Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The shooting portion of the Iran “War” lasted about 40 days—far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya.
Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants—far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far.
No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes—depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance.
But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.
The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and is now closed, so the war was a failure.
The Strait was open because an appeased Iran had no reason to close it—given that no nation on earth dared to end its nuclear dreams of dominating the Middle East, funding anti-Western terrorists, and threatening Europe and the U.S.
So the rub was always disarming Iran and then dealing with its inevitable desperate strategy of closing the Strait.
Trump’s agreement will simply be a copy of Obama’s earlier Iran deal.
Obama dealt from a position of abject weakness. Iran assumed correctly that Obama would offer endless concessions and cash, while never considering force.
Does Obama really believe that Iran in 2015 was stronger than it is now after 40 days of intense American, Israeli, and Gulf state bombing?
Trump is dealing with a bankrupt Iran, a neutered military, a restive Iranian street, a wounded regime, and the specter that the U.S. can do whatever it wishes militarily to a shattered Iran for the foreseeable future.
The U.S. is bereft of allies and strategically isolated in the war.
During the war, the unthinkable occurred when Israel de facto became an ally of the Arab Gulf monarchies. Other than a few rogue nations and Arab terrorist clients—the weakened Hezbollah, the crushed Hamas, and the wary Houthis—Iran has zero friends.
Neither China nor Russia offered Iran much in the way of aid, other than satellite imagery and some smuggled supplies. Both lost their once-prominent positions among clients in the Middle East who deeply resented their siding with Persian Shiite theocrats over Arab oil suppliers and arms buyers.
Israel has more combat aircraft than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The Gulf monarchies do so as well. Both Israel and the Gulf states have been flying bombing missions against Iran. There is a far greater chance of Arab-Israeli rapprochement after the war than before it.
The war has torn apart the Republican Party, ensured a Democratic landslide in the midterms, and endangered a Republican victory in 2028.
Antisemitism, neo-isolationism, and conspiracy theories were already the mark of the apostate right. But almost all of the new MAGA critics have lost the trust of Republicans and increasingly are either mirror-imaging the Left in Never Trump fashion or drifting off into Nick Fuentes nihilism.
Trump may lose House and/or Senate seats in the midterms—as happened in 38 of the last 41 midterms since the Civil War.
Yet there are still well over four months before the elections. If Trump keeps the Strait open—ither by force, negotiations, or through a mixture of both—oil prices will likely drop before November, given increased production worldwide.
If Iran is rendered militarily incapable of posing a major threat to the region and the world and is forced to accept American terms, then Republicans may enter November quite competitively.
The Iran War was a betrayal of MAGA’s commitment to no “forever wars.”
The second Iran intervention, following up on the initial June 2025 bombing, was certainly an optional and preemptive action. In that sense, it was akin to Trump’s first-term Soleimani and Baghdadi hits, the destruction of ISIS, and the response to the Wagner Group attack.
Yet there still are no ground troops in Iran. The loss of 13 soldiers, while tragic, is less than the two-week fatal-accident rate of the military.
There is a good chance that less than six weeks of active bombing achieved far more than 20 years in Afghanistan and a decade in Iraq—at a fraction of the human and fiscal costs.
The key to negotiating an end to the war is to always remember that Iran’s regime—its theocrats, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, military leaders, and elected officials—has no history of telling the truth or abiding by any agreement it signs.
So the only means of enforcing concessions is to use disproportionate force each time Iran inevitably violates the terms of the armistice.