Editor’s note: 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.
Jack Fowler: Well, you mentioned the war, Victor. So, the Straits of Hormuz are—the Iranians say they’re in control. This is from two days ago, where, clearly, [President] Donald Trump’s saying we are now in control. Anyway, what’s your take on the latest headlines, Victor?
Victor Davis Hanson: Nothing that the Iranians say can be taken at face value because there is no Iranian government. The first and second echelon of that apparatus is gone. So, you have the people in the military, that’s one clique. You’ve got the theocracy, the Khamenei, you know, surrogates. That’s another. You’ve got the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s probably the most dominant. Then you’ve got these elected politicians. And they have two driving concerns.
One, they are terrified that one of the other three groups will think they’re weak and are negotiating with the Americans and either kill them or marginalize them or cut off their revenues, such as it is. So, they always want to outdo each other. At the same time, they want to outdo each other by saying, you know, we’re winning and all this crazy stuff.
They are also afraid of an uprising. Because if there’s an uprising, any of their hardline stuff that protects them from each other is gonna put a noose around their neck, in a Nuremberg-like trial, given they’ve killed 30,000 to 40,000 people.
So, you got the schizophrenia that on one day they want to be moderate and signal the Iranian people that maybe we might transition someday, with me as a figure. On the other day, it’s hardliner, or please don’t kill me if you’re in the Guard Corps. So, it’s almost impossible.
The other thing that’s going on is they did a—and everybody says, well, why didn’t he blockade Iran and open the strait? He had a sequence that makes sense. He destroyed their air, capital, navy, air defenses, most of their military, industrial, nuclear complex.
And then he said, let’s talk. And he had negotiations. And now he started a blockade that reportedly is costing them $430 million a day in revenue. Now this is on top of losing probably a 50-year investment of a half a trillion dollars in a missile arsenal, barracks, military apparatus, vehicles, planes, drones, nuclear factories—you name it. It’s wiped out.
I just make a little footnote of that, Jack, because Ben Rhodes and the Obama people are all on TV saying, oh, Trump—people don’t understand, he’s just reinstituting the Obama joint plan—you know, the comprehensive plan, joint plan action.
Fowler: Are we sending pallets of cash over?
Hanson: Yeah, exactly. We’re not. It’s nothing the same. Obama was rearming an ascendant Iran that was scary and indomitable, so people thought. We are dealing with a prostrate, weakened, and feeble corpse of Iran. And we’re dictating. We’re not negotiating, we’re dictating to it.
So, if these negotiations break down and Iran thinks it’s going to send some missiles into Saudi Arabia or storm a tanker, Donald Trump will take out their bridges, the first day, probably. He will take out their power plants.
And what is Iran thinking? Well, Iran is thinking that we’re going to go into the traditional rug—I don’t think that’s an ethnic stereotype. I’ve been in the Middle East. I bought a rug in Turkey once and one in Greece, and it’s—you barter. But that’s what they think.
They’re gonna go to the bazaar and barter, and yesterday, today, and tomorrow, whatever they say doesn’t matter, and draw out the negotiations, hoping that the Left will win the midterms.
The midterms will be lost, Trump will be impeached, and the Republican congresspeople will put pressure on him, and before the midterms, to get out. The Europeans will put pressure, Japan, everybody—they think time is on their side, and he will fold, and then they can reconstruct, and they probably feel they have some fissionable material they can fish out.
OK. Time is not on their side, not when you’re losing $400 million-plus a day. All he has to do is not give in for the next five to six, 10 days, and he still has plenty of time during the midterms. Just don’t put the boot off their neck.
Make sure they suffer $400 million, $450 million in lost revenue, and that’ll mean finally these people who are living lavishly and sending their children and their friends all over Europe, the United States, money—it’ll cut off. And then they will negotiate.
And if you want to accelerate a little bit, if they start to do crazy things, then yeah, take out their bridges or something. And if anybody complains from the Left and says that you’re going to impeach them, just remind everybody that Bill Clinton took out every bridge on the Danube in 1999 when he bombed, and he also bombed all the electrical facilities in Belgrade, so don’t fall for that hysteria.
So, I think we’re in a pretty good place. I think a lot of people are getting nervous that it’s going on too long, but he’s got another week or two to put—he’s right on the verge. If he can hold out against all this European and domestic pressure and Asian pressure and the Gulf pressure. The Gulf pressure is either cut a deal with them or destroy them, but don’t leave them.
Fowler: How do you cut a deal with liars, though, Victor?
Hanson: You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You have to dictate. It’s like talking to the Japanese after World War II. We learned that they bombed Pearl Harbor while they were telling us that they wanted to have peace, and they were working right in the middle of negotiations with Cordell Hull. Right. That fleet was already on its way to Pearl Harbor when the negotiations started. So, they knew that.
And so, when we saw them on Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur handed them a list of demands on unconditional surrender: free use of your country by the United States military, United States military will be the occupying power and the military government to reform. And they looked around and they thought, we do not want another atomic bomb. We didn’t have another atomic bomb for months, but they didn’t know that. We don’t want Curtis LeMay bombing us back to the Stone Age again. They agreed.
Same thing with Hitler. They thought as soon as [Adolf] Hitler killed himself, all these people came out of the woodwork. [Karl] Dönitz, [Hermann] Göring, they—you know, even Himmler—oh, we’re the government, deal with us, will you not?
No, no, no. You were defeated, and here’s what’s going to happen. You’re gonna be occupied, you’re gonna be zones of occupation, you’re gonna have no military, nothing. And this time you’re not gonna cheat like you did after World War I. And that’s what they did.
They don’t have any cards to play. They have none. The only card they have is the dream house of the Democratic media nexus that thinks this is a disaster.
And by the way, not to get off topic, did you see Tim Walz, Jack, in Spain?
Fowler: No. What? What happened?
Hanson: He went over to Spain to this international socialist conference at a time—
Fowler: To a socialist conference?
Hanson: Yes, in Madrid.
Fowler: What?
Hanson: Yeah. And he goes over there, and he’s one of the keynotes. Now he’s being hosted by this anti-American government that’s utterly corrupt and stolen money and is very unpopular and knows the next election it has, it’ll be thrown out. But it has just denied the United States, at a time of war, the use of its airspace and its joint NATO base, in large part paid for by the United States.
And he gets up in front of this foreign audience at a time when Americans are risking their lives in their Gulf, and he says that this is a fascistic agenda enterprise. This is fascism. What we’re doing is fascism.
In other words, you go into a foreign country and you basically say to the soldiers out risking their lives, you’re engaged in a fascist enterprise, and I’m gonna trash you to your enemies, which are our enemies—the socialist government of Spain as an enemy. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. I never have.
Fowler: Maybe he was trained well when he was in China, Communist China. How many times did he go there?
Hanson: Seventeen. You know what’s funny about all these—have you noticed all of these left-wing icons, they all had these flaws that they covered up.
Now we knew that guy was a pathological liar. He had gone to China, and they rebooted him as working man, that changed his own oil
Fowler: Coach. Coach Tim.
Hanson: And now he’s just a complete—and they did the same thing with Jussie Smollett. They said he was this, this, this. They did the same, and he was—you know, everybody knew that guy was a faker unless you believe the laws of chemistry don’t apply when you throw bleach out at minus 40 degrees and it doesn’t freeze. And you can kickbox holding your sandwich in one hand and your cellphone in the other against two huge attackers in your definitive—
Fowler: Bustle. Yeah.
Hanson: Yeah, yeah. You believe all that. And Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did believe that. And then there was Jeffrey Epstein, who was kind—well, you know, Jeffrey’s got some girl. He’s kind of a—he always wants to be an intellectual. He wants an office at Harvard. And then there was [Eric] Swalwell. Well, you know, he is a little randy. He has this little tendency to get a little drunk and get a little handsy, but he’s our guy. And they do that with all of them.
George Floyd? Well, yeah. George Floyd put a gun to a woman’s stomach. He had a home invasion. He was four years in prison. He was a career felon. When he was arrested, he was high on fentanyl. He was resisting arrest. He was passing counterfeit currency, and you know—but he was a martyr, and he has angel wings on. He’s the same.
That’s what they do. They take all of these people and they manufacture them into something they never were, and it ends up just the opposite. I mean, they end up as just—they implode, and then they go to the next one.
Another one is that lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
Fowler: Oh, yeah.
Hanson: Michael Avenatti.
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: That guy was a complete crook. And remember, he was on CNN, and they said he is so handsome, he’s dynamic.
Fowler: He was gonna run for president.
Hanson: Yes. He was gonna run for president. Then he stole Stormy—
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: By the way, another one was Stormy Daniels. Well, she had to put out in this—she had to go into this sordid career because she was a working mom, all this stuff.
Fowler: Oh yeah.
Hanson: And then she never paid the fine. The court ordered her to pay Trump for violation of the nondisclosure—I think it was the attorney fees, $400,000, and she never paid. But they had a picture of it the other day. It was very sad. Did you see her on the internet?
FOWLER: I did, yeah.
Hanson: She kind of covered with tattoos and obese, smoking a cigarette.
Fowler: Yeah. A lot of city miles on that lady.
Hanson: Where are all her leftist champions? Why doesn’t any of them that had her on TV every night call her up and say, Stormy, I’m really sad that you’re destitute. Here’s $10,000?
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: They’ll never do that. She was a useful idiot.
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