Victor Davis Hanson: They Said ‘Forever War’—Reality Says Trump Just Crushed Iran in 5 Weeks

The Daily Signal

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The legacy media, the so-called anti-MAGA Right, and the Democrat grandees in Congress have two things in common: They never wanted the U.S.-Iran war to go in America’s favor. Many of the critiques of Operation Epic Fury were not historically empirical, meaning they didn’t compare the ongoing conflict with Iran to past U.S. wars, such as the bombing campaign in Serbia or even the war in Afghanistan. But the evidence—in five weeks alone, the United States, with the Israeli Air Force, wiped out most of the top echelon of the four ruling cliques in the Iranian nation—was there, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words”: “We’ve never taken on a country of 93 million people that had the most fearsome, terrible reputation of being dangerous and unpredictable, and running the Middle East with a ring-of-fire proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon—indomitable. They had terrified seven presidents. And yet, in five weeks, we destroyed its ability to make war.”(00:00) Media and Right-Wing Doom (01:09) Demanding Data, Not Spin (02:18) Iran Leadership in Chaos (05:52) Three-Phase War Strategy (07:29) Hormuz Gambit Backfires (10:27) Endgame and Final Warning 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠ Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027 👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:43.3	I know a lot of you have been exasperated by the reaction to the Iran war from the Democratic grandees in the House and Senate,
0:51.5	the liberal media, the New York Times, particularly the Washington Post,
0:57.5	NPR, PBS, the network, even the Wall Street Journal's news section.
1:02.2	And then we have some people on the right who have also looked at the war and said it was lost,
1:07.0	it went south, it was going to, World War III, blah, blah, blah.
1:10.5	All of them share one thing in common. Excuse me, two things in common. One, they wanted it not to go well. Wanted it not to go well because it would reflect badly on Donald Trump and his administration. And if you were a Democrat, that would give you some momentum going into the
1:29.1	midterms. And if you were disaffected former supporter, it would prove to the world that you were
1:34.8	right all along, and Donald Trump is reckless and got us into a forever unwinnable war. But whatever
1:40.5	the particular reason was, both of them were not historical analyses.
1:46.2	Both these people never were empirical.
1:48.8	They were never historical.
1:50.7	Had they looked at America's wars in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and more importantly, more
	...

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