Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/30/26 Daniel Davis on What’s Been Happening in Ukraine

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Scott brings Daniel Davis back on the show. As the world’s been focused on what’s happening between the US and Iran, important developments have taken place in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Scott and Davis break these down and then finish with a quick reflection on the ongoing economic stand-off between the US and Iran. Discussed on the show: Daniel Davis / Deep Dive Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel.  Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. It's the babies I make it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, y'all introducing Danny Davis, former lieutenant colonel in the Army, host, of course, of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive on the YouTube analyzing all the wars

and particularly Iran right now. Welcome back to it. How you doing, Danny? I'm doing well, Scott. Thanks for having me back. Always a pleasure to be here. Great, man. Good to talk to you again.

And, you know, we've got to talk about some Iran stuff. But, you know, I just got off the line with Larry Johnson talking around. on stuff. So maybe I should start with asking you some Ukraine stuff. Are you up to date on at least more or less the battle lines in the east? And can you tell us how much they've changed over, say, the last couple of months or not? And how difference it makes? Yeah, there was, and there's some debate about the causes of it. But when you just look at the graph, the chart that shows how many square kilometers of territory Russia gained going back into, I want to say late

2023, early 24, somewhere around there. You have a steady progression. And you see it goes up and I think it would be like 794 square kilometers is the most of it got in a single month. And that happened during the spring or summertime. And then you see a dip when the weather gets bad. And then the January, February, March time frame the last two years ago of this graph that I'd seen showed a dip in that period of time.

then they get in the spring, the weather gets better, things start going back up. This year, you had about the same December that they'd have had in the past, and then all of a sudden in January and February, maybe it was, I'm sorry, no, it was, January was the same. Then February and March, it's like Russia just stopped fighting. I don't know what they had done. I don't know what happened there because, honestly, I've been so focused on the Iran War. But when you look at the amount of territory, they actually lost 37 square kilometers,

which is in terms of a whole country, it basically means almost nothing changed any hands. And then they, I think they gained 25 in the month of February. So basically a net over two months of nothing. It was almost a wash. But there's still a lot of fighting going on. A lot of people being killed, drones flying back and forth on the same side. But it's unclear exactly why all of a sudden there was a stop.

Since April has started back, then rushes back on its offensive again. they're starting to make some moves. And so now they're starting to pick up territory and inflict casualties. But the Ukraine side, one of the things is partially responsible for this, I think in February, they launched a couple of fairly sizable counterattacks in the Donbos area, one around, let's see, I think it was a Cerro-Donetsk area or, yeah, I think it was around that area, that area somewhere in the center. Basically in the middle of the zone,

And they went on a couple of pretty sizable offensive operations. And they gained back some territory, which is why we saw a dip there. But like all these others, everything that they've done, whether you're talking about the foray into Korsk a year and a half or so ago, the operation to cross the Denepper River and Crinky, these things and what they did in Kupianz, six or five or six months ago. Those things have temporary success,

but they're always temporary because they don't have the manpower to hold anything they have, and they definitely don't have the men power to cause any kind of a general offensive to where they'll just start rolling the lines back in the other direction. And that's exactly what we've seen happen here, is that the gains that they may over that couple of month period have now been largely lost already, and Russia is now back on the offensive again. And all indications are that there's going to be another big push here in the late spring or early summer. A lot of signs about assets being built up, et cetera. that looks like Russia is going to make another big push.

And like all of these, it's going to matter what the personnel is and what the personnel situation is on the Ukraine side, which continues to be really bad. Morale is low because they still keep grabbing people off the streets. In fact, they're having to do it in greater numbers because they just can't come even close to offsetting the losses by normal recruiting methods. So that's the only thing left to them.

One other benefit, a couple of benefits on the Ukraine side that is also responsible for the slowdown on the Russian side, is that they, after, when this offensive period began in 2024, it exposed a lot of the corruption on the Ukraine side that many of these fortifications they were supposedly had built and paid for were just basically people stealing money, and a lot of the equipment was just piled up somewhere in a corner, never got turned into anything.

Well, they got that apparently fixed because now on some of the fortifications they have since built are like a world-class. I mean, from some of the things that I've seen video of, it's really, really good. The big problem for the Ukraine side is that they don't have enough men to man them and to make the maximum benefit from them that they can because you can have the greatest fortification in the world,

but if you can't keep fire on them and you can't keep them covered from multiple angles, then the other side can breach them, and especially find a place where you can't cover it, it's pain-taking, it's hard work, but you can do it, you can get through. And once you break through, now that it's hard to get that recovered. So that's part of the reason for slowdown on the Russian side, but now then, like I say, they're starting to pick that back up. And bottom line is we remain in a war of attrition to where the much bigger Russian side

is going to continue to have its way on the Ukraine side. And they just can't match the numbers. And no matter how heroically they fight, no matter how great some of these counterattacks are, they don't have staying power. It just doesn't exist. So in a certain sense, maybe it's like, hey, you can either die sitting in the trench or you can die offensively, maybe better to die on your feet charging the enemy than die just waiting for a drone to fall in your head.

I don't know. I'm totally just speculating there because I haven't heard anything on the Ukraine side. But what we can see is that they do things that militarily just are not going to make any difference. And it's just a slow grind. And for various reasons, some of which are evident, some more. opaque. Russia has chosen not to really put the foot on the gas and they're apparently content to just the slow grind down, even though some of the public opinion in Russia is actually

starting to get a little agitated at the Russian side. This is something we haven't seen much of, at least in the first four years. But something happened, Scott, when they crossed over that threshold, I think we're at like a 100, 1,526, if I'm not mistaken. something like that. When they crossed over the number of days that the USSR won World War II from the time the Nazis invaded in September, 1941, until Berlin, and I think it was April 1945, people said,

hang on, our greatest generation won this great military, and it took all this time, and then now here, after the same amount of time we're at war, and we still don't even have all of the Donbos, and so people are starting to grumble a little bit, and that is eaked into some of President Putin's overall approval numbers. But you got to keep in context. You have Putin at, I think it's like one poll that had it as low as 65, others is around 80,

which is down from 87 that it had been before. So it's come down a little bit, but it's still, I mean, in the stratosphere, to anything anybody in the West is they've even dreamed about. So you've got to keep that in contact because too many people in the West are going, look he's proven he's human Putin he's going to start losing support and now maybe we can win the war no you're not going to win the war the people are agitated but they're not like we're losing the war they're just mad that you're not pushing harder and eventually you're going to end up winning because nothing is going to save the ukraine side let's understand that whatever happens with morale or

anything else nothing is going to change the situation on the front line in the in the from the point of a spear for the Ukraine army because you just don't have enough, you don't have enough ammunition, et cetera. And they are getting better at the drones. I'll say this is part of this normal process of action, counteraction, reaction, you know, and then you just keep on iteration going through, you know, one side comes up with a new drone, the other side comes up with a way to defeat it, and then they have their own, and then the other side, it works for a while and so forth. And so we've gone through like several iterations of this, and the Ukraine side has gotten really good at drones and the Russian side.

I did interview one on my show not long ago who was fighting in there, and they say it's no joke. They definitely have some skills in that. But of course, the Russians do too, and the Russians have mass. So even if you got great technology here and the other side can even come close to matching it, but then they can substantially double it even, possibly in volume, then it's not going to matter what you can do. And that's why this remains a lost case for the Ukraine side.

And the longer the war goes on, the ground. greater the eventual cost for loss will be the Ukraine, the greater number of dead men that they will have that they can never recover and the greater the destruction on the land. Other than that, it's going great. Yeah. Well, you know, I read a thing about the drones that said that, no, this is what is really turning the tide. I remember you and I had a laugh about, you did that debate with the lady from the CSIS where she said, well, they'll just have to jerry rig some new technology. And that was the quote, Jerry rig. And then from there then, that, is what we'll turn the tide. We just have to keep this up until we can figure out a new technological

breakthrough. And then, so the thing I was reading was saying that, yeah, no, the Ukrainians have figured out the drone. And they're putting them out in huge numbers, and they're getting so good at using them. And they, in fact, they claim at least that they recently won a battle with no human men at all. All drones and robots went in there and cleaned the Russians out. And that now the tide his turn. And the Russians have their volume of men, but the Ukrainians have American money and technology. And so, you know, I haven't seen that if it's not different than two years ago. I haven't seen any evidence of that on the battlefield. I'm sure that they are. I mean, I just told you, they definitely are advancing their drone capability, their technology. But what's not relative to

the enemy, the other side is too. That's what none of these people seem to, they only look at the Ukraine's side and say, well, yeah, now then they're going to get the upper hand, and somehow they think that's going to be decisive. And now it's just going to roll back. Like the other side's not going to do anything about it. They do in 100% of the cases, as the Ukraine side has in 100% of the cases. Every time Russia comes up with something new, it works for a while, and then the Ukraine side figures it out, and they have a counter to it, and then they introduce something new. And that's what you're seeing, this continue iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration. And that's yet you don't see, like I said, you did see a counterattack. And the last.

lines moved for a while, but then they move back. And now then, because again, it doesn't matter how many drones and robots you have if the other side has even close to the same amount and substantially more men and more weapons and ammunition and the glide bombs and the missiles, more artillery. That's still out there. It's still an issue. And you can't overcome all that. That's the bottom line.

Yeah. Hey, guys, Scott here for Moondos Artisan Coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show flavor. coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to

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Scott Horton.org slash coffee. But now, you know, like you, I've been focusing on other things, and it's been difficult, but I guess the last I checked, they still have, what, the Russians still have something like a quarter of Donetsk still to occupy, and then something like a third of Zeprosia, and I don't know how you round these things off, but obviously one third or so of Kurson is on the other side of the river. these are relatively the same proportions as a year ago, right? Maybe it was, they still had one third of Donyetsk to take rather than one quarter.

And so, you know, just as you're saying, it's action and reaction and almost parity as far as the drones go and all that. I mean, and the Russians have not been willing to, you know, really do. a mass conscription and a full-scale invasion by as many extra hundred thousands of troops as it would take to just win the war. Well, that is prohibitively expensive. So, like, the Ukrainians have been holding them off barely well for four years. I don't know. Yeah, that is a true statement.

In terms of the amount of territory, where the lines were a year ago and where they are now, like I said, it is 600, 500, 400, 400 square kilometers per month, minus those two months and now it's back going on. So it is still moving to the West. It's just not moving very fast, but it's coming at a... It's a profound cost in manpower, though, on the Ukraine because the casualties are still just going through the roof. And that's why they continue to have to force mobilize,

and they're literally bleeding themselves dry of men, especially military age men to the front lines. And so it's just sacrificing into this maw of death. And the Russian side is content to just keep doing that because that's been one of their objectives is the demilitarization of the Ukraine side. And apparently they're much more patient than anybody in the West is.

And so even more than many in their country are because they're grumbling about the slow pace of it. That's why I said, even the Russians are getting mad. And that means military as well as civilians, by the way. but the thing is though it's still people are grumbling about it but they can see there's no way to reverse it and eventually there just won't be enough men to even steal off the streets

and apparently that's what they're going for but that's evident it's not as though there's this view sorry for jumping around there's this view in the west that this is as fast as they can go because that's all they can do and they just aren't able to go any further than that but evidence suggests that this is their plan that they want to go slow to reduce the casualties on their side

and to maximize the casualties on the Ukraine side. And the Russian casualties are nowhere near. I think it's pretty clear what is being claimed on the Western side routinely. I think that's just for public consumption because the Russian side are say, no, we have casualties and they're ugly, but they're not a fraction of what, you know, this is 33,000 a month that's being claimed. I think it's a whole lot less than that.

But they're willing to spend that as long as it's going to move the other one because the other side probably is in the 20 to 30,000 per month. And that's why they're getting, it's still moving to the West. But you haven't seen them. The Russians have not even attempted a large scale offensive. If they had tried something like what the Ukraine side did in June 2023, and it failed, like they tried to bum rush the chains, you know, the, what is it? Sorry, these defense barriers that the Russians had built.

the concertina wire, the dragon's seat. If they tried to bum rush that and they did a poor job and they died in large numbers, all these, you know, tank graveyards we saw all the place. Russia has not attempted to do that. So what they could do, and it doesn't take much of an analysis to look at that front line. And I've done it actually several times. And I'm like, you know, this area here is very lightly defended. This area over here is lightly defended.

All it would take is the Russian side to, you know, you could build up a faint and where they are strong. and make it look like you're going to have a big offensive there, and they're going to move all their stuff and get ready. And then you can start with a lot of firepower, artillery, drones, and the missiles coming in. And then all of a sudden, you move everybody over here to the weak spot and you just overwhelm it with numbers. You could do that.

And militarily, that's not that hard because then you concentrate all your power in a certain area and you can have a breakthrough. And then you have exploitation forces behind that waiting that as soon as you open up a breach of, you know, seven, 10 kilometers, 15 kilometers, something like that, you can just literally drive into the rear enemy. You get behind all of these fortifications that they're building and then, you know, the whole place is just collapsed. Russia hasn't even attempted to do that. So that tells me that it's a conscious decision to go with this slow grind attritional war because meanwhile,

their artillery, their artillery, their drones, and their missiles, they continue to stockpile massive numbers of them. They're making a lot more, according to you, U.S. intelligence a lot more than what they use each month, which means they're building up stockpiles somewhere. We can guess what that might be for. I don't know. Some say that there's a fear on the Russian side that eventually NATO is going to join in, so they want to make sure they don't have the problem that America has right now in the Middle East that, oh, snap, we've got about two months of ammo left and we're done. They don't want to get in that situation. So if they get into a big war, they want to have enough ammunition to sustain a long-term conflict

with NATO and be able to outlast NATO, et cetera. So that's theoretically possible. I don't have any idea if it is or not, that that's one of the possibilities. But what we do know is they are building a lot more than they're using each month, and they have chosen not to saturate the place with it. So again, the evidence suggests that this is a conscious decision

and not in absence of capacity. Like they haven't ever gone after Ukraine leadership. I mean, they can drop a number of arrests down and just like wipe out. out all of the leadership in Ukraine in a night should they want to in Kiev. They've never done that. They have an assassinated Ukrainian leaders like they have the Russian leaders in Moscow with several generals being killed, et cetera. So there's a lot of things they could do. They definitely have the capacity, but they had chosen not to do that for various reasons. So I think

that people in the West should not be getting too much optimism from that temporary offensive that the Ukrainian side has because the fundamentals are still off the charts on Russia's favor. Man, what do you think of the chances that somehow like right in early 2022, they had a meeting in the Kremlin where some guy had a chart that said that, well, America's going to spend a hell of a lot more money on this war than we are. we should prolong this war and inflict a strategic defeat on them, not by grinding up our guys,

grinding up Ukraine's guys, but grinding up American dollars and just wasting, forcing Europe and the United States to waste all this money on a war that's not really that costly as far as them being able to feel an army in the country right next door compared to, you know,

whatever advantage America tries to buy with high-end, exquisite military technologies, as they call them, which can only be so effective. I don't know the exact ratio, but I'm sure America's spent a hell of a lot more on this war than Russia has, even probably as compared to GDP or something. I don't know.

But I just wonder whether, like you say, they're doing this for various reasons. I wonder if they just thought, yeah, strategic defeat, prolong the war to hurt the other guy more, that's actually a really smart idea, Joe Biden. That's exactly what we're going to do to you because it seems like that is what they're doing to us.

Yeah, I don't know that that was ever a conscious decision, not in the beginning anyway, but it seems pretty evident to me that that is what they're doing now because, I mean, just look how it's denuding NATO. Over time, it's weakening NATO. They're fracturing within. U.S. is again talking about, hey, we may just walk away.

We're going to start, we may start taking our troops out of Germany because the German leader said something President Trump didn't like. So out of the spat, he's saying maybe we'll do this. He previous to that, prior to that, was like saying, I don't even know if we need NATO because y'all are a bunch of paper tigers anyway. You didn't come and help us in the strait of Hormuz, so screw you guys. You know, it's just falling apart. And that's not falling on deaf ears.

And so the Kremlin is sitting back and they're watching all of that, like the tennis match back and forth and going, cool, you guys keep pounding each other way. They see what's happening in the Middle East right now. They're like, this is what I was warning about a bunch of times. I think even on your show a few times, I said, listen, before this, the Iran war broke out, I'm like, we have given so much ammunition to Ukraine and to Israel in their wars around the Middle East. I said, look, if we get into a war, we're not going to have enough stuff to sustain combat because our industrial capacity is too low. And if we do, then we're going to find ourselves in like getting in the red zone pretty quick where we don't even have.

have enough. And now we are literally right there. You're talking about the jasm's, the long-range cruise missiles, the Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Thad interceptors, the Pact three interceptors, all at dangerously low levels right now. Now, should we restart the Iran War, then that could take it down into the bottom of the barrel. You may even run out of some of those categories of weapons, offensive and defensive missiles. And then you may have to start pulling old stuff out of the The inventories, we got a lot of that stuff in there, I'm sure, but it's like gravity bombs and some other things that are far less capable, they're more risky to use, they may have a higher dud rate, you know, all this kind of stuff. Meanwhile, again, back in the Kremlin, they're going,

interesting. They're maybe looking in Beijing, thinking the same thing and going, cool, these guys are burning themselves out on a stupid war that can't benefit them. They should never have started, but it's also dumb because it's costing them. Their economy is now starting to wobble pretty badly and they're setting the conditions for an even worse outcome later this year. Europe itself is still just cutting its own throat there by continuing to say, hey, we're going to not even take any Russian oil. Oh, meanwhile, Russia's going on. But you know what?

How about that Kazakh oil? Let's cut that off too. I mean, since we're talking about you don't want our oil, how about not having any of it on our schedule? At the same time, the straight-o-or-moos is shut down because of our actions, which is causing other problems for the oil. So we're literally falling apart all over the place. So whether this was anyone's intention or not, I can't say for sure, but I can't tell you that they're sitting there loving the way it's working out. Yeah, man. Hey, I don't know about you guys, but I don't even have

health insurance anymore. The system is so rigged and the prices are so high. Insurance for just my wife this year cost as much as it did for both of us last year. Something like that. Pretty close anyway. And so I've just opted out. I don't even have health insurance. insurance right now. But I signed up with crowd health. And it is a great alternative to health insurance. And what it is is it's just crowdsourcing. You help crowdsource other people's bills and they help crowdsource yours. The more people who sign up, the less any of us have to chip in to help the other guys down. And it just helps drive down costs for everyone. Oftentimes you can negotiate a cash price if you're not paying with insurance. You can get a good discount from your health care

and then you can crowdsource those bills through crowdhealth.com. It works really great. I was skeptical at first, but Tom Woods explained the whole system to me, and it's really great, and I do hope that you will look into it. And if you use the promo code Horton, when you sign up at crowdhealth.com,

then you will be charged only $99 a month for the first three months. Get a great discount there at crowdhealth.com. Use the promo code Horton. All right, well, a couple of notes from the news here. The president of Ukraine has officially res suspended and postponed any new elections. And I don't know if they bother saying this anymore. I always thought it was funny.

They say, yeah, but he has to because according to the law, as long as it's martial law, then you can't hold an election. But of course, he's the one who declares whether it's martial law or not. He could obviously choose to say, well, we're canceling martial law. law on election day. Abraham Lincoln stood for election in the middle of the American Civil War. But anyway, this guy was last elected in 2019. But anyway, also another thing from the news, I don't know that that's really relevant

to our story necessarily, maybe a little. But my real question is, oh, no, the other point of the news was that Donald Trump talked on the phone with Vladimir Putin the other day, and maybe yesterday. And they said that they talked about Ukraine and that they talked about Iran. And America is very concerned about Ukraine and Russia is very concerned about Iran. So that obviously raises the question of whether there's any hope for a diplomatic solution here or whether like, hell no, the Russians are just driving all the way until they own all the curse on until the Ukrainian army is broken and they take Odessa if they feel like it and all the rest fighting insurgency in the Carpathian Mountains till the end of time or what, man.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine this. It was interesting because according to the Russian media, Putin is the one that initiated that call. It wasn't Trump that wanted to talk to Putin, but the other way around. And one imagines that he's like, hey, I want to get back on your radar again. Because if Putin can talk Trump into having some kind of a negotiated settlement on terms acceptable to Moscow, that's better than having to just keep on slugging it out because whatever the number of Russians dead are, they're still rushing dead every month and it is still causing them a lot of difficulty.

So I would, I interpreted that as Putin saying, look, I can count as well. I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I see that you're running low on all these weapons. How about I help you out and stop the bleed from all the ammunition going to the Middle East from going out here?

All you got to do is just agree to my June 24 terms and say, hey, we're going to leave, we're going to walk away and we're going to end this war. And then everything's good. And by the way, I've got all of these economic deals, man. We would love to give you lots of stuff we can do in the oil and gas industry. We've got some other stuff with some of our rare earths. Dude, we can do some business.

Try and talk to Tom in his terminology. I suspect that's what happened. We haven't seen a lot of the readout, but I can see them trying that because, hey, it's worth a shot. If I can, knowing that Trump is in a weakened position and is vulnerable, just do a good time to try and pile on that. Because I can't imagine him going in trying to putin. and offering to concede anything because they don't have to. I mean, just imagine if the people in Russia are upset

because of the slow pace of the offense, just imagine how they would revolt if they heard him saying, you know what, how's about we'd just give in on this issue right here? You pick it, I don't know what. So I don't think that's going to happen. In fact, Putin did two days ago going and talk about how they're about to have Duma elections for the first time in the four oblasts that they have annexed,

so they're going to have deputies in the Russian Duma because they consider that already a part of Russia. So they're moving that forward to say, no, this is conclusively, it's in our Constitution, and now they're also about to be in our parliament. So they are not doing anything except continuing to move forward, both politically and militarily. Give us a short synopsis real quick. Like the briefest that you feel like on Iran and where we are, and what do you think are the prospects for Trump figuring out a way to cut and run?

here for us. Yeah, we're in this stalemate right now, both diplomatically and militarily, with dueling blockades. So Iran has everything in the GCC shutdown that we don't want to, that we do want to come out and can't. And we have a blockade on the outside that keeps the stuff that Iran wants to get out blocked in so it can't, at least mostly. There's lots of reports that ships are still getting through in some small number, but it's not anything big. So it doesn't really have a big strategic impact. Bottom line is that that restraint is continuing to be there. The question is, who's going to blink first?

Because both sides are saying, we have all the cards, we have the stamina, and the other side is weak, and they're going to give in. And so they're like saying, you know, I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue or something like that. Well, the problem is, I mean, it doesn't take a genius to look at the price of oil right now. It doesn't take a genius to realize that aluminum, helium, fertilizers, urea, all kinds of other products are not getting out every day, and that is causing huge problems throughout the world,

especially among our allies in Asia and in Europe. So there have lots of difficulties there. And even here, it's baking it. Not only is the price of gasoline and diesel going up, but also the price of fertilizers here is going up. A lot of farmers in the United States have already been, had to foreclose because the economics just weren't working out. And now then you're going to supercharge that and make it even more difficult. but on top of the difficulty of the farming itself,

it's also the production because without sufficient number of these petroleum-derived fertilizers, you can't produce as much. The crop yields will be smaller. So now then we're building in already, because this is planting season, a lot of these things, it's already too late. So we're going to have lower crop yields in the autumn,

and so that means that the food that's going to be coming all the way through the first part of 2027 are already going to be curtailed, which means a higher price and less of it. So that's going to have negative economic implications. And that's, of course, once this is opened up, that's already baked in. We're going to have that as it is.

The longer this goes on, the greater the compounding problems are from that to include chip making in Asia because of the lack of helium and aluminum to an important ingredients. That's also going to have rebounding and amplifying effects on like the auto industry, cell phones. I mean, practically everything in our economy right now is electronic, and it's all going to be negatively impacted by that. And so when you look at who's the pressure on and who's going to blink first, Iran knows how to suffer.

We've had them for 47 years. We've had sanctions. We've had periodic attacks. We've had now two wars in the span of a year. We had assassinated their leaders and stuff before it. There's always all these economic sanctions. So they know how to deal with it. They hate it.

They don't like it, but their people can live with that. They know how to suffer. We don't know how to suffer. And the Iranians also know it is a literal life and death matter for them. So their population is going to be willing to suffer because they see they have to. But they also see they have control of that straight. And that gives them leverage over us. And we don't know how to suffer.

And our populations, and I'm talking about Asia, Europe, and the United States and some of our friends in Africa, they're all going, dude, the only reason we're suffering is not because of an existential threat, this fake, imminent threat of a nuclear weapon, which is physically impossible because you told us that all that material is still buried under a mountain somewhere. So you expose that you lied on that. And so that means you shouldn't have had this war at all. Therefore, un-chuse it. Get it off the table here because we can't survive this. Iran is just one country. They just have to worry about how they can survive in this. We have to worry about all of these other economies all dependent upon the actions we took that are causing compounding effects everywhere that is

continuing to raise Russia up because we didn't talk about this a minute. ago, but one of the other reasons why they're not going to do anything to surrender is because now, all of a sudden, they are flush with cash because we pull sanctions off of them, and everything they're selling is now not at a discount, but at a premium. And so they are making money handover fist. The Chinese side has foreseen this for a long time. So they had this massive petroleum stockpile, strategic petroleum reserve. They can weather this for a long time, but nobody else in Asia can. And we can't. And we had a all of these increased exports of oil.

A lot of people are bragging on it. I've been seeing it on X earlier today that a lot of guys are going, yeah, this is all good for America, man. Look at our exports. Now they're going up. Dude, you realize that's not because of increased production because you can't do that. That's not a tap that you can just turn on.

It takes years of investment to get it. And the international, I'm sorry, the U.S. energy agency has projected either flat or declined. next year in production because all the things that go into the next year's production had to be invested last year or even earlier. So it doesn't matter what the political things are. You can't just flip that switch. So the only reason our exports went up is because we drew down our strategic petroleum reserves, i.e. we're now more vulnerable to any other shock. So China looked out for that and they're good. We're in a bad situation. And every day that this dueling blockade goes on,

the price gets worse for Iran, but it compounds and gets much worse for us. And so at some point, Trump's going to have to do something. He's either going to have to just do the, I'm just going to declare victory and walk away. Oh, yeah. Senator Kennedy previewed that last night on Fox News. We could just walk away right now. We've accomplished everything. Take your tape.

We're right, man. Call the victory. Greatest victory since the American Revolution, in fact. Sure, why not? I might even go back to the Peloponnesian War. It's probably better than that one too. That's right. Victor Davis Hanson will get to take his share of the credit.

All right, listen, I'm sorry. I got to run so bad, but thank you so much for doing the show, Danny. Everybody, check out the rest of what all Danny knows and thinks about the horrible war in Iran at the Daniel Davis Deep dive, which is on your YouTube all day long, every day. Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate it. All right, man. See you next time.

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