Latest news with #RobertPape
Express Tribune
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Lying to win
Listen to article Robert Pape, in his Dying to Win, asserts that suicide terrorism is a strategic tool used by weak groups to achieve political goals, especially to compel democratic states to withdraw military forces from territory they view as their homeland. Nowadays both insurgents and states, in their fight against each other, have been using well thought-out lies as a strategic tool to pacify their supporters, cohorts and public at large. Be it regular or irregular warfare, lying has become a strategic tool both in the hands of states or insurgents. It has, with time, become more important than carrying out a suicide attack or a vehicle borne improvised explosive assault against military or paramilitary forces. The way a series of lies are used in a structured fashion can actually tailspin an incident which enhances prospects of a state or an insurgent group in an ongoing fight against each other. In it, three levels can be conceived namely disinformation, deception and dispersion which may be used profusely during a conflict. Deception has overlapping areas with disinformation whereas dispersion is a subset of deception. All dispersive activities are part of deception but not vice versa. Similarly, all deception exercises are disinformation practices but not the other way round. It means we have three concentric circles with dispersion lies at the centre enveloped by deception and disinformation spheres respectively. The disinformation is both related to imaginary and real things. The dispersion is a practical situation in which multiple models of actions are present on ground and all of them are real. The adversary can guess the most probable way of action but it is difficult to see with certainty as to which course the enemy may undertake in the end. A state may gain ground through minimising the causalities of its forces while maintaining their morale and public pacification at a higher level. A state never wants to lose its monopoly of control over violence and almost always shows alacrity of its retaliation in case it gets attacked heavily by an enemy state or an insurgent group. Normally, a large loss is compensated by highlighting same losses by the insurgent group or an enemy state through disinformation. On the other hand, the insurgents try to maximise the damage in order to instill fear in hearts and minds of the public. They want to magnify an insignificant attack in terms of material damage and human loss. They also secure their recruitment base among the population by maintaining a cascade of deceptive actions on different social media platforms. The disinformation is expressed by competing parties in opposite directions. One tries to belittle the claims of the other. Though insurgents and states compete with each other, the real test pivots around who gets its narrative through to convince the population. In some situations, the insurgents can cause a friction between two countries through an incident leading to animosity and possible tension between them. Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent has the wherewithal to produce such a result so that they can divert the attention of the adversaries from the issue of terrorism while strengthening their bond with the local militants. This way it can deepen the suspicion and mistrust of one country against the other. The recent conflict between Iran and Israel which also dragged the US in it has used disinformation, deception and dispersion activities. The US has used a kind of directed disinformation action which was complemented by wait-and-see mechanism. Israel has employed all three with alacrity — dispersion, deception and disinformation exercises. It has minimised the infrastructural losses on its mainland while using the same to provoke a US attack on the soil of Iran. The latter has used deception at a moderate level especially with missile launchers in urban centres along with controlled dispersion through reliable channels for its retaliatory measures. The future conflicts therefore are going to involve a high percentage of dispersion and deception exercises to subdue each other.
South China Morning Post
04-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Could hi-tech China revive the US rust belt – and steady superpower ties?
China could draw on its innovation in advanced manufacturing to improve business – and overall – ties with the United States amid a fragile trade truce, according to a prominent American political scientist. Advertisement In an interview, Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, also said China could 'rise peacefully' to be the world's leading superpower through its strength in innovation if it continued 'moderate responses' to US President Donald Trump 's foreign policy – while America grappled with domestic fractures and a rise in political violence. Pape, who specialises in international security affairs, pointed to what he called the 'Wuhan model' – integrated university-industry clusters in second-tier Chinese cities that focus on advanced manufacturing, which he said opened up possibilities for reinvigorating rust-belt cities in the US. Political scientist Robert Pape visited some of China's biggest tech firms last month. Photo: LinkedIn 'They're integrating university research in private industry. But it's not just happening in Stanford and Silicon Valley or Harvard, MIT and the Boston area. This is happening in a second-tier city,' Pape said. He made the remarks after a 10-day trip to China last month when he visited some of the country's big tech firms in cities including Wuhan, Hangzhou and Shenzhen. Wuhan – capital of central Hubei province and home to a hi-tech manufacturing cluster known as Optics Valley – has traditionally been seen as a second-tier city but in recent years has moved into the ranks of the 'new first-tier cities' as its innovative and industrial strength has grown. Advertisement Pape's visit took place amid a temporary de-escalation of the US-China trade war following separate talks in Geneva and London in June.
ABC News
25-06-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Iran was 'running to the bomb'. Some say it's now in a nuclear sprint
Despite a ceasefire being declared between Israel, the United States and Iran, we're now "moving into a true danger zone". That's what Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago is predicting, anyway. Twelve days of deadly air strikes and missile launches may have ended for now, but Professor Pape, an expert in global security affairs, has a warning. Iran is likely to speed up its nuclear program — which the US and Israel say has been the primary target of their massive strikes this month — in the wake of the attacks. He told CBS the country's conservative regime would "probably" now "sprint to that nuclear weapon". US President Donald Trump claims his country's bombing campaign had "obliterated" three of Iran's nuclear sites. However, even senior White House figures — including his deputy, JD Vance — admit the Iran may still have enough uranium to make 10 atomic weapons. Iran has already said it plans to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), aimed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons globally, and stop co-operating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had previously inspected its facilities. Professor Pape is worried the program will speed up in the shadows, saying "we're not going to be able to see it coming". "That is the real danger zone we're moving in to. "People are focusing on the things they can see, and then maybe counteract. "What the problem is, is what we can't see, and what we won't see, because Iran is not going to tell us exactly how they're fashioning that remaining nuclear material, and whether they have some other nuclear sites we don't even know about." Retired IDF General Yaakov Amidror spent more than three decades in Israel's military and has previously advised the country's prime minister on national security. He says his division uncovered intelligence in the 90s that Iran had a nuclear weapons program and told the ABC the Gulf state had more recently been "running to the bomb". "How did we know? Because they have enriched uranium for years, and they had, at the beginning of the war, more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium up to 60 per cent. "They needed a few weeks to enrich it to military grade." Assessing the impact 12 days of fighting has had on Iran's nuclear program is difficult. The most high-profile targets Israel and the US attacked were facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow. While Mr Trump has been bullish about the damage done, a leaked preliminary report this week says otherwise. Before this attack, US intelligence had reportedly predicted Iran could have been as little as three months off developing a nuclear bomb. The classified report leaked to The New York Times and other outlets this week claimed it had been "delayed but by less than six months". On Wednesday, local time, multiple Iranian state media outlets reported the country had already begun repairing the Natanz nuclear facility. Jason Brodsky is the policy director at United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a US-based not-for-profit which bills itself as "formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic". He's studied the region extensively, and believes these latest attacks could have set Iran's nuclear program back "years". He described Mr Trump's decision to order the US bombings at the weekend as a "gutsy move". "It will change Iran in many ways as well," Mr Brodsky told the ABC. "I was always concerned about eroded American deterrence vis-a-vis Tehran. "I think they took advantage of America's self-deterrence after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and other deeply divisive wars that took place during that time. "The Islamic Republic thought it could get away with murder — with everything. "The United States sent a very loud message, that we are not going to be deterring ourselves any more with respect to your nuclear program, and your proxy activities," he said. There are conflicting accounts swirling elsewhere, too. In an interview with the Associated Press, Israel's ambassador to France, Johsua Zarka, claimed at least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists had been killed in the 12 days of fighting. "The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years, by quite a number of years," he said. Alain Bauer, a leading criminologist and national security expert, told French broadcaster BFM TV Iran's most prominent 20 nuclear scientists had been moved to Russia before the attacks. James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is sceptical about how much the country's mission to build an atomic weapon had been set back. "The problem the United States and Israel have is that Iran almost certainly has materials and equipment, in locations we don't know about," he told the American Broadcasting Company. He said it was unlikely Iran's highly enriched uranium, which was previously stored at Isfahan, was destroyed in the attacks. "This is material that is stored in things that look very much like scuba tanks. It's that small. Tracking that material is going to be exceptionally difficult," he said. Iran has claimed about 400kg of it was moved before the US dropped its bombs. "I tend to believe them," Mr Acton said.
Forbes
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
No, Israel's Air Campaign Isn't Futile: 'Airpower Alone' Is A Straw Man
Israeli Air Force F-35 fighter jet In his recent article 'Israel's Futile Air War,' Robert Pape argues that Israel's effort to destroy Iran's nuclear capability and pressure the regime through airpower is doomed from the start. He claims that only ground forces can achieve such goals, pointing to historical U.S. operations as cautionary tales. But Pape's central premise—that 'airpower alone' cannot accomplish strategic objectives—does not only misinterpret modern military history but also distorts understanding of the nature of joint operations and of how to best employ military forces to attain political goals. Furthermore, and fundamental to appropriately invalidating his conclusions, neither the civilian nor the military leadership of Israel claims that Israel can accomplish its strategic objectives using 'airpower alone.' Warfighting at a campaign level does not occur in any domain 'alone'—not on land, at sea, in space, in the electromagnetic domain—or from the air. Israel does not rely on airpower in a vacuum. It applies air and space capabilities in coordination with special operations, cyber operations, psychological warfare, and strategic messaging. That is the modern model of coercive power—and it has proven itself before. If boots on the ground were the magic ingredient, the U.S. would have prevailed in Vietnam at the peak of ground force employment in 1968; in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1993) against a hostile warlord; and in Operation Enduring Freedom (2001) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)—both extended ground occupations with hundreds of thousands of land forces—but they didn't. Military victory depends on a far more complex set of variables that characterize the desired effects associated with achieving the political objectives of a particular operation. Those variables include strategy, operational concepts, technologies, tactics, and of course the conditions and environment of the specific conflict. Pape is entirely wrong to suggest one set of means is superior to another absent this broader assessment. 'Airpower Alone' Is a Straw Man Pape argues that Israel is falling into the trap of believing it can achieve its goals through airpower alone. But this is not what Israel believes—it is Pape's mischaracterization. No credible strategist views any domain in isolation. Israel does not have to occupy Tehran to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions; it must impose high, repeatable costs that degrade capabilities, lengthen timelines, and keep the regime off balance. The idea that only land invasions can achieve military objectives belongs to a bygone era—one that has cost the United States dearly in blood and treasure. The blunders of U.S. ground-centric military strategies in both Afghanistan and Iraq offer the most recent evidence. Desert Storm: Airpower Was Decisive Pape's dismissal of airpower's effectiveness ignores perhaps the clearest counterexample—Operation Desert Storm (1991). During that campaign, U.S. and coalition forces employed airpower during all 43 days of the war, but it was only on day 39 that the first ground forces were committed. Airpower paralyzed Saddam Hussein's regime and rendered his military ineffective. Airpower negated the Iraq's command and control systems, obliterated its air force, suppressed its surface-to-air missile systems, and devastated its ground forces—all before coalition ground forces entered Iraq and Kuwait. When ground operations began, the Coalition soldiers required only 100 hours to finish the war and to reoccupy Kuwait. This largely involved rounding up Iraqi Army troops already defeated by airpower who were looking for U.S forces to whom they could surrender. Of the over 500,000 U.S. troops deployed to the Gulf, 148 were killed in combat. While any loss of life is unfortunate, that astonishingly low figure underscores the strategic value of using airpower to dismantle the enemy's warfighting machine before exposing ground forces to risk. Had the United States pursued a traditional attrition-based ground-centric campaign the death toll on both sides of the conflict would have been enormously higher. Yet as decisive as the air component was in Desert Storm, that does not diminish the necessity of using ground forces to execute the operation. Clearly, Desert Storm represents a successful example of using airpower as the principal instrument of war, with ground forces in a supporting role. Desert Storm was thus an exemplary demonstration of true jointness—using the right force at the right place at the right time to achieve a given objective. Enduring Freedom: Strategic Success, Undermined by Mission Creep Another example Pape ignores is the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The United States rapidly achieved its core national security objectives using airpower as the key force, supported by indigenous ground forces and a small contingent of U.S. special operations forces providing intelligence: 1) the Taliban regime was removed from power; 2) a friendly government was established in Kabul; and 3) the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were dismantled. The United States met all these objectives by December 31, 2001, without deploying tens of thousands of ground troops. The success was swift, efficient, and decisive—an exemplar of the asymmetric application of airpower and supplementary capabilities. But instead of recognizing success and withdrawing from the area with a warning not to repeat husbanding Al-Qaeda or we would return, U.S. political and military leaders defaulted to the traditional belief held by the Army-dominated leadership at Central Command headquarters and incorporated in U.S. military doctrine of the day: that only a traditional ground presence could secure the peace. As a result, the United States eventually deployed hundreds of thousands of ground troops—the ostensible 'decisive force.' In one of the costliest examples of mission creep in U.S. history, the objectives in Afghanistan shifted from disrupting terror networks to 'winning hearts and minds'—in essence, trying to transform a 16th-century tribal society into a modern Jeffersonian democracy. The result was a 20-year quagmire with over 20,000 U.S. casualties that ended with the Taliban returning to power following a humiliating U.S. capitulation—proving that the early air-led campaign had achieved more in three months than ground force occupation did in two decades. Contrast this with Operation Allied Force (1999), a 78-day NATO-led air campaign that unseated Slobodan Milošević and halted human rights abuses in Kosovo with no NATO lives lost in combat. Israel Understands the Lesson Unlike the ground-force-dominated leadership of the U.S. military over the past two decades, Israeli leaders today have no intention of changing Iranian society or democratizing Iran. They are applying precision air and space power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, eliminate senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leaders who pose a threat to their country, damage critical infrastructure used to secure Iran's nuclear objectives, and erode the regime's ability to control events—all while minimizing their own exposure and the risk of escalation. This is not fantasy. It is the smart use of airpower—and, in conjunction with other means, it can achieve desired political outcomes. Strategic Delay Is Strategic Success Pape sets up a false binary: Either Israel eliminates Iran's nuclear program, or it fails. But this ignores how modern coercion works. Damaging Iran's nuclear facilities, decapitating its leadership structure, and repeatedly disrupting its enrichment efforts forces Tehran into a permanent state of caution. That amounts to success through delay—a repeatable outcome, sustained through intermittent precision attacks. With air superiority established over Iran, Israel has already secured the means to exercise this strategy option over and over again. This strategy also keeps Israel's alternatives open. Tehran must now reconstitute its nuclear program under threat. Iran would undertake any new effort to enrich uranium or build covert facilities under the shadow of Israeli air attack—which imposes a degree of strategic control over Iran. Boots on the Ground? No Thanks Pape implies that the only path to success is the deployment of massive ground forces—a strategy that would lead Israel into the exact kind of grinding occupation it seeks to avoid. The lessons of U.S. ground operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—where U.S. ground forces succeeded tactically but failed strategically—should warn analysts away from such logic. So should the results of the Russia-Ukraine war. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has proven able to secure air superiority in that war, resulting in a stalemate and devolution into an attrition-based struggle. Russia has suffered nearly a million casualties to date and that number is growing at a rate of 1,500 a day. Israel has no appetite for repeating America's or Russia's misadventures based on old paradigms of warfare. That is why it is leveraging the domains where it holds clear superiority: air and space. Conclusion: Control of the Sky Remains Vital Airpower does not offer a panacea. But it is also not the fragile fantasy Pape suggests. When applied strategically—as in terminating World War II in the Pacific, breaking the Iraqi army in Desert Storm, bringing down the Taliban in the early phases of Enduring Freedom, ending Serb atrocities in Allied Force, and now Israel's effective air operations over Iran—airpower can achieve real, measurable results with dramatically reduced risk and cost, providing strategic advantages not otherwise achievable. Pape's straw man of 'airpower alone' obscures the actual lesson: that modern conventional airpower integrated with intelligence, cyber-attacks, special operations and other tools can shift the strategic balance—without occupation, without regime change, without the illusion that democracies can be built with bayonets, and without masses of casualties. Israel's air campaign is not a mistake. It is a masterclass in 21st-century coercive strategy.
The Guardian
22-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Our era of violent populism': the US has entered a new phase of political violence
It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America. Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates. The same day, during national 'No Kings' demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed 'safety volunteer' associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester's leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters. Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was 'run off the road' by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling. 'We are in a historically high period of American political violence,' Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. 'I call it our 'era of violent populism'. It's been about 50 years since we've seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.' He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump's first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left. In 2017, the first year of Trump's first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court's rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman's bullet missed Trump's face by a few centimeters. The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails. Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the 'use of force' to achieve political means. The May survey was 'the most worrisome yet', he wrote. 'About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump's agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.' Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible 'mobilized blocs', Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming 'increasingly premeditated'. Quantifying political violence or 'domestic terrorism' can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those 'have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump's first term', he said, adding that the threats have been 'essentially 50-50' against Democratic and Republican lawmakers. The US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated 'has climbed for the second year in a row'. While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. 'We haven't seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,' he said. He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was 'more of an anti-system extremist' who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, 'when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it's almost identical to Stephen Miller posts', he added, referring to the White House aide. Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against 'little crackers' with 'white privileges', investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety. This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect's family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems. In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don't fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described 'pro-mortalist' – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction. Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump's polarizing politics. 'He's as much a symptom as a cause,' he said. The more important factor is 'a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that's been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation', Pape said. The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders. There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal. Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history. Lewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that 'political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it's your in-group … against the 'other side''. American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: 'The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.' After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized. Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman's death. 'I think it's fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they've used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,' he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however. 'I don't know how we unwind this,' he said. 'The optimistic side of me hopes that it's going to translate into a different approach.'
