The Iran War represents a strategic trap where the US has committed to a conflict with Iran, the most difficult country to defeat since Germany in WWII, with significant economic consequences including potential Strait of Hormuz closure affecting 20% of global oil supply, and political implications including the normalization of political violence and potential civil war dynamics. Iran's primary objective is to damage America economically and politically rather than achieve military victory, making the conflict likely to continue for months or years without resolution.
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Pentagon War Expert: “Iran Wants to Destroy Trump!” American Men Will Be Trapped | Robert Pape本站添加:
Today's guest is an expert on warfare, political violence, and the collapse of empires.
>> Iran, I believe, their number one objective is to damage America economically. We've taken on the most difficult country to beat since Germany in World War II.
>> A political science professor at the University of Chicago, he's taught generals now running the Iran War and advised every US president since 9/11.
What we're coming to are the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. 40 million American adults believe the use of force is justified to remove Trump from the presidency. Republicans may never win another election. In this episode, we'll break down the simulation he's been running for 20 years that predicted this war, expose the trap pulling America deeper into a fight we might not win, and question if the most powerful empire in human history is one wrong move away from total collapse. I'm 24 American man. Will I get drafted to this war?
>> Um, Professor Robert Pape, welcome to the Jack Noil podcast.
>> Uh, thanks Jack. Thanks for having me.
Uh, it's really I've done a lot of podcasts, but yours is really particularly an exciting opportunity for me. Really is an honor. Um, I'll start it off here saying a lot of my audience is young men, >> many of which have never voted, likely couldn't find Iran on a map a year ago.
Why do you think young men should care about the war in Iran?
>> They should care because this is the conflict that will the international conflict that will affect their futures uh more than uh the conflicts uh since 9/11 have. So we had two forever wars after 9/11. We had this forever war in Afghanistan, forever war in Iraq. And that did affect some small subset of the f of of America's male uh their futures.
But that was purely through voluntary uh induction, volunteering uh to go into the military. Uh and for most Americans, and this is most males in America, uh the economy was not wrecked. Um this did not really have a big effect on jobs, for example. Uh and so if unless they chose specifically to go into the military uh which was again relatively small segment here um uh the amount the impact on this uh of those wars was was not really uh was not going to change their life. It just didn't change their life. Uh now for those who did serve it many changed their life. We had between the 6,600 killed as in the military.
That's double the number we lost on 911, just to be clear. And we have tens of thousands who are badly wounded for the rest of their lives. They've survived, but it's real. The amount of uh you know, personal injury here was quite serious. Now, this war, we're uh so far have very little personal injury to the uh those that serve. Uh that may or may not continue. I think it's uh this war is going on long enough that that may actually change. But the one thing that is happening already is the economic consequences and these economic consequences are going to be felt first and foremost by the youngest in our uh country and uh that is definitely going to be affecting young men. That's going to have uh significant effects in uh whether guys who are uh say 18 who don't want to go to college decide they want to get a job. This is going to be much more difficult. Right now, just uh today, yesterday, Jack, the unemployment rate is 4.3%.
Uh if we can keep it under 7% by the end of the year, we're doing fantastic. As time goes on, it could become even worse than that. Inflation is also uh are likely to go up tremendously over the next uh uh 6 to 8 months. This is going to impact uh people who are 18 years old. Now then there's also folks who are going to say well okay so I won't get a job what I'm going to do is I want to go to college uh either um get an associates degree or get a uh get a bachelor's degree. Well here the problem is uh colleges were already getting uh uh hurt economically because there's a big battle with the Trump administration and and universities. Uh but now what's going to happen with the economic fallout of the war? those universities are going to lose funds even more there.
What that means is the uh offers to have um tuition relief, some sort of various forms of scholarships. These will be shrinking over time. Uh and they'll be shrinking right for the people we're we're talking to uh here on this podcast. Then though you have another factor here. Universities in the last 30 years have uh gone to international students in droves to cover full freight. That is to get them to pay the full costs. Well, with the Trump war on universities, this is having a dramatic effect on the international students. Uh and I know because I teach international relations at the University of Chicago.
Oh, I was just in China last June. So, what you're getting is you're getting the shrinkage of that pool. So, what that means is that the need for the American students to pay higher freight, maybe not quite still full freight is going up. So, the price of this is going up. That was before the Iran war. Okay.
So, this is what they're really the these are the real pressures here.
they're going to come to bear and why um uh a lot of folks uh are now just give you the third pressure because I see this I I deal I was spent all like four hours last night with 45 students uh who are all 21 to 23 years old talking about various things uh but AI so now there's the idea well wait a minute okay so now I'm going to take out all this debt and it's going to get worse with the Iran war and when I get out I'm going to have even less chance of getting a job and and unemployment rate might already be professor pap saying going up significantly and that's not even taking AI into account. So, so these are the real challenges, the reasons why um the last thing 16 to 22 year olds want is uh this this Iran war taking on Iran. We've taken on the most difficult country to beat since Germany in World War II or maybe the so you say the Soviet Union.
Okay. But Iran wasn't a great power like Germany. It wasn't a great power like the Soviet Union. We're making Iran, a major power uh as we go forward, but this is this was the biggest one. Uh much more difficult than Vietnam, uh much more difficult than Iraq, much more difficult than Afghanistan. And so the consequences of taking on that much more dangerous, difficult uh uh foe are going to be with us really significantly longer. Uh this is not just going away. We don't have an easy out over the next few weeks.
>> Are we spending like what is it 500 million a day in this?
>> It's probably 1 to2 billion a day now with the funny account the phony. So, at the moment, I don't trust any of the accounting coming out of the uh uh of the administration. Um, so when I look at what is likely the cost of this war, um about uh 2 weeks into the war, the Trump administration went to Congress to get an extra 200 billion to cover the next six months of the war. 200 billion for about 180 days. And I think that's probably as good as you're going to get as what the the best accounting is until we go through several years. Two or three years from now, uh we'll probably get um you know 80 90% clarity on that accounting. We may never get 100% clarity. But in the middle of this uh war where we're failing strategically, I mean it's a disaster of the first order.
The last thing that's going to happen is, you know, direct honest accounting where um the administration is going to come forward when and say, "Oh, okay.
Let's really release all this." When Trump came in, the very first thing he did and Doge did uh was get rid of all of the accountants, so to speak. Uh rather than continue them and rather than just say, "Oh, well, we just need our own political appointees." Uh no, no, they just zeroed out the offices altogether. So, so what that means is the umpires, so to speak, have been removed from the game, right?
>> So, it's like playing a baseball game, uh, without umpires on the field on the field. You you're expecting the players now to call balls and strikes >> and and who's and whether who got tagged out at first or not, you know, you don't really have the umpires anymore.
>> No one's making sure we have enough money essentially.
>> Well, that's right. and and with our debt situation $40 trillion and climbing, the last thing we need is a war that is going to be uh global in nature of an economic nature. What I'm saying is you're going to have a global um uh crush of the economy uh because we're not in the good position economically to withstand that.
>> When do you predict that would happen by?
>> It doesn't work that way, Jack. So, so having um >> or what would be an indicator? Oh, the bond rates. Oh, you can you'll see it coming with the bond rates. So, the first thing people look at to try to understand the health of the economy is to look at uh the stock market, >> right?
>> Well, it's really important to know though that uh only half of the adult population has any money in the stock market at all. And um 80% of the stock market's uh value is held by 10% of the adults. 10% of the adults. These are basically rich people at the casino table. Okay. So for everybody else, you may want to be that rich person at the casino table. I can certainly see you're 60. You say, "I want to get there. I want to be in that 10% or even better than that." Um, but the fact is it's a measure of the money that's slloshing around to invest in companies and a much better sense of the health of the of the country are interest rates, things that are boring. You don't even see them reported very often. You have these bubbles in the stock market that burst here. The interest rates are the leading indicator. And when those interest rates start to go up here, um it's a it's a serious problem because what that means in ordinary people's languages is uh uh when you borrow money from like your folks here and uh they don't charge you interest rate usually. When you borrow from a bank, they charge you interest rate. Well, these bonds that I'm talking about, this is the government borrowing the money. So, they got to pay that interest rate. And those interest rates go up, you lose a lot of your money, right? Real quick. How many years or months would the war have to go on before you think that would be pretty likely?
>> A a good um uh benchmark here is 197374 because that's when there was an oil embargo on the United States on the world essentially from um uh these countries uh in an organization called OPEC. It's a it's the group of oil producing countries. Saudi Arabia is the biggest in OPEC. And uh what they did is they were really angry about uh America supporting Israel in the 1973 war between Israel and the Arab countries.
And so these Arab mostly Arab states in OPEC, they decided to cut off oil.
That's a pretty big deal. And they kept it off for 151 days. That was only 6% of world supply. uh hormuse today is 20%.
Um but they kept it off for 151 days.
That is what led to the doubling of inflation, the doubling of unemployment within 12 months. And over the next 6 to 8 years, interest rates um today the interest rate on a home is a little over 6%. In the 1970s, it was 16%.
that came as a ripple effect, a wave effect of that 151 days. But where we are today is around day 70 just to put it in perspective. If we get to say July, August, and there's been no real change here, and that is completely plausible. Uh so in the short term, Jack, this looks like um $5 gas, >> right?
>> In July, maybe we're talking about 650 gas. Okay. And people will then start to notice unemployment going up because as you have the gas prices go up, you have to lay off people. You're you're not just uh paying more money. You're you're literally going to be laying off people because a lot of industries can't afford that. The um the airplines are the leading case of that. They're always the leading indicator because jet fuel is so expensive. So, >> so do you think with what's happening right now, >> about 6 months to a 12 months is when you could have a gigantic problem, right?
>> And that's why we need to try to uh uh do something uh within that period of time. So, do you think with what's happening now, like do you think Iran is trying to destroy the US dollar? All right. So, imagine you need relationship advice and you ask your friend who hasn't been on a date since co and has three matches on his dating apps. even after paying for premium. Like, why would you do that? There's a reason you wouldn't ask that guy to handle your love life. Just like there's a reason Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. Not all law firms are the same. Hire the wrong one and you might be beat before you even start.
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But anyway, guys, back to the podcast.
It's probably trying to do that more directly. My assessment is the way they're thinking about it is what can they do to destroy the Trump presidency.
So if you look at it from a security like let's say I'm the national security adviser of Iran uh and what is my number one problem? Well my number one problem is not the blockade and it's uh not even the bombing that's already happened. The number one problem is for the last several years, Israel and the United States have bombed me and bombed me extensively just whenever they felt like it. They've killed my negotiators. So instead of, you know, I might say I'll have a negotiating track with them, but twice now when Iran has been negotiating a deal with President Trump, the Israelis have literally used the tactical intelligence of where those diplomats will be to kill them. If you're looking at this from an Iran's perspective at all, how are you going to stop that? How do you get yourself out of a situation where >> Trump was trying to close the negotiation with the negotiator and 3 days before he was about to sign it, the Israel military killed the guy.
>> In June, we had what was called the 12-day war. Well, that was started when um Israel decided that they would take advantage of knowing where the Iran negotiators were going to be. And so the uh the fact is uh Trump was going to meet with them. And u he can't he couldn't because they were killed. They were literally killed. But what that shows you is that when you're when you're thinking about this from Ron's perspective, well, you can talk about negotiations, but that's a giant question mark at every single stage. So, what do you do to um uh deter, prevent, stop, or diminish the risk of future attacks by the United States and Israel?
You would like to uh wreck the Trump administration, not that he would be removed from office. In fact, you you want him badly hobbled. You want him um discombobulated. You want him where there's many internal problems that are just consuming his every waking moment.
You don't really, if you're Iran, actually want him replaced with a more effective leader. That would not that would not suit your goals. So you're you really are in a situation where Iran, I believe their number one objective is to wreck the Trump administration politically uh in the United States and then let it stay there for another 2 years uh here in a hobbled state. And does that mean that America will never attack you? Uh no. Um but it probably gives you um as much um uh protection as anything else you're going to do. And then you can also see right away, Jack, why the odds that you're going to want to surrender like your control of Hormuz, this is just very unlikely. I mean, if you give Hormuz back and and we go back to the status quo, Annie, like the Trump administration is saying, well, then why isn't the Trump administration a few months later just going to go and start up the war again on some other grounds?
Now, part of what that means then to hurt the Trump administration politically is to damage uh America economically. Uh it's also when the more you damage uh the world economically right now the blame is going directly on Trump. So who who is Europe most mad at?
Who's merit the leader of Germany? Who are they most mad at right now for the economic problems and all the problems they're facing uh here? Uh it's actually not Iran, it's Trump. It's or America.
It's actually even big. It's it's bigger than Trump now. They just blame America because America's reelected Trump.
Elected him twice. So So this isn't even just a Trump problem from the Europeans perspective. This is America who's really to blame. uh and without America then they think Israel wouldn't have done the bombing. So yes, they would blame Israel too, but it's really America who's getting the lion share of the blame. And that's true for Asia as well. That's true for Japan as well. So it's not just our allies are are not rushing to come to our aid or aid of the Trump administration's bad war with throwing their assets into a bad plan.
they're just uh seeing Trump as the cause of the problem and it's America who's underneath that because we elected the guy twice, >> right?
>> So, you add all this up and Iran doesn't have um incentives to fix the economic problem for the world. They have incentives to let it ride probably at least another four or 6 months. Maybe by the time we get into January of next year, the world will stop blaming America and Israel. Maybe it'll start blaming Iran more. But it's going to take time to do that because so much anger has already come out here and it's so obvious that that the war would not have started if Trump had not given the green light to Israel and then we jumped in at on February 28th. There's just no plausible story to spin. Iran was not about to attack the straight of form.
there there's no plausible pretext here.
You see what I mean? So this is why um Iran is gaining power. It is hurting the world's economy by gaining that control of Hormuz which is then fragmenting America's allies in the Gulf uh with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia now just this week telling us they really don't want to you us using their airspace anymore um here because that means we they're getting hurts. Their survival is going down.
just to give people an idea that are unfamiliar brief breakdown on straight up hormuse why it's important and uh I want to ask you about Xihinping's meeting with Trump and what kind of that will be about. Iran is on um the north eastern side of uh Hormuz. Uh Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States on the other side. And what you see right away with this waterway is a very narrow wasp waste around this area called Hormuz.
Then you will say, "Oh my god, you mean 20% of the world's energy, that's uh 20% of the world's oil, 30% of the world's natural gas. There's other things like 30% of the world's fertilizer that all comes through that little narrow wasp place, that little bitty space. Um, and you can see right away, boy, if uh if Iran's mad, why don't they just grab it?
Okay.
>> What was the thing that triggered them closing it?
>> So, in the 1930s is when oil was discovered in the Persian Gulf. Uh Saudi Arabia was the first, 1938. And once you've discovered the one in Saudi Arabia, then it was uh quick soon after that you discovered, oh, Iraq has a puddle of oil, Iran has a puddle of oil, and so does Kuwait. Those are the four big puddles of oil in this in this area, and they're all like a horseshoe band around Hormuz. So what happened was um Iran has always um been we've we've had concerns for decades that Iran would uh in a military conflict close the straight of foremost. So because Iran used to be uh run by uh the Shaw of Iran who was an American puppet. We helped install him in the ' 50s then got toppled in 79. That's the revolution we hear about uh here and uh well since 1979 there's been a huge concern that Iran might close the straight of Hormuz if there was a conflict. And so what does that mean if you're in the Pentagon? You got to think about well what are my priorities here? What are the dangerous things I need contingency plans on? And the number one is going to be horm. If you wanted to crash the global economy or maybe the US economy, like is there any one action that would do more damage than keeping the straight of Formoose permanently closed?
>> No, there are some other choke points.
Just so you know, there's a straight called the straight of Malaka here.
Nowhere near as big as what and there are lots of ways around the straight of Malaka here with the straight of Hormuz.
The problem is so it's literally a um a horseshoe um with uh water that is a dead end and the only way out is hormones. There's no other way out. Uh they built some pipelines uh which can carry couple percent of that oil out. Um but the but the challenge here is that um once you are down to that horseshoe, it's not just the ships that are vulnerable, but those pipelines are vulnerable too.
They're not uh being protected by anything. And so you the real uh issue is there. You're quite right. There is no other spot on the planet that could wreck the world's economy as efficiently as Hormuz. If you were designing, if you if you came if you you know, we're looking at whether we have UFOs now that came out yesterday. Uh if you're saying, well, okay, I'm coming from another galaxy and I want to wreck the planet Earth's economy. What would I do? You wouldn't need AI. You would just do a mapping and you would see right away you would do something to totally shut down traffic on that little uh little artery, that little choke point called hormones.
>> And what would you do if you wanted them to shut it down.
>> Versions of what we're doing. So, what we're doing is blocking the ships.
There's no way to uh get those that oil and gas out of that area except by ship.
It's too heavy. So, you can't fly it out. You might think, well, okay, if we really need it, couldn't we just fly it out? No. You're moving this stuff out, and there's no way to do it except by ship. So, how do you block the ships? uh you um can literally have a blockade where you have US uh ships or you have um Iranian vessels here that say if you cross my line I will sink you. Uh you can have drones which you don't need an actual line. You just use your drones to shoot down the ships. Or you could literally mine the entire straight. You could just um Iran has 5,000 mines.
These are essentially similar to World War II vintage mines if you ever saw the movies. They're just big fat hunks of of of iron that have explosives in them and they are set to go off. Most of them on contact. You you touch it goes it goes off. Can you clarify for me? So like what military resources uh ships, weapons, humans, etc. like are currently in Hormuse from the US and then what do the Iranians have there?
the last um several years we've had a set of 13 bases in the Persian Gulf.
These are I mentioned one uh base that was at IUD air base and that is inqatar.
Cutter is a little peninsula island like uh country just on the uh it's on the western side of the Gulf and it just kind of jets out a little bit like a peninsula. Well, we would have in addition to those bases and the navy you need some logistic support. So somewhere around 30 40,000 troops, but these were not organized as as combat troops. They weren't uh tank divisions. They weren't aircraft. Uh we did have some aircraft in IUD air base uh cuz that's one of our bomber bases.
So there was some fighter units. Uh but most of it was actually just logistics.
Then what happened is starting in January, we added. So that was the the the foundation if you would Jack. Then starting in January, we uh over a period of about six weeks, we moved hundreds of uh land-based uh fighter uh aircraft, fighter bomber aircraft. Uh these are F-35s, other aircraft. Uh we added an additional carrier. We added destroyers.
We we added >> What's a destroyer? The way we organize our navy is we we build uh our entire concept around a carrier. So the carrier is a floating airfield and then we have ships around the carrier, the destroyers, the uh a cruiser and then also submarines. And what they're doing is a double mission. Mission number one, protect the carrier. That's like your king in chess. You got to protect the king. But just as in chess uh here the pieces that protect the king can also attack. So that's what's happening with the the way the organization of a of the navy is is set up. We had uh uh some naval forces there before. It was mostly a naval mission. Uh and then it was set up for what's called presence to just sort of give confidence that we're there and an anchor of support like an insurance policy if ever needed. That's what the idea of just being there is about. Well, then what we did though starting in January is we expanded and this goes on for about 6 weeks. Um and um uh and it could be that we that maybe that's when they started to have the idea we were going to do this bombing mission or it could be they were there initially to do something like say support the pro-democracy movement that was u getting clobbered in um uh in Iran at the time. uh and then maybe things just evolve from there. Uh but the bottom line is when they added they added uh the aircraft those aircraft um were part of then what became the air campaign that was going on day after day. How did we hit 12,000 targets? You did it with a lot of that land-based aircraft.
>> So what was the first action we took on Iran? So this then we get to February 28.
Um so this happened uh was triggered by the day before at 3:00 3:15 in the Oval Office. President Trump met with U.
Jared Kushner, Steve Whit. These were the two people negotiating with the Iranian diplomats and the Iran had presented a deal and the deal uh was that Iran uh would uh keep um the 3.5% enriched uranium on its soil. Uh it would promise not to enrich beyond that and it would dilute it 60% enriched uranium to meld it in with the 3.5% but it would keep it on its soil. And just to clarify on that point, so you're saying that uh I think it's Iran has the capability to potentially build 13 nuclear bombs and they have enough to 16 10 to 16 >> 10 to 16. There's a little bit of ambiguity because it's a little hard to know exactly how efficient they can be.
>> So 10 to 16 is a is a real number.
>> And I'm guessing what Trump was told was something along the lines of uh like they are months away from these nuclear capabilities. uh they're being they're measuring it in months and weeks, >> right? So the bottom line is um that for Iran to build uh working nuclear weapons, they need a certain amount of 90% enriched uranium. And to get to 90% enriched uranium, uh they have to go through a process where it's a serial process. You first enrich it from 0 to 3.5%.
Then from 3.5% it's uh the next stage which is to 20%.
Then the next stage is to 60%. Then the next stage is to 90%. And at each stage it's you can measure the time it takes.
It takes about 3 months at each stage.
So, it's it's uh the last stage goes a little quicker, but it's the bottom line is it's about a year to go from uh uh uranium ore in the ground to um the material for for a bomb. Whether you're going to have material for one bomb, 20 bombs, doesn't it's that time is is is very very predictable. So we uh then can measure this by knowing the quant how far Iran is from a working nuclear weapon. Now once they have the 90% it's important to know that it it's going to take probably um somewhere between 3 months 6 months 9 months for them to fashion it into a working weapon.
>> Were they at 90%.
>> They were 60. They were at 60. So they were about five or 6 weeks away uh from finishing it to get to 90%. That's when we bombed last June. So when we bombed last June, they were at 60% and um uh they could have we don't know if they were doing it, but they could have gotten to 90% easily within 2 months, within 6 weeks. So they were only a few weeks away from the 90%. But that's not quite means it's a bomb because you have to then fashion that uh material into a working weapon. That does not take years and years. Um this is World War II technology. This is metal energy coming out of a metal shop.
You don't need the fancy um uh stuff that we do that we developed in the 50s and 60s with bombs that have yields much bigger than Hiroshima Nagasaki. So So what we're when we're measuring this, we're measuring their ability to do a Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which by the way is pretty awful. So, so once you've had that, you the rest of it becomes the the when I teach this, the students become much less interested in how to build a hydrogen bomb because the Hiroshima bomb is already so bad.
>> Dumb question here. If you blow up like enriched uranium at 90%. Does nothing happen?
>> No. Yes, that's right. So, in order to um so I'll give you the a mini version of this of this lecture here. So, one of the key things to know um about um an atomic bomb is people are often uh often think that an atomic bomb is all about uh the complicated way to trigger a bomb to an atomic bomb to go off. What they don't realize is that when you're working with this enriched uranium, you it is already unstable.
And so what you're doing with the enriched uranium is you're increasing it to 90%. So that the instability of each atom, an electron of one atom comes off and bounces into another atom or causing another atom to lose an electron and then you end up having a chain reaction so that it geometrically occurs quickly like in a a 500th of a second. And what you're doing then is it's a function of whether that material is all together. I have 90% if I literally had 90% enriched uranium in this cup here. Okay. And it's actually going to be bigger than I don't see a gallon jug, but if I had a gallon jug of it, it would go off right in the jug. Okay? So, you need to store it in ways that the uh atoms and the electrons don't bounce into each other all the time.
um at at a what's called a critical mass, right?
>> And the critical mass of uranium 235 is 40 lb. So that's a gallon jug uh here.
So if you bring 40 lb of uranium 235 together, even if it's just piled up right here on this table, you're going to get a chain reaction. A nuclear explosion is going to occur right in front of us. What an atomic bomb does, what the weapon does is keep the pieces of that far enough apart, it doesn't go off and then it brings it together when you want it to.
>> It looks like a gun shooting at another one.
>> Yep. And what the gun is doing is you hollow, you take that 40 lbs and um so I I'll use this as an example. Okay. You have an artillery tube uh here and this is um the uh the snout of the gun and you build a it's a cylinder that has a hollow middle and that uh hollow middle then is the bullet that's on this end of the gun. So how do you make the uh gun type uh this was the uh fat man in that did Hiroshima. How do you make it go off? You literally just have some gunpowder. You just hit it just like an artillery tube. That ignites the gunpowder. It shoots the bullet, but the bullet is the uranium 235 now. And in the 15,000th of a second that there is a fit between uh the two parts of the metal here. Boom. That's what causes it to go off. And that's why what's when you when you drop these things uh here, the odds of them going off are actually quite remote. Cuz usually if you drop an atomic these one of these bombs, the pieces go the other way.
>> I do want to just clarify. So if they have enriched uranium at 90% and you blow that up, does that blow up bigger?
>> Uh it goes out. The pro the problem is there will be some it'll be like a um a rad it's called a radiological bomb.
You'll have some pollution. So it's not um benign.
If you blow it up and you scatter it uh here, you end up with these radioactive particles, it's not a bomb. So, it's not as bad as a bomb. It's usually called a fizzle or something like that. Uh but it's a um uh it is going to cause pollution. So, this is why the idea that we would just go in and keep like say bombing the area over and over and over again. No, somebody is going to probably just excavate this stuff out. The Iranians may have already done that already, but you're you're you're not going to be um satisfied by just keep bombing it. It's because even if you tried to really create this, you're going to leave so much pollution uh for it to then waft around, bad things are going to happen. Is this just not a realistic uh approach? The realistic approach uh here is uh to go after the stuff is either the Iranians voluntarily give it to us uh or we uh physically take it from them in a fist in an actual fight where we're going to use military force to go get it. Uh there's not a a an alternative here. Um we've probably even thought about you know using like attack nuke to try to take it out and the problem is attack nuke creates all the radiation. So all the ways you would think about trying to encase this in some way um are are just not satisfactory uh here uh because either because the means like a tactical nuclear weapon well that's just another way in which the radiation is going to come wafting back. Yes, you will you eliminate one problem but you'll create another problem. So, it it seems to me that Iran wasn't weeks away from building a bomb.
Would you say that's true?
>> I think um most likely 6 months at the fastest. I would say most likely 6 months to 9 months is a more realistic.
They hadn't tested one before. So, they still have to go through the trouble of doing everything for the first time. uh they would need another month uh probably six weeks to have gone from 60% to 90%. Then they need um another 6 months after that to confidently go to weaponizing the parts of the bomb. So that's why I say it's 6 7 months 9 months but not 2 3 years not 5 years not 7 years uh within a within a 69month period of time for sure. So, you've been simulating this war for over 20 years and accurately predicted the bombing of Foraux, uh, Iran closing the straight of Hormuz, and US Marines being sent off the coast of Iran.
>> For everyone watching this right now, when they open their phones tomorrow morning, what's the one thing they should look for in the news to tell them where this war is actually going? number one thing to see is uh whether or not and you could do this every single morning is uh how many ships have passed through hormones. Uh so this is the by far the absolute leading indicator. So uh we ha we know as a fact that uh uh 140 ships a day on average pass through the straight of Hormos before the war.
We know there are over 1500 ships in that upper horseshoe shoe band I was describing waiting just sitting there waiting to leave and um war is going to change materially in the next uh the next few days or the next week or so uh materially for the advantage of the United States the west the world economy it's going to be with the number of ships passing through Hormos so there's an absolute straightforward indicator and that's the very first thing to see.
Now, if you don't see those ships, and we have not seen this change much in the last uh 70 days. So, there's been a tiny little wiggle room here where some days it's uh near zero, some days it's five, some days it's been up as high as 10 or 11 a day, but that's pretty far away from 140 a day. So, we have nothing that looks like uh the pre-war status quo. Um and then if you don't see that moving, uh the next thing is to look for uh indications of um uh logistic flights.
These are the flights that you bring in just before you're about to unleash a wave of uh military action. When I was looking at tracking the uh whether or not we were going to start the bombing on February 28, exactly what I was looking at was was the straight was open, but what I was looking at was the movement of aircraft to the region, carriers to the region, and then as we got closer, the movement of the C17s, and then especially when we started to uh fly in a lot of what are called KC135s. These are the aerial refueling tankers. So once we once we started to move the true logistic footprint of of the operation that I've never seen that happen without bombs falling.
>> Would you consider troop movements to be a major indicator?
>> Yes. Yes. But we that's what I was telling people to watch in uh the first uh two weeks of the war when I was being interviewed. Then I was walking through the stages of the escalation trap. I call it where I had modeled this for 20 years. We're about to get into a trap where we're going to have bombs hit targets. This will not topple the regime. The regime in fact will strengthen and lash back. And because we hadn't moved enough force, there's a very easy target for them to lash back against which is Hormuz. And so uh then as uh they uh control uh Hormuz, we'll be in a ground power dilemma. That was uh stage three where uh we would then have to be uh thinking seriously about ground force options as the only way to take back Hormuz. And so as the bombs then fell and as we had stage one just as I laid out and then stage two just as I laid out, people said, "Well, okay, what what are the indicators? We might be moving to ground operations." And I said, "Well, the key indicator is just literally moving the Marines." Uh, and then we started to move the Marines. So, the bottom line is, uh, you're right that you would also track troop movements. Well, that's what I was saying the first few weeks because we hadn't moved those ground troops in.
Now, we've moved at least the beginning of those in. Now, if we move more ground troops in, well, for sure. And then, but that'll be so obvious, you won't need PAPE for that. uh what PAP is there to tell you. It's it's a forecast here or to give uh indicators that are not so obvious to the media. Uh that's mostly what I'm doing with the Substack and it's the things that the professionals are looking at. They're looking at the logistic flows. They're not just looking at the troop movements. The troop movements are the tippy part of the spear. The logistics make the spear move.
>> Right. So, when Trump launched Operation Project Freedom last week, what is Project Freedom and did Trump just make a bet that could end America?
>> Yeah. So, he made a bet uh when he did this and what he's betting is with Project Freedom that he could literally run the blockade by Iran and Iran would not fire back. Uh now, how could he think he could run the blockade? Well, I just explained to you sort of Hormuz has uh there's a horseshoe at the one end and then there's a wasp voice. Well, there are these narrow channels through Hormuz and Iran had blocked one of those uh several of those with mines. Well, what what we have done is we have verified a certain very narrow uh width of water that you can pass through hormuz that has no minds. And that's what I mean by President Trump want to send ships to run the blockade. So he's these couple of ships that we got through. They went through this narrow band of water that uh we had verified were cleared of mines. So we we know the danger is pretty low for mines. Um and um and what Trump was doing um uh was betting that Iran would not fire back, would not try to sink those ships, would not try to attack the Navy ships that are we we moved a couple of destroyers closer to help protect the ships if they needed it. Trump was betting that Iran would not send what are these little fast boats. These are these little cigarette boats and they uh have uh squads of guys between say six and 10 on the boats here and they'll carry weapons and uh um they can even carry mines. Uh anyway, and so but what happened here is uh he got two through two boats, two ships came through, but then that was all that got through because Iran did immediately respond uh almost immediately respond uh here and they attacked a South Korean ship uh here. Uh and so that South Korean ship did not make it through and then the uh other ships, you know, turned around. So that stopped ships coming through. But on top of that, uh, Iran did two other things.
First of all, they fired, uh, missiles at our destroyers. Now, we claimed, uh, that we they were going to hit the destroyers and we shot them down. Iran claimed they were warning shots and not meant to hit the destroyers, but the bottom line is they were near enough to our destroyers that that's a that's a real threat uh, here. So, that so Trump lost the bet right there. the the idea I mean it's one thing you could say well he didn't lose the bet because it was only a South Korean ship once he's once there's fire against our US ships he lost the bet right there >> was there any scenario in which he would have won that bet >> oh sure that the that Iran would have um not fired Iran would have just stepped down Iran would have been intimidated or you could maybe uh kind of um imagine China would tell Iran that it had had enough and and and China would tell Iran to let the ships pass or you could imagine Russia would tell Iran to let the ships pass. Uh I don't know what was making the Trump or the White House confident they could actually run this blockade. It's that's that it's a real risk and it's a bet that Trump was never likely to win in my estimation. But then on top of that, there was a third thing that happened, which is um Iran attacked a uh an oil facility that was actually a UAE oil facility on the other side of the straight of Hormuz, which was in this uh Gulf of Oman. That's a little further out on the eastern southeastern part of uh uh Hormuz. And that was uh at this area called Fyra, which was the tail end of a pipeline that the UAE had.
That's a working pipeline, which is the only oil uh coming from the UAE that was getting out was going and bypassing the straight of Hormuz altogether and coming out at Pyra and then getting into the Gulf of Oman and then going on its merry way. Well, when Iran hit Pyra, that scared everybody. That's when the oil prices went up to 115 or whatever it was, they they jumped again because right away that makes it absolutely clear that Iran is going to gain more control of the straight of Hormuz oil.
It had already gotten about um 75% control of the oil, maybe 80%. But then now it's starting to take away the pipelines. Hadn't done that before. It left those pipelines alone. And the UAE is one pipeline. Saudi Arabia had a bigger pipe. So this is putting at risk the final little bits of oil that we're getting out from the Persian Gulf. The Saudis called up and said we don't want anything to do with this uh and to to to the white uh to the White House and then also Kuwait. Uh, and so that's when President Trump pulled the plug on his own plan within 24 hours of having started this whole plan. It it was it was a disaster. Uh, I think they're still trying to start it back up, but that what you're seeing, Jack, is this is what's underneath these these skirmishes where you're you're now getting um almost every day uh some shooting going back and forth between the Iranian uh the Iranians and and the American Navy and it's over. you uh coers Iran to stand down, Iran voluntarily stands down, or you take the the coastal region and prevent Iran from attacking those ships. There's not a third way.
So Trump lost the bet. If America loses that bet under pretty much every scenario except minority few, like why did Trump take this bet at all? Well, well, notice this is now the third time he's taken a bet. So, on February 28th, he started what uh he said was supposed to be just a two or three day air campaign that's going to in his mind cause the current regime to completely collapse and it's then going to be replaced um uh by some pro-democracy movement uh which he's opening the gateway for is the way uh that he's he's describing it. Uh well, that failed. It failed, Jack, because what happened is we the bombs hit their targets, um the uh leaders were killed that that were targeted, but instead of the regime collapsing, uh the politics of the regime just brought the regime even closer together and made it even more aggressive. What we call the regime in Iran, you can think of it as a threepart regime. You can think of it as the original supreme leader who we then killed, but the original leader was a cleric. uh uh a religious man and he was uh at the top but then he was over the military that's the Islamic uh revolutionary guards uh and then he was also over the political leaders like say the parliament or the president or the foreign minister so that's a threepart regime um and what happened when we killed the supreme leader the new supreme leader was elevated essentially from the revolutionary guards. He was the son of the supreme leader, but he was somebody who to stood toeto toe in battle on the front lines with the revolutionary guards in the 1980s in the war uh with uh between Iran and Iraq and frontline fighter. This is not somebody who's who's uh you know off in a nightclub while everybody else is doing the fighting. This is a guy who was right there with the revolutionary guards. So he uh was not actually that much of a cleric. He doesn't have a much of a religious standing here the way his father did. So what happened is instead of the uh softies so to speak um coming in to power, what happened is you took the old supreme leader off and you elevated the revolutionary guard.
>> We also killed 20 other people who could have filled the position. Right.
>> Who were the softies, >> right?
>> Right. So was it? No, it was actually Israel.
>> So this is the second time. So Israel is the one who started the bombing on the morning of February 28 when it started and they told us what they were going to do. They told Trump who they were going to kill and uh Trump himself has told us that they killed the supreme leader and the leader was meeting with these 20 people. That's how they knew the timing of of why they wanted to strike. Then they knew the meeting was going to occur at a certain time.
and they wanted to get all 20.
>> Why do you think the new supreme leader of Iran is more dangerous than the previous one?
>> Oh, for what I'm saying, he's coming from the military essentially. He's he's not a coming from the clerical route, even though he's the son of a cleric and has some lower status as a cleric. He is he's a frontline uh revolutionary fighter who's put his life on the line. And then second and then in addition to that the bombs kill his father, the bombs kill his wife, the bomb kill some of his children uh here.
So uh the bombs hurt him. He was wounded in the bombing as well. So uh he survived obviously. Um but you have a situation where the uh this new supreme leader just has layer after layer of reasons to want uh uh to first of all not make concessions and and want payback for what has happened. So the idea that that this was going to weaken the regime, it just hasn't happened. Um what you've got was a stronger, more aggressive single leader. But even broader than that, Jack, when you study these cases of bombing against regimes, which I've done for decades, uh, in detail, what you see is that the politics never works out the way the bombing state thinks it's going to work out. Bombing state is always got some story they tell themselves. And this is going on since, you know, for hundred years, even with dumb bombs. uh the some story they tell themselves about how well you're going to attack this regime and when you attack the regime it's going to soften it and the new leaders will become more pliable and do what you want them to do. This just never works out that way because what happens inside of the uh the group, this collectivity here is there's once you uh kill the current leader, there's a group around and they're vying for authority. They're vying to be the leader. Uh if they don't want to be the leader, they have an easy thing. They can just go run away. But the group around here, they want to be the next leader. Well, in order to be the next leader, you're you're never going to find this group rally around somebody who says, "Oh, hey, guess what?
I got a great idea. Let's go and surrender and turn our whole futures over to the guy who just killed our previous boss." That just doesn't happen. Now, if somebody were to make that suggestion, there's every reason to expect they'll get a bullet in the back of the head at the meeting. you you just you're you're this is uh not an environment uh where they're looking for someone to surrender and carry the surrender papers. They're looking for they're having meetings among themselves to figure out who's got the plan to fight back. Uh and that's why the new leaders who come in are either uh just as bad or they're even more aggressive when you when you do go through these.
So you're saying when a country gets attacked, a more radicalized like uh aggressive leader goes into place for political reasons. It's a set of political dynamics, not personality driven dynamics. It's even if you thought they were soft ahead of time, the people who come to the floor, even among the most dovish here, are going to be much more hardline. And it's for the political reason I'm saying.
>> So what's the opposite of that? Like what would a country or cabinet people in power v for if say a leader launched an attack on another country? Like would would it be the opposite effect? Like >> wait, say it one more time, Jack, so I make sure I understand.
>> So you're saying that if a country gets attacked, a more radicalized leader appears. That's right. But what happens um to a country when there's an election coming up in that previous >> that's when you tend to see things more fractured when you have like the normal churning of politics in a country without the outside power doing the attacking there are gaps between the society and the regime and there clearly was true in Iran um probably something like 20% of the population of Iran worked for the government literally got a paid paycheck from the government.
They were the supporters. Um maybe there's a few more supporters of the of the government who weren't getting a paycheck, but you could reasonably imagine before the bombs falling that 80% of the public just didn't like their government. Some maybe to the point of even willing to risk dying to oppose it, but um that the government only had minority support. what we did when we intervene and we have the foreign US uh you know juggernaut. We're we're an 800 pound gorilla. We're a juggernaut coming in here and we're not just uh uh putting our thumb on a scale. We're literally saying we're going to kill this leader and we're choosing the next one that we choose who the next leader is. Well, once you um make it clear that it's uh Washington who's running the country now, that tends to unify. Whatever the gap was between society and the regime tends to condense. It tends to close because even the most uh pro uh and opposition movements to the government don't want to become uh puppets for America. That's that's uh traitor that's being treasonous. That's being uh anti-Iranian.
So you may not Another way to put it, Jack, is um a lot of Democrats right now uh do not like uh President Trump and haven't liked him since he came down the escalator 2015.
Uh, but that said, if Iran were to assassinate President Trump, how many Democrats are going to call on the Iranian assassins to come to Time Square and party with them? None. They're not going to do that. In fact, they're going to probably be some of the leaders of we need revenge and fight back here if uh if Trump is assassinated. uh and and so this is uh this is the same this is the dynamic that's true in in politics in in all modern nation states. It's not uh that there are some countries more vulnerable to this than others. It's literally the bombs change the politics in the country and that's the mistake that's made by governments over and over. So governments read these pre-war trends and as I'm saying it's quite reasonable to say 80% of the public was opposed to the Iranian regime. Pre-war trend and they say no problem. I'm just going to knock off that regime. That 80% will love me for it. They'll do our bidding. Never happens that way. Because once you do once you the foreign government doing the bombing, you change the politics. that pre-war trend doesn't matter anymore. It's gone. It's not that it's you were misreading the pre-war trend. It's you changed the game. It was a gamecher and it's a selfdefeating strategy. It's literally a contradictory strategy which is why for over a hundred years we have zero cases of success. It has always backfired and uh it's only a matter of the degree of backfiring, but it's never worked out positively.
>> I guess what I'm asking here is domestically, how does that change like our midterm and presidential elections?
>> Oh, you mean here?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Does that make it favorable for the incumbent conservative Republican party or does that make it favorable for the Democrat?
>> Well, no. So right now um in in the current trends what you're seeing is uh Trump is clearly to blame for starting the war inside of the American public and that's why he's lost he already lost the support of the Democrats but he's lost support among almost all the independents and even probably about 15 or 20% of the Republicans now are um saying he's doing a bad job. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to vote Democrat because right now this is all being judged based on the consequences of the Iran war. When we get to the midterms, you can absolutely and you already see this and I I was already telling my class to expect this. Uh what Trump is going to do is is he is going as the closer we get to the midterms, he's going back to the social issues. He got elected on social issues big time. uh remember the immigrant issue uh the trans issue he's going to remind everybody why they voted for him in droves over Kla Harris and he he legitimately won in 2024. It wasn't a he didn't uh hoodwink anybody. So that he's he will undoubtedly come back to that strategy and it's already occurring uh here. So, so the uh what looks like a gigantic title wave of um uh of support for the Democrats here is probably more of a mirage at the moment. Now, that said, if the economy, as I'm saying, is going to continue to go uh south here, um this will work to his political disadvantage. So, and we get into the midterms here. Now, what you have, Jack, is my nightmare scenario. This is something I worried about several years ago and it's where you have a gigantic international crisis that's really uh hurting America at home in addition to the political crisis that we've been facing for the last 5 years. For five years we have had we've been in an era I call the era of violent populism. This is uh you've seen the rise of political violence on the right. On the left, you've seen uh January 6 on the right during the George Floyd protest. Uh 5 to 7% of the George Floyd protests were violent. Uh to this day, you can go into downtown Chicago and you'll find um uh Water Tower Place is still uh not open.
That's one of that was our our gi that's where Oprah had her apartment at the top. uh they're only now talking about maybe bringing it back in 2028 here. So, so the consequences of all of that violence here, uh which I'm saying it was only 5 to 7% of the protests were violent, but that's 600 protests were violent because it was such a massive uh uh uh situation. Well, that was on and then we had um uh lower level of violence of course the uh uh the campus protests that happened after um a October 7th uh here. So um that was another wave of of this uh era of violent populism. So we've had for 5 years now uh this rising political violence uh lonewolf and collective political violence. You've have the rising normalization of political violence. I I track this in these national opinion surveys we do at my center, the University of Chicago project on security and threats uh here.
And so now what you're seeing in the fall, these lines are crossing.
These lines are literally crossing and they're happening not five years from now. They're going to happen in these midterms. So, I um uh think these midterms and also probably 2028, what we're coming to are the most dangerous elections uh in our lifetimes. And my lifetime is a lot longer than your lifetime. So, I mean my lifetime uh here. Uh this is really uh with with the uh Iraq with the Iran war, you're bringing these two things together in ways we we just uh we haven't seen since the 60s. The last time we had um this, you know, hugely unpopular war uh and uh this uh domestic chaos was the 1960s.
And it was it it that was also a string of political assassinations and so forth. And >> do political assassinations typically bode well for the incumbent party or the opposition party? Well, normally the assassinations in a we say normally in a in a time not a violent populism. So, we're in a specific era, Jack. But if you think about uh the assassinations that occur outside of that, say 1981, Hinckley by the name of Hinckley tries to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Well, that's pretty clearly a oneoff. There's not there. This was a good period of time after the 1960s. So, it's it's essentially an isolated event.
Um, and what it does is it actually brought a lot of sympathy for Reagan in the short term. Uh, didn't really last a long time politically because nothing if if it's just a oneoff event. Uh, nothing really lasts uh very long in our country. Politics just on too many big things here. So, uh it normally politically doesn't really matter. it will matter for a few days um when they're oneoff events.
>> I guess when you think of JFK and like the uh Lyndon B Johnson was brought on >> JFK was in um uh 63. So this is the early part of the the 60s era violent populism really gets going a few years later. So when JFK is assassinated, it's essentially a one-off from as people felt it at the time. Now in hindsight you can see it as part of maybe a connected but it's too early in the process to be viewed as part of an era or a hinge event of a new era. The truth is it was a period of of pretty great sympathy across the country and it was viewed again as a one-off an exceptional event. Compare that to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Uh this happens in um April uh early April 1968.
This is happening after a whole string of violence had happened in our country.
You have riots in cities. You have anti-war violence going on. So So the second half of the 1960s is not like the first half of the 1960s. The second half of the 1960s is essentially an era of violent popular. I have a whole chapter on this in my the book I have coming out um in in a few months here. It's uh it's called Our own Worst Enemies uh uh here.
Um anyway, um and what you uh what you see there is a completely different set of reactions. So when Martin Luther King is assassinated uh in Chicago, which is 500 miles away from King where King was assassinated, uh you have a whole two-mile strip of uh downtown Chicago literally burned to the ground.
Literally burned to the ground. It was two uh miles of a smoking ruin. Uh, and that was because of the reaction to Martin Luther King's assassination. Uh, well, you didn't see anything like that with uh JFK. You see, it was a it was if anything there was a reaction, it was positive. Um, it wasn't uh because JFK was a Democrat. Uh, here it's just because we were in an era where uh public support for political violence hadn't yet uh occurred. It will occur a few years later in the 60s. And that changes everything. Once you have tens of millions of Americans uh support political violence for their own political goals, that changes everything about political violence.
It's It's not just about militia groups anymore. It's not just about um um it's not just about a lone wolf. Uh the lone wolf has um an enormous incentive to commit violence once there's tens of millions who he can look to as uh people who will support him, endorse him. Today on top of the tens of millions, we have social media where you can see almost instantly the support for political violence. uh um uh it just happens and that motivates the wouldbe lone ass lone uh lone wolves to do even more.
>> How did the pandemic affect political violence in the US?
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But anyway, guys, back to the podcast.
How did the pandemic affect political violence in the US?
>> So, this is when I first started to worry about political violence in the US. It was actually with the pandemic.
Um so the pandemic just to remind everybody was uh starts in in small ways in late January 2020, early February, but the lockdown happens in the middle of March right away. I wanted to know what did the pandemic mean for political violence? What did it cuz I study violence. That's what I do. What does it mean for war? Were we going to go to war against China for instance? Because this was the China virus, remember? So, did that mean we're about to launch invasion of China? I mean, what did all this mean? You see what I mean? So, um, uh, I teach courses on strategy. You've heard us discuss it here. So, I already when we did the lockdown, I decided, okay, middle middle of, uh, uh, a couple weeks in, I'll give a lecture. So, I'll spend time reading all the books. All the a lot of professors are doing this. I read a book that very few other professors probably would have read because a lot of them would have gotten out the histories of epidemics, pandemics and so forth. I did that too. But I also read another book. It was by William McNeel, a historian called Plagues and Peoples.
And this was a book that was about the impact of disease on war. And it stops in the uh 19th century. It doesn't even get to World War I in the Spanish flu.
So, not coming up on CNN. No one's talking about this book. Okay. But this is the book. Okay. Now, the fact it doesn't deal with the Spanish flu and dot dot dot that no, this is dealing with the actual problem here, not just the narrowness of a virus. It's and and what it shows in this book is that the consequences of mass like pandemics, the black plague was a big one. Um is political fragmentation of the first order. When the what happens is when you have disease um it makes people individuals fearful of being near each other. So we had the six-foot distance, right? Well, this was also having not just social effects but political effects. It makes us more likely to see each other as rivals, as enemies. And that's what McNeel was tracking in plagues and people. So, what this told me is this is beyond what we call we already had what we called political polarization. Uh that's where you just have extreme disagreement on policy. That's not what McNeel is tracking. what he's showing in this little 250 page book again not even dealing with the Spanish flu which is the closest corona virus event that we had uh here is there's going to there there is political fragmentation which is far more extreme >> can you define fragmentation really quick as opposed to bifurcation and polarization >> yeah what what what he is describing is a situation where you have a community and there is a community that is uh under threat threat here. Normally when a community comes under threat, say by an external actor like another country, uh it will bring that community together and that's what I just described with the bombing that's happening and bringing the Iran society and its regime closer together. It makes it more cohesive and that's been true for um lots of wars, lots of conflicts. Um 9/11 brought a lot of Americans closer together. uh made us more warlike too.
That's how we started two forever wars.
But we did this together. Uh 70% of the public supported those forever wars.
This was not a case of big bifurcation between uh polarization between uh Republicans and Democrats on how to respond to 9/11. what McNeel was showing which you don't see in normal international politics because most international politics is about great power wars or states fighting wars which bring the societies closer together.
This was different. What he was showing is there's a threat but it's not a threat from an outside country. It's a threat of a disease and what the disease the threat that the disease poses to every person is every person. Every person is the threat to every other person. Uh so uh just to remind everybody what it was like during the pandemic when you would go walking you would stay on the other side of the street of people. the most you would do is you wouldn't go and actually talk to them and even get within six feet of them uh because we were told we could kill each other essentially. So the biggest threat uh to other people to to to each person was the other person not a foreign country the other person. So this uh told me there was uh I didn't know how it was going to unfold but there was a chance we were going to have uh serious political violence in the United States. So I started to revector my research teams which I had been having them do work on international terrorism. I said you know we've got to do some historical studies here on domestic political violence. Now, we had known about this some, but we we started to do some more serious studies, and this was in April of 2020. This is before um any violence had happened. And sure enough, the George Floyd video came out that created a lot of peaceful protest, but it created a lot of violence as well, just as McNeel would have, you know, said was going to happen. Um, and that then set me off on tracking uh with the research team um in the top 100 American cities the protests and the violence every day in those top 100 cities. So that's how I got into the issue of studying American political violence in the first place. If there was a pandemic tomorrow, what would be the effect with everything going on now? Well, it would it would fragment us again. So, we have this uh this uh uh cruise ship right now.
There's a there's a virus that's starting out there and it's reminding everybody of how this thing started uh with the corona virus uh here. So, if it if it were to unfold, I think what you would see is for the first few months um you would see that um just as happened in the spring of 2020, probably not much more violence. In fact, you might even have a uh the initial low of violence.
But then um just as we saw with the uh the corona virus, that fear that that that fear induced telling us that every person we meet could be uh the you know our death sentence. That is then what can lay the groundwork here for reacting much more violently to events than we would imagine.
>> It's really the only thing that can divide every individual from each other.
>> That's right. Disease is the only thing that can divide it. And it's insidious.
I'm saying because uh and this is true with political violence in general is what's insidious about political violence. It's not happening on a schedule that's linear. You get lols.
you get um there's a famous statement by people that have been in combat um uh which is uh because in say Vietnam or in Iraq they were in these tours that were one year long which is uh what it's like to be in combat are weeks of boredom punctuated by seconds of absolute terror.
So, so it's a it's a punctuated problem.
And the fact that you have this punctuated crisis of terror with the violence and then you have weeks or months of a lull, well, no, that doesn't mean the problem's over. It it just means that that this this type of phenomenon is not a linear phenomenon.
>> Let me ask you this. If you wanted to end the American Empire, you might close the straight of Hormuse.
You might launch a pandemic. What else would seal the deal on? Well, if you launch the pandemic, um it's not guaranteed. It did not uh morph into uh violence against China. But if you if you look at the uh public opinion data, you'll see that it predates the pandemic, but it it gets more aggressive during the pandemic. Uh this anti-Chinese set of attitudes starts to become much much more serious. Uh now we don't end up having that vetored into a war against China or military conflict against China. Thank God, you know, we don't. That's the last thing I want to see happen. Um, but I think that we we should be careful.
>> Did it make China stronger?
>> Well, it does over time. I was in China in June for uh two weeks when we were bombing Foraux. I was in China visiting its advanced industries and uh they um had a plan that predated the pandemic.
You could say the pandemic made them stronger. But the truth is what happened is when she came in the current president of China, when he came in uh in 2013, he started a process where by 2015 he had a a strategy called digital China. And they showed me these plans uh for what this looked like. Um and uh China goes by these five-year plans. So they had the five-year plan from 2015 to 20, the next one, the next. And so I got uh not just these tours of the advanced industries, the shop floors, the robots and so forth, but I got more of the background of what what's the strategy?
What are the plans? Where's all this come from? And what happened with China is she comes in and he comes in with this idea of digital China. Then Trump came in and slapped some tariffs on China, which then reveeded or or sort of shaped some of these early plans of shei to have China's growth plan be much more independent of America. So if you're going to really um uh zoom ahead, uh the last thing you're going to want to do is let your uh your plans be hostage to your rival. And once Trump came in, it became very clear that Trump was going to try to disrupt the plan. So the Chinese started right away, early in this process to develop plans for a digital China uh that were going to be much more impervious to uh say tariffs uh uh loss of market in the United States. And that's why they don't even sell their their great um electric vehicles. They have the best electric vehicles in the world are made in China.
I don't mean that they uh have caught up to the best in the world. They're the whole next level beyond Tesla. And I know cuz I've been there. I've been in them. And the BYD electric vehicles, their SUVs, the uh where you want to sit is in the back seat. When you're in the my RAV 4, you don't really want to sit in the back of the RAV 4. That's where the kids are supposed to sit or your passengers are supposed to sit. But when you're in the BYD SUV, the back has turned into a cabin that looks like first class cabins in aircraft where the seats lay absolutely flat and you can't get this cool stuff. That is fascinating and I think it it ties to some other ideas. I do want to close the gap though on the question of what could really hurt America aside from the straight of hormuse a potential a pandemic right now might really hurt us but what else would be like a third thing? Well, I think that the the difference between hormuz and a pandemic is that um America weathered the uh corona virus pandemic uh the co 19 pandemic better than any other country on the planet cuz we're the richest country. The problem with the straight of hormones is this is a chronic problem that can be with us for 20 years. for the rest of the world to make up the loss of 20% of the world's energy, oil and gas. Uh that is a five-year problem at minimum just to make a serious dent because you need to there are um certain oil fields. There's offshore drilling. There's different uh approaches here to try to make up for that loss of energy. All of them are very expensive.
All of them require um not just a few months but many years of development and what that means is that it's going to take some time before the companies would even go down that road because if I need to be uh uh assured that I'm going to get my I'm going to it's going to take me a a five-year investment in offshore drilling um to get serious uh uh oil out of Um, and then I need to be assured I'm going to make money for another 5 years after that. What's in it for me as a company to invest all this money up front, have somehow Iran just reopen the the straight or something happened and then I've lost all my investment. No, no, no, no, no. This is a this is where the the uh this idea that we're just going to do our own drilling or drill baby drill our way out of this much more difficult because uh Iran if Iran is smart it's going to and you notice how smart they've been so far Iran is going to play the game of keeping the oil price right where they most sweet spot where they're making a lot of money and they're not um uh uh creating so much trouble that this is going to incentivize all those companies to fix the problem. So, they're going to want to string this out. Jack, this play is not a forever play, but 10 or 15 years is a long time in international politics. It it's uh it's a long time to hurt the American economy. Uh you can have crises where you go through and you wreck the American economy. We have a recession. We're we're I'm not an economist, but I I think you can already see the tea leaves are almost surely going to end up in in a in a recessions here starting in the fall. But anyway, you end up uh playing the game from Iran's perspective, you can you can try to modulate this and you can modulate it so that um uh just like OPEC was modulating the price of oil, now Iran has the incentive to modulate the price of oil. And part of that is to melt as much as you can out of the system. Part of it is you want to damage your uh political rivals political system uh so they don't attack you. Uh and part of it is you don't want those oil companies um to be able to start thinking they can take these five-year investments that'll put you out of business. So these are all the predictable futures that that I'm sure are being uh you know front and center as they're thinking about what to do with their new power. So I don't think that if you layer up the pandemic here that at least the one that we just experienced onto this I don't think it's quite as bad as uh hormones. I think the having Iran control Hormos, they're going to become a uh I call it now emerging because this will take a year or two. The emerging fourth center of world power. What that means is um they will control the fate of the economies of many countries in the world. That's power number one. They control the fate of many countries in the world. uh economically u 20 to 30% of um the UAE, Saudi Arabia's uh economy is all hinging on uh Iran right now. Same Japan's economy very much uh hinging on on uh on this. Uh and then over time there's a very good chance um that we're going to have to uh give them money. Uh this is what the deal was talking what what what it's going to look like Jack into the future which is um Iran's going to get to sell its oil uh and then it's going to get to charge the tolls uh or if we don't do that we're going to have to take it back physically uh here with war uh with probably ground war. So these are the real choices that we have. And then the third part of Iran gaining world power is um I think any analyst who if you ask them just um straight up uh what are the odds that Iran will have a working nuclear weapon say 18 months from now uh just based on the physical possibilities of it it's over 90%. This is just the reality of the situation.
And if we if in fact Iran gave up all of its enriched uranium, shipped it all out of the country, they have gigantic uranium ore mines in the country itself.
They're not shipping in uranium ore.
They would still be about a year away from working nuclear weapons. So there the problem here is we're we're uh they have all the knowhow, the materials, they're just right there. uh they have now deep underground caverns where they can uh uh they can manufacture things.
They don't need the facilities we just destroyed to do this. And um if you look at all those layers, what you see is this is this is about as as much as you could imagine uh hurting America as if you had said, "Well, let's just design the absolute worst."
the pandemic I think will will turn out to be um the lesser of the two because it it's something to be over.
>> Is there a third thing that would do it?
>> Well, if we come apart as a country, yes. The bigger thing here, Jack, is >> So, you think those two events alone will lead to this political uh compartmentalization? these nightmare scenario that I'm describing here um where we're bringing these two streams of problem the international crisis of Iran now we have the uh age of violent populism and they're coming together this is leading to some really severe strain um because you we know that um poverty is a major cause of potential violence now it doesn't always lead to violence um but we know That's a that's a problem. So if we see the uh poorest of the poor among us getting poorer and that's happening on both sides of the aisle, uh it's not going to pick parties. Um uh that that's adding to the age of violent populism already.
>> Does the data you have suggest that there's one group or one common enemy uh or two main groups, three main groups that people are going to be particularly violent toward?
>> Um they're going to be violent toward each other. our own worst enemies. So, so the what you are seeing is that in the United States we're going through a set of social changes.
These social changes are very profound.
We're transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy for the first time in our history. That is happening across the country. That's a huge uh change never happened in 250 years when you have gigantic demographic changes in countries. This is a common uh uh cause of radicalized politics, a common cause of that radicalized politics becoming violent politics. The change because when you have demographic change, it is not agnostic politically. um our parties do not have the same percentages of white and minority in them. So that means as the uh balance of whites and minorities in the country shift, so to political power, so too does the possibility that political power will not come back to one party. So the permanent exclusion of one party from political power is on the horizon. Well, that that hasn't really been a problem for a while. we've had um essentially oscillation between Republican and Democratic administrations. Um but if you are if you once you start to see the relationship between the demographics uh and political parties and then the shifts you can start to see that it's it's not um at all a uh uh illusion to uh see that as the white uh minority population occurs, whites become a minority, uh Republicans may never win another election. uh now that will take time to have happen but it is that fear of political exclusion which often pushes people to political violence in this uh generation I call the tipping point generation where the numbers show that this demographic change I'm talking about starts really in the 1970s but we're at the tipping point 20 years where this will really happen in the next 20 years and that's why immigration has been not just a policy issue like it was under Obama, but a front and center view issue of existential politics that we haven't seen under Obama or in the years before. It's because it really is mattering to the future of of political power in ways that hadn't happened before. We're on a the balance here is shifting now and it's a it's it's shifting in ways which um which may end up becoming permanent. Are you more worried about people on the left or people on the right becoming radical?
>> I'm worried about both. Yeah, I'm worried about both. And what's happening is the demographic change, this tipping point generation corresponds to the rise of Donald Trump on the right. It corresponds to why his uh signature issue is immigration. Um and uh why then it's not just been about immigration, it's been about changing voting rules and changing uh who counts as a citizen uh here because it's about the right trying not everybody in the right. I want to also be clear it's not I'm painting with a broad brush where in our data it's a subset of the right. Uh they want to stop the transition and reverse it if they could. Well, that energy to stop the transition and reverse it is what's creating a counter reaction on the left. So, the left is seeing the uh the trend and it doesn't need violence.
It's going to be the big winner here.
Especially the progressive liberal idea of America that's coming into being. So, the progressive liberal side of the house, they they just really don't need violence to ultimately um carry this forward unless the other side, the right, stops it.
Now, you have real energy that's very, very hostile to the right. And that's what you're seeing in our country. So, that's why you're seeing political violence rise on both the left and the right almost at the same time. Uh it's because this change is occurring. It's occurring in the country and um uh Donald Trump is both a cause and a symptom of all of this. It's it's not that if Trump went away tomorrow uh all the problems would be fixed because the demographic change is still going to happen. There's going to be others and you see this with uh uh JD Vance's approach to what counts as being an American. Uh JD Vance went to Europe a year ago to explain to the Western Europeans um that they're letting too much immigration come in. They're changing what it means to be European.
And so he wants to have more right-wing governments take over from the leftwing government. So So he's basically exporting the Trump revolution to Europe. Um here, but it's on the demographics as I'm explaining. And Marco Rubio is uh giving very similar speeches, not as quite as aggressive as JD Vance where he's talking about Western civilization. And what is Western civilization? It's very much a white civilization. So you end up with more and more of the uh leadershing around this uh this goal to stop the demographic shift. That's what's underneath ICE and the deportations. And then on the left, they see this coming and they've been seeing it even before the the uh the actual policies occur because they can see the talk. They they see it coming and they're very sensitive to this. So that's why you you have it happening on their side as well. So you're seeing both sides here um of tens of millions of uh people in the public support violence uh for their goals. Um, and that doesn't mean that tens of millions will take up arms or something like that, but it does mean that when violence happens, um, they tend to excuse it on their side. They tend to look the other way.
Uh, when Trump was just, we had the third assassination attempt on Trump.
What was one of the big storylines on social media? It was all fake. Wasn't real. It was all fake. Well, the problem is the guy had shotgun and the guy shot people and then there's real bullets flying. So, uh, this very unlikely to be anything. This is not a faked event. The claim that everything is fake is just another way to say that, uh, we're not going to worry about that. That's just not going to be something we're going to we're going to care much about or you're accepted.
>> Why do you think Americans didn't care when Trump got shot the third time?
What's very likely here that what you see on social media and what we've seen in our past surveys uh is uh that what you see on social media does reflect actual uh attitudes in a um uh representative survey of Americans. So with the Manion uh shooting of the healthcare CEO for instance, we saw this in the surveys uh that uh >> Do you have a stat line on that? I'm actually really curious about that one.
like what's the correlation between social media perceived opinion and then actual survey data.
>> We never did that. Um I we well maybe we'll do this in the future Jack. So it's I I'm telling you just from having um uh SP we spend so much time with the uh the actual surveys uh because that is what gives us the uh pool of data that allow us to see why the support for political violence is what it is. we can correlate risk factors. So, for example, um if you are uh upset about uh white decline that I'm describing, um you can see how much does that matter to your support for political violence uh to keep Trump in office or to punish or to use force against Democrats or if you're uh want uh if your view is that um uh America is a racist country and always has been, how much does that correspond respond to your view that uh political violence to uh remove Trump from the presidency is acceptable. So what we when we look inside the surveys, we're using highly uh reliable data not just to track the portion of Americans supporting political violence, but we want to know more about the likely reasons.
And we can um uh we can see some good risk factors they're called of that and they correspond quite a bit to these demographic changes.
>> What's the most shocking piece of data you have? I have >> the most shocking for sure is the raw number. So if the absolute shocking data is not even the reason, it's literally the raw number. Jack, January 2026 survey. That's the one that we did right at the end of the month there. Uh we found that uh 21% of American adults uh that equates to 40 million American adults uh believe the use of force is justified to remove Trump from the presidency.
uh we've done other deeper uh surveys focus groups to know what does that phrase use of force justified means half of the people who you it's 55% actually by mean by that phrase assassinating him with guns killing him uh so this doesn't use of force does not mean yelling at him so that at a minimum is something like 25 million American adults That's just on the left. That's on the one side. Okay. So then we have >> So those are Democrats or like >> almost all a lot of some of them are um uh well almost all like 75% of those are Democrats, but then you get a lot of independents cuz it's a independent here can go both ways. Uh and then you will pick up some Republicans.
>> What percentage of Republicans supported uh assassinating Trump to remove him from office?
>> It would be something like 5 to 8% something like that. Uh but it's a um these would be the group of people who are uh the Republicans who are very angry that Trump is distorting their party. They're angry the a lot of Republicans were embracing Hispanics. By the way, um this was the Jeb Bush Republican that this was who who Trump beat in 2015. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015, uh, he was out of sync with the Republican party. The Republican party was a party.
>> And you mean in the primaries, right?
>> I mean in the primaries. That's what he was doing in the primaries. What Trump was doing in the primaries wasn't just beating individual candidates. He was changing the policy and ideological positions of the Republican party. Uh Jeb Bush uh was the sort of the nominal frontr runner and um uh he was uh married to his his wife's Hispanic. Uh for years uh the Republican party has seen this demographic change coming and Jeb Bush was the leader of well the way you move forward is you embrace the uh Hispanic side um and you especially do it with religion. So just to be clear uh and there is still uh Trump does does take a little bit of advantage of that.
Uh but the truth is what Trump was doing was was uh replacing the Jeb Bush part part of the uh Republican party. Um and now um the Jeb Bush part is a much smaller part. Nikki Haley probably still represents that that part of it. Um but you are you are just getting a smaller portion of that. Now uh the more dominant part is that uh um uh is the part of the Republican party that wants uh to uh deport millions of immigrants.
So that's not where Jeb Bush was going.
He was going more down the path of uh of uh citizenship over time, want to get rid of the worst of the worst. But this is what Trump did. So now on the left or on the Trump side today in our January poll, 16% of Americans support um the use of force by uh the use of the military by Trump to suppress Democratic protesters.
Uh that's that's a a question wording that we've come to as our best measure of core support for political violence on the right. And um that's what you saw here play out with the Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago. Uh also in Metro Blitz in Minneapolis where for the country as a whole uh I don't just mean what happened in the local parts of the city.
I'm talking about for the the country as a whole massive support for ICE even as they were uh killing Good and Py in uh uh on the videos uh here. So, it's it's this wasn't just like polarization in the normal sense where we're divided about what a policy should be. We're literally um uh seeing violent populism and action where there's uh support for ICE to keep doing its actions on the right even as you're getting the killing of American citizens. What number would you have to see from your polling to believe that we are currently in a civil war?
>> We're currently somewhere around 15 to 20% and we need to double that number essentially to get to civil war territory.
>> And that number is people that support.
>> Yep. It's just supporters. It's just supporters. It's not the when you when you um it's not just about that number alone, Jack. So that you asked me that number directly and I gave you that, but that makes it sound like that's the one and only single feature that you need. What you also um are looking for with uh with civil war is where you have the beginnings of true divided sovereignty.
Uh what divided sovereignty starts to look like is when um uh say uh one state say California since you're from California would stop paying uh income taxes to the federal government. So Gavin Newsome last summer uh in June when when ICE went into LA in June for a hot second he talked about um not sending the money from California to the federal government that is supposed to go. Then he took it back because once you start to go down that road, now you're really talking about true um uh divided sovereignty, separation, and those tend to be these precursors to civil wars uh here even more so than just the popular support alone. So that it's not just the popular support, but you're starting to truly fragment the body politic in ways that you can start to have organized violence. So what a civil war is, that's different than violent populism is where with a civil war, a true civil war, you have large organizations, whether it's large armies or whether it's large terrorist groups that are organized for the purpose of violence. Um, in the 1960s we got uh some small little bits of this with the weather um underground, the weatherman, the weather underground. These were just 25 people, you know, maybe a little bit larger than that. Very small. Nothing of the size of hundreds of thousands of people uh here or even tens of thousands of people organized for violence. Uh so it's not that we haven't seen the beginnings of what we would call a domestic terrorist group before and and we saw that in the '60s, but the fact is to get a true civil war um you're you don't necessarily need uh two armies toeto toe like you saw with uh the uh US civil war in 1860. I think it's a mistake to think we're heading to civil war because civil war is raising the uh uh the expectations of what this is going to look like uh in a way that is number one not likely to happen and number two it's like chicken little saying the sky is falling. You you keep telling people their problem is we're right around the corner to civil war. It doesn't happen. And so what you're really doing is creating a world in which uh the real problem of violent populism, this middle ground, can grow and grow. And that's already pretty bad.
January 6 are pretty bad. Um uh different versions of that that are even more aggressive where they actually take control of different parts of the government. That's pretty bad. Well, what I'm doing in this work, Jack, is I'm deliberately trying to develop a concept called violent populism. I'm trying to explain there's a middle ground here. It's not just nasty politics and it's not civil war. Uh it's uh I call it violent populism. It's where you have this normalization of political violence and these patterns of collective violence that keep happening and these patterns of lone wolf violence that keep happening. And this is a distinct animal. It happened in our country before in the 1960s. It happened in the early 20s from 1920 to 25.
There's a period there with the rise of the second KKK. So in the 20s um this was a mostly right-wing phenomenon. in the 60s was mostly left-wing. Today, what's especially distinctive about our era of violent populism, the third one, uh is that it's coming on both the right and left. And that is what's very distinct. It's not just we have a distinct >> are we already in that era or we just >> Yeah, we crossed the Rubicon here with with So in um uh I I believe that um you saw the brink really change last summer in the summer of 2025. So we had the political assassinations in Minnesota. Few months later we had the um Charlie Kirk assassination. Then we had um the political violence by the state by ICE in um operation in Chicago and in Minneapolis. And the one I was really concerned about was um you would get the uh the use of uh political violence uh essentially the ICE operations uh because um this is a another level here and it's what's going to cause this once you you escalate a partisan issue of deportation and you say well the reason we can do it is because our president one, which means you're just going to ram it through because you have the legal authority to do it. That doesn't mean you have the political legitimacy in the country to do it. And and that is what is uh causing the fracturing of legitimacy in our country.
So we're in an era I'm I'm I'm saying it's this era of violent populism now is is we're in the stage of fractured legitimacy. Do you believe the uh government is using violence in a legitimate way? Well, once you don't accept once you you fund once large parts of our uh body politic don't accept that the federal government is using violence uh for the common good uh to really just reduce criminals or to really just uh enforce public safety.
Once that is an asymmetric um uh view, legitimacy is broken. And that's what happened with um uh ICE and the fracturing of legitimacy. It's literally causing the uh it's an escalation within an era of violent populism because what's uh yes, President Trump is is he he is the president. He has the legal power to do many things. But power is not the same as legitimacy.
Legitimacy is that idea that we'll go along with it because we fundamentally believe it's the right thing.
>> Can I ask a dumb question? So, how did uh Charlie Kirk's assassination affect people's support for political violence versus like how does I don't know like how do you think something like playing Call of Duty affects someone's support for political violence?
>> Yeah. Well, there are different parts of the pipeline. So when you say playing Call of Duty, what you're talking about is some behavior that somebody's engaged in for months or years and whether or not that has uh sort of uh impacted their brain in ways that they're just numb to um actual violence that's occurred in the world. When we first started to do our surveys, um we wanted to test that by asking how much time a day do you spend on social media where uh we don't mean like so I'm not counting the hours we've had in our podcast now is I'm on social media although it's my app is open the X is open that doesn't count. I mean how much time would you spend scrolling on social media? Uh, and what we found is that as you might expect, um, if you spend, um, eight hours or more a day scrolling, you are more likely to support political violence. But we also found because we're doing nationally representative surveys, we can see the proportion of the public that fits that bill. We also found that is only uh uh true that that pattern of behavior is only true for five 7% of the population maybe 10% at most um that you don't have >> is there a specific demographic that's true within >> uh it's younger yeah it is younger but it's not only I mean >> do you think people answer honestly about how often they scroll >> yeah so we um we haven't stress tested that question but what we did is We um started to do this work in the spring of 2021. Um we um I told you the origins of how I got into this whole thing and then the George Floyd protest and then we had January 6th. So after January 6th, that's when I became persuaded there was something that was likely a mass phenomenon because these these are too big. It's and it's also happening on both the right and the left. Uh not to the same degree. I'm not painting an equivalence, but you're seeing things that are just undeniable. Uh, so what I did was I started to meet with um David Axelrods. He is a black belt at trying to understand political attitude. Now, he's doing it for um trying to judge who's going to win a an election. I'm focusing on support for political violence. So, it's not quite the same thing. But nonetheless, um uh he's the one who just immediately told me that there's simply no point in, uh you really have to understand that if you don't do a a nationally representative survey, you're just not going to get good enough information. And um and that's probably why you see a lot of bad political polls because they're not really paying the money to have them really they're they're sort of um uh you know sort of papering over. They they say they're more representative than they really are. The true probability samples are just expensive.
>> Some polls are just propaganda used as media tools and some polls are actual data. You know, >> actual data and the the more you want actual data, the more expensive it is.
The bottom line here is that uh social media is like pouring gasoline on the fire, but it's probably not the fire itself. Uh and this is why when we deplatformed Trump, it didn't matter.
Okay? So, we took away his social media, it didn't matter. Uh took away Tucker Carlson, it didn't matter. Um and there's an audience there that what's there's there's um uh they are providing supply to a demand and that demand is coming from the social change I'm telling you and so they are both a symptom and a cause um and I got into big uh debates with certain people about this in say 2022 because my data this data was showing that social media idea was an accelerant. It wasn't the heart of the matter. But people didn't want to hear that. They wanted to hear we platform Trump here. We do this and we do that. We're going to stop this problem in its tracks. Well, I went toe-to-toe with those folks. They got their way. They chose to ignore what I was saying. And then they basically came back later because what happened was their way didn't work out as they thought it would. And I had the explan mine was a more coherent explanation for what was going on.
>> I'm actually really fascinated in that.
But I do I want to tie it back to the radicalization we're seeing in Iran. So on day one of this war, one of our missiles hit a girl's primary school in Manab, Iran.
>> Mhm.
>> 170 people died. Most of them children.
>> It's actually multiple tomahawks hit.
There's not just one, multiple.
>> Was it three?
>> Three. So, three or it's either three or four, but it's certainly multiple. So, you have two waves. First wave, they uh the tomahawk first wave hit the school area and that caused the girls to go into their prayer room. The second one burned them to death in the per in the prayer room. There might have been others that got close as well, but this certainly the second wave is the one that Tomahawk I think that did the real.
How many of those girls brothers are going to grow up to kill Americans?
>> Before uh working on American political violence, a big part of my life was international terrorism, suicide terrorism. And so looking at the backgrounds of uh suicide bombers, suicide attackers, suicide terrorists, and we have thousands in our database now. So we have the biographies, the backgrounds of these and uh what you see is that um a significant portion and it's a little difficult to get too definitive on this but something like uh probably 20 uh or 25% of the suicide bombers um and attackers that u that we were able to track uh from uh the 1980s through say 2010. uh here that period of the forever the heart of the forever wars uh here and then just before uh had um uh friends, relatives, brothers um um uh sisters killed uh aunts uh uh fathers, mothers killed in um the conflicts. So you're saying 25% of suicide terrorists have a direct family connection to people who were killed in the a family or or close friendship connection of people who were killed in the conflict.
>> So why do suicide bombers actually do it?
>> The lion share the biggest uh proportion don't have a um connection to a family member. uh the biggest proportion um uh are doing it because uh they are themselves simply angry at the atrocities even though they don't have the family members there. Uh that's a a large fraction. I would say probably half is probably fits that bill. Um now some of these would be people who are uh seeing the atrocities like up close and personal. So we have u you know there's a um a range of say female suicide bombers. Uh some of the early female suicide bombers in um uh for uh Hamas and Alaka were um ambulance drivers.
They were uh essentially people who were the first responders who were picking up the bodies of the people the Israelis had killed. Uh now they themselves that was not a direct relative but they're they're really just directly seeing the death for themselves and then they're going down that road of uh wanting revenge for that. They might also getting uh um propaganda where you're you're getting the the militant groups u um the terrorist groups Hamas, Alaka, they're funneling in the images here.
Um, and so that's a that's what I mean by they're they're they're being mobilized or being upset by the atrocities themselves. Um, and this is um, >> so it's not just Islam.
>> Well, very few are mobilized because they were brainwashed in madrasas in Islam. So >> very few like what what percentage?
>> Oh god, it's under 5% in our data. I mean, we don't >> because we're told like I was told growing up 9/11 happened because of radicalized terrorists under Islam and your data suggests that that's >> for example um the Hezbollah suicide attackers in the 1980s uh 10% of them are Christians. They're Christians just to be clear. Okay. So the this is uh the the kind of uh picture that you're getting here with these top level clickbait and which is happening before clickbait by the way. So this is uh the it's just simply not true. That's why my work was uh >> so controversial in 2005 >> and also called pathbreaking because it's and it's actually providing the raw underlying uh verification. So, it's not a claim that's verifiable. The Bush administration, the Pentagon was starting this and they wanted more evidence, more information. Well, they didn't just want reports with like 20page reports with summaries. Um, I was sending whole volumes of the actual uh data itself on which every judgment was being made. I mean, uh, these were three- ring binders here that would fill this whole table. Uh, then I collected all the martyr videos I could in the world at a certain point. We subtitled them. Uh, we translated them into English so you could read the English at the bottom. Uh, this was eyeopening for the intelligence community because they hadn't collected. We I send students to buy things on black markets in Beirut and Damascus and and so to really get to the bottom of this was a massive information collection campaign. And um so this isn't just uh you know sort of looking up stuff on a weekend and handwavy collecting things from uh from Google. This is the actual primary source information itself. What was the most surprising realization you had after seeing the videos uh the documents of hundreds of suicide bombers? Like what was the one thing you noticed that was >> the the one thing I noticed was um they they were such true believers in their uh protection of their community. the the hardest thing here. So I I come at this um so I started um my work to go in uh get a PhD in the 1980s. I was going to go into the foreign service. I was going to go become a a foreign service officer and support American democracy around the world. Uh so I'm a big believer in America. I believe uh that um we should have strong security, a strong country, very wealthy country.
But what what was really very hard to see is that our military presence overseas, the actual military presence uh even when they weren't um the troops were not doing atrocities, this was the number one motivator for the suicide bombers because when you have military troops of a foreign country on your territory, this is just so alienating.
And and the way I used to describe it 20 years ago was was imagine we're here in Chicago and the Bush administration um tells us that we need a 100,000 Chinese troops to police the city of Chicago and it's the Bush administration telling us that uh how many Americans do you think are going to pick up guns after a few months, maybe not on day one, uh and want to shoot those Chinese?
A lot. Okay. Um, and yeah, you can hear that your government is behind that and they've signed off on this on the dotted line. Okay? But the fact of the matter is you're just going to have all kinds of reasons why those Chinese troops, those 100,000 because that's we're talking about large numbers of troops now um overseas in these foreign countries are going to uh do things which they're going to not realize even that they're uh doing things to um disrupt religious services because the Chinese they they don't pay attention to our religion. They don't know what that is about. uh how much training are they getting in Catholicism and Islam and all the different religions we have Judaism even in the United States? They're probably don't know much about that at all. This is just like our troops. We we might have a you know a little bit of training here, but we're not giving them years of training of this. Uh and so the uh the problem here is that um you see this in the uh the voluminous information their last video will and testament. It's like a video a a video will uh and their testimonials are a lot of times to their their mothers, their fathers, their parents, their uh their uh sometimes they're they're saying and and uh I'm I'm so sorry, Mom. I I didn't pick up the the milk or the this or that at the store, you know, they're they're literally saying goodbye.
And some of it is to the uh the foreign troops, some of it is to their own governments or their own leaders, but some of it is just directly to uh their uh their parents uh which is common. Um or we had the oldest one with the martyr video we had, we had a grandmother who was in her early 60s uh and she was doing a suicide attack and she was explaining to her grandkids why she was doing the suicide attack. which was for the kids. Uh, and it's because of what the Israeli military meant and what it was doing to disrupt the society and their way of life. Uh, and she wanted them to have this this way of life that they were in charge of, not Israel telling them what they should be uh, thinking and doing. And that it's it's to see a 62year-old grandmother, you know, saying goodbye to her grandchildren and explaining why. And she did. that she did go and do the suicide attack. This is not a a a mission that did not happen. This is a mission that happened.
>> That's one of the wildest things I've heard. I think it would be great to do a couple just maybe quick yes, no sentence answers. Just one sentence answers.
>> Very good.
>> Do you think Xi Jin Xiinping is about to decide how this war ends?
>> No. No. No. No. I think he is very happy to let things ride. Uh and I think that he uh doesn't want uh nuclear weapons used. So I think there will be some limits here. Uh but I think that he um uh is probably seeing that uh and this is what I saw when I went to China, met with all those business leaders for the for very long dinners. What they were telling me is that they would expect that uh yes um if America gets into a war with Iran, this will mean a loss of one or two% of GDP for uh China, but overall what's going to happen is America is going to get sucked into a quagmire that's going to help them grow and jettison beyond uh America. So I think that this is probably where where she is. She she may want some concessions from Trump uh here. Uh, >> another one. Do you think Iran has already won this war?
>> Um, no. Iran is winning the war and this will be going on for months and months, but this is not a war that is likely to end with a peace agreement. Uh, this war is could easily end up looking like Russia Ukraine where Russia went into Ukraine. It was supposed to be a six- day war. Uh, just like we went in here, supposed to be a three six- day war. And four years later, you still have the ongoing nature of of war. This is uh the reason it won't end, Jack, is because in order for this war to truly end, um you would have to pull back American troops to their uh December 2025 uh status. And even if we have a um uh Democratic president come in, this is going to be very hard to do because we have so radicalized Iran. We've so radicalized this regime. Um there is a uh we will worry about not just them developing nuclear weapons and not just them uh controlling Hormuz. We are going to worry about terrorism coming. We're going to worry about lots of things. So for us to just simply walk away from this, I think this is just an very this is what a lot of people would like to have happen. Uh and I bet a lot of people in Russia wanted the war to end too when Putin failed and failed again with the next plan and failed again with the next plan here.
>> What does Israel actually get out of America fighting this war? Uh, I think it thought it was going to get um uh cover for greater expansion, weakening their uh most important adversary, breaking its back. And instead, what it's done is it's set off a uh um a uh a real um title wave um of growth for their their most uh uh probably the the biggest existential enemy they they think they had. They they've actually uh triggered growth in that and they don't have any good way to stop that.
>> Last question. I'm 24 >> American man.
>> Will I get drafted to this war?
>> Um I am going to do everything possible with my public work here to see that that doesn't happen. Jack, I wish I could say it was impossible. I I would say that it's probably um uh barely it's somewhere it's somewhere between um highly unlikely and plausible. And the reason is because the trajectory of this war um long wars uh here have have really nasty trajectories and um if we have a big terrorist attack in this country uh if we have um so right now um we know that there have been Israel has bombed a site that they thought just in the last month was uh involved with chemical weapons. So, imagine if Iran starts to put chemical weapons, nerve gas agents on its uh drone missiles.
Bad things can happen here. And during the Iran Iraq war, Iraq used nerve gas agents on Iran. So, I'm not saying they're going to, this is all likely.
What I'm saying is that the the reason we didn't want to go down this road at all is because we don't have good off-ramps. we can't just call this whole thing off because we decided it was a bad idea here. we've we've created a problem and um uh I think that uh the best way to go forward here is probably to accept that Iran is going to become the fourth center of world power and to uh work with that and maybe then build um more support or our allies in um Saudi Arabia in the UAE so that they don't end up becoming toppled as uh Iran becomes more and more power. Uh the best thing to do now is to I think accept that um we're not not going to have a a direct US military solution to this which means we are going to have to accept Iran is going to become an emerging force center of world power and then build a more of a containment approach here with Saudi Arabia, UAE u uh to uh strengthen the ability to limit how far that uh power could spread onto our allies. Otherwise, um here I think that we don't really have a stable place to go, a stable strategy.
>> Beautiful. Well, everyone, uh this has been your guest, Robert Pap, Professor Pap. I appreciate you coming on the Jack podcast.
>> Jack, thank you very much for having me.
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