Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” with Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. This show was filmed prior to the start of Operation Epic Fury. Sami Winc: So, Victor, let’s then turn to another topic before we go to a break again. I was wondering your thoughts on Iran. I know that Trump has moved assets into the region, that the regime has now killed, from my source, 32,000 demonstrators, and Trump has said he’s going to do something. And not so much what will Trump do—because, obviously, you couldn’t know that—but what’s in the realm of possibilities of what Trump might do and what is the grand strategy of Trump right now? Victor Davis Hanson: Well, he’s looking at—he always looks at these situations of intervention or bombing on a cost-to-benefit analysis, whether it was killing al-Baghdadi, or Soleimani, or the Wagner Group, or bombing ISIS in his first term, or hitting the nuclear facilities in his second in Iran, or the Maduro kidnapping capture, etc. And so that’s a good way to look at it. What are the downsides? The downside is: If he starts bombing, who does he bomb and can he hit them? He has to have the Revolutionary Guards. He has to get the theocracy. They all know he’s going to be after ’em. They’re in bunkers. Will he be able to do it? He’s gonna have to get the missile depots. He’s gonna have to get all of the means that that regime exercises to create deterrence: missiles, nuclear facilities … tanks. Get rid of ’em all. And he should expect, as we saw with Hamas in the tunnel, that they’ll all be parked, stored—like they are in Beirut—in apartment buildings, in hospitals, in mosques. And so they want a lot of collateral damage. And then he has to understand that he needs a popular uprising at the same time. We’ve already had one and that prompted him to send the assets to the region. But he said, and you said, 32,000 people were killed and they’re probably executing thousands that we don’t even know about. So, if you’re afraid to go out on the street and you see American planes, maybe even Israeli planes, and they’re hitting targets, is your reaction, “Good, good. I’m glad they’re killing my government,” or “I don’t really care anymore. They’ve killed us. Why are they hurting Iran? I’m an Iranian”? And will that create a counter-patriotic fervor? Then he has to think: Look what happened in Libya when we bombed. We got rid of Gaddafi, the Obama—that triad of Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Samantha Power. And what did they give us? They gave us ultimate chaos. And we went in and took out Saddam, we had chaos. We went in and got rid of the Taliban, we got chaos, and we had to stay there. So do we want ground troops in there to overthrow—no, we don’t. So, who is going to take the place—the shah? And if we could get the shah’s son, we could have him say, “I will not be in power for more than three years. I’m a transitional… to get a new constitution and bring in outside observers for fair elections. And we’re gonna outlaw that theocratic Khamenei party, sort of like the Germans outlaw the Nazi party.” So that’s a lot of—and then he has the weather and then he has other considerations. Israel has a whole list of targets and they may not be the same number of targets as we are. They have killers that have killed Jews, they have terrorists. They know where they are. Once people see Israeli planes, does that confirm the propaganda of the regime that it’s Israelis, et cetera. Then he’s got the MAGA base to worry about. Tucker Carlson said just the 30-minute incursion into Iran was gonna start World War III. Steve Bannon, that group. So he has the assets. You can’t take a 100,000-ton displacement, huge carrier, $14 billion, 5,000 people, and just stick it out there forever. You know what I mean? It has a shelf life, maybe three, four months at most. So, he’s assembling these assets and they’re almost in place. They’re in the Mediterranean, they’re in the Strait of Hormuz, they’re in the Persian Gulf, they’re in the Red Sea. They can come at a 360-degree angle. But they’re reaching their climactic point of their extreme readiness. That means if you’re a young sailor, you’re not sleeping well, you’re gonna be called at any moment. You’re having drills. You’re at a state of readiness. It’s not sustainable for more than three or four weeks. So, at some point the commanders are going to come to Trump and say, “You’ve gotta pull the trigger, or we gotta go back.” And that is gonna be a decision, I think, that has political ramifications. So then his other advisors are gonna say, “We’re nine months from the midterm. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it now. And this is what can happen if we have a bloodbath and we hit a hospital and the Europeans—don’t expect the Europeans to be there. Don’t expect the British to let us use Diego Garcia. Don’t expect anybody—and expect the Chinese and the Russians to be very angry because they’re gonna lose their asset and they will cause us problems somewhere else. Maybe they’ll start threatening, at a higher degree, Taiwan, or maybe Putin will escalate in Ukraine while we’re doing this.” So, there’s all these things that he has to filter out as important, somewhat important, irrelevant. And then he has to say, “What is the timing on the world stage?” Well, the Olympics is over. Well, you can’t bomb somebody during the Olympics. I mean, there’s this pretense— Sami Winc: All these things come in. That’s true. Victor Davis Hanson: And you can’t bomb somebody before the State of the Union. So, my anticipation is the Olympics are over, the State of the Union is over. The weather and the seasons are getting better. And if he is going to do it, he would probably do it in the next 10 days. And then he will not have ground troops because, you know, he said George W. Bush should have been impeached for going into Iraq. So, it’s a very difficult thing. Very quickly, then, there’s a grand strategy. I just wanna say, you know, H.R. McMaster and Nadia Schadlow created the first national security strategic assessment in the first term. That was updated. I think Michael Anton and others updated it. It was a little bit different, but it had the same theme. The theme was that Trump is not an interventionist. He doesn’t want to go into ground—but he is not an isolationist. He is a Jacksonian. He is a preemptive deterrent. That’s what he wants. And his main fear in the world is China. And if you think about that—and it’s been pretty brilliant what he is done the last 13 months, because if you take, say all these isolated incidents that everybody said, “Oh, he is herky-jerky. We don’t know what he is gonna do on any given day. Oh, there’s no point to it.” There is. If you just go down the list of say, nine or 10 things. Take the Panama. He goes in and he starts, “We might take the canal back. We might do this, we might…” but what was the whole point of that? The whole point was to get the Chinese out of the entry and exit and tell the Panamanians you violated the spirit and the letter of the Panama Canal Treaty and we have a right to revoke it. So you’ve got one choice, you get ’em outta here now, and you restore the Panama Canal to a partnership between us and you, or else. That worked. Take another one. He got rid of Maduro. Maduro had a communist enclave that was a drugs -exporting conduit to Mexico, or the United States via Mexico. And partnership with the left-wing government, Colombia, anti-American, and embargoed and stealthily sending oil to China. And he said, “Nope.” And we’re going to do what? We’re going to starve Venezuela out of its oil. We’re gonna blockade it, and we’re gonna take him out and we’re gonna restore the Monroe Doctrine. And China, we should have warned you in Panama. Now get out. And they did. The post Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Cost-Benefit Analysis for Striking Iran appeared first on The Daily Signal.