Victor Davis Hanson: When Will the Iranian People Overthrow the Regime?

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 are six months out now from the beginning of the Iran war, if that’s what it is. It’s not a formally declared war. It’s not even like any war we’ve seen in the past.  

It began on Feb. 28 with a 38- to 39-day bombing that did enormous damage to Iran. And ever since then, it’s evened out to a tit-for-tat every couple of weeks, negotiations, a memorandum of understanding, but we should remember that it’s not like any war we’ve seen. 

One of the reasons it isn’t is we can get no reliable information. There are no embedded reporters because there are no American or Western troops on the ground, and the Ministry of Information in Iran is less reliable than Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad Bob.  

And to the degree there are foreigners within Iran that are trapped, they don’t risk their lives by trying to communicate with us.  

And Iranians themselves know if they call relatives in Europe or the United States and disclose information, they can be killed or executed. 

So there’s a complete news blackout. In that vacuum, of course, it didn’t stop The Washington Post, but especially The New York Times, from telling the American people we’ve essentially lost the war.  

And we’ve even had illustrious people like Robert Kagan, as I’ve mentioned in the past, or John Mearsheimer from Harvard saying that essentially the war is lost. I don’t know how they can draw that conclusion when we don’t have reliable information. 

We do have information that comes from Israel, which did a lot of damage to Iran and has photo reconnaissance, and us, but of course they don’t trust the Trump administration. 

The other thing to remember about this war is there are two laws, canons, protocols that we haven’t seen before. The first: Under no circumstances will there be American troops on the ground. No American troops on the ground, given the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we are not invading, we’re not going to overthrow the government, we’re not going to arm the resistance for good or evil. That’s just not going to happen because it’s politically impossible. 

The other sideline or parameter that we cannot violate, or that we have to respect, is we can’t do enough damage that would impair the Iranians’ ability to eat, sleep, get fuel, and exist. 

If this was a true enemy, as was Germany in World War II, as was Japan, North Korea, or Vietnam, we would be taking out power plants as we did in Serbia with Bill Clinton, or we would be taking out dockworks like we did with Barack Obama in Libya, or bridges, all of them, as Bill Clinton did on the Danube. 

But we’re not doing that. And I guess the rationale is the Iranian people are now short of food, they’re short of water, they’re short of fuel, and we count on them to rise up at some point in the fashion of Eastern Europeans or Russians during the period following the Cold War. 

So we do not want to do enough damage to Iran to hurt the viability of a successive free government, and we don’t want to put troops on the ground. So that means that it has to be air power. 

There’s another consideration. The countries that would benefit just as much or more than we do—Japan, South Korea, most of Europe, which import oil either from North Africa or from the Gulf states, or themselves—are terrified of terrorism, specifically European countries that know that even Arab terrorists who seem to be Sunni terrorists are indirectly subsidized by Iran. 

So they know that if this government falls, there will be no interference with the Strait of Hormuz. But more importantly, you can criticize anybody you want. If you criticize the Iranian government now and you’re a European country, or you take sanctions against them, they will retaliate by closing the Strait, and that’s what they were afraid of. 

It’s not quite true, as we are told by the Left, that the Strait was always open until [Donald] Trump got us in this war and then they closed it. It was open conditional on the attitude of the particular country using it. 

So where does this leave us? This leaves us with a new situation. And in that void, finally, as happens in war, we have a new comprehensive strategy. 

We really didn’t have a strategy in the Civil War until 1863 or 1864 when Grant said, “I will go down and tie up the Army of Northern Virginia and bleed it white while Uncle Billy Sherman is going to go down to Atlanta, the transportation hub of the Confederacy, destroy it, and then humiliate the martial chivalry and chauvinism of the Southern soldier by marching right through Georgia and then through the Carolinas to meet Grant and end the war.” 

That didn’t formulate until there’d been 250,000 Union dead. 

So what’s my point? We finally get a strategy that some of us might want to say, “Why didn’t we do this at the beginning?” 

And what is that strategy? It’s the Anaconda Strategy that I mentioned. 

So we are doing a type of blockade, sanctions, freezing of bank accounts, targeting individual theocrats who live double lives, very austere, very religious, very sanctimonious in Iran, not so much in Europe, where they use their ill-gotten gains to buy penthouses, suites, properties, investments that get high interest for a theocracy that says interest itself is sacrilegious. 

And if we squeeze them as we are, they will break. 

The question is now a political one, and it has two corollaries. 

At what point will the Iranian economy cease to function entirely, and that will force people to take great risk and go out and remove this regime in hopes that immediately there will be billions of dollars of Western aid, which there will be, and the country will be reopened? 

That’s one question. 

And will this new Anaconda Strategy break the regime before the midterms? 

Because mark my words, if we have a midterm landslide for the Democrats, as happened against [Barack] Obama in the case of a Republican landslide that neutered his last two years, this opposition isn’t like Republican oppositions. 

When the Republicans took the House, they did not impeach Barack Obama. They did not impeach Joe Biden. 

This bunch will immediately stop all House proceedings, try to cut off the war, deny funds to the military, and begin impeachment hearings against Donald Trump and most of his Cabinet. 

At that point, the Iranian theocracy will be emboldened to take even more severe measures in hopes that the Left is a de facto ally. 

Finally, one last perspective, because we are in a dispute with Canada right now as well. 

One of the things that came up is President Javier Milei of Argentina said that the Falklands really, given their proximity, should go to Argentina. 

He’s a big supporter of Donald Trump. The economics and government and new culture in Argentina are much more akin to a conservative government in the United States than is the hard-left government in the U.K. 

The hard-left government of Mr. [Keir] Starmer and the present government, remember, had denied us airspace rights, had put Diego Garcia, a key island in the Indian Ocean, off-limits for our resupply. 

And now what happens? The Falklands comes up, and the British media is paranoid. 

Why are they paranoid? 

Because they have broken a traditional close relationship with the United States. 

Milei senses that, senses his affinity for free-market economics under Donald Trump and conservative governance, and all of a sudden thinks he might take a risk and the United States would not get into it as it did during the tenure of Margaret Thatcher when we saved them. 

Bottom line: if the United States were not to help logistically Great Britain protect the Falklands, they would not have the ability to do that. 

And that would be something that would be a reminder to all of our allies that alliances are not one-way. 

And so this war, for all the criticism that it’s incurred in the United States and in Europe, does have historical importance. 

It’s very crucial for Western civilization because it will change the entire Middle East and eliminate a 50-year existential threat. 

And no president, given his advisers’ acumen, who said, “Do not go into that hornet’s nest, just rhetorically say it has to be done. Tell everybody it has to be done to stop this regime. You’ve got to stop their nuclear weapon, but pass it on to the next president.” 

Donald Trump didn’t do that, and we’ll see what happens in November. 

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