"Iran's Supreme Leader Just Called for Attacks on Americans Worldwide" | Robert Pape

[00:00:00] Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the At the Waters Edge podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics. It's the 13th of July, 2026. Let's get started. Well, the war with Iran is back on in full swing, and we have been quote-unquote bombing the hell out of them, while Trump is paranoid about a possible Iranian assassination attempt. Of course, the intel came through Israel. Always got to be a little skeptical there. But the Ayatollah did make some threatening statements over the weekend, so, you know, maybe it's not nothing.

[00:00:28] So, what does all this mean for the future of the war with Iran? Is there any possible off-ramps left for us to even explore taking? And is Trump going to reach for a nuclear weapon sometime soon? Well, for all that and more, we get to Professor Robert Pape from the University of Chicago. His excellent sub-sac, The Escalation Trap. Please subscribe to it, and he will be doing a live briefing tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, going into details about what's going to happen next in the war with Iran. Always great stuff there.

[00:00:58] Now, if you've enjoyed this content, please be sure to like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend. It really helps get the show out to more people. With that, let's get to Professor Pape. You're right. Well, good morning, and welcome back. How are you doing today, sir? I'm doing very well, Scott. Good to speak with you. Pleasure, as always. I'm trying to figure out if the family budget can accommodate what I can only assume are going to be skyrocketing gas prices in the near future for all our summer camping trips.

[00:01:25] But let's see. This past week, the war is basically back on. I would start budgeting for 2027. I was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah. This is going to be a tough Christmas, and 2027 is not looking good. See, I was trying to not think past the next time today because I didn't want to be that sad, but I guess it's time to start thinking about it.

[00:01:47] It's totally understandable. Nobody wants to think this is escalating, and it's tragic, but it's predictable, and it's pretty close to on track. And that track is not a good trajectory. Yeah. Well, with the war back on and Trump paranoid that Iran might be trying to assassinate them, which, to be fair, they might be. The intel came from Israel, which is always questionable.

[00:02:12] Yeah, we're getting beyond the conspiracy theories, Scott. We're getting to the realities of long wars. So at this point, we haven't circled back to the formal framework of the escalation trap in a bit. Where are we in the framework? Are we getting to a new step? Yeah, we're knocking on the door of stage three. And so that's been true for some time, but we are closer to stage three than we've ever been.

[00:02:40] And that is for a number of reasons, but just to focus on what I mean by closer to the stages. So the escalation trap in general is the framework that I put out a few days before the first bombs fell on February 28th to explain the three stages of the war that were likely to come over the next six months or a year. So this was not meant to be like the next three days. And keep in mind, I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years.

[00:03:10] I always said in the modeling, the modeling always showed that if we bomb Fordow a year or two later, we would do regime change bombing. And that is what has happened. So this model has been validated even before February 28th. And so on what the model said is, let's just start on February 28th. Stage one is you would have U.S. tactical success. Military bombs would hit targets.

[00:03:38] Bombs would kill leaders and bombs would destroy missile sites. But this would not cause regime collapse. This would cause regime strengthening and actually Iran to surge in power, taking Hormuz. That's stage two. I call that horizontal escalation. I published a big piece on this in Foreign Affairs shortly after the bombing started to explain what was this stage that was about to unfold. And this was in the days before people were even saying they had taken Hormuz.

[00:04:08] So just to be clear, now we take all this as a given. But at these early days and couple of weeks, this was all kind of foggy for the rest of the world. But this was stage two. And that did, in fact, succeed. And then what happened is President Trump went to punishment campaigns. He tried to punish the regime some more. And then that didn't really work. Destroy some missiles. That didn't really work.

[00:04:34] So he shifted to the economic blockade to punish the population of Iran. He, of course, made other threats in that regard as well. But when you do an economic blockade of the country as a whole, you're going to punish the population as a whole. There's no selectivity in that. And he explained it as much multiple, multiple times. So but punishment campaigns do not work. They rarely work. That's one of the things I've studied for 35 years. So I fully anticipated we would do punishment campaigns.

[00:05:04] We this is always an arrow in our quiver. We reach for these arrows. Unfortunately, military leaders of all kinds, including in the military, rarely really know the weakness of punishment campaigns. And so the. He. So I was never really expecting these punishment campaigns would would ever work, but I'm not surprised they're tried. And so he tried them fairly extensively. Then he tried the MOU, which was basically not really diplomacy, but inducements.

[00:05:33] We tried to bribe our way out of this. So let's how much got costs. Let's just pay the money here. And then I explained in my you know, this wasn't going to work either because these are just the tactics. This is what Biden did. Biden tried to buy his way out of it. So it didn't work for Biden. Why exactly is it going to work for J.D. Vance? What exactly is the difference here? Well, well, because Trump is a strong president and Biden was a weak president. It's just the personality of the leaders at play. That's the only factor that matters. Right.

[00:05:59] That's the that's the then we keep getting back to the fact that that doesn't really that doesn't produce success in any of the punishment campaigns. So you're saying those factors exist beyond the current political regime. That's exactly. Or the whims and the wishful thinking of leaders. At the Water's Edge is supported by Grayzone Advisory. Grayzone helps businesses and organizations understand geopolitical risk before it becomes a crisis.

[00:06:26] If your company is exposed to conflict, supply chain risk, defense markets or international instability, Grayzone provides executive briefings, strategic analysis and decision support to help leaders understand what is changing and what to do next. Learn more at grayzoneadvisory.com. And and these are smart people. So these are not dumb people mistakes. I teach the smartest people in the world, including the military and the universe. And so these are not dumb people mistakes. These are smart people.

[00:06:55] But anyway, stage three, which I published before the bombing started, I said would be limited ground control. There would be a ground power dilemma. We would be move in stage three to limited ground options. Those limited ground options. Again, this is on February 25th would be to take coastal regions or islands near Hormuz. Because, of course, I'm imagining Hormuz will be have been taken by then. This again, three days before the whole war starts.

[00:07:24] And then the other limited ground option would be to go to a nuclear site, say Estefan, with, say, the 82nd Airborne to get the nuclear material that we were focused on as a result of this war in the first place. And so that is exactly where we are today, Scott. So when I say we're knocking on the doors of stage three, we've gone through all of the exit ramps. OK. We tried China. We tried. I mean, we've done everything to come.

[00:07:52] And we just can't because there is no other other other than capitulation, which President Trump really is unable to accept. And I'll explain that in just a moment. But you would be it would be a full capitulation. And then what is stage three look like?

[00:08:07] What stage three looks like is taking the armada and the forces that we had moved initially even closer into the Gulf of Oman, even closer into the coastal areas, focusing the bombing on coastal areas. You will then want to expand the bombing to go deeper, basically to hit any target you could possibly imagine might have a missile or a drone in it.

[00:08:35] If they have garages, good luck. That's every building and pickup truck in the country. Well, and before this is all said and done, we're going to get this satellite imagery at some point with SARS, and we may be seeing stuff like that in the next six months. So people just can't imagine this because everybody swore all up and down. Now, we'd never get into a long war. Well, OK. Well, my job is to not have wishful thinking. It's to analyze the situation here.

[00:09:04] And that is what you are seeing. You're seeing just the analysis go forward. And so when I say that we're knocking on the door, it's not just that we've restarted the bombing campaign and hit 450 targets in the last like four or five days. That's a lot of targets.

[00:09:21] But they're highly concentrated around exactly the suppression sites you would expect right out of our doctrinal manuals to suppress air attack, air offensive, other ground operations against any kind of landing or movement or attack on our ships as we move our ships closer and closer.

[00:09:45] Because the bottom line is what we're trying to do here, at least in phase three, in stage three, there's really, as I said, two missions. One is reopen Hormuz. The other is grab nuclear material if it looks like that's getting used. And Pickaxe Mountain, I'm pretty sure, is in the crosshairs at the moment. So the – but what you would do here is on a military term completely predictable.

[00:10:14] These are not – I mean they're certainly complex operations. I don't mean to diminish it. And, oh, my goodness, the combined arms that we have in the U.S. military, we are the best in the world. I mean we're very – compare us to the Russians. I mean, oh, my God, even the Israelis. We're just fantastic. So – but that is tactical at the tactical level. But that doesn't yield to strategic – produce on its own strategic success.

[00:10:39] And so what you are going to see here is we are knocking on the door of stage three. There's a very good chance now this will be accelerated by the punishment campaign. That's your point about threatening Trump. So what happened in the – with the punishment, it's not just punishment campaigns fail to coerce. That's like mistake number one by smart people.

[00:11:06] Mistake number two is punishment campaigns create revenge. And that is revenge by large numbers of people, not just a tiny number of people. And that's mistake number two.

[00:11:20] So in what you are seeing is, again, fully predictable results of a punishment campaign is millions, and it's probably tens of millions in the streets in Iran and other countries around the world, taking to the street to wave those red flags, demanding revenge, red for blood. That's what they're talking about here.

[00:12:11] The IRCG. He's saying worldwide target Americans. Worldwide, Scott. So that means airplanes, commercial ships, hotels with U.S. business executives, or even affiliates. It doesn't even have to be, by the way, just narrowly Americans. It could be anybody who is perceived as a supporter. And these are not necessarily at all command-directed, Scott.

[00:12:39] So I've been studying terrorism for 25 years, books on suicide terrorism and so forth. This isn't – there are command-directed attacks, don't get me wrong, but they tend to be more of the 5% or 10%. The main lion's share of attacks are fundamentally inspired attacks. And these are what you saw with ISIS.

[00:13:01] The leader by the – the statement by the supreme leader on Saturday is almost exactly the kind of statement Baghdad, the leader of ISIS would make to create, stimulate the inspired attacks that occurred in Europe. Remember the giant Paris suicide bombings here in 2015 in the United States? San Bernardino. You know, I mean, just all kinds of things here. This is what we have coming.

[00:13:25] So what we have coming is not just – see, people are talking as if, well, are we going to have a full-blown war, meaning we go back to the War of March? No. It's much worse than that. No, it's much worse than that. So I did not, on all of my briefings of the escalation trap up until now, talk about suicide terrorism. And people kept wondering, why not? And they said, because it's not time yet. Now it's time tonight.

[00:13:55] So my live briefing, I'll be talking about that. I'll be expanding on what I just told you. And it's because of the timing. It really – we had a lot to talk about. It's not that I, you know, couldn't wax and talk about suicide terrorism. Okay, I've got a lot of 25 years to talk about. That's not it. It just wasn't the right time. Now it's beginning the right time. And it's not about what's going to happen tomorrow or in the next hour.

[00:14:20] We're talking about unleashing a series of events here that's already in momentum. I don't know that Trump could stop it now if he – I mean, in order to stop it here, you would literally have to pull out every American troop here from the Persian Gulf and bring them not just to Cuba. You've got to decommission it.

[00:14:49] I mean, I don't think you're going to be able to stop this with – and that's why I think they've given up the pretense of negotiations. I'm pretty sure Trump understands that this is going to be pretty difficult to stop here. Now, there's reasons why Trump himself is stuck in the escalation trap, and I'm glad to explain those reasons. But given your audience is so much focused on the front lines here, I really want to talk about – I just wanted to really emphasize what's really likely to come.

[00:15:18] Because what we're doing is we're moving through – as we knock on the door to the third stage, that door is opening. It's not a situation where the door is firmly shut and we can't go forward. For months, we've been listening to this in the media. Oh, couldn't possibly do X or Y.

[00:15:42] Well, it's nice that they think that, but it's just not the reality, and that's what you're seeing is the escalation trap month by month by month has been the most accurate predictor of what to expect, and it's on track. Yeah. So I'm definitely stealing that phrase, smart people mistakes. I like that. I need to start using that more often. That's a pretty way to put it. Yeah, you were not talking about – people tend to insult each other, and I know because social media, I get insulted, okay?

[00:16:11] People insult each other. Not here. Nothing to positive comments on YouTube. Don't worry about it. Well, I'm just saying. It's okay because I understand. In fact, sometimes somebody will send me a snarky email, and I'll write back, and I'll give them an actual answer, and they'll say, oh, my goodness, Professor Pape, it never occurred to me you actually read your email. I – oh, yes. So I think they're just, like, upset, and there I am. So I'm not really – I don't take a lot of umbrage at it.

[00:16:38] But what I'm explaining is that we – because we're getting into this snarky business, we're misunderstanding what are – what are really are dumb people mistakes and what are really smart people mistakes. And so when you talk about investor Goldman Sachs executives, four-star generals, when you talk about national security advisors, when you talk about presidents of the United States, when you talk about vice presidents, these are not dumb people, folks.

[00:17:05] You can keep saying they're dumb people all you want, okay? But this is – especially in the United States, there's a lot of competition here, okay? So they may not be smart in every aspect you are, but they're often pretty smart in some aspects here.

[00:17:20] And so what you – but what you see is the actual understanding in a deeper way, meaning the history going through it, seeing the different – the depth here of things like why punishment doesn't work, why an economic blockade is not going to produce change of political preferences.

[00:18:09] Here – admirals don't know this. Cuba, you know, end of the Cuban Missile Crisis and protected the homeland. No, this was a nuclear threat. We went to DEFCON 2. That's a very convenient, selective – so I, every year in my class, 90 minutes on the Cuban Missile Crisis. We go through the whole thing. No, this is not just a blockade.

[00:18:32] So, again, what we're getting is we're getting the happy story by the different branch of the service to accentuate their role. The Navy won the new Cuban Missile Crisis. This is just a total mistake. It's not the Navy didn't matter at all. They were part of a combined operation with nuclear threats when DEFCON 2 means our nuclear bombers were two hours from their targets.

[00:19:01] I don't mean two hours to take off, Scott. They were two hours from their targets. And if the Soviets had fueled their missiles, because this was liquid fuel day, if they had fueled, they would have been done. That was what the trigger was. And so this was not – now, I don't want to – the Air Force had a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were going to bomb some targets. The Navy had a role here. Ground forces were going to play a role.

[00:19:30] We were going to actually invade the island and totally occupy the entire island here. So this was not a case where it's just one service. And I don't mean to bemoan the Navy, but I'm just telling you this is what I mean by people don't know their history. Or what they have is they have the selective reading. They go to the different war colleges, war colleges will say, yeah, we're the most important service. And let me tell you the history of the world as if none of the other services ever played a role whatsoever. I know.

[00:20:00] I taught there for years. I know how this works. The problem is that this is a PR for the service. It doesn't actually add up to military victory for the service. It goes the other way around. What it's doing is it's planting the seed for defeat and not understanding. That's why SAS was created. That's why SAMS was created.

[00:20:24] These were tiny little schools in the Army and in the Air Force for just a handful of people. And it's because they deserve to have a year learning the secret knowledge. And you know what the secret knowledge is? It's often a combined arms. Okay. And we go through all of it in detail. And we have the smart people. We have road scholars, by the way. And our joke at SAS was they could barely keep up.

[00:20:51] Because those kids, this wasn't like usual PME where you're spending time grilling with the family here. Man, we're working them like a dog. And if we didn't assign more, they would say, why are you only assigning us 300 pages this week? We're here to become generals. Okay. We're not here in order to just have – and their families would often get pretty upset because the family, well, wait a minute. This is supposed to be some time with us, right?

[00:21:19] It's supposed to be a year off from the forest, supposed to relax. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's not what SAS and SAMS are about. This is a completely different situation. And that's why, you know, it attracted people like me because this was for really serious people who really wanted to get into it. So an indicator that folks picked up on over the weekend is that, you know, we've heard bellicose rhetoric from Iranian leaders in the past. It's typically the president who comes out and says, let's destroy America, the great Satan.

[00:21:45] It seemed like a significant shift to have the actual supreme leader come out and make the statements that he made. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. This is very similar to the previous supreme leader in Salman Rushdie here. Now, the previous supreme leader, just to be clear, had more clerical and religious authority. This supreme leader is more junior on that score. So he has not issued a fatwa, okay?

[00:22:10] And we'll see if he ever does because, again, this is somebody who's very much in the military side of things, less in the religious side than his father. The father, Salman Rushdie, did something very similar, and I put this in this morning's substack. I just published a big substack to go through all these details on the escalation trap. And the fatwa issued by the supreme leader for Salman Rushdie here about 30 years ago was very, very similar.

[00:22:36] And it called for attacks on Salman Rushdie, the author, and his publicist, and anybody involved in the publication. And that all happened over the course of 20 years here. So this was not a matter of, oh, nothing happened today. I guess there's no authority here. We can move on. That's not what happened here. And so I lay out some of that here. So the history of this gets a little bit more into the public, into the, like, knowledgeable public record.

[00:23:06] And so this is what you are seeing here. So this is, and it's not just a leader's statement where there's no evident public support for the revenge. This is going the other way around. This is waving the red cape in front of a bull charging at Americans full bore.

[00:23:26] So if you want to know how could you get the Iran-Iraq war and get those Iranians to go to their death to kill all those Iraqis, this is what you're about to, this is what we're stimulating here. And as we kill more of their civilians, and I know we're going to some lengths now not to. So I'm not saying that we are, you know, doing it willy-nilly. But nonetheless, there are more civilians being killed.

[00:23:52] If we get the Supreme Leader in our gun sites, I highly doubt we're going to pass up the chance to kill them. And that is only going to make everything worse. So what's going to happen over time is there's going to be more killing. There's going to be killing now probably more on both sides. And some of it is going to just be a surprise. Now, I hope nothing happens around the world. I hope that nothing is going to happen.

[00:24:17] But you've got, as this war unfolds, this will only amplify naturally without even telegram. You won't, this would happen even without telegram, but with telegram for sure. This will only amplify that leader's statement. And there will be takers here. Now, whether they can succeed, get the equipment, all that, that's, again, these are, it's a matter of threat equals capability times will.

[00:24:45] Here, the will is going up pretty high. Capabilities are always tricky for these non-professional covert actions. So think of it as light infantry that have never had training or they try to train on their own. That, you know, they kill themselves a lot. You know, they have all those problems. But that doesn't mean they can't get some success. And especially when you've got AR-15s and you've got other ability to get explosives from construction companies all around the world.

[00:25:14] There's just a lot of possibilities here. And you've got time. Doesn't have to happen tomorrow. Could happen. What sort of time frame do you think we should be considering when we're looking at trying to think through the likely outcomes and the direction of this war? Or, you know, I'm going to joke about 90 days. You're talking about Christmas and next summer. Well, right now, it won't seem to be able to pull back, Scott. So the problem is the political pressures here for Trump have mounted. And the political pressures on Iran have mounted.

[00:25:43] And they are spiraling and they're interacting with each other. So what this means to me, so I've been saying now for actually months, and I can understand that people didn't take it seriously, that we had to prepare for this war to go through January. And maybe January we could start to have some different trajectories of this war. And I always said maybe. I didn't say guaranteed.

[00:26:07] And that was always hard because there were some of the folks in the media, Scott, when I'd say January, they would gasp. They would audibly gasp because they couldn't imagine that this was going to go on this way. Well, we're now, what, we're into this war five months now, right? There's only supposed to be a weekend war drive-by shooting. Okay? It didn't work out that way. And so this is where we're heading.

[00:26:30] And it's because the problem here is fundamentally Trump wants, does not want Iran to control Hormuz. Iran wants to control Hormuz. Both of those cannot occur. And they are both willing to use force and lots of force to get their way. And the world economy going off cliff, less and less of a problem for either one of those actors.

[00:26:59] So why President Trump? I just want to say this so your folks will hear this. So a few weeks ago, President Trump said, I don't want to become Herbert Hoover. And our oil inventories are about to run out in four weeks. Well, that four-week clock is coming up. And we are still, even with the MOU, the MOU did not stop the drawdown on the oil inventories, did not open Hormuz. It just didn't. It failed on that score. It didn't happen. We can argue about why it didn't happen.

[00:27:29] We can blame who we want to say. But the bottom line is Trump's heading to become Herbert Hoover. So what's he going to do? Is he just going to ride as Herbert Hoover into the sunset and say, yeah, goodbye, everybody? Okay. Or is he going to pull out all the stops to open Hormuz? These are his choices. Certain Herbert Hoover or maybe Lyndon Johnson. This is in the history of preventive war. So I study decision-making and preventive war.

[00:27:59] People say, how could the Japanese think? And they would attack us at Pearl Harbor and get away with it. I know the answer to that. And not because I'm guessing. It's because we study the documents of their decision-making. We just did this in my graduate seminar. Okay. Three-hour seminar, spending a whole week preparing. That's like 40 hours of reading of the documents to go in. Why did the Japanese do this?

[00:28:25] Because they saw certain defeat versus a risk of defeat. And they took the risk over the certainty. The risk didn't work out. But the other way was going to be an even worse outcome. And I go through the details of that. We probably don't want to do that here. But I'm just telling you, that's what President Trump is seeing. And so that's why the political analysts here just – when was the last time they studied the documents of how Japan bombed Pearl Harbor?

[00:28:55] When was the last time that – and when, by the way, was there a three-hour seminar in our – most of the war colleges dedicated to studying the actual documents by the Japanese decision-makers? At the time, translated into English, which we all have now, okay, about why they made their decision. You see, that's the level at which you need to engage to study war for real. You see, that's what I'm talking about.

[00:29:25] And that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of time. And it means – so anyway, that's the background of why President Trump is basically going to reverse his defeat. His goal now is not simply punishment. His goal is to reverse the defeat. And that is likely to lead to, I don't know, the mother of all battles.

[00:29:55] Yeah, well, something that folks have been kicking around is, you know, at what point does Trump look at the military and say it's time to use a nuke? Is it after the deliberate assassination attempt? Like he's brought it up before. There are later stages of the escalation trap here. And it is not – these are not off the table. But just like I wouldn't talk about suicide terrorism too soon, these conversations, I think, now are probably poorly timed. It's not because I'm not willing to have them.

[00:30:25] I'm willing to have them. It's that we need to focus on what's immediately in front of us for the next few months. And the problem with using a nuclear weapon for President Trump in the next few months, as for Putin, is that he will kill a large number of those 50,000 troops still in the Persian Gulf. So is he willing to – in order to use the nuclear weapons here, he has to be willing to kill all of American troops in the Gulf of Oman.

[00:30:53] He has to be willing to kill them in Bahrain. Now, not immediately. He wouldn't target them. I'm talking about the radiation. So this is why, just to answer it directly for the troops on the front lines here, I don't think President Trump is going to do that. And I don't think your military leaders would let him do that because that is the actual consequence here. This – we need to – if we're going to talk turkey, Scott, we've got to talk real things. And the problem is we're not really doing that. We're still talking smack.

[00:31:23] Okay? Yeah. Well, we try to do that here, and we appreciate you participating. Well, I'm glad to do it, Scott, and I'm so honored to be involved here with you. And I'm so honored by our troops. I just can't tell you how proud I am of our forces here. It's just incredible what we're asking them to go through, and I am one proud American. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I know we're at time. Looking forward to checking back in next week.

[00:31:53] Okay. Very good. Bye, Scott.