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: You know, you listen to the news accounts of the U.S. military maintaining control of the Persian Gulf. And you know, so I say, for example, they’ve stopped ships and a cargo ship with a bunch of Chinese missiles, et cetera. And then you hear the Left saying, oh, they’re committing war crimes by controlling this gulf.
But in the undercurrent of all of that news coverage is that that’s what the Iranians were doing, even worse for years and years. And they weren’t just stopping something to stop military arms. They were hijacking and stealing.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. They took British prisoners. They took hostages. Whenever they had a Democratic president, Obama or Biden, they were emboldened. It’s really disgusting to hear Ro Khanna this Democratic congressman saying that Obama was a great statesman, and they didn’t do—under Obama, they lifted sanctions, and that was where the first initial cash infusions came in.
So they got all of this money. They were so embarrassed of what they were doing, they had to ship $400 million dollars, at night, in frozen assets. They unfroze their assets, then the Iran deal did not stop them from getting a bomb. It just delayed the trajectory.
So Trump came in in 2017 and stopped it. Well, they didn’t even try to cheat because they thought he was crazy. After he killed Soleimani and Baghdadi and ISIS, Biden came in. The first thing he did is he removed the terrorist designation of the Houthis. He separated us from Israel. Hamas got that message. He did a deal with natural gas in Lebanon, and he empowered Hezbollah.
And then with the Iranians, begged them to get back in the deal. When they didn’t do it, he rewarded their negativity by lifting sanctions, and that’s where that period of 21 to 24 is when they went up to 60% enrichment. So we had this congressman there who just gets on Maria Bartiromo, and he just starts lying. And he’s been really one of the more unfortunate spokesmen because, unlike a Chris Murphy or Tim Walz who are buffoons, he always starts this moral argument.
Another thing I think everybody’s getting sick of is they say, this is fascism. Trump is a fascist. This is untoward—not that fascism is coming—they don’t define their terms. What do you mean by fascism? Did he cancel an election? No. Did he try to gerrymander? Well, not as well as the Democrats were doing. Did he use the government to go after his presidential rival? So is he going to have Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom in five separate civil or criminal trials like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith? Going to do that? E. Jean Carroll? Maybe he’s going to try to get him off the ballot. Twenty-five red states, are they trying to get a Democratic leading candidate off the ballot? Did he raid Kamala Harris’ house? Did he raid Joe Biden’s house? They hadn’t done any of that. Did the attorney general say, I’m going to put Steve Bannon, I’m going to put Peter Navarro in jail for not honoring a congressional subpoena, but I’m Merrick Garland, I’m not going to honor it? He hasn’t done any of that.
So they don’t define their terms because if you look at what they did during the Trump years—and I haven’t gotten into the two impeachments, which we’re learning now that Michael Atkinson, the inspector general, he, hand in glove with Adam Schiff and Eric Ciaramella and Vindman allowed that first impeachment to proceed. And remember, in the first impeachment, this is very important, there were 15 or 16 people in the National Security Council in that room, and they listened to that phone call with Zelensky. It had no problem whatsoever. Some of them were holdover Obama people. Only Vindman did.
And Vindman didn’t even have the courage to become a whistleblower, so he called his pal Ciaramella. And then, based on hearsay. This is what I heard. And then Ciaramella was basically saying, I heard what he heard. And then he disguised his name and played the wounded fawn, so you couldn’t even talk about him. And then he lied, as did Vindman, when they went in to Adam Schiff and cooked up the whole process. And then each of those three people lied and said they had never colluded. The inspector general knew they did, and he did nothing and allowed it to go on. And that was the second—that was the first impeachment, and that followed the day after the Mueller collusion collapsed. As soon as that collapsed, they said, take a deep breath. Now we go into impeachment. And they ate up the entire 2018 and ’19 presidential term of Donald Trump.
So this idea that Trump is a fascist and the war’s fascistic—it’s on the side of people who want to be free. But more importantly, that’s a subtext. The main thing is these people have been killing us for 47 years, blowing up the embassies, barracks, shooting diplomats, trying to kill the president, trying to kill the secretary of state. They’re a horrific regime. They’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. They’re horrible. And they hijacked the Iranian illustrious Persian tradition. They’re an aberration, and they have no popular support.
Everybody hates them. The Gulf hates them. Israel hates them. The Arabs hate them. The Europeans are too timid to express their hatred, but they are terrified of them and hate them. The Chinese don’t even like them. The Chinese are one of the greatest Islamic oppressors in the world. They have a million Muslims in camps, the Uyghurs. The Russians do not like Muslims. They leveled Grozny in the third Chechen war and killed 100,000 people, Muslim. So their alliance with Iran is Iran is a useful tool. A useful idiot. They say, this is what we want you to do. We want you to sell us sanctioned oil, we’ll buy it off the books. You got to give us a discount, and then we’ll give you credit for our weapons. And then when we get those weapons, try to destroy Israel and any pro-Western country. And intimidate the Gulf states. That’s what their strategy was.
Sami Winc: So, Victor, I was wondering about this. So as we move forward, if we think about what Donald Trump needs to do, I think that warning the Iranians that they’re going to hit the bridges and the power plants, et cetera, just gets them out to, as you said, they don’t have any concern for people. And so they’ll just bring their women and children out to protect these things. My thought is—
Victor Davis Hanson: They will but there’s hundreds of bridges in Iran.
I know.
So you just say, we’re going to hit the bridges, and are they going to get people to come out every single day from dawn to dusk? No.
Sami Winc: No.
Victor Davis Hanson: You don’t tell them. You just say, one bridge today, one power plant. I’m not going to tell you where they are. If they start shooting at tankers or if they send missiles at the Gulf States or Israel or our ships—our ships support, most importantly. And the point is that while everybody says the war’s going south, we’re losing, they’re going broke. And they’ve lost half a trillion dollars in a 50-year investment, essentially, in military, industrial, nuclear infrastructure and investment. It’s gone. They had over 12,000 targets. The Israeli-American air force. So they’re going broke, and the question is now, will they be able to delay, delay, delay before they give up their enrichment and any claims that they’re going to try to stop the blockade, or will the propaganda campaign in the United States so embolden them and be so successful that they can drag this out for months and then get the Democrats elected to cut off funds?
I don’t see that happening, but that’s their deranged strategy.
Sami Winc: Yes, it is deranged, and yeah, if I were Donald Trump, I would just say, you can—even dallying too much. Take a bridge out, take a power plant.
Victor Davis Hanson: Donald Trump does not want—
Don’t let him dally.
If you’re Donald Trump and you’re in the Oval Office, this is what’s happening: someone comes in, he says, I’m up for reelection. And we were a red state plus 10. But my polls show me, even. I was five ahead before this war. The Democratic propaganda is killing us. Another senator comes in: gas prices in my state are too high. When is this going to end? And the point is that he’s trying to do something for the next century.
If he can destroy this regime or destroy its ability to cause havoc, there will be a regime change. Not now. Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Once you destroy the edifice of communism, in that case, then the Soviet Union fell within two years, and Eastern Europe was free within six months. That will happen.
So his view is that this is an existential moment because it’s going to change the entire Middle East. It already has. The Gulf states are now partners with Israel. And this is very interesting because if you look at the Democratic Party and the paleo-Right and Europe, they are more anti-Israel than are the Gulf states right now. No question about it.
And this is ironic because a lot of the people who have been hammering Trump about the war on the Right, have financial ties with the Middle East. And they are telling them, what are you doing trying to call off Trump? He’s trying to eliminate this threat right across the Gulf from us, that for 47 years has threatened to destroy us. And for the first time we’ve had an American president that might just neuter them permanently. So be quiet.
The whole thing is so misrepresented. And, you know, there was, I guess it was an MS—that’s what they call MSNBC now—I think it was an anchorwoman, and she was listening to some Democratic guests come on. And she finally said, so you are saying, as Jimmy Kimmel said, that you trust the Iranian government more than you do us. And you want to think, well, what do you trust, that they were telling the truth about nuclear enrichment? They just admitted they could make 11 bombs. Were they telling the truth about missile range? They said only 1,800 miles. It was going to go 2,500 miles all the way to Diego Garcia, if had it not been knocked down.
So that’s what they do, is lie. But this Democratic Party—it’s not the Democratic Party at all. It’s something different. It’s something weird. I thought it was just a Socialist party, but it’s almost becoming an Islamist party, because of the intense antisemitism.
