic negotiate on their behalf instead. Exactly. They did not go after Milosevic. They didn't go for what was called the head of the snake at the time. Let's go for the head of the snake. They didn't try to kill Melodic. They didn't try to even kill Arkin. So if you look at the actual targeting of deliberate force, you would say, I teach about this all the time, Scott.

So that's why I'm so familiar with it. If you look at the targeting, you'll see the target set are tactical command targets, bridges across the drina. So you'll know the drina. You've got Bosnia separate from Serbia. The drina is the river that separates the two. So if you're going to enable the Muslim Croatian ground offensive to turn the tables against the Serbs, which are essentially a stronger force, you need air power and help. And how do you do that? Deliberate force was crafted this two-week air campaign specifically to weaken the Serbs' ability

to coordinate across the battle space, their forces, and also to reinforce from the mother country, Serbia, the forces in Bosnia proper that were getting clubbed by the Muslim Croatian ground offensive. And that's why the Muslim Croatian ground offensive gains. so much territory, especially around a place called Banja Luka. And I'm saying these things. So if people want to look at the maps, they can identify exactly where Banjuluka is. And you will see.

Or Dayton, right? Yes. And you will see that the line of contact that existed on September 15, 1995, is to the half kilometer, the Dayton Accord maps. literally the maps that are done several months later, it's right on the lines of contact. And this is a very important point, Scott, because it shows that air power can be effective used in concert with other instruments,

but understanding what the limits are of air power. So that I didn't go into thinking air power is worthless, It can't do anything. Just dismiss it. I took a middle approach, Scott. And so that's why the Army occasionally will bring me out to talk about it, but they don't really want to hear that air power could actually matter a lot. You see, the Air Force will occasionally still bring me in to give talk,

but they don't brought it really here. You need that army to really help. And then when you look at what happened with the modeling of the bombing of Iran, once I saw I thought about Bosnia for a minute still I'll do it just a second I promise but and listen I was in high school I paid a lot of attention

to a Rock War I but I skipped Bosnia at the time because it's just too many syllables in those names I just wasn't up for it I was like a junior or a sophomore in high school so you know what can I just interrupt once you got it after the fact right it's in I have a whole section on it and provoke and then so I don't know nearly as much

about like remember it in real time the way that you do. But from what I got from Provoke, I know at least one source off the top of my head for this is the famous Time Magazine story, bringing the Serbs to heal. And there's a picture on the front of Time magazine of a giant bomb going off in an otherwise idealic pristine, you know, scene there.

And then so you would think the articles about how, yeah, we're bombing them to make Milosevic do what we want. But then when you read the article, it says he had already given in on everything, was already signaling to the Russians and everybody else that he was ready to deal. And by the time the air campaign began, he'd already given it.

And so I worry that really what happened with the air campaign was it empowered the Muslim and Croatian forces, like you said, but not in the way that it was necessary to force him to the table at Dayton. He was already sick of the Republic Serbska leadership and was ready to cut them loose and make a deal over their head or behind their back anyway. But what it did do was it empowered the Muslim and Croatian forces after Dayton to go ahead and continue the war

and a massive ethnic cleansing campaign then against Bosnian Ser. What it did, Scott, to be very precise, was it prevented Milosevic from even considering the Serbian army as an option to supplement the Bosnian Serbs. So what happened in this case is the Bosnian Serbs were doing a lot of the dirty wars.

in Bosnia. And part of the reason was because the Muslims and Croatians were disjointed in their responses. They were defending their local areas. But the Muslim, and you're right, the Muslim Croatian ground offensive played a big role that storm because this was the first time you saw that concerted effort. However, there's a huge, however, there's still Serbia there. And Serbia still has a lot of power, big army could come in. We saw what it did in Kosovo. There was no Muslim Croatian ground offensive in Kosovo. So that's why that problem. So that extra point of air power, I would still argue that it was pretty important. And I wouldn't say that it was decisive, just as I wouldn't say the Muslim Croatian ground offensive is decisive. The combination is

decisive. And that's what frustrates then people who wanted to be one or the other, because you got tape in the middle, and he's given credit to these two instruments. You see what I mean. But when I see other wars that go to war without the army or without the ground forces, this is where, yeah, you can see right away that when I looked at the bombing, the modeling of bombing of Iran, and then I saw what the forces were we were bringing to bear in the middle of February, 2006, there was nothing like the kind of forces you would need to stop Iran from taking Hormuz. So there you go. That's why the trap, that's why I could lay out the stages of the trap. Right. It looks a lot like the problem that Clinton faced with Kosovo. Very similar.

I wrote a piece. I have, again, a piece in the escalation trap on the Kosovo issue. And also Chechnya when Yeltsin assassinations Dudaev in Chechnya. You have a piece. of a similar situation, not identical, of course. I show all the, you know, the details, the differences in the details. But the bottom line is that you start to really see the power of Hammer and Anvil coming together. And in this case, I think you saw what the Iran has done is studied the heck out of these campaigns. they really have impressed me as being quite astute students of air strategy. They're really quite good.

I used to grade the students pretty harshly on, you know, force them as their final papers come up with their own air, coercive strategy, solve problems, X, Y, or Z. So I, and some of these folks were Rhodes Scholars. So they're pretty, it was tough to get into this school, advanced, advanced air power study, now air and space studies.

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and in fact you'll save and get a big discount, only $99 for the first three months if you go to join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. That's join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. Man, all right, so, yes, on Iran, I don't want to change the subject to Iraq, but it's just sort of a comparison analogy type of thing. I know that a big part of the lead-up to Iraq War II

was they're playing a lot of these kind of Lockheed promotional videos. about with Lockheed sponsored Air Force power and a few Lockheed provided javelin missiles on the ground, we can do anything. The javelins being more sophisticated tow missiles, anti-tank missiles, shoulder-fired stuff. So with these two Lockheed, you know, the Lockheed air power, all the planes,

and these shoulder-fired missiles, man, we can just go wherever we want, do regime change wherever we want and, you know, with a heavy focus on the air power there. And I guess that was really Rumsfeld's thing, right? He wanted to starve the army, get their money to Special Operations Command and the Air Force to go and essentially make the new order look like

one of these Lockheed promo videos where we just go from place to place to place, inflicting our will, but then cutting out and moving on to the next one and letting the State Department of the UN or somebody else handle it after they're done. And that was sort of the thinking, at least in Rumsfeld's minds, seemed to be a lot of the way he conceived the Iraq War, especially the second Iraq War,

to work. Not that it did, but that was kind of what he had in mind. Then I wonder, like, how much of that influence do you think is going on in terms of bombing Iran? In fact, even, I remember Gareth Porter in 07 talked about how well the Navy and the Air Force are for it, but the Army and the Marines and Socom are against it. And you can see why right there. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about 2003. So I knew some of these. folks, including Paul Wolfowitz, and the run up to the Iraq War, and they knew me. So I explained, through Andy Marshall, he was an intermediary who worked at the Office of Net Assessment, a very important person in the circle of Wolfowitz.

I gave him a copy of my suicide terrorism paper before it was published, and I explained that if we thought we were going to defeat Saddam Hussein. simply through a paping to win, Hammer and Anvil campaign, we were going to be likely wrong. And the reason is because suicide terrorism was a real possibility that we weren't taking seriously. And what I meant by that is that Hammer and Anvil would beat the Republican Guard.

That is Iraq's conventional forces. But this does not mean that the persecuting, division tool that we had could then be extended to guerrilla warfare or extended to terrorists. That is one of the things I teach a lot about. I explain that it's not true that once you have a great hammer, you can use it for all kinds of different parts of the spectrum of conflict. It works well in one spectrum. Doesn't mean it's going to work well and transfer in others.

And essentially, that's what became dying to win. Scott. So that was the basis for that. I wanted to really understand the power of suicide terrorism, where it came from, and also then how it fit in with my earlier argument. And I saw, and then I predicted if we invaded Iraq, and this was right to Wolfowitz before we did this, we would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times. Well, the word came back verbally, so I don't have written statement of this through Marshall that my article, Wolfwood, saw it, he wasn't going to change anything. He didn't say they were going to therefore do Iraq, but that's what this meant.

They weren't going to change their view on what to do in Iraq, but they would pull the ground troops out of Saudi Arabia because I was explaining that the military presence in Saudi Arabia led to 9-11, and they pulled them out, and that's when they opened IUDD Air Base, in Qatar in 2004. That's how that happened. Then... Sorry, I have to interject here just real quick, and you can get back on your stream of thought here,

but in the famous interview with Tenne House in Vanity Fair, where Wolfowitz said that, well, we agreed on WMD as the reason for bureaucratic reasons. In that same interview, he says, it's one of the main reasons we had to invade Iraq so that we could pull our bases out of Saudi Arabia because they were motivating bin Laden night, suicide terrorism against Americans.

But then, oh, don't worry, we just invade Iraq. That'll make that problem go away, which is completely insane. So when I sent back to Andy Marshall was that it would be too much, it wouldn't be enough to simply pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia, that the occupation of Iraq would itself become the largest trigger for the largest suicide terrorist campaign. And then what happened, Scott, is a year away. We invade Iraq, March 2003. A year later, February 2004,

who do you think started my center at the University of Chicago, which was originally called the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism at Sea Post? Now it's security and threats. But I've kept the acronym. It was the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Secretary. It was actually through DARPA, through a program through DARPA, and essentially they wanted to know more about. the causes of suicide terrorism because the PAPE prediction came right.

So once they saw that the suicide terrorist campaign did in fact occur, and by the way, this prediction by PAPE was unique. The other terrorism experts at the time, all those folks in Washington, whether they were in think tanks or whether they were on CNN or whether they were in the Pentagon or in the CIA, they all disagreed with me. They all thought that suicide terrorism was simply a product. Mainly, there were some other issues, but mainly Islamic fundamentalism. And what my work shows is that Islamic fundamentalism is not the main trigger.

The main trigger is the military forces and the military presence. And so this was a huge debate. So much like I had the gigantic debate with the Air Force on leadership decapitation versus hammer and anvil in the 90s, I ended up having this, another gigantic debate, this time with the whole slew of terrorism experts. And there were no other folks making this argument I was. In fact, I was always the skunk at the garden party. And they would, you know, sometimes, you know, I would get invited. But I was never like the pivot where everybody was coming around and agreeing with, I was always the odd person out, much the similar situation in the 90s with the Air Force.

Well, Bob, I mean, all of these people should have been listening to Punk Rock Pirate Radio in South Austin at the time because we covered it. We said that was exactly what was going to happen if you invade Iraq. And, you know, like I used to joke in the Star Wars prequels that if only Yoda had ever just taken a cab, sometimes. And the cab driver would have told him, can't you see the chancellors, the one behind this all? Like, you're just so up in your ivory tower guys. But I could tell you, like, guys that managed bars downtown who knew exactly what was going to happen if we invaded Iraq and empowered the Shiites and all, et cetera,

just from knowing anything about it. I don't know if you know, you probably are, you know, this is below your radar, but it was perfect for me in the 90s. About two, three years before September 11th, Tom Clancy put out a book that begins with, a Shiite has secretly made himself a member of Saddam Hussein's bodyguard. And at a big parade, the Shiite shoots Saddam Hussein in the back of the head and kills him. And then, of course, is immediately cut down.

But now Saddam's dead. And then in the book, Iran takes over all of Iraq in two weeks. They just walk right in and take over everything because the Shiite super majority welcomes them in to conquer the country. And that was... Well, and we may see something. I mean, this may have been 25 years later, but this scenario's not done yet. No, of course.

I mean, this is what's been playing out ever since then. But, like, that was how I knew better. In fact, I have a clip somewhere, which I'm embarrassed to play because I get my Sunnis and my Shiites confused. But there I am a cab driver doing pirate radio in autumn of 2002, saying the Iranians are the Sunnis, and they got the Sunni super majority.

And as soon as we get rid of Saddam, they're going to come in and take over the whole country. is going to be just like in the Tom Clancy book. And by the way, like, of all novelists, like people in D.C. read Clancy, right? Like, that should have permeated a little bit. It should have permeated. Let's make a good point there, but no, no.

Everybody wanted to listen to Maciah and Chalaby promise that, no, you're going to inherit all the power. Your point, Scott, that ordinary waveglass, I think it's really worth paying attention to. The October 2002 was when I submitted my article on suicide terrorism to the American Political Science Review. But just before I was submitting it, it was midnight one night in October 2002. And I wanted to print off a copy because I'd been working on it on a computer and I didn't want, what would happen at the computer somehow disappeared overnight.

So it's midnight and the office of the political science department was closed. So I go over to Kinkos, which later now became FedEx, and here it's midnight. They're still open. I have my little floppy disk, and I give it to the guy to print off. He comes back and he says, hey, do you mind if I make a personal copy for myself? It was called the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. That's really when I knew I had something to say. It wasn't just because of the academics or the government.

Once I knew the guy literally at midnight at Kinko's making the copies thought it was worth his while to read it, that told me a lot. Many such cases. You know, life is like skateboarding. And skateboarding, there are guys who are among the very best, who never tried to turn pro, who never were competitive. They only just skated for fun in their hometown and you never met them.

But they're rad as could be. It's the same thing with foreign policy analysis. There's bartenders and air conditioner repairmen and regular joes of every description all across this country that know better than Washington, D.C., on all of these things. You know what I mean? And it's not just a partisan divide either, because I can find you conservatives that knew better

than what Bush was doing and liberals that knew better than what Obama was doing and all of those kinds of things, so-called against interest, just because like you were saying before about how they're all biased. The Army wants you to say one thing, and the Air Force wants you to say something else. else. Well, I'm way out here in Austin. I don't have a dog in that fight. I just want peace

at all costs except in the absolute necessity where we have no other choice is the only bias that I'm coming from. And that's the same bias that most Americans are looking at. And so they don't have a vested interest in pretending to believe that Saddam is friends with Osama. They know anything about it. They're going to be like, I'm not so sure that's true, actually. And because they don't have a real incentive to believe, you know what I mean? Because they don't have power influence on it anyway. So you could always find much better wisdom outside D.C. than inside, I think. Well, if you don't mind one more story, I think you'll appreciate this, Scott. This was four years after 9-11. I was invited to New York City to give a talk. And in the evening, I was essentially

by myself. So I went to a restaurant who was only about five blocks from the World Trade Centers, where they were. And I went there because I liked steak. So it was a steak. And here I'm sitting by myself at a table, and I don't even quite know how this happened. The person next to me on the other table just happened to ask what I did. So I briefly told him. And then he asked another question, my goodness, before you knew it, the entire restaurant, I'm talking about 80 people, Scott, we're suddenly huddled around, listening to an impromptu discussion by me of why 9-11 actually happened.

and this went on and on. And then there was a group of people by the bar here, and one of them at the end, this went on about two solid, imagine that. I mean, this is totally impromptive. And at the end, they all said, well, thank you very much, Professor Pape. That was amazing.

And there was a guy who was at the very end, who was some, it turned out, super wealthy man. And he said, Professor Pape, I'm not going to be able to do anything for you, but I'm going to pick up the tab for the entire restaurant. And he literally picked up my meal, so I got a free steak, but so did all the other 80 people there.

And I never saw the man again. He didn't give me a, I never saw the person again. He just literally said, I'm picking up the tab for this one. Yeah. That's the American. We don't have nice stories like that to share.

We're always telling the awful stories of human beings. Yeah. No, man, that's the American people that our leadership serves so poorly, right? I mean, those are the ones who deserve to be defended, for sure, you know. This is where people ask me, how do I stay so optimistic? These are the actual stories, Scott, the real human life stories that I see. And that's where my faith is, is in the American people.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Donald Trump, he already lost his score. I got a new one, which is Donald Trump, as the wizard, of Oz, he tripped and stumbled and pulled down his own damn curtain, right? He called his own bluff. He went, look, everybody, you want to see the limits of American conventional military power? Well, here they are. And then he showed everybody what we can and cannot do. And so in other words, Scott, he kept his promise. We're never going to do another forever war. I guess not yet. No, this one's already over. And he cried uncle on April the 8th and said,

well, geez, I guess this ain't working. The Pentagon clearly told them boss, this ain't working. The magic wishes didn't come true. We're already at the, it's too late. They did not come true. Not they still might, but they already didn't. And so now, you know, we got to find another way out of this. But now you've been warning before that and since then that even though it actually

would be easy from in Washington's terms, it's impossible for the president to extricate himself from this idiot war that he's already lost, and the only way he can see out is through, even though there is no way through. And so that's the trap that he has set for himself, according to your... That's exactly right, Scott, and you're getting it right.

The real danger with this great precision military, this idea that we were invincible, is not just we drank her own Kool-Aid, but we had the illusion that we controlled not just starting the war, but ending the war. And ending, it's a lot easier to start a war than to end a war, especially a major war like what we did with the Iran War, especially in starting February 28. This was the real nature of the trap because it wasn't going to be good enough

for President Trump to simply decide to walk away. You were going to have to get Iran to agree and accept an end. And what I warned about from the beginning is Iranian nationalism. A lot of energy would occur with Iran for ambition and revenge. And it's because the nature of the way this war opened. And it's important to remind people, we didn't just kill one person. the Supreme Leader, who is, you could describe them like the President of the United States or the Pope, however you want to describe it.

We killed something like 137 leaders, some number there. We don't even have a full accounting, I don't think, yet. And that is like knocking out the President of the United States, the First Lady, members of the First Family, about a third of the Congress that includes senators and representatives, and also a big portion of the U.S. cabinet, the top of the Pentagon, the top of the CIA. But that's only the beginning. Then we go on and we kill, in this 40-day air campaign, we kill about 4,000 Iranians. And this includes the girls that we talk about, the girls' school and so forth.

But this is just still the beginning, because then afterwards, when there is supposed to be a ceasefire on April 8, What happens? We have one meeting with J.D. Vance and Iranian negotiators, about 12 hours as best we can tell, maybe a little longer. And what comes out is J.D. Vance kind of is in a huff. And that's when the two months, the naval blockade, which is a blockade that harms all 92 million Iranian people. I mean, this is not a selective use. This is a blunt instrument of the first order. And I was warning, and a lot of my work in bombing to win, in dying to win is about the dangers of triggering nationalism where the targets want payback. They want to harm. It's emotions.

It's not just a game of chess for people in war. There's emotions that are triggered in war. And this is then part of the escalation trap. It's not just the chess pieces of the military tool. It is also politics and the emotions of politics. And this is where we, why I started to argue that we would trigger dynamics lead to Iran becoming on a trajectory to become the fourth center of world power, Scott. But all of those issues that are now coming to be and people are starting to give whole podcasts on. I mean, they're literally, these were the arguments I was explaining at the end of February, before the war started, in March, in prominent places.

And at the time when I published these things, a lot of people, Professor Pape's overreacting. Now it's becoming the conventional wisdom. And the reason is it's hard to end this war is because right now, Iran's not giving Trump a face-saving way out. They're not simply deciding, oh, they want to get peace. That was April 8th. They're not simply deciding they want some economic benefits. That was the MOU. What's happened is step by step by step, Iran's demands are escalating.

They're literally escalating almost on a daily basis last week. And what you're seeing is they simply want to wreck the Trump. presidency. If they want to wreck the Trump presidency, you're going to have to do a lot to wreck the American economy. And if you're going to wreck the American economy, you're going to have to do a lot to wreck the world economy. And I've been explaining all arguing for months on podcasts with people who would say, oh, no, no, no, Professor Pape, you're overreacting. Iran's going to sue for peace. They're hurting because of the blockade. Or they're hurting because of this. Or one of the big issues for months, Scott, was China's going to bail us out.

And I've kept trying to explain that there's, it's not that China wants a great depression to go on for five or ten years in the world, but to actually knock down America in a, in a truly irreversible way, this is tremendously in China's advantage. And they have built a system for 10 years able to withstand quite. a bit. And look at how well China's navigating this war. Hey, you guys know I have another show too, right? Yeah, it's called Provote with me and Daryl Cooper. We're on every Thursday night, live on the YouTube's. Mmm, Scott Horton flavored coffee. I drink this stuff first thing in the morning,

every morning and then right around 2 o'clock when the potential siesta starts to kick in. No siesta, more coffee. Moon dose artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks, because Starbucks supports the war party while Moondow supports peace. Just go to Scottwharton.org slash coffee. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. All right. Now, the thing of it is that there are so many stipulations that they started at the beginning, so many demands.

You have to give up all of your alliances in the region. We're going to completely destroy or you're going to surrender all of your missiles to us and, you know, all of these kinds of things. And, of course, they're never very specific. what they mean, but they're going to one way or the other render Iran's nuclear program so you know, inoperable that essentially their breakout time is a decade or some kind of thing that they can claim a victory there. And yet they have no ability to insist on any of those now. And they already know that. They've already essentially lost all this thing. So the problem

as I see it is that, and this is the way Joe Kent puts it, or his plan, is just turn around and walk away. And the problem with that, as I see it, is that it's too good and too simple for Washington. But in fact, that is the smart thing to do because politically speaking, you know, the MOU was a miracle and they still couldn't buy it. And he went ahead and sabotage it. Remember, it wasn't the Iranians escalating things. It was Trump tried to run the blockade. And they said, no, you don't was what kicked off the fighting again. And so he's not willing to seal the deal and follow through on turning that MOU.

to a real treaty because it's just, as you said, it's too much of a humiliation. I have great respect for Joe. I brought Joe on leave. But what he could do, though, is if he just turns around and leaves, obviously he's got to eat a lot of crow in Washington, look very bad politically and whatever. However, in the region, then that shifts the entire burden on to Iran

about how they are going to proceed in their negotiations and whatever, their terms with everybody else. Because after all, we are not there. North America's here. And so their whole problem then becomes somebody else's, everyone else's problem. And then the burden is on Iran to be as reasonable as possible, charge as reasonable fees as possible and exercise their dominance in the region, their newfound dominance in as careful a way as possible so as to, for example, not drive the Saudis straight towards an atom bomb or something like that that is against their interests. And so even though it's a Scott Horton

overly simple, too good to be true type of an answer. It seems to me that actually is the most reasonable solution to the situation. Well, so I think very highly of Joe. I've had him on my escalation trap as one of the few guests I've actually had on, Scott. So I don't do much the way of interviewing people. And I've had Joe on and I've talked with him many, many times and so forth. Here's the real issue, though, with the, if we marched in, we can just march out policy, which is, I agree with most of these dynamics after about two years.

So I think that between now and January, 2009, I've thought this for quite some time, I think it's going to be extremely difficult for the dynamics, the benefits for this policy to occur. And there's a couple reasons for that. One, I have already explained to you, that Iran wants to wreck America and wreck America's presidency and really wreck it hard, not just to have a sort of a little bit of a brushback pitch. But number two is that as long as President Trump and Netanyahu are leading their respective countries,

the world is going to blame mostly Trump and Netanyahu. And that is working in Iran clearly seems to understand that and is riding that wave. Now, over time, once Netanyahu and Trump are gone from office, and I think it would have to be the Trump presidency. So even if President Trump somehow we're not personally there, I think this really will go on, even if JD Bans were to take over. I think the problem here is that America and Israel are going to be blamed very, very heavily because this is the actual cause. Iran did not trigger this war. They did not trigger the 12-day war in June 2025,

and they did not trigger the current war that started in February 28. There's just nothing they did to trigger this war. In fact, in President Trump and Netanyahu, they don't even give a pretext. This isn't like Vietnam Gulf of Tonkin, but there's no pretext here to even say that there's a lie that we can give that Iran started the war. So what you are seeing is that Iran is, the world is going to remain, I believe, quite angry at the United States and at Israel. And I think this is going to go on for some time. And Iran is then under this, you could even call it a cover of the anger against America and Israel, is going to drive this home. And they're not driving a hard bargain.

It's not about bargaining. They're not doing tough bargaining the way a lot of people want to. believe this is true. That's not what's going on. They want outcomes. They want outcomes. And those outcomes are real, wounded, the end of any reputation to the Trump presidency forever. These are the outcomes, the level of the outcome. And if you could cause a debt crisis in the United States, that would be great for them. And I think China and Russia would be pretty happy with that, too. So these are not, they're not looking to simply get an end here, Scott. They're looking to get some real payback.

And payback for them looks like real pain for America. Well, but I guess, I mean, I agree with what you're saying. In fact, there's the quote from, I forgot which official saying that, oh, we don't want to talk again until the new president in 20209. I've been saying this for months, Scott. Right. So they've made that very clear. But again, that's sort of the underpinning my whole theory here is that if we just turn around and sail home and just say forget the whole thing, then it makes it much more difficult for them to carry out that grudge for two years when we're really not doing anything to that.

I believe. Maria that's got to still suffer for it, you know? I believe what's going to happen is starting in January of 2027, the next set of presidential candidates will. start to be, we'll start to emerge and we'll start to have some serious discussions about bringing some semblance of stability to the Middle East, with or without America there. This will become a big topic for years. I don't think it's a big topic right now, Scott, although it's somewhat of a topic, because we're still coming into the midterms and there's still the issue of will Trump somehow escape here like Houdini, where even though he's done all this, he will escape and

so forth. By January, we will all know that political reality one way or another. We'll know at least quite a bit about it. And I think then we and the world, essentially, will be in a position where we can talk seriously about a future of a several-year American grand strategy. And that's what I think we had a chance at some off-ramps in March. In fact, in my foreign affairs piece, I essentially, this was one I published on March 9th, I essentially am telling the Trump administration, declare victory, go home right now. Stop right now. Then in April, I'm trying to give advice to the Trump administration through the media again. Do military containment of Israel? Israel's gone into Lebanon. Put pressure on Israel to get them to pull back. Well, all of these off-ramps

here were missed. And the MOU was a third one that was missed. Every single off ramp, we're a day late and a dollar short. Iran is not a day late and a dollar short. They're taking advantage of this. And they're not going to keep understanding that it's okay for Americans to kill all these people. And I worry about Iraq, Scott, because you'll recall that a lot of Americans don't know. We triggered a civil war in Iraq that would not have started, except for our invasion, that killed over 100,000 Iraqis. And that was on us. And this worries me a lot.

And I'm very pro-American. I'm trying to stop these things, but we can't erase history. We did that. Okay, but here's the thing, though. We're having this conversation in the middle of the summer of only 26. And this man is going to be sitting in the chair for, two and a half more years.

And you say he might be in a trap, but he also possesses 7,000 H bombs. And ultimately, he does have more power than anyone in the history of mankind and maybe ever. I am extremely worried for our country, Scott. And that's why you see me working so hard on the substats. And this is not the, you know,

I got plenty of things I could be doing. And right now, I've just lived through tornadoes for three weeks in my, as I told you before, I'm in a hotel room. So this is, and here, what am I doing? I'm working on trying to help bail us out of this crazy war and doing it the best I know how. And the reason is I am so concerned about what's coming. I'm very concerned. And I think that we are, one of the ways I put it, Scott, is we're kind of in an exit trap

where we are thinking there's got to be a way where we can quickly get out of this between now and the midterms or now in the next few months. I think we need to start already seriously talking about the future beyond Trump. We need to already start. And I think if I had my druthers, we would be already starting with presidential candidate discussions now. But the candidates just won't do it. You know, I mean, this is just not going to happen, not seriously. And in this But this, I think, would be extremely helpful because it's going to take years to dig us out of this mess. And we might be having some pretty tough times in that intervening a couple of years. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, everybody, that's Robert A. Pape, professor at the University of Chicago. He wrote Dying to Win and Bombing to Win. And The Escalation Trap, is that a book that you're working on now or it's already out? I'm thinking of making, yeah, I've already got plans for it. where the Escalation Trap book will be explaining how we had one success in 1991 and then managed to lose so many other wars. Right.

All right, so there you go, and it's escalationtrap.substack.com. Thank you again, Bob. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Robbers, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee,

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