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. There is going to be an eruption in Iran, I think, maybe within a year or two.
We hear stories that the revolutionary Islamic government has already executed almost a thousand of its own citizens. It’s in a state of paranoia.
Why? Because it has no air defenses, No. 1. Israel showed the world that Iran was a paper tiger. It has dismantled its terrorist surrogates, just wiped out the Houthis command and control in Yemen, it’s embarrassed Hezbollah, there is no real Hamas organized resistance, and Iran has no defenses. The United States then took out its nuclear proliferation apparatus, at least for a number of years.
More importantly, the theocracy has no popular support, it seems like. It has a core base of followers who have been enriched by this corrupt government, but the people themselves, under sanctioning and embargoes of the only real thing that Iran can export, oil, have been hard-pressed.
Electricity is sporadic. Water and sewage have been interrupted. The Iranian currency is inflated. But more importantly, the Iranian government knows that there is popular dissent, and some of that popular dissent has been manifested by allowing the Israelis to get the necessary intelligence to knock off the key people in the Iranian nuclear program.
I don’t think any scientist in Iran would want to be openly affiliated with nuclear physics, given the short lifespan of all those who, in the past, worked central to the Iranian nuclear bomb project. And the same thing is true of their general staff. A lot of generals have been killed.
And the question is: If you were a high-ranking officer in the Iranian military, in the Hezbollah hierarchy, in what’s left of the Yemeni command and control, would you want it to be known? Because if you did, your days would be numbered.
And so, this government is under economic, social, political, cultural, and military pressures, and most of their problems originated with their aggression toward Israel, that could take only so much and decided to solve the problem by destroying its surrogates and attacking the head of the octopus, and the United States under President Donald Trump, ending the nuclear threat for the near future.
So, what has happened in the Middle East is that the Obama idea that Iran should be a counterweight to our friends, democratic Israel and the moderate Gulf states and Middle East countries, like Egypt and Jordan—there was going to be a counterweight. It was going to be—I guess we would call it the Shia axis. It was going to be in Iran, the Assad dynasty in Syria, the Lebanese-Hezbollah takeover of that country, and pro-Iranian groups in Yemen and the West Bank and Gaza.
And this then would create tension, and the Obama administration and its successive Biden administrations would then come in and adjudicate, not favoring the Shia Crescent, not favoring Israel and the moderate Arab regimes.
And therefore, we would get social justice for the—I don’t know—underrepresented, oppressed Shia or the Persians, but we wouldn’t openly side with a democratic, liberal society, like Israel, and reforming societies in the Middle East that are at least not as extreme as Iran or Afghanistan or some other more lunatic countries.
That is in shambles now. That whole notion is in shambles.
As I said, Iran is near destitute, and it’s on the brink of internal revolution. There is no more Assad dynasty in Syria. It’s in turmoil. The Lebanese government is no longer deathly afraid of Hezbollah and incrementally trying to reassert control. The Yemenis are flabbergasted that their entire terrorist command and control has been wiped out.
And so, we’re on the verge of some great developments in the Middle East, if we can just stay supportive of the moderate Arab regimes and Israel and let these natural processes play out and keep the sanctions on Iran, keep the embargo on Iran, and don’t let up until there’s a change of government.
We don’t have to be the instigators. We don’t have to stage coups. All we have to do is turn up the heat and let this pot boil over. And boil over it will.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.