Victor Davis Hanson: War in Iran is Due to Peace Through Strength, Not ‘Neocons’

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:19)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, during the confusion, the anger, the controversy over the memorandum of understanding concerning negotiations that will ensue with the United States and Iran, JD Vance, our Vice President, was tasked in visiting the media and being the public spokesman on behalf of the memorandum. It wasn't an enviable job, he's very skilled. I think we all admire him a great deal. But one of the strange things that followed was there was criticism in Israel and that would be natural. We are a large country and very powerful and we're 7,000 miles away from Iran. Israel is a very small country of roughly 10 million people, and it's right proximate to Iran. So obviously, our ultimate strategic aims and agendas are not always identical. But Vance made the argument that there were people in the Israeli cabinet that were too critical of a deal, and he wanted to slap them down and say, no one likes you in the world except, I should say supports you, except us, i.e. you should show more gratitude. Number two, we give you over $3 billion of aid, and 75 percent of your missile defense is contingent upon us. Donald Trump C is your best friend you'll ever have, as you have acknowledged yourself. And fourth, the United States policy is the United States policy. It's not affected by other people trying to influence it. This was kind of extraordinary because in that speech, he was more critical of the Israelis really than he was of the Iranians, because he talked in the sense that we're dealing with Iranian moderates, and there are people that might emerge as the new Iran. We didn't have that tolerance, it seems, for our ally, Israel.
The question of is Israel an asset? Yes, we give over $3.5 billion to Israel, but unlike all of the other money that we give, we give a billion dollars to Egypt. We give almost a billion dollars to Jordan. Both by the way are autocracies. They're not constitutional systems or consensual governments like Israel that's western. And we gave $17 billion, $17 billion, six times what we gave Israel in as late as 2023 I think it's been over $100 billion so far. Israel is not the only recipient of USA, but unlike all the other recipients, maybe with the exception of Ukraine lately, it's a strategic partner. Its intelligence is vital to our knowledge of the Middle East, especially of terrorists, which it shares daily with us. It is a laboratory of US weapons. Every day they are flying F-15, F-16, latest models of each F-35s using Patriot missiles. And almost daily, they consult with our people and say, this is what we've learned as a flaw, this is what we've learned as an unrealized advantages. And that knowledge is incorporated into our defense profile.
Another thing that was, so it is an asset, and this is quite aside from the idea that there are commonalities between Israel and the West in general, in the United States in particular. We both are part of a long Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
We both are consensual governments. We both have freedoms. Israel is not as other nations in the Middle East threatening death sentence to some people who say they want to break away from their religion. You can break away from Judaism if you want in Israel. Try that in a Gulf state or Saudi Arabia in the case of Islam, and you're going to be in big, big trouble. One of the things he said was that the neocons, and we've heard that word, neo-neo-neo-cons. That's a term for people who were in the former decades of their life, their formative decades, they were liberal. So we put the Greek prefix neo, meaning new cons, and then they flipped, oh, during the Reagan years or the Bush years into conservatives, and many of them were Jewish Americans, most notably people like Donald Kagan, Norman Pothoretz, Irving Kristol. Their children and others in the next generation have been strong supporters. So the idea or the accusation is we are going to war against Iran because a small influential group of neo cons feels their first loyalty is to Israel, and defending Israel is not in the national interest because there's 550 million Muslims surrounding Israel. So in terms of population or oil wealth, they are geostrategically more valuable. That's not true in itself, but what I'm curious about is who are the neo cons? If you look at the primary spokesman for the neo-conservative movement that happened incidentally to be Jewish, they all detest Donald Trump now. Bill Kristol, he was the arch spokesman of the neo-conservative movement.