Victor Davis Hanson: Is Iran’s Regime About to Crack?

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.  

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of revolutionary times, it’s sort of like being in the eye of the hurricane. You can’t really detect or fathom what’s going on, even though the changes are tumultuous. That’s what’s happening in the world today. 

The world is radically changing, and we don’t even feel it, or we don’t appreciate what’s happening. All we’re hearing in this midterm cycle are three things: affordability, affordability, affordability. And we’ve talked on earlier occasions that affordability is a result, the worry over affordability, of a 21% inflation just a year and a half ago after the Biden administration finished its four-year tenure, and a 30% inflation rise in things that matter: cars, insurance, fuel, power, health care, housing. 

So we don’t really hear much. We hear the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, and we hear, thirdly, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But take a deep breath before the midterms and look at the world as it is now versus what it was, say, five years ago. Russia has been fighting since Feb. 28, 2022. 

Its invasion, even if it does annex some of the Ukrainian territory, has been a colossal disaster. Its economy is in shambles. It’s under drone attacks. Its oil and natural gas have been embargoed. It has suffered 1.5 million dead and wounded. Its political leadership is in disarray. 

It’s lost its proxies in Venezuela, in Syria, and Iran.  

China’s not much better. It just fired its entire top echelon of its military. Its economy is stagnant. Its fertility is 1.0. It’s a shrinking, aging population. About 400,000 Chinese have been completely shut out of the 1.4 billion population who is supposedly in a capitalist, proto-capitalist, quasi-capitalist, revolution, but they’re not feeling it. 

In other words, China has enormous problems. When you look elsewhere, as I said so often before, Latin America is not in a pink tide. Don’t listen to the old words of John Kerry that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. It is not flipping toward the left. Maybe Brazil and maybe Cuba, and there are those governments on their last legs, and maybe a few countries like Nicaragua and one or two in the Caribbean. 

Otherwise, you have about 28, 27 of the 32 Latin-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, and some in the Caribbean have completely flipped through free and fair elections with the aid and help of the United States. USAID that was propping up left-wing movements is over with. 

The Chinese controlling the exits and entry of the Panama Canal is over with. [Nicolas] Maduro sending drugs and millions of people northward who were criminals is over with. And people in Latin America see the American economy, and they want to be a part of it. That is a completely radical change in the status quo.

People have been screaming about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. 

Yes, it’s unfortunate that Donald Trump is hyperbolic. Yes, he says things that are crazy on Truth Social. That’s the art of the deal. But the aim of the United States, as it was during World War II vis-à-vis Greenland, was to preserve this continental-size North American island, so to speak, in Western hands with it to be defensible and protected from hostile powers who want to use it as a base in the North Atlantic or to infringe on Western claims to the Arctic Circle and Arctic Ocean. 

And that can’t be handled alone by the 50,000 people of Greenland nor tiny little Denmark. World War II proved that when the Nazis overran Denmark, noble as it was, in three days and Greenland was lost and the United States stepped in, put bases there, protected it from the Axis incursions. After the war was over, it handed it back over to Denmark, and it protected it from the Russians for Denmark. 

All Trump was trying to say is with new missiles and new technologies, the shortest route to the United States is over the Arctic from our hostile powers in China and Russia, and we’re not going to leave Greenland ripe to be picked by these powers. And so now we have a new agreement, and the Danes have been wonderful. 

Trump has been wonderful. The Greenlanders have been wonderful. Everybody says, let the Americans build bases and protect NATO’s interest and the Western Alliance’s interest in Greenland. The Greenlanders will see prosperity from these bases. Denmark will retain sovereignty. It’ll still have Greenland on its coat of arms. 

It’ll still brag that it has this huge continental colony, so to speak. Fine. All we need to do is make sure that this is a Western entity, and it serves Western interest, and that’s happened. The same thing is going on in the Middle East very quickly. We are one country away from flipping the entire Middle East. 

This is not the world in which the Soviets were running Egypt or Saddam Hussein was in Iraq, or there was a crazy lunatic Russian Assad dynasty in Syria. It’s just Iran. The Gulf States have divorced themselves from Al-Qaeda and ISIS. No more subsidies. They wanna become wealthy and prosperous and secure. 

And they’re talking more with Israel than they are with other Muslim countries. They see Israel as not an existential threat, but the enemy of their enemy, which is Iran. 

And so Iran, with 93 million people and a history of civilization, high technology, high learning, has been hijacked for 50 years by a terrorist theocratic regime that has done all it can to hurt the interest of Europe and the United States and the world economy at large, and was seeking a nuclear weapon to deter any retaliation against it. 

And now, after about 200 days, that regime’s military, industrial, and nuclear complex is in shambles. Its economy is broke. Its currency is worthless. And we have accomplished that for about $40 billion. That’s about the size of the current here-in-California fraud that was perpetrated on us state and you federal taxpayers by crooked politicians and shysters who were hijacking programs for the poor, the homeless, hospices, and various welfare entities, and they stole $40 billion. 

That’s what we’ve spent so far to free Iran and change the Middle East without putting one ground soldier there. We tragically lost 19 soldiers in seven months. That’s unheard of in military operations of this scale and ambition. In other words, every single day on average, one person tragically dies by accident in the U.S. military. 

From the time we first hit Iran to the present day when I’m speaking now, the number of people, American soldiers who have died in Iran are a fraction of the daily accident rate. In other words, 11 times greater have been the accidents each day of people being killed in the military cumulative over this 210-day period, 11 times more than have been lost in combat against Iran. 

That is unimaginable. 

And we’re right at the point where if we continue this anaconda strangulation of this wicked regime without putting ground troops in, without upping the military tempo unless they retaliate with the Strait of Hormuz opening up and oil prices now starting slowly to recede, this regime will crack. 

And if it should crack, it will be the most calamitous, major, significant change in world political affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

All of these things are happening as I speak around the world, and it’s all a result of a suddenly dynamic U.S. economy, a suddenly changed position of the U.S. that is not only going to advance American interests, but also collective Western interests. And its subtext is we are going to stop the influence of China and Russia, communist governments in Latin America, in the Western Hemisphere, and in Asia and Africa, and we are going to preserve Western civilization and the United States’ preeminence. 

Why? Because we feel that if the world is consensual, we’re not nation builders. We don’t want to go in and change people’s hearts and minds. We are just saying, “Don’t tread on us. There’s no better friend and no worse enemy.” But when you threaten us, if people threaten us, our allies, our interests, we are in Jacksonian fashion gonna strike back, and we have.

And the world is far better off for it. 

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