Victor Davis Hanson argues that the key difference between Trump’s Iran dealand the Obama-era deal is that Iran is now far weaker militarily and economically. He pushes back on criticism from the left and the anti-interventionist right, saying the war may help Trump politically if the Strait of Hormuz reopens and oil prices fall before the midterms.
A lot of people are upset. They feel that Iran was on the ropes, they’re going broke, and that had we continued, or if we were to continue now, we could put them out of commission and then dictate an un-conditional surrender to them.
That’s absolutely true, but what this deal then hinges on—because there’s no history of Iran ever keeping their word or following any agreement, explicit or implicit—is the willingness to keep maybe one carrier group in the region to ensure that the strait stays open, that the missiles are not launched against our allies, and of course, the enriched uranium is turned over.
And if we’re willing to do that and hit them hard every time they break it, then it might eventually work.
There are a lot of misconceptions, though, about the deal and the war in general. I’d like to address just a few of them.
A lot of the critics of this administration are saying, [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries said that not long ago, “Well, the strait was open and now it’s closed, so the deal didn’t accomplish anything. In fact, it made it worse.”
Well, the strait was open because Iran had no reason, as it did now, to close it. And the reason they didn’t have any reason to close it was the seven prior presidents — Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t want to disarm Iran. They didn’t want to go in there and try to stop their proliferation agenda. Donald Trump did. Anybody who did was going to be confronted with a desperate effort of Iran to close the strait. Now we’ll open the strait. But the idea that we made things worse is ridiculous.
And then second, people are saying, “Well, it’s just like the Obama deal. Why did Trump get out of the Obama deal?”
Well, they enriched uranium all through the Obama deal. We know that. They wouldn’t let inspectors in. During Joe Biden’s presidency, he begged them to go back into the Iran deal. They didn’t wanna do it.
Why? Because we now know they had pretty much already enriched to the point, 60 or more percent, that they could make a bomb in a month should they want to.
But here’s the big difference. In the Obama, atmosphere of that deal of 2015-16, Iran was ascendant. Everybody was scared of it. Its military was heavily equipped with Chinese and Russian weaponry. People were afraid of it. Israel didn’t want to attack it. The Gulf States didn’t want to attack it.
Europe was advising caution. It was an appeasing deal because nobody wanted to use force. Now, whatever your disagreement is with the current war, most people, and we don’t have boots on the ground, we don’t have journalists on the ground, but they agree that the Iranian military and its economy are devastated through forty days of intense bombing with probably a thousand planes in the air at any one time.
So we’re dealing with a much-diminished Iran that we can hit again and again because they have no air defenses. Obama was dealing with an ascendant Iran that he was scared to even mention the use of force to make them comply.
There’s a third misconception. People say, “Well, now we’re isolated. We’re all isolated. We have no allies. China and Russia are ascendant.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the first time in all of our lifetimes that the Gulf Council, for all their double-dealing over the years, basically are more attuned to an alliance, maybe unspoken, with Israel than they are with Iran.
We know now that some of the 600 combat aircraft based in the Gulf were stealthily flying missions, and that meant alongside the Israelis.
We know that there are Israeli technicians in the Gulf helping them with missile defense. We know the Gulf states and most of the moderate Arab countries believe that Iran, not Israel, is the existential threat.
In other words, we’ve never had a closer relationship with the Gulf states vis-a-vis America, nor has Israel.
As far as Russia and China, they’re both shut out of the Middle East. They have lost their client in Syria. They have lost, and they’re going to lose their client in Iran. They have lost their client in Venezuela. They have an enormous problem. Russia cannot sell weapons to Iran anymore. They may smuggle some in, and China can’t get discounted oil anymore.
There’s another misconception, that is the apostate right, that is the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens right, has said that they were going to fracture the party, and maybe their influence will turn the MAGA movement against Donald Trump.
Well, first of all, on all the other issues, maybe except the Iran war, most of the conservative, if not all, agree with Donald Trump. Even Tucker Carlson would agree with Donald Trump’s crime policy, his border policy, the Wall, the deportation policy, the rejection of the green energy mania.
But on this question of the war, the MAGA and Republican parties still overwhelmingly, 75%, support Donald Trump.
And the reason they do is they don’t feel this is a forever endless war, as the apostate right do. They believe that we have not used ground troops, and we have lost fewer soldiers than the accident rate that the military suffers daily over that period of 38 to 40 days of kinetic operations.
Finally, everybody says we’ve lost the midterms.
The midterms are four and a half months away. If the strait is open, suddenly you’re going to have a traffic jam of two things. One, tankers leaving, trying to get out full of oil, and tankers waiting to get in.
But there may be 200 or 250 tankers full of a million to 2 million barrels at a time when the United States and Russia and the Middle East and Venezuela are upping production.
So, there could be a substantial drop in prices.
And if you do get a deal the Left is going to be sort of flummoxed because they said that we had lost the war and we didn’t achieve our objectives. But if you do get a deal and the deal is enforced by military action on the part of the United States, it wouldn’t hurt Trump, it could help him.
And then there’s a larger context of redistricting. In this redistricting war, it turns out that so far the Republican legislatures will outdo the Democratic legislatures, and the Republicans may pick up anywhere from three to four to five seats.
And the Supreme Court that said it is a racial obsession, a fixation to create congressional districts on the basis of race, and you can’t do it, may lend the Republicans another four to five.
I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump, can overturn historical precedent. Remember that of the last 40 presidents, 95% lost their first midterm election. So, his history is on the wrong side, but he will not lose the Senate. And it doesn’t really matter, to tell you the truth, if they lose the House.
It would be nice to get legislation through, but most of his legislation has already been through. He can still use executive orders, but most importantly, they can’t… They may impeach him as a performance art act, but the Senate will never convict him.
