Trump’s Iran Gamble

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Victor, let’s go ahead and get to the memorandum of understanding. It was a very short two-page document, easy to read through, dealt largely with the peace agreement.  

You know what I thought was really interesting? They emphasized Lebanon, Lebanon, Lebanon. It must have been written in there three times that they’re making a peace deal, but also for Lebanon.  

And the Strait of Hormuz will be open, and the Iranians will give up their nuclear material and not build any more nukes.  

And then the sanctions. And I thought that it seemed kind of light on the sanctions, was the only thing that I noticed. Although there’s lots of criticism out there, I was wondering your thoughts. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I think a lot of people are missing a couple of premises. No. 1, we don’t know the extent of damage in Iran. No ground troops, no embedded reporters, no news, no internet there.  

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[President Donald] Trump said a trillion dollars or two trillion. Maybe even if it’s a half trillion, it’s a fifty-year investment in the military nuclear industrial complex, and a lot of it’s ruined.  

And they have been embargoed, and they’ve been sanctioned. Their assets are frozen. They’re losing $400 million a day in revenue. So, they’re in bad shape. We don’t know how bad they are. That’s No. 1. 

No. 2, Iran is not a protectorate of the United States. It’s 93 million people. It’s one and a half times the size of Texas. And we don’t have a good record of going in on the ground and managing a country. 

We saw that in Afghanistan. We saw that in Iraq. Seventy-five hundred dead, $2 trillion, and look at it, the Taliban is still in control. So, we’re not going to go in there and manage it. If you’re not going to go in there and manage it, then your control over that regime is limited, especially when it has patrons that are nuclear like Russia and China, and they want to get back in. 

So, my point is simply this: Can you stop them from enriching? Yes. You can say we’re going to bomb the moment we see you tamper with Pickaxe Mountain or any of those areas.  

And can we stop them from closing the straits? Yes. You have to open the straits or we’re not going to lift the blockade.  

The key to all this memorandum of understanding is, will he use force when they inevitably cheat? So, a week from now, if they think, “Well, we got a lot of concessions. We’re going to send three missiles into the hated UAE, and we’re going to send a couple more into Kuwait and have a big Shia restive population.”  

And if Trump says, “Oh, that was just a love tap,” it won’t work. He’s got to say, “OK, you sent three, you’re going to lose 10 bridges. You sent three against Kuwait, you’re going to lose a power grid.” He hasn’t done that yet. 

People forget there’s a whole list of targets that [Barack] Obama went after in Libya and a whole typology that [Bill] Clinton went after. We were in the same place in Serbia in 1999. It was not working after 60 days. We limited, and then all of a sudden Clinton went wild. All the bridges gone in the Danube, the grid.  I wouldn’t do it. He hits museums. He hits hospitals. He hit everything. Anytime he heard they were using something that he thought he wouldn’t hit, they hit, and that stopped him after 78 days. 

My point is, they have a whole list of targets that we haven’t even touched, but you can shut down that entire economy in two days if you hit them. You take out two big power plants in Tehran, and you’re in trouble. And you take out the power—where’s all these missile factories and everything? Where are they getting their power? It’s on the grid. You hit them, and they’re in trouble. So, we can do that.  

And if he’s going to do it, it doesn’t really matter. All he has to say is, “We can’t control what you do, but if we decide you’re funding terrorists that attack us, if we find that you’re building missiles that are shoot launching … ”  

He doesn’t have to have them in the memorandum of understanding. He should have the nuclear enrichment, and he should have the straits. 

Meanwhile, he’s telling the UAE and the Israelis and the Turks, “Hey, you guys, you all have avenues for pipelines. Get to it. So, double your capacity, Saudi, to ship out the Red Sea. Double your, triple your capacity, UAE—you’re on the right side of the Strait of Hormuz—go straight into the Persian Gulf and double that. And then Turkey, get a long pipeline into the oil fields. You can do it. And Israel, cut a deal and go right out of Haifa and do it now so the next time they do it, we’re not over a barrel.” And I think they’re doing that. 

Final thing is we don’t care what the Left says because one day he’s Hitler and the next day he’s Neville Chamberlain. Hakeem Jeffries can’t figure that out. Oh, he’s just—he’s a chicken. He tacoed out. Trump always chickens out. The next day he’s Neville Chamberlain.  

Oh, this is not—we didn’t get anything. This was a useless preemptive war that was too—you know, we’re striking a school, you know, all this stuff. It’s just whatever Trump’s for, that you don’t pay any attention to it. 

But on the right, what they’re doing is they’re getting attacked in two places. So, there’s Steve Bannon, Tucker [Carlson], Candace [Owens], Megyn Kelly, podcasters, and some politicians are angry that they did anything at all.  

So, now it’s like, we didn’t want you to do anything, but now you haven’t done anything. They’ve done a lot. They keep thinking that this is like the Obama deal when Iran was ascendant, convinced that Obama wouldn’t lift a finger militarily, and they had all this infrastructure. They’re devastated. It’s not this—they’re not in 2016, and Trump isn’t Obama. He’s got a lot more assets at his disposal. 

He doesn’t have some crazy idea that he’s going to champion a Shia alternate crescent to rival the moderate Arab regimes and Israel and empower Damascus, Tehran, Gaza, Beirut. That was Obama, Valerie Jarrett’s, Ben Rhodes’ idea.  

So, there’s a lot of assets, but people have to realize that he’s under a lot of pressure. If he loses the House—and the history says 38 out of the last 41 midterms, the in-party lost seats. If he loses the House, No. 1, they’re going to impeach him on day one. I don’t mean that literally, but it’s going to start.  

No. 2, they’re going to call in the entire Trump family, and they have the power of subpoena, and they’re going to tie him up. 

So, he’s getting House members, and they’re saying to him, “Believe it or not, Mr. President, given our redistricting, we’re going to beat these guys. The redistricting is going to help, and given that racial gerrymandering is going to stop some of that, and given that no one likes this socialist agenda that their radical candidates are promoting, and given that the price of oil is going down, $67 a barrel, $65 is break-even. They’re down to below $4 a gallon. It was only, I think, $3.30.” 

They’re saying to the president, “We can win. We have a chance of doing the incredible. We can win. But you can’t stay in there too long. If you stay in there too long and the price of oil goes up, we’re dead. So, cut a deal, and then if you have to do something, just do it a day or two at a time and keep the strait open.” 

So, he’s under that pressure. 

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