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America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war. The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum. The Strait of HormuzPrior...

Summary of Video Transcript Victor Davis Hanson suggested letting NATO "die on the vine" by putting into it exactly the amount of effort that Canada does, while making bilateral deals with European countries that support the U.S., in this video for "The Daily Signal." "Even though they have a $22 trillion GDP, apparently they don’t want to invest that in their own defense," he said. "And they don’t want us to use it when we need it." "What’s the future? Do we get out of NATO? I don’t think we do. I think we just let it die on the...

We've come a long way from the 2003 British lectures about American obtrusive ray-bans and Kevlar losing what British soft hats and smiles had won. That quote about defeat from "a senior U.S. official" about the British withdrawal from southern Iraq is probably accurate, but it belongs to a larger, more disturbing context: (1) the popular British anger at the U.S. (whether evidenced by the "poodle" slur or the latest Pew poll finding that a bare majority of British subjects approves of the U.S.); (2) a growing acknowledgement of British weakness and appeasement, as exemplified not just by the escape...

The Left and some on the Right went crazy over a recent Trump tweet. He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” His wording may have been sloppy, but Trump obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and wouldn’t come back once power plants and transportation systems crucial to the regime’s survival were cut off. Why do we know that? Because, unlike...

--SNIP-- Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism. They are more reliant on oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz. All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state. But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some ****** the US effort as either illegal or unnecessary. The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting the US...

NATO endures on American backing while many allies demand U.S. action abroad but withhold it when asked, exposing a widening gap between rhetoric and responsibility. NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in...

Military victories are decided on the battlefield—but in modern America, they are too often lost in the politics that follow. The rare quick and total victory over an enemy at little cost often ensures unquestioned political support in modern consensual societies. In most cases, however, especially in the Western world, ongoing military success or failure is adjudicated through the lens of politics—in a way sometimes at odds with the reality of the battlefield. Politicians answer to the people. The best do not drift with the prevailing winds. On the other hand, all must face elections, secure legislative support, and ultimately...

𝗩𝗗𝗛: 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗦 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗣𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗔𝗠𝗘 𝗗𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡.Victor Davis Hanson has spent fifty years studying how wars end. When he says the tide is turning, it's worth listening to why.His argument isn't based on what the Pentagon is… pic.twitter.com/pC35L1Hdsu— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) March 20, 2026

YouTube video = 00:11:01Daily Signal article https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/03/19/why-2026-could-be-the-most-dangerous-and-transformational-year-since-world-war-ii/2026 looks like it’s going to be the most tumultuous, geo-strategically significant and dangerous year since the fall of the Soviet system and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The whole world is in upheaval. Donald Trump is the catalyst of this. A lot of people, both in his base and his opponents, both here in the United States and abroad, blame him. ...

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on how the war with Iran is going after two weeks for "The Daily Signal." Video Transcript Summary VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We’re just completing the second week of the so-called Iran war — this effort of the United States to bomb the theocracy into submission so they will cancel their missile and nuclear programs and to champion the popular protests on the streets that have some potential to get rid of the regime itself. But it’s a very surreal war. I haven’t seen — I don’t think any of us have seen — anything like...

Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic. All that said, was it really ever all that formidable? The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming the most secular and modern of the Middle East Muslim nations into the most medieval that routinely hung homosexuals, adulterers, and almost anyone who questioned the authority of...

For decades, Iran cultivated a myth of invincibility through terror and proxies—until war exposed the regime as weaker, poorer, and far more fragile than the world had feared. Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic. All that said, was it really ever all that formidable? The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists. They did so by taking American hostages, murdering opponents, executing former supporters, and transforming...

Trump’s doctrine is simple: strike first at the guilty, strike hard from afar, skip the nation-building, and end wars on America’s terms. War is the use of arms to settle differences—tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material—between organized groups. It is unchanging. The general laws of armed conflict stays immutable, given the constancy of human nature. However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid. New weapons, tactics, and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority. That said, has President Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?...

The Daily Signal @DailySignalVictor Davis Hanson: Susan Rice, What More Can You Do To Trump?Susan Rice, former UN ambassador under Obama, said on a recent podcast interview that corporations who “take a knee” to Donald Trump were not going to be left alone if/when Democrats come back to power.Do Rice, and Democrats, have anything to back up their threats? No.“ So Susan Rice, I just think that you've done it all and it didn't work, so your threats are empty, you know,” @VDHanson says on this week’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”Full Episode: https://youtu.be/L_zuHiz0VhMFeb 25, 2026

Several prominent Democrats have been open and vocal about their plans to punish members of the Trump administration, including civilian ICE agents, if they regain power. Eric Swalwell has vowed to make ICE agents' lives a living hell if he's elected governor of California, Rep. Shri Thanedar said Dems will prosecute ICE and Border Patrol agents, as has Philly DA Larry Krasner, and Mehdi Hasan wants the next Democratic president to run on a platform of prosecuting conservatives. Now Suan Rice, the former Obama National Security Advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as promised that Democrats will...

Susan Rice has a message for corporate America, and it sounds a lot like a threat. Obama’s scandal-plagued former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations sat down with former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara on his podcast Stay Tuned and laid out what Democrats have in store for businesses, law firms, universities, and media companies that have sought to accommodate the Trump administration. It was a disturbing promise of government retribution. Rice wasted no time getting to the point. "It's not gonna end well for them,” she promised. “For those that decided that it was, you know, that they would act...

Susan Rice offers a taste of what’s coming should the left retake power — promises Democrats will punish corporations and other institutions who have “taken a knee to Trump.” “It’s not going to end well for them." “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming." “There will be an accountability agenda." “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget."

Trump’s strategy prizes preemptive deterrence over drift or isolation, exploiting leverage to sap rivals, steady allies, and avert the cascading conflicts that metastasized under Obama and Biden. Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy. Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism. A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence. That is, Trump’s foreign...

Trump’s strategy prizes preemptive deterrence over drift or isolation, exploiting leverage to sap rivals, steady allies, and avert the cascading conflicts that metastasized under Obama and Biden. Critics of Trump’s second-term foreign policy—the usual Left and some on the neo-isolationist Right—claim it is recklessly herky jerky and guided by no consistent grand strategy. Yet, in both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy paper and its second-term update, he clearly disdained ground wars abroad, nation-building, and isolationism. A better description of U.S. strategy across Trump’s two terms in office might be called Jacksonian or preemptive deterrence. That is, Trump’s foreign...

Elite fashions harden into dogma, dissent becomes taboo, institutions fall in line—and only when reality intrudes does yesterday’s madness begin its overdue collapse. How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed? There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity. The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential...