Robert Pape
speaker
2,835 appearances
10 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Robert Pape’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But here's the big issue you need to hear, which is that idea of punishment, that you're going to – your change to the past is rapid punishment, is exactly what other presidents have tried to do.
Bill Clinton tried to do this with Slobodan Milosevic in March 1999.
And that produced massive backlash, which made a problem that was a problem a gigantic crisis here.
And this could be 10 times worse.
And the reason is because what happens when you try to punish is what we were just describing before.
You're going to get a fight or flight response by a distribution of people inside the government and also in the society.
And you only need a 25% or a third of that distribution to want to fight before this all becomes worse.
Because what you may think you're going to do is knock off the worst of the worst.
here um but that's not what's really going to happen what you're doing is you're taking a risk that when you try to speed this up it will become 10 times worse and you're going to have to walk away with a gigantic black eye uh here and that's what happened to bill clinton when he tried to do this uh and that's why when we went into this with the bot with the balkans after this whole thing blew up yes we finally fixed it and i was uh giving advice um uh here there as well
Sandy Berger's son was actually at Dartmouth where I taught at the time, so he was the national security advisor.
So the bottom line is, sir, that this is not the way to win.
You may think and hope to win this way, but what you're doing is you're taking a risk that's even bigger when Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, they wanted a quick solution here.
And what happened is they unleashed a tiger, a much bigger tiger, and they got crushed.
This is the danger.
I understand the other way seems a bit slower.
It seems not distinctive enough.
But this is the way to actually win here over time.
And, sir, you just had this happen in Syria.
And you were part of this.
Showing 781–800 of 2,835 · page 40 of 142
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