Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Iran Deadline: The Midterms Aren’t What Iran Thinks

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. 

The traditional view among Americans is that the Iran war, I think they feel, was a mistake. Some of the supporters of Iran have been critical. I thought we should have continued the kinetic action longer than the initial 38 days and adopted something similar to Scott Bessent’s Anaconda Squeeze earlier, but that happens in all war. 

But is that general consensus that it was either a political or a military mistake, or both, accurate? 

Well, there’s a lot of things going on right now. First of all, why would the Iranian government suddenly say, “We are complaining that you hit a civilian target”? They didn’t really distinguish which, but this is a government that sent hundreds, thousands, of drones and missiles into Israel for the express purpose of hitting civilian targets. That’s what they do. They always hit civilian targets. 

So why would they think the world would be sympathetic to this complaint if it were true that the United States finally is hitting dual-use targets? Dual-use means they can be used for either civilian or military purposes. A bridge, a power grid, an airport, a TV studio, etc. 

So that shows you that there is an element of desperation on the part of the Iranians for them, of all people, to say, “It’s not fair that you are hitting civilian targets.” 

Second of all, they said, “This is not fair that you don’t meet us in battle. If you were really strong, you would meet us in battle.” 

Translated, that means, “Well, we really liked it when you were in Iraq and we could give shaped charges to the Ba’athists and then later the radical Islamists to kill you Americans. We really liked it when you fought our type of war in the streets of Fallujah, but you’re not fighting our type of war. You’re fighting an air war where your superior technology and firepower is killing us. This is not fair.” 

So again, a second symptom that they seem to be very angry. 

How about a third one? Donald Trump said, and he says this a lot, but he said that they have never been calling for talks more eagerly. More eagerly. They’re desperate for talks, he says. 

What is going on? 

We have some other indications. There are indications coming out of Israel and coming out of our own government that finally, finally our intelligence agencies have ignored what the Turks have been telling them: “Please, please, please do not arm the Kurds. Do not do it. We forbid that.” 

But maybe Turkey’s rivalry with Iran is greater than their fear of Iranian Kurds. I don’t know, but these rumors are increasing and increasing, and they dovetail with a report that in September, early September, the Iranian Kurds are having a national day of strike and protest in the street. 

Who knows what that’ll happen in a situation as dire as what’s going on in Iran, for millions of people to go on strike and get out into the streets, Kurdish or not. 

Another indication is that Iran now is trying desperately to open up another front. They have failed with Hamas. Hamas is basically inert. The Israelis every single day continue to kill Hamas leadership. 

Hezbollah is anemic. The Israelis have decimated their leadership, and the Lebanese government is getting more confident that with Western help they can rid themselves of Hezbollah. 

The only wild card is the Houthis in Yemen. And they now are threatening to close down the Red Sea, and they are supposedly getting help from the Iranians. That can be stopped very easily. You can stop all air flights to Yemen from Iran if they even continue. So they have a finite supply. 

But what I’m getting at is all of a sudden, seven weeks before the midterms, things are heating up in Iran. And that’s a result of the fact that they cannot buy any material goods, any imported goods. They cannot sell any oil. They are losing $500 million a day in economic activity. They cannot be resupplied easily, only by perhaps the Chinese and Russians through a train or something, and those bridges have been hit. 

They rely on Chinese satellite help, but the United States will be addressing that very soon. 

And so they thought that because the midterms are coming up and Donald Trump wants to get the price of gas down, that he would negotiate a sweetheart deal to let them escape, saving face and with much of their government intact. 

That’s not going to happen. There’s no chance that’s going to happen. 

Instead, what do the midterms tell us about the pulse of the Iranian war from all the dimensions? 

Well, the Iranians have interpreted it wrongly. They believe that as the midterms get closer and closer, and the war becomes more unpopular because of the price of gas, and as Democratic legislators get more emboldened and declare the war lost, and some of our hard-left socialist Islamists, public intellectuals, people in Congress, people in the bureaucracy, swear that Iran might be a sympathetic victim of an overweening United States, they feel that the midterms are in Iran’s favor. 

That one of two things will happen. In panic that he might lose the midterms, Donald Trump suddenly will give Iran concessions and try to get the strait open completely on Iran’s side and get the price of oil down. That’s not going to happen. 

Iran then thinks that Donald Trump will lose the midterms, and historically he may get the average of 22 seats he would lose, so he would end up with a 13- or 14-seat Democratic majority and either a deadlock or a one- or two-seat disadvantage in the Senate. 

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could. 

But what would that do? Do you think the Democrats would have enough strength to cut off all military funding for the Iran war at the moment when we’re making enormous progress? No, that’s not going to happen. 

The Iranians are sorely mistaken. 

If the midterms have any effect whatsoever, they might result in the opposite. Rather than Donald Trump thinking that he wants to be quiet and he wants to allow negotiations to resume, or he’s fearful of losing the midterms, it might be that he feels that for the first time he will allow the CIA to arm the Kurds. 

It might be that there are people working with the Iranian people who might want to go out in the street before the midterms because they feel this is the best time possible. 

If the theocracy is very worried and Donald Trump is very pro-dissident and everybody is saying the Democrats are going to win, maybe the people say, “If they get elected, we don’t have friends in Washington. We do have a friend now in the Congress and the White House, so let’s bring the revolt, the dissension, to a head.” 

And finally, if you look at the entire situation, the midterms are actually in the interest of Donald Trump and the Iranian dissidents. 

Donald Trump then has a deadline to which he can bring this thing to a close. He’s got seven weeks, and I think that he will be encouraging internal revolt. He will be encouraging intra-tribal revolt under the Kurds, and he will be upping the sanctions and the squeezing and the blockade and the embargoes. 

And as we get closer and closer to the midterms, Iran is going to be in dire straits. 

In other words, far from making him let up, or far from him being worried that the Democrats will cut off funding after the midterms, he feels that this midterm coming up, this deadline, will accelerate his efforts to get rid of that regime. 

And I think now there’s a good chance that that could happen. 

Final observation: Everything we’ve talked about, the midterms, the redistricting in red states, the Supreme Court racial gerrymandering, the radicalism of the Democratic socialist candidates, all of the historical fact that an in-party loses seats in Congress in a midterm, that’s all off the table if there were, if there is, a widespread revolt among the people of Iran. 

No one’s expecting it. It would be historical. It would change the entire complexion of the Middle East. It would be equivalent to the Berlin Wall, and it would give Donald Trump the greatest foreign policy coup of the last 50 years. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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