Victor Davis Hanson: Iran’s Three Possible Responses to Trump’s New Pressure

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

Victor Davis Hanson: Just thinking about Iran, there’s some developments today that we, on one of the islands in the strait, thought that they were, I think we were pretty assured that it happened, were arming missiles that had, I’d never really heard of this, but mines on them, and so that they could reclaim control of the Hormuz.  

So then we took those out, and then they replied by sending eight or nine missiles to Jordan, which didn’t do any damage. And now, as I’m talking, I think [President Donald] Trump is considering hitting them. 

A lot of us, I think we said on this podcast, we expect an October [surprise] … I didn’t quite expect a September surprise. But Iran has to do something because it is being squeezed economically, culturally, medically, politically, militarily, and its economy is ruined.  

The only thing I’m troubled by is I understand that we did a lot of damage for the first 38 days. But I don’t understand, since we were six months from the midterms, why we didn’t spend, as we’ve said on this podcast, another 22 weeks, 23 weeks, 24 weeks, and obliterate Pike Mountain with B-1s coming back again, maybe three or four missions. Just hit it, hit it, hit it. 

I’m not aware of the inventory status of our bunker busters, but I didn’t know why we didn’t take out some of their dual-use bridges, their TV communications, crater their airport, and really do a lot of damage early, and then start what we’re doing right now in April. In other words, complete economic sanctions, blockades, shut down their access to foreign exchange, everything. Secondary sanctions against those who trade with them. I think they would’ve been kaput by now. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. 

Hanson: Not that they won’t be, but …  

Fowler: Well, do you think it has something to do with Donald Trump’s belief and his talent for being a negotiator? Do you think that has something to do with it? 

Hanson: I do. I think you overestimate … I think the difference is … The Chinese have a sense of their own self-interest. The Russians have a sense of their own self-interest. We learned that. I mean, they were the biggest, those two countries were the biggest mass murderers in history, really, [Josef] Stalin and Mao [Zedong]. But I’m not sure Iran does. 

I know everybody’s rational, supposedly, and I know that these people who say that they’re waiting for 72 virgins in paradise seem to be pretty savvy investors when it’s stealing money from the people and buying townhouses in the choice locations of Paris or London.  

That said, I just don’t think that you can believe what they say. I don’t think you can believe anything they agree to. 

They have a different vision. Their vision is that this is a corrupt world. The West, the Western colonial experience, harmed them, was an insult. There were great days of the past when there was a caliphate, and then the Ottomans, at least, even though they suffered, the Iranians and the Arabs suffered terribly, mostly the Arabs under the Ottoman Empire. 

The point they have is they want to create a Sharia, radical Islamic, ninth-century, kind of like the Taliban only in Shia terms, with a headquarters in Tehran run by a bunch of theocrats with nuclear weapons and using the oil and making the Gulf Arab states subservient in the way that Hamas and the Houthis are, and using the combined oil of their own and the Arabs to really shake down and destroy the West. 

They hate the West. I’ve heard this so often: “Well, Victor, there’s a million Uyghurs, or Muslims. The Chinese treat them as slaves.” 

Yes, but they don’t hate the Chinese. 

“Well, Victor, Victor, [Vladimir] Putin, in the third Chechnyan war, he leveled Grozny. He just wiped out thousands of Muslims.” 

Yes, he did. He doesn’t hate Islam. They don’t hate Putin like they hate us. They hate us because we’re successful, we’re wealthy, we dominate the culture of the world, and they know that it’s a narcotic. 

The best example of that is on the eve of Sept. 11th. The 19 murderers, where were they that week on the eve of when they were gonna commit mass murder and be such Puritans? They were in Vegas partying it up. 

And what was [Osama] bin Laden doing before we got him? He was thumbing through his porno collection. 

Well, they are so repressed that they hate the titillation and the seduction of what they think is a corrupt West. So, they’re never gonna listen to Trump. Never, never, never. They’re only gonna listen if they have no choice. 

So, if he continues to squeeze them, squeeze them, squeeze them, one of two things will happen. Either they will come begging him to stop, and I doubt that’s gonna happen, or there will be a popular uprising at some point, or they will starve if we continue to do it, or something will stop Donald Trump. 

And what would stop him? Beause here we’re getting to the meat of the argument. They really do believe that the democratic socialists of the Left, the Islamicist voice in America, the Ilhan Omars, the Rashida Tlaibs, the Zohran Mamdanis, the Hasan Pikers, the Abdul El-Sayeds, they really believe that they’re on their side. When El-Sayed said, I have to be careful about criticizing the death of being celebratory in tone about the death of the Supreme Leader, he was on the hot mic. 

Well, he said on the hot mic, “Be careful. That wouldn’t go down too well with my constituents.” 

So, they really believe that they’re winning demographically and politically, and that there are forces in the United States and this new democratic socialist-Democrat-Islamicist coalition that will stop Trump once they win the midterms and either cut off funds, which they won’t do, or, in some strange way, have resolutions. Who knows? 

They have something … I’ll just finish this rant. They have some evidence for this because I mentioned that when you have ex-presidents visiting at heightened tensions, like [Barack] Obama planning to go to [Mark] Carney, or you have, as John Kerry was negotiating in Paris, basically privately while we were getting out of the Iran deal, or you have the Left really cheering on our enemies or calling this Trump’s war, you could make the argument that they have confidence. 

There’s reason for their confidence that you can call off the United States, that there’s people on the left that agree with them and wanna stop Trump by any means necessary. 

And so, they would rather see the United States hurt if that involved the destruction of Trump. By all means, they wanna destroy Trump. That’s their issue. And if they can do it with collateral damage to the United States, that doesn’t bother them at all. 

When he says he’s going to have record natural gas and oil production, or he’s bragging that he closed the border so there’s zero illegal immigration de facto, or they sent back 300,000 criminals, or we have more space launches suddenly under his tenure than the whole world combined, not even close, or that our AI companies now are nine out of the top 10, our software companies are nine out of the top 10 worldwide, we’re racing ahead on AI, they don’t care. They don’t. That doesn’t matter at all. 

And if you sit down with a leftist and you say, “We went up to … We had 5% inflation for four years, and we had cumulative 22% inflation. And the first year we had 1.9% under Trump. We don’t know what it’s gonna be, but it won’t be 5%.” 

They don’t care. They’ll say, “The unaffordability that we caused is your fault.” 

So, it’s an irrational hatred. That’s one reason I wrote the book about Trump, “The Counterrevolution,” because I don’t think that even he sometimes realizes that you can’t negotiate with the Iranians, but you also can’t ever, ever be … Don’t expect any credit from the Left. 

This isn’t the Democratic Party. This isn’t even Bill Clinton’s kind of left-wing version of it. This isn’t even Barack Obama’s Left, Left, Left revolutionary wing. This is different. This is a nihilist, young, millennial, I don’t know what you want to call them, but they detest him to such a degree that they want him and everybody with him to fail. 

I can see it just by writing good things about him. When I get classicist, because I still keep up in classics, I try to write an article a year. I’ll have people who I knew very well, but just the fact that I wrote a book about Trump, they’ll write and say, “He was a terrible classicist. He sold his soul to Trump and da, da, da, da, da, da.” 

They’re so full of hatred, and they’re not empirical. And some of our best friends that we used to know. 

When Robert Kagan writes an article that the Iran war is lost, when Iran has no functional military and it’s on the edge of bankruptcy, and OPEC is splintering apart, and Israel is stronger than ever, and the Gulf states collectively have much more clout than they’ve ever had, and he says that Iran is winning, that can only reflect the deductive hatred of Trump. 

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