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InternationalCommentary

‘Paper Tiger’ Exposed: Victor Davis Hanson on Trump’s Strategy Crushing Iran

Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show." His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers. Contact him at [email protected].

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. 

Jack Fowler: So, Victor, you had shared with me a long thread off of X by Miad Maleki, I think. I’m sorry if I mispronounced your name, sir. And it’s 10 points about the success, the economic success, of the blockade, the U.S. blockade. Would you like to take that on, my friend? 

Victor Davis Hanson: I liked that article because it was analytical and empirical. 

What he was saying were certain aspects that people had forgotten. They are receiving in their aggregate income about, was it $430-something million a day, Jack, in oil? 

Hanson: Oil, petrochemicals, and … 

Fowler: Let’s just to say the collective economic damage— 

Hanson: Yes. Collective, is that $435 million. 

And you can see how, because everything they have, from washing machines to tires, that has to be imported, and you can stop everything if you control the Strait of Hormuz. And everybody talks about, well, they have the Caspian Sea, or they have a port on the other side of the strait, like the Gulf of Oman. 

No. He points out that those are very minuscule areas of oil export. The big enchilada is Karg Island. Unfortunately for the Iranians, it’s way deep in the Persian Gulf. So they came up with the idea, they want to blockade that, fine. And they say, “We’re only going to let pro-Iranian ships in,” fine. They don’t have the wherewithal to enforce that. If they send out their narcotic-like PT boats, the warthogs, they can destroy them. 

If they try to blanket the Gulf States and Israel with missiles, [Donald] Trump will lay the blow… He will just take out their dual-use generation and stuff, and that will stop that very quickly. So, what Trump basically did, Jack, is he said, OK, blockade—hmm, good idea, but you’re the wrong people blockading it. We’re going to have a blockade, but we’re going to borrow your idea that it’s selective. So we’re going to flip it upside down. You say nobody but pro-Iranian people can come in. We’re going to say nobody but anti-Iranian are going to come in. So any ship—and they’re going to have a problem with China because that’s 80% of the ships coming in to get the oil will be Chinese, but they’re going to have to turn back. 

That’ll be explosive if they try to do it. I think eventually Trump will do it, and China will get angry and we’ll see what happens. But we have the wherewithal to stop it.

And a couple things are going to happen, as he points out. They don’t have the storage capacity just to keep pumping oil and add it into Karg Island big fuel storage depots, or into ships that are idle there. At some point, very quickly, in a matter of days, they’re going to fill all those things up.

And as he points out, with oil wells, if you just shut them down, they have to be maintained and they get water seepage. And it’s very hard and expensive to reboot them. 

It’s a very intricate process. And he said they’re not going to be able to have any petrochemical or oil income because they’re not diversified with their ports like the Saudis are or the Emirates.

And he made another good point, and I had written about that this morning, but I wrote it a couple of days ago, that they don’t understand the Gulf. They think it’s going to be forever 20% of the world’s oil leaves. And therefore, they are critical, because you’ve got to go close to their shore, and they’re going to interfere. And they just keep talking about that. 

And while they’re talking, they don’t see the world is changing, and it’s changing rapidly.

The Saudis now export most of their oil to the Red Sea. If the Houthis get orders to stop it, well, Trump bombed them for 56 days, and the Israelis and the Americans can shut down their power, their water, everything, if they try that. They’re going to build probably another pipeline to the Red Sea. 

They’re talking about building one across the desert through Jordan to Haifa, or near Jerusalem. They’re talking about expanding the one that already exists in the Gulf of Oman, where you could get the oil before you got near the Strait.

And at the same time, they think that nobody will touch their oil because it’s critical to the world price. Maybe, maybe not, one or 2 million barrels a day, but Ukraine and Russia are talking about a ceasefire. 

You put Russian oil at full capacity on the market. You put Venezuela, which is increasing every day, a little bit, their oil output, and Trump says he is going to have another million barrels. You could say to the Iranians, “as long as your regime is in power, you’re not going to export any oil—not today, not six months from now.” 

And the world economy would make the necessary adjustments, is what the writer is saying.

He’s basically telling us that it’s a political challenge to Donald Trump. They have counted on the Left to embolden them. So their strategy is to indulge in accrued stereotype of the Middle East. They want to do a rug deal. And they want to barter and barter and barter and feign anger, and back and forth. 

And they want that to draw that out for three to four to five months. And they want the economy to stall, the world economy, and then they want the Left to come in and take the House and take the Senate and cut off funds and stop the war. 

I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s their strategy. But what he’s trying to argue is that strategy requires a quiet population that can be intimidated, as it is now, but permanently so, and it requires some economic viability to survive. And they already can’t afford food, they can’t afford gas, they’re under attack, they’ve lost probably a half a billion dollars, half a trillion dollars in weapons and infrastructure that was accrued over 47 years. 

They can’t rebuild that, and they can’t give money to the Arab terrorists, there are three or four proxies, five proxies in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza and Yemen, without angering further the population. 

As I said in this article, it’s one thing to tell the population, “Well, you don’t like us, but we restored the Iranian credibility. Everybody’s afraid of us. We’re the terror master.” And now the people are saying, “No, you’re not the terror masters of the Middle East. You’re a paper tiger. You’re buffoons. 

“They’ve wiped you out. We’re going down the toilet with you. This is what you did. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore. You’re a bunch of clowns.”

That is fatal to a dictatorship, to be humiliated and to be an object of ridicule. 

So he points all of that out, I think, quite successfully, as did Michael Duran, who always has important things to say. He says seven myths about the Iranian war. 

So I guess to sum up, the Left is in a bubble, and it’s all frenzied because Trump is under such criticism by Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Candace Owens, and they say, oh, the MAGA movement’s blowing apart. And everybody’s saying it’s lost. And they don’t look at the situation, you know. They don’t look at the actual military. It’s the most asymmetrical war in memory. 

And Trump can adjudicate when it starts and when it ends. And if he wants to take up the Iranian challenge, it’ll be very interesting when American warships go through there and they’ve completely demined the area, this week, and tankers follow them. And they start to bring in those little mosquito boats and see what happens. 

I think you’ll see a whole fleet of warthogs in the air, and they will blast them out of the water. And I think they’ll hit any missile within two or three minutes. They’ll know where it was launched, they’ll take that out. 

But they’re not going to stop there. They’re going to tell them, OK, you’re broke now. You’ve got $400 million in economic damage plus, per day. Wait till you don’t have any power. And that will really shake up things.

And somebody said, well, that would be inhumane. Well, then talk to Bill Clinton, because he shut down the power grid at Belgrade almost for a day or two every week, he did. And talk to Barack Obama. He shut down television stations in Libya, shut down the ports. He tried to do a lot of stuff. Which he said he didn’t do. So there’s a long tradition of dual-use targeting. 

Fowler: Yeah. I mean, outside of war, we shut down the United States during COVID. 

Hanson: I will say something more controversial. I really like The Wall Street Journal, but I’m getting very, very disappointed. I look at the headline stories in the news section, and I can’t distinguish them from The New York Times. It’s all doom and gloom. Trump did this and this, this is this. Then I say to myself, at least the editorial page—I really like Dan Henninger, Barton Swaim. Is that it? He’s very— 

Fowler: Don’t forget Bill McGurn. 

Hanson: Don’t forget Bill. Yeah, but I love Bill McGurn. I like Holman Jenkins, Kimberly, of course. But today, Gerald Baker, whom I really like, he’s a very brilliant guy, but he has succumbed to the pessimism of the news stories. And he’s basically saying that war is lost or it’s not going well. And it’s just anti-empirical, to say that, given the great difference in damage. 

I can see that he’s upset with Trump’s exclamations, but that doesn’t disguise the fact that we’ve done so much damage to this Iranian military. And the economic damage hasn’t even taken its full toll yet. But it’s now at a crisis point, and they know it, and that’s why they wanted to negotiate. 

Fowler: Inflation is nearly 50% there. 

Hanson: Yeah, they’re broke, and everybody said it was brilliant—nobody imagined they would close it. Now, they knew they were going to try that, but they don’t have the naval facilities to close it. Not against the US Navy. And all they’re going to do is say, well, we’re going to close it. And the Americans said, well, we weren’t going to do that, but because you gave us the idea, or you think it’s OK, we’ll do it. 

But none of your friends are coming in, and all of your enemies are. And they’re all going to get oil from the Arab exporters. But they’re not going to get any from you. 

And so it’s going to flip back on them.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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