Victor Davis Hanson: The Epilogue of the Iran War

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.

I think we’re coming to the last chapter, the epilogue, the postscript of the Iran war. It’s been going on for over 60 days, but there are certain time conditions or limits to the war on both sides. 

As I said earlier, the military question has been resolved. The United States, by day 40, had effectively destroyed the ability of Iran to make war. And it has, since then, enacted certain blockades and economic coercion—especially canceling bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and interrupting commercial tankers on their way in and out of Iran on the high seas—that will guarantee the Iranian economy will explode somewhere in the next two or three weeks or month. 

But each side has a time constraint. On the side of Iran, it knows that the status quo is not acceptable. It’s a death warrant for them because they cannot continue their economic activity at the present rate. It’s just a question of how long can they smuggle things in on rail or through land routes or across the Caspian Sea. 

But it won’t be enough. 

And so their strategy is to often negotiate and give a hint that they might offer greater concessions. And then we, as a proverbial fish, take the bait. They hook us. We get into four or five days, then we find out it’s a ruse. Then we get mad and back off.

The point of that is, of course, to drag these negotiations out to the point where either the War Powers Act restricts Donald Trump‘s options, or concern about the midterms does, or the price of gas, or there might be a looming recession, or the pressure of our Western allies in Europe and Asia to resolve this incomplete. 

So what Donald Trump has is a series of pressures, as well as the Iranians. So right now we’re in a standoff. Iran says, “We can outwait you,” and Donald Trump says, “We can force you to bend to our will.”

And they counter back and say, “Yes, you can, but you don’t have enough time given the pressures that are upon you domestically, politically, economically, and globally. 

“And we have more time. We won’t go broke.” And Donald Trump says, “Yes, you can.” So you can see that these are two fixed objects in collision, and there’s no way to resolve it, except at some point, as the United States opens the Strait of Hormuz and people start to come in, there’s going to be greater traffic. Wall Street will be happy about it. And the price of oil will start to fall. And Donald Trump has the ability, with the U.S. Navy, to make that happen. 

And the Europeans, if they feel that it’s a successful naval operation, will want to come in—and come in at the end, when there’s no longer a military threat. They’ll send, I don’t know, 10 or 12 nations will send a ship or two. We’ll guide them in, and then they will take credit, which is fine. 

But what is the likely end to this standoff? And the likely end, I think, is something like the following. Iran will still send out boats to harass ships that get too close to the coast. It will still say it wants to negotiate, but it will never, never concede on two or three issues that were the purpose of the American intervention in the first place. 

Remember, we didn’t go in there to get boots on the ground. We didn’t go in there to change the regime. We went in there for two or three reasons. 

One, to ensure they could not enrich uranium, or that they would not have enriched uranium to make a bomb. Number two, we were going to stop their ability or propensity to launch missiles at their adversaries. Number three, we did not want them to subsidize the terror masters of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. And you could add there that we didn’t want them killing Americans anymore. 

That for 47 years, whether it was embassies or military barracks or individual Americans or, in some cases, U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq who were killed by Iranian-shipped-in shaped charges, we had enough of it. 

So all of those demands that we are putting upon them, I don’t think they’re going to concede to them because to concede to them would mean they’re no longer a revolutionary theocratic society. And that’s what they exist to be. 

So what will happen? In the next one, two, or three weeks, Donald Trump has a magic date. I don’t know what it is. You don’t know what it is. He does, and his advisers do. And they say, “At this point, we can still continue a robust economy. The signs are good. We’ll get the oil price down around five months from now, almost six months. The economy will be roaring and will be in great shape, and people won’t even remember this downturn. 

“But we’ve got to do it in the next two or three months.” 

And what will they do if we demand that they get off the seas of the Strait of Hormuz? They will send out boats. We will sink them. Then what will they do? They will send missiles into the Gulf and try to destroy the oil capacity and potential of the Gulf states. 

I don’t think they’re going to spend that many into Israel because they haven’t had the effect they achieved by sending six times more drones and missiles into the Gulf. And then what would we do? It seems to me that at that point, their economic status would be almost nil, and we would try to destroy their ability to exist as a regime without destroying the ability of the people to have regime change and take back their country. 

Now, what would that look like? Probably we would destroy the port facilities on Kharg Island. We would damage as much of their missile capacity as possible. We would destroy all their small boats. We would probably hit some dual-use targets, as Bill Clinton did in Serbia or Barack Obama did in Libya. That might be bridges. That might be generation plants. We don’t know. 

And then we would—if we can’t send troops to get the uranium—we would find out where it is, and we would have an intensive bombing to seal it, with hopes that the new regime then would let it stay there or try to recover it and give it back to us. 

So the bottom line is both sides have time constraints upon them. Iran knows that they are going broke, and they have no ability to stop going broke. So they want to negotiate, negotiate, and send little carrots for us to eat and then drag it out until the midterms or until there’s an economic crisis in the United States governing the price of oil. 

And Donald Trump has time constraints. He’s got to deal with an opposition who feels the war was a mistake, or they’re actually rooting, in some cases, for the Iranians. They want to impeach him. But when they take over the House, they want a recession, and they want the price of oil to stay high. 

So in the next week to month, something’s got to give, and that “got to give” will probably be that the United States will take the move to force open the Strait of Hormuz. And when they react to that by sending missiles, then they will finish the job and destroy their ability economically and militarily, for good. 

It could be quite violent for a week or two, but ultimately the decision is not in doubt. And then, according to this line of logic, the United States then would have time to reboot and make sure that we do not have an oil crisis or a recession before the midterms. 

And that seems to be pretty much the scenario. So bottom line, let us watch very carefully the next two to four weeks, because something is going to happen to break this deadlock. 

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