Victor Davis Hanson: Iran’s Dangerous Midterm Strategy

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 in about 160 days now of the so-called Iran war, and we’re 84 days out from the midterm elections, Nov. 3. What’s going on?

The administration has given some indication all week that they are close to yet another deal. This is the seventh or eighth time they said a deal was at hand.

But this time, people like Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio confirmed Donald Trump’s optimism. And the deal would be that there would be a cooling-off period of no kinetic activity, and they would open the straits, and then they would pledge to make a good-faith effort about the nuclear enrichment problem, etc.

In other words, we’ve seen all of these negotiations. I think there’s been eight iterations where they promise to either turn over their nuclear enrichment or tell us where it is, where it can be destroyed, or that they would ensure that the Strait of Hormuz was an international waterway, or that they would cut off their subsidies to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, or they wouldn’t use their vestigial missile force to hit our allies in the Gulf.

And on every occasion, they’ve either denied that they said that, or they lied and said that we weren’t close to an agreement, or they’ve launched missiles at especially the UAE, or they’ve tried to obstruct traffic. So why are we doing this again and again now? And I can tell you why. Each side has a position.

TRENDING ARTICLES

news

Declassified Documents Reveal Democrats’, Deep State Targeting of Sessions in Russia Probe

Fred Lucas

opinion

Mamdani Blames E-Bike Sellers for Crisis He Refuses to Police

Jarrett Stepman

opinion

What the Situation on the Ground in Iran Actually Looks Like

Victor Davis Hanson

The United States knows that this war, as we head in 85 days, 83, 84 days when you hear this, into the midterm elections, it’s not popular. People don’t really care about Iran anymore. Now that it’s been defanged, they were for the idea of neutralizing it, and it is pretty much neutralized. It has no military capability to wage a serious war. Its military-industrial nuclear complex has been neutralized. They’re just tired of it, and they’re tired of the disruption worldwide, and especially in the Strait of Hormuz that’s raised their gas prices due to speculation up to about $3.50 to $3.70, and in some states $4 a gallon. They want it over with, and the Iranians know that. So the Iranians want to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, and then launch a missile, send some boats out to attack a tanker, to do something contrary to what they said.

Then we get angry, and we hit them, and then they get paranoid that they’re going to be hit hard, so they want to talk, talk, and we go through these cycles. And they feel that as we go through the cycles, we get closer and closer to the midterms, and therefore they have more leverage on Donald Trump. Maybe they can force the Democrats’ hand. In other words, the Democrats may win, they may cut off funds. It’s kind of a long shot. That’s their strategy.

And what is our strategy? Why does Donald Trump put up with it? He has a strategy too, that while they’re talk, talk, talking and they’re breaking their talk, they’re getting poorer. We did not lift the sanctions. We did not lift the embargo. We did not cancel their bank accounts. We have de-banked them, and they have a blockade around them every day. They’re losing $400 million to $500 million a day. They talk all they want, but the facts on the ground show that they’re going broke.

So the Trump administration’s attitude is, as long as we’re not conducting a full-scale war, and the American people don’t think we’re at war, and as long as we’re negotiating, we’ll negotiate till hell freezes over.

And we don’t really care because we’re winning every single day. They are getting poorer and poorer to the point where they’re either going to implode, there’s going to be a revolution in the streets, or they’re going to collapse and agree to it.

Now, that strategy is pretty smart, but it depends, from the American point of view, on one important thing. As they get to the midterms and Iran sees that while it has increased the unpopularity of the war, and as it has raised the price of gas and it has created global uncertainty, it still has not been able to ensure that Donald Trump will lose the midterms.

So they need some dramatic event to remind the American people they’re still at war and the price of gas will get higher and the Europeans and our Asian friends will be angrier at us.

What will that mean?

I would imagine that we will have a late October surprise. Right before the elections, they will try to do something dramatic. Empty their last missiles, hit the Gulf, attack Israel, try to go after a carrier. Anything that would remind the Americans that the war was not winding down, but with this last gasp, sort of like the German Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes Offensive, where they marshaled all of their final resources and tried to stage a dramatic counteroffensive to remind the Allies they still could lose this war and they should negotiate, or something to that effect.

So what does that leave us? I think the Trump administration should keep talking, keep all the sanctions and blockades, keep them on. But because Iran will probably do something dramatic, they should do something dramatic. In other words, if they have a list of targets, command and control, dual-use facilities, missile inventories and caches, and they think Pickaxe Mountain might be vulnerable, they could actually do some damage there, they should do it all and keep talking and get this dramatic element out of the way before the midterms so that Iran would be substantially reduced in its nuclear industrial military capability.

It already is, but try to preempt them and hit them very, very hard, and then keep talking. And then the American people will see they’re getting more and more desperate. But don’t be reactive because, trust us, they are going to try something dramatic to bring home the idea the war is not over, and they’re not defeated, and gas will go up.

But if you do something dramatic now and keep talking, you may hasten or accelerate the pace of negotiations, i.e., the pace at which Iran is losing and is going absolutely broke. And that could happen faster than we anticipate, and there’s at least an outside chance that they will be in a far, far weaker place by the midterm elections in 83 days than they are now.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.