Robert Pape argues the U.S. is trapped in a costly "escalation trap" in the Middle East, having lost 6,600 lives and $5 trillion while risking a worse terrorist resurgence. He proposes "offshore balancing," shifting defense burdens to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, replacing broad sanctions with focused escalation limits, and repositioning naval power away from vulnerable onshore bases. Pape warns that current policies empower China's rise and urges citizens to bypass gridlocked Congress by using the internet to assemble concrete solutions, as political disintegration prevents necessary policy shifts driven by reputation concerns. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Laying the Foundation for Change00:02:53
Thanks very much, Brian.
That was great.
Our next speaker, I'm very happy, uh, to have here, uh, when he released, uh, Dying to Win in 2005, Dr. Paul and I were starting to, Dr. Paul and I were starting to create a coalition inside the House of People, of Republicans, who were getting nervous about the Iraq War.
The greatest thing that I think Professor Pape did then is that he challenged the stereotype that they hate us for our freedoms.
He did the most in-depth study, objective academic study of what motivates people To commit suicide terrorism.
So it was very important.
So when this war broke out, Professor Pape has come out and completely exploded everywhere on social media.
You can't miss him.
He has some other great analysis about what's happening now.
So we're so happy to reconnect with Professor Robert Pape.
Thank you very much, everyone.
It is a great pleasure to be here.
Ron Paul inspires.
He inspired me 20 years ago when he used my work on the causes of how foreign interventions cause suicide terrorist attacks like 9 11 to literally lay the foundation to do something nobody at the time thought could be done.
End the scourge of suicide terrorism.
He did that in multiple ways.
He brought me, as you just heard, for years to the Liberty Caucus, to congressional committees, to give testimony over and over to both parties about what was truly driving suicide attacks like 9 11, our foreign military presence in the Middle East.
No one really wanted to hear that.
Ron Paul made sure they heard that.
Then, when he ran for president, He would call me up because he's debating Giuliani on this issue.
And over and over, we would go over, and this is, I'm just a professor, go over exactly what the points would be, what his points would be, back and forth.
And I'll tell you, that was watched by tens of millions of people.
This was laying the foundation for change.
That is why I'm inspired.
By Ron Paul.
And Dr. Paul, you inspired my talk today.
So I'm going to talk a bit about what you've heard on social media, but I'm going to give you a new talk, something I haven't given before.
Escaping Forever Wars00:15:41
I want to talk about how we're really going to get out of these forever wars, for real, not just talk about it.
I'm going to try to do this in 20 minutes.
I've asked, maybe we can take a few questions.
I realize that's a little unusual, but I believe in interaction.
So let me just talk for about 20 minutes.
For 25 years, the United States has been trapped in a cycle of forever wars in the Middle East, and this must stop.
I hope you agree.
What began after 9 11 was a necessary act of defense, but it became something else.
A pattern of intervention without clear objectives, without defined endpoints, and without lasting success.
And the worst part, the sheer waste.
The cost of regime change forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is now undisputable.
20 years of war, over 6,600 American deaths, twice.
The number lost on 9 11.
Tens of thousands awfully wounded, and roughly $5 trillion, and probably more spent that could have been spent on ending American prosperity at home.
Imagine if even a fraction of those trillions had been spent uplifting the economies here in Houston, or in Oklahoma, or in Kentucky, or my hometown, Erie, Pennsylvania.
What a difference that would have made.
America would not be $40 trillion in debt, wondering how to balance paying for medication and a breakfast at Denny's.
And the carnage from the deindustrialization would largely be a thing of the past without those forever wars.
And here's the hardest truth of all this was not a partisan failure.
In 2002, 77 senators from both parties voted for this war.
This was a systemic failure, it was a failure of strategy.
And yet today, We are doing exactly that again because the world has changed, but we still don't have a real strategy for the Middle East.
Now, without a clear strategy for the Middle East, I believe this is going to happen again and again.
Because when you have no idea where you're going, many things can divert you.
Israel can divert you, the military industrial complex can divert you, shifty politicians can divert you.
So, the real thing I'm going to lay out is that strategy.
But before I do, let me just say a word about Iran, because you see, in Iran, we were told this is different.
Well, of course, we're always told it's different.
But you know, and we all know, this is just more of the same.
We have the initial strikes, the expectations of rapid success, assumptions about the regime's fragility, and then reality sets in.
The regime does not collapse, the conflict spreads, the costs rise, and the objectives begin to shift to God knows where they're going.
All to save a president's reputation, not to save America.
This is the escalation trap I write about.
This is tightening.
And right now, we are at a fork in the road.
Either we today, and we're talking about this today literally, escalate to take Hormuz and countless Americans will die in the future, or we walk away and Iran becomes the fourth center of world power.
And, and this is what people don't like to hear on that side, and then as the fourth center of world power works with Russia and China to likely crush America's economy in other ways.
And when that happens, we're going to be right back at military escalation.
Now, I believe there is a third way.
We need an actual alternative.
Otherwise, we're coming right back.
Now, this may take new leadership.
I can't tell you it won't.
And I don't know that it's going to happen soon with this White House.
But we should at least identify what that third way is and do what we can starting now.
To head toward it.
So, why do we need another approach?
You see, Iran is not just going to be another forever war, it's more dangerous than that because it threatens the foundations of America's prosperity and power itself.
If we stay on this path of escalation months or years, a military effort to contain and weaken Iran, two things are going to follow.
And if those follow, the outcome is really not uncertain, folks.
It's completely predictable.
First, we will continue to spend our blood and treasure in the Middle East while the economic foundations of our prosperity at home weaken and possibly collapse.
While we are going to spend new billions, possibly trillions, again in the Middle East, we will be adding to our $40 trillion in debt.
Inflation, sorry to say, is likely to double by the summer.
Could get higher after that.
Unemployment is going to rise.
This is already baked in.
And we will not be investing in our future.
We're going to wreck our future.
The second thing that's going to happen is that we're recreating the conditions that generate terrorism that you just heard about.
And I'm sorry to say, this could be worse than ISIS.
And that terrorism can come home to the United States.
Previous speakers both talked about how large scale bombings here have already created images.
Those nearly 200 girls burned to death.
We may not want to watch those images.
I guarantee you, those images are watched by 92 million Iranians, 500 million Muslims in the Middle East, and many others around the world.
That has not come back to hit us today.
It usually takes five or six months to get those things going.
I'm sorry to say that.
This is just because it didn't happen yet does not mean we're out of the woods and we keep going down that road.
Electric power, yes, you see that already.
Now, when you combine these two effects, economic disaster and renewed terrorism at home, you don't just weaken American power, you systematically erode America's prosperity and power by diverting resources from what builds our economic strength.
You increase our vulnerability at home while crowding out the investments needed to sustain America's prosperity into the future.
Now, at this point, the United States faces a defining choice.
For a generation, America's strategy has equated strength with intervention.
This is a wrong assumption.
We need a different principle.
A different principle, one that preserves America's power over time and does not ignore the mounting threats coming at us.
And here's the core principle we should follow it must be the policy of the United States to strengthen the economic foundations of its power at home and to use military force abroad only to prevent threats that cannot be contained by others.
That is Is, I believe, the key principle.
And that is how America builds peace and prosperity, how America can contain escalation in the Middle East, and how America can preserve our competitive edge against China in the 21st century.
Now, this means strength is not measured by how many wars we can fight, it's measured by whether America truly becomes stronger over time.
Now, this principle only matters if we can translate it into concrete action.
So, let me be concrete about how this applies to the Iran war.
And let me make four points.
And altogether, I call these a shift to offshore balancing.
We need a name for where we're going, not just what we don't want to do, but what we're doing.
Otherwise, we'll never know what we're doing.
And I believe offshore balancing has four pillars.
First, we reposition America's power.
The United States should move away in the Middle East.
From vulnerable onshore bases and large fixed military footprints that have become essentially targets toward permanently offshore naval forces and carrier based air power, and not temporarily as we do every so often.
Our role is not to fight every part of this war, our role is to contain escalation.
This means those carrier forces.
Should focus on the highest end threats, Iranian missiles, drone capabilities that could destabilize the entire region.
Second, we shift the operational burden to regional actors.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates must take primary responsibility for defending their own shipping and securing the Gulf.
That should not be America's mission.
They have the most at stake.
This must be their mission.
This is the core of a sustainable security strategy because it truly aligns interests and responsibilities.
That means expanding the naval patrols, escort operations, and critically, the use of drones and other low cost systems by Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Iran's small, fast boats.
Those harassment attacks should not be our responsibility.
Those should be the responsibility of the local actors.
So basically, here's the division of labor I'm suggesting.
The Gulf states should handle the daily, close range threats.
The United States should handle the more difficult, longer range threats that would limit escalation.
Third, we need to create the conditions for restraint.
I don't mean trust.
I mean true restraint.
And that applies to the shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Under the strategy I'm proposing, both Iran and the Gulf states would face a clear choice continue attacking each other's shipping, not America attacking Iran's shipping, they attack each other's shipping, or they don't, or they restrain themselves in a mutual restrained way.
That would recognize the mutual vulnerability of each other's shipping, and that puts the responsibility where it belongs on the local actors.
This is not about idealism, it's not about liberalism.
This is about changing the incentive structure in a way that we can actually limit escalation.
Fourth and finally, this strategy requires a clear shift with our current economic blockade.
The United States should redefine its naval mission from broad economic coercion to focused defense.
That means ending open ended economic interdiction and shifting, as I said, the burden to local Gulf allies to protect their own shipping lanes.
But it means something more.
It means that the American objective should no longer be to collapse the Iranian economy, which is what it is right now.
It should be instead to limit escalation and prevent the conflict from expanding.
Now, why focus on this?
Why give up the economic coercion?
The effort to compel Iran to surrender to American terms by blockading and crushing its economy that way, I have to tell you, folks, has little real chance of success.
This is not about being Mr. Nice Guy or Mr. Good Guy or Mr. Harsh Guy.
For 30 years, I have studied economic sanctions and blockades.
I'd study suicide terrorism, air power.
This is a natural complement.
And here's the harsh reality that you have not been hearing on CNN, MSNBC, and very few other places, I should point out.
Sanctions, even when they're strong, tight, blockades, they do produce economic pressure, that's for sure.
But that economic pressure on the target, just like bombing the target, hardens the regime.
And it hardens support for the regime unless you combine it with ground operations.
This is the lesson that we learned in Iraq in the 1990s.
For 12 years, the United States and other countries imposed nearly airtight oil sanctions and other sanctions on Iraq, crippling its economy by 50%, double what we could expect to cripple Iran's economy.
The Limits of Military Force00:02:44
And we did that every year for 12 years.
Until what?
We finally launched the ground war.
Sanctions, blockades, these are not alternatives to military force.
They're often the preconditions to military force because they take that complaint, you haven't tried the other option, off the table.
We need a true alternative to our strategy, what we're doing now.
I believe that alternative is offshore balancing.
Which means partner led military operations, not American led military operations.
I don't believe offshore balancing is retreating.
We're changing America's role from a primary combatant, where we've been, gosh, for a long time in the Middle East, to essentially a strategic backstop.
And that is how you protect American power while you avoid the next forever war.
The foundation of American power is not what we destroy abroad.
It's what we build here at home.
For a generation, we've chosen forever wars and escalation, believing that more force abroad will give us more control.
The record shows the opposite.
We now face a different choice.
Either we continue the path of escalation, which is what we are now doing literally today, and that will lead to overextension, or we choose a different strategy grounded in a different principle, not just simply bouncing around from day to day.
And that principle must start with what builds America's strength at home.
That should be the core to our security strategy.
So, I'll say again, it must be the policy of the United States to strengthen the economic foundations of its power at home and to use military force abroad only to prevent threats that cannot be contained by others.
That, I think, should be America's principle in the Middle East.
I would apply that broadly around the world.
The decision, though, is now.
This trajectory to accept the steady loss is to Do we accept the steady loss of America's position at home or abroad?
Strengthening America at Home00:08:34
Or do we act anew?
Do we move forward with a new principle, a new strategy?
We can build, and I believe if we do, we can build a future that sustains America's great experiment for as far as the eye can see.
Now, last night, you heard Dr. Paul optimist.
And that's one of the things that's always inspired me about him.
And you've just heard a pretty hard kind of reality here, and then a pretty alternative way.
But fundamentally, I too am an optimist.
And why is that?
And even with the current administration, it's because of you, or more fully, you and the internet.
As you've just heard, I started a substack literally three days before the Iran war.
This thing has totally exploded.
What I'm seeing.
And I'm not just copying what others are doing.
I'm doing new things.
And what I'm seeing is we've only begun to take advantage of what we can do on the internet, not just simply to communicate, but to assemble, to engage on the internet.
This is why I am optimistic.
And when I say we move forward now, this is what we should be moving forward in droves with our energy.
Support, expand, experiment with new ways to communicate and assemble on the internet.
This is the American way updated for the 21st century.
This is where we should go.
And with your help, I believe we can do that.
Now, I've asked them if it's okay to experiment.
They don't normally let the speaker take any questions.
We're going to have a few minutes here.
So, I want to show you, I really do believe in experimentation.
So, I want to take a few questions.
Yep, somebody's already got their hand up.
Okay, him first, then you.
All right, and it's okay to disagree, it's okay to challenge.
This is what it means to be in the new age.
Yes, sir, way in the back, and I'll repeat your question.
To squeeze China?
Yeah, let me talk about squeezing China.
So last June, yeah, the question.
Yes, he is asking, he's saying that there's an argument floating around that this is all some brilliant strategy to squeeze China, the Iran war.
I was in China for two weeks while we bombed Fordeaux last June, literally while we're bombing Fordeaux.
And I was visiting all of the advanced industries.
So I'm not doing the usual thing, I did give a few talks.
But I wanted to see on the shop floor, BYD, what those robots are doing.
I wanted to go to Alibaba.
I wanted to literally go for two weeks.
And that's what I did for 18 hours a day for two weeks.
And in the evenings, I had all these dinners.
And I had all these dinners with these BYD executives and everyone else.
And you know what they told me about the US in the Middle East?
And they said, more power to America because they may lose a percent of GDP here or there.
But they're going to gain five years in replacing us as the world's number one.
And the reason is because, and they show me the business plans, they've been planning for 10 years since Trump slapped those 10% sanctions on in 2017.
They've been preparing.
They've pulled back from one.
They have huge oil reserves.
They're cutting back their dependency on oil.
They're going huge into solar.
This has been going on not just for a year or two or talking points in China.
So, this idea that this is somehow going to wreck China?
No, I don't think so.
Right now, we're number one in GDP.
China's number two.
I'm worried in five years, not 20 years, this is going to flip.
And I think those, and one of the things you're seeing in China, they're not bragging.
They're quietly going about their business, beating us.
So, this is what's really going on.
I think Xi can't wait to get President Trump, and we'll see if Trump goes, because guess what?
He's going to have to give up.
Taiwan.
They're Taiwanese, I know, because they're consul in Chicago.
They're shaking in their boots.
Yes, sir.
Putting this in the context of the seminar, I know you were talking about, you know, other people have talked about the disproportionate Israeli influence on our policy.
So, if what you're proposing is a more balanced foreign policy where we don't let any foreign country control our affairs, we all want the straits open.
You have to have.
I'm saying that we want a better deal in the Strait of Hormuz.
Whose actually's interest there is it in the Strait of Hormuz?
It is Saudi Arabia, it is the UAE, and there's others, of course, as well.
Notice I'm not focusing on Israel.
I'm not trying to tell you, and partly it's because Israel's just going to get smashed politically no matter what.
I mean, that's just going to happen, whether it happens in 27 or 28.
We all know it.
I mean, this is like, we all know the world's economy is coming down.
We know that's happening.
So why am I here to tell you that?
You already know that.
I'm here to move forward and tell you something you don't already know.
Okay.
We're going to deal with that over there.
But what are we actually going to do in the Middle East?
What are we really going to do in the Middle East?
You see what I mean?
That's what nobody really wants to talk about here.
And I'm just telling you, I'm, I'm laying out what we should do.
And I mean, we start today on the internet.
We start moving in this direction now.
I don't know if you can move the White House or not.
I'm not that optimistic, to be honest with you.
And so, but the bottom line is, this isn't about just moving Trump for a day or two.
We've got a fundamental problem.
We've got a vacuum here of a strategy.
There's nothing there.
And that's why it's so easy to pull it this way or that.
And so, we can pull MBS, can pull one.
We need to define what do we think the strategy should be, not just call up MBS or Netanyahu and say, oh, what do you guys think and triangulate Bill Clinton style.
I'm laying out the actual, what I think is a policy.
And people may disagree, but I'm trying to give an actual benchmark here.
So, if you disagree, you say, oh no, you got four points, Professor Pay, three are okay, this fourth is wrong, you didn't add the fifth.
Now we can build an actual approach.
Yes, sir?
How about 2003 Air Force Academy Ground Site?
I taught for the Air Force for three years.
Thank you.
Yep.
I think that they haven't really...
So I've advised every White House since 2001 to 2024, including the first Trump administration White House on various things.
Also, the chief staff of the Air Force on various things, also, our secretaries of defense.
And what I discover here is our folks are actually pretty smart in Washington, and they can get boned up pretty quick when they decide they actually really want to know.
I think what's happening right now in Washington is everybody's really ducking.
And they're ducking because something's happening in Washington, which is Trump's power is disintegrating.
And they have no idea where they are.
I mean, it's not so much about predicting the trajectory of the polls and so forth.
Trump's Power Disintegrating00:05:00
It's not that.
It's that you've got 535 members of Congress, and there's only a few lifeboats, and they're trying to figure out where they get a lifeboat right now, and what would that even look like.
And I think that's a real problem.
So I'm really not that optimistic about moving Congress between, and I think you see that with the kind of things coming up.
About the war power.
I mean, really, we're going to talk about the war powers resolution in the situation with the economies going over a cliff.
So, no, I just don't think, sir, that that's a.
And so, what I think is probably in January, we'll see, it might be a pretty rocky time to get to January, though, folks.
Pretty rocky, okay?
But by the time then, we might be able to do something.
Between now and then, it's we the people, it is us, it is our democracy, and we have the internet.
Yes, sir.
Well, just want to keep in mind, I obviously love, I mean, I really respect Dr. Paul.
I mean, you're just hearing that here, but we're now at a point where we need to fill in the empty cell with something.
Because if you don't, others are going to fill it in.
And that's what I'm trying to tell you it's not enough to just simply say, everybody go home and walk away.
We need a little bit more.
Now, that little bit more doesn't mean we're trapped in an escalation trap.
That's my point.
My whole point.
That's why I'm calling it that.
I'm trying to get us out of the trap.
But if we don't have a direction, if we don't actually understand that what matters in the Middle East is the local countries must do 90 plus percent of the work militarily, we just can't do that for them, folks.
And that's what you see.
You've heard all the expenditures of all this.
I mean, this just isn't working out.
And it's not going to work out just to say, well, we'll bounce back over here because.
I also got to tell you, when that economy, when the inflation really doubles on you, and when unemployment really doubles on you, and that's where we're heading here by the fall, you're going to get a lot of anger.
Some of it's going to go to Israel, some of it's going to go to Trump, a lot of it's going to go to Iran, especially if you end up with that terrorism.
And they can't, they'd have to shut down the terrorism.
I mean, think about that.
In order to stop the terrorism coming at us now, Iran has to shut that down.
That's what we're talking about.
They're currently not actually doing much.
They're making laughing stock of President Trump online.
You're probably all seeing that.
They're not doing the ISIS videos, though.
Okay?
But this is still a problem.
One last one, and then they're going to kick me off.
Yes, you're in the back.
Okay, quick.
You got.
Yeah, 10 words.
Yeah, let me respond to that.
I was on redacted on Fox for 20 minutes.
And I was really explaining to the, let me just respond to this, sir.
Because I was explaining to them the White House, this White House, should already be cutting policies for truckers to help them pay for that gas.
So one of the things you're going to see that's going to happen is cost of fuel goes up.
That's all going to be passed on.
Those truckers are the ones that are the key.
These are the MAGA voters.
So why we got the, you, you, you got the president.
Who's MAGA?
Okay.
You got the House who's MAGA and you got the Senate who's MAGA.
Where is Scott Bessett?
Where is Ludwig?
Where is the proposal to help those truckers?
I don't see that.
Now, you might say, well, I'm not a trucker.
It doesn't matter to me.
No, those eggs are going up.
Okay.
You're, that really matters to you.
So I'm, I'm not, I'm just trying to be practical here.
And the problem is, this is what I mean.
We need to really be talking.
And if they don't have proposals, we don't need them.
We can give them proposals here.
We got triple digit IQs.
We can come up with things that will help us.
But we can't just keep thinking they're going to help themselves, help us.
And the reason is because President Trump has a problem.
His reputation is on the line.
Guess what he's probably thinking about 99% of the time?
Okay, his reputation.
Well, we got the rest of the country, 333 million of us, and I believe we can do more than we're doing.
But just like I tell my students at the University of Chicago, I'll write letters for you, but you've got to do 95% of the skyrocketing here.
I can only help a little bit.
I believe that's true.
And I believe that's what Ron Paul believes.
I believe this is what we whipped ourselves up.
And if government's not helping, we start helping.
Anyway, I better go because otherwise they're going to throw me off.