Victor Davis Hanson: Iran Isn’t Winning—It’s Just Surviving (And Trump Knows It)

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 about 60 days into the Iran war, and we’re getting a lot of mixed signals from the media, from the administration, from the Iranians, of course, who have no real government, there’s nothing more than a series of competing factions, of which we’re not sure who has the power in Tehran. 

But we should review very quickly what the options are. So what are Iran’s options? Because people have made a fundamental logical error that survival is the same as victory or advantage. It’s not. Iran’s survival hinges on what the United States prefers to do, whether militarily, politically, morally, ethically.

But just because a nation survives doesn’t mean that it’s winning. Nazi Germany was flattened, but it survived. Japan was flattened, but it survived. So just because Iran now is talking loudly and boastfully does not mean it has not been soundly defeated.

The next question is, will the regime survive, at least? And they have three options. The first is the soft—the non-hard-liners or the soft-power people could come in. The parliamentary elected officials, such as they are in Iran, could capitulate. They wouldn’t capitulate and say, “We give up.” 

They would say, we meet your demands, and those would be international inspections. There’s surrender of enriched uranium and inventories of their missile, rocket, and drone programs, and they’d have to give that up.

Or number two, they could continue what they are just starting to do as I speak—that is, they could start sending out their PT boats, these small fast craft that have rockets and some light artillery, machine guns, torpedoes, and attack tankers.

And then if we were to reply, they could hit the Gulf states, or they could hit tankers, or they could even shoot missiles at our fleet.

Or I think their preferred option is delay, delay—the same 47 years that we’re all accustomed to through seven different presidents.

Yes, we want to negotiate. Yes, we will give up our nuclear enrichment. No, we won’t today. Yesterday we said we will, but we thought it over. Yes, we will give up our missiles. But why don’t you make Hezbollah exempt from the deal. Again, like a rug merchant: barter, barter, delay, delay. And why are they doing this? 

They feel that they’re only six months away from the midterm elections, and when they hear Democratic senators such as Chris Murphy say that it was awesome that Iran—when they lied and said 12 tankers had broken out of the blockade—it was a complete lie. But when Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator, voiced and amplified that lie, and not only did that but editorialized and said it was awesome, that gives them hope. 

So does Tom Friedman, who said, Well, I’d like him to lose, but not if it empowers Trump. So does Tim Walz and Chris Murphy going over to a socialist conference in Madrid. So they feel that they can help build opposition, of course, in Europe and in the United States. 

One of the ironies is that the Arab Middle East, at least the Gulf states, are more pro-American right now and for this war than is the American Left. But they think the American Left can put pressure on Donald Trump, get elected in the midterms, control the House and Senate, and then enact the War Powers Act and cut off funding. That’s not going to happen, but that’s one of their strategies. 

What is our retaliatory strategy? We have a lot. Right now, we have a blockade, and we’re waging economic warfare. We’re trying to stop the importation of weapons and the selling of oil to starve the regime out. The problem we’re having with this, even though it’s reportedly costing them $420 million a day, is that there are avenues on the Caspian Sea where they can import Russian weapons. 

They have a rail line through two different countries that goes into China. They can import; they have mechanisms other than airlifting weapons into Iran. And so we don’t really know—and we don’t really know to what degree. There are Iranian oil tankers all over the world in transit from before the blockade, so it might take longer than we think. 

That’s a decision Donald Trump will have to make. And the pressures upon him will be the world economy, the price of gas in the Western world, the midterms coming up, his polls, and defections among his own MAGA supporters, et cetera, et cetera. 

But otherwise, we can talk and talk, talk as they do. But the cards are in our hands because they are hemorrhaging money and we’re not. And we don’t need their oil. We don’t need their natural gas. We don’t need their petrochemicals. We only feel the pressure from others who are our friends that do need them. 

The second thing we can do is if they start to try to break the blockade, as they had recently by attacking tankers. We don’t have to go back to war. We can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, I guess you don’t want this bridge.” And then just announce—today—we’re going to announce it in advance. We’re going to take out this bridge, and tomorrow we’ll take out one of the four or five nuclear—excuse me—electrical generation plants. 

Not a full-scale war, but just tit for tat. But their hits will be very small, and our hits will be very great, and that will accelerate the economic strangulation. Or if they continue to do this, and we feel that the war has gone on too long, then we can hit where 90% of their oil comes from. 

And I say that because Venezuela is very rapidly making up the difference in Iranian oil, which, by the way, was going mostly to China—80% of it anyway. But the United States is ramping up production; Venezuela’s ramping up production. The more that we can enforce this blockade, the more Middle East oil gets out. 

So we could just say to Kharg Island, to the Iranians: We’re not going to hit your storage facilities. We’re not going to destroy the ability to pipe oil to Kharg Island and store it, but we are going to destroy the dockworks, the cranes, the ports, so that you can fill up the oil all you want, and for the regime that follows you—hopefully a democratic or transitional government—but you’re not going to be able to export oil, even if you get a ship in there. 

And so we can say, well, if you have one of these Liberian tankers that’s masquerading as if it’s neutral but is actually controlled by China, it’s going in close to the Iranian coast, it’s going to park at Kharg, it won’t be able to get any oil because we can damage it from the air without invading. 

The bottom line is we have a lot of alternatives, and Iran has very few. But remember another thing: defeating an enemy soundly and then demanding unconditional surrender and forcing that government to abdicate are two different things. They’re very different, and the latter requires a lot more time—probably boots on the ground. 

It’s not on the agenda, but that does not mean that we can’t strangle this regime and make life go on as usual for the West and our partners. And I think you’ll see more of that in the upcoming days. 

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