The Most Dangerous Weeks of the Iran War Are Here | Robert Pape

[00:00:00] As the midterms approach, President Trump is facing a set of wicked incentives that might cause him to escalate the war with Iran to disastrous consequences. Is anyone going to explain this to him before we get there? Well, apparently it's such a problem that Robert Pape sent me a message this morning saying, Scott, let's talk this afternoon. So we are here today on the 8th of October, 2026 with the one and only Robert Pape. This is the At the Water's Edge podcast where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics.

[00:00:29] Like, share an episode with a friend, subscribe, all that good stuff. With that, let's get to Pape. Well, Professor, welcome back. How are you doing this afternoon? Oh, I'm doing terrifically, Scott. So I was off for a few days. My daughter got married over the weekend. Congratulations. Congratulations.

[00:00:46] Unbelievably happy time. 75 people at the wedding. And really, it was just absolutely amazing. As I'm telling people, there was a lot of friendship, a lot of love and healing. And people who have been to weddings will know what I mean by all three of those.

[00:01:05] And it was just unbelievable. And a big thing, as I'm a father, as one of my two daughters who got married, the first of my three children to get married. And it's like an unbelievable gift here. I feel like I'm the one who got the gift. It's just a great gift to see your daughter and her husband now, not fiance, her husband, and known them and known him, the family. It's just such a gift.

[00:01:33] And that is just, so anyway, we're going to talk about stuff's a lot more tense right now, but I'm on cloud nine still from the wedding. And it was just fantastic. Awesome. Well, since you were gone, so quick highlights from the news. I jot it down for you. What, you didn't stop everything? I was surprised too. So as of this morning, Saudi Arabia actually had to shut down its main international airport for several hours. I'm not sure if they've reopened that yet.

[00:01:57] Apparently we have a plague outbreak in Russia. The Mecca Pact has been activated and Pakistan and Turkey actually said they're sending troops to Saudi Arabia. Trump is telling the Pentagon to get ready for more strikes ahead of the midterms. And we have that third aircraft carrier going into route. Oh, and then my dad called me this morning, said he was very happy that you gave him a shout out on your live stream last night. Yeah, it was great that your dad came. It's really becoming a community. That was awesome. Awesome. So I'm not sure where you want to start. You said you had some slides, but what's going on?

[00:02:27] Yeah, the big thing that's happening is we are in the most dangerous weeks of the escalation trap in the war. So this is not yet at the point of kinetic levels that we saw in March. But in terms of the danger and the risks to the world economy, to forces in the region, to the Gulf states,

[00:02:52] we are at a higher point now than we have been for seven and a half months. So this is really a very big danger zone. And it's not going to get better. Whatever post or tweet or whatever post that comes out of President Trump isn't going to change this a whole lot over the next few weeks. It's going to be very tense.

[00:03:16] The only thing that will change this in a structural way would be if you literally saw the United States reverse course with the Roosevelt, for example, have the Roosevelt and the second Marine Expeditionary Unit literally reverse course and go back to their home stations.

[00:03:37] If you literally had the militaries, the Houthis and the Saudis to literally stand down here for weeks, that would actually be significant. I don't think, though, we're heading in those directions based on just what you just said now.

[00:03:58] And I wouldn't have thought that because, as I've been saying, that the midterm focal point, this midterm focal point is a critical focal point. It's a critical focal point for multiple reasons. I'm going to talk to you about this. And that what it does is it creates escalation dynamics and incentives for multiple actors in the region. Now, that doesn't mean they'll all jump on them.

[00:04:28] But we have so many actors here that it's important to see. Now, from our perspective, I want to talk to you about how we need to think very long and hard before we bite on the we take the bait and we take that. I mean, we, the United States take the bait on these upcoming incentives and they're going to be wicked and they're going to be wicked for President Trump in particular.

[00:04:54] So, I'm not coming at this as pro-Trump, anti-Trump. I'm coming at this as pro-America, pro-military. But I'm very much concerned that we want to go into this understanding some of the real ways that this is a problem. That's what I want to do with this short slide presentation. And it doesn't replace everything I did on the escalation trap last night. I did a much longer thing.

[00:05:23] And I've done this in the post. But what I want to do is give the whole world a little bit of this because I think it's just that important. So, what I want to do is I want to slide. I want to screen share. And, Scott, let me know if you can still see it. We're good to go. Okay, good.

[00:05:42] And if you don't remember anything else from this presentation, I want you to remember that how and whether the United States escalates according to the options that are surely coming on President Trump's desk, probably as we speak. If we take these options, there's understandable reasons. I'll explain in just a moment why we might.

[00:06:12] And why we may well be more likely to than not. But we're handing Iran the advantage. This is not just a situation where we'll be no worse off than we are now. This is a situation where we have the capacity to escalate, but we don't have the capacity to escalate advantageously. And even the preparations for the escalation are incredibly dangerous, as I'm going to explain.

[00:06:42] And what we're basically doing is we're handing gifts to Tehran. And that's what I want us to understand. So, let me explain the window, how we're in this tense phase of the escalation trap. And so, as I've said before, just a minute ago, and as I've said on your program before, the focal point of the November 3rd midterms, very, very, very important.

[00:07:07] But what do you see here is the focal point represents three clocks coming together. The first clock is the Theodore Roosevelt clock. That is also the Marines that are en route, the additional 2,000 Marines. There's more on the ships, but these are the landing part that would go on land.

[00:07:33] And this is, they left about the 27th of September. It's about a five-week transit. We can't give it to the day. This is not an eight-week transit, and it's not a two-week transit. So, it's about a five-week transit. And the Theodore Roosevelt will be within striking range of Iran before they're fully there.

[00:07:58] So, this is just important to see that this is a big part of the clock that President Trump has to work with, and then also Iran is going to be seeing. The second is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has run down to a plateau.

[00:08:17] So, we have been drawing on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help buffer the loss of oil coming out of the Persian Gulf in general since the war. But now those buffers are plateauing, and we're still getting a little bit out every week, but it's very, very small amounts. And you can see that we're very nervous about drawing much more out for fear that the salt walls will collapse.

[00:08:46] So, the risks are growing. And what that means is that the price of oil, the price of gasoline, the price of diesel in the United States, it's not likely to go down that much. And also, it could actually go up.

[00:09:04] And what you see just in the last seven days is Iran has struck more ships in Hormuz, tankers, in the last seven days than at any week in the history of the war. Not just an uptick from the previous week. So, they're pushing on the leverage here. It's quite evident there.

[00:09:30] And also, and I don't know if you mentioned this in your news summary, but the East-West pipeline has been struck again. So, that what you have here is as the U.S. Petroleum Reserve's going down and plateauing, the buffer disappearing, Iran is tightening the noose. Iran and its allies are tightening the noose on oil coming out. And they can tighten it even more, Scott.

[00:09:59] Now, there's a third clock. And we haven't talked a lot about that. At least I don't recall we have, you and me. But I want to talk about it here, which is what's happening inside of Iran's economy. So, it is the case that the blockade is having a big effect on Iran's economy. It is driving up inflation. And it hasn't produced concessions. Not yet, anyway. But it hasn't produced concessions.

[00:10:27] But it is producing high inflation in Iran. It's about 89% of where it is year on year. So, it's near 100%. The real is at record lows. That's the currency. And this is very important. Because if you're looking at this from the White House perspective, you could think to yourself, oh, wait a minute. They're already in such bad economic shape.

[00:10:54] If I were to damage Iran's economy with air power, I could push this up even more and maybe break their back. So that now we can cause the collapse. We can break Iran. Because we're already halfway there or most of the way there. Just more bombing will cause that to happen.

[00:11:19] And this is an argument that's facilitated by when you hear on CNN different ad rules saying, oh, yes, well, it just takes time for the blockade to work. Well, if that's all the issue is with blockades producing political pressure is time. Bombing is a way to accelerate that clock.

[00:11:37] So, these are the clocks that are driving toward the focal point of the midterms, which are going to determine political power in Washington for the next two years. This is a major, major, major election. And so, Washington has reasons to use force as it arrives within range, which could be before the next five weeks. That's probably what's leading to the, you know, give me the options before the full five weeks are up.

[00:12:05] And Iran has reasons to move first early. Why? Because they're seeing the same clocks. Everybody is seeing the midterms. Everybody is seeing all these clocks. This is what the world is responding to. And this is why this is such a nerve-wracking few weeks we're going through. Now, what happens if we go up the rung of escalation and America attacks Iran?

[00:12:36] Well, you're hearing this in the reporting that's come out in the last 24 hours that one of the key options is going to be hitting energy infrastructure in Iran. Now, why would you do that? Let me go back to that logic again. So, okay, so I mentioned to you they're already at high inflation.

[00:12:55] Well, a thing that most people don't either realize or take into account is that Iran's oil, most of its oil it pumps out of the ground, goes to its own people. Really cheap gasoline in Iran. And that's where over about 60 to 66 percent of all of Iran's oil goes to its own people.

[00:13:20] Only a small fraction, not small, a third of it or so, 40 percent, is exported. So what that means is if you're looking at this economically and you say, oh, man, we got them at 100 percent of inflation. If I could, how can I drive them to 150 or 200 percent in just two weeks? Take out some or many of the Iranian oil refineries. You're going to have a major effect on inflation. So you can see right away the temptation there, Scott.

[00:13:51] And that's what I'm trying to explain, that this is there really are reasons to think about this. However, Iran has escalation dominance here, not just a response. And that's what Abcake is. So Abcake is a facility I've been talking about for some time now on my escalation in my sub stacks. And the reason is because Abcake is the largest oil facility in the world.

[00:14:19] It handles seven million barrels a day. And what it's processing is separating the sulfur from the crude. And it's doing what's called making the oil sweeter. Well, that's what Abcake does. And this is a giant facility. It's above ground. It's stationary. And it's well known. The coordinates are completely known. And in and of itself, that one facility is 5% of the world's energy.

[00:14:48] Well, you knock that out in response. And this is that 7 million barrels a day. That's more than three times the 2 million barrels a day at most that Iran has been exporting on its best days over the last several years. So, in other words, this isn't just tit for tat. Iran literally has escalation dominance here.

[00:15:12] And if they were to take out Abcake or in combination with the Houthis take out Abcake or the Houthis and the Iraqi militias take out Abcake, you're definitely going to have the spike of oil. But you're going to have treasury yields climb. And the Gulf allies are going to be hedging even more. In other words, we can go up the ladder. They will feel the pain. We will feel it worse.

[00:15:39] This is a gift to Iran in around midterm season because this would give them the justification for doing something like this. So, Scott, it's important to understand this is a capability Iran has. But if we strike first, this allows them to do something and lash back in a way that weakens us more. And who does the world blame?

[00:16:08] America or America and Israel. That's what happened when we started the war in February 28. Iran lash back, got stronger. And who does the world blame? The United States and Israel. This is why this is just a bad idea. Now, the biggest gift to Iran would be to land Marines on an island or Iran's shore. Now, why might we do that?

[00:16:36] Let's talk about the military logic here about why you might do that. So, as folks in CENTCOM are going to know, when those drones and those Iranian missiles are attacking targets in ships, there's a kill chain. And that kill chain has spotters. Because, you see, the sensors on the drone and the missile aren't good enough to have fire and forget.

[00:17:01] You fire the drone from 500 miles away, generally in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf, and you magically hit a tanker. No, that's not how this works. You need to have spotters that narrow the location, identify the location radius, so that you fire the missiles into that radius. And that is then how you will hit your target. Well, we have been hitting the radars, which are spotters, for Iran for months.

[00:17:30] And this is, some people have said, well, isn't hitting the radars in preparation for landing? Well, maybe, but not so. Most likely, it's to knock out the spotters. And Oeric Island, that was a big reason why we made that attack. And what you could see, though, in the last week in particular, is that we knocked out the radars we saw. And the problem is that it's not stopping Iran from being able to hit ships.

[00:17:59] That is, their kill chain is still working. There are enough spotters that are working. So, then you might think, well, let's physically control this limited territory. And that will stop the spotters from being there. So, you could move a second marine expositionary unit. Now you have two. You could take one or both islands here, Oeric and Hormuz. You could also try to take an area around Shabahar.

[00:18:25] So, basically, you're getting areas here where you're going to try to take out where the spotters or the radars are in a more comprehensive way. Now, the big problem here is that Iran has options. Iran's not limited and tethered to one and only one set of territory for their spotters. They have mobile radars that can move to other areas.

[00:18:52] This is what the fastboats are very important for because the fastboats are basically provide the Mark II eyeball for you will literally have human spotters that can communicate with radios. And these can be launched from dozens of inlets around. They don't have to be launched from just a few. And, ultimately, you can, if you're Iran, you can go back to mines. And mines, you don't need spotters.

[00:19:19] So, the bottom line is that if we were to go down this road, we would discover quite limited, I think, ability to break the kill chain of Iran with its drones and missiles. And what Iran gets as a gift are fixed American targets. This becomes, the Marines become attrition sponges.

[00:19:43] And the terrain on these areas is just unbelievably horrible for the Marines because there's no cover. So, there's no good cover here for the Marines. And so, this is a gift to Iran. And if we were to attack, again, the world's going to be blaming us. A lot of people in Iran are going to be blaming us. And they're going to be very, very happy to kill those targets.

[00:20:11] And putting it in as a summary, the big gifts we're giving Iran here if we move up these rungs on the escalation ladder are targets. Every rung up the ladder hands Iran something new to hit. That is the fundamental problem with moving up the rungs of escalation.

[00:20:36] Now, we're in an escalation trap, meaning those incentives I just laid out for you are real for President Trump. And he's going to be sorely tempted, no matter what he says on True Social, all the way through the midterms and probably after the vote. Because we still have the question of the counting of the vote and the seating of the Congress. Now, the next question beyond this, Scott, is will Iran preempt? Will they move first?

[00:21:04] And I'm going to give a more fuller answer to that next week here. And so, that's going to be my focus on the escalation trap on my Monday escalation trap post. But that's where I wanted to leave us here today, Scott. I wanted to put this out here so that your audience can see the benefit of the short version of my thinking.

[00:21:30] If they want the longer version, they can go to the escalation trap and they'll get the full briefing. But I just wanted this to come across so we really understand what the actual issues are as we're making these incredibly important decisions. There's something else that you and I were talking about when we first started doing this reoccurring series. And that was the risk of suicide terrorism in the United States. You know, a week – what was it?

[00:21:56] A week ago, we had an Iranian-inspired, if not directed, attempted suicide attack with a pilot on the Abu Dhabi airliner. That was just inspired as far as we know. If we actually take territory in Iran, what does it look like with Iran actually directing suicide terrorism against the continental United States? So my – yeah.

[00:22:16] So to give you a condensed answer here is that it depends on whether we are there for a day, a week, or multiple months. So if we're there for a day or two or a week and then we just are in and out and we leave, then the risk of suicide terrorism here is not very great. And that's for multiple reasons. We can go into them.

[00:22:41] But let me just – the real bottom line is that what you see in suicide terrorist campaigns is that it takes some time for the taking of the territory to lead to the mechanisms where you congeal the support and then the actuality of suicide terrorist attacks. And that is over a period of months.

[00:23:03] So when Israel invaded southern Lebanon in June 1982, it went into deal with FADDH, that is basically Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization. And what it ended up doing is a month later creating Hezbollah. Hezbollah was born as a result of that. And then it was several months after that that there were the beginnings of a suicide attack in southern Lebanon.

[00:23:31] And then it was a year later, October 1983, you had the famous Marine barracks attack that killed so many of our great troops. Well, that is – if we look at the origins of the suicide terrorist campaign after we invade Iraq in 2003, you would find – it's not literally the same to the day, but you would find that there is several months here of a ramping up.

[00:24:01] And that is both for organizational reasons, public support reasons, discovering you'd have so few other options. So suicide terrorism is a strategy of last resort, not first resort. If it were just about religion, you would – it would be first resort. You'd do it right away. Let's get to heaven as fast as we can. But it's not about religion. It's about, again, community defense, as my books lay out.

[00:24:29] This is at least for 95 percent of them. And so you end up with months. It takes months. And that's why the real AQI, suicide terrorist campaign, we invaded in March of 2003. But it really starts around late July, early August 2003. Think of it as about a five-month period of time.

[00:24:54] And so it's – and then it becomes undeniable because it bloomed – it grows very rapidly. So once you get beyond an inflection point, it's not a slow ramp up. You end up getting a lot more attacks. So the campaigns, when the first few attacks start, usually the target country that was Israel in 1982 and the United States under Rumsfeld, they were denying that the first couple attacks were even happening.

[00:25:23] But very quickly thereafter, a month later, there's no denying it. It's just too big. You just can't deny it. And that happened with Israel as well. So this is what to expect here with CENTCOM. So that's why I've been warning that we would get likely some small amounts of terrorism with Iran. You can see – I've said this on Piers Morgan, I think, in July.

[00:25:49] It was around the time of the 10 million who showed up for the Supreme Leader's funeral. I might have said it on your show. But what I said is it went from the risk of terrorism being nil to being low or low to medium, not high yet. But nonetheless, it wasn't still zero.

[00:26:07] And that meant that it was really important to recognize that the risk had gone up of getting on airplanes, civilian aircraft in places like the UAE. And now myself personally, I'm willing to go to Europe. I went to Europe, to Brussels. But Abu Dhabi wanted me to go right around now, and I wouldn't go. And they offered me a big pile of money, and I still wouldn't go. And so the problem is I've got to – I'm a dad.

[00:26:37] I mean, you know, there is an issue with how much risk you take because you have responsibilities. And that's – you know, I have fewer responsibilities now, but I've still got some responsibilities. So it is a – it's – so I was responding to the rough level of threat here, but it wasn't because I thought it was already maximally high.

[00:27:02] So I'm not at all surprised you had the Tel Aviv flight incident. I'm not – that I think looks completely inspired. On my Escalation Trap substack, the very first information we got about it within, I think, 12 or so hours, I put a post out where I said was a suicide or suicide attack. It was most likely a suicide attack, and here's the reason why.

[00:27:31] And I showed a map that the co-pilot tried to take over the cockpit after two and a half hours of flight from Dubai, and that was only 30 minutes from Tel Aviv. And that was the key piece of information, not whether it was Omani and not – anyway, that was the key piece of information because if it really was just suicide, you probably would have done this earlier.

[00:27:58] You do it right away, so less chance there would be a way to mess up your suicide plan. And what it – the proximity to Tel Aviv made it look like take over the plane. You want to kill the people on the plane, but you also want to kill a target. You want to hit a target. And then the more information that's come out about that, the more it looks like that is right.

[00:28:23] And so I put out more posts as more information has come out that has – it's not still 100% certain that it's a suicide attack, so I wouldn't go 100%, but I'd say it's beyond 90%. And the fact is, a lot of people are skeptical of it, but from what I can see, they're not skeptical as they actually have any evidence. They're skeptical as they don't trust Israel. They don't trust the UAE. They just don't trust.

[00:28:52] Well, that's not evidence-based. That's just because I just don't like you. So I'm giving you the clear-eyed what the evidence is saying. I'm not telling you to trust anybody. I'm just telling you what the evidence is. And then you – but I think the RAF incident where there was apparently a threat of a drone attack against our B-1s that got us to get out of dodge there apparently overnight within 12 hours,

[00:29:21] that doesn't look like it was inspired. That looks – if it's inspired, it's got a heavy dose of command-directed to it because for weeks the IRGC has been complaining about that exact air base and that exact issue that the B-1 bombers are there and they're there to attack Iran. So it doesn't mean it's 100% command-directed in the sense that somebody is literally on the phone in Tehran ordering that.

[00:29:51] But there's this kind of intermediate stage where, you know, it's still inspired. But in this case, Tehran, the IRGC is telling – hit that base there. I don't mean just hit them generally. So they said do it and then it happened. We can't prove the two are related, but at some point –

[00:30:13] Well, you can see there's a lot of people burning the midnight oil in DIA and CIA, I'm pretty sure, trying to connect these dots with what's called linkages. In Intel, it's the linkages. Can you get the linkages? And I understand when you're a captain and that's your job to get the linkage.

[00:30:34] But the truth is, I think we kind of can go overboard with demanding we have the actual linkage when, okay, it's not that there was somebody on a cell phone in Tehran communicating this directly. But it's an extremely heavy dose of command-directed in that case. And we took – I mean, we took it seriously enough to move those B-1s out.

[00:31:03] And I at least trust our commanders that there's something there there because that's a very expensive thing to do in the last minute. It's embarrassing to do. It doesn't mean they've lost their ability to hit targets because you can fly from CONUS, of course. So – but it is the case that – so what I would say is, though, that if we actually get into a three- to six-month ground war, whatever that looks like here,

[00:31:31] then a lot of things become dangerous inside the United States. Inside the United States. I don't mean over there just – and so the kind of thing you're seeing with Tel Aviv, the kind of idea of a drone attack against an RAF base in Britain, suddenly there's going to be those possibilities of drone attacks against military bases, airports in the United States, shoulder-fired missiles against aircraft in the United States.

[00:31:59] These are going to be – and we're going to be, by the way, extremely – as soon as even the first whiff of that happens, we're going to go, you know, sort of ballistic as a country here. You think we were profiling after 9-11. You wait until this happens. And you're not going to stop 330 million people in the United States from becoming so – yeah.

[00:32:22] So this is – you can see, this whole thing can start to go haywire pretty fast. And so that's why these weeks are so important. And that's why the ground operation is so important. It's – once you're in for – another final thing to say about the ground operation is a lot of people think that it must necessarily be the case that the Marines go in and they are killed,

[00:32:51] that we will then just pull back. Like, we'll touch the hot stove and we won't do it again. Well, this becomes a very different thing because now we're insulting the deaths of our military. And so now the question is, will we be – basically say that they died for nothing and then we're throwing their lives away? That whole issue was a big problem in Vietnam.

[00:33:16] And so it really is, to this day even, a problem because when you're sacrificing your life for your country and you die, then the idea that you lose all the honor for that is just incredibly problematic. So that's why I want to analyze these problems in advance, Scott.

[00:33:42] I want to focus on them in advance because the idea that we'll just kind of come out of this okay is – the consequences here are just really horrible for so many people. There's another escalation trap that some of us think might be brewing in the Middle East. I wanted to ask about real quick with the activation of the Mecca Pact. Oh, sure. I look forward to speaking with the brief – with you on the – your group on The Briefing Room. Thanks for watching.

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