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’re in the eighth week of the Iran war, and things are starting to heat up even though there’s not kinetic action. What do I mean by heating up? The Iranian government has ceased to exist. We don’t know, and the Iranians don’t know who holds power.
There is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. There is the theocracy, there is the elected people in Parliament, and there is a regular military. And those four groups operate in schizophrenic fashion.
Sometimes they freelance and appear very hard line and give press releases that they’re not going to negotiate and anybody who negotiates is a sellout and blah, blah, blah, because they are afraid each faction of being called by the other too pro-Western or not hard enough on the United States.
By the same token, sometimes they give off signals that they would like to negotiate because that is predicated on popular resistance. When you get rumors, which are increasing, that the people are getting more and more restive, some of them are being armed, then people think, well, given the crimes that we have committed, should this revolution next time around succeed, we’re all going to have a collective noose around our neck.
So, the bottom line, we can’t figure out who’s saying what. We were supposed to negotiate this weekend, and Donald Trump was going to send Mr. [Jared] Kushner and [Steve] Witkoff over all the way to Pakistan. I think all of us are a little bit dubious, given Pakistan’s long history that’s checkered with the United States, and it’s an Islamic country, a very impoverished country.
But Donald Trump has very good relations with the foreign minister, the head of defense and the president. But nonetheless, he canceled that because he couldn’t get any negotiation that offered any chance of success from this motley group.
So, what are we gonna do now in week eight? We’ve got a little over six months from the midterms. The war, even though it’s been spectacularly successful militarily, people want it over, even though Wall Street has adjusted.
And we’re at record highs now with stocks, which suggests a lot of brilliant people think not only is the war gonna be over very soon, but it’s gonna be especially beneficial to the West in general and to the United States in particular, and especially since we’re making enormous profit selling oil to anybody who can get ahold of it.
That said, what do we do at this point? There is a blockade. Time is on our side. The Iranian’s strategy has been delay, negotiate, delay, lie, backpedal, go forward, confuse, delay, delay, delay. Why are they trying to do it? They’re hoping that public opinion in the United States on the side of the Left, as we’ve said before, when you have Sen. [Chris] Murphy saying it’s awesome when he digests propaganda from the Iranian Ministry of Information and says that boats have broken the blockade, he likes that.
They pick up on that, they absorb it, and that gives them confidence to keep delaying. They feel that they can last for six months. They cannot last for six months. The blockade is working, the de-banking is working. Their oil wells are reaching a critical point in a week or so, where they either have to shut down with irreparable damage or they have to find some cast-off tankers or somebody to store this oil that’s coming out of the ground, or maybe just to dig holes and pump it in.
But they are desperate. They’re losing $400 million to $500 million in economic input, and it’s starting to hurt all four of these cliques that claim they represent the government.
So, what are we supposed to do about it? I would suggest that Donald Trump does not differentiate these PT boats, whether they’re laying mines or boarding ships.
Whatever they are doing, they should not be in the Strait of Hormuz. We should have an ultimatum that says any boat, for any reason, that’s a military craft that leaves an Iranian port should be considered an enemy engaged in hostile action. Whether it’s boarding tankers or it’s laying mines, and they will be destroyed.
That’s all they have. That’s the only military arm that matters now. We’re not gonna go in there on the ground and fight their army. Their air defenses are shot. Their navy otherwise is destroyed, as is their Air Force. Just finish the job and say nobody gets in any ship that’s a military craft and gets into the Gulf.
And then at some point, in two weeks, I would give a week or two, and if these demands are not made—that they surrender their enriched uranium, they surrender their ballistic missile fleet, and they cut off the subsidies to their terrorist proxies—then the United States says these are the targets that are going to be hit.
And then we’re gonna go home. We don’t have to say we’re gonna go home, but we should just go home. And those targets would be a series of bridges, transportation hubs, media and television stations. And if you want bridges that have dual use for the military. They don’t have to be done all at once.
They just say, if you’re not gonna negotiate and you insist on retaining the possibility or the chance or the real viability of a nuclear weapons program, and you’re still going to build drones and ballistic missiles and attack your neighbors and disrupt the oil supply of the Gulf and attack Israel and kill Americans, then this is what’s going to happen.
We are going to systematically start to hit things to accelerate the economic blockade, and I think very quickly they will concede. If they do not concede, we should systematically go down the list of targets. And then when we reach a point in which our military feels that we’ve so crippled the military-industrial complex and the nuclear complex of Iran, that we can go home, we can leave a carrier on rotating duty near the Gulf—the Persian Gulf—and go home and concentrate on the economy.
And I think Iran will look at themselves and they’ll see that we have no economy, we’re flat broke, we’ve lost 50-year investments, probably a half a trillion dollars of military infrastructure and weapons of arsenal. And the people will take care of the rest—the Iranian people.
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