38 Days of Strikes, 60 Days of Negotiations—Is Iran Just Buying Time?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

We talk about an Iran war, but as I speak on June 9, we haven’t had a real kinetic back-and-forth bombing campaign or anything since around April 8. So we had 38 days of bombing, and then we’ve had 60 days of negotiations. 

So there isn’t really an Iran war right now. 

We have a War Powers Act. The Left is all upset and trying to stop the war, but there is no war right now. It’s a waiting game. And what is the waiting game?  

The waiting game is that Iran feels that by giving a concession on Monday and taking it back on Tuesday and letting Hezbollah attack Israel and then telling Israel not to reply and then sending a little boat out in the strait, it can delay, delay, advance, retreat, and Donald Trump will allow this because he has got a deadline too. 

Their deadline is they’re losing $400 million a day in economic productivity and probably, I don’t know, $2 billion or $3 billion in revenue.  

Donald Trump’s problem is now that we’re less than five months until the midterms and inflation is moderate. It’s not as high as the Biden years, but it’s bothering people, and the gas price is high. 

And because the gas price is high, people feel they can raise prices commensurately because they think we’re in a hyperinflation.  

I’ve been talking to a lot of contractors lately. They’re not getting work right now, even though the fundamentals of the economy are sound. But people are so paranoid here in California about paying $6.50 a gallon for gasoline, they feel everything will go up. 

And so they’re holding off on a lot of their construction projects.  

What is Iran doing then? It’s hitting Kuwait. Why does it hit Kuwait? I suppose it has the largest Shia population in the Gulf, and it wants to stir up restive opposition to the royal family. It hits the UAE because it hates the UAE. 

It’s the most liberal, progressive, and pro-Western and anti-Iranian of all of the Gulf nations. It wants to show the Arab world that if you, like the UAE, have a detente with Israel, you’re going to suffer.  

It hit Israel. Why did it hit Israel? It hit Israel during this so-called peace because it wants to widen the reported gulf or anger between [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Trump and turn public opinion toward Iran a little bit. 

So what is—how does it all divide? Who gives in first?  

Donald Trump is kind of mystifying people because he’s a Jacksonian. He believes in tough deterrence. So throughout this so-called peace of now 60 days, Iran has had a lot of provocations. They’ve broken the peace. They’ve, as I said, tried to mine the harbor. 

They’ve tried to attack U.S. ships. They’ve attacked our allies. And we have sometimes done a little bit of retaliation, but why don’t we just unload on them?  

As I said earlier, why don’t we give them a list of targets and say, these are going to be hit if you don’t concede to surrender your enriched uranium, get out] of the strait and let it be open, stop the subsidies to these terrorist appendages, and surrender your missile arsenal or what’s left of it? 

Why doesn’t he do that? I have a feeling he doesn’t do that because he has intelligence that we don’t have, because we don’t have any boots on the ground or embedded reporting that Iran is in much worse shape than we think, and that there are civilians in the Iranian government—the president, some members of the parliament—that are sending signals that they’re not part of the Revolutionary Guard or the theocracy and they feel the people are getting more and more restive, and Trump is looking at them as a transitional government. 

Now, the problem with that is we have no idea if those rumors are accurate. They’re kind of based on the fact that we’re getting information. 

On the first day when we took out [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and some of the henchmen of the theocracy, there were other civilian elected moderates in the general building or vicinity that we deliberately spared on the idea that we want to work with moderates. 

But we don’t know whether the moderates are playing good cop and the theocracy and the Revolutionary Guard play bad cop. And how that would work would be something along the lines of, well, the Revolutionary Guard got out of hand again, but they don’t represent the people. They don’t represent us. We want real peace. 

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—the days go on.  

So at some point it seems to me that we’re going to have to take the bull by the horns and resolve it. And the way you would resolve it is one of two things. You would either, as I said earlier, give a deadline and say these are the nonnegotiable four items that have to be met on your part. 

If you don’t do it, we’re going to completely preclude your ability to wage war. You’re going to have no missiles. You’re going to have no dual-use bridges.  

You’re going to have nothing that could be used in a military sense, and it’s going to be a week or two of hard war against you. 

Or we could continue to negotiate and not say a word, but every single time they send one missile into Kuwait, one boat into the strait to mine it, one barrage of missiles against ships in the Gulf, one missile against Israel, we do 10. 

We do 10 bombings. And we tell them that every single time you show any military aggression or hit any of our assets or our allies, we’re going to reply in kind. And I think if it is true what rumors suggest—that they are starting to crumble economically and the people are getting a little bit excited that there might be a change—and Donald Trump does not want to precipitate military action to either stymie the growing resistance or take out targets that might be useful for a post-theocratic Iran, that’s fine and good, but he is running out of time too. 

And because we’ve got to get this economy—all the fundamentals of the economy are good. The jobs reports are good. The stock market is good. Foreign investment is good. Job creation—everything is good except inflation and gas prices.  

So if he can pivot and assure the world that the strait will be open and Iran is militarily defeated or has submitted, we can— 

But it has to be very soon because now we’re down to five months.  

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