Iran Is Losing This War, and the Global Balance of Power Is Shifting

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.   

We’re approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran war, and we’re still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war’s not going well.

It’s completely nonempirical. It’s antithetical to the evidence. 

Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about $500 million in input per day. It’s running out of storage space in a week or two for its daily output of oil, at which point they either have to stop pumping or they’re going to have—if they don’t stop pumping—their wells will collapse. 

They either have to stop pumping, or they have to build, as fast as they can, storage facilities, which will be known to us and we can take out. 

So, they’re at the brink economically. They have no military ability. The course of the war, how it ends, is entirely in the hands of the United States. It depends on whether you want an unconditional surrender and you want to pay an extra price—maybe another month or two—with economic strangulation, or you want to use air power to take out bridges, and you can do that. 

What I’m getting at is it’s not a military problem like Afghanistan and Helmand Province, or the Marines having to go into Fallujah in Iraq. It’s entirely a political problem. It’s not a military problem. The military problem has been solved. It’s just a question of how much political price does President Donald Trump—or risk, I should say—want to take to get an unconditional surrender and the removal of the regime.