The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: War in Iran is Due to Peace Through Strength, Not ‘Neocons’

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

The Left likes to argue that neocons are fueling the war in Iran, but the same radical, anti-Trump Leftists will say anything to criticize the president’s foreign policy.   When one actually goes looking, America doesn’t seem to have enough ‘neocons’ to be fueling an entire war. Once again, the war may actually be a strategic part of Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. 👉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

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. For 250 years, America has been a bastion of freedom. As we look ahead to the next 250, we're reminded that freedom is ours to defend. Today, Alliance defending freedom stands in courtrooms across the country to protect those freedoms we cherish. life, free speech, religious freedom, parental rights. These freedoms are at the core of who we are as a nation and they must be preserved. ADF is approaching a critical fiscal year-end fundraising deadline.

Your support today helps ADF defend these freedoms so they may endure for many years to come. Every dollar you give will be doubled thanks to a special matching grant while funds last. visit join adf.com slash hanson or text hanson to 833-848 to give today that's join adf.com slash hanson or text hanson to 8348. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. Recently during the confusion, the anger, the controversy over the memorandum of understanding concerning negotiations, that will ensue with the United States and Iran. J.D. Vance, our vice president, was tasked in visiting the media and being the public spokesman on behalf of the memorandum. It wasn't an enviable job. He's very skilled. I think we all admire him

a great deal. But one of the strange things that followed was there was criticism in Israel, and that would be natural. We are a large country and very powerful, and we're 7,000 miles away from Iran. Israel is a very small country of roughly 10 million people and it's right proximate to Iran. So obviously our ultimate strategic aims and agendas are not always identical. But Vance made the argument that there were people in the Israeli cabinet that were too critical of a deal. And he wanted to kind of slap them down and say, no one likes you in the world except, I should say support you, except us, i.e. you should show more gratitude. Number two, we give you over $3 billion of aid, and 75% of your missile defense is contingent upon us. Donald Trump C is your best friend you'll ever have, as you have,

as you acknowledge yourself. And fourth, the United States policy is the United States policy. It's not affected by other people trying to influence it. This was kind of extraordinary because in that speech, he was more critical of the Israelis, really, than he was of the Iranians, because he talked in the sense that we're dealing with Iranian moderates, and there are people that might emerge as a new Iran. He didn't have that tolerance, it seems, for our ally Israel. The question of, is Israel an asset? Yes, we give over $3.5 billion to Israel, but unlike all of the other money that we give. We give a billion dollars to Egypt. We give almost a billion dollars to Jordan. Both, by the way, are autocracies. They're not constitutional systems or consensual governments

like Israel. It's Western. And we gave 17 billion, 17 billion, six times what we gave Israel. And as late as 2023, I think it's been over 100 billion so far. Israel is not the only recipient of USA, but unlike all the other recipients, maybe with the exception of Ukraine lately, it's a strategic partner. Its intelligence is vital to our knowledge of the Middle East, especially of terrorists, which it shares daily with us. It is a laboratory of U.S. weapons. Every day they are flying F-15, F-16, latest models of each, F-35s, using Patriot missiles, and almost daily they consult with our people and say, this is what we've learned as a flaw, this is what we've learned as an unrealized advantages, and that knowledge is incorporated

into our defense profile. Another thing that was, so it is an asset, and this is quite aside from the idea that there are commonalities between Israel and the West in general, in the United States in particular. We both are part of a long Judeo-Christian moral tradition. We both are consensual governments. We both have freedoms. Israel is not as other nations in the Middle East threatening death sentence to some people who say they want to break away from their religion.

You can break away from Judaism if you want in Israel. Try that in a Gulf State or Saudi Arabia in the case of Islam, and you're going to be in big, big trouble. One of the things he said was that the neocons, and we've heard that word, neo-neo-neocons. That's a term for people who were in the former decades of their life, their formative decades, they were liberal. So we put the Greek prefix, neocon, meaning new cons,

and then they flipped, oh, during the Reagan years or the Bush years, into conservatives, and many of them were Jewish Americans, most notably people like Donald Kagan, Norman Pote Horowitz, Irving Crystal. Their children and others in the next generation have been strong supporters. So the idea or the accusation is we are going to war against Iran because a small influential group of neocons feels their first loyalty is to Israel, and defending Israel is not in the national interest because there's 550 million Muslim surrounding Israel. So in terms of population or oil wealth, they are geostrategically more valuable. That's not true in itself. But what I'm curious about is, who are the neocons? If you look at the primary spokesman for the

neo-conservative movement that happened incidentally to be Jewish, they all detest Donald Trump now. Bill Crystal, he was the arch spokesman of the neo-conservative movement. He advocated voting for Mondami. Professor Elliott Cohen, radically anti-Trump. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, hysterically anti-Trump. Former National Review writer, Mona Chiron, radically anti-Trump. Jonah Goldberg bolted away from the National Review, radically anti-Trump. I could go on and list David from radically anti-Trump. Some of them in case are

voting Democratic, even though the Democratic Party is now a socialist-ish-Islamist party. So there is no neocon movement anymore that is an inside lobby for the Israelis. Second point I want to make very quickly is there is a larger climate on campus. today of anti-Semitism. We're seeing candidates like Mr. El-Said in the Senate in Michigan, or we're seeing Graham Platner that are openly anti-Israel, but also anti-Jewish. And I think I could be frank and say, if you are a Jewish American, you cannot run. You cannot run on a national ticket on the Democratic side. If Joe Lieberman was going to be nominated today, it would be implicated.

to be a vice presidential candidate as he was in 2004. The anti-Semitism is so marked and explicit in the Democratic Party. So we have to be very careful when we talk about inside influence and a general climate where already Jews are unfairly targeted and suspect. And I'll finish with Lebanon. Donald Trump was critical as well. He said, you can't blow up a whole building when a Hezbollah person walks in. And I think, I think J.D. said something to the effect. I'm just paraphrasing you can't kill your way out of your problem. But if you say to Lebanon and you say to Israel, tomorrow just don't fire either one of you. Israel will be fine with that. The people who are breaking the truce or Hezbollah who has hijacked the Lebanese government.

The Lebanese government hates Hezbollah just as much as we do and just as much as Israel does. But Hezbollah isn't even a nation. It is a terrorist thuggery. Its relation to Lebanon is like the cartels' relation to Mexico. And they are attacking Israel daily. They have 160,000 missiles originally. They have shot thousands into Israel. Israel tries to be disproportionate, just like we are.

If somebody attacks us, we attack them 10 times harder. Why? To create deterrence. So when somebody shoots missiles or drones at Israel and then runs back to the suburbs of Beirut and has them stashed in the basement and thinks, you can't hurt me, Israel targets that basement. It does not blow up the entire apartment. building by intent. It tries to blow up the particular areas within the apartment. It is much more careful to target individual Hezbollah killers than the Hezbollah people are willing to target

the IDF. They target everybody. And again, if you don't want Lebanon to be an issue, and I don't know why it's even in a memorandum of understanding, it has nothing to do with our effort to disarm Iran. Shouldn't be in there at all. That should be something the Israelis handle and Hezbollah handles. And all we need to do is say, don't give money to Hezbollah. But that's an Israeli Hezbollah question. And Iran is desperately trying to cling on to something to get leverage. What we shouldn't allow them, that leverage.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hanson 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.