Victor Davis Hanson: If Iran Cracks, the World Will Never Be the Same

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)

And we're right at the point where, if we continue this anaconda strangulation of this wicked regime, without putting ground troops in, without upping the military temple unless they retaliate, with the Strait of Hormuz opening up, and oil prices now starting slowly to recede, this regime will crack. And if it should crack, it will be the most calamitous, major significant change in world political affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. Sometimes when you're in the middle of revolutionary times, it's sort of like being in the eye of the hurricane. You can't really detect or fathom what's going on, even though the changes are tumultuous. That's what's happening in the world today. The world is radically changing, and we don't even feel it, or we don't appreciate what's happening. All we're hearing in this midterm cycle are three things. Affordability, affordability, affordability. We've talked on earlier occasions that affordability is a result, the worry over affordability, of a 21% inflation just a year and a half ago after the Biden administration finished its four-year tenure, and a 30% inflation rise in things that matter, cars, insurance, fuel, power, health care, housing. So we don't really hear much. We hear the Iran War, the Iran War, the Iran War, the Iran War, and we hear, thirdly, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But take a deep breath before the midterms and look at the world as it is now versus what it was, say, five years ago.

Russia has been fighting since February 28th of 2022 Its invasion, even if it does annex some of the Ukrainian Tatar, has been a colossal disaster. Its economy is in shambles. It's under drone attacks. It is its oil and natural gas have been embargoed. It has suffered 1.5 million dead and wounded. Its political leadership is in disarray. It's lost its proxies in Venezuela, in Syria and Iran. China is not much better. It just fired its entire top echelon of its military. Its economy is stagnant. Its fertility is 1.0. It's a shrinking aging population. About 400,000 Chinese have been completely shut out of the 1.4 billion population, who is supposedly in a capitalist, proto-capitalist, quasi-capitalist revolution, but they're not feeling it. In other words, China has enormous problems. When you look elsewhere, as I said so often before, Latin America is not in a pink tide. Don't listen to the old words of John Kerry that the Monroe Doctrine is dead.

It is not flipping toward the left. Maybe Brazil and maybe Cuba, and those governments are on their last legs, and maybe a few countries like Nicaragua and one or two in the Caribbean. Otherwise, you have about 28, 27 of the 32 Latin-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, and some in the Caribbean have completely flipped through free and fair elections with the aid and help of the United States. USAID that was propping up left-wing movements is over with. The Chinese controlling the exits and entry of the Panama Canal is over with. Maduro sending drugs and millions of people northward who were criminals is over with. And people in Latin America see the American economy and they want to be a part of it. That is a completely radical change in the status quo.

People have been screaming about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. Yes, it's unfortunate that Donald Trump is hyperbolic. Yes, he says things that are crazy on true social. That's the art of the deal. But the aim of the United States, as it was during World War II vis-à-vis Greenland, was to preserve this continental size North American island, so to speak, in Western hands, with it to be defensible and protected from hostile powers who want to use it as a base in the North Atlantic or to infringe on Western claims to the Arctic Circle and Arctic Ocean. And that can't be handled alone by the 50,000 people of Greenland nor tiny little Denmark. World War II proved that when the Nazis overran Denmark, noble as it was, in three days. And Greenland was lost, and the United States stepped in, put bases there, protected it from the Axis incursions. After the war was over, it handed it back over to Denmark, and it protected it from the Russians for Denmark. All Trump was trying to say is, with new missiles and new technologies, the shortest route to the United States is over the Arctic, from our hostile powers in China and Russia.

And we're not going to leave Greenland ripe to be picked by these powers. And so now we have a new agreement, and the Danes have been wonderful, Trump has been wonderful, the Greenlanders have been wonderful. Everybody says, let the Americans build bases and protect NATO's interest and the Western Alliance's interest in Greenland. The Greenlanders will see prosperity from these bases. Denmark will retain sovereignty. It'll still have Greenland on its coat of arms. It'll still brag that it has this huge continental colony, so to speak. Fine. All we need to do is make sure that this is a Western entity and it serves Western interest. And that's happened.