Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s, Bessent’s ‘Anaconda’ Strategy Is Tightening Around Iran

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript 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: Let’s turn then to somebody who’s not a lunatic, Scott Bessent, our treasury secretary. And he had a couple of things this week. One, he is engaging in a new Operation Economic Outcast, where he is continuing new sanctions, sanctions on bank and finance entities with Iran.  

And I think that’s interesting to me because it seems like just about every two or three weeks he announces an operation of this kind. And maybe our audience knows a little bit more, but it seems like they find new things all the time, countries that are helping Iran, finances that Iran has access to that they can cut off, and he’s always got something new on the horizon. 

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.  

Victor Davis Hanson: I think the problem was that on Feb. 28, when they finally unloaded on them after the fruitless negotiations, and they did overwhelming damage with the Israelis, that they were going to collapse. 

But they were like Japan after Okinawa in July. Japan was done for. Their harbors were mined. Their cities, 60% of which were hollowed out by the B-29. They had no control of their own airspace. Battleships sent salvos into their shores with impunity. Submarines wouldn’t let anybody go in or out. But they lasted all of July and all the way up to the atomic bomb. So it was very hard to make them give up. 

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So, you need a shock. So, we thought they were going to surrender, but this is a theocratic, unhinged regime that just killed 30,000 to 40,000 of their own people. They don’t care. So, their attitude is the Americans stopped, so we’ll negotiate.  

And, by the way, not all the countries are following the blockade or embargo. And they will never enforce it because people like the Spanish, the North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, and we have rail links on land that haven’t been touched. We have airports. So, we don’t get all of our stuff out or in just by sea. 

And we kept thinking it was hurting them, the embargo and sanctions. And then finally people said if you can’t trust these people, the 60-day memorandum of understanding was a joke. And they had a lot of, as people say, there’s a lot of rot left in an institution. 

So, what I’m getting at is each time they make a pronouncement, somebody tells them you can do it better than that. So, now we are embargoing and sanctioning not just them from trading, but people who trade with them. 

So, in theory, if we find out the Chinese are sending missiles, say, then we’re not going to deal with China. That would bankrupt China. We’ll see how that goes. 

And then, secondly, we’re trying to tell the world that these theocrats that feel that any day they would like to be in heaven with 72 virgins are unhinged, but at another time they’re savvy business people, and they’re greedy and they have luxury estates in London and Paris and property and vineyards. And we are going to trace every single one and confiscate it, and that’s going to hurt them. 

There are people who have been writing that the problem that we’re going to have is that, since the currency is worth nothing more than wastepaper, and there’s no oil getting out for revenue, and even being pumped in some cases for gasoline because they need spare parts and they don’t produce their own oil and gas. It all has to be imported. Everything in that country has got to be imported except drones, and even those components have to be imported. 

And so, now, after March, April, May, June, July, August, six months, they’re running out of parts and the whole thing is starting to grind to a halt. 

So, now the existential question is, [President Donald] Trump said yesterday those people have to rise up and fight. Which is greater: the fear of being slaughtered as in the past, because these people will kill 40,000 more, or the idea you’re going to starve to death or you’re going to not just be confined in your home and you’ll have no air conditioning, no heating, with winter coming on? 

And that’s what we’re worried about. There are people who say, “What are you going to do, Trump, when they can’t eat?” 

And the government likes that because they think that you’ll ease up. They’re using their own people in the way that Hamas uses people to shield their tunnels and mosques, schools, and hospitals. They’re doing the same thing on a national scale. They’re using their own people that are pro-American and we like, and they’re saying, you can do what you want, but they’re going to die before we are, and that’s a problem. 

Trump’s attitude, as I said, is kind of the anaconda, and it’s trying to make the war livable by basically saying we’ve got it down now so we don’t have to do kinetic action very much. It’s expensive. We’ve tragically lost 17, but we’re not going to really lose any more people. 

The price of oil goes between $70 and $90, but 9 million. Everybody said they’re lying. It can’t be 9 million barrels. We found out this week there are 9 million barrels getting out, and there will be 15 million very quickly on pipelines to the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Oman, and the Red Sea. 

So, what I’m getting at is Trump is basically saying, I can sustain this and it’s a war, but it’s not a war. Everybody says it’s a war. We’re losing it. No, it’s not a war. It’s sanctions now. It’s like the blockade of Cuba in 1962. How long did that last? They couldn’t withstand that. 

So, that’s what we’re doing, and as long as we’re not spending a great deal of money, we are, but not like a real war, and we’re not getting people killed, it’s sustainable. But it’s not sustainable for them. 

What the Left is terrified of, both the European Left, Canadian Left, and the American Left, is a scenario like this. Everybody should listen very carefully. 

So, everybody is saying Trump, as in the Republicans, are generically down eight points and they may lose the Senate, maybe even get the Democrats to a Senate-seat majority, and they’re going to lose the House. 

And then, on Oct. 20, guess what? The people come out. Thousands of them are starving in Iran and they head for the Iranian National Islamic Guard Corps, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and they go in there and they get in a pitched fight and they win. And it’s like jubilation. And they have pro-U.S. signs. 

That is what everybody’s afraid of. If that happens two weeks before the election, then all bets are off for the Democrats because at the cost that we paid to get rid of a 50-year existential threat that everybody said was impossible to get rid of and it would be another Vietnam or Iraq, to get that out with no bomb, and then not just to get rid of them but to have them pro-American, basically the most sophisticated, largest population except for Egypt, biggest area, pro-American on both sides of the Gulf. 

Can you imagine what that would do to Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah? They would be flat broke forever. It would free Lebanon. It would empower Syria. That could happen. 

So, that’s what they’re really worried about. I would say the odds of that happening are 30-70. 

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