The Midterms Didn’t End the Iran War. They Made Escalation More Likely | Robert Pape

[00:00:00] The Democrats have had a historic win with the midterms this week, and somehow it's made everything with the war with Iran even more precarious. Welcome to the At the Water's Edge podcast, where we take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics. It's the 5th of November, 2026, and we are back today with the one and only Robert Pape to explain how these midterm elections actually impact the war with Iran going forward. Please be sure to like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend. Really helps get the show out to more people. And with that, let's get to Pape.

[00:00:28] Well, Professor, good afternoon and welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing great and always great to speak with you, Scott Kelly. Likewise. So we had the big midterm elections. Blue tsunami has been used to describe it. We have the Democrats taking control of the House and the Senate. And in my rosy projection of life now, so the Democrats are going to be seated in January. Congress is actually going to enforce the War Powers Act and wind down this whole Iran conflict. It was all just a big misunderstanding.

[00:00:57] And we're going to go sing Kumbaya into the distance. Everything's good now, right? We can just check this block in the history books and move on. Is that the correct rating of what was on this week? Well, exactly. We could just stop right now. We're all done. Everything's over. Woo! Time to get more coffee. There we go, folks.

[00:01:13] Yeah, so I wish it would be that simple. And the big picture, Scott, is that we're heading into a very dangerous several months. It's very dangerous here with respect to the transition of power in the United States.

[00:01:34] It's very dangerous with the issue of escalation in the Iran War. It's also very dangerous, Scott, with respect to Russia's escalation and then Ukraine's counter-escalation with Ukraine.

[00:01:50] So we have three very serious dimensions all tracking along the identical two-month window, a 60-day window. And unfortunately, they can easily interact with each other in not-so-good ways.

[00:02:12] And that's really the period. So we had a lot of, I would say, a very emotional run-up to the midterms. And then the midterms were a stunner, a real shock to the system. And the biggest shocks here, I don't think, were exactly the numbers in the blue wave.

[00:02:37] I think that there was internal White House polling, I mentioned this in some of my substacks, that were projecting pretty close to what happened, which was these were leaked in the last week or two before the midterms, which would be the Democrats would end up controlling 240 or more seats in the House and then 54 or more seats in the Senate.

[00:03:02] And we are pretty close to that. It could be a little bit worse than that. But those are already very strong control by the Democratic Party of both of those two houses. I think the sort of stunner beyond stunners, and J.D. Vance's post yesterday mentions this, but this was already coming out in the exit polls,

[00:03:26] is how many Republicans turned up, actually literally turned out, to vote Democratic. And these are not Democrats. These are not closet, this isn't like there's been this hidden pool of Democrats masquerading as MAGA. We saw parts of MAGA become Democrats in two years. That's right. That's right. Now, I don't think they're Democrats.

[00:03:54] I think this is an anti-Trump MAGA vote. So this is now, of course, the Democrats are feeling wind at their sales. They're sort of out. They got to get out of jail free card after they lost the 2024 midterm. So there's a lot of this happiness going around on the Democratic side of the House.

[00:04:18] But I don't think any I don't think these elections, there certainly were tens of millions of Americans who voted for Democrats because they wanted Democratic policies. So I'm not I'm not saying there's none of that, but especially this key band of somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of MAGA, the actual MAGA voters turning to come out to vote for Democrats.

[00:04:46] This is not because they're looking for open borders and they haven't changed their mind on transgender issues and all. And they're not they're not happy with the demographic direction of the country and so forth and so on. They're extremely angry. And this is an angry vote here.

[00:05:07] And this is an angry vote because they are very, very angry and feel betrayed by President Trump. And that's a very important thing to understand. So as I've explained, and you probably know quite well, Scott, we've been a tinderbox of of a country through this run up to the election.

[00:05:30] We have our Seapost national surveys of support for political violence show the highest levels yet in five years where 60 million Americans were so angry. They supported the use of force to prevent Trump from being president and 40 million Americans were so angry. They supported Trump's use of the military to suppress Democratic protesters. Well, what you're seeing then is this is this tinderbox.

[00:05:59] But now it's also tilting here. It's not just that clash. You see what I mean? It's there's a there's a dramatic anger here that is within within MAGA. And it's looking for a place to go. It's looking for a place to go. Now, President Trump was an obvious place for it to go and voting.

[00:06:23] You know, so but but literally getting the out party, the other party to show up, make the effort to show up in large numbers to vote, not just to that. You don't want the you're you're you're mad at your your your side, but to literally vote on the other side. That's quite a that's quite a thing. So that's that's that's what's really so this is a massive humiliation for President Trump.

[00:06:53] It means President Trump has lost control of large parts of MAGA already. So President Trump, one of the things I've been saying about the escalation trap is that when from the moment the first bombs fell, there was a progressive loss of control by Trump and Israel in controlling escalation in the Iran war. And that's proven to be true over these eight to nine months.

[00:07:19] Now, what you're seeing is a loss, a serious loss already of control by Trump over over MAGA. And this could well get worse for Trump. Now, you see this with just the very fact of J.D.

[00:07:39] Vance's post means that there is now a clear gap between Trump and between Trump and Vance. Now, there had been maybe possibilities of gaps and maybe Democrats are trying to read it more into that than there was. But this is now out in the open and it's direct. And then it but it's not just limited to J.D. Vance.

[00:08:06] You saw Ron DeSantis come out and Ron DeSantis is somebody who's been very quiet on the sidelines for several years. Been the governor of Florida, focused on Florida. But now he came out for the first time, really, in several years. And his statement that this is an extinction level event is clearly separating himself from President Trump.

[00:08:33] And also he's somebody who everybody thinks is has his eyes on running for president down the road. But it gets it's it's even worse than that. So this just this is what I mean by this is going from humiliation to the beginnings of the shattering of the Trump presidency. So the next thing that notice that's just happened, all this is happening in white speed. I mean, very quickly is Representative Massey, who is still in office.

[00:09:03] So so he is not out of office, just to be clear. He he is a member of the House. He has said that next week he intends to bring articles of impeachment against Secretary Hegseth. Now, Secretary Pete Hegseth has been sort of the leading poster child for anger related to the Iran war. This has been true for many months. Tom Tillis has been very angry about he's a senator, Republican senator.

[00:09:32] And the so but what you are seeing here is that the world of Washington is not waiting until January 3rd for the political consequences of what happened on Tuesday night to sort of move in this kind of smooth pathway.

[00:09:56] And so President Trump really is in a world that it's he has not been in before. He's not really been in the world of having lost even small slivers of MAGA before. But now he's in territory we haven't seen in our country since. And this is still in the beginnings. So I don't want to say he's he's met there yet.

[00:10:21] But so far, we've been comparing myself included President Trump to say, Linda Johnson in the Vietnam War, maybe Jimmy Carter, who had his own real problems with Iran. And and a lot of his presidency was hurt and destroyed, really, by the Iran hostage crisis. Now, President Trump is starting to move into Nixon territory.

[00:10:46] This is a different world because, see, what happened with Nixon is he lost the Republicans. See, so far, those other two that we've been talking about here were were angry.

[00:11:02] The Democrats were not happy with those leaders, but because of these mostly the foreign wars here, it's now percolating with President Trump to the core Republican base and the core MAGA base or not even just the word Republican. That's a very different story. And so and this was one of the reasons I've been warning.

[00:11:24] You'll recall we've had some conversations before and I was explaining that that there's in this escalation trap if the midterms, if there is a blowout with the midterms, this is going to cause a lot of pressure on President Trump to think seriously about a major escalation in the Iran war. And the reason is because right now it's not just he's had a humiliating domestic defeat.

[00:11:52] It's not just that this is on top of a humiliating point of loss with the with the Iran war. His presidency itself is starting to come unglued. And the way Washington works is more of a feeding frenzy. This doesn't have a natural stopping place. You see, it's not like, well, OK, we're going to throw a lot of people are saying, who is Trump going to blame and throw under the bus?

[00:12:20] So that would be of the idea. Well, OK, let's give them the Pete Hegseth thing and then that'll calm everybody down. No, this is kind of that's not how Washington works. I wish I mean, I really wish it was different. But but but once this gets going, it just keeps going, you see.

[00:12:39] And so that's where there is real there's a real and I think going to be growing incentives for President Trump to escalate here with Iran. And it's not because he's found some new surefire strategy of victory through escalation. It's because the downside problems domestically for escalating have basically zeroed, bottomed out.

[00:13:06] So he's already facing the shatter, the humiliating defeat and the shattering of his presidency. So this is already happening. You see what I mean? So is the the issue with escalation with Iran is would this somehow change the game in some way? Would it provide some kind of game changer?

[00:13:28] It's a it's a it's it's it's it is like a Hail Mary pass when you're behind, except the costs here are for all the all the people in the stadium. It's not it's not just for the players on the field here. The outcomes here have a lot of ripple effects for the the fans in the stadium and fans for both teams, by the way. So so you have a situation where this is really quite precarious.

[00:13:54] And now Iran, just to sort of show what I mean by this very dangerous few months. Well, we have been building up forces for weeks and weeks, and your audience will be part of that. They will know that. And Iran has been on knife's edge, pins and needles. And they put out a zero hour targeting plan. I mean, they've told us what they're going to do. They're basically saying they're they're on high alert all the time.

[00:14:20] Um, they are poised if they see movement here by us that they think is a little too big to preempt. That is to go first so that it's not so much they want to start it as much as they're being a use it or lose it situation. Because we do have enough force that we are going to be able to knock out a lot of stuff. It's not true that, you know, we're not we're not going to be we don't have power to do things. And Iran knows that that's true.

[00:14:49] So that's that use it or lose it. Scentive incentive. So that creates a very, very dicey. But then you also have Netanyahu. Netanyahu has got his own escalation trap. He has been itching. He's been pushing Trump on. And we know through the leaked reports of an October 10th that there was a real push by Netanyahu to go first to strike Iran before.

[00:15:16] His election also before our midterms and Trump squashed that here. But we also know that there's still pressure coming. There are reports here and nobody's really denying them. So we don't have the denial of the report that the Israelis and Netanyahu are pushing a new threat, a chemical weapons threat that Iran has. And by the way, Iran building chemical weapons or biological weapons completely in the capabilities of Iran.

[00:15:45] I'm not saying that they have those weapons or weaponize it. But the chemical and biological weapons are well. There is no special techniques or so forth. That you need here. The one thing I'm not seeing, by the way, and maybe the folks listening will have better information on this issue,

[00:16:08] is what is a telltale sign of a state building chemical and biological weapons are strange deaths. Because these are dangerous. And they will go to some lengths to protect themselves as they are making these. But these are nonetheless dangerous suckers.

[00:16:30] So we know with the Soviet-slash-Russian program in the 90s, when they were developing this biological weapon, it's a form of Ebola called Marburg, that even with all of their protective rooms and buildings and so forth, there were scientists who got it. And it was incredible.

[00:16:55] So that is a specific telltale sign that if you see it here, you know it's actually happening. If you don't see it, you can't be 100% sure it's not. But it does give you a sense of the scale. So if there is a large scale of this going on, one would expect that you would see some telltale signs like that. So that's just what the—now, so notice I'm talking about the United States front, the American front.

[00:17:24] I'm talking about the Iran front. And then we have Russia-Ukraine. And Putin has put out his own plan. Okay. So we got a lot of plans. And Putin's not just doing plans, not just on paper. So the—as I've also been talking about since the summer, Putin is failing on the battlefield. This idea, Putin is like off to the races, he's about to break through into Kiev.

[00:17:53] Many ways—not that I want to hurt Ukraine. Many ways I would say, well, maybe that's not such a bad outcome because then you wouldn't get the escalate. But what you're getting is exactly the escalation trap. He is blocked. He is not gaining that territory. All the map analysis I've done, there's—I even got the Russian map. There's no analysis that he's breaking through. So what is he doing?

[00:18:17] He's doing what he has done before here, which is he's escalating with punishing attacks. And he's got a plan to attack electric power, to literally knock out electric power in Kiev, Kharkiv, and Odessa.

[00:18:33] And what has happened in the last, say, six, eight days is that he's been attacking certain substations of electric plants in the middle of the country that look like, to me, the beginnings of executing this plant. And this was enough to scare the bejesus out of the British defense minister.

[00:18:56] So now Britain has put out that they want everybody to buy three days of supplies, water, beans. I mean, this is what we're talking about here. He said buy three days of water, three days—not in literally nine, he specified the amount.

[00:19:12] Okay, have a radio with batteries, have a flashlight, and then also have money in hard currency, dollar—well, pounds—because ATMs might not work. Okay. So you see, the worry over the next two months here, it's not just any—it's not—we can decompose any one of these things.

[00:19:41] And then say, oh, no, it's never going to happen. Okay. But the problem is we got a lot of sparks here. Yeah. A lot of sparks. And so we really need to be very, very aware that these really are a very dangerous several months we're going through. That's all—the American timetable of the midterms is having a shadow effect on all three of these. It's not the Illinois factor, of course, but it is having a shadow effect.

[00:20:11] And it's not the day of the vote, as I want to just keep emphasizing. The clock on the midterms that matters here starts when the voting stopped, which stopped on Tuesday night, and the counting begins, and the transfer of power begins. Because as the power transfers, that is what really creates the shattering of the Trump administration.

[00:20:38] That's what is the momentum for this. And then it has interaction effects on the others. Let me put a contrarian and somewhat hopeful take to you on what the midterms might mean for this. We've talked about how one of the reasons we're in an escalation trap is that Trump can't own the L of the Iran war and ending it. But we also said that about him and the midterms. Surprisingly enough, after the midterm election results started coming in, he went on Fox News.

[00:21:06] He was very consolatory. He congratulated the Democrats, said he had spoken to them. He was looking forward to working with them because he didn't just want to veto stuff for two years. It was about as amicable a message as President Trump, I think, is physically capable of giving a political opponent. Does that indicate that he might also be willing to accept an L on Iran? If that lasts through, say, Thanksgiving, then maybe so.

[00:21:33] But right now, he did that with the MOU. He owned the L with the Memorandum of Understanding. And then within a week, it was all coming unglued. And this morning in Axios, we have just the most recent reporting that it is not true that we're calling off all the plans for attacking Iran. Now, Axios has been our best pipeline into the military planning here.

[00:22:02] Now, not to say that it's a perfect one and not to say you should take biased reporting, you know, as independent reporting. But the fact of the matter is different newspapers and different media are more plugged in. And Axios has been that. Now, if this goes on, Scott, the conciliatory approach and there's no strikes here over the next, say, three or four weeks, well, then this is a different story. Because then half of the period, we've gone through half of the period and we're OK.

[00:22:31] And we may go through. So I am not putting as a certainty that we are going to escalate with Iran between now and January 3rd. If I had to put numbers on it, I would say it's about 50-50 right now. And it will, though, incrementally get worse and worse here as we get closer, because now the transition of power will really happen.

[00:22:56] And as the transition of power happens, there'll be more and more MAGA peeling off from Trump, more and more Republican congressmen and senators peeling away from Trump. And this is then the pressure on Trump will get worse. But nonetheless, if it turns out, I would still say the gradient is up.

[00:23:17] But nonetheless, I would still say, yes, that my argument, my concerns, I would have to give more credit to the other side here if we go through three or four weeks. And there's Trump is continuing to be conciliatory. He could bring Hakeem Jeffries to the Oval Office. There are plenty of things he could he could have him for lunch and dinner. You know, he could do things like that.

[00:23:43] And so it is not, you know, Trump has done very sort of surprising things before. But this would be this would be something because what you're really then navigating with Jeffries is the complete destruction of the Trump administration, where they're all the policies. It's not just his political personal political power, but the policies that are associated with Trump.

[00:24:09] The the whole idea of not just mass deportations, but even modest deportations is going to start to roll back. The Democrats are would would certainly want to keep going on their subpoenas and the investigations. The idea that the Democrats will really stand up to their 60 million, the 60 million who have anger.

[00:24:34] You know, if there are 60 million who support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. I think it goes without saying they're going to support the use of subpoenas to have Trump not be president. So this is not a just a handful of people in the country. So for the Democrats to pull back from investigations, subpoenas, which would then have the threat of jail. Trump could, of course, pardon people.

[00:25:02] But this just gets it just keeps getting worse and worse politically. The there was a time with Nixon. Would Nixon pardon himself? That's where that first started to come from. So this whole thing here, Jeffries would it's not just will Trump be conciliatory, but is there going to be a we talked about this with Iran? Will Iran give a graceful exit to President Trump?

[00:25:28] So now are the Democrats going to give a graceful exit to to President Trump? And what a graceful exit would mean is call off the investigations and subpoenas. However, doing that is going to start you might even have start to have recall movements on the I mean, I'm just saying there's a lot of anger in this country right now. And we've let it boil and boil. And now you're seeing some of the results of it.

[00:25:58] And that's why I've always been arguing. Don't wait for this to get worse. Yes. But it is it is the kind of deals you would need now are are going to be very difficult between the Democrats and President Trump, because what President Trump is going to want is to hold on to power. And the Democrats are going to want to take his power, you see. And that's not enough. Now they have the mantle of the vote.

[00:26:27] But can they actually take Trump's power? This is very similar to the problem of the MOU. You see. Yeah, a lot of folks are hoping that once the Democrats are in power, they're going to do something to end the war with Iran. But I think that might overstate the case there, because there's a lot of traditional Democrats. I'm thinking that Chuck Schumers of the world that are very happy that we're in a war with Iran. They might not like exactly how we did it, but they're very pro-Israel. War with Iran is a bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C.

[00:26:58] We have a small minority of new politicians who are against it who will now supposedly be in power come January. I'm curious if there's actually an incentive for the Democrats to try to end the war with Iran or keep it going so they always have something to beat Trump over the head with for the next two years. Well, there's a there's a couple of ways to think about this. So, first of all, what is in the national interest is to shut down this war. OK, and I'm going to say more about this in the coming weeks, Scott.

[00:27:25] You've already heard me talk about the regional balancing idea. Well, that's going to be start. I'll start more of a drumbeat and on this even more because now it's clear where that we have an opportunity. As I've said, we had to get through the midterms and we have to get through it. Now we'll have an opportunity for actual change. You see, that's here. But it's not like change in a day. It's it's a change over time. And so that third approach, which is not escalation.

[00:27:53] It is not conciliation to Iran, but it's regional balancing here is is that third approach. And that's something that possibly, possibly we might be able to move some of the Democrats here, even some of the pro Israel Democrats. And the reason is because this would ultimately be in the interests of the United States and also in Israel's long term interest.

[00:28:19] So so so what you are seeing is the the idea that the this partisan interpretation of the country's interests must just be right because these are the folks in power. No, that's not true. What you're seeing is those those were partisan interpretations of the national interest and the national interest is being damaged. And I also believe that's true in Israel as well.

[00:28:43] So I think that there is from the national interest perspective, that said, what you have is you have some pretty calcified positions here. You have Trump derangement syndrome here with a gigantic hunk of the Democrats. You have a very pro Israel sentiment here.

[00:29:05] And the one element that I would also throw in that you didn't mention is one of the the things that Trump may be you may we may see he may be surprised that he'll if he gets an opening, he may take it is to try to pin. And the the future failures with Iran, that is Iran, Iran, getting nuclear weapons, Iran, keeping the straight of four moves on the Democrats on the Democrats. You see.

[00:29:34] So I think that, as I've said for a long time, Iran is very likely to get a nuclear weapon. I think all the military buildup that we've just done. I mean, well, if you're if you're in the military, you wanted a nuclear weapon yesterday. I mean, so I think that this is we're heading there. I think the idea that Iran will just willingly concede and give up the straight of four moves now that Trump's presidency is being wrecked. I do think they're happy.

[00:30:02] They wanted to wreck the presidency, but they weren't going to wreck the presidency and then give up power. That is that was never, I think, likely to happen. And so from President Trump's perspective, if he can then pin this even halfway on the Democrats and blame them as the actual traitors to the country. So he would paint it not just that they lost weight, that they're the true traitors.

[00:30:30] You see, this is something that that President Trump, I think, will will at least certainly start to consider. And I think it's going to be a real issue then for the Democrats, because they're going to have to have a real answer. They're going to have to. And that's why this middle approach I'm talking about, the regional balancing here strategy, is, I think, the right direction to go. I think it's the right direction for the national interest.

[00:30:58] And I believe it has the best chance of the different strategies for navigating where we are with domestic politics. Hmm. Do you have questions from the audience? Yeah. Yeah. All right. And that actually start with Hegseth. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. Yeah. OK, starting off strong. Democrats have talked about impeaching Hegseth. Assuming folks are actually seated in January. Do you think they go after flag officers like General Cain next?

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