Recorded in May. Join angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes early and commercial free.

America’s war against Iran has gone on for more than two months and the United States has achieved none of its political objectives. American power has diminished, its munitions stockpile is low, and Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz.

Tehran has all the cards.

To hear Robert Pape tell it, this was all predictable. Pape is a political scientist who teaches at the University of Chicago and specializes in the use of violence to achieve political goals. He’s the author of Bombing to Win and a scholar of air power failures. On this episode of Angry Planet, Pape walks us through the uses of air power, why it never achieves victory on its own, and why the Pentagon keeps promising it will.

• How you become an air power expert
• Losing Vietnam after such perfect precision
• Man as meme
• “You don’t learn this by real estate deals.”
• There has not been a single case in history where air power alone has succeeded.
• “Our power is declining as a result of this.”
• The persistent myth of winning through air power
• Dumb bombs to precision weapons
• “It’s a dismal record of failure.”
• NATO in Kosovo
• What are America’s definable political goals?
• Iran’s political goals
• Iran says seized tanker in Gulf of Oman, as US ‘disables’ two ships
• Punishment, denial, and decapitation
• The fragmenting GCC
• Pape as Casandra
• Breaking Trump in the Strait of Hormuz
• “This will end up being America’s worst defeat since Vietnam.”
• A grim prediction

The Escalation Trap

The Gulf States Just Voted on American Power

From Kosovo to Iran: The Smart Bomb Trap and the Risk of Catastrophic Escalation

Buy Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War

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On the morning of April 21, Trump posted an image of eight women on Truth Social, claimed they were Iranian dissidents set to be executed, and demanded that Tehran release them. Detractors, and several Iranian sources, claimed the women were AI-generated. A day later Trump claimed the women would no longer be executed and that he’d saved them.

The truth is that the women are real and many are still in danger. Trump’s post made real Iranian women who protested the Iranian regime appear fake. The story speaks to a moment we’re in where it’s become impossible to parse truth from lies online. This was already difficult before AI-generated pictures and video. Now it feels impossible.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Mahsa Alimardani is here to tell us the story. Alimardani is the Associate Director of Technology Threats and Opportunities at WITNESS.

• Eight real women turned into AI propaganda
• Real crimes bastardized into regime propaganda
• “We need to come to terms with the fact that our information environment is structurally different.”
• Content Credentials as a partial solution
• How AI is supercharging our chosen reality tunnels
• The cycle of uprising and repression in Iran
• The structure of Iran’s internet and how its blackouts work
• Domestic intranet as an alternative form of communication
• AI-generated Lego propaganda videos
• Iran Reframed
• Explosive Media’s deep connections to the Islamic Republic
• Politics as fandom, fandom as politics
• “Everything is becoming flattened.”
• “The onus on the person scrolling is a bit unfair.”

Mahsa Alimardani’s LinkedIn

The Real Iranian Women Protesters Trump Made Look Synthetic

In the Room With Iran’s Social Media Savants

How AI Content Detection is Being Weaponized in the Iran War

Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War

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Kim Song Ju, the man who would become Kim Il Sung, was born to devout Presbyterian parents. Billy Graham’s wife was born to christian missionaries in China and went to high school in Pyongyang. American protestants once spread the gospel in northwest Korea and found fertile ground for their gospel message. Kim listened, learned, and used those teachings to shape a cult of personality that rules North Korea to this day.

On this episode of Angry Planet I’m joined by Wall Street Journal China bureau chief Jonathan Cheng to talk about his new book Korean Messiah. Cheng’s work is an exploration of the origins of North Korea and Kim’s deep ties to American Christianity.

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• Angry Planet as dress rehearsal
• Billy Graham in the Hermit Kingdom
• 19th century Protestant missionaries in Korea
• Presbyterians in the untamed northwest
• Untangling the history of a self-made godking
• The Kim Song Ju nativity
• Women without names
• Attending church during the Fire and Fury period
• The Soviet era
• Leading from beyond the grave
• Kim bombs his first public appearance

Buy Korean Messiah

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded March 24, 2026. Subscribe at angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes first and commercial free.

Last week an article published in Al Jazeera by an academic at the University of Doha in Qatar proposed something that felt crazy to some western war watchers: America and Israel’s strategy in Iran is working.

On this episode of Angry Planet, author Muhanad Seloom is here to explain his position. Seloom is an assistant professor of international politics and security at the University of Doha. He’s also an Iraqi who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and both US invasions. From his perspective, the US has degraded Iran’s ability to hurt its neighbors in the long term and changed the regime.

What comes next is a more complicated question.

• Why did this war even start?
• Setting aside morality and legality to look at ground truths
• “Iran is much weaker”
• Missile production, missile range
• The highly enriched uranium is in one place
• “The regime has changed. Whether we like it or not, the regime has changed.”
• The case against the new Khamenei
• What is it like to live nextdoor to Iran?
• There’s a reason no one is standing up for Iran
• Why isn’t the GCC doing more?
• What happens if we pick up and leave?
• What’s the plan for what happens next?
• “It’s not easy to rise up.”
• Charging tolls on Hormuz
• “I have to say this: I am against the war in any way.”
• What about the JCPOA?
• A great unanswered question of history
• Air campaigns don’t win wars
• …did America really lose in Afghanistan and Iraq?
• “War is hell.”

Labelling Ethno-Political Groups as Terrorists

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

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America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger.

So what would it take to get rid of Iran’s stockpile HEU?

François Diaz-Maurin is on Angry Planet today to answer that question. Diaz-Maurin is editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he recently published an article outlining what it would take for US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

• How a civil engineer becomes a nuclear journalist
• “You can’t bomb away nuclear material.”
• “Technically, it’s nearly Mission Impossible.”
• How much highly enriched uranium (HEU) was left after last year’s strikes?
• Moving HEU around Iran
• What we can learn from satellite photos and the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Why 60%?
• Managing scuba tanks full of gaseous toxins in a war zone
• Why blowing up the cylinders won’t work
• “Let me throw something weird at you.”
• Downblending versus exporting
• We’re living in the third nuclear age
• Deterrence works and that’s, maybe, not great?

Trump may send US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. There are no good options

Netanyahu says Iran no longer has uranium enrichment capacity

Iran willing to dilute uranium stockpile as fresh protests erupt

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AI enthusiasts love to say that the technology is as revolutionary and important as nuclear weapons. Even the Trump administration has adopted the metaphor. The President and the Department of Energy have repeatedly referred to the development of AI in the US as “Manhattan Project 2.0.”

But is the buildout of LLMs and machine learning systems really as important as the development of the atom bomb? And what are the lessons from the atomic age that AI scientists should then learn? Do we need an AI Non Proliferation Treaty? An AI International Atomic Energy Agency?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Ankit Panda comes on to talk about the uses and limitations of the “AI as nuclear weapons” metaphor. Panda is an expert in nukes and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been sharing his extended thoughts on the AI-nuclear connection at his Nukesletter Substack.

• Stanislav Petrov
• AI as nuclear weapons
• Why nuclear weapons resonate with people in the AI field
• The Strategic Air Command story
• That time we spilled nuclear material all over Greenland and Spain
• NNSA and Anthropic
• AI as the next Manhattan Project
• A massive infrastructure project
• Fissile material as silicon
• What’s the AI version of an NPT and IAEA?
• AI and nuclear are both dual use
• On AI winters
• What AI is actually being used for, what it might be used for
• The socialization around AI will change.

AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crisis

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Things have gotten very surreal in the dark corners of the internet. AI-generated prophets are preaching jihad in Facebook groups, Minecraft servers host digital caliphates, and school shooting fandoms gather to study their heroes and plot how to up beat their score. It’s a double bill on this episode of Angry Planet as two experts from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit that studies and works to mitigate violent extremists, discuss the brave new world of online-born violence.

First up is Milo Comerford, the co-author of a study about nihilistic violence. Then we’ve got Moustafa Ayad to talk about how the Islamic State is circumventing bans and pushing its message on social media.

• Staying sane on the internet
• Violence without ideology
• The Comm
• 764
• True Crime Community
• Saints Culture
• When fandom becomes a killing
• An aesthetics driven movement
• Online and offline have merged
• Moderation is impossible
• You don’t have to hand it to ISIS
• Broken text posting
• Copyright strikes and the Islamic State
• Facebook professional as the gold standard
• AI resurrects dead influencers
• Jihad influencers
• Even IS is obsessed with the Epstein files
• Virtual caliphates in Roblox and Minecraft
• “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
• Once again, it all comes back to 4chan
• Saying nice things about twitter dot com

Beyond Extremism

‘The Comm’: The Group Linked to a Nationwide Swatting Rampage

How the True Crime Community generates its own killers

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America spent most of the 19th century at war with itself. It conquered its western expanse then collapsed into civil war. Once the North beat the South, partisan politics consumed the country for a generation. A string of assassinations, progressive firebrands, and civil service reforms burned people out on domestic politics and a bored and febrile nation began to search for meaning beyond its borders. It noticed the Spanish Empire was awfully close.

In Splendid Liberators, award winning journalist Joe Jackson chronicles the beginning of the American myth of the “good war.” He’s on the show today to talk to us about Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and a general who lay in state at the Alamo.

• Recurring patterns in American history
• Roscoe Conkling jumpscare
• Remnants of the Spanish-American War in South Carolina
• What did liberty mean in the 19th century?
• Clara Barton, Leonard Wood and the dual American personality
• The first modern concentration camps
• The Battleship of Maine
• When Congress used to fight, physically
• Drones won’t win a war
• The US in the Philippines
• ‘The water cure’
• American historians facing reality in the Philippines
• Teddy, finally
• Laying in state at the Alamo

Buy Splendid Liberators

A Defense of General Funston

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

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