Robert Pape: “Trump Has DOOMED Us!” Iran Will DESTROY Presidency

We're happy to be joined once again by friend of the show, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago and of course the Escalation Trap sub stack. Make sure to subscribe to that if you haven't yet. Professor Pape, thank you so much for joining us once again.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoy these discussions. You guys are just the best. So thank you so much for having me.

Well we appreciate you for being here. Yeah, keep the compliments flowing and we'll stay happy.

It'll be part of the escalation promise.

Yes.

In fact, I've been noticing, and I don't know, tell me if you noticed this at all, it feels like Iranian officials have actually been following some of your analysis, particularly the argument that they're becoming a major power. Like I've seen them sort of repeating that back in similar words.

That may be right. And so just so listeners know, so Russian television wants me on and has for a long time. Iranian media of various kinds wants me on. I just won't do that here. So I'm laying out what to expect for the world here. And I'm not trying to, you know,

certainly not help the bad guys here or something like that. Just not, you're not seeing somebody who's in any way other than an American supporter here.

But you said you weren't trying to help the bad guys.

And also, just so everybody knows, my ideal world is where America remains number one. We're the strongest, richest country in the world. We want everybody to come here because we're the best place on the planet to be. I think we need to get back to being the best place on the planet to be here. But we're not going to get there if we don't understand the world that's coming at us. place on the planet to be here. But we're not going to get there if we don't understand

the world that's coming at us.

Well, let's just start by getting your reaction to the whirlwind of events yesterday where the deadline was looming, where JD Vance, Jared Kushner, Steve Whitcoff were supposed to go to Islamabad and everybody was waiting, trying to figure out if the plane had taken off. They ended up, of course, not to figure out if the plane had taken off. They ended up, of course, not going and Trump extended the deadline. We woke up this morning to news that there were ships fired on in the Strait of Hormuz.

So Professor Pape, wild 24 hours. What do you make of that?

Yes, but fully in line, if you're following the Substack post here, this is just in line with the expectations I've been laying out on both sides. So, and what you are seeing number one is, and as I've been saying, you know, from my early post about how Trump has the illusion

of control, Trump's just lost control. So, the bottom line is America's not winning, Trump is not in control. And what you are seeing is a rising trajectory for Iran. It's just growing, you know, sort of bit by bit. It's not exactly linear, there's some pauses,

but it is growing just as I've been saying. And Iran has cards to play. They are more in control as each day passes. And since the first hour of the bombing America has been less in control And has less cards to play and that's actually playing itself out now in detail Let me just shift over to the details here because I did post these

Here these longer articles about what's happening with why is the ceasefire breaking down? Well, the ceasefire is breaking down not because, this is not a case of misunderstanding, where you need to have negotiators get to the table, talk to each other face to face to clarify things. No, that's not what's occurring here. What's occurring is a zero sum problem. We have two zero sum problems, and that's what's breaking us in the negotiations to break down.

You see, we have two issues, the nuclear enrichment and Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz. And these are classic zero-sum issues. Iran cannot both control and not control the Strait of Hormuz. There's no middle ground here. Iran cannot both have enriched uranium to make a bomb and not have enriched uranium to make a bomb.

So there's no real way to cut this pie evenly, you know, 50-50, 60-40. That's just not what's occurring. One side has to give up, essentially. And what you're seeing is both sides, rather than give up, prefer to escalate. Now, Donald Trump is also trying to find a third way. So I've been arguing this for some time and explaining this.

I just explained more in detail that we're on a fork in the road. Either we pull back here from escalation and Iran becomes the fourth center of world power, or we go forward with escalation. Well, Donald Trump is trying so hard to get a third way, which is, can't you just give me the fig leaf of a cover Iran so that I can declare victory?

And then I'll maybe even give you the Strait of Hormuz or something here under the table. We'll just kind of, let me just have my victory, okay? They're not doing that, folks? They're not doing that folks. They're not doing that. And there's I think a very simple reason

they're not doing that, which is they wanna torpedo Donald Trump's presidency. I think this has got the classic earmarks here where they want Donald Trump to become the lamest of lame ducks. Now he's hurt right now.

He's a wounded animal as it comes to his presidency. That's why he's squirming trying to get out of this thing, but he's not unrecoverably wounded. So I think what you're seeing on the part of Iran is they're gonna wanna string this out. Now, I don't know exactly how far they can string it out,

but I can tell you they're gonna wanna string it out at least to November. Now that's horrible for the economy. Think about that. I'm about to do a new substat. As I did this one on the economy,

I'm about to do a new one projecting out even further soon. Here, because what's happening is everybody wants this to be over. Well, that's because they are not Iran. Okay, all right. That's the bottom.

And what Iran is now wants is they have, they wanna become that emerging power. Okay, so how do you do that? You keep the straight and forward moves and you make sure everybody knows you're in control, which is what they just did this morning with demonstration.

Number two, in about a year, you want nuclear weapons. They're going to want nuclear weapons here. And number three is you want to go down in history as the country that torpedoed Trump's presidency when the Democrats couldn't. Just think about that on their legacy, you see. This would now establish them in this powerful way. And you're gonna, if that happens, if they torpedo Donald Trump's presidency,

oh my goodness, the cow-toweling that's gonna come to them from, you know, UAE, because the governments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they're gonna start to be fearful. Well, if you can torpedo Trump's presidency, what are you gonna do to be fearful. Well, if you can torpedo Trump's presidency, what are you gonna do to me? So this is what the game we're in

is power politics of the first order. This is not real estate negotiation. This is not this idea of just getting to yes. I knew Roger Fisher's son here in Dino. So I'm familiar with all of this. This is now power politics of the first order and we are not playing up to, Iran's just

beating us at power politics and they're doing it almost every single day.

So Joe Kent, the former top Trump official who resigned in protest, has put out a version of another third way that he sort of presented, which is similar to what you were talking about, but not exactly. He was saying what Trump should do is just walk away and but and slash but leave sanctions in place.

And you then leave Iran in this situation where they are then left to negotiate bilateral or multilateral deals around passage through the Strait of Hormuz. But it's very difficult for them to then fire on Israel or anybody else at that point if they're not fired on themselves, because then they become the aggressor rather than defending themselves. But if sanctions continue to choke them, yes, they'll be getting revenue,

yes, they'll have control of the Strait of Hormuz, but without the ability to engage with the international economy, they'd be slowly choking out and you'd have a hopeless population.

Joe Ken's plan is a version actually of you walk away and Iran becomes the fourth center of world's power, maybe a little more slowly because he's trying to slow it down a little bit. It's not really a third way. That's not a third approach because there's no actual way

to stop Iran from exerting more power in Kent's plan. And what I'm specifically referring to in the whole in Kent's plan is the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So if we follow Kent's plan here and okay, we keep the blockade even going here, the US blockade going.

What that's going to do is it's still going to open the door for Iran, not necessarily in a week, but in several months to topple the governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia over time. You can never really put a time clock on how you topple governments and so forth, but they have a lot more powerful ways

because they're in the region. There are different groups inside of the UAE and Saudi Arabia that they don't like to talk about who are minorities, who they try to keep a close eye on, of course, but Iran, if you can penetrate Iran, they can penetrate you.

So this whole game here will change. And so the idea that Ken has as well, we'll have a stable equilibrium that will keep a containment band around Iran. And that's just not what's gonna happen. This is not Iraq, this is not a situation like Iraq.

It's worse than Iraq. There are gonna be some similarities, of course, but it's worse than Iraq. And so what he's doing is he's saying there's a fork in the road. His paper's saying, I wanna take this fork over here,

back away, slow down this rise of Iran becoming the fourth center of world power. And notice in Ken's plan, they still get nuclear weapons. They can still process all that material and become a nuclear weapon state in Ken's plan. So this will, you know, and that's really the hole in the plan. And I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm telling you what the choices are in front of us.

In this situation, one final point with Ken's plan is just recognize the world still, the economy still goes over the cliff or the dips here. He's not actually stopping. He's not opening the Strait of Hormuz for the UAE and Saudi Arabia to have its oil exports come out here. So just be aware.

This is the fork in the road. He's choosing clearly Saud A, and then there's B, escalation. He doesn't want to do that. And I can appreciate that. I'm not really happy about escalation either. So I'm not really fundamentally saying thatation either. So I'm not I'm not really Fundamentally saying that this the choice he wants is necessarily wrong

I just think we need to go into this with open eyes And I'm not gonna sell the come the country a bill of goods and say oh sure this will all be fine Over here and this is what people are frustrated with me because they want me to be the happy guy who says, well, if only we would not do X and only do this over here, everything's working out and I'm sorry, Donald Trump has doomed us to a trap

and what you're seeing is Joe Kent choosing one side of that trap, but he's not getting out of the trap.

Because the move would be a U-turn at the fork and go backwards. Pardon me? The move would be to pull a U-turn at the fork on the road and go backwards and not

Well, the move would be to go to Star Trek and we go back and we don't do this at all.

Right.

I mean, come on, we're not in a situation where we can have these magical ideas and go back to February 27 Iran has learned something Even I think even more than their material gains They learned something in the last eight weeks. They did not know before which is they can beat America not just survive They can actually beat America.

And they're not just beating Donald Trump. Nobody in America is coming up with this brilliant plan where you're gonna use escalation dominance that we're all gonna be happy with to win. And I'm saying, this is not good. This is not good.

When a major rival in the world really understands they can beat you here. This is different and this is what Donald Trump has done more than anything else He's he's given Iran Actual knowledge they did not have before they had uncertainty before and they thought well could they survive? This is way beyond survival. And this is why this is what's happened here is Trump will go down as the worst president probably ever that we've had worse than Jimmy Carter,

worse than Lyndon Johnson. And this catastrophic disaster will probably go down, certainly the worst since Vietnam. And it won't have necessarily the military casualties of Vietnam, but Vietnam did not wreck the world's economy. And the 2003 Iraq war did not wreck the world's economy. We didn't have gas prices

shooting up like this in that. That's why this is Donald Trump is this is all on his back and Iran is not letting him off the hook with some face-saving gesture. And that's gonna frustrate people. But now come January, so as bad as I'm painting it, I'm saying it's gonna possibly get quite much worse here

because I think they wanna torpedo Trump's presidency more than the Democrats wanna do it. I mean, imagine that, they wanna do it worse than the Democrats. So what you're getting here is maybe by January here, when Trump's presidency is thoroughly wrecked,

unrecoverable, the Republicans wanna get him out of Dodge, not just simply the Democrats here, then you might actually have a situation where they wanna, because they will be around for decades, okay? And the US will be around for decades.

But I really think this is this missing ingredient that I'm not hearing in the media, that Iran, I think, has a true interest in wrecking Trump's presidency. And send me emails, folks. Listen, if I'm missing this on all these other channels, you just let me know. I'm on those channels.

I'm watching them on TV. I'm listening to them on podcast. I'm just not hearing people explain that Iran wants to wreck Trump's presidency. And that's gonna take some time. I mean, if you're really gonna do this for real you see and make it so he can't come back after January 6th

the Democrats let him back in back in office. I mean think about that. They weren't. You want to wreck a president you got to do worse than what happened here and I think they're trying to do that.

Now I wanted to get you to respond to the very influential popular historian Neil Ferguson, who's of course at the Hoover Institute. Now he posted a viral ex, I guess tweet, yesterday and it's super interesting. Now back when the war began, Professor Pape, you were already warning of the escalation trap. Neil Ferguson's first column on this was tepid, but I would say bullish on the US. Now as of yesterday, he's saying, his point seven in this was, the Iranians have survived regime change and discovered that closing the strait is just as powerful a lever in

economic warfare as they had always hoped. It's not despite the Russian quip, a quote, economic nuke, because unlike a nuclear weapon, you can use it. Then he says, where we go from here is fairly predictable. I would be surprised if Trump now deploys ground forces. There will be more negotiations.

So Islamabad, here we come. There may have to be more bombing. If the Iranians dust down the North Vietnamese playbook of stringing the US negotiators along. Neil's actually the Kissinger's biographer. He continues to say the final compromise will take longer to be agreed upon than Mr. Market currently believes.

What's your response to this, Professor Pate? Because in a way, he's come around to your perspective.

Yeah, that's right. One thing that your listeners would not be surprised about but won't know is I do more than talking to the media. I talk to very important people outside of the media. These are people in government. These are people not in government.

And we have more lengthy back and forths. And you're willing to give me quite lengthy back and forth. I really appreciate that. Most of the media won't do that, but we have your audience gets more informed. And so you can actually have that intelligent conversation

and you see right away that he's directly on the pay path. Right? That is, I mean, there's no gap. There's no daylight anymore. Well, I'm just pointing out, and I won't talk about these private conversations, who they are and so forth, but it does, it is the case that there are very, very smart people. I highly respect people, even people that may seem to disagree with me.

There are people I highly respect in that way, and I will have lengthy conversations with them offline so we can talk about things that they really want to hear about, which might appear to the ordinary person to be, you know, sort of off track or in the weeds, but when you get the experts together, this is what the talk is like, I'm sorry to say,

that we get to the weeds, we get into certain things. And it really does matter here, and I value that tremendously here. And I think that for me is quite an honor that Ferguson, and whether it's an honor to me or he just come out with his own view,

I don't really, that's not real, that's neither here nor there. What it really means is the world is coming around and these frameworks that I've been playing out, super smart people. Everybody is, I think, I get so much email here about the benefits of the

frameworks, the actual frameworks, you see what I mean, not just simply commenting on yesterday's news. And I think that's what you see here and I'm really glad I started the Substack. I could not be happier.

And we're glad to have you here, Professor Pape, to talk about the Substack. Hope everybody goes over and subscribes to the Escalation Trap.

I think that people need to be aware, just before we leave here, that so yesterday I published a trajectory on the Substack here and this was, I said, the ceasefire is about to end in just a few hours Don't be surprised if you see the next stage would be Demonstration attacks and what you're seeing and I don't think Iran could have read it and responded in time It's just not possible But what you're seeing is the validation of this when Iran took those ships and then the other thing you didn't mention is they had?

A parade where they brought in the missiles. I don't know if your listeners can see or your viewers can see the missiles. This is just like with North Korea. This is just like with Russia, just like with China. And what they're doing with those missiles is they're saying, you mess with us, we're going to go beyond demonstration.

And those missiles have American city names on them. Now they can't really reach American cities so I don't want America to freak out over this but what they are doing is they're moving up a ladder of escalation that other countries have done. This is just you know if you study this for 30 years demonstration there's whole articles on this you would see they're they're moving up a standard rung themselves and the fact that they're having those missiles out there,

that tells me that this is not gonna be over anytime soon. The idea that they're simply now gonna kowtow here and just surrender that power, I don't think so. They're feeling their oats here and they're sending a direct signal. Maybe most Americans don't understand it,

but those people in the White House get it, which is America, you're next. You keep targeting us in our homeland. So maybe Joe Kent's not necessarily all that.

Right, well, I think he's trying to speak Trump's language and be persuasive.

Well, he's trying to speak Trump's language and be persuasive. Well, he's trying to speak Trump's language, but Trump wants a clear victory. He wants the fig leaf of victory. And the reason is because that way he can recover his presidency. I don't think Iran is going to be, if Iran was going to give him the fig leaf of victory, they would have met with JD Vance. And I think that's a clear sign that they understand what Trump wants, and he's begging them for this.

And I think that this is just not, I don't think they're gonna play that game because this is signaling to me, intel to me, that they're revealing their preference. They would rather wreck his presidency than give the fig leaf of a cover for him to declare victory. That's why he can't declare victory now.

What's he gonna say? They took a ship and now we won? I mean, this is just not, yeah, they're making it impossible for Trump to declare victory and walk away. He can still walk away.

He just can't walk away with a victory.

He can declare it.

He can try it, but they're gonna say, they're gonna do the next thing and say, sure, they're gonna have the big image. Trump declare victory, we take ship. Trump declare victory, we topple UAE.

Yes.

That's what they want. That's what they're doing. And I'm just saying, this is power politics of the first order. Trump's playing domestic politics, okay? Iran is playing power politics. And you can see that when our CIA goes

into topple governments, as we have done, including in Iran, okay? We're playing hard ball for real. We may paper it over with, we're Mr., you know, Trump said, we're Mr. Nice. No, we're rarely Mr. Nice Guy. When we topple governments here, we're pretending to have

the fig leaf of this. We topple, it took us 15 years to topple the Syrian government. So over time, you might be able to topple a government like 15 years, you see. So you keep at it for 15 solid years, you might be able to topple the Syrian government. But in that 15 years versus Iran, you can see Iran has a lot of cards to play in that

period of time. Professor Pape, thank you so much for being so generous with your time once again.

We really appreciate it. Well, and thank you. It's just a great pleasure and honor to be on with you in every possible way, and I just wish your folks in the audience is here all the best.

They love to hear that. All right, we'll talk to you later.

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