by Victor Davis Hanson
Iran’s rulers are not playing to win the war today—they are playing to survive long enough to fight another one tomorrow.
We are now in Stage III of the Iran War: the familiar monotony of bomb, talk, bomb.
It is now the liberal consensus that the war has failed, if not been won by Iran.
Hardly. It will likely take a decade for Iran to recover and rearm.
Russia has been sidelined in the Middle East. China is losing its influence with the Iranian theocracy. Nor is Beijing riding high; instead, it is grappling with trade, demographic, energy, and food challenges.
The Gulf states are more pro-American than they have been in decades.
Israel is stronger than ever and has humiliated an enemy that, for nearly 50 years, remained on a war footing while enjoying a population ten times larger.
But what’s next?
We could be entering the war’s final stage, marked by an effort to escalate decisively before disengaging.
We know the tired Iranian strategy by now. We might call it “theocratic rope-a-dope.” For the theocrats and their terrorist proxies, survival means outlasting Trump, waiting for the next cash-laden Democratic administration, and using “moderates” to play good cop while haggling away months.
The mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps feign indifference even as their half-century, half-trillion-dollar investments in what is now essentially a vaporized military-industrial-nuclear complex continue to be destroyed.
The war has finally revealed the full extent of Iran’s vast conventional arsenal, nuclear program, and missile and drone industry.
These munitions proved far more numerous and deadlier than experts had imagined. The regime had poured much of its GDP into conventional arms, missiles, drones, and its nuclear program in hopes of dominating the Gulf, holding Israel beneath a nuclear sword of Damocles, and eventually bringing European cities within range of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
The Islamic government shows no real concern for the attendant suffering of its own 93 million people. In the theocrats’ view, it matters little whether 1,000 civilians die as collateral damage from allied bombing or 36,000 are murdered by their own government. All that concerns these corrupt grandees is preserving their own comfort amid the rubble.
The Iranian zealots are counting on the Trump administration to withdraw, thereby avoiding a two-year-long impeachment and lawfare circus while preserving the Republican House majority. Yet doing so also requires relative calm in the Gulf, a denuclearized Iran, an open Strait of Hormuz, oil prices between $60 and $70 a barrel, and gasoline prices of roughly $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon—all conditions the theocrats believe they can control.
So what would best accomplish the Trump administration’s objectives, both militarily abroad and politically at home?
We may see another week or two of intensive strikes against Iran’s dual-use infrastructure. At some point, the United States may also seal Pickaxe Mountain and any other remaining sites suspected of storing or producing enriched uranium.
The United States has already severed many of Iran’s rail and maritime links to China, Russia, and their allies. It can reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force and convert frozen Iranian assets into a maritime insurance fund to compensate any foreign tanker damaged by Iranian attacks.
Then, by mid-August, the United States could disengage, leaving a small naval flotilla and regional air bases to coordinate Gulf and Israeli retaliation against Iranian missile and drone attacks while maintaining all sanctions and embargoes until Tehran ends its attacks on the Gulf and shipping through the Strait.
One reason, among many, that the Shah fell in January 1979 was that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent 13 years in exile in Iraq, where he built a veritable shadow theocracy. As resistance to the Shah mounted, Khomeini moved in 1978 to the more visible and media-friendly setting of Paris for four months before returning to Tehran to hijack the revolution and seize control of the country.
Iranian anti-clerical dissidents should reverse that model by establishing their own provisional government in exile, pledged to oversee a transition to consensual rule once it assumes power. Western governments should recognize it, transfer frozen Iranian assets to finance its media and outreach, help arm it, and negotiate exclusively with it while shunning all contact with the theocratic prevaricators.
Its agenda should entail a comprehensive plan to replace the theocracy with the help of seized Iranian assets and Western military and financial support.
Unlike the Obama administration’s haphazard and incoherent intervention in Libya, the United States could make any direct assistance contingent on a viable provisional government presenting a concrete plan for national unity, a realistic timetable for elections, demonstrable support within Iran, and a determination to prevail.
The Iranian people remain pro-Western.
They will likely eventually regain their determination to rid themselves of their corrupt, mass-murdering rulers once the bombing stops. Then the full extent of the damage will become clear, and the theocracy will try once again to rebuild its garrison state and subsidize Arab terrorists abroad—at the expense of an already destitute Iranian people.
Photo: A man walks past a huge mourning banner depicting Iran's current supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei and his late father Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a strike on the first day of the US-Israeli war against the Iran on February 28, set up along a road in Tehran on June 30, 2026 ahead of Ali Khamenei's funeral. Giant portraits of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's late supreme leader killed in US-Israeli airstrikes, hung from Tehran's Grand Mosalla on June 30 as workers raced to prepare for his grandiose funeral ceremony. His public funeral, initially delayed at the height of the Middle East war, will begin on July 4 as Iran and the United States uphold a fragile ceasefire after signing a preliminary deal to end the conflict after more than three months. (Photo by AFP) /
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/30/the-iran-war-at-the-crossroads/
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