The Daily Signal - Why Trump’s Iran Ambitions Don’t Require Ground Troops | Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Following the initiation of Operation Epic Fury, there has been a lot of talk about a supposed MAGA split among Trump supporters. After all, the America First credo was no optional wars in the Middle East following disgust with the 20-year misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. This is a top-down, air-only military conflict whose stated mission objectives do not necessitate ground forces, and the MAGA base understands this, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “But nobody has ever seen a war in which one side destroyed the entire air force of the enemy, the entire navy of the enemy, and has got pretty much 90% of its ballistic missile arsenal nullified and probably 85% of the drones and decapitated the entire command and control of the military.” 👉 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

In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at about about about Amazon.ca. There's a lot of talk about a make America great split among Trump supporters. When you look at the MAGA base, the people who identify themselves as Trump conservatives are Trump MAGA people. The support for the Iran war is over 90%. How could that be when they have told us that there's a widespread civil war among the MAGA people? When you look at the people who are objecting, you know, it's the Steve Bannon Wing, the Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, maybe Megan Kelly, I don't know,

and they're saying that this is contrary to mega philosophy of no optional wars. It would be if we insert ground troops and we're there for months, this is different. This war is only conducted by error, and there's certain characteristics of it that we haven't seen before. It's a top-down war. We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We've never quite seen that before. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. There's a lot of talk about a make America great split among Trump supporters. And this originated here in context with the

Iranian war. I'm speaking on a Monday with the 10th. day of the war, and there's talk in the air that the MAGA base may desert Donald Trump, because, after all, Mega's credo was no optional wars in the Middle East. That came out of disgust with the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the scadadaddle from Kabul that left billions of dollars of weapons, and, of course, the 8,000-plus dead and more casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. But this is different. This war is only conducted by error,

and there's certain characteristics of it that we haven't seen before. It's a top-down war. We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We have been taking out, along with the Israelis, 50, 60, 100 scientists, generals, Mullahs, political leaders to decapitate, not try to organically destroy the entire Iranian military. Second, it's part of, they were all part of negotiations. We were negotiating with Iran and gave them a lot of options. Just don't fund your terrorist proxies. Don't create a bomb. Knock it off and they didn't want to do it. It's just like the prior Iran strike last year where

we gave them another option. It's very different. You can't really change a regime we're told if you don't have ground troops, but maybe there's something different about the modern age with the sophisticated satellite imagery and reconnaissance that you know where individual people are by their GPS footprint, by their cell phone communications, and then you couple that with these highly sophisticated missiles and drones where you can actually take something through a window and dispatch somebody at a meeting. We've never quite seen that before, so you don't really need a sniper to take out a toxic Hitlerian type of leader. The other thing is that Donald Trump pretty much knows there's three alternatives that we've talked about before,

and none of them really require ground troops. The most desirable, obviously, would be to get an interim government. Maybe former dissidents get expatriates back, depose the mullahs so that there are people in the army depose them and then you have elections. That would be wonderful with problem solved. Or you could find somebody within the apparatus, theocracy that was a dissident and felt that he had military backing and he would, you know, pick the Venezuela solution, sort of what we see in Venezuela. We're not going to nation build. The worst scenario, is not all that bad. We say stew in your own juice. We mowed the lawn and we can do it any time we want. We can come back in and destroy your new Navy, your new missiles, as long as we have a president post-Trump who's willing to do that and ensure that they don't become nuclear again or they don't build another missile fleet.

And that's reflected, getting back to my original point, in the MAGA so-called dissidents. If you look at polls and there are was some released by CNN, Donald Trump has 87% support among Republicans. That is much higher than Joe Biden had among Democrats or even Barack Obama had among Democrats. And when you look at the MAGA base, the people who identify themselves as Trump conservatives or Trump MAGA people, the support for the Iran war is over 90%. Now, how could that be when it's, when they have told us that there's a widespread civil war among the MAGA people, that's what the left is saying. But when you look at the people who are objecting, you know, it's a Steve Bannon Wing, the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, maybe Megan Kelly, I don't know, and they're saying that

this is contrary to mega philosophy of no optional wars. It would be if we insert ground troops and we're there for months. I mean, if we end up bombing as Barack Obama did in Libya for seven months without congressional authority, one of the last things he did while in office was to bomb Libya, then that would be another matter. But nobody has ever seen a war in which one side destroyed the entire Air Force of the enemy, the entire Navy of the enemy, and has got pretty much 90% of its ballistic missile arsenal nullified and probably 85% of the drones and decapitated the entire command and cruel of the military and now is looking at secondary targets where maybe Revolutionary Guard headquarters and regional areas, but there hasn't really been any American

losses of equipment. We've had tragically seven people killed, but tragically and terribly as that is, in a war of 10 days with being that kinetic, it's very rare to see such few casualties. I mean, we're looking at the Ukraine war. There's been a million point two Russians killed and probably another two million wounded, probably three or four hundred thousand Ukrainian. So this isn't comparable to what we've seen. And I think the president understands that there is a deadline and the deadline is going to be

met and the deadline consists of we do not want this war to drag on with the midterms coming up and he wants to pivot back to the economy. And the people on the MAGA base who are saying that the party is split in two, they don't really have a constituency as the polls I just told you illustrate. They're loud. They have audiences and they make points that you know you can consider but they don't represent a constituency, at least not yet. On the other side, the sort of onto Cuba, Lindsay Graham wing of the party, I think that after Venezuela, which we didn't lose anybody, we lost some wounded people that were hurt, but we have a Venezuela solution of a strong person there that will be an improvement over Maduro and might lead to elections, but we're not

going to go on the ground and insist that we're going to create Carmel, California, and Venezuela. And we have, as I said earlier, three choices. and they're all preferable to what's there now in Iran, how the war in Iran ends. And so after that, I think the president will say, I'm going to concentrate on making sure that the Western Hemisphere is free and it's not captive to the cartels and it doesn't kill Americans. And obviously Cuba might be a concern, but there's no need now to go into Cuba or to bomb Cuba or to do any of that. And it's dying on the vine. And the more pressure we apply, insidiously so, not kinetic or dramatic, it'll soon, I think, deteriorate to a point where there'll be a change of government. But that's something in the future.

Right now, I think the mega base and the Republicans are sticking with Trump because they don't see oil prices spiking. They don't see the economy in danger. And they don't see the war dragging on for months and months like the Libyan fiasco or the misadventures in Afghanistan. in Iraq. What we're looking at instead, I think, is a spectacular achievement of getting rid of the two worst governments that we were dealing with in Venezuela. And if we don't get rid of the one in Iran, at least it's neutered or nullified, so it doesn't have the clout to subsidize terrorists and it doesn't have the wherewithal to threaten us or our allies in Europe and the Middle East. more importantly, the Gulf states are now openly hostile or at war with Iran, and they will not be subsidizing Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis to the same degree they were in the past, and Iran won't be doing it at all.

I think people absorb that, and now it's time, I think, to think of the midterms, and if they, they being the Trump people, can overturn the historical trends that the end party usually loses the first midterm dramatically, loses seats in the House and Senate, and maybe they can avoid that by having good economic news. And with the deregulations, the tax cuts, the energy development, the foreign investment, the interest rates coming down, I think there's a good chance by June or July, as I've said earlier, the economy will be strong, and he can point to the foreign policy successes. And that is reflected in the overwhelming support that the recent polls show for the Trump agenda. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal.

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