Victor Davis Hanson: Another Iran Quagmire Might Mean Big Losses for Republicans in the Midterms

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’re coming up on the fourth day of war in the Middle East since the United States attacked, along with Israel, the theocratic government in Iran. What is the status of the conflict as I speak, and what will be some possible outcomes? What would be ideal in the Trump administration’s view?

I think you all know that. It would be something along the following lines: a couple of more days of targeted strikes on the Iranian theocratic leadership. Its revolutionary guard would encourage the people who went out a million strong just a few weeks ago and were slaughtered, this time, they would not fear a diminished government.

And they would take control, storm the political residences, the political meeting places, the political key points of the Iranian government, mass outside them, and you would see some kind of plane come in from the United States with a Shah’s son or maybe the interim government in from Paris would fly in and you would have a coalition government.

And then everybody would rejoice. The United States would be popular, and there would be a normalization in the Middle East. And then of course there would be retribution for the murders in this government, committed not just against the United States and Europe and Israel, but against, primarily, the Iranian people.

How do we gauge the pulse of that intended, or desirable, result?

Well, at some point, the Iranians have a finite supply of arms. They have thousands of missiles we’re told. They had a navy, they had an air force, but they are up against over probably about a thousand jets of various countries, mostly Israeli and the United States, and they are expending a lot of their ordnance attacking almost every Arab country in their vicinity as well as Cyprus and Israel and attacking the United States Navy.

And so, they have a finite supply of missiles, drones, and airplanes, and they’re being attrited, demolished, destroyed every day, and they’re not being replenished. You can’t get into Iran. You can’t fly into Iran to give them more arms.

So they have a finite supply while their enemies do not. That’s very important. And more importantly, what would end the war in their favor would be something like the Iraqi War or the Afghan war. In other words, they would have to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans or Israelis to create public backlash to a degree that would force the leadership to back off.

Or they would have to accomplish stunning strategic victories, maybe blow up the facilities right around the Straits of Hormuz and blockade it somehow. Blow up some ships, make it impossible for 20% of the world’s fossil fuels to get out. That doesn’t seem … They don’t seem to have the wherewithal.

Each day, as I said, their stock of weapons and stock of leaders is diminishing, and there’s no way to resupply it. That’s how we lost in Vietnam. The Chinese and Russian governments were supplying either across the border or at the Port of Hai Phong. And that’s why we didn’t win in Afghanistan because there was an open border with Pakistan, and that’s why we had trouble in Iraq.

Syria was transferring weapons into Iraq. But this is different. We can isolate the entry and exit into Iran with air power, and we have done that pretty well.

One of the key indicators of the pulse of this war will be the Iraqi people. Excuse me, the Iranian people. And this is under controversy. People are in disagreement.

When you see your infrastructure go up in smoke, do you say, “Well, I like the Americans, but now they’re starting to blow up apartment buildings, and I don’t know who lives in there. Maybe they’re members of the regime, but that’s gonna cost all of us. And, you know, my third cousin is actually working for Rafsanjani or something. And he’s not all that bad.”

Or will it say thank you? “These are the people who butchered us. And when you take them out and you take their infrastructure out, it empowers us, and we’re gonna hit the streets pretty soon.”

Nobody knows that answer. A lot of people opine upon it, but we’ll have to wait a few more days to see what the pulse of battle is.

And what are the attitudes of foreign peoples and nations and countries? The Europeans have been very circumspect. The British government, the French government, at first said they were worried it was dangerous, or they supported the idea, but they didn’t want to have the United States use, in the British case, Diego Garcia.

I think what you’ll see with the British, the French, the Germans, the NATO powers, the EU, it’ll be pretty predictable from past wars.

In other words, number one, they will express guarded optimism and guarded support and then hedge. And then watch the pulse of battle. Put their finger in the air and say, “Who is winning? Is the United States gonna stick around this time?”

If the pulse of battle favors the United States and Israel, then they will climb on and say it’s deplorable what the Iranian government is doing. They attack neutral parties. We’re gonna … And then finally, we’ll send some of our assets in kind of a ceremonial performance art fashion.

We might send some French jets or British jets, park them in Oman, park them in Kuwait and say, “We’re protecting the oil producers of the world against Iranian aggression.” And that’s about it. There won’t be any sizable help, and there won’t be any sizable obstruction. It’ll be rhetorical, and it will be based on whether they think we’re winning or losing.

Russia and China. Russia lost a client with Bashir Hafez al-Assad’s destruction in Syria. He fled to Russia, but Russia didn’t do much to help him.

They didn’t send in a fleet. They didn’t send in convoys of aerial. He had no popular support. But more importantly, Russia’s lost over a million dead, wounded, and missing in Ukraine. They have lost the majority of their tanks. Their air fleet is vastly diminished. They’ve lost oil customers.

They are broke. Their GDP is now almost 50% invested in munitions, but the munitions are being wasted at an astronomical rate. There are maybe 20,000 Russians as well. Dead, wounded, or killed each month. They are in no position to help Iran.

How about China? We just have to go on past behavior.

Did they threaten us over Panama and say, “You leave the Panamanians alone. We cut a deal with them. We have a right to station Chinese Communist-controlled companies at the entry and exit of the canal.” No, they did not.

How about with Venezuela, Mr. Maduro. They said, “How dare you? This was one of our clients. We had inroads into Latin America. Our Silk Road, our Belt and Road project was good for Latin America, and we have a unique relationship.”

No, they didn’t. They didn’t. They’re not going to do anything.

Getting back to our Trump way of war, there was a strategic subtext to all of these incidents that I’m enunciated. And it’s to isolate and weaken China’s influence, especially in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the Middle East, and snap the Europeans back into action.

Finally, what will be the domestic reaction to this war? That will depend again on whether it’s successful.

I don’t want to be too cynical, but as I think I’ve told you once, during the April 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled, and people were screaming and yelling in jubilation, Iraqis among them, 90% of the American people polled that they supported George Bush’s demolishment of the Hussein government and the liberation of Iraq.

Fast forward to the 2006 midterms where the Republicans took a shellacking and support for the war was below 50%. And when George W. Bush left office, he had only about 30% support, and there were only 20% supporting the war.

Did the aims of the war change? No. Maybe a little bit more on nation, but what changed was the cost: 4,000-plus dead, many more wounded, trillion dollars. And for what? An ungrateful Iraqi people, it seemed to us, who now were hand-in-glove working with our arch enemies, the Iranians.

So you have to be very careful about the polls.

Americans will, by a small majority, want the liberation of Iran if it’s quick, if it doesn’t cost Americans a lot of blood and treasure, and if people around the world pat us on the back for liberating Iran.

If we get stuck in a quagmire where we have to have ground troops, and we get into the hundreds of American dead, it’ll be a disaster for the Republican Party in the midterms.

And finally, what happens with a MAGA base?

And I’m talking about the people who identify with the former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson, some of the more fringe people like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens or Steve Bannon—the MAGA people, America First, they have been loudly critical of this war in every aspect.

The problem is that part of that criticism has been gloom and doom, and they have predicted it’s not going come out well, or they have predicted that it’s really not in our interest, or that Donald Trump is a captive of Jewish influences.

All of that does not resonate with a majority of Republicans that support Trump. It doesn’t resonate with the independents.

The Left finds that as sort of a useful idiocy that they can glom onto internal criticism of Trump, but otherwise they have nothing in common with the extreme MAGA base.

So I don’t think that that will be a hindrance or a brake on operations, except as I just said, if the casualties climb, if we have to put in ground troops, if there is a falling out between us and some of our allies, if the anti-war movement ramps up and takes its fumes, takes an accelerant, I should say, from the ICE demonstration, the No Kings demonstration, the Tesla demonstration and really gets going as it did during the Second Gulf War. Then we could have some problems with the Trump administration’s conduct of war.

I don’t see that yet, and I think there’s a good chance that we can still see a vastly weakened Iran within a month, a triumphant United States.

And the $64,000 question will be, who will be in charge of Iran, and that is very important because you do not … We went twice into Iraq. This is the second time we’ve gone into Iran. You don’t want to go in a third time.

So it would behoove Donald Trump to find a magical solution of removing the theocratic government, putting a benevolent government in its place without a lot of American blood and treasure, and that’s a hard thing to do.

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