Transcription
What Iran has achieved after 18 days is truly a catastrophic failure and loss for the United States. For over a hundred years, states have been trying to topple regimes with air power alone. And in a hundred years, it has never succeeded. If we cross these Rubicons here, then we really are probably in Vietnam territory. We're finding out that Donald Trump has lost control. That's the issue I'm trying to really focus people on.
Hello and welcome back to Unheard. Iran is not weakening. It is gaining power. Iran is more powerful now than before the war. These are statements not of some contrarian on social media, but one of the most distinguished professors of political science in the US. His name is Professor Robert Pape at the University of Chicago. He is an expert on military strategy and writes a substack called The Escalation Trap, and this is his view of the emerging conflict in Iran. Professor Pape, welcome to Unheard.
Thank you very much for having me. I guess the first question must be, how do you justify those kinds of statements? Because a lot of observers see an almighty power in the United States pretty much pulverizing a much inferior power in the shape of Iran, who is not able to do very much in response. How can you justify saying that Iran is more powerful now than before?
I have studied every air campaign in history, every air campaign since World War I. I published a big book, Bombing to Win, many articles in Foreign Affairs. I've spent years teaching targeting strategy for the US Air Force, including leadership targeting strategy. I have also studied escalation dynamics for decades, and I've modeled the bombing of Iran in particular for 20 years. So I bring not just a quick reaction but quite a bit of understanding of the stages that we are now going through, which is what I put on that substack you called The Escalation Trap, which I started just before the bombing came in, started in order to help people understand that we can go, we are going through very likely the predictable stages of what would happen. And in fact, we are now at stage three, and so far, all the stages have been fulfilled.
So, before we get into the stages, let me just directly answer your question. So, Iran, after 18 days of war, now controls the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. It did not control that traffic before. To put this in some perspective, everybody now knows the Strait of Hormuz is 20% of the world's oil. But I want to also explain that for 50 years, since the 1970s, America's number one grand strategic objective for the Middle East was not about Israel. It was about preventing a single state from controlling the 20% of the oil in the Persian Gulf that is controlling the Strait of Hormuz. So, what Iran has achieved after 18 days, the extra power that it has gained, is truly a catastrophic failure and loss for the United States. And it is only beginning to exert the power that it now has. And that power is likely to grow over time. It will grow through the disruption leading to energy shocks throughout the world, which will lead to real trouble for the global economy over time. And that power it did not have before.
Let's start, because I really want to push back on some of that. I think that there are other ways to see it, and let's try and get a bit of a both sides in front of our viewers and listeners. But before that, set out the stages for us so that we understand how you see the stages of escalation and where you think we've reached so far.
Stage one is tactical success. And you saw that as our smart bombs hit virtually all of the targets and killed leaders, virtually 100% tactically successful. And that is what you saw in the opening wave of the bombing. But that would then lead to that tactical success, a strategic failure in this case, because the goal of regime change is really quite too far for us to reach. For over 100 years, states have been trying to topple regimes with air power alone. And in a hundred years, it has never, and I'm choosing my words carefully, it has never succeeded. Also, Iran has enriched uranium. So, you might say, okay, we don't topple the regime. Maybe we get a grip on that thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium or the 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20% enriched uranium, which is so crucial for making weapons and other problems that Iran could throw at us. Well, that too was not achieved. So, you end up with stage one. The smart bombs work. They hit targets. They don't achieve success.
Stage two is where the enemy lashes back. And we've seen this in other precision campaigns before, but that lashing back has become a horizontal escalation campaign by Iran. And I lay this out in Foreign Affairs in detail to explain the full strategy of horizontal escalation that Iran has unleashed. And that is what has led to damage in the Gulf States. But even more critically, the decline of shipping through the Persian Gulf by well over 95%. And they just hit another tanker just before we came on, a few hours before we came on. So that is being done with their drones. And their drones are precision weapons, not just kind of being thrown up in the sky and fall where they may.
So now we are at the second stage, that is the most dangerous and critical stage that I said, and I said this would be the most critical stage, which is the ground power dilemma. So now you've had stage one, the smart bombs hit their targets, and of course, we're still doing that, but they're not leading to hard breaking the regime. The regime is harder today, more dangerous today. They haven't led to weakening Iran. Iran is more in control of the world's oil than it was 18 days ago. So what are you going to do? Well, you see that there's pressure to double down or go up the escalation ladder. And that is where the ground power dilemmas are coming in. And you're already seeing all the scenarios, the maps are coming out on all the cable channels of what we're going to do with cars and the coastal regions. Now, this was always likely to come. This I called it the ground power dilemma, and this is where we are. And this will be the most dangerous phase of the escalation trap because it'll be the pivotal phase. It'll be the phase after we go through, if we cross these Rubicons here, then we really are probably in Vietnam territory. That is a very, very long war. That's my view on where we are, the stages we're at. And by the way, this was again, the modeling that I've done for 20 years at the University of Chicago. I teach a big class on strategy here at the end of every spring, 90 minutes on laying out what to expect with the bombing of the nuclear facilities in Iran. Been doing this for 20 years. The double-tap attacks, the B2s, all of that. And so this is exactly the normal trajectory of what to expect once we went down this road.
And in your model or in your framework, how does it end? It ends by us going deeper and deeper. Here, President Trump is now on the horns of a dilemma. There's no golden off-ramp here. So he's got a choice sitting right in front of him. He can try to cut a deal with Iran, but that's going to be a big political loser for him because Iran's not just going to give this up, say, "Oh, yeah, sure. We're going to hand this back and let you wall us up again at your leisure." So Iran is going to want a pretty big price here. And you hear the foreign minister talking about this. And that will be a big price for Donald Trump to pay, but possibly recoverable for his presidency. If he goes further and he's rejected these deals all the way through, you see, so he's never really found a deal he's ever liked with Iran. If he keeps rejecting the deal because the price will keep getting steeper and steeper, and we go through the third stage of the escalation trap, then I think we're in Lyndon Johnson territory. And for your listeners who were certainly not alive but may not know, President Lyndon Johnson was president during the Vietnam War, the critical years of the Vietnam War. And it was spring 1968 that he was doubling down his escalation until it became absolutely crystal clear it was a total failure. And that's when his presidency dissolved, and he became essentially the worst president that America's ever had. He had to, he didn't leave the presidency, but he had to drop out of being reelected. His party lost disastrously in the 1968 presidential elections. And notice that we have a similar election rhythm here in our country. This is spring. We have the midterms coming. And so there's really an enormous amount at stake here. There's at stake with Iran, the Gulf States. There's the global world's economy, and then there's also President Trump's presidency and politics in the United States. This is what is at issue in the escalation. And this, by the way, has been my specialty of not just focusing on how bombs hit targets, but when I taught for the US Air Force and when I teach, I'm connecting military action to politics. Politics in the target government, politics in the attacker, politics in the world. So, I see strategy is not how to put a bomb on a target. That's tactics. What I do is I do strategy, which is how do you actually end up with political end-states, and what are those political end-states you're going to end up with? That has to do as much or more with politics as the military hardware.
Professor, I'm now going to try and argue against you, and you can explain to me and to our listeners why I'm wrong.
And by the way, I teach at the University of Chicago. We believe in intellectual Darwinism. So this is the way to really get into things. So I appreciate that.
So, point one, the hard power aspect, the actual level of degradation of Iran's capabilities. I feel like you somewhat underestimate or skip over there. I've got a few figures that I'd like to share. So Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90% over the last two and a half weeks. 350 of them on February the 28th, 25 on March the 14th. That is the best data we have. Drone launches have gone down from more than 800 on day one to 75 on day 15. So this is a complete collapse of their military capability. Their naval assets, their attack craft, submarines, gradually all of these are being liquidated by the United States. And even those small launches that they're able to do to attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz and land occasional strikes, every time they do that, they reveal a new launch capability which is then pulverized by the United States. So you could make quite the opposite case that in hard power terms, the United States has been extraordinarily successful and Iranian prospects look pretty bleak.
So you're looking at the wrong metrics of hard power. I'm not going to make a soft power argument to you. You're just, and that's not you, that is Secretary Hagerty doing that, and that's the victory narrative. And what that is is the tactical success we have in reducing the visible hardware Iran has for toe-to-toe set-piece conventional battles. So if we were going to fight a naval war with Iran, where our navy goes up against its navy, that would matter. If we were going to fight a tank war or a conventional war with Iran, where we're going to have two armies clashing on the battlefield, these metrics would matter, but they don't matter, and they don't matter really much at all. And it's similar to Vietnam. See, in Vietnam, we had a version of this that was called the body count. And it became known after Vietnam as the body count fallacy. Because what Lyndon Johnson did, very similar to what Pete Hegseth is doing here, is he kept recounting how many VC we had killed or captured in that guerrilla war, and the numbers kept mounting. The problem is that the opponent has a strategy, and it's actually a military strategy, and it's a military strategy that connects to politics. It's a long war strategy, which is about imposing costs on the United States, the world, and the GCC countries. And that is what you are seeing. They are not focusing on how to hit, you know, sort of our missile batteries. Exactly. That's not the tit-for-tat they're playing. What they're playing is a game of imposing costs long-term with tiny numbers of attacks. And those tiny numbers of attacks are things we can't thwart. You see what I mean? And that's what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz literally on an hourly basis here. It's not that they're using 10,000 drones. No, they're using tiny numbers of drones, tiny numbers of mines, and these are producing inordinate costs on the world, and that is how they have gained political leverage.
I guess there must come a threshold, however, beneath which they can't impose those costs on the US and the rest of the world. I mean, if they really run out of those mine-laying capabilities, the anti-ship missiles, you know, there will be a threshold at which it's just not even at the Houthi level. It will just be a nuisance.
You're quite right. It's just that you're not taking into account that that threshold may be something we could never dip below. You see, so it's not that that's not logically correct. Of course, that's logically correct that they're literally down to zero. But the problem here is that they produced 55,000 drones for Russia last year. So that's if you're talking about going down from 55, we don't know what the number actually is, but just imagine how far down you have to go to get to zero drones. And maybe three drones a day would be enough, you see. And what about the 5,000 mines, you see? So only a handful of mines is going to be plenty here for them to solve this problem. And then what about their ability to regenerate the drones and to regenerate mines? They don't need to have industrial-scale factories producing 55,000 drones. That's not the idea here. The idea is if they can produce as few as say, 20 drones a week, we could destroy literally 100% of the drones. And as long as they can keep manufacturing 20 drones a week in a country of 92 million, three and a half times the size of Iraq, we have no idea where the most of these drone factories are. They're deep underground. If we could take them out, we would have. If they can do that, then this is right where the VC were. You see, this is back to the Vietnam problem and the body count fallacy that I'm trying to explain. That metric makes sense if you're in a toe-to-toe conventional battle on the armor battlefield. That's not what this war is.
Point number two, professor, the Strait of Hormuz is also critical for Iran. People don't seem to focus enough on the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is also how Iran sells its oil. And more than the United States, more than any really of the Gulf States, it is reliant on that product to sustain what is left of its economy. And the recipient mainly of Iranian oil via that channel is China and various other people who will still do trade with it, not particularly Europe, and almost not at all the United States. So you could make the argument that actually it's Iran who is self-defeating by keeping that strait closed, and they're not going to be able to sustain it for very long.
So, one of the things we haven't mentioned is I've also studied economic sanctions for 30 years. I have made these huge articles, studied this problem. So I've studied a lot of these dimensions. So if we look at taking Iran's oil off the market, what that effectively means is making the supply lower for the world. So, if we take Iran's oil off the market by shutting it down, which of course we can, notice what that's going to do is take even more oil off of the market and make the price of oil go up even more. We ran into this problem with Russia. So that's one of the reasons why we fought this war with Russia for four years, and we can't persuade ourselves to take Russian oil off the market. The reason is because of inflation, bond rates, interest rates. These are the real possibilities. But let's say you even did that. Let's say, okay, we're going to pay the price. We're going to have $8 a gallon.
Sorry to interrupt because I've just looked it up. I'm not going to pretend I know this off the top of my head, but Iran is 4% of the world oil market. Russia is 11%. United States is 22%. But what I'm telling you is the way prices work is on the margins, sir. So what that's going to do is it's going to make the price of oil that's already going up go up more. Now, it might, it's not going to double it, but it's going to make it go up more. And that's just an economic fact of life here. And that 4% is plenty enough to add on top of the problems we're already having. So, so, but back to my point about, okay, but let's say we pay the price. We're going to have six, seven dollar a gallon gas here. It's going to go on for months, and it's because we think the economic sanctions essentially are going to wreck the regime. Well, the problem is sanctions have a horrible record of wrecking regimes. We've had economic sanctions on Cuba's regime since 1960, and notice Donald Trump now is talking about invading Cuba. That hasn't gone very well. We had economic sanctions on Iraq here from 1990 all the way through 2003. That's 13 years where we took virtually all of Iraq's oil off the market, and that didn't work either. Now, why is that? It's because when you take that money out of a society, what that, without the government still being there, you're empowering the government more. You're not shifting the balance to the doves. What you're doing is making the doves more beholden on the hawks to get the little bits that are left. That's why the 13 years of cutting oil 95%, we shrunk Iraq's GDP by 48% for 13 years, did not crush Saddam Hussein's regime. And the reason is because the logic doesn't really work. It was a logic problem. What we did is we made Saddam more powerful. In other words, he was a bigger fish in the smaller pond that we created. And that is what will happen here. So if it were, again, we're talking about fighting a protracted war of conventional armies on the battlefield, this would all matter. But you're not talking about that, sir. You're talking about a situation where they are playing the game of asymmetric warfare, long-term costs with basically small amounts of attacks that have inordinate economic effects and even bigger political effects. And that is why these strategies are simply producing the escalation trap. These are, this is part of the thinking that gets us into the trap.
Let me throw another one at you, professor. Is it possible that the world could actually adjust to a different kind of oil market with less reliance on the Strait of Hormuz for Western, for European and American needs? And China and India have already shown that they have negotiated safe passage through that, so they could continue. And actually, if you look at the oil price shock, such as it's been, yeah, we're looking at around about $100 a barrel, which is a huge increase in where we were, but it hasn't spiked to 150. If you look at oil futures, it's down to 85 in six months, back down to 70 odd in a year. So the markets are presuming that things will gradually come back to normal. And, you know, Saudi has its pipeline that manages to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously, the United States now, unlike in the '90s, has its amazing fracking revolution and is much more self-sufficient. The world is less reliant on the Strait of Hormuz than it was 30 years ago.
Yeah, a couple of points here. So number one, the oil execs just yesterday are telling the White House to expect $120, $130 a barrel oil in the not too distant future. So that's coming right from the oil execs. Okay. So, so this is what they're thinking. Number two, let's say it gets to $120 or $130, that is the market will adjust. So markets always adjust. So at $130, that will be more profitable to do offshore drilling. Offshore drilling has not happened very much because the price has been around 70, 60, that range. You double it to 130, but that takes 18 months, 24 months. So now you're talking about real investment over time, and it won't be invested in very soon. So you're going to need to persuade the oil companies that that price of oil will stay at $130 for probably two years before they're going to make that investment. Otherwise, why would they bring in all that money only to go bankrupt here? You see, so the economics of this, you're right, but we need to get and unpack those economics a little more fully, the way it's really going to happen in the city of London. And that's why these are not, you don't see the oil execs going, "Oh yeah, can't wait to get my offshore drilling going" because their fear is they spend 18 months of investment and oil goes back to $60 a barrel. They don't know. But after six months or a year at $130, you're going to see them in. But think about what that's going to mean politically. You're going to have gas prices extremely high in this situation. So you will be able to eventually bring this back down, but there is no way in the short term, sir, to replace 20% of the world's oil. That is simply a fundamental fact. And that is not 2% of the world's oil or 4% of the world's oil. You're talking about trying to replace 20% of the world's oil. That's going to take time, and it's going to mean investment of money, and that is going to mean that we're going to see this long war play itself out. This will work to Iran's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not actually 20% we're talking about because most of the oil that goes through the Strait of Hormuz is headed to China, India, those kind of countries that are already forming a kind of arrangement with Iran. I can well see that tankers that were destined for China, because of Iran's personal benefit, would be allowed safe passage. So that 20% rapidly goes down to eight.
No, you got it quite right.
What Iran has is power right now.
Iran, this is in my earlier remarks. I chose my words carefully, sir. I didn't say Iran had blocked 20% of the world's oil. They control 20% of the world's oil. Those are, that's a different story. That's what America was really fearful of, because when you control 20% of the world's oil, you get juicy deals for yourself. You see what I mean? You become that oil hegemon we talked about in the Persian Gulf, which becomes more powerful over time. So now, let's say we just walk away and we allow Iran to keep 20% control of the world's oil. Well, then it will become richer and more powerful over time. Let's say we go forward with these ground power options, the Marines, coastal, etc., etc., the war, whatever options we can talk about the details to take the 20% back. Well, now you're talking about the actual possible disruption of 20% of the oil in a very much more permanent way, where that is shut down for a long period of time, where it's not about control, it's just the physics of the problem of the long of those wars. So you are right, sir, about the oil that's coming. In fact, Iran today, so far, has actually increased its exports of oil. So it's actually making money, more money, because of the price going up, just as Russia is making more money. This is about power, sir, not simply about bombs on target widgets. And it's important to see. This is a power politics game at bottom.
Let me throw one final scenario at you and see how you respond to it. And this is based really on the Donald Trump attention span. Two months ago, we were all vexed about Greenland. We did a number of shows about Greenland, and we felt that was going to be the geopolitical center. Apparently, Mr. Trump has kind of forgotten about it, and so the world has moved on. We were then exercised about Venezuela. He did a kind of surgical strike on the president, and you know, the vice president is now in power, and things are rolling along, and basically the world is forgetting about it. It feels like this is the pattern. So, is there not a scenario in which in four weeks or eight weeks' time, Mr. Trump has moved on? He's withdrawn. He's declared victory of some kind. A lot of people will be skeptical about it, but there'll be some new thing that everyone is talking about. And Iran, its fragile regime, will be trying to reconstruct itself. They will want oil to be sold once again to China. They will kind of be happy that everyone's forgetting about them, and we'll be talking about something else.
So, let me make two points here. So, number one, has Donald Trump forgotten about Greenland? He may have, but Europe didn't. So, if you notice, there's no mad rush to answer President Trump's phone call to get those escort ships from Europe. In fact, you hear the Germans and others saying, "Not our war." Well, what you're seeing here is these are the price of Greenland. So, Trump may want to pretend Greenland didn't happen and we'll forget about it, white it out. That's not the rest of the world. The second big point I want to make is, you're in a war, sir. So this is a two-plus actor game here. So Donald Trump can just walk and say, "I'm going to forget about this. I'm going to go into Cuba." He may try to do this. Okay. But in order to shut down the war that has now happened here, you've got to get Israel to stop bombing and assassinating Iranian leaders whenever they seem fit. You've got to get Russia to stop providing military intelligence to the Iranians to help them with their targeting. And you've got to get Iran to give back the Strait of Hormuz. So if Donald Trump walks, and these other three actors just keep going, this is not an end to the war. See, this is one of the things the Democrats in the United States have now figured out. And I know because I've been dealing with a lot of them in the various media and other ways. And they were hoping that what you could do is just have a way where you're just going to bash Trump politically for a while, then he'll pull back, and we'll forget about all this. This is a trap. What's happening here is it's the illusion of control. We're finding out that Donald Trump has lost control. That's the issue I'm trying to really focus people on. We have lost control. And so these ideas, well, Trump will just walk away, he'll do Cuba. What he's doing in the Oval Office yesterday is trying to project he's in command. He has control of the situation. This was Lyndon Johnson, because what really sunk Johnson's presidency was when the world figured out, not just Dems, not just Reps, not just the other party, when the world figured out he had lost control. That's when the bottom really fell out, and it fell out like that. And so this is really what Donald Trump is most afraid of, as I see it from his behavior here. And so that's why I chose the word trap, sir, because it's the opposite of control.
Compared to the 1973 shock, is your sense that the escalation mechanisms are more dangerous today or less dangerous?
They're more dangerous on the economic front. There's a lot of similarities here. So it was 151 days of OPEC embargo. We're now at 18 essentially here with Iran. But what I would say is the big difference here is number one, precision drones. So OPEC wasn't coming out about, you know, with precision drones. Number two, is the nuclear material. See, the risks that aren't being taken fully yet into account are that the nuclear material, these thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium, 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20%, well, they're dispersing inside of Iran, they may start to disperse outside of Iran. That is very dangerous. And then the final point is terrorism. See, the terrorism shoe has not fallen yet. We have a bit of terrorism here, but the real terrorism that could come could come as a result of the battle for Hormuz. And that means, so I'm getting on an airplane to go to New York in a few days here after the battle of Hormuz. I don't think my wife's going to let me get on airplanes. And it's not because of TSA. This is going to be the world. We haven't seen the full stretch of the escalation that could happen here, because this is not just the OPEC shortage. So what you're seeing is different sectors of the world, the financial sector is studying their part, government sector, diplomatic sector. This is going to start to intersect. And that's what I do. I bring, I try to bring things together to understand the stages as they unfold. And I'm not trying to tell you that Donald Trump couldn't cut a deal. He's going to have to pay quite a price for that deal. And truth is, he probably should cut a deal because cut his losses now, possibly recover his presidency, rather than wait three or four months, take the bigger risk that you're going to win everything, pull a rabbit out of a hat, and take a much greater risk of losing your entire presidency, sinking the GOP, and much of the world's economy for months to come. So these are the real, and so that's why I can't tell. I don't know what President Trump's going to do tomorrow or in an hour. I'm not predicting his behavior.
Professor Pape, thank you so much for talking to us today.
Thank you very much. Really quite excellent questions. Really excellent. Thank you.
Thank you. That was Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, taking a very strong line that America is only just getting into what he calls the escalation trap, and things could get a lot nastier from here. I tried to throw some of the counterarguments at him. As ever, you can be the judge as to how that fell out. Thanks for tuning in. This was Unheard.