Episode 135 - Robert A. Pape: "The goal here is to use social science to save lives."

Professor Robert A. Pape from the Department of Political Science discusses how his early research interest in air power and international political violence brought him to sit with military officers and policy decision-makers on various occasions. Professor Pape also expanded his interest in national security and democracy as he continued his research and teaching path at the University of Chicago, and directs the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST). Tune in to listen to his thoughts on the upcoming presidential election.

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Transcript

Stephen00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Robert Pape of the Department of Political Science.

Professor Pape is the author of several books, including the influential Bombing to Win, Air Power and Coercion in War, and his commentary has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other major outlets. He's advised the U.S. Air Force and multiple White Houses on matters of international security.

One of his most notable recent works is the Political Geography of the January 6th Insurrectionists. He's here today to discuss the many fascinating paths his work has taken him down. why the topics he studies are so very relevant at this point in American history, and how he became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Pape, it's really great to see you this morning. How are you doing?

Robert Pape 00:48
 Terrific. It's a beautiful day here in Chicago.

Stephen00:51
Thank You for joining us. Before we get too into the weeds, could you just tell us your position at the university and a little bit in layman's terms about like what it is that you do and study? 

Robert Pape 01:02
 I'm a professor at the University of Chicago. I'm in the political science department. I'm also the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. I study political violence. I've studied it in multiple different ways. Over 30 years ago, my work started focusing on coercive air power. 

I wanted to know how America could use its instruments more effectively because with the Vietnam War, I saw we didn't do that very well. And so I studied all the cases of air power in history. And then over time, because I started to study how air power impacted societies, I started to see back-lash effects, and then that led me into studying different responses to air power, and one of those was terrorism. 

And after 911, I ended up going very strongly into the field of international terrorism, studying suicide attacks, suicide terrorism, multiple books on that subject. And then, as time went on, I have studied now, American political violence, especially in the last five years, I focused on American political violence, whether it comes from the right or the left.

Stephen02:20
That's a fascinating range of topics there and obviously, somewhat unfortunately there's plenty of bearing on current events, so I do want to get to some of that. But first as we like to do on the show I want to go quite far back. I mean, we typically ask people if they imagined themselves doing this kind of thing when they were kids or if not, like what they did think they would. Did any of this stuff, like interest you as a kid or what did you think the future might hold when you were maybe like, at high school looking towards college?

Robert Pape 02:52
 When I was in high school, I never played war games, so I wasn't studying military affairs. I wasn't studying security. I was in a college preparatory high school, so I thought I was going to college. I was on the debate team, so I debated various issues of the day. I thought, actually, I was going to go into become an international interpreter.

I thought I might work for the UN. That happened because I spent my junior year, between junior and senior year, in Germany, West Germany at the time, living with a German family, and spoke German with them that whole summer, and I came back loving the language, I came back loving the people, and that's where I thought I was heading as I went into college. 

And then when I went to college, the University of Pittsburgh, I ended up going on the first university trip by any college in the United States to China. That is mainland China. This happened in the summer of 1979, I found out about it by luck that this trip was happening, there were 30 professors. Mostly economists going on this trip, three or four graduate students. And then when I found out, I asked, well, are there any undergraduates going? And I was told no. So I wrote a letter to the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, telling him what a brilliant idea it was to have this trip and how sad it was that there were no undergraduates going on this trip. 

And to my surprise, actually, I didn't really think much would come of that, he came back and said, how would I like a free, all expenses paid trip for five weeks to China? And that was a tremendous opportunity, not just going to China, we spent five weeks touring Economic enterprises. This was textile mills, steel factories. This is 1979, so China had not yet gone through its economic revolution that we know of China today. 

And also spend just hours and hours and hours with all of those professors discussing and arguing about all kinds of things as you would do on a trip when you're just basically with that group for five weeks. And it was just a tremendous change in my trajectory. And then I came back wanting to go into the foreign service. 

And then after a few years, I decided I wanted to get a PhD before I went into the foreign service. That led me to go to the University of Chicago to get a PhD, which I did, I focused on air power because I wanted to know how we could lose the Vietnam War with all these great assets and instruments. How we could make so many bad decisions in the Vietnam War. After all if I'm going to the foreign service, I thought I should learn something about the biggest disaster in that we had had at that up until that point and during the Cold War. And lo and behold, the Cold War ends.

And lo and behold, right after that, the first Gulf War happens, which is an all air power war, And so who would know that here I am, 30 years old, and I am front and center and all of the media, all of the discussions about air strategy, because we didn't really have much in the way of a stock of air strategists and the military generals we see on television and on the airwaves today did not go on the air at that point in time. 

So here I found myself thrust into this national discussion. And then a few, a year after that, the U.S. Air Force ends up offering me a job to come to Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama to help stand up a new school, an entire school, build around air strategy to make improvements for officers who would become generals so they wouldn't make the same mistakes as Vietnam. 

So right on the same wavelength I was, that I was on. And so I did that for three years. And then suddenly, I found myself being offered yet another job at Dartmouth College. And then after five years as I was coming up for tenure there, I found myself being offered a job at the University of Chicago as a tenured professor, back to where I got my PhD, which I never thought would have happened.

So that trajectory is one where I never really planned any of those steps. They just simply happened. And I've been a kid in a candy store ever since I came back to Chicago in 1999.

Stephen07:13
I'm certainly glad to hear that it feels that way. Let me ask about one big moment there, which is the decision to do the PhD, was that still primarily because you thought it was going to make you a better candidate for the Foreign Service? Did you see, or you know, have an eye towards other applications. Like what went into that actually?

Robert Pape 07:30 
No, no, it really was because I had fallen in love with academe or the pursuit of knowledge. So I came back that summer of 1979. I end my first year as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. I spend that summer with those 30 professors. Well, those 30 professors started to invite me as a sophomore to take their graduate classes. That was quite unusual, so I ended up taking, not just getting a BA after four years at the University of Pittsburgh, but a master's degree. And in fact, I had another set of credits for another master's degree. 

I found that I could take not just 15 credit hours, but 21 credit hours. I found I could do that and I essentially never went home, Stephen. I did this during the summers, I ended up getting tremendous number of A's. Of the nearly 900 people graduated the University of Chicago when I did, I was number one. And that was because I had taken all these classes, you know, so many of them graduate classes. And also doing quite well in those settings.

And I just really loved it. And I love the idea of especially political theory, you see, because I was going to the Foreign Service, I thought it would be also a good idea as an undergraduate to study political theory. So I understood more about democratic theory, what it meant to be a democracy. And this was something that there were actually at the time in the 70s and debates about this because there were some folks there was a famous scholar at the time, John Dunn at Cambridge, arguing that Brezhnev Era Soviet Union was just as much a democracy as the United States.

Well, I thought I should learn more about those debates and understand that more deeply, which is fundamentally a graduate subject, a graduate student subject. And that is how I ended up taking so many graduate classes and focusing so much actually in political theory. And so, when I went to the University of Chicago, not so much study international relations, that was actually my secondary area. 

My main area was political theory. And yes, I thought it would help me, but with the Foreign Service, but not in a, like, tactical way to kind of move up more quickly in the latter. In a deeper, more intellectual way to understand what it was that, what did it mean to promote democracy? What was that really all about? 

Now, lo and behold, I go to the University of Chicago, and the very group that I wanted to study with, in the first month, and this happens in graduate school, and many of your listeners will know, there was a certain professor. His name was Brian Barry. I really wanted to study with Brian Barry, and he said, Bob, it's really great to meet you. I'm going to Caltech. 

And so he picked up and left so in my first few years at the University of Chicago, I took every political theory course there was. There was a group called Straussians, which I learned about. I worked for two years at the Journal of Ethics, which I did this as an editorial assistant, helping to process all the reviews and so forth. And it's because I just love all the political theory that was happening in ethics. Russell Hardin was one of the big leaders of rational choice political theory at the time. I would go to his house for seminars every Tuesday evening. This was just really wonderful. But as time went on, I just never quite found that same niche I was looking for.

And there was another younger set of faculty in international relations - John Mearsheimer, Duncan Snidal, Charles Lipson. These were just brand new, newly minted PhDs. And they were just taking off. And they were doing fantastically interesting work in international relations. And so I found myself gravitating to that area.

And that is how I ended up choosing my topic on air power. Because, you see, the air power topic allowed me to meld the moral issues about the use of air power from Walzer’s Just and Unjust War. This sort of moral approach to bombing, so to speak, was strategic approach from Thomas Schelling, and that was essentially a bridge intellectually in my work.

So I entered this study of air power from both a moral lens and a strategic lens. And not with any real depth of background in operations and so forth. I had to learn all that over time and it was just a really tremendous opportunity to come into a subject from some really quite novel vantage points. That's something that happened with suicide terrorism I believe it's also happening now with my work on American political violence. But it's not something I ever started out as I never consciously did this as a strategy or a plan.

I followed my passions and I followed a vague trajectory. And then the truth is, I just never got around to going into the foreign service and I'm pretty sure I've kind of aged out of that at this point. 

Stephen12:56
Hey, don't say that. You never know.

Robert Pape 12:58
 You never know. You never know. 

Stephen13:02
I'm really curious about this job with the air force. I don't think anyone else on the show has had a similar experience like that. I'm curious how you think that impacted the rest of your career. I mean, like what did that role look like?

Robert Pape 13:15
 So I was at the University of Michigan as a postdoc. That's where I was for three years and then when I was there, the first Gulf War happened and right in the midst of it. Literally February 1991, as our Air Force is bombing Baghdad, I got this call from an Air Force major at the time. His name was Mark Clodfelter, he gets promoted later on, but he wrote a study of Vietnam that I knew from my dissertation. So I didn't never met the man before, but I knew who he was. And he called me and he asked me if I would consider coming down to Maxwell Air Force Base for this job.

Well, it was a total surprise and I had a lot of trepidation. I'm coming from a very university environment where there's, at the time, especially in the 1980s, the military were thought of the dunderheads, the strategic dunderheads, so we might think that there were biases against the military.

Now this is nothing like the 1980s because again, we had just lost the Vietnam War. So this was, I had a lot of trepidation. But I decided, well, I'll just go down for the interview and I go down for the interview. And I was stunned during these two days that they took the ideas I had in my dissertation, I hadn't published the book yet, so seriously.

And they were so focused on whether or not, not the issues of, I was a true civilian, no military background, coming into a true military environment. They really wanted to know whether there was something they could learn from that. And so, I came back and I thought, my goodness, I think I'm going to give this a try. It may not work, it may, this all may have been a mirage. But then I go for three years and every day, all those majors and lieutenant colonels wanted to do, and these were the best pilots in the Air Force who had just been bombing Baghdad. They knew how to put bombs on targets. My work on air power is not how to put a bomb on a target. It's about what happens strategically when you threaten and bomb targets. What happens to societies, what happens to target governments, what happens to the military. And no matter how many times you put a bomb on a target, that's not something you learn as a pilot. That's just not what happens. This is what, this is, the core debates though are about with air power at the level of three and four star generals, at the level of the president, at the level of the national security council.

Well, all they wanted to do was argue with me every single day about my arguments. And I was telling them, point blank, that they were doing things completely counterproductive strategically. So there was so much focus at the time on killing leaders. Leadership decapitation is the new way to win wars. And I was showing them powerful logic and evidence that this was not working out, and they took me seriously. And this was a surprise, it's a very big surprise. 

And then lo and behold, I found myself in arguments in the basement of the Pentagon about what targets we should be picking for to end the Bosnian Civil War. And there were lots of folks who wanted to end the Bosnian Civil War. The Bosnian Civil War was raging from 92 to 95. Lots of ideas here from liberals, conservatives, and nothing was working. Well, I ended up making a set of arguments about why we should focus on a certain set of truly military targets, and especially bridges between Serbia and Bosnia.

Lo and behold, we do this in deliberate force, and lo and behold, it ends up making a huge contribution and ended that civil war, and that war has been, that area has been mostly stable to this day. So that went all the way up to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. This was quite, ended up briefing, at the time, Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

This was really quite an opportunity for me, as again, somebody in his early 30s, to see how the arguments, the data, the social science, could actually play a role in saving lives. And this really impacted me tremendously. So we talk in academia about having policy relevant work, but it's rare that academics have an opportunity to see their arguments put into practice.

And sometimes when that happens, it doesn't work out so well. To be honest, there are cases of academics where it doesn't work out so well. My situation, I found actually, the engagement with the policymakers quite valuable. I paid attention to the criticisms they would have. I would go back, and I would try to think them through.

Sometimes make tiny adjustments, not really very much usually, but I took seriously that the goal here was to use social science to save lives. And that really was something I saw up close and personal in Bosnia with the Bosnian Civil War and the American Air Force. And that was something that has stayed with me to this day. 

Stephen18:28
You're talking about presenting these arguments and data and actually, you know, seeing them have a real-world effect, which I think must be quite wild.

But, what, how do you make those arguments? Like, what are you presenting to people in those cases? What kind of data, like, are you bringing to the table to influence those decisions?

Robert Pape 18:48
 Very much the same data you see publicly. So, if you look at my book Bombing to Win, which looks studies every air campaign in the 20th century you will see patterns, you will see cause and effect arguments, you will see analysis, you will see deep dives into key cases and the application of those findings to specific cases is that next step that happens in the briefings with the senior just policy, the senior policy makers. 

And that is the step that is really, probably I would say the presentations I make to the policy makers are 50-50. So it's not, let me tell you 90-95 percent what's just in my book and give you a summary of it and then just three sentences and now go, you go figure out how this applies. There is a second step to what this looks like. 

In the case of Bosnia, I published with John Mearsheimer. We co-authored a piece in the New Republic and the summer of 93 called The Answer. And that's not quite the most humble title, but it has extensive map analysis and extensive discussion of what to do with air power. And that is my contribution to that piece. 

And so if you want to know what am I presenting to those senior policymakers, it's the underlying foundation of why you should find my application, my analysis of the current case credible. That's coming from the social science. And then the detailed application to the current case, and in this case, I published it in the New Republic and that was what we were discussing. 

And then with the policymakers, there will be questions, there will be issues, there will be follow up and sometimes quite intense debate, more intense than many academics are used to. So, I have been in intense discussions of my work, let's say on women's shift to suicide terrorism with some of our, our great Nobel Prize winning economists here at the University of Chicago, I was through that multiple times with Gary Becker and came out of it. I have to tell you, I was quite proud to come out. You almost get a purple heart when you do that. But this was, I would say nothing compared to the debates in the White House and debates with the, this is just stage one.

When you're really talking about decision makers, making your, taking your arguments or not, and then their careers will rise and fall based on this. There are people will die or not based on this. All of those discussions get a lot more intense and they're serious, and the, they're not happening in with the cameras on. So you are, you are often seeing here the actual intellectual discussions. And I've seen that now multiple times, and I've seen it across administrations. I've seen this in Republican administrations and Democratic administrations. And it's surprisingly similar because they're making serious decisions.

The reason I'm in the room typically is because things are not working out. If things were already so great, they wouldn't really need my advice or my discussions. You see what I mean? I'm usually there because all those other strategies aren't working and they're looking, they're searching, or a way out of this mess or this problem.

It's really intense. Once with the Bush administration, in September 2005, I was called by our Deputy Secretary of Defense and I was asked, just come to Washington. We have some questions for you. So I just came. I have no idea. I get there. And here I'm in a room with 25 analysts from CIA and DIA. These are the top intelligence people in our country on terrorism. And England, Deputy Secretary of Defense England said, we're here today because the National Security Council tomorrow is going to decide whether to send an army to a country in Africa, and they want to know how good is your data on whether military presence triggers suicide attacks.

And for three hours, we, they went through my work, and I'm telling you, they came in at, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet, 50,000 feet. That was like a swarm here. No breaks for three hours and that was very intense and that army never was sent to that African country. This is what it means to have really independent advice outside of the Beltway and outside of the parties. 

Stephen23:38
That's fascinating. And yeah, kind of a role that academics play that we don't often see or hear about. I'm sure listeners will understand why you have been focused more on, uh, the situation in the U.S. lately but I'd love to just hear a little bit about your recent research. 

Robert Pape 23:56
 So my shift to American political violence starts in March 2020, right when the pandemic lockdowns began, and it's before there's any uptick in political violence in the United States. 

The reason I shifted is because, like many people I saw that the government was fumbling. There would be mass deaths and a million dead due to COVID in the United States is mass deaths. However, because of my work on political violence, I worried that because the federal government was fumbling so much, this could lead to deep insecurity and deepening cleavages in the United States, which could lead to a uptick in a surge in political violence. Like we hadn't seen before, at least not since the 1960s.

Well, then as I started to study historical cases of this, the George Floyd protests took off and 7% to 10% of them were riots. That is the largest political violence that we had seen in the United States since the 1960s, and so I did big study of that. And then, just as I'm trying to kind of develop a publishable piece out of that, January 6th occurs, which is another even more further escalation of political violence, even more serious because it affects the transition from one president to another. Again, this is not something we had seen really in our history domestically ever. This is really quite a serious, the most serious challenge to our democracy.

And so what that did is it really fundamentally shifted, those events, all those events together fundamentally shifted my trajectory, and so that's why I ended up publishing, doing a number of very detailed studies of every individual who was arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6th, on what’s very important findings, and then also national surveys of support for political violence in the United States, which led to rather, you know, dramatic findings about just how serious of a predicament we are in. 

This was, that are 12 national survey of political violence the United States, we found that 10% of American adults, that's the equivalent of over 25 million American adults support the use of force to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. 7% of American adults are not in support of the use of force to restore Trump to becoming the president. 

Well, that environment helps to explain a lot, how you could end up with assassination attempt against Donald Trump, and also the overall trajectory of what we have been experiencing for the last three years with the riots during the George Floyd protests from the left, to the January 6th, which is from the right. Then the campus unrest, again, coming from the left. What you are witnessing, and a whole string of lone wolf attacks, attacking congressmen from both the right and the left judges, Supreme Court justices. What you are seeing is the rise of an era I call Violent Populism in the United States, and we are now heading into an election, which will be the most consequential election, not just in our lifetimes up to this point, but for the future of the United States for decades to come. And no surprise, it is also likely to become the most dangerous election in our lifetimes.

Stephen27:28
That leads us to yeah, right where we are today and also to some of your sort of immediate future plans, which I wanted to ask about. What is interesting or maybe worrying you? I mean, like, where are you looking? And what are you most interested in seeing as this current election unfolds? And also, could you just tell us briefly about this lecture series that you're a part of, which I know has to do with the election?

Robert Pape 27:54
 So, just in the next few weeks, and it could even be in the next week, Foreign Affairs is going to publish a large piece by me that will explain, not just the rise of Violent Populism in the United States, but the overarching dynamics that I think are fueling it. And this piece is going to explain that what we are seeing is not simply the product of polarization and gerrymandering, not simply the product of social media algorithms run amok, and not even simply the product of a single individual, Donald Trump, although of course he plays a pretty, pretty powerful role here. What we are seeing is that we are seeing a transition in the United States from a white majority democracy to a genuinely multi racial democracy. 

In 1990, nearly 80 percent of Americans were white. That is non-Hispanic white. Today, that number is 61 percent. By 2035, that number is going to be just a little over 50% and then in the few years after that, it's going to be under 50%.

This dynamic of demographic and social change is profound. It's having major effects on our politics. I believe it accounts for the rise of Donald Trump in the first place. It accounts for then the reaction by the left to the rise of Donald Trump because you see, what we have is a large part of the country wants to stop and possibly even reverse this transition, so that we remain a white majority democracy.

Another large part of the country wants to continue and possibly accelerate the transition to a genuinely multi racial democracy with whites as a minority. Well, this is really quite consequential for our politics and you are seeing that it's having major effects on our parties. The Republican party is becoming more and more the party of going back or making America, as they say, great again, which a lot of the supporters are understand as preventing the shift to a multicultural America.

You're seeing that The Democratic Party, especially the youth in the Democratic Party, are shifting more and more to a multicultural or progressive understanding of democracy. And these are the underlying dynamics which are helping to explain why we have now millions of Americans on both the right and the left willing to support violence if politics doesn't go their way. And as we go forward, we have to expect that this transition to a genuinely multiracial democracy with whites is a minority, this is probably going to go on for another 10 years.

And that means that we are not simply in a period where this will all be over on November 5th. November 5th is likely to be a flashpoint, a very important period of time. The period after November 5th will be extremely important. But in the coming years, this general shift, this transition, this is not going away. In fact, I don't believe it's possible to stop this transition. Therefore, the contentious nature or what I call the Era of Violent Populism is likely to continue for years.

Stephen31:46
Okay, well, on that cheery note, no, that's a really interesting set of points you raised there and yeah, a whole lot to digest. I look forward to the article. Could you just tell us briefly about the upcoming presidential election series?

Robert Pape 32:02
 The Hong Kong Campus of the University of Chicago asked me to organize this very important series on the US presidential election. And so I'm the main organizer, and I will also be speaking. So we have four lectures. I will be giving a lecture in September on the Era of Violent populism, unpacking and, and then also being able to field questions from probably thousands of folks in Asia over zoom on this. We can do this quite with quite large audiences. 

And then in October, we have two other lectures. These are going to be with some of the most fantastic young professors in our political science department in international and American politics. So we're going to have Paul Post and Robert Gulotty. These are professors of international security and international economics.

They are going to talk about the impact, the potential impact of the presidential election on alliances, especially in Asia, and international economic policies, say tariffs, especially in Asia. 

And then we're going to have another lecture later in, in October, where we're going to have two great, two of our great young American political scientists study American politics, we're going to have Molly Offer Westdorf, who has done fantastic work on disinformation, and she has just, in fact, won this great, award by the Carnegie Corporation in New York that’s been given to just a handful of scholars around the country. So truly a very prestigious award to study this problem of this information. And she's gonna share her thoughts with us. And then also Ruth Block Ruben is going to, who's one of the leaders in studying American political parties, is going to talk about the consequences of selection for our party system in the United States. And keep in mind, whoever wins will be very happy, but the losers in this case, the parties could actually become quite unstable at losing in this situation. And so Ruth will be, offering us her thoughts there. 

And then in December, after the election, we're going to come back, all of us as a group, for a roundtable in early December. And we're going to see, what are our thoughts now that the election has actually occurred? Did we, have we changed our minds? Did we get some things wrong? What would we, what would we, what do we think now that we actually see reality, not just simply the possibility of the election?

Stephen34:46
Thank you, Professor Pape, for your time today, and Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.