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.
This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
We’re approaching five months of our on and off war with Iran, but it’s not really quite five months of war. It’s more like forty days of kinetic action, the first forty days, and then the subsequent hundred and ten days are often on negotiations with the Iranian regime, once in a while punctuated with exchanges of missiles and bombs, etc.
So where are we now? What is the strategy of the United States? We’ve been talking about the midterms for seven months, six months, five months, four months, three months, but as we’re looking at August, September, and October, we’re getting down now close to just three months.
So what is the Trump strategy?
What is the Iranian strategy? We know what the Iranian strategy is. The regime cares nothing for its own people, whether that’s the thousand or so collateral deaths through our and our allies’ bombing, and we know that they slaughtered somewhere between 40 and 50,000 of their own, and they don’t care.
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As long as they’re corrupt, rich, and in control, that’s all they care about. They have no problem being royals, monarchs, and lording over a nation of rubble.
So what should we do though? They’re trying to wait us out, remember, because they think Trump will—if the price of gas is $4 and the price of oil is $110 and there’s a war going on—the Left will win the midterms.
They’ll take the House, and we’ll have an impeachment circus for the next two years punctuated by lawfare. That’s their strategy. And then you’ll have a Democratic president, they think, soon enough, and it will be Barack Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken all over again. That’s what they hope.
Donald Trump has to have a strategy, so what is it? How’s he going to stop and get out? I think we know he’s now going on a two-week… he just finished two weeks of intensive bombing.
The strategy is to say that I have taken a 50-year investment worth about a half a trillion dollars and essentially destroyed it.
Destroyed it. And I’ve also hit some dual-use targets, and I’m about ready to leave. But I had certain objectives that I want to ensure are met. Number one, they can’t have a nuclear bomb. I can bomb Pickaxe Mountain. I would expect he might do that in the next week and seal it, not necessarily get all the enrichment, but just seal as he did the other nuclear depositories.
He can say I wanted to create turmoil. So when we’re gone and the Iranians start to recoup and they emerge from the rubble, they see what their government’s doing.
They see they’re broke, their standard of living is falling, falling, falling, and this theocratic corrupt regime wants to take what little money they have and buy missile launchers and centrifuges and subsidize Arab terrorists, and therefore domestic unrest will continue, if not accelerate.
And that will be a form of containment itself. I also want to ensure if Donald Trump is talking, he would say, I want to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is open. We have done considerable damage to the coastal offensive capability opposite of the strait of the Iranians, and we have attrited its navy, its drone forces.
So he can probably say, with a skeleton American fleet who is always stationed in or at the Gulf, the strait, I can tell my Gulf allies and the Israelis and my allies in Europe and Asia, you depend on the strait, you can help patrol it, and we will help you too. And it won’t be hard to keep it open.
He can also say, “We are not lifting the sanctions. No, no, no, no. And we’re not going to stop the bank account freezes. You’re not gonna get any money. We’re not gonna talk to you, is what I’m saying.”
And then he can say as well, “I don’t know what the denominator of missiles is. I know the numerator. We have destroyed thousands. But obviously they had prepared for this and there are launchers here and there.”
But Israel and the Gulf states between them have nine hundred combat aircraft. We probably have five to six hundred in the area. If they begin launching missiles, they can always retaliate, and we can keep the strait open, but we’re not going to be in a war footing and the majority of our forces are going to leave.
And here’s what I think is new. He can declare that there is now a government in exile, an alternate regime. It can be based in the Western countries, or it can have affiliates in places in the Middle East that are sympathetic to it. And we will talk to the government in exile, the alternative government.
Who did this?
Ayatollah Khomeini did. For 13 years, he was in Iraq setting up, with the help of Saddam Hussein, the arch enemy of his own Iran, an alternate theocratic government and inundating Iran with propaganda. And then as it started to work and the revolution started to take off, he went the last four months of the Shah’s regime to France, and he sent thousands of cassettes in, and he was the government in exile.
And people in Europe began talking to him. Michel Foucault and other crazy French intellectuals thought he was wonderful. But the point is, then he flew in and hijacked that revolution and took control.
Why can’t that regime suffer what they created? In other words, take the confiscated money, the hundreds of billions of dollars, and say to the Iranians, “We don’t want to talk to you because you can’t tell the truth.
We don’t recognize you anymore as the official government because you killed forty to fifty thousand of your own people. So whether it’s the Shah or a temporary coalition of dissidents, we’re going to recognize a government in exile, and we’re going to give it sufficient funds so it has media capability.”
It can tour Europe, it can tour Asia, it can seek big power support, and we’re going to probably help arm it and arm the Iranian people. And they will be a government in exile. As far as we’re concerned, there is no government in Iran. We don’t know who’s running it, and we don’t care. We do not want to talk to it.
We are talking to a group of people who represent the people of Iran and who have promised us, as a condition of our support, that they will, if in power, quickly move to a transitional government that ensures elections within a year or two. And it worked for Khomeini, it can work for us. Don’t talk to the Iranians.
Do enough damage so you can go home with the assurance they have not had the ability, they do not have the ability, to create a bomb. And the Strait, with the help of our allies, will remain open, and any tit-for-tat further activity can be managed by the fifteen hundred combat aircraft that is shared by U.S.bases, our Gulf partners, and Israel.
And that should be sufficient force to handle a radically debilitated Iran that has lost a half-century and a half trillion of investment.
And the moment it gets one dime, it will not spend it on a restive population. It will spend it on Arab terrorists to arm them and to rebuild, but that will be very difficult, both politically when the people are furious at them and both financially when they have a half a trillion dollars of reconstruction and no income.
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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