Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We are at a historic time in the Middle East. Never in our lifetimes have we been closer to a complete revolutionary fervor that gives promise of normalcy for the Middle East. And never have we been in more danger of seeing the entire region blow up.
What am I referring to? The war right now between Iran and Israel.
It is surreal. If we had this conversation five years ago and I said to you, the Iranian nation—that is huge compared to Israel, 10 times the population—the Iranian nation has lost all control of the Houthi terrorists and they are themselves neutered. Their surrogates in the West Bank, Gaza are neutered. They’re gone, Hamas as a fighting force. The formidable, the terrifying Hezbollah cadres, they’re inert.
There is no more Syria—the Assad dynasty, the pro-Iranian Syria—it’s in chaos. But whatever the chaos is, it seems to be anti-Iranian. There is no Shia Crescent, starting with Tehran, all the way to the Mediterranean. Lebanon is free of Iranian influence. So is Syria. Gaza, de facto, will be.
There is no Russian presence. It’s not a patron. It is not a protector. It’s not a power in the Middle East. It’s tied down in Ukraine.
And Iran itself, the formidable powerhouse of the Middle East that evoked terror all over, has no defenses.
And now we’ve seen five days of war, in which the Israelis have systematically dismantled all of the Iranian missile defenses. They have air defenses. They have dismantled the terrorist hierarchy. They have dismantled the people who are responsible for the nuclear program.
We’re down to a single critical issue. They have suffered casualties. The Iranians have sent over 400 ballistic missiles and drones into Israel. And 90% are stopped but that 10% gets through.
But here’s the crux. All of this chaos and all of this war will be for naught if Iran’s theocracy emerges intact from this war and its nuclear infrastructure can either be quickly rebuilt or there are elements of it that have been missed and maybe there is enough fissile material—if not already, soon—to make another bomb.
So, here we are at the critical point.
Should Israel continue, does it have the ability to nullify the entire nuclear program, which was the object of this war? Or must it rely on the bunker-buster devices, bombs of the United States?
And if the United States should try to go into these key nuclear facilities and blow them up—with the ordinance and the aircraft that it has, which Israel lacks—will it be fighting an optional Middle East war? Of which the MAGA doctrine says: No more forever wars. No more intervention in the Middle East. No more ground troops.
Or can President Donald Trump say: “I’m not an isolationist. I’m a Jacksonian. You should have known that when I took out Qasem Soleimani in my first term, when I took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when I took out the Wagner Group. I don’t like to intervene. But when people threaten the United States and our deterrence as a matter of conjecture, I want to ensure that they understand the repercussions.”
And so, is there a fight between the isolationists and the Jacksonians or is it just a minor group of people on the right who don’t want any action at all?
And we don’t know the answer yet. But if this war should end with the Iranian regime intact and the elements of its nuclear program recoverable, then, in some ways, it will be all for naught. And people will make the necessary adjustments in the Middle East. And it won’t be necessarily, well, Iran is still very weak. They’ve lost all their terrorist surrogates. They have no air defenses. They’ve lost their media. They’ve lost their commanding—it will be more like, my gosh, Iran survived everything that Israel and, by association, the United States threw at it. It’s indestructible.
And so, we’re at a critical cusp. It’s, do you risk more danger by taking out and eliminating the nuclear threat for good and, by association, humiliate the theocracy to the point it can be overthrown, or do you play it safe and have negotiations and allow the regime and the remnants to survive?
I don’t like forever wars. I don’t like preemptive wars. I do not like the United States intervening anywhere in that godforsaken area. But if the war ends with the regime intact and a recoverable nuclear program, it won’t just be back to square one, it will be a disaster.
So, we’ll see what happens. And hold on, everybody. I think we’re going to see things that we haven’t seen in a lifetime in the Middle East. And it could turn out very bad, but it could also turn out to be quite revolutionary and remake the map of the entire region.
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