Victor Davis Hanson: How Trump’s “Anaconda Plan” Is Squeezing Iran

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
Their military is shrinking as we speak. It doesn't have parts, it can't get fuel, and it doesn't have an air force to provide air cover. Anytime almost any of the Gulf states or the United States wants to take out facilities in Iran, they can do so, and they have done so. And they've done so to such a degree that it doesn't really have a maritime component in their military.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. What's going on with Iran, or rather, what's next with Iran? We've gone through six or seven iterations of, we're at war, we're negotiating, we're at war, so about 75% of the so-called war that began on February 28th of this year has been negotiations. About 25% have actually been kinetic action. And I think that's obscured a little bit what we're doing in Iran. We're not passive when we're negotiating.
What Trump is doing right now, the Trump administration is very similar to what the North did as it started the Civil War. They were not sure how to deal with the South because they'd have to invade it. It was the size of Europe. So Winfield Scott came up with the idea of an Anaconda plan named after the snake, python-like snake of Latin America that would squeeze the South. In other words, they would occupy the Mississippi River and cut off their Western approaches to trade and commerce.
The battlefront in the North would cut them off from the industrial cities of the North, and then they would blockade Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, and they would not be able to export cotton or import manufactured goods, especially weaponry. Now, it was very slow because in those days, there was not an international banking system that you could freeze accounts or you could isolate an whole area, region economically, or I should say financially, but it did work. And one of the reasons that Sherman was successful in 1864 in the march through Georgia, and Grant was successful in his siege of Richmond, although he never took the city, was that the South had run out of weapons that were commiserate with the Northern armories, and they did not have the industrial capacity that the North did, and they couldn't import sophisticated weaponry from Europe, especially Britain. So what we're doing right now as we talk, fight, talk, fight, is we're in a battle of wills. Iran thinks they have the cards because Donald Trump is down to less than 80 days before the midterms. The war is unpopular. They expect, as they have now explicitly said, that the Democrats will take power and maybe cut off funding for the war, or they can wait out until they have a democratic presidency.
Donald Trump, though, has the cards. Iran doesn't. What do I mean by that? We are witnessing, really, the most successful blockade, embargo, freeze, sanctioning, and debanking of any modern nation. I can't think of any other examples, with the exception maybe of North Korea during some periods of hostilities, but Iran cannot export oil. It cannot import through rail or by sea, and increasingly not through the air, material goods, industrial parts, replacement weaponry from abroad. It has no financial access to the world's economy or to the world's currency. It can't convert its domestic currency into dollars or euros and buy things on the open market. You can't get out of Iran and travel. You can't have your bank accounts in Bank of America or Citibank open for check writing.
You can't bring in any foreign currency. So it's estimated they're losing four or 500 million dollars a day, a half a billion dollars a day in economic output revenue. And this is in addition to the enormous half century, one half trillion dollar military industrial nuclear complex they've lost. So they are being squeezed in an anaconda like plan that we've never seen before. And so when we talk about who's going to win this war of nerves, the Iranians, as the mid-term comes closer, they're going to force Trump to let up so he can keep the house, or us who are going to make Iran bankrupt. It doesn't really matter because if Trump loses the house, they won't have enough votes to cut off aid to the American military, nor would they do that. If Trump were to win the mid-terms, he would still be as free as he would be to lose them. If he loses the mid-terms, if he wins them, it doesn't matter. After the mid-terms are over, he can do whatever he wants, but he feels he does not want to harm the infrastructure and the livelihood of the Iranian people. So he's squeezing, squeezing, squeezing and making them almost irrelevant. Now, a final thought is, they believe long-term the future is theirs because they keep bragging that they're going to control the Strait of Hormuz. They don't really control it now. Ships are going in and out against their will. They're not getting ships in to import goods, nor are they exporting oil out of it, but they feel they have achieved such a level of harassment and mind-laying that you can't fully use it. But here's the problem with that.