Professor Pape: Trump Ceasefire Will FAIL As War Metastasizes

Very excited now to be joined by our great friend of the show, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, author of The Escalation Trap on Substack, which everybody should go subscribe to. Thank you very much for joining us, sir. We appreciate your time.

Oh, absolutely. Always great to talk to you.

So let's go ahead and start with some of the latest news from The Washington Post. We'll put it up here on the screen. And thousands more US troops are heading to the Middle East as Trump seeks to squeeze Iran. Professor, you have long held that these ceasefire talks and others remain either a cover or a delaying to the inevitable escalation to ground troops. Just confirm your hypothesis. How are you looking at this structurally?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, this is exactly what I'm saying. So we can pay attention to the rhetoric, which is the noise, or we can pay attention to the movement of troops, which is the signal. And what you are seeing is over and over and over again,

this being now in our seventh week of this war, there's all this noise about back and forth rhetoric, what does this mean or that mean coming out of the White House? But what you see are troop movements and those troop movements are going in one direction.

There's not troop movements coming out, there's troop movements going in. And they're going in, just as I said, they're gonna be limited, they're gonna go in salami slicing essentially. And that is what you are seeing.

We are not on a path of peace. We are on a path, the war is metastasizing, and we are seeing thresholds being broken. There's multiple and I'm glad to talk about those, but what you are really seeing is a path of escalation and it is toward that stage three and this is just going to build.

Right, and so actually that's, if you could break that down for us, that would be very helpful. I'm sure everybody, when you said I could do it, everyone in the audience was like, yes, please, including us, Professor, so let us know.

That's right, so as, and our audience really is familiar with stage one, stage two, stage three, where stage three is coming to the limited ground operations, which could expand. But let me just unpack what I mean by breaking threshold. So what we are seeing since the talks,

since JD Vance came out of Pakistan in his three minute speech, which everybody should go and listen to. That three minute speech was important for go and listen to. That three minute speech was important for a couple reasons. Number one, he made absolutely blisteringly clear that we are not going to make concessions to the United States. We're going to choose escalation over concessions. And number two, he made blisteringly clear he personally is on board with the escalation.

So the hope that we were had JD Vance was going to kind of push us over to another side that really has disappeared. Now what you are seeing with the military blockade is, and I can understand why people are confused. I've studied these for 30 years. This is part of that repertoire of what I study.

What you are seeing is it's breaking thresholds, including just this morning with the news out of Iran. So number one, it's breaking a threshold in the region where now the United States is using military force to shut down Hormuz against Iran. And what that is doing is widening the war

inside of the region because Iran, as completely predictably has just responded by, you do this, we're gonna shut down that other choke point, or they'll try that other choke point in the Red Sea. So that would take another hunk of oil off the market here if they do that. And the Houthis, they have the excellent proxy with which to do that.

And of course, they have their missiles and drones. But number two, another threshold that's being crossed here is, notice that it's China who gets a lot of the oil and who has flagged some ships. So what this means is that U.S. naval blockade is now going right up against China. Now we have not sunk a ship. We have not, you know, but this is an act of war.

A naval blockade is not a political statement. It's an act of war. It says you either go back or we sink you, we shoot you. That is a very, very important threshold because obviously China now is, this is another actor and that actor has got 600 nuclear weapons.

So we need to understand, this is not, again, going up against Panama, Greenland. We're breaking real thresholds here. And then there's the third threshold, which is when you bottle up the entire Strait of Hormuz, and then possibly also now the Red Sea

gets bottled up with this. This is essentially another threshold here where you're locking in the consequences for the world's economy for at least weeks, if not months from now. And there's already the stories,

the different economic organizations are starting to come out on my sub stack this week. I have a very, I wrote this on the plane back and forth from London. So I have this long explanation of what happens in these blockades so people can understand the consequences

for the world's economy over time, 45 day, 60 day, 90 day. And this is just now locking in that analysis here. So we are really heading to, not just, it won't just be like one giant cliff. I'm explaining there's a series of decline, a little bit like rollercoaster, a series of these declines, which we need to expect.

And the markets just simply aren't paying attention to that.

Yeah, Professor, I saw your comments on that. Yeah, and I think it's very important to underscore. What you're trying, The Trump administration has done, I mean, honestly, a shockingly good job of jawboning the oil markets and the stock market. They have convinced them that the blockade or a ceasefire will inevitably lead to some sort of memorandum of understanding that will return to normal.

You have consistently maintained that is absolutely not going to happen. And yeah, I do want to go a little bit into, so your first thesis, which I think really struck a lot of our viewers and myself, is about how Iran has become this new world power. And a piece of news that I instantly thought of you with is F4, let's put this up there on the screen, was this US carrier, the George H.W. Bush, which it has been revealed has had to sail around the entire continent of Africa rather than transit through the Red Sea, specifically

because of fear of the Houthis in the Bab al-Mendeb Strait. I mean, what do you make of that for this reflection of power that Iran can project to force a multi-billion dollar, or multi-multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier.

You are just so on it. And I really, this is one of the reasons I love coming on, because you're not just hearing my words, you're seeing the implications with the new piece of information. So what you are seeing here is a power projection capability by Iran. So we are used to thinking of Iran back in pre-February, 2028 time period, where we're thinking we've been told Iran is crushed,

it's on its last legs, just one more nudge, and there's this pro-democracy movement that's totally gonna take over. This was always extremely unrealistic. It was the most exaggerated version of the weakness of Iran, which was just right.

Well, what the reality is, and you see this with their drones here, is that as their drones have reach, they can, and missiles have reach, it's not just about a short-term thing.

They have reach across the region and even further than that. You would not have our carriers essentially a thousand miles away here if it was not for Iran's power projection capability. Well power projection is what we define, well one of the leading indicators of a world power. And notice Secretary Higgs said in his briefings, which he has now stopped giving of course, but what he said in his

briefings was we've taken away their power projection capability. No we haven't. That's that victory rhetoric meeting escalation reality, which you're now demonstrating here. And this is also, by the way, the when the Iranians are making their threat this morning, they're not simply saying this is only going to be a threat to the Red Sea choke point with the Houthis, we need to understand those destroyers here that are within range now,

there are 300 sailors on those destroyers. Now they don't have to be sunk for those people to be hurt and killed. You can have fires, you can have a lot of things happen under those attacks, which is why none of the oil tankers themselves

want to go through and risk this, you see. So this is an extremely tense situation. So we are not de-escalating the situation. We are escalating the situation. And let me just add one more point here, if I might, because I'm getting this in emails from some really smart people who aren't yet ready to say, I can identify them and we can go, but these are not, these are really, really smart people.

And what they're asking me is, why exactly, Bob, that's what they call me, Bob, why exactly won't the Iranians make the concession? Because after all, aren't they facing all of this pressure? And here's the fundamental thing that people need to hear, which is if Iran makes a concession, say gives up its nuclear material or gives up the power over the Strait of Hormuz, that

makes Iran more vulnerable. You see, the problem here is that the United States and Israel, if they get more, if they get concessions, they can pocket those concessions and that weakens Iran. Those are actual power tool, power assets for Iran, and it makes Iran more vulnerable. It's more likely that Iran will be attacked by Israel in the United States directly if it doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It just is. It's also more likely that it will be attacked in one way or another for whatever reason if it gives up world power and we have history

here. The Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons. Qaddafi gave up his movement toward nuclear weapons and look at what happened to those states. Okay, this is not a good history. You can also look at the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, you can say, well, they gave up world power, global power. They're a basket case right now. Putin is barely keeping 2% of the, it used to be that some of you have 15% of the world's economy.

Now they have 2%. And what is Putin doing? He's fighting back to get it back. So you look at the history of all this, and that history is, you and by the way the united states promised in all those three cases you were gonna have an enormously beautiful future just like donald trump i mean

literally those other presidents right out of donald trump pay a page of it's going to be beautiful and it's not because they're vulnerable so this is really the problem. We're asking Iran to take sucker deals that other states have taken in the past, in their lifetime, and it just is not working out because what's happening is when the Soviet Union basically gave up power,

we rode NATO right up to its doorstep. You see, that is what I mean by vulnerability. So if Iran gives this stuff up, this is not making Iran safe. This means Iran has a really, really even worse future over the next five or 10 years.

And we're hearing the Israeli right already talking about Turkey, no surprise there, but.

Oh, there you go. This is another, and Turkey doesn't have nuclear weapons. Yeah.

Right.

Okay, so I'm just pointing out that we are teaching the world, you know, yeah, it's nice to be, you know, send Donald Trump, you know, some presents, but better get a bomb.

Yeah, that's right.

And professor, I wanted to ask, actually, we're sifting through this enormous amount of propaganda. What do you think actually is the sticking point at the end of the day for both the Trump administration and the Iranians, just looking ahead? Because as we look at what seems to have fizzled last weekend, what could that tell us

about if there are more Islamabad attacks?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say again, the three-minute clip by J.D. Vance when he came out is really important here for everybody to watch. It's not just another one of the clips here, because what J.D. Vance did is he zeroed in directly on the nuclear enrichment, that Iran is going to become a nuclear weapons state. And I've been saying here in the Substack, in the live briefings on the Substack, this

is actually the taproot, not just of this crisis, but the whole military antagonistic relationship with Iran going back to 2002 and 2003. We had a politically antagonistic relationship from 79 to 2002. But once Iran started to enrich uranium, this really took it to a new level. And what you see is all this talk, all this confusion about the goals. Yeah, absolutely. Donald Trump's all over the place in what he posts. But there is a core through line here. And

that core through line is Iran is enriching uranium. And we are teaching it, by the way, in these 25 years, that their only chance of real survival is to get that, is to translate it into a weapon. And what you're seeing is, JD Vance is right on that. He's explaining that. And that is what the Trump administration really is going to have to concede.

They're gonna have to make a choice. If they want to get Iran to allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz here, then that is gonna come at the expense of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons in about a year,

maybe a year and a half. And they can talk out of both sides of their mouth all they want to, but the bottom line is, this is what is becoming more and more in Iran's rational security interests. And if we had a hope of this not happening, it was the Obama deal.

And everything since Trump ripped that up has been making everything worse.

Professor, last question for you on my end here is, it's possible that we get no deal, and Trump just declares some sort of unilateral walk away and a permanent blockade. What do you think would happen as a result of that?

Iran would attack the Bab al-Mandab Strait, they would escalate, maybe they wouldn't and they would just suffer economic pain.

That will just be that path. So there's path four, which is we let Iran become the fourth center of world power. You're seeing Trump doesn't want to do that. But that there's only two choices. Either you do path four, stage four, or you do stage three. There's no going back to Feb 27.

So stage three is where you're moving along the path of escalation. And the real consequences here of you say that, you know, like we talked about that permanent blockade is going to be that first of all within the region the UAE Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, they're all going to see their GDPs decline by 20-30 percent or more here in the next in the next coming months. It's all going to go

over a cliff for them. But then also, you're going to see that for the world economy, you're going to see that this pattern here, and basically what happens is up till day 45 of a oil blockade of some kind, you have prices go up. Then from 45 to day 60, you start to get actual shortages. And then from from day 60 to 90 that's when you get economic contraction and then you get the prices keep going up the shortage is good worse and the Contractions start to happen and that gets baked in and what we're gonna see here

If you just take that blockade is like a permanent blockade is yes You will stop Iran from becoming that world center of power, at least without them fighting for it, but at the price here of taking the world's economy over the cliffs.

And that is not gonna make the world happy with the United States.

And probably losing more American soldiers.

Almost surely here because the idea that Iran will not, Iran was willing to attack the Gulf states, they were also willing to kill 20 or 30,000 of their own people. So the idea that, and they also have already bombed American bases. So what those vessels are, are essentially floating American bases. So if Iran was willing to bomb American bases in the region, I really think the idea they're gonna be scared

to bomb the ships here, I don't think so. I think they're gonna be probably playing some tactical games here. They're gonna be thinking through what's their best way to go forward. And they probably would really like China to go through

and force the blockade to confront China because all that does is put China even more deeply in their camp. So if you're wondering why they're not already firing back and forth, it's because there really are, you know, there's a long game here and Iran has played it pretty well so

far. We're not playing it very well. And as we go forward here, getting China more deeply on Iran's side, you know, it's already got Pakistan working with it and they've got 60 to 100 nuclear weapons. You bring in China, that's 600, and now, of course, you've got Putin.

So you're really building this coalition here for Iran. We are helping Iran build it.

Yeah. Well, Professor, as always, you're so enlightening. Escalation Trap on Substack, link down in the description. And we will see you later, sir. Thank you very much for joining us.

Absolutely, thanks again. Great, great, great session. Great discussion.

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