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. There’s always two wars, as I mentioned on earlier occasions, a political war and a military war, once the conflict begins. But I didn’t discuss really what the political war is about. President Donald Trump can easily decimate Iran. He can knock out the water, he can knock out the sewage facilities, the power grid, the communications grid, and paralyze the entire country.
And that might even lead to the removal of the regime. But he is not doing that for political reasons. No. 1, he would get global outrage from even our allies, and that is a restraining influence. But more importantly, he wants to empower the Iranian resistance movement, and they need all of that infrastructure if someday they were going to come to power.
Now, I mentioned earlier that regime change was not an explicit aim of this administration when they went to war, but it was a collateral dividend that they hoped would occur by their earlier aims, which all weakened, existentially, the regime: cutting off the Houthis and the terrorist proxies, getting rid of their nuclear proliferation program, the ballistic missiles, etc., etc.
Wiping out command—that will all weaken it to such a degree that even if we were to stop without regime change and follow the agenda, they would stew in their own juice, and people would get very, very angry. We’ll get to that in another video. But right now, what are the constraints that Donald Trump has to deal with?
No. 1, the MAGA base says, “It’s a forever war. It’s an endless war. He broke his word.” We see Megyn Kelly making that argument. We see Tucker Carlson making that argument. Steve Bannon—a lot of people in the MAGA base.
But if you look carefully, he’s used force on many occasions. Took out Qasem Soleimani in his first term, the ISIS kingpin Baghdadi, bombed ISIS into oblivion, took out the Wagner program, the Wagner Group. Second term, he took out Maduro, 25 hours over—all of those were one-offers. He hasn’t had a forever war.
What he did learn is: If you say that you are against forever wars or endless wars, that can be interpreted by your enemies that you’re an isolationist. And therefore, you can increase aggression, and you’ll lose deterrence. So, it’s much better to be a Jacksonian and basically say, “We don’t want to nation-build, we don’t want to get into people’s affairs, but if you aggrieve us, if you’re aggressive, if you provoke us or the interests of our allies and us, we may retaliate in a way that you have no idea [what] will follow.”
It will be asymmetrical, disproportionate, deadly, and that’s what Trump is doing. And I don’t think that anybody historically would say 30 days of an exclusively air campaign is an endless war. But he has to worry about that MAGA base. Not in numbers—the numbers are 90%, 85% of the Republican Party supports him—but the people who don’t have large audiences, and they can be influenced as they look at the pulse of the battle.
Then he has to worry about the economy. One of his signature achievements was getting gas down to $2.50 a gallon in some states. I think in Iowa, it was down to $1.80 prior to the war. The price of oil has soared from $50 to $60 a barrel to $100 to $120 a barrel, and oil is one of the linchpins of the economy. That can hurt him.
And the news, the psychological news of war, and it could be regional and could involve the Houthis, it could involve the Gulf states, it could blow up, we might have to interdict supplies from Russia. All of that creates tension and uncertainty on Wall Street, the stock market, the bond market. So, he has got to be careful of that. That’s an impediment to a purely military campaign.
Then I mentioned earlier, he has the midterms coming up, and he can’t lose his legislative majority. If he does, you will see his last two years in office consumed by investigations of the Trump people, his family, his associates, and they [Democrats] will impeach him. You can count on that. They will not convict him, but they will impeach him.
And then, of course, there’s the Israel question. He’s working with a very competent ally. Seventy-five percent of their aims and our aims overlap. We’re both Western democracies. We have a common theocratic enemy that has attacked and killed hundreds, in our case thousands, probably, if you count the Iraq War, and the Israelis have the similar—but we don’t have necessarily completely identical aims.
Why? Because we’re distant and not that vulnerable yet, because they don’t have, yet, an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead. They will, but not yet. Israel is proximate and vulnerable. So, in their way of thinking, the idea that we would neuter or disarm Iran would be like shooting a bear in the shoulder and leaving him on the prowl. He is going to be angry and capable and furious, and he’s going to crawl or charge them. They are the people who will take the punishment. So, in their way of thinking, why would you go to all this trouble, and that’s not an explicit aim of your campaign, i.e., regime change? “It is our aim,” the Israelis are saying.
But that’s not influencing Donald Trump necessarily. He said it wasn’t an aim. He may change and announce he’s changed, but the idea that the Israelis are running things is untrue, but he has to be careful about that.
Finally, there are some other impediments, and those impediments are: if you put an American boot on the ground in the Middle East, everybody left and right becomes hysterical, and for good cause. They remember the first Gulf War. They remember a brilliant four-day war. They remember the liberation of Kuwait. They remember the march on Baghdad.
And what happened? We let Saddam [Hussein] stay in power. We had years of no-fly zones, and then we went back again, and we spent a trillion dollars from 2003 all the way into 2011, and we tried to have a consensual government. We lost over 4,000 soldiers, many more wounded and casualties. And then the Obama administration essentially, by 2010, 2011, said “I’m done with it,” and pulled out.
And now we have Iraq—sort of consensual, sort of not—as a proxy, sort of, sort of not, of Iran. And then we had a 20-year … misadventure in Afghanistan, and we remember that pullout, that horrible August 2021 pullout that led to 13 deaths and, I don’t know, 15, 20, 50—I’ve heard 50—we heard $70 billion of military assets left.
So anytime you go into the Middle East, Americans say, “Tell me when it has ever worked.” Did the Suez Crisis of ’56 work? Did the first Gulf War work and get rid of Saddam? Did the second Gulf War with the Iraq invasion work? Did Afghanistan work? Even did the bombing—we went and bombed the nuclear facilities, and now we have to do it again. It’s a quagmire. We don’t like the Middle East. That’s the American left and right, Republican and Democrat. That is a limitation. So, anybody who says, “I’m going to end this problem with Iran, once and for all, and neuter them, people are going to say,” “It’s in the Middle East, Mr. President.”
So, Donald Trump has to contend with the MAGA base, the crazy Democratic opposition, the midterms, the economy, definitely handling the charge that he’s too influenced by Israel, and the general repulsion of the American people for anything to do with the Middle East, militarily, and blood and treasure on our part spent for people we feel are either ungracious or ungrateful or not worth it in a cost-benefit analysis.
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