Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
I think we should take another look at the Iranian war, and I would call it a longer view, not the short-term 24-hour news cycle.
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What’s happening right now is the media and the left wing of the United States political spectrum, the Democratic Party, and they are a nexus now, a Borg, they react in 24-hour cycles. So, anything that looks unfortunate, from the point of the American success in Iran, they cling to.
So, last Monday, it looked like President Donald Trump, after his tweet on Easter that he was going to end the civilization of Iran—and I mentioned before he meant the regime, the theocracy, the civilization of radical Shiite jihadism in Iran—they wanted to impeach him. They said he was a “warmonger,” a Hitlerian figure.
Forgetting that we have 100,000 soldiers in the theater risking their lives, and they’re risking their lives to eliminate the real opportunity, the real likelihood that Iran could get nuclear-tipped missiles very quickly, not just aimed at Western Europe, but in two or three years, perhaps the United States as well, given the participation of North Korea, China, and Russia in their arms industry and their agenda.
So, we have to look at the long version, and the only way we can do that is look at history, and history says it’s very unusual that one side has been so victorious in an asymmetric war, especially against the strongest power in the Middle East by all accounts, 93 million people, a huge territory. And people were terrified of it, not just the Gulf monarchies, but the Europeans.
We say the strait was open before the war. Yeah, it was open, but it was open on the condition that Iran would close it at any minute or could make things difficult. Prior to this closing, it had closed it in 1979 and 1980, and again in 2019, and had threatened to do it on many occasions. It’s not going to be able to do that when this war ends.
So, if you look at it realistically, very quickly, they don’t have a military, so to speak. They have lost probably hundreds of billions, if not half a trillion dollars, in a half-century investment in missiles and now in drones, sophisticated aircraft and submarines and capital ships.
Their command and control is down to the second and third tier, and no one knows who’s in power. We don’t know if it’s the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. We don’t know if it’s the political class. We don’t know if it’s the theocracy. We don’t know if it’s the army.
But we know two things: that they are each afraid of each other. They don’t want to seem as if they’re too compliant, so they want to be as hard-line as possible, but we don’t know what that really represents. All of these communiques that are so lunatic may be just intended for internal consumption.
And the other fear they have, any one of them, is looking at these four different groups and says, if they cut a deal with the West or the United States in particular, and there’s a transitional figure and the people take over, we’re all going to be dead for what we’ve done.
And so, it’s a very fluid situation politically, but militarily, it’s clear that this has been an overwhelmingly devastating war for Iran. And who were the winners and losers of it? Take Russia. Russia has no presence in Venezuela now. It has no presence in Latin America. It has no presence in the Middle East. Its Assad regime is gone.
It had a drone back-and-forth relationship with Iran. Maybe it’s supplying some weaponry across the Caspian Sea we don’t know about, but for all practical purposes, that’s been severed.
It’s bogged down in a war with Ukraine. It’s lost over 1.5 million people. It enjoys a little spike in oil prices, and that may help it, but it would be much more likely that they would want now to get out of the Ukrainian war, have some kind of deal, armistice, and then have sanctions lifted off them because they feel that the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t have a good future.
Which turns us to the Gulf itself. The Strait of Hormuz has 20%, not 80%, 20% of the world’s oil going through it every day. The Saudis are going to expand their Red Sea pipeline. The Emiratis are going to expand their pipelines that serve other countries that are oil producers in the Gulf of Aden. They’re talking about going across the desert through Jordan to Haifa, and you could envision in four or five years the Gulf might only serve Iran.
Instead of being an asset, it could be a liability. If anybody wanted to close it, it would’ve hurt Iraq and Iran more than anybody else.
I mean, Iran has other ports, but it would be an inert asset. And so, holding onto the strait and threatening the world means that people are going to find alternative oil supplies, and they’re already doing it with the U.S. and Venezuela.
And if Russia is smart, it will try to find a ceasefire and join in this alternate supply that’s non-Gulf.
China has been hurt because it got 80% of all Iranian oil, and that’ll be contingent on the United States. It’s already contingent, whether they get Venezuelan oil, on the United States. It won’t be sold to them at a discount.
Source:
Diem ‘Richard’ Nguyen
Liên Minh Bảo Hiến Mỹ Gốc Việt
Vietnamese American Conservative Alliance (VACA)
https://freedom-vaca.org/vaca-blog-tieng-viet-nam/