Iran's Funeral Just Changed the War | Robert Pape's Warning to Washington

[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 6th of July, 2026, and let's get started. Now, over the weekend, America had an awesome party celebrating the 4th of July, good times, while across the world, the funeral for the Ayatollah was being held in Iran. Millions of people poured out into the streets. Massive display of national unity.

[00:00:27] Now, what does this mean for the future of the conflict going forward? Is this going to support hardliners in the regime? Is it all just propaganda? Does it have any impact at all on the capabilities of the nation-states at play? Well, for all that, we go to Robert Papes from the University of Chicago. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to his awesome substack, The Escalation Track. Link will be in the show notes.

[00:00:49] And if you've enjoyed this series of ongoing contact with the professor, please be sure to like, subscribe, and share an episode with a friend. It really helps get the show out to more people. Well, good morning and welcome back to the podcast. Glad that you have power and connectivity again after a wonderful 4th of July weekend.

[00:01:07] Yeah, and it was pretty wonderful, Scott. And so thanks for asking. I just explained that we lost power for 48 hours. And so we spent it a little bit north of Chicago with my 97-year-old mother-in-law, basically in a hotel room and without any cell service.

[00:01:24] So we were great. It was great. We got to watch President Trump try to have the celebration. We still celebrated 250 anyway. So we were there with three other people watching on TV late at night. I will say, I think I had more fun up here in rural upstate New York than anyone in D.C. was having, but it was a lovely 4th of July weekend.

[00:01:48] Yeah, so actually, and I really want to say thanks to all the great service here of all the people who are listening here. You know, it's thanks to our folks in uniform that we're here and God willing, it'll be another 250 years. God willing. And actually, we have, I actually have two questions from folks in uniform overseas right now that work in one of the two shops on one of the ships that might be in a region involved in some stuff.

[00:02:18] For folks not knowing, the two shop is shorthand for they work in the intelligence staff section of a unit. So a couple of incel weenies. J2. Yep. So big thing that happened this past week, there's some diplomatic chatter. We're going to have negotiations with Iran on the 11th. That's all lovely. Kuwait and Bahrain went to the Security Council and complained about being attacked by Iran. It's interesting that nations still go through the process of doing that like it matters, but good for them.

[00:02:46] The funeral of the Ayatollah, big event in Iran. Lots of interesting stuff happened. A lot of folks were looking at this, trying to see what public signals we would get from the funeral and from what we've seen. And of course, propagandize news, censorship, all that. But what we saw was a pretty unified demonstration from a pissed off populace that seems like they want to stay in the fight. Didn't see spoiling events by folks in Iran.

[00:03:15] Didn't see a spoiling attack by Israel, which there was a betting poll about whether or not Israel was actually going to directly attack the funeral to really throw a wrench in the works. Yeah.

[00:03:52] And that's a big issue. So I've been working on this. So it's not quite true. I didn't have any connectivity to anybody. I did watch what was happening on the news on this. And so it was quite clear over the weekend, all the events you were just describing. And this is going to be extremely important. And then we'll come to the issue of Israel, if you want to know my assessment on the Israeli issue as a side, as a secondary thing. But let's focus on this. This is the big event that just happened, Scott.

[00:04:22] And it's very it's it's not it's being, if anything, downplayed on television and the media. It's very understandable. I mean, this is our Fourth of July. This is smack in our face. It's, you know, and you're hearing everybody wants to introduce this as propaganda and so forth. This is missing a gigantic thing that is now happening. So here's the the very big picture, Scott, which is for months, the balance of power.

[00:04:51] That is the balance of capabilities has been shifting toward Iran. We've been talking about that on our weekly podcast for weeks and weeks and unpacking that. The balance of power did not shift. Capabilities did not shift over the weekend. The balance of political will shifted. So threat is capability times will.

[00:05:17] So that capability has been shifting now for quite some time in Iran's favor. It has to do a straight of four moves, et cetera, et cetera. But what happened this weekend is cape is will is shifting. And it's shifting in extremely important ways that are not just a weekend. This is not just a one off. It's not like this is all going to go away when the funeral is over.

[00:05:47] So, number one, what you are seeing here is the reality of millions and millions. Now, is it exactly 15 million people that have shown up? We probably never going to be able to document that. But we have 100 foreign countries documenting this in Tehran. 100 foreign countries doing this. This is not just a handful of people in the Iranian regime orchestrating this here.

[00:06:17] And even if it was, think about what that would mean. These handful of people could work. That's a huge demonstration of capacity. If it's propaganda, it doesn't mean it's not effective. Exactly. That's what I'm trying to say. But it might be bullshit. You can grow a lot of stuff in bullshit. Manure works. Well, and you might remember we if you go back and look at the old films from World War II with Nazi Germany, we said the same thing. Oh, there's no real public support for Hitler as they're killing us in droves. OK.

[00:06:44] Or there's no real public support for the VC in Vietnam. Yeah. So. Well, thank goodness, because imagine if there were how much worse it would get. Exactly. So. So this is there's there's just tremendous. It's it's beyond simply the videos. And you've got the independent CNN is there and they are documenting this with their own eyes, saying that this is with our own eyes, not just simply with the cameras. So.

[00:07:12] So there's really no reason to doubt this reality here. OK. Although people will want to doubt it because it's just so hurtful to us. Oh, my goodness gracious. But what this what this is about is how the trauma that this society has experienced in the last now four and a half months is translating into anger.

[00:07:38] And it's not translating into anger against the regime, because with that many people on the street, if you wanted to have a French revolution, you could have it. There's too many people there to mow down here. OK, you start mowing them down. They're going to mow you down right back. OK, so. So this is that huge. If you if if you look at the the millions and millions here day after day after day.

[00:08:06] So it's not like Tenement Square. This is much, much bigger than that. So what you have here is a society that has been traumatized by the. And I'm going to go through the details by the killing of leadership, by all the people in Iran. And what you might think is that the trauma would lead to cowering. That almost never happens, Scott, here.

[00:08:37] And usually you need a ground war if you're going to get that kind of cowering. Air power blockade alone. Leadership decapitation doesn't produce us. Now, now, let me just explain the scale of what we're talking about, because we don't really like to talk about this in the media here because I know because I'm in the media and they just don't like to talk about it. OK, but what has happened here.

[00:09:03] Is in the opening of the war, we didn't just kill a supreme leader who was like our president of the United States. We killed the leader, his wife, like our first lady, three members of what would be the first family. We killed all together about 50.

[00:09:23] This is just in the opening week or so of the top national political leaders, military leaders, intelligence leaders and religious leaders in the country, the top 50. So that is like taking out our president, our first lady, three members of the first family. That is taking out parts of the cabinet who would be in the succession.

[00:09:52] That's when Donald Trump says we took out the next group as well. OK, and also the senior leadership of the Pentagon, the senior leadership of the intelligence, the CIA here. And that's just the leaders that we knocked out. OK, now, in addition to that, over the six weeks of the bombing, upwards of and we don't have perfect numbers.

[00:10:17] We all understand that somewhere around three thousand seven hundred people were killed. That includes a mixture of military and civilian, which we'll probably never sort out. In other words, in that six weeks, they lost. We lost on 9-11 three thousand people. Mixture of civilian and military and first responders, just to kind of put this in some comparative.

[00:10:44] However, we had 300 million people in the country when that happened. They have they have about 90 million, maybe 92 million in the country, which means that this is somewhere in proportionate terms. Three to four 9-11s all happened. Almost a 9-11 a week happening in their country. Now, that is an enormous amount of trauma to a country.

[00:11:14] And it didn't go down because, remember, then we inflicted the punishment of the blockade, too. So we keep layering, layering, layering on this. And what you get in a society and I've studied this for 30 plus years, Scott. I mean, this is one of the big things in bombing to win. It's one of my big areas. I go through this and go through this in great detail. What you get in this situation is not the shattering of civilian morale.

[00:11:43] What you get in this situation is payback, anger, the demand for anger. And where was this most recently for us visible? Right after 9-11 in the United States. So on 9-11 itself, Scott, I was on the Chicago Talking Head show called Chicago Tonight. It was a huge honor. I'm on with Dick Durbin, senators, Rahm Emanuel. I mean, it was a big honor.

[00:12:10] I'm this, what am I doing there as a kid, you know, academic? I was there to talk about the impact of this as if it were an air attack. And one of the things I said on this show, and it's still there on tape, people can Google it, is I warned that what is going to happen is this trauma that happened to us on this day.

[00:12:32] And I'm saying it's the night of 9-11 is going to morph into not just grief, but fear and anger that's going to lead us to lash back. And every one of those politicians said, well, Professor Pay, very nice. We're never going to do that. As then, 18 months later, we didn't take out two countries, one country. We took out two.

[00:12:57] And it was called, and I live in Chicago, and I would go to church and so forth, and they would explain to me in church, this is the Chicago way. You take one of, you put one of ours in the hospital. We send two of yours to the morgue. Churches are different in Chicago. We didn't have that growing up where I was at. Well, this is what we, this, I'm just telling you, religion, people think religion is very pacifist. I'm there to tell you that this is not true, and it's not about the religions over there.

[00:13:25] People get pretty angry when you start trying to mess with their religion, man. So anyway, but what you see is that this led to 70% of the American public, about 67%, supporting the war in Iraq, which there was no evidence Iraq had anything to do with 9-11. We were just angry, and we were just not done. It was too easy. Afghanistan was just too easy.

[00:13:55] Okay. And so, and now you look back on this, and we call them forever wars, and we say, oh, never again. Well, at the time, and this wasn't just the day of 9-11. This went on for years. It wasn't never again. It was can't wait. You see, we want to go get them. And this is in history.

[00:14:14] So my books lay this, I lay this out in detail in so many cases where the desire for payback, and it causes the governments to replace their militaries because the military say, sir, this isn't really going to work out too well. We should focus on winning the war. And so the leadership said, well, that's fine. You think that? You're gone. Okay. And then they do this, and it doesn't help them win the war.

[00:14:41] Actually, the militaries that were fired often were right. But that doesn't, it's because there's so much domestic political anger, you can't contain it. And that's what you're really seeing here, Scott. And that's what needs to be explained, especially to our folks here on the front lines. This is real. And this is going to be, this is going to go on for months and months and months. It's not going to be overturned because, and they're all seeing it now.

[00:15:09] See, another point about this, and this is what happens in a demonstration, is you don't just see your anger on display. You're seeing everybody else also sharing your anger, which of course then means it normalizes it. You get permission to be angry. That is what you're seeing here.

[00:15:31] So, so all, you know, all, it doesn't mean all 92 million are just as angry, but you don't need 92 million to be that angry. 10 to 15, plenty, good enough here. And they all know it here. And what that will do is it will make it even harder to get up. So why is there, let me just circle back to, I was worried that Israel might try to pull something off this week. And it's not over yet. This might still happen.

[00:16:00] And what I said on some other shows was that I assessed Israel's will to kill leaders in Iran at close to maximum, the very high will. And it would be a capability problem. That is, can they actually get enough of the capability to pull it off? And you probably need to do it on the ground because if it's coming in by air, everybody could probably disperse enough. You wouldn't kill the leader. You might kill civilians, but you might not kill the leader.

[00:16:28] So I said it was probably like one in four chance this would actually happen, which is actually pretty high here. And I'm, and so I wasn't surprised America was sending these signals, warnings and so forth. But what you see here with this many people showing up is it would be very, very difficult to pull off the sabotage, the kind of covert action that Israel is going to need to pull off.

[00:16:55] Because there's lots of people that would do effectively call 911 on those covert actors supporting Israel. A lot of people. And there might be people calling 911 on that and they're not actually covert actors for Israel. They're just didn't kill them. We don't even see it. So you might see with that mass of a showing, they're extremely likely to be, even if you don't get like economic benefits for turning people in, you're just going to, it's just the emotions are riding so high, man.

[00:17:25] And you can't get at Donald Trump and the first family. So what are you going to do? You get at who you can get at right in front of you here. And that is, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if everybody is saying verbally, whether they believe it or not, how much they agree with all this anger. Because otherwise they're going to, or I'm kind of suspicious about that guy and you never see him again. So that's what I think is happening with the Israeli angle.

[00:17:52] At the Water's Edge is supported by Grayzone Advisory. Grayzone helps businesses and organizations understand geopolitical risk before it becomes a crisis. 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. Okay.

[00:18:21] I asked you a few weeks ago, like, what would it look like if Iran overreached? And I was reading the sub stack you sent over this morning. Of course, link to all that will be in the show notes for folks who want to read it. Yeah, definitely should. But you brought up the interesting point of comparing, you know, how the rally around the flag effect that we had after 9-11 to what Iran's going through right now. And then, of course, after 9-11, we did do Afghanistan. We did do Iraq. You could say politely that we overreached the mark. You'd also say that we classily fucked up.

[00:18:50] But those things did not go well for us. Is it possible that Iran's leaders could take this national sentiment that's building and overreach and do something like we previously discussed, you know, a ground invasion of Kuwait or one of those activities? Yeah, that would be – yeah. So I would say the odds of that are 1 in 4 maybe at highest, maybe 1 in 3 because you would still need to organize. But that is exactly the scenario that would be the overreach scenario. I think there's a more likely scenario.

[00:19:19] I'll explain it in a moment. But I think that the overreach scenario would probably be focused on Kuwait, Kuwait City. You would want to – there is a – if you – and I'm sure the folks here in service know this. But if you take the map out, you will see that the major concentrations of oil in the Persian Gulf are within about 150-mile radius of Kuwait City.

[00:19:48] So if you think about, like, literally controlling the spigots, so to speak, here, that would be a target that you would find as a center of gravity. It would maybe not be the only one, but it's an extremely, like, obvious geographic center of gravity to build around so that then you would move from there to the Basra oil fields. You would then move from there to the Saudi oil fields.

[00:20:17] You already have, of course, presumably your Iranian oil fields. You know, now that doesn't get you quite to UAE and so forth. But you can see already you're well on the way to occupying that. Now, the truth is the physical occupation of this doesn't do Iran all that much good right now because it means they have to now run the spigots.

[00:20:44] They're much better off in direct occupation doing the British model of imperialism. You know, you get somebody else to do the hard work. And that is what it means to control the strait of hormones. Now, there's so much emotion on display. It's not impossible this could happen. I don't think it's the most likely scenario, however, because of what I'm saying here.

[00:21:09] But it would be the overreach, and it would be a way to actually help us here. It would be a very costly way to help us. It would probably end up having a lot of extra damage here to our troops in the region and also to our allies.

[00:21:29] But it would, in terms of, like, turning the world's attention here, it would be that kind of a thing where I doubt you're going to get 100 countries signing up that, oh, yes, they went to the funeral. And now you're seeing the occupation and conquest of Kuwait, which would probably be pretty bloody under these circumstances. So I don't think – so it is possible. And that is exactly that scenario.

[00:21:56] And that would be the center of gravity I would be concerned about. However, there's a more likely scenario where the leaders can't resist all of this, but they channel it a little more focus here. And I think this would be much more challenging for us to ultimately deal with. And it would be the thing that I would be the most worried about if I were in the West Wing right now.

[00:22:24] Now, again, I would lay out these different scenarios. But, look, when you're in the West Wing, you've got to put some probabilities, at least one – I'm just telling you. I've not been paid there, but I've done that advising in certain circumstances. And if you don't come in with some clear-eyed understanding of what you think, there's no point in you being there. So the – but what I would say is that more likely – and this would be closer to the two-thirds, 75 percent scenario – is what I lay out in the substack.

[00:22:52] And that's why I put it out there so that people could actually assess this and get prepared, which is what you see – and it will be called emboldening of Iran's demands – is that what happens is it's – Right now, the demands we're talking about are literally limited to the four corners of the MOU, which are still operative, by the way. Those demands are still there.

[00:23:17] That is, don't mess with Iran's fee structure for Hamouz and also Lebanon. And maybe this can extend to the issue with Lebanon to the Red Sea. These are things we've talked about before and I have on the substack before. That's not gone away. Layer on top of that, however, is another demand, which is American bases out of the region. American bases out of the region.

[00:23:46] Not just they're not repaired, but they're literally out of the region. And in the last week, I've been seeing some signs that Iranian leaders are already thinking this way here. And I put some of these quotes in the substack so people could follow them. And there's probably more. I mean, if you eavesdrop, there's got to be everywhere.

[00:24:06] But what I would say is that here's the scenario, Scott, that I'm particularly concerned about, which is we get to August 15th. August 15th is like a witching hour, okay? It means a double witching hour. And now I'm saying it's a triple witching hour. Witching hour, number one, is because the 60-day MOU is up, all right? So now Iran's not banned by the four corners of the MOU.

[00:24:34] Witching hour, number two, I've been saying this is when Iran's period of maximum leverage starts. I've been putting this in multiple substacks over the last few weeks. This is the oil inventory drawdown. I give you the latest stats today. They're on track for that. As best we can tell, something in that window. And that will generate maximum pressure because that would mean that the oil inventories are down to the bottoms or near bottoms.

[00:25:03] And if there is not even if it's only, you know, a third of the oil coming through, the straight and foremost, this is really shaky ice here for the world's economy. I mean, one hurricane, man, and you're causing going through the ice. So this is bad news. And, of course, the midterms. You know, Trump may not want to just get in this and start this so easily, as everybody's been saying. But now you have a triple another issue, which is the rising demands.

[00:25:33] Now what you could do if you're Iran, and again, there's some evidence there. I don't know if they're thinking about this exactly yet, but it's common. I mean, they're not going to. These folks have not been. They've not missed many beats here, which is they were already talking about how when they do put the fees in. Friendly countries won't pay fees. Friendly countries won't pay fees or at least lower fees.

[00:26:00] What are they talking about is an unfriendly country. A friendly country is someone like China. Okay? There's no bases here helping the United States. What's been an unfriendly country they've talked about? The Gulf states with the U.S. bases. They're unfriendly. You see what I mean?

[00:26:21] So all of a sudden, the talk over the last couple weeks about this friendly, unfriendly distinction, you can see that this can start to morph into something, which would be a lot of pressure on us before the midterms and probably after the midterms.

[00:26:42] Because, again, what I've defined as this period of maximum leverage is the midterms are there, but I'm saying it's about the oil inventories that are at the bottom. And that puts us on the unbelievable thin ice in the world economy that we're not going to want to put extra weight on that ice in this period. And that's what creates the leverage.

[00:27:07] You see, everybody else has been saying, because I think they're basically people coming from politics, and that's what they do. You know, they do politics. So they're just trying to guess that Donald Trump couldn't possibly do this or possibly do that before the midterms. And those are the same people that told you we would never have the flare-up of the four days of violence we had last week. That was never supposed to happen based on all that. I just think there's some weight to what they say. I wouldn't dismiss it altogether.

[00:27:35] But I think they're missing the issue of the great power politics issues, the balance of power issues. And now you've got Iranian leaders here. And the reason that they can be emboldened in this situation, Scott, is because the one thing you might have thought Iranian leaders would have to worry about is if the world's economy goes off a cliff, Iran's people are going to topple them.

[00:28:04] Well, that doesn't look so likely for the next six months or a year, does it? So, yeah, maybe a year from now, maybe two years from now, the world's economy goes off a cliff and they get an Iranian, the IRGC gets toppled. But I guarantee you, Americans and in Chicago, they're not going to care about that two years from now. I'm not sure we have the patience to get through this summer, much less next year. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[00:28:32] So you want to wait for all these economic things to bubble up finally, finally, finally. I can't tell you it will never happen, but it's highly unlikely, as I've been saying for a long time, to happen anytime soon. And so what you are seeing is another historical data point in the paper book that punishment doesn't work. And it's just a powerful data point.

[00:29:00] And it's something that we had no signs that the population in Iran was cracking. We had no signs. I mean, Netanyahu showed up with a bag full of signs that he handed to Trump that he took a client sinker. So, I mean, Israel saw it. Well, this is how we're dealing with such thin information. And if you live in—just take Joe Ken.

[00:29:30] I had Joe Ken on last week because he's, as a lot of your listeners will know, a deep insider, very full of all the intelligence, briefed Trump directly on Iran multiple times, and, of course, resigned in opposition to what happened after February 28th.

[00:29:51] Well, Joe is very aware that what happened here was Trump was in an echo chamber in January and February. And so he explains—and he knows. I mean, he was there comparing, you know, January and February to last May. So he can do this because he's literally in the rooms, OK? OK? So he has a very good knowledge of what is going on.

[00:30:17] So if you're in an echo chamber where you wall yourself off from competing information, it doesn't mean the competing information is always right, of course. So we live in a world that's competitive and you got—but if the one side who's pushing doesn't have to compete, they can just keep making it more extreme, more extreme, more extreme, and you can talk yourself into anything. I mean, literally, you could talk yourself into anything.

[00:30:43] So this idea that, you know, only Donald Trump could have been talked into this—I mean, we saw Bill Clinton get talked into bombing Milosevic in March 99. All right? We saw George Bush get—I mean, so these ideas that this is all just about President Trump, I think he is highly impulsive. I don't doubt that. I hear all these psychological, you know, these people with these degrees in psychology analyzing all this.

[00:31:12] There's probably something to what they say. And I'm not defending the man. I'm pointing—because I've been so critical, by the way. But I'm pointing out that there's over and above that, you get in a situation of groupthink here. And we've seen this for decades and decades. And that is, I think, one of the things—and so what you were—and even today, you know, is President Trump actually looking at the screens here?

[00:31:39] You know, is he—and that would be why Fox News should cover this funeral for, if no other reason, to help us generate a better outcome for the country here. I mean, this is just—I mean, the idea that it's—you're not going to cover it because it hurts? Well, somebody's got to—we've got to care about the future of our country.

[00:32:05] So we're at a point where the best thing for the country is to hope that Fox News decides to take a mature approach to journalistic integrity and show the president things he doesn't want to see. Okay, I'm sure that's going to go great. What other advice do we give under these circumstances, Scott? Except we do the analysis. We see what's coming.

[00:32:25] And I think that this is why it's been so—you know, I really value our time here because I have always believed in our country. I've always believed in our troops. My grandfather fought in World War II. He lost his faith in God, but he said he never lost his faith in the American people. And, of course, he means the troops here.

[00:32:50] And I believe that we need to have the best analysis we can have, even if it's not nice to hear. And then we go from there to make the best decisions that we can, as opposed to constantly sugarcoating everything because it's just—it's too hard for us to hear. I just think this is a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know folks really appreciate, you know, in the military, you know, they deal with messy situations for a living, and they're very comfortable with uncomfortable troops. That's literally what they get paid to handle.

[00:33:20] Yeah. But it can be very isolating when you're in those communities thinking that nobody at home is looking at what you're looking at or seeing what you're seeing. And look what happened, Scott, in the 2003 Iraq war, because I was very deeply involved in all this and so forth. It took years, but we ended up, bit by bit, getting a better set of decisions. It took way too long. It should never have happened. The war, it shouldn't have taken that long.

[00:33:47] We had to go through all of that, but we did get to some better set of decisions here. And I think that that's unfortunately the place we're in right now. We're still going in. And why might President Trump escalate in August or actually even before August? It's because if I'm even half right about what's coming, that means another gigantic L. He's already had the L of the MOU.

[00:34:16] He's trying to get everybody to forget about that. Okay. They're not, this would be, this would be, it will never be possible to forget the L that I think Iran wants to tattoo on him. This is what I think, this is what I've been saying for a long time. Iran wants to wreck the presidency of President Trump, not just simply get out of it in some sort of business deal.

[00:34:43] And that's why they won't take the money that Jerry Kushner and Steve Whitcoff are offering, as the Wall Street Journal made absolutely crystal clear. They're throwing money at the Iranians. And the Iranians just simply saying, sorry, it's not good enough. And it's because they want power. And power is, unfortunately, means hurting America. And that, unfortunately, means hurting the world's economy.

[00:35:11] And that's how you get at weakening America. That's what's at issue here. And I think we're, we're, we're slowly coming to grips with the reality of what started four and a half months ago. Yeah. Well, hopefully things speed up for the better. You're helping it. You're helping, Scott. Well, we appreciate your joining us on a weekly basis and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Provides a lot of comfort to a lot of folks. So thank you so much. And we'll check in again next week. Absolutely.

[00:35:41] Absolutely. Absolutely.