Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. 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 Donald Trump—or risk, I should say—want to take to get an unconditional surrender and the removal of the regime.  He doesn’t need to do that. That was not one of his prewar agendas. The prewar agenda was to neutralize the nuclear proliferation of Iran, the missile and drone force, to attrite its military so it was not capable of conducting war, to stop the subsidies to its terrorist proxies, and to make sure it no longer attacked Americans and our allies as it has for 47 years. These have mostly been met—not quite, but mostly.  So what are the ripples strategically? Well, just recently, OPEC has announced—I should say the United Arab Emirates and perhaps Oman as well—that they don’t want to be in OPEC. Remember about OPEC: It was formed in 1973, and the whole purpose was to drive up the price of oil, and they did that by not pumping what they could pump.  So right now, they have each individual country has a quota, and that’s only about 70% or 80% of what they could pump if they were not in the cartel. That is what the United States is pumping right now—maximum. Russia will probably be pumping at maximum very soon. Venezuela will be pumping at maximum very soon.  But what you’re talking about is 2 million barrels, maybe, from the UAE alone. Maybe if Saudi Arabia gets out, they can pump another 20%. What I’m getting at is the long-range strategic value of the Straits of Hormuz are going to decline because all of these countries, once they see one person getting out and taking advantage of these high prices, they will swarm to get out.  But once they get out and pump more oil—and they’re immediately capable of pumping more oil—the price will drop, and the Straits of Hormuz will not be so important. And that will not be good for Iran if it has oil wells at all in two or three weeks.  The other thing to remember is China. Everybody talks about, “Well, China, China, China.” China hasn’t come out well. It had threatened to go into Taiwan all of the Biden administration. Year after year, it issued videos of bombing Japan, threatening to take out Taiwan, lecturing people: “Don’t tell us that we can’t take it.”  Pundits saying that they were emboldened by the Russians. I never understood that—Russia is in a Stalingrad-like quagmire. But once they looked at this type of war—an air war in a gulf—and they were thinking, we have to transmit, what, 300,000 troops or so across 110 miles of open sea. And from what we can see from the Americans, the Israelis, these Western powers have enormous ability to flood the zone with drones, with missiles, sophisticated air defenses, submarine drones, surface drones. It could be a nightmare.  And that’s not talking about the Taiwanese ability to defend themselves as well. So in a cost-benefit analysis, I think the message is the United States can pretty much do what it wants militarily, and China will be somewhat deterred.  Remember that it has lost its hold in Venezuela and in Iran. It was basically, along with Russia, controlling the Maduro regime, buying their sanctioned oil for a discount, selling them arms, trying to spread their influence in Latin America—the Panama Canal was a good example.  And the same was true of Iran. They were buying sanctioned oil at a discount and then flooding Iran with sophisticated weapons and hoping Iran would use those weapons to hamper or neuter Israel and attack United States installations, as they did in Syria and Iraq. And then China wanted Iran—which they did—to supply Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.  That’s going to be over with. Iran is broke. The people will not stand for—or the government won’t be so stupid when they’re impoverished—to start giving, what, $50 – $60 million a month to Arab terrorists just so they can cause havoc when the people are starving.  And they’ve lost probably a half a trillion dollars of a 50-year investment in their military, industrial, and nuclear industries.  So China’s on the losing end. Russia had lost the Assad regime. They were kicked out of the Middle East. They have a temporary little blip because the price of oil is going up. But as I said, with the breakup of OPEC and the increased production in Venezuela and the United States, as soon as this thing calms down, the price of oil is going to crash, and Russia will be a big loser in this.  More importantly, they saw, again, a demonstration of U.S. air power, and maybe by extension, they correlated it with NATO proficiency. So I think they will try to get out of the war and get as much territory as they can along the existing battlefield today—maybe call it a DMZ. But they’re running out of people and money. They’ve lost a million and a half soldiers.  And so this war probably reminded them that they don’t have very many strategic options elsewhere, and they can’t develop them as long as they’re tied down in Ukraine.  Europe was a big, big, big loser. They had forged a relationship with Donald Trump. They had agreed for a 2% and had met that 2% investment of GDP in defense, but they were talking about 5%. NATO had called Trump “Daddy,” and then all of a sudden Trump assumed they were normal allies.  So when he went in there, he didn’t want to disclose what he was going to do because he felt the U.S. Left and the Congress, or the Europeans would tell—and they would have revealed any type of surprise.  But more importantly, he felt that the Spanish, the Italians, the British, the French—all of them—would just say, “No comment,” or “This is a United States effort. We support our NATO ally,” and then call him up and say “Donald, were not going to talk about it but use our airspace, use out NATO bases you pay for most of them. And this is what were gonna do but were gonna do it under the radar.” No. Instead, they pandered to their Islamic constituencies, their left-wing constituencies. In Spain, even in Italy with Meloni, they said: No bombers in Sicily. No planes in Spain. Can’t fly over France. Can’t use Diego Garcia unless it’s for defensive purposes.  What is a defensive strike? What does that mean? We’ll let you have a missile battery if somebody tries to destroy our base—we’ll allow you to defend our base—but don’t take off anywhere and attack anybody.  It was absolutely ridiculous. Europe came off really badly—really badly.  And then they made it worse when they said they were going to patrol the Strait and then they realized the Strait might be kinetic, and they would have to use some force if we were to turn it over to them and they don’t have that force. So it’s all talk, talk, talk, and its based on envy and anger at the United States.  And it’s a very dangerous game they’re playing because at some point the United States says: We love you. Europe’s a great place. You’ve got problems—just settle them yourself. Maybe we’ll have a coalition of the willing, just like you did in Serbia.  You went into Serbia—that wasn’t a NATO country. Kosovo—you weren’t protecting a NATO country. You went into Libya—those people weren’t in NATO. But you freelance all the time—in Chad, in the Falklands you people—and we always help you. And then when we want to freelance, you’re reluctant.  So go ahead, do what you want, but count us out.  And finally, the American Left kept saying the war was lost—the war was lost—the war was lost. Donald Trump blew it.  Don’t count him out. We have six months before the midterms. The price of oil could crash. A lot of the things Donald Trump put into practice—with the big, beautiful bill, deregulation, tax cuts, enormous amount of foreign investment—all of that has plenty of time to kick in in August or July and have a stronger economy than we do now, with cheap oil.  More importantly, he can say that in his regime, his realm, his tenure, he neutralized the threat from Venezuela. It’s not spreading communism throughout South America—Latin America, and he neutralized the Middle East in a way that all seven prior presidents had dreamed and had never done. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.