Preventive or Preemptive? The Pros and Cons of a Potential US Strike on Iran

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump is positioning the largest naval and air forces with submarines off the coast of Iran—in the Persian Gulf, in the Mediterranean, in the Red Sea—that we’ve seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And there are pros and cons about striking Iran.

We’re not at war with them right now, so this is what we would call either a preventive war, long-term threat, or a preemptive war, that there’s a short-term threat that has to be precluded by the use of force.

It’s very controversial, and we don’t know whether he’s going to pull the trigger or not. He said help was on the way when the protests were maximized. Anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people, estimates say, were killed. Those protests are now—we haven’t seen much of them, given the mass death and murder on this awful regime of some, it’s getting nearer, as you know, a half-century, 46 years.

So, what are the pros and cons of what we’re doing? Does he have to go to Congress to get a declaration of war? No. No more than the Obama administration had to do when they bombed Libya, for example. But there are pros and cons, and let’s go through the pros first.

It has been the dream of eight presidencies, going back to Jimmy Carter, all the way to Donald Trump, to have some type of regime change.

There’s one exception, Barack Obama. He had a harebrained scheme, remember, that he was going to empower Iran. He had the Iran deal. He brought in $400 million at night on pallets to give them money that had been sanctioned. He lifted the sanctions. So did Joe Biden. The idea was to balance off Israel and the Arab countries with a Shia revolutionary country. And then that would produce creative tension, I suppose, that Obama thought he would adjudicate.

But other than that, every president has wanted an end to that anti-American regime. They have killed more Americans than any terrorist organization, probably as much as ISIS or more than ISIS, given the use of shaped charges in Iraq. So, that makes sense that you’d want to get rid of it.

You would also, in this cat-and-mouse game that we played for 20 years about Iranian nukes, it’s a given that anytime they sign a nuclear nonproliferation deal or they give someone their word, it’s not going to happen. They can’t be trusted. They’re a revolutionary, ideologically driven, not rational regime. But it would be very good if they didn’t have the ability with their hypersonic missiles or their other ballistic missiles to hit Europe or our allies in the Middle East or even, at some future date, us. So, you could end that project for good.

They’re in remission now, thanks to our prior bombing missions, but we haven’t ended that threat. It’s existential as long as the regime is in. It would be a moral thing, as I said, 10,000 to 30,000 protesters were murdered. Their bodies were not even given back, in some cases, to their families, secretly buried.

And this regime, as we speak, is hanging people, executing people. It’s a rogue regime. And the moral case is strong to help out the protesters, and there might be a chance that Donald Trump could time his attack with a second wave of protests.

It would also stabilize. Everybody thinks it’s going to destabilize the Middle East. It would probably stabilize the Middle East. And with the source of funding for Hamas, for the Houthis, and for Hezbollah completely cut off, those terrorist organizations may die in the vine, and the Arab countries might feel more secure that they could cut a deal according to the Abraham Accords with Israel.

But there are cons. Let’s make no mistake about it. When you park 200,000-ton displacement carriers, one in the Persian Gulf and one in the Mediterranean, those are big targets. They’ve got some of the best air defenses in the history of naval warfare. They have a fleet of accompanying ships. Hopefully, their air arms could take out the ability of the Iranians to hit them with either drones or missiles, but it’s not a sure thing. And they’re big targets. And we’ve got about 5,000 Americans on each one of those carriers, and they’re a $13 billion, $14 billion investment. So, that’s a great risk.

The midterms are coming up in November. Most presidents are very wary to take on an optional military engagement when there’s so many unknowns up in the air, and it could either sink the Trump administration’s prospects in November or, if he was able to displace and get rid of this horrific regime, the first of, as I said, eight presidents to be able to do that, that would be quite an achievement, it might help him in the midterms.

He has another problem. That is the MAGA base. The MAGA base is neo-isolationist. He campaigned in 2016 and 2020 against so-called forever wars, optional military engagements, especially in the Middle East. In the past, he’s been able to square that circle by limited engagements. In other words, the taking out of the Wagner Group in Syria, the killing of Qasem Soleimani or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or the bombing of the nuclear facilities. They were all finite, very short, solved the problem. Bombed ISIS into oblivion. Said he was going to bomb them, he did.

This is a little different. There’s not so easily an endgame here because this is a huge country and it’s got a very ideologically fervent population.

There’s another thing, too. The protesters themselves, we think, are pro-Western. They want to bring back the shah, but we’re not sure of that.

So, if you’re a protester and they killed 30,000 of you and you’re afraid to go back out and you’re sitting in your apartment and you see bombs raining, and they’re not going to be completely accurate, and take my word for it and your word for it, these Iranians know how to do Hamas and Hezbollah-like tactics. Their missiles and their command and control will not be in something that says a secure bunker. They will be near hospitals. They will be near mosques. They will be near schools. They will be, as we saw in Lebanon, in residential areas. So, there will be collateral damage.

Will the Iranian public have the long-term view that that’s in their interest, or the short-term view and turn on the Americans?

These are all pros and cons, but ultimately, Donald Trump will have to make that decision. He’ll have to make the decision pretty quickly because you can’t just take those many naval assets and stick them halfway across the world. In terms of deployment, wear and tear on the machinery, deployment time, etc., there is a window. And the window is probably about another six weeks. He’ll have to make that decision.

We have the Olympics. You would not want to strike during the Olympics, apparently. He’s got to worry about the Israelis. On the one hand, they want the regime gone. On the other hand, the last time they exchanged missiles and attacks with Iran, they were getting very low on anti-ballistic missile defense weaponry. So, we don’t know quite where their stocks are now.

Finally, what should Trump do? I’m not going to advise him. I don’t have the expertise or the knowledge to advise him. But I do think that he might want to have a brief press conference or address to the nation, five minutes, not detailed, just say that we are facing an existential threat for nearly 50 years with this country. It’s killed thousands of Americans in Iraq and Lebanon. And it is a human rights abuser. It murders its own people.

And it’s very important, given its key role in controlling the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% to 30% of the world’s oil passes every day. And more importantly, the price of oil will depend on it as well.

And here are the dangers and here are the advantages, and I’m going to make my—it doesn’t have to be that explicit, but he needs to give some information to the American people.

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