The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Iran’s Problems Are Just Getting Started

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

People have also mischaracterized the deal itself. This is not the end of the negotiations or the war. This is the very beginning of the problems for Iran. Once the kinetic part of the war stops, they have to face the people, and the people are angry, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” 👉Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit JoinADF.com/HANSON or text HANSON to 83848 to give today. Every dollar you give will be DOUBLED thanks to a special matching grant, while funds last. HTTPS://WWW.JOINADF.COM/HANSON.COM  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hanson to 838 to give today. That's join ADF.com. dot com slash hanson or text hanson to 83848 well this is victor davis hanson for the daily signal the so-called iranian memorandum of understanding involving a 60-day period of negotiations that may or may not lead to an armist was published just recently and it's got a lot of storm of criticism it's kind of ironic all last month and up until the memorandum was published. The left said that Donald Trump was a moor-monger. Now they're calling him Neville Chamberlain and an abject appeaser. The right was some on the right were saying he was the bravest of the last eight presidents, the first to take seriously the Iranian threat. In a sense, he didn't just talk about it.

He tried and did end it, I think. And now they are saying he was had. He's a fool. So what's going on with this memorandum of understanding? I think everybody is confusing, first of all, military victory versus strategic victory. In a tactical sense, we have had an overwhelmingly historic victory over the Iranian military. There are no air defenses. The airspace is anybody who wants it. The Iranians cannot stop the Americans, the Gulf states, or Israel entering its airspace. That's new.

Second, they don't really have a Navy. They have some mosquito boats, but now we've learned they have very few of those left. We've been attriding them in the evening, and there's about 160 ships we sank. Their missiles have been 90% destroyed, but we don't know the denominator. We don't know how many there were, but even then we are still aware of where they're stored, and if there is another war, we could pretty quickly dispense with them. I could go on. 80% of their leaders, 80 of their key leaders have been taken out, including the Supreme

Leader. So that's a military victory, but that is different than a strategic victory. Strategic victory means an unconditional surrender, and you dictate terms unconditionally to the defeated. We did that in World War II. We did it in the Civil War. We sort of kind of maybe did it in World War I with the Versailles Treaty that followed the armist of 1918.

And we did it with Saddam Hussein, and we initially did it with the Taliban. But here's the catch. You usually need ground troops to enter the foreign country, and then you remove the regime that you were fighting and install a new one. We did that with the Confederacy. We destroyed.

We did that with Germany, Italy, And Japan, we did that with the Taliban. We did that with Saddam Hussein. But the key is you have to have ground troops. To do that, that required 7,000 American deaths, 53,000 wounded, $2 trillion, and a combined chronological frame of 30 years, 10 in Iraq and 20 in Afghanistan. And then the regimes we installed completely flipped or were replaced. the Taliban came back in power, and now there's a consensual government in Iraq,

but it's heavily dominated by our enemies, radical Shia. Do we really want to do that in Iran? It's 93 million people. It's one and a half times the size of Texas. If you want to go in there and remove the regime, and then, of course, you can say, you are not going to have missiles. You are not going to give subsidies to terrorists. You're not going to send agents throughout Europe and the United States.

but that would require a strategic victory. And right now, the American people poll overwhelmingly they do not want any more ground troops in the Middle East. They feel like Bismarck did about the Balkans when he said it's not worth the bones of one German grenadier, meaning the Middle East isn't worth that type of expense. So we're not a colonial power, and Iran is not a protectorate that we're going to micromanage. That said, our ability. to go in any time and severely damage, it means that we can get the objectives that we talked about, specifically the strait of our moves open and no more nuclear weapons. And that would be a fantastic

achievement. And so far, we've tragically lost 13 soldiers. That's about the accident rate every two weeks in the military. So it hasn't cost a lot of blood and treasure yet. So what can we do if they violate the memorandum of understanding if they send missiles into Kuwait or they try to shut down the strait, we can go to the next level of bombing. You won't believe it, but Donald Trump hasn't bombed like Obama did in Libya in 2011. He has not bombed like we did in Vietnam. He has not bombed like Bill Clinton did in Serbia. All of these Democrats, whether they're Johnson or Clinton or Obama hit dual-use targets, docks, TV stations, and Libya, schools, hospitals.

Not that we'd ever do that, but we accidentally hit them, including the Chinese embassy. But we did take out the bridges and the electrical goods in Serbia. In Vietnam, we tried to destroy everything that could be used by the military and civilians. So we can do that if they violate the terms of the ingress. we can say, okay, you violate it, we're going to respond disproportionately and take out 10 bridges for every missile. And I think that would have an enormous effect on them. But why did Donald Trump and why did the administration even have a memorandum? Because polls said that

the people wanted it over with, because the price of gas had gone up to over $5 a gallon from $3.12 on average, or $3.00. And because the world was pressuring him to avoid a global recession and the midterms were coming up. So Donald Trump wanted a space in which he could get some of the objectives. He could get the enrichment. It's under a buried mountain. And he's got the straight open. And then the others will be discussed. In the meantime, the stock market is soared. The price of gas is falling precipitously. And in a generic poll, do you support or reject the negotiations with a random majority support it. Everybody says he can't win the midterms.

If he were to lose him, he will be impeached. His whole family and associates will be subject to lawfare investigations for two years. So it's paramount that he bulk and he break from historical precedent that says he's going to lose. But redistricting, whether it's racial gerrymandering or Blue State gerrymandering, will result in a law. due to the red state gerrymanding of probably five to ten seats. The Democratic agenda is very unpopular when people hear about it, whether it's a trans issue or open borders or Green New Deal or DEI, etc. And of course, the economy is, for all the bad news about the war,

record Wall Street highs good employment, enormous foreign investment, Tax cuts, deregulation kicking in, we could have the inflation back to where it was well before the war by November. People have also mischaracterized the deal itself. This is not the end of the negotiations or the war. This is the very beginning of the problems for Iran. Once the kinetic part of the war stops, they have to face the people, and the people are angry. And we have taken out much of their leadership. the next second or third tier are mostly incompetent.

And the people are going to say, not one dime of reconstruction goes to Arab terrorists, the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah. Not one dime goes to these crazy nuclear programs. Not one dime to your missile fleet. You lost them all. You were humiliated. You lost a half a trillion dollars in a half century of investment.

No more. So they're going to have a problem with internal dissension that's rising. We can always at any time encourage that. We can even arm it. More important, time is on Trump's side. Not only can he react with dual-use targeting any time during the memorandum that they break it, then he can also explain to our allies and our friends that the strait itself will be irrelevant in some sense in two years, maybe one year. Right now as we speak, the Saudis, Oman, gutter,

UAE, Kuwait, all of the Gulf councils are saying expand the pipeline to the Arabic Sea outside the Strait of our moves and we can export oil

without even getting near it. Expand the pipeline to the Red Sea without even getting near the Gulf. Expand pipelines or build them whether with Turkish plans or with the Israelis to the Mediterranean. And the result of all that is that you may be able to export 10, 12 million barrels without ever going into the strait,

which would flip the entire geostrategic reality, Iran would be vulnerable. We could shut the strait any time we wanted and shut down all of their oil exports and imports. But if they tried to shut down the strait, it would not affect within two years from now the vast majority of oil exports to the west to Asia, to Africa. etc. And the same thing is true of imports. Finally, geostrategic, I've talked about this before, but Russia has lost its clients in the Middle East Syria and Iran. China has lost its clients, Venezuela and Iran. They both have enormous problems, both have very low fertility. China has to

import 10, 11 million barrels. They're big losers in this war. They're not winners. When Elizabeth Warren says, everything was going well until the war, and now Iran is much stronger than it was before the war. She should ask 80 or so of their leaders who are now burning in an inferno if they would prefer the present to the past under Obama when they were ascended. She should ask the Air Force generals, the head of missile defense, the Iranian admirals, Would you prefer right now having no military, or would you like to go back to the heydays when you were calling the shots under Obama? The straight Senator Warren was closed.

Sometimes, sometimes it was open because we decided for the first time to disarm them nuclear. Every other president, all seven of them said they cannot have a bomb. And then people said, but they might close the straight. Okay, we don't want to get near that. They closed the straight because we took away their nuclear option. When you don't take their nuclear option away and you appease them, the straight is open. It's that simple. Thank you very much.

This is 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 Victor Hansen.com. and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.