Transcription
We are joined once again by University of Chicago Professor Robert Pap, author of the escalation trap Substack, which if you're not following by now, you are missing out. Professor, thank you so much for joining us once again.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> Of course, much to discuss. There are negotiations that were supposed to be happening in Qatar today. We'll actually still see what comes of that. It's unclear even right now at this moment. But let's start here with B1. want to roll this clip of an Iranian military adviser talking about disagreement with the Trump administration over the strait of Hormuz. Obviously the crucial point of leverage that Iran has in these negotiations. Let's take a listen.
>> But regarding fees, there is a cost dimension to this matter. There is a tolls discussion, a fees discussion. Our current discussion is about service costs in the straight of Hormuse. Yes, we want to maintain the security of the Strait of Hormuse. We want to protect the environment of the straight of Hormuz. We must establish insurance mechanisms so that if incidents occur, ships that encounter problems are covered to reduce their risk. And when we provide all of this, these costs cannot come out of the pockets of the Iranian people. These costs must be collected from those who are transporting oil through this straight.
>> Okay. So that's I mean, Professor P, tell us how significant that statement is in the context of these negotiations. Obviously as we already mentioned with which the straight of hormones is absolutely the kind of critical part right now.
>> Uh it's important in a couple of ways. So number one what you are watching in the last week is the escalation trap snapping back hard. Uh this is what I was worried about the last time we were on. I realize we all want this war to be over. We want it to be in the endgame. And as I was trying to explain, we're in the middle game of the escalation trap pretty much as I have been uh telling you for some time and also the modeling has shown. Uh what you see here is Iran is playing hard ball. Uh it is Iran. The the big thing that is catching people by surprise is uh most people have been saying, "Well, if we could just get President Trump to stop bombing, stop doing the initiation of the violence, then this whole thing will just be over. we'll walk away. It's all going to be good and we can go about our merry way. Well, the problem is uh Iran is an actor and what you are seeing is as I have been explaining on the posts on the escalation trap in this period of time, it's actually Iran who's most likely to initiate the violence the bombing to close the straight of form or diminish the traffic to keep its leverage. Iran is moving into its period of maximum leverage because the oil inventories are drawing down in this period of time. Uh it is going to use that leverage to force the Trump administration to stick to the four corners of theou. Now so far they haven't gone beyond the four corners of theou. I think we can see pretty clearly what Iran's red lines are, but they include Israel um uh completely ceasefiring, not just lowering violence in Lebanon, probably Israel out of Lebanon. Uh number two, this means the fees will come back in 60 days. And but before we just got on, the New York Times is reporting that Oman is putting forward a piece a fee structure. I don't I didn't have a chance to even read it, so I don't know if the the full structure is there yet. But what we're talking about with fees is I think what uh Iran said from the beginning, it's going to be 2 million bucks a tanker. Uh if there are 50 tankers or so going through uh that means leaving the straight, that's a hundred million a day. That is $36 billion a year. That's uh in addition to all the oil revenues that they're going to get, all the waiverss on all the sanctions. So Iran, what they are doing, this isn't just a little bit of money. This is what you would do to become to become um ascendant as the dominant state in the Persian Gulf. So what this is all about is not a return to the JCPOA idea. It's not a business deal where we're paying Iran fee for service. What it's about is the balance of power. And that's what the three states here don't agree on. Iran thinks it should be the ascendant state, the the the regional hegeimon. Uh the United States used to be the preeminent state in the region. Israel thought it was going to be the replacement rising power. Well, these three states just simply don't agree. That's the escalation trap in an in in a nutshell.
Um, I wanted to get your response to some of the analysis I heard from Professor Mir Shimemer that I was just listening to this morning. He feels very confident there's not going to be a full return to war and that Trump will ultimately accept what he describes as a surrender document simply because he's out of military options. You know, in his telling, okay, they tried the air campaign that obviously didn't work. They tried the NA naval campaign with the blockade also didn't work. they do not want and have no uh concept of how they could do the ground invasion or the army approach uh in a way that would be more successful. So he doesn't really have another option other than accepting this uh what amounts to a a US surrender. I wonder what you think of that analysis.
>> Well, well, first it's important I think for your audience to know that John's office is literally right next door to mine at the University of Chicago. I'm John's first PhD student. So I got my PhD in December 1988. Two of us went through Mike Deshb. So maybe I'm the second one if it was done alphabetically. But the bottom line is I've known John since uh September 1982. I started as a PhD student the University of Chicago. He was a first uh year assistant professor. So needless to say John and I know each other really well and I highly respect John's views. So I think there's a couple things to say. Well, this is what it mean. What does it mean to return to a full resumption of the war? Well, Iran is not looking for a full resumption of the war. It wants to keep the oil flow under its control, and it only needs to use small amounts of force in order to uh to to make that happen. For Trump to go back to a full bombing campaign, there's a real operational problem. I just posted before I came on on my escalation trap Substack which is Saudi airspace. You see right now there's something like 8,000 Pakistani troops and jet fighters also a squadron in Pakistan and they've been there for over a month according to Reuters and others. And what that mean that corresponds to when um Trump wanted to do that is remember he wanted to have a certain operation operation freedom it got shut down because Saudi Arabia well this is Saudi airspace. So there's going to be a real operational limit on just what President Trump can do uh to go back to this uh uh resumption of the bombing in March. So I think that uh in many ways John is right. But what I would just point out here is that doesn't mean the oil we're not going off a cliff. I mean the big issue here is um the oil inventories are running down. I've been warning about this for months. They're running down and that clock is still ticking away. It has not changed. That means come August 1st, man, we're on fumes here on the international economy with energy. And so this is hurricane season's coming. A lot of things are coming here that could be quite rocky and this is essentially uh Iran's leverage. Now by January, they may let up on the throttle a little bit, kind of set this tone for the next administration to come. But between now and January, this could be a very rocky time with the world's economy.
>> Well, let's get to the Lebanon element of this. We can put our next element up on the screen. This is a reporting from drop site based on or it's a post on X based from Dropsite based on the reporting of Courtney Bell. This is going to be B2. Drop site says Israel continued its military attacks across southern Lebanon on Monday despite a renewed ceasefire announced on June 20th and then a framework agreed agreement reached on Friday uh looking at artillery shelling um in the outskirts of a village that's about 15 miles north of the Israeli border. So, Professor Pap, this is for the Trump administration emerging as a a challenge almost as monumental as the one with the street of Hormuz. Where do you make of the progress or lack thereof when it comes to the US being able to secure this part of a quote unquote ceasefire agreement that would actually be lasting?
>> Yeah. So, what I see is this is the Trump administration or at least part of it with Secretary Rubio trying to undermine the whole idea of uh the article one of theou. It's the equivalent of a congressional killer amendment they're called. you have an amendment which would undo the entire bill because what this is doing and and Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a big public video presentation over the weekend on this and he showed on the map what this framework means is Israel stays in southern Lebanon and he pointed that out in absolutely blunt terms and I'm sure Iran saw that. So, so this is not a situation where this is fulfilling article one of theou. It's going the other way around. Now, from uh President Trump and Secretary Rubio, they have said, "Well, this is a minor thing. Iran will just dismiss it. It's the m No, I I disagree. Uh this is part of Iran's sphere of influence as a rising regional hegeimon. They're going to want a secure uh base, a strategic base. That's where it moves. That's that great wealth, global economic wealth. And then they want a sphere of influence. This is what powers, regional hegeimons want. Russia wants it, China wants it. We want, America wants it, Iran's going to want it. That is where Lebanon comes in. And Lebanon's important not just for ideological reasons, but recall many people are talking about pipelines going through Syria to bypass Horamuz. Lebanon is the perfect aircraft carrier. You've got uh Hezbla is the perfect troops. There are already drones there to basically enforce fees going out through the Med if they need to if those Syrian pipelines occur. So balance of power framework here helps to explain a not just generalities but a lot of the details of what is going on, what Iran wants, why they want it, why we want to undermine it. And that's what I mean by the disagreement. This war can't end until all three sides, the United States, Iran, and Israel, all three sides agree on the new balance of power. That's how wars end.
>> You've been telling us since the beginning that we should pay more attention to things that are actually happening versus words that are being said by the various actors involved. And in that spirit, let's put before up on the screen. There's increasing amount of of publicly available data here. We're talking about satellite imagery confirming the US is continuing a military buildup in the Persian Gulf. 20 new refueling aircrafts been spotted at an air base in Qar. Sentcom says it has at least 50,000 soldiers in the region that are ready for action. You know, what do you read into um these dynamics?
>> Uh what I think is this confirms what I've been telling you and forecasting. Uh, and also I really appreciate you using the right metrics here because people just want to keep, you know, focusing on every uh, post on Truth Social as if this is somehow the reality. Some are, some aren't. It's but this is the reality. And by the way, notice that other folks were hoping uh, as you know, recently as a week ago that we're pulling troops out of the region when that's not the reality. Th this is the reality that you see. And I think also Speaker Johnson this morning, he's floating the idea that uh Congress will give Trump another 60-day uh window for uh more operations. We can conduct operations from the sea with our carriers for a long period of time. We have Jordan. We have some other bases here. this is if the idea that this is not going to there certainly will never be a return to to some serious operations is just is just too much. Uh I would still u say President Trump doesn't want to. But remember, President Trump thought this was going to be over in 3 days. He didn't want to get to we're starting month five of the escalation trap. This is month five of the escalation trap. Not day five, not not not a window. Th this is where we are. And JD Vance told us this was never going to happen. President Trump told us this was never going to happen. The problem is they don't have the control. They just don't have the control.
>> And Professor P, one thing we've seen just in the last couple of weeks, I'm just thinking about this now as we're talking is some of your critics, the most ardent pro-Israel folks out there, uh I'm curious if you think they kind of proved your point about the escalation trap over the last couple of weeks by saying thisou is garbage. Trump needs to escalate in order to get a better deal. Now, sometimes they were saying that explicitly. Other times they were saying it's it's a total straw man to suggest this would necessarily involve 3,000 ground troops and more deaths of American service members and more time spent actually prosecuting the war. But it's hard to get around that would have been the inevitable consequence of this. So just even as we were talking this occurred to me that some of your your critics were calling to escalate as soon as theou came out which may have been perhaps amusing for you.
>> It is irony of ironies that there is the overlap as you're pointing out. Um and I appreciate you telling me about them because there's so much I'm doing and writing. I don't read the comments.
>> Now maybe I should be reading the com. My wife tells me I should be reading the comments. So the way I get the comments is when I talk to you folks who you always will you read the comments. That's
>> you know what you need to know, Professor Fab. Don't you worry about it doing that. And I just want to point out though that this is this is a very tricky middle game. And this middle game, people want it to be over by a date. You know, we got a midterm coming. We got the NFL season coming. Man, we're busy. The problem is that this could go on. And I just want to point out over the weekend the fire's news service, the IRGC most uh started talking about going nuclear, actually having nuclear weapons. I've been warning about this. That's saying it's going to happen next month, but over the next year or so, Iran is very much going to want to have nuclear weapons. That's part of becoming that regional hegeimon, that secure power. This is going to be very difficult for President Trump to just let stand. Maybe he can let it stand. But if Iran were to literally test a nuclear weapon, whether it's in the fall or a year from the fall, that would pretty much end President Trump's legacy. He would then become the Lynden Johnson. So it's either Hoover or Johnson. These are the problems for President Trump. And I'm just pointing out these are the things that are not really being solved diplomatically. None of them are being solved diplomatically because diplomacy can't do uh fix what's wrong with the balance of power. The sides have to agree. They have to agree on the new balance of power.
>> And the Iranian uh the more hardliners within the Iranian government feel that the US has not suffered enough pain yet to accept that new balance of power. Is that effectively your assessment as well that um you know whether through a nuclear test or whether through creating more economic pain that's what it will take
>> that's right this is what I said back in March when we first started to say which is um they're playing a long game and what a long game means is just like with the North Vietnamese they want to go at the soft underbelly of the United States in long war which is those costs mount up and for many Americans they don't see a vital interest it's not just it's not so much Americans are too loft. It's they don't if if there was an Iranian army in Mexico, I think this would be a different story. But the fundamental problem here is um if you just read any of the opinion polls or all the people I talk to, and I talk to quite a few, uh they don't see the vital interest here for the United States worth paying all these costs. Iran certainly sees the vital interest because we have toppled their governments before. We have just killed their supreme leader. So my goodness, do they see a a vital interest in having a nuclear uh weapon or just simply being a stronger and imposing these costs. I that's why I'm say I really think that between now and January, we're going to see there's a good chance those costs are going to go up and the point of the cost is not just to make America hurt. The point of the cost will be to get America to truly leave the region. Apparently, we've already moved our kayak. I understand that's a command center from uh uh Qatar uh our air base in Qatar uh over to the states. Uh here I I think what Iran really wants here is America to truly leave the region and not just President Trump to say he's doing that for a week or two or a month or two. They want this to happen in a substantial way. And that means basically the American public has to be on board with that.
>> Fascinating. very uh dicey times we're living through and very grateful to have your analysis to help us understand what's going on. Everybody go subscribe to the escalation trap on Substack and Professor Pap. Hopefully we'll see you back here next week.
>> Absolutely. Absolutely. Right there with you.
>> All right. And tell Professor Mirshimer we said hi when you see him.
>> Oh I Yes. Yes. Yes.
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