The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Iran Is Breaking Down, and the Ripple Effects Are Just Beginning

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Despite claims the war is failing, Iran is facing massive economic losses, dwindling oil capacity, and a military that’s effectively been neutralized. “It’s not a military problem… the military problem has been solved.” What remains is a political decision about how far to go. But the bigger story is the ripple effect. From a potential breakdown of OPEC and falling oil prices, to China being deterred and Russia stretched thin, the global balance is already shifting. Even Europe’s response is called into question as the U.S. continues to demonstrate overwhelming strategic leverage. In his words, “Iran is broke,” and the consequences are already spreading far beyond the region, argues Victor Davis Hanson. 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at ototrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for The Daily Signal. We're approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran War, and we're still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war is not going well. It's completely non-imperical. It's antithetical to the evidence. Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about 500 million. an input per day. It's running out of storage spaces in a week or two for its daily output of oil,

at which point, they either have to stop pumping or they're going to have, and if they don't stop pumping, the wells will collapse. They either have to stop pumping or they have to build as fast as they can, storage facilities, which will be known to us and we can take out. So they're at the brink economically. They have no. military ability. The course of the war, how it ends, is entirely in the hands of the United States. It depends on whether you want an unconditional surrender and you want to pay an extra price, maybe another month or two with economic strangulation, or you want to use air power to take out bridges and you can do that. But what I'm getting at is it's not a military problem

like Afghanistan and Helman Province or the Marines having to go into. Fulusha in Iraq. It's entirely a political problem. It's not a military. The military problem has been solved. It's just a question of how much political price does Donald Trump, or risk, I should say, want to take to get an unconditional surrender and the removal of the regime. He doesn't need to do that. That was not one of his pre-war agendas. The pre-war agenda was to neutralize the nuclear proliferation of Iran, the missile and drone force to atrite its military so it was not capable of conducting war to stop the subsidies to its terrorist proxies and to make sure it no longer attacked Americans and our allies as it has for 47 years. Those have

mostly been met, not quite, but mostly. So what are the ripples strategically? Well, just recently, OPEC has announced, I should say, the United Arab Emirates and perhaps Oman as well, that they don't want to be an OPEC. They can remember about OPEC. It was formed in 1973, and the whole purpose was to drive up the price of oil. And they did that by not pumping what they could pump. So right now, they have, each individual country has a quota. That's only about 70 or 80 percent of what they could pump. if they were not in the cartel.

That is what the United States is pumping right now, maximum. Russia will probably be pumping maximum very soon. Venezuela will be pumping maximum very soon. But what you're talking about is two million barrels maybe from the UAE alone. Maybe if Saudi Arabia gets out, they can pump another 20%. What I'm getting at is the long-range strategic value of the Straits of Ramos are going to decline because all of these countries, once they see one person getting out and taking advantage of these high prices, they will swarm to get out.

But once they get out and pump more oil, and they're immediately capable of pumping more oil, the price will drop, and the Straits of our moves will not be so important, and that will not be good for Iran if it has oil wells at all in two or three weeks. The other thing to remember is China. Everybody talks about, well, China, China hasn't come out well, China. It had threatened to go into Taiwan all of the Biden administration. Year after year, it issued videos of bombing Japan, threatening to take out Taiwan, lecturing people, don't tell us that we can't take it.

Pundits saying that they were emboldened by the Russians. I never understood that. Russia is in a Stalingrad-Quagmire. But once they looked at this type of war, an air war in a Gulf, and they were thinking, we have to. just transmit, what, 300,000 troops or so across 110 miles of open sea? And what we can see from the Americans, the Israelis, these Western powers have enormous ability to flood the zone with drones, with missiles, sophisticated air defenses, submarine drones, surface drones.

It could be a nightmare. And that's not talking about the Taiwanese ability to defend themselves as well. So in a cost-of-benefit analysis, I think the message is the United States can pretty much do what it wants militarily, and China will be somewhat deterred. Remember that it has lost its hold in Venezuela and in Iran. It was basically, along with Russia, controlling the Maduro regime, buying their sanctioned oil for a discount, selling them arms, trying to spread their influence in Latin America. Panama Canal was a good example. And the same was true of Iran. They were buying sanction oil at a discount and then flooding Iran with sophisticated weapons

and hoping Iran would use those weapons to hamper, neuter Israel, and attack United States insulations as they did in Syria and Iraq. And then China wanted Iran, which they did. So supply Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in their anti-W. That's going to be over with. Iran is broke. They will not, the people will not stand for or the government won't be so stupid when they're impoverished to start giving, what, 50, 60 million dollars a day, a month to Arab terrorists just so they can cause havoc when the people are starving. And they've lost probably a half a trillion dollars of a 50-year investment in their military, industrial, nuclear industries.

So China's on that losing end. Russia had lost the Assad regime. They were kicked out of the Middle East. They have a temporary little blip because the price of oil is going up. But as I said, one of the breakup of OPEC and the increased production in Venezuela and the United States, as soon as this thing calms down, the price of oil is going to crash. And Russia will be a big loser in this. And more importantly, they saw, again, a demonstration. of U.S. air power, and maybe by extension, they collate it with NATO proficiency. And so I think they will try to get out of the war and get as much territory as they can along the existing battlefield today, maybe call it a DMZ, but they're running out of people and money. They've lost a million and a half soldiers. And so this war probably reminded them that they don't have very many strategic options elsewhere, and they can't develop them as long as they're tied down in Ukraine.

Europe was a big, big, big loser. They had forged a relationship with Donald Trump that they had agreed for a 2% and had met that, 2% investment of GDP and defense, but they were talking about a 5%. And they had called, NATO had called Trump Daddy. And then all of a sudden Trump assumed that they were normal allies. So when he went in there, he didn't want to disson. disclose what he was going to do because he felt the U.S. left and the Congress or the Europeans would tell, and they would have revealed any type of surprise.

But more importantly, he felt that the Spanish, the Italians, the British, the French, all of them would just say no comment or this is a United States effort. We support our NATO power. And then call him up and say, Donald, we're not going to talk about it. But use our airspace, use our NATO bases. You paid for most of them. And this is what we're going to do. But we're going to do it on the rate. No, instead they pander to their Islamic constituencies, their left-wing constituencies in Spain.

Even in Italy with Maloney, and they said, no bombers in Sicily, no planes in Spain, can't fly over France, can't use Diego Garcia unless it's for defensive. What is the defensive strike? What does that mean? We'll let you have a missile battery. If somebody tries to destroy our base, will allow you to defend our base, but don't take off anywhere and attack anybody. It was absolutely ridiculous.

Europe came off really badly, really badly. And then they made it worse when they said they were going to patrol the strait, and then they realized the strait might be kinetic, and they would have to use some force if we were to turn it over to them, and they don't have that force. So it's all talk, talk, talk,

and it's based on envy and anger, at the United States, and it's a very dangerous game they're playing, because at some point, the United States says, we love you. Europe's a great place. You've got problems. Just settle them yourself. And maybe we'll have a coalition of the willing, just like you did in Serbia. You went in Serbia. That wasn't a NATO country, Kosovo. You weren't protecting the NATO country. You went into Libya. Those people weren't in NATO. But you freelance, you freelance all the time in Chad and the Falklands, you people. And we always help you. And then when we want to freelance, you, you're reluctant. So go ahead, do what you want, but count us out. And finally, the American left

kept saying the war was lost, the war was lost, the war was lost, the war was lost. Donald Trump blew it. He's not, he's, don't count that, don't count him out. We have six months before the midterms, the price of oil could crash. A lot of the things that Donald Trump put into practice with a big, beautiful bill, deregulation, tax cuts, enormous amount of foreign investment. All of that has plenty of time to kick in in August or July and have a stronger economy than we do now with cheap oil. But more importantly, he can say that in his regime, his realm, his tenure, he neutralized the threat from Venezuela. It's not spreading communism throughout South America, Latin America, and he neutralized

the Middle East in a way that all seven prior presidents had dreamed and had never done. Thank you very much. Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.