Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Real Threat in the Iran War are the Fast-Approaching Midterms

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:41)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There's been a lot of confusion about this memorandum of understanding. And that's the 60-day hiatus in the quote unquote war with Iran that leads us on into further negotiations. A lot of people have rightly pointed out that they seemed a little bit too lenient given the military defeat of Iran. I mentioned in earlier segments that they weren't strategically defeated because we didn't really know how to stop absolutely their missile attacks or their ability to stop, ruin the state of Hormuz traffic. It's getting a lot of criticism. From the left, of course, we don't really want to calibrate it because anything Trump did, they would criticize. If he won the war in one day, they would say it was too long. But from the Carlson right, as we said earlier, they said it was a forever war, even though there were only 40 days of actual bombing, and it would go on and on and on, and they were not in favor of it. And the subtext of that Carlson right criticism was that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis, due to undue Jewish influence in the United States, brought us into a war that was neither in our interest nor could be won. I think it is in our interest, well aside from Israel, that the Iran not have a bomb or not terrorize an area that the world depends on for oil. And more importantly, I don't think it's cooked up by a small number of Jews. But there's a new criticism from the supporters of the war who feel that the memorandum of understanding was too generous to Iran and that they're going to take advantage of it. And even as I speak, they hit with a drone, a cargo ship in violation of the memorandum of understanding. So what is going on? In a nutshell, Donald Trump feels, and this is my reading of what he's said and what people in his administration have said or written about, that the Republicans must win the midterms or at least keep the Senate. If they do not, everybody and his brother are going to be called in, in a circus of law suits, lawfare, investigations, you name it, both before Congress and all over the federal judiciary. And they will paralyze Donald Trump's final two years in office with nonstop impeachment hearings as well. I don't think they can convict him in 60 votes, but they will try to do anything. In addition, the world pressure will rise if the strait is closed. And we had continued kinetic action because the price of oil would ruin the economies of Europe and Asia, so we were told. And then in addition, the price of gas in the United States, it had gone down to almost $2 nationwide on average. It went up to $4. It's down to about $3.20.
And that was really the only known driver of inflation. So you put all that together. Donald Trump wanted a timeout of 60 days and then negotiations. But really, let's be honest, he wanted a four-month timeout until the midterms in which he could manage the war. Now that would be possible if there's two things that he can communicate. Number one, every time Iran violates the memorandum of understanding by trying to block the Strait of Hormuz or fire missiles into the Gulf States or Israel, we have to reply disproportionately. One missile, we have 10 missiles or 10 days of attack. If you don't do that, the natural propensity of Iran to get more and more aggressive will increase and he'll lose all support because people who supported the war will then say, we defeated them militarily, but we didn't enforce the peace and therefore, they're taking advantage of us. So it's very critical that in this lead up to the midterms, he reacts to these provocations and of course, they're going to be provoking us because they want the price of gas to go up in Donald Trump to lose the midterms and the Strait to be affected. So they have to be very, very careful. They have to reply disproportionately, but not to the extent that it panics markets or it shuts down the Strait.