Victor Davis Hanson: Iranian Regime Has Only One Way Out

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.

This is the first week of October, and the Iran war conflict, whatever term we want to call it, is coming to a denouement whether we like it or not. 

We’ve had seven months of conflict, but that’s the wrong word. We had 38 to 40 days of actual kinetic action and then on-and-off negotiations, all overshadowed by the tick, tick, tick, tick to the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3, as well as the Israeli elections in late October, as well as elections all over Europe. 

So what I’m getting at is this conflict was always framed in political terms. Donald Trump did not have to try to force the issue during the midterms. He did because, remember, seven other presidents said Iran could not have a bomb.  

Information came to him after he tried to stop that in June of 2025 that, yes, they still could get a bomb, but, more worrisome, they also were developing missiles that could hit cities in Europe and would soon have intercontinental ability to the Western Hemisphere. 

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So he decided to act. 

Where are we now? 

We’re in the last stage. We are bringing over a third carrier group, the USS Roosevelt. That means that we will have all of the resources of our land-based airplanes, jet fighters, and bombers, but we’ll have three large carriers. In other words, we’ll probably have 400 or 500, maybe 600, at our disposal. 

If the Israelis find out that this Dubai hijacking, and there is more information that’s coming out every moment, had anything to do with Iranian agents, then they will probably join in. 

And if we find out that the RAF-American joint base in Britain was the object of a terrorist attack by British subjects who were influenced, paid for, or trained by Iran, that will add a different dimension as well. 

But for now, Iran is desperate. 

How do we know that? Because we don’t have any news people in there. We don’t have any embedded troops, as I keep saying. We only have people calling out, and usually when they call out to their relatives or friends to assure them of the terrible conditions, the next thing they know, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is at their door. 

So you have to gauge it by the attitude of Iran. 

They’re doing two or three things right now. 

Number one, they wrote a letter—it’s 25 pages long. You should all read it—to the American people. But it isn’t really to the American people. It’s to half the American people. It’s to the Left. They have gleaned and absorbed the message from the Left in the Senate, in the House, and in popular culture that this is an illegal, immoral war that we’ve already lost. The Strait of Hormuz is hopelessly closed. And that has emboldened them. 

So they’re now saying, Why don’t you people take it to the next step and join us and vote in the midterms to get rid of this horrific, warmongering, evil Donald Trump regime? 

They feel… and they don’t understand American politics, obviously, because whatever happens in the midterms, the Democratic Party is not going to get 60 seats and get a veto-proof Congress. It’s not going to happen. 

So that’s not going to stop Donald Trump, but they think it is. 

The second thing they’ve done is that they have said, now we want to negotiate with Donald Trump. We want to negotiate, which means we’ve been at this seven months. They want another two, three, or four months while they try to figure out how they reclose the Straits of Hormuz. 

Third, they have threatened us with new weapons. We have new weapons. We have new ways of killing you. We’re going to unleash them. 

I don’t know if that was referring to the terrorist attacks in Britain and over Dubai, but we’ll see. 

What’s the actual status? 

For some reason, we only belatedly started to really crush Iran. I don’t know why we didn’t have a complete banking boycott, freezing of all assets, a secondary boycott of anybody who trades with Iran or enters financial transactions with them. We would also boycott them. I don’t know why we didn’t have a complete embargo on their airspace, but we didn’t. 

Now we do. 

They are getting no income, but 90% to 95% of other countries’ ships that want Gulf oil are now coming in. They can’t stop them. 

And now we’re going to have more assets. 

So one way or another, this regime is going to implode. It may implode after the midterms. It may implode in three or four months. 

There is only one thing that can save the Iranian theocratic terrorist regime. One thing. And that is if, for some reason, popular opinion, or the Trump administration, loses its nerve and they begin another monthlong cycle of negotiations, and they allow that regime certain exemptions, then all of this will be for naught. 

We are very, very close. The United States is very, very close to doing something that no one ever anticipated: so hurting, so injuring this terrorist, murderous regime that either the people will now go out in the streets and overthrow it, or it will be too weak to operate as a terrorist home base for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and terrorists worldwide, or Donald Trump, in frustration, will destroy the regime’s ability to make war for 20 years. 

He will hit dual-use targets, and then he will leave. 

But in any case, they only have one chance, and that is now to call off the United States military and the United States financial architects of this embargo and somehow squeeze or slither out of the noose that they put their head in. 

Let’s hope that does not happen. We stay the course, and I think very soon, in a year, a lot less than a year, or two years, that regime will either fall or be taken over by moderate elements, and the Middle East will look like a completely different place. 

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