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June 23, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:37:03

Trump's MASTERSTROKE: What Comes Next?!

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	Alrighty, folks, got a ton to get to on today's show.
	The latest from the Trump administration, the latest from the Israeli government, the latest from the international situation regarding President Trump's brave, courageous strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities.
	We'll discuss what comes next.
	We're joined by a wide variety of guests ranging from Professor Victor Davis-Hansen to Caroline Glick and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.
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	Well, folks, President Trump's courageous decision to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities, to take them out completely, has been a masterstroke for him.
	We're going to explain how it's reshaped American foreign policy.
	What comes next?
	So the President of the United States has been quite active on Truth Social over the course of the last 48 hours.
	Late on Sunday, he posted, quote, monumental damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran as shown by satellite images.
	Obliteration is an accurate term.
	The white structure shown is deeply embedded into the rock, with even its roof well below ground level and completely shielded from flame.
	The biggest damage took place far below ground level bullseye.
	He is responding, of course, to accusations that the use of the bunker busters, the 30,000-pound MOPs, these massive ordnance penetrators, that somehow that had only damaged the facility a little bit.
	Now, the reality is that on the ground, the suggestion is that the facilities were either completely destroyed or that they were so heavily damaged that they are completely unusable.
	Again, Top Gun Maverick had a setup where the American forces essentially hit a vent above a nuclear facility.
	And it appears that's exactly what happened here.
	It appears that somehow these B-2 bombers from 30,000 feet were hitting with massive ordnance penetrators an air vent that went directly down into the Fordo nuclear facility in Tehran.
	Essentially, it was like destroying the Death Star.
	I had said earlier last week that that was not exactly what it was going to be like.
	All you had to do was actually just drop these massive ordnance penetrators on the site itself.
	But it turns out that the Iranians made the cardinal mistake of actually constructing their nuclear facility along the same lines as the plans for the Death Star leaving the exhaust port.
	George Lucas once made the statement that he had created the exhaust port in the Death Star as a warning not to do that.
	And apparently the Iranians took it instead as a blueprint, which is actually quite hilarious.
	In any case, those massive ordnance penetrators appear to have done extraordinary damage to the nuclear facilities over at Fordo, Natans, Isfahan.
	All of the nuclear sites have basically been destroyed at this point, which means that we are coming close to the end of this conflict.
	Israel has a list of targets.
	That list of targets will likely be exhausted by the end of this week.
	That list of targets includes some more military sites.
	It includes missile production sites.
	It includes missile launchers.
	Because again, Israel went into this particular war with a couple of goals.
	One was to obliterate the Iranian nuclear regime, and the other was to get rid of their ballistic missile capacity.
	Last night, Iran only had the capacity to shoot one missile at the state of Israel.
	They then posted some sort of meme online showing themselves firing hundreds of missiles because they're doing misinformation to their own population at this point.
	The Israelis are going to end up achieving their war goals here.
	And we'll get to what Iran does next in a few moments.
	But President Trump then went on Truth Social and he put out a statement that freaked everybody out.
	His statement was, quote, it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?
	My God.
	Again, President Trump, he's the best at this.
	When it comes to the trolling, there is no one in history who has been a bigger Twitter troll or truth social troll than the current president of the United States.
	Obviously, all of his opponents on the horseshoe theory left and the horseshoe theory right are taking this with absolute seriousness, that President Trump is going to unleash Iraq War too, as we'll talk about again a little bit later on in the show.
	That's sheer nonsense.
	What the president is saying there is the perfectly obvious, which is that the Iranian people should think about rising up and getting rid of their regime, which has been true for some 40 years.
	The regime has never been weaker.
	It might not be this weak again.
	So if there's some sort of domestic political movement to get rid of the Ayatollahs, then perhaps now would be a good time for them to actually go ahead and do that.
	He is certainly not calling for American troops on the ground in order to participate in regime change.
	That's not what he is doing.
	And anybody who's suggesting that is being, I think, quite stupid and deliberately stupid about what the president is saying right there.
	I know there's some people on the right who want to be deliberately stupid and have been deliberately stupid about this entire conflict and American foreign policy in general.
	However, the risk of President Trump, a man who ran in 2016 against the Iraq War, getting us into a long-lasting engagement on the ground after he sent B-2s some 37 hours in order to strike this nuclear facility and then come home.
	All I can say is people are being deliberately obtuse.
	And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, appeared on Fox News yesterday and he said, the big message here from President Trump is it is a mistake not to take me at my word.
	If I say that I'm trying to negotiate a deal with you, I'm trying to negotiate a deal with you.
	And if you don't take the deal, and I threaten that if you don't take the deal, I'm going to bomb your nuclear facilities.
	You can guess what I'm going to do?
	Bomb your nuclear facilities.
	This is absolutely true about President Trump.
	I'm constantly amazed at people who cannot read Trump's signals.
	They are not signals.
	He just says it out loud.
	He is by far the most transparent president in American history.
	If you want to know what he's thinking, good news.
	All you have to do is listen to the words coming out of his facehole.
	That's it.
	It's really not that difficult.
	And what he said to Iran for 15 years was no nuclear program.
	And then he said, if you want to make a deal where you give up your nuclear program, I'll leave you alone.
	And then they said no, over and over and over.
	And then the president said, well, there was a then to that if-then statement.
	Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, who's been stalwart on this issue, here he was yesterday.
	Are we now at war with Iran?
	No, we're not.
	This is not a war against Iran.
	This is very simple.
	You know, 67 days ago, the President of the United States sent the Iranians a letter and it said, you're not going to have nuclear weapons.
	You're not going to have a militarized nuclear program.
	Let's negotiate.
	I want to do this diplomatically.
	I want to do this peacefully.
	They tried to play him along the way they've played every American president for the last 35 years.
	And the president told them, if we don't get a deal, which is what we wanted, then I'll have to handle it differently.
	And that's what he did last night.
	He handled it differently.
	But that was an Iranian choice.
	We didn't make that choice.
	They did.
	By playing games with Donald Trump, they made a huge mistake.
	And President Trump acted last night.
	And I think the world today is safer and more stable than it was 24 hours ago.
	And a bunch of these countries putting out statements condemning us privately, they all agree with us that this needed to be done.
	They got to do what they got to do for their own public relations purposes.
	But the only people in the world that are unhappy about what happened in Iran last night is the regime.
	He is absolutely right about this.
	You got to love the subtle hat tip to Saudi Arabia right there.
	Saudi Arabia put out a statement saying that they were a little concerned about what happened.
	They were having parties in Riyadh.
	The notion that the Saudis, whose oil fields have been attacked by Iran, who have been arch enemies with the Iranians for decades, that the Saudis, of all people, are deeply disappointed that the United States, along with Israel, has obliterated the top levels of Iran's military, destroyed their ballistic missile program, and killed their nuclear weaponry program, that the Saudis are somehow crying, shedding real tears.
	Those are some of the biggest crocodile tears I've ever seen coming out of Riyadh.
	And as time moves on, it's going to become very clear that Saudi Arabia, of course, was very much in favor of all this.
	So was Jordan.
	So was Egypt.
	So was Turkey.
	So believe it or not, was Russia, which is doing nothing in order to help the Iranians at this point because Russia also doesn't want those nutjobs having a nuclear weapon.
	That is not something that if Russia had wanted that, Russia would have facilitated a Russian nuclear bomb significantly more, even than they did.
	They were helping Iran build nuclear facilities, but they certainly weren't smuggling a nuclear warhead into Iran or anything like that.
	Meanwhile, the United Nations, of course, of course, has decided that the United States and Israel have done something very wrong.
	So an organization which, as I've discussed, is the most Eisley of international politics, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, they've decided that they are very, very upset now with Iran for developing nuclear weapons or a massive ballistic missile program for firing ballistic missiles into Israeli civilian centers, for funding the creation of massive terrorist groups all around the region and terrorist sleeper cells all around the world.
	No, what they're really upset about is when President Trump does the most targeted strike in American military history.
	Literally the most targeted strike in American military history.
	You're going to have to name me a more targeted strike than the one that President Trump did on Saturday night.
	So there are some countries, of course, that have come out in favor.
	Argentina's Javier Millay, who is the best.
	President Javier Millay is fantastic.
	He posted, quote, today is a great day for Western civilization.
	The Australians, who are actually quite far to the left, even they came out in favor, quote, we support action the U.S. has taken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
	But then the Australian government, led by the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who, of course, is a far leftist, called for de-escalation, dialogue, and diplomacy.
	Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada reiterated President Trump's belief that, quote, Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
	Many of the more leftist leaders around the world were very upset.
	The Chinese said, quote, the actions of the United States seriously violated the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law and have exacerbated tensions in the Middle East.
	Yeah, I want to hear from China, a country that has destabilized international relations since the days of Chairman Mao, that has engaged in massive warfare across its borders, a country that right now is destabilizing everything from Africa to Asia to South America.
	I want to hear from the Chinese.
	Quote, China calls on the parties to the conflict, Israel in particular, to reach a ceasefire as soon as possible.
	China's calling on Israel to reach a ceasefire.
	You know what China could do?
	They could actually just force Iran, presumably, to engage in a ceasefire here.
	And by the way, that is quite likely to happen because the next move that Iran is talking about making, damages primarily, wait for it, the Chinese.
	We'll get to that in just a moment.
	So again, a wide variety of countries are supportive.
	That would be Germany is quite supportive.
	However, the UN was condemning.
	Many of the leftist countries that opposed the United States were upset.
	And so this led Danny Dunon, the ambassador to the United Nations from Israel, to rip into the UN and many of the countries saying that President Trump did something wrong.
	He says, you're denouncing the U.S.?
	You people?
	Seriously?
	Now, some come here to denounce the United States and Israel.
	So let me ask you, where were you?
	Where were you when Iran waste toward the bomb?
	Where were you when it enriched uranium far beyond the point of civilian usage?
	When it buried entire fortress beneath mountain to prepare for our extermination?
	Where were you when Iran turned negotiation into theater and deceit into strategy?
	You were silent.
	You were complicit.
	You were afraid.
	You were bystanders.
	Let the record show when the world stood at the edge of a nuclear disaster, America stepped forward.
	Alrighty, coming up, we'll be joined by Caroline Glick out of the Prime Minister's office in Israel to get their take on what's going on.
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	Families across Israel are wondering if the next siren will sound in their neighborhood.
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	Joining us online is Caroline Glick.
	Caroline is the International Affairs Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel.
	Caroline, thanks so much for the time.
	I really appreciate it.
	Oh, it's great to be on your program, Ben.
	Thanks for having me.
	So first of all, let's discuss what it means to the state of Israel that President Trump decided to authorize the use of these massive ordnance penetrators on the Iranian nuclear facilities.
	Obviously, an act of tremendous courage and bravery by the President of the United States to stand up for our ally, Israel, and also to finish off what he has called for decades a massive threat to the United States and the Iranian nuclear program.
	Yeah, I think that it means a couple of things.
	First of all, in relation to President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, I think that the American operation last night was a testament to the power of the United States military.
	They are, as the President said, the only military that's capable of pulling that kind of thing off from the air.
	The other thing that's important is that the partnership between these two leaders has just historic dimensions, both for the United States and for Israel and for the nations of this region and the larger world, because together these two men have changed history.
	For 46 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has transformed the world for the worse.
	If you just go to things like having to go through security checks before you go onto an airplane, to everything that we have to do to protect ourselves from terrorism, that's all because of Iran.
	And it's very important to know that because for the first time we're seeing with this assault, really with Israel's larger war against Iran's proxy armies and now against Iran's nuclear installations and its ballistic missile installations, we're seeing that finally the war is being taken to where it emanates from, which is Iran.
	And that has dimensions that are epic, that it has implications that are historic, not only for Israel and the Jewish people, but for humanity.
	For Israel specifically, we've been carrying around this dread that we could be nuked by Iran for decades.
	And now that weight has been taken off of our shoulders because of the brave, extraordinary leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.
	And one last word about that.
	Prime Minister Netanyahu has been warning about the specter of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons for over 40 years.
	And he has been leading the international campaign against Iran's effort to achieve nuclear, military nuclear capabilities for decades.
	I was working for him for the first time in the 1990s, and he was talking about this with the Clinton administration and warning about it.
	So now what we're seeing is really the fruition of decades of work and leadership on the part of Netanyahu.
	And it's an extraordinary thing to behold what he's accomplished and to really to see how he personally has transformed Israel into a regional power and has transformed Israel's relationship with the United States into a strategic alliance of historic proportions.
	As President Trump said, there's never been a partnership like this.
	And Caroline, I think that partnership is so important to emphasize.
	And there are people in the United States who have tried to make the claim that somehow President Trump was manipulated here, that President Trump was talked into this.
	The fact is, President Trump has made clear since his very earliest days in politics that Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a disaster, not only for Israel, but for the region and for the world.
	He was perfectly true to his word.
	He's been absolutely consistent on this for literally decades.
	And it's only the coordination between the president of the United States, the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States, bar non with no competitors and no close competitors.
	It is only his close coordination with Israel that made this sort of thing possible, the destruction of the Iranian nuclear threat.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, President Trump himself, I mean, the White House put out all of his statements or so many of his statements against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons going back to 2011.
	So yes, this has been his consistent policy and efforts, there have been such extraordinary efforts by Americans to try to undermine his legacy of statements of commitment to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
	You got to wonder what that was about.
	But the president himself, people just listened to him.
	If Iran had just listened to him, you know, they might have, they had 60 days to make a deal with this guy.
	But I think maybe they were listening to messaging operations or something that made them think that they didn't have to worry about President Trump.
	When Trump himself, if they had just listened to the president, they would have understood just how deadly serious he was about preventing them from acquiring nuclear weapons.
	So, Caroline, let's talk about the actual effect of the strike on the nuclear facilities and Israel's continued operations.
	So, obviously, Israel continues to fly air sorties over Iran.
	Iran continues to fire missiles and barrage the missiles into Israel, sometimes striking civilian targets, obviously directed at civilian areas.
	How long do you think this lasts?
	What is the end goal here?
	There's been talk about regime change.
	Obviously, the prime minister has said whatever happens in Iran is up to the Iranian people.
	That is not the chief goal of what Israel is attempting to do.
	President Trump has said the same.
	The goal here is the denuclearization of the Iranian regime.
	This is a meticulous hit by the United States.
	Israel continues to operate in an extraordinary environment.
	And again, the IDF And the IAF, the Israeli Air Force, have done such an unbelievably extraordinary job, along with intelligence and Mossad, in this operation from the very get-go, something the President himself acknowledged.
	It is an effort of historic proportions.
	What's the end goal here?
	For Israel, we have two goals.
	One is to wipe out their military capabilities, and that's been largely accomplished, as President Trump and Defense Secretary Eggset said today and yesterday.
	And Prime Minister Netanyahu also resonated that claim today in a news conference that's just ended here in Israel to the Israeli media.
	And the other issue is Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.
	And so that has been the second goal of Israel's operation.
	We continue acting through our Air Force to achieve the goal of wiping out Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.
	As you said, they continue to attack Israel with ballistic missiles.
	We had two more volleys into Israel today that attacked civilian targets and caused damage.
	Thankfully, nobody was killed today, but several were wounded.
	So we have to wipe out that capability.
	We've taken out a lot of their factories that make different components of their ballistic missiles.
	We took out another one today in Mashhad, I think it was.
	And we continue to act in that.
	And the most urgent thing to protect our home front is not only to eliminate the missiles, whether in flight or before they, or better yet, before they're launched, but also to go after their launchers.
	Because if they don't have any launchers, then they can't launch their missiles.
	And so that's really been the primary goal right now of our aircraft has been hunting down those missile launchers and attacking them sometimes just before they launch a missile.
	So that's really been our focus.
	We want to just prevent that from happening.
	When you look, if you look, there have been a lot of graphics out on American television showing the range of Iranian missiles and the location of U.S. military installations in the Middle East.
	And of course, they're all in range, as is Israel.
	And by the way, as are large swaths of Europe.
	And so this just shows how important it was to eliminate the nuclear capabilities because we had that kind of missile capability and they were building a capability in terms of industrial capacity to build another 300 missiles a month.
	So we have to take that out because whether with nuclear warheads or conventional warheads, that kind of thing for a country Israel's size, which is 175th Iran's size, is in fact an existential threat.
	So, Caroline, obviously one of the big things that's on the table, remains on the table, which is the issue of the hostages in the Gaza Strip.
	Hamas's main supporter throughout this conflict has been Iran, both directly and indirectly.
	Iran, obviously, has been extraordinarily damaged in this entire effort.
	The goal, which was to isolate Hamas, seems to be coming closer to fruition through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a non-UN-run way of supplying the people of the Gaza Strip with the food and necessities that they require.
	Hamas is so angry about this that they're shooting members of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to prevent the dissemination of that food.
	How close do we think we are to the end of some sort of conflict in the Gaza Strip?
	What does an end to that look like?
	And then how does that turn into what everybody is hoping for, the culmination of President Trump's Middle Eastern legacy, the broadening of the Abraham Accords to countries, including Saudi Arabia, respectively?
	So I think, first of all, to talk about Gaza, just as we have very clear goals for Iran, the ballistic missiles eliminating that capability and the nuclear capabilities eliminating those capabilities.
	So also in Gaza, we have three very clear goals of this war.
	The first one is to get all the hostages home.
	And today we brought home the bodies of three more hostages.
	We have 50 hostages.
	20 are alive.
	30 are either certainly dead or two are probably dead.
	So between 22 or 20 are alive and between 30 and 32, I mean, 28 and 32 are deceased.
	And we want to bring all of them home.
	And I think today's operation just reinforces the fact that we're serious about doing that.
	And then the other two are to eliminate Hamas as both a military organization and as a regime.
	And the third one is to prevent Gaza from ever posing a threat to Israel's security in the future.
	So there are two components of that.
	So the issue of the Hamas regime in Gaza, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which you were citing, their work is extremely important in eliminating Hamas's grasp on power, political power, because Hamas has been funding both the rebuilding, constant rebuilding of its military forces that are being eliminated by the Israeli military by stealing the humanitarian aid that's been provided largely by the UN, but also by other international humanitarian organizations that kow-towed to Hamas.
	So they've seized all of the aid trucks, and then they take most of it for themselves and for their terrorists and for their loyalists.
	And then they gouge prices for the Gazans in terms of selling what's left of the aid to them in both open markets and black markets.
	And so by taking, and that in turn finances their continued operations, both as a regime and as a terrorist army.
	And so by taking away their ability to control the humanitarian aid and moving it to the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which is not beholden to Hamas, Israel is able to remove Hamas's grasp on power.
	And so that's been very, very important and very effective in the two and a half weeks that it's been up, or actually three weeks that it's been up and running.
	And as to the military operations, so our combat forces continue to operate at just about full throttle in Gaza, even as we're operating in Gaza.
	The Prime Minister said today in his press conference, just he's constantly authorizing new operations.
	He did just now.
	And so our ground forces on the ground in Gaza are working.
	We've unfortunately lost several soldiers over the past couple of weeks of operations and a lot more wounded.
	So we continue to pay the price of this war.
	But we're absolutely determined to achieve the goals.
	And regarding the long term, I think that that has to do with Trump's plan for Gaza to clear it out of all the ordinance, to allow the Gazans who want to leave this horrible war zone to go and to see how we rebuild in a different kind of regime there over time.
	And that leads us, of course, to your last question, is about the prospects for peace in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors.
	And I think that they got a huge boost Over the past year and eight months, because of the fierce and extraordinary courage and success of Israel's military in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Iran, and in Yemen.
	I think that the Arabs who may have been questioning whether we're capable of standing the test of time are more than convinced that we are and that we're going to bury anybody who stands against us, as we have over the past year and eight months.
	And now that the President joined forces with Israel and with Prime Minister Netanyahu to take out the largest threat posed to the Arab world, to the Gulf states and beyond in Iran's nuclear program, I think that both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump are standing very tall in the eyes of the leaders of the Arab world,
	and that will have a profound impact on the prospects for peace in a positive way in the weeks and months going forward.
	Caroline, I just want to conclude by asking a question or the answers, because obviously I have so many friends who are over there in Israel, which is, what is the feeling on the ground about President Trump, given what President Trump just did?
	I mean, I know, obviously, before the election, if Israelis had a vote, and some Israelis are, in fact, American citizens and did vote, but if Israelis had a vote, then he would have won the election overwhelmingly.
	What's the feeling on the ground there about President Trump given the historic move that he just made?
	I don't remember whether his approval rating or his support rating ahead of the election was 80% or 85%, but it's probably much closer to 90, 95% after what he did yesterday.
	There's an enormous amount of love in Israel for your president, for Donald Trump, and it's love that he's earned by his actions.
	He did a tremendous thing, not only for the Jews of Israel, he did a tremendous thing, and for the people of Israel, he did a tremendous thing for the Jewish people.
	I mean, I think that what we have been doing over the past 10 days in Iran is making it clear that the Jewish people will destroy anybody who tries to destroy us.
	When we say never again, we mean it.
	And when the United States stepped up and joined Israel in this operation yesterday under President Trump, the United States said, not only do we respect the fact that you're doing what you have to do, we're going to stand with you.
	And we're proud to be your ally.
	And that is something for all Jews in Israel and throughout the world just is an extraordinary boost.
	It's an amazing thing to have a friend like that, to have a friend like the United States of America.
	That's Caroline Glick.
	She's the International Affairs Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel.
	Caroline, thank you so much for your time.
	And really, God bless President Trump and God bless Prime Minister Netanyahu for having done so much work to destroy the Iranian nuclear threat on behalf of all of civilization.
	And thank you and God bless you, Ben, for everything that you do for the United States, for Israel, and for the cause of freedom more generally.
	Thank you.
	Coming up, we'll be joined by Jonathan Chanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to talk about what happens at Next First.
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	So now the question becomes, what is Iran going to do in response?
	So Iran apparently has threatened the United States that they have sleeper cells in the United States.
	According to the UK Independent, the United States has ramped up its monitoring of Iranian sleeper cells.
	Following Saturday's strikes, which Trump claimed totally obliterated, Iran's nuclear sites at Fordo, Natans, and Isfahan, both White House and FBI officials have been on high alert for Iranian sleeper cells.
	Those, of course, would be cells embedded in the United States by the Iranian government, terrorist cells, which suggest they might not be our friends.
	I know for all those people who keep saying that Iran is, you know, they're friendly, they were seeking peace, there's nothing to suggest that they were enemies of the United States except for the thousands of dead and maimed American troops over the course of years, ranging from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq.
	For all those people who are saying that, it's weird.
	Like, I don't know a lot of other countries that have embedded actual terror cells in America and in Western soil.
	I don't know like tons of countries that are doing that.
	Iran, of course, is the leading state sponsor of terror around the world.
	The idea that that group of people should have a nuclear weapon is, it boggles the mind.
	What is the argument for?
	What is the argument for we should let Iran go nuclear when they have terrorist cells they've been spending Decades embedding in the West.
	Does that seem like a great idea to you?
	Apparently, it seems like a great idea to some.
	It's kind of astonishing.
	Even before President Trump ordered U.S. involvement in the strikes, FBI Director Cash Patel increased efforts to surveil potential sleeper agents linked to Hezbollah.
	This is yet another reason why leaving a wide open southern border is one of the dumbest things you could possibly do.
	And Joe Biden did that for years on end, facilitating the entry of people who hate America and want American citizens dead.
	This is why you have to have a closed border, another big win for President Trump.
	But remember, the Iranian government has been sponsoring and subsidizing terrorism against Western citizens and Americans for a very, very long time.
	In fact, contra some major pseudo-conservative commentators, quote, the Iranian government ordered an operative to assassinate Donald Trump before the 2024 election, Manhattan federal prosecutors said Friday.
	This is the latest in a string of assassination plots directed at the former and future president in recent months.
	This is according to Politico, November 8th, 2024.
	Prosecutors charge Farhad Shakari with murder for hire and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
	He is believed to be in Iran and remains at large, prosecutors said.
	In addition to the plot to kill Trump, Shakeri and two other men, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, were charged with a separate attempted murder for hire scheme targeting a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin who has publicly opposed the Iranian government.
	And of course, people have been attacked on American soil.
	There was a murder for hire plot that Iran was engaged in against former Trump official John Bolton.
	There was the attack on Salman Rushdie.
	That was a decades-long fatwa against the author of the Satanic Verses, who ended up being stabbed on American soil in the eye.
	So Iran has a very long memory and a lot of terrorists all over the place.
	The United States, of course, is going to be on high alert for this.
	Those terror threats existed before.
	Those terror alerts exist after.
	The president of the United States has made quite clear that if the Iranians attempt something like this, that does put the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in danger.
	The reports today suggest that he is hiding in a bunker, that he does not have access to the outside world, and that he is being hand-fed non-electronic messages because he is afraid of electronic surveillance at this point.
	Meanwhile, the Iranians are threatening the closure of the Straits of Hormuz.
	As I mentioned yesterday on our special episode of the show, this is presumably one of the dumbest things they could possibly do.
	Seriously and unbelievably stupid thing.
	First of all, it will spike the price of oil.
	It'll spike the price of oil in kind of fairly short term, because the reality is that Middle Eastern oil supply, while it is important to global oil prices, that does not mean that the average price of oil across the globe is going to be the spot price in the United States.
	So prices of oil in Asia are going to soar.
	Prices in the United States will go up somewhat.
	Okay, that's the actual way this works.
	In the same way that when you have an oil price spike in the United States, the price of oil radically jumps in California and jumps somewhat in, say, Alabama.
	That's true globally speaking as well.
	When there's an oil spike in which the area that the oil is moving through goes to Asia, obviously it's going to affect Asia significantly more than it affects the United States.
	It doesn't mean that it doesn't have any impact.
	It does mean that in the mid to long term, it hurts the Asian countries, particularly China, which is the number one recipient of Iranian oil.
	50% of all Iranian oil goes to China.
	It affects the Chinese way worse than it affects anyone else.
	This is a point that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is making.
	He's like, listen, if Iran wants to shut the Straits of Hormuz, maybe China should bomb their fleet.
	Do you expect Iran to move to close the Strait of Hormuz to try to disrupt oil transportation across the world?
	Well, I encourage the Chinese government in Beijing to call them about that because they heavily depend on the Straits of Hormuz for their oil.
	If they do that, it'll be another terrible mistake.
	It's economic suicide for them if they do it.
	And we retain options to deal with that.
	But other countries should be looking at that as well.
	It would hurt other countries' economies a lot worse than ours.
	It would be, I think, a massive escalation that would merit a response, not just by us, but from others.
	So, look, they're going to say what they need to say.
	You know, these are the things that need to happen for their own internal politics and so forth.
	But in the end, we're going to judge them by the actions that they take moving forward.
	We had three objectives.
	We struck those three objectives with decisive force.
	And that was the point of this mission.
	And that's what we achieved.
	What happens next will depend on what they do.
	They want to negotiate.
	We're ready to negotiate.
	They want to get cute and do things that are dangerous.
	We have responses available that are devastating.
	Now, again, this is a major difference from the Obama era.
	I'd just like to remind you that when Barack Obama was president, there was an actual picture of American sailors on their knees with their hands behind their head with the Iranians having picked them up in these waters.
	Now, the idea is if you guys shut the Straits of Hormuz, well, maybe you'd like to see your ships at the bottom of the Straits of Hormuz.
	I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity about the size of the Iranian Navy.
	Quote, the Iranian Navy consists of more than 100 vessels, including 19 to 27 submarines.
	It is ranked 37th globally, and it specializes in asymmetric warfare and coastal defense, particularly in the Straits of Hormuz.
	However, the feasibility for Israel simply destroying the entire Navy in the Strait is significant.
	Degraded Iranian air defenses allow the IAF aircraft to operate with reduced risk.
	Real-time intelligence and precision munitions could target larger ships like frigates and submarines at port or in transit.
	U.S. naval support could further constrain Iranian movements.
	And by the way, the entire world has an interest in the Strait of Hormuz not being closed.
	So if the Iranians choose to move in that direction, good luck to them.
	One of the dumbest strategic decisions they could make at this point.
	The problem for the Iranians is effectively they are boxed in.
	If they decide to activate their proxy groups to attack American bases around the Middle East, President Trump will probably say to the Israelis, go ahead and kill Khomeini.
	If they decide to shut the Straits of Hormuz, there's a good shot that their Navy ends up at the bottom of the Straits of Hormuz.
	The best move for them at this point, given the fact they have nothing with which to negotiate anymore, the best possibility for them is to negotiate, actually, is to come forward to the United States and say, listen, our nuclear program is gone.
	Leave us alone.
	Weapons down.
	That would be the smart thing for them to do.
	All the way up to this point, they've not done the smart thing, so it'll be interesting to see what they do next.
	But they don't have tons of options.
	Now, again, that doesn't mean that they can't provide danger to human beings.
	They certainly can participate in terrorist attacks designed to create fear and dissension.
	They certainly could attack Americans in the Middle East at military bases, Although the idea that they're going to expend widespread ballistic missiles on American bases, I think wildly overestimates their capacity, given the fact that Israel has been systematically destroying all of their missile launchers for nine days at this point.
	With that said, Iran is in horrifyingly bad position geopolitically.
	Militarily, they have been devastated by both the Israelis and the American strikes.
	Already coming up, Professor Victor Davis-Hansen joins us to put what President Trump did in historic context first.
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	Joining us online is Jonathan Chandzer, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former terror finance analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department.
	Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Really appreciate it.
	Pleasure.
	Good to be with you.
	So first of all, my understanding is that you were in Israel for a large part of this conflict, that you somehow got out.
	So how exactly did you get out of Israel in the middle of all this?
	Sure.
	Well, we actually landed, our group landed.
	We had 18 journalists.
	They landed the day that the conflict began.
	I actually was meeting with a defense, Ministry of Defense official, and the guy told me that it was a tense time, but Phoebe's son was getting married in a couple of days.
	So conflict would be unlikely.
	Well, sure enough, eight hours later, the sirens start going off.
	And initially, we tried to see if there was a way out through the airport.
	That was not happening because the airspace had been closed off.
	So after about four days, as we started realizing that, you know, there was no way that we were going to have any programming with this group, we made our way to the Allenby Bridge at the border with Jordan, crossed over, and from there, we made our way to Greece.
	But there was a lot of chaos, and a lot of people were saying that maybe Jordan wasn't the best place to get out.
	Ultimately, I think it was the right choice, given that we had 18 people with us, and most of them wanted nothing to do with these ballistic missiles that were raining down on the country.
	So now let's talk about what exactly happened over the course of the last couple of weeks, because it really is astonishing.
	So you've obviously been following the conflict in Iran and Israel extraordinarily closely for a very long time.
	October 7th was effectively an operation by an Iranian proxy.
	Khizbollah was an Iranian proxy.
	The Houthis are an Iranian proxy.
	The Assad regime was working hand in glove with the Iranians.
	If anyone had said on October 7th, 2023, that a year and a half later the Hamasniks would be essentially flat on their backs, Khizbalah would be so eviscerated that Assad would fall in Syria and Khizbollah would tell the Iranians, I'm sorry, guys, you're on your own, and that Israel would be flying open sorties for weeks on end above Iranian airspace.
	Everyone would have thought you were nuts.
	If you would have said that President Trump would have been re-elected and then he would have made what I think is the most courageous decision I've ever seen a president make in my lifetime.
	I think that you'd have been hard pressed to find a lot of takers on those bets.
	Oh, this was, I mean, absolutely not on my bingo card.
	Everybody at work right now keeps telling me I need to stop talking about my bingo card because there was nothing on it for the last year and a half.
	But yeah, when you look back at 10-7, you know, and Israel was flat on its back in complete shock and had to figure out how to start fighting back, first in Gaza, then in Lebanon, then had to start dealing with the Houthi missiles, had to deal with the Shiite militias out of Iraq and Syria.
	And somehow they were able to neutralize all of these fronts.
	But I do think that the big moment came with the Grim Beaper operation, as they call it.
	That was a turning point in the war because that essentially knocked out the suppressing fire that Iran was going to have if and when it finally came time for the Israelis to take out the nuclear program.
	That was always the fear.
	Every scenario that I had ever heard over the last 15, 20 years was that if Israel had to go it alone and to take out the nuclear program, that it was going to be Hezbollah with its 150,000, 180,000 missiles and rockets and drones that were just going to hammer the Israelis while they were trying to get out of their own airspace.
	Well, when that all went down back in October of last year, and then the Israelis took out the air defenses of the regime last year, I was thinking, this is it, folks.
	And then you had the Biden administration pump the brakes.
	The Biden administration essentially told the Israelis, you cannot go another step further.
	Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
	And they sat there knowing that Hezbollah was eviscerated, knowing that the air defenses were out.
	And it was only until Donald Trump came in that I think the planning truly began for this operation.
	And you heard it from the president last night after he made the announcement about these strikes in the three different nuclear sites across Iran, that the cooperation that he had with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was second to none, that they worked closely all the way through.
	Don't forget that the Israelis started attacking on day 61 after that 60-day deadline that the president had given the Iranians.
	And then he waited.
	He assessed what kind of danger there would be to the United States.
	He wanted to assess, I think, how much the Israelis had knocked out over the previous nine days.
	And it, I think, was a compelling case that it was time to go in, drop the hammer, and finish this thing off.
	And I'll just say one last word.
	It's not over, right?
	I mean, the Islamic Republic is still looking to land some blows at the Israelis, maybe with the United States as well.
	We're obviously hearing about the Strait of Hormuz being shut down.
	This is a wounded animal here, and it is dangerous that we're dealing with this regime right now.
	But when I look across the region, all the proxies, the power that this regime once had, I just can't see it surviving.
	And one of the things that's so astonishing here: number one, President Trump, all the people who misinterpreted him on the left and on the right this whole way, so many people on the horseshoe theory left and the horseshoe theory right who are assuming that he was some sort of radical isolationist who thought that America's role in the world had to be brought to a close, that the end of the American empire was going to happen under President Trump rather than the restoration of American greatness on the world stage.
	And President Trump has been absolutely 100% clear about his agenda with Iran since 2011 and before.
	No Iranian nuclear weapon.
	The idea that he was ever going to get us into an Iraq-style, full-scale occupation of Iran was fabulous nonsense.
	The idea that this was going to somehow result in World War III was absolute fantasist garbage promoted by people with some form of ulterior agenda that I can't quite discern.
	Because the fact of the matter is, there are no allies for Iran that are coming to the table.
	China is not coming to the table.
	Russia is not coming to the table.
	Hezbollah is sitting there, defenestrated, crying to itself because it can't come to the table.
	There's no one left for Iran to rely upon.
	And this is why, as you say, the Iranian regime is in real trouble right now.
	Now, that's not a goal of the war here.
	The goal of the war for President Trump is not to get rid of the Ayatollahs or involve himself in regime change.
	Whatever comes next is up to the Iranian people.
	But President Trump made a promise.
	He kept his promise.
	And in doing so, he's shown, number one, unbelievable spine, not just to the left and to the media, but to people inside his own party who are lying that they controlled the movement that he built, who are lying about his agenda and what he does for a living and what his agenda was, and who are lying all the way through to their own audiences about what was likely to happen if he actually did it.
	You know, I got to say, I agree 100% with everything that you just said.
	But what really strikes me about all of this is the way in which the MAGA movement, Donald Trump's foreign policy, it's like a Rorschach test, right?
	Everybody looks at him and they think that they know what it is that he is trying to achieve.
	I mean, they project their own needs on this man.
	And part of this has to do with the fact that there is not a Trump doctrine.
	It's not spelled out.
	It's not written anywhere what Donald Trump wants to do in the Middle East.
	This has been, he has maintained maximum flexibility.
	He has kept all of America's enemies off guard.
	This is sort of the way that he operates.
	It drives the left crazy.
	And by the way, it's starting to drive the right crazy a little bit too as we watch this, as you call it, the horseshoe left and horseshoe right.
	They're frustrated.
	But I've got to say that this is remarkably consistent with what we saw in the previous administration.
	He started it all by trying to push for the Abraham Accords, for a different kind of reality in the Middle East.
	And I have to say that if he finishes this off with the Israelis in tandem with the Israelis, the Israelis come out looking stronger now than they ever have with the full backing of the United States.
	I've got to say, it does feel like he has set the table now for the Saudis to come back and normalize with Israel.
	And then once the Saudis do it, who knows what happens after that.
	But this, I've got to say, it is more consistent with what Donald Trump did in his previous term than I think anybody has really acknowledged up until this point.
	And Jonathan, I think that it helps transform President Trump from a person who clearly was a historic figure to a world historic figure, because what we are watching right now is the reshaping of an entire region of the world.
	I mean, you mentioned the Middle East.
	The fact is that Israel went from, as you say, prone on its back to a full-scale regional power.
	Now, it probably already was, but the tiger had been poked, but it had never really awoken.
	And as Victor Davis Hansen, another guest on the program recently, has said, you know, the sort of idea that you poke a tiger, a democratic tiger, and it gets up and it roars, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
	Israel is the only Western power in the Middle East.
	And Israel flexing right now a country of 10 million people, 2 million of whom are Arabs and 2 million of whom are Haredim, ultra-Orthodox, is really an astonishing thing.
	And what it means for the future of the region is that this region follows the strong horse.
	If Israel is the strong horse, then it's almost impossible with American backing to see a situation in which the Saudis don't look to get into some sort of Abraham Accords arrangement with the Israelis as soon as some off-ramp can be found in the Gaza Strip.
	And Hamas no longer has its chief sponsor behind it in the form of Iran.
	So it looks like that's going to happen in the near future as well.
	So there's that in the Middle East.
	And then meanwhile, President Trump has sent a ringing message to the Chinese that if they try something in Taiwan, they don't know what's going to happen.
	The Chinese, I think, three months ago, two months ago, probably thought if we go for Taiwan, there's at least a 60-40 shot that the United States does nothing, that the United States sits there, does a few economic sanctions and lets it go.
	Now the Chinese can't be quite so sure because President Trump has made clear that if he makes a threat of use of force, there is no taco.
	I mean, that threat of military force is quite real.
	It is quite real.
	And I do think that there is something astounding about what he's just done.
	I think just by using the B2, by using the MOP, demonstrating the power that we have, I think was an astounding message.
	And you see the crickets coming out of the Kremlin right now.
	You see the crickets out of the CCP.
	North Korea hasn't peaked.
	So the whole crank construct seems to be collapsing, right?
	It was a four-legged stool.
	It looks like one of these legs has been kicked out.
	Now, I got to say, we need to see this job finished.
	And I do think that that's going to be crucial here.
	The U.S. has played an enormous role, but now I do get a sense that it is up to the Israelis to finish this.
	Look, the Israelis have some tough days ahead of them right now.
	They are going to have to hunt down all of those missile launchers and missiles and all the weapons that the Iranians still have.
	And they're going to have to knock them out because the regime is going to try to saturate Israel's airspace.
	And they're going to try to do more damage on their way out.
	This sort of feels like martyrdom, right?
	And that is the ideology of this Shiite regime, this Islamic revolution.
	And it doesn't look like they're ready to capitulate.
	There's still a chance, but I do think that the Israelis may have some tough days ahead.
	They're going to have to finish this.
	And that, I think, is the number one thing right now for the United States and for Israel.
	If Israel comes out with having defeated Iran with a little bit of American help, this is going to set the stage for what comes next around the region and perhaps even around the world.
	So, Jonathan, final question for you.
	Obviously, you've been watching presidents for a long time.
	I've been watching presidents for a long time.
	This was, you know, by all appearances, a really well-calibrated operation by the president of the United States over the course, you say, of decades of actual philosophy and consistency, but also over the course of months and weeks of planning.
	It did take a tremendous amount of spine.
	I've been saying that this president has the most solid spine of any president of my lifetime.
	I don't think it's particularly close, actually.
	In historic context, what does it mean that the president did what he did this weekend?
	He's changed the arc of history here.
	I mean, if this goes the way I think it's going to go, he has removed one of the worst malign actors in Middle East history.
	It looks like he's neutered the Islamic Republic.
	And you got to remember, this is a regime that's been around since 1979, terrorizing every country in the region.
	This dark shadow of Iran has been cast over Lebanon and Iraq and Gaza and West Bank and Israel and Jordan and Egypt and on and on it goes.
	And right now, the region is looking around and they have seen that their number one enemy, the number one destabilizing factor in the region, is flat on its back and gasping.
	So again, this is unbelievable.
	As you say, the spine showed by this president, especially in the face of these neo-isolationists who were pushing him and trying to nudge him in a different direction.
	I love that he stood up to Tucker Carlson, or should I say Tucker Katarlson?
	I am unbelievably grateful that he's done that because he's shown everybody literally what happens when you want to make America great again.
	You've got to stand up for the right principles.
	He's done that.
	And I think the rest of the region sees it.
	And this makes America the strong horse in the region again.
	And I do think we've got better days ahead.
	That's Jonathan Chanzer.
	He's Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, former terror finance analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department.
	Jonathan, thanks so much for the time and the analysis.
	Anytime.
	Meanwhile, the Republican support is, in fact, pouring in.
	The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, over the weekend tweeted out: quote, the military operations in Iran should serve as a clear reminder to our adversaries and allies that President Trump means what he says.
	Yes, the president gave Iran's leader every opportunity to make a deal.
	Iran refused to commit to a nuclear disarmament agreement.
	President Trump has been consistent and clear that a nuclear-armed Iran will not be tolerated.
	That posture has now been enforced with strength, precision, and clarity.
	The president's decisive action prevents the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants death to America, from obtaining the most lethal weapon on the planet.
	This is America first policy in action.
	God bless our brave men and women in uniform, the most lethal fighting force on the planet.
	As we pray for their safe return home, may God bless America.
	By the way, they did safely return home.
	The video is very cool.
	You can see the B2s actually flying in to U.S. bases.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	Here's what the video actually looks like.
	It is very cool.
	Look at this thing.
	Man, these B2 bombers, there's a reason that I bought my son models of the American B2 like years ago.
	What a cool piece of machinery.
	And for all those people who said that the B2 was not worth the cost, all I can say is that thing is absolutely badass.
	That thing flew 37 straight hours.
	It took off from America and went all the way to Iran and bombed a specific target the size of a washer and then came all the way back.
	Unreal.
	How good is our military?
	Truly.
	How unbelievable is the American military?
	Truly astonishing.
	Senator John Thune, who of course is the Senate majority leader, he also put out a statement, quote, the regime in Iran, which has committed itself to bringing death to America and wiping Israel off the map, has rejected all diplomatic pathways to peace.
	The Mullah's misguided pursuit of nuclear weapons must be stopped.
	As we take action tonight to ensure a nuclear weapon remains out of reach for Iran, I stand with President Trump and pray for the American troops and personnel in harm's way.
	Senator Ted Cruz also put out a statement, quote, I commend our pilots and service members, our intelligence personnel, President Trump, and his national security staff on tonight's successful and critical operation.
	The prospect of the Iranian regime acquiring nuclear weapons represents the most acute immediate threat to America and our allies.
	When the Ayatollah chants death to America, he means it.
	And the reason he is building nuclear weapons is because he intends to use them.
	And again, using nuclear weapons does not necessarily mean blowing up a nuclear weapon in an American city, as you just point out here.
	It also means using the nuclear weapon to shield all of your terrorist activities because it prevents serious action against your regime when you pursue the growth of terrorism all around the region and the world.
	Senator Cruz continues, President Trump has consistently and unequivocally stated that those threats cannot be countered without dismantling the Iranian regime's enrichment capacity.
	The president and his negotiators spent two months exploring whether the regime would agree to a negotiated settlement that met America's national security needs.
	At the end of that period, Iranian regime officials declared that instead of agreeing to a deal, they would open a new enrichment facility and install more advanced centrifuges.
	After that declaration, our Israeli allies launched a preemptive attack against the regime and its nuclear infrastructure, which was enormously successful, but could not disable the nuclear activities at Fordo, an underground enrichment bunker built into a mountain, which was legitimized by the catastrophic Obama-Iran nuclear deal.
	As long as Iran was able to access and conduct activities at Fordo, they could still rush to build a nuclear arsenal.
	Tonight's actions have gone far in foreclosing that possibility and countering the apocalyptic threat posed by an Iranian nuclear arsenal.
	Senator John Fetterman, who of course is a Democrat and has been absolutely stalwart on this issue, astonishingly stalwart on this particular issue, clear-minded.
	Again, I'm going to praise moral clarity from perhaps the only Democrat in the Senate to actually offer it.
	And he's been absolutely fantastic on this issue for years at this point, in the face of tremendous opposition from his own party, who's been attempting to almost oust him from a Senate seat that he won because of this.
	Quote, as I've long maintained, this was the correct move by the president.
	Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism and cannot have nuclear capabilities.
	I'm grateful for and salute the finest military in the world.
	Again, those who are clear-minded are actually spanning the aisle.
	An ex-Biden aide named Jamie Metzel actually posted on social media, quote, the world will be a better place if Iran's nuclear bomb development capacities have been degraded or destroyed.
	I am not a fan of many of Donald Trump's actions, but I will speak openly and honestly when he takes bold steps defending America's interests as he did tonight.
	I served on the National Security Council under President Clinton.
	I was Joe Biden's deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
	I voted for Kamala Harris.
	I've been a vocal critic of many dangerous and undemocratic actions taken by President Trump, but I'm not a blind tribalist and am perfectly comfortable praising President Trump for bold and courageous actions in support of America's core national interests, as he took tonight.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, Mark Levin, who has been a voice of absolute moral clarity and a peace-through strength advocate his entire career, here's what he had to say about President Trump's decision to strike the Fordo nuclear facilities.
	You're looking at a historic figure.
	Shouldn't we have a little faith in this man?
	We have a lot of faith in this man.
	Shouldn't we have a little faith in the United States military?
	We just kicked their ass.
	Obviously, Mark happens to be right about that.
	Now, I think it is important here to point out what a seminal turning point this is for American foreign policy.
	For years and years and years, we have been boxed into the idea that every war is the Iraq war.
	So critics of President Trump of peace through strength, going all the way back to World War II, particularly on the left, but now on the Horseshoe Theory right as well, have suggested that people who advocate for American military action liken everything to the lead up to World War II, to Neville Chamberlain and Munich.
	Okay, not everything is World War II, obviously.
	Some things are different than other things.
	But also, not every war is the Iraq war.
	And you will notice that the vast bevy of people who keep complaining about President Trump's strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities keep comparing this to Iraq, which is crazy.
	I'm sorry, it was always crazy.
	These people who keep saying that a one-off strike on a nuclear facility, which is significantly more like killing Osama bin Laden or killing Qasem Soleimani or killing Anwar al-Aliki, that all of that is somehow akin to the Iraq War, a full-scale hundreds of thousands of troops ground invasion of a country in the Middle East, followed by a 20-year effort to rebuild the country and remold the government.
	Honestly, I think you have to be empty-headed to make that comparison, but there is an Iraq war syndrome that has set in in the American body politic that suggests that every military action is like the Iraq War.
	It's very much like the Vietnam War syndrome that set in after the end of the Vietnam War, when every military action was supposed to be the thing that America did in Vietnam.
	And it took Ronald Reagan breaking the Soviet Union in order for that to end.
	And it really took George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War in order for that to end.
	The lesson here is that victory is a possibility.
	Victory can be achieved if the commitment is clear and if the goal is defined.
	President Trump had a goal.
	He defined that goal.
	He made a commitment to that goal.
	And then he pursued an action in pursuit of that goal.
	The lesson of Vietnam and Iraq is not that military power or the threat of its use by the United States is bad, or even worse, that the United States itself is bad, which is an argument that, again, is being made all the time by the horseshoe theory left and the horseshoe theory right.
	The same people who are suggesting that President Trump is wrong to bomb the nuclear facilities are people who suggest that the United States was wrong to use the A-bomb to end World War II or that America has been historically evil over the course of decades.
	The Howard Zinn left and the Tucker Carlson right, they shake hands on this particular prospect, on this perspective.
	That perspective is wrong.
	It is not just wrong.
	It is a nefariously bad perspective that damages America.
	The world is better off for American power properly used.
	Again, properly used.
	We can misuse our power.
	Anybody can misuse their power.
	We're the most powerful country in the history of the world with the most powerful military in the history of the world.
	But when you use your power properly, you can actually effectuate good things happening.
	John Spencer, who of course teaches at the Urban Warfare Institute, he's the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, teaches at West Point as well.
	He has a piece over at X.com talking about this.
	Quote, we're hearing it again from the random comedian turned geopolitical analyst, the podcast influencer, the backseat foreign policy expert.
	Remember Iraq, they say, forever war, as if that one phrase ends the conversation.
	The uninformed reflex is to think of years of troop deployments, endless insurgencies, wasted lives, and strategic quagmires.
	The instinct is understandable, but it risks misreading the moment we are in because Iran is not Iraq.
	It is not Afghanistan.
	And this is not the same war.
	So first of all, he's being more charitable than I will be.
	I do not think it is understandable.
	President Trump is not George W. Bush.
	He ran against George W. Bush's foreign policy.
	President Trump has never engaged in a long-term nation building project, nor will he.
	He defined this mission specifically.
	I do not actually think that the quagmire folks are saying something understandable.
	I think they are saying something dishonest.
	I think they are lying to you.
	In other words, this is not something that President Trump wants to sink us into.
	As John Spencer says, Israel and the United States are not talking about regime change.
	That is not the mission.
	This is the point I was making at the beginning of the show.
	When Trump says maybe there will be regime change in Iran, he means from the Iranian people.
	That's the same thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said.
	Do you think Netanyahu, from a country of 9.7 million people, 2 million of whom are Arabs and 2 million of whom are ultra-Orthodox, that that country, that tiny country, is going to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to Iran to engage in nation building?
	Do you think the United States is going to do that?
	I saw a tweet the other night saying, you know, maybe there will be nation building when Israel decides they'll take in as many refugees from Iran as the United States and Europe.
	So first of all, I have a great idea.
	How about no refugees from Iran?
	How about that?
	How about everyone just stays in Iran?
	And if they want to overthrow their regime, they overthrow their regime.
	How about that?
	That seems like the best possible solution.
	And again, if they don't overthrow their regime, that's their prerogative.
	That does not mean that you allow that regime to go nuclear, obviously.
	John Spencer says, many invoke Iraq as a cautionary tale.
	I was on the ground as an American soldier sent on missions to find weapons of mass destruction.
	They were not there.
	The United States invaded Iraq based on intelligence assessments that turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
	There were no active WMD programs, yet that claim became the justification for war.
	But the greatest failure came after Baghdad fell.
	The mission shifted from regime removal to vague, open-ended nation building with no clear plan and no unified political strategy.
	Then came one of the most damaging decisions in modern U.S. history.
	The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the entire Iraqi military, sending hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers home without jobs, income, or direction.
	At the same time, a sweeping debatification policy purged virtually every experienced civil servant from government, not for war crimes or corruption, but for their affiliation with the ruling party they had often joined just to survive professionally.
	Those moves collapsed Iraq's governing institutions overnight and left a vacuum that was immediately filled by chaos, insurgency, and extremist groups.
	The failure was not in the use of force, but in what came after, a rushed deconstruction of a functioning state with no viable plan to rebuild it.
	This is not the case with Iran.
	The IAEA Has hard data, not vague suspicion.
	It has verified uranium enriched to 83.7%.
	It has documented missing stockpiles and hidden facilities.
	The only historical comparison is not Iraq in 2003, but Iraq in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor before Saddam could complete his program.
	The world later saw that act for what it was, a necessary preemptive strike that likely prevented a future disaster.
	The situation with Iran today is even more urgent.
	The United States is not at war with Iran, but it did act forcefully and with purpose when the Iranian regime crossed every diplomatic and nuclear red line.
	This is not a prelude to war.
	It was a deliberate proportional military action to send a clear signal.
	Iran's path to a nuclear bomb will not be tolerated, not diplomatically, not politically, not militarily.
	This was not a hypothetical threat.
	It was real, immediate, and accelerating.
	John Spencer says, this all began with Iran's continued defiance of international nuclear agreements and its rapid acceleration toward a weapon.
	Waiting did not reduce the threat.
	It allowed it to harden.
	Every day of delay gave Iran more time to disperse its programs, develop more advanced delivery systems, and raise the cost of future action.
	So for those shouting, Iraq or Afghanistan from the sidelines, I hear you.
	I fought in Iraq.
	I've studied these wars my entire adult life, but you are applying the wrong history to the wrong context.
	This is not a forever war.
	It's not occupation.
	It's not regime change.
	This is preemption.
	It is a decisive action to prevent the single most destabilizing development in the region, a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran.
	That, of course, is exactly right.
	So this all raises a question.
	What exactly is the opposition?
	What is the opposition here?
	Truly.
	What is the steel man case against?
	So you can basically make three cases against.
	One is constitutional.
	One is pragmatic.
	And the third is ideological.
	I think there are a lot of people who are making the constitutional and pragmatic arguments who really secretly want to make the ideological argument and very often do.
	The ideological argument is that America is bad, that when America involves itself in foreign policy, that we are doing something evil and immoral, that our enemies, our geopolitical opponents, never have their own philosophy or their own interests.
	They are always, in every case, driven by American blowback.
	That we do something, that's the only reason people are bad.
	The only reason people in the world are bad is because America did a bad thing to them and then they get bad.
	That, of course, is ignorant.
	It is stupid.
	It is wrong.
	Civilizations have different interests.
	Countries have different interests.
	Those countries are driven by interests that are not always about America.
	Iran pursued regional domination in spite of what America was doing, not because America was a threat to Iran.
	Iran decided that it wanted to obliterate Israel, that it wanted to wipe Saudi, by the way, from the map, that it wanted to take control of Yemen, not because of America, because that is the Iranian goal.
	Russia is invading Ukraine because that has been their long-standing policy, not because Ukraine was moving in a more pro-America direction.
	Russia decided they wanted to invade Ukraine because it has been Russian policy since the 1990s to reunify with Ukraine or at least turn it into a proxy regime.
	Countries have their own rationales.
	That ideological case, again, a Howard's in America hating first case, has been adopted by many on the horseshoe theory, right?
	And there are many people who are sort of masquerading as constitutionalists who are interested in the constitutionality of what Trump is doing or who are deeply worried about the pragmatic effects of this, who were not worried a few years ago when President Trump killed Qasem Soleimani and who didn't seem particularly worried five minutes ago before this all happened when Iran had terror cells throughout the West.
	But now they're very, very worried.
	So again, people's motivations are their own.
	I think that people's motivations sometimes are clear from many of the statements they've made about American history and American foreign policy and whom they consider to be sources on these things.
	However, let's steel man the case.
	Okay, so Thomas Massey, the congressman from Kentucky, he put out a statement, quote, this is not constitutional.
	Now, again, Thomas Massey is basically Ron Paul.
	Ron Paul is a congressman from Texas, who, again, I agreed on on many things when it came to, for example, government spending and the expansion of the federal government.
	And when it came to foreign policy, he was basically an anti-Israel isolationist.
	Thomas Massey is the same thing, effectively speaking.
	So Thomas Massey said it's not constitutional.
	President Trump, of course, responded.
	He said, Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky is not MAGA, even though he likes to say he is.
	Actually, MAGA doesn't want him, doesn't know him, doesn't respect him.
	He's a negative force who almost always votes no, no matter how good something may be.
	He's a simple-minded grandstander who thinks it's good politics for Iran to have the highest level nuclear weapon while at the same time yelling death to America at every chance they get.
	Iran has killed and maimed thousands of Americans, even took over the American embassy in Tehran under the Carter administration.
	We had a spectacular military success yesterday, taking the bomb right out of their hands, and they would use it if they could.
	But as usual, and despite all of the praise and accolades received, this lightweight congressman is against what was so brilliantly achieved last night in Iran.
	Massey is weak, ineffective, and votes no on virtually everything put before him, Rand Paul Jr., no matter how good something may be.
	He is disrespectful to our great military and all they stand for, not even acknowledging their brilliance and bravery in yesterday's attack, which was a total and complete win.
	And then he continues to attack him, suggesting MAGA should drop this loser, Tom Massey, like the plague, and that he's going to put significant efforts into primarying Thomas Massey.
	Of course, Massey is joined in his supposedly constitutional objections by Representative Rocana of California.
	He says Trump struck around without any authorization of Congress.
	We need to immediately return to D.C. and vote on Representative Thomas Massey and my war powers resolution to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war that is joined as well by AOC.
	So first of all, let's talk about this constitutional point.
	This idea that the War Powers Act somehow prevents the president of the United States from engaging in a one-off strike.
	It's absolute sheer nonsense.
	It is not true.
	First of all, there is serious doubt as to whether the War Powers Act, the War Powers Resolution passed by Congress in 1973, is even constitutional.
	It may, in fact, violate the Article II prerogatives of the President of the United States.
	Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says, quote, the president shall be commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States and of the militia of the several states.
	So again, he is commander-in-chief.
	Only Congress has the power to declare war under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. But did we declare war against Iran?
	Is there a war against Iran?
	So first of all, one-off airstrikes do not mean a full-scale war against a country.
	They don't.
	If that's true, then we've been at war many, many, many, many times since World War II, all across the globe.
	But that is not what war constitutes.
	The Supreme Court has said so.
	The war powers resolution requires, quote, in the absence of a declaration of war, the president report to Congress within 48 hours after introducing U.S. military forces into hostilities, which must end within 60 days unless Congress permits otherwise.
	Now, there's only one problem.
	Do you think the United States is engaging in 60 days of on-the-ground hostilities with Iran?
	We barely engaged in 37 hours of hostilities with Iran.
	Does this amount to a war powers resolution violation that is quote unquote unconstitutional?
	Truly, like one-off airstrikes, done in the immediate interest of the United States.
	And it was immediate because apparently the United States was coordinating with Israel to open the airspace so as to provide zero threat for the B-2 bombers we were flying in.
	So it's an immediate opportunity.
	President Trump took it, and now he's done.
	That is what he has said.
	As far as the notion that there is a violation of the War Powers Act right here, that is really, really silly.
	According to the Congressional Research Services, presidents have taken a broader view of the commander-in-chief power to use military force abroad.
	They have variously asserted sources of authority and other statutes that do not specifically cite the War Powers Resolution.
	There are many times in the past that we have passed authorizations for use of military force.
	The first AUMF was passed by Congress in 1798 during a quasi-war with France.
	We did not declare war against Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991.
	We had an AUMF.
	We had one in 2002 with regard to Iraq.
	We had one, of course, with regard to Afghanistan.
	In 2017, President Trump ordered missile strikes against Syria after a chemical warfare attack.
	And that was, of course, felt permissible by the courts under that 2002 AUMF.
	Biden also cited the AUMF in 2002.
	And the same Article II power is asserted in taking military actions against Iran-backed militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea.
	I don't remember many of these congressmen sounding off about all of this at the time.
	So the constitutional objections here, effectively non-existent.
	Okay, then there is the pragmatic perspective.
	These are people who suggest that the blowback is going to be the real problem.
	And here you have people ranging from Marjorie Taylor Greene, that great intellectual like from Georgia, quote, let us join together and pray for the safety of our U.S. troops and Americans in the Middle East, of course.
	Let us pray we are not attacked by terrorists on our homeland after our border was opened for the past four years and over 2 million gotaways came in.
	Of course, let us pray for peace.
	But of course, the idea here is that if there is a terrorist attack, that is somehow President Trump's fault for getting rid of Iran's nuclear program.
	Here is the problem.
	Iran has been pursuing terror attacks, including, again, the attempted assassination of the current president of the United States for decades at this point.
	They have planted terror cells all throughout the world.
	If the idea is that DAP buys Iran impunity, Iran can now act with complete impunity all over the globe, pursue nuclear weapons willy-nilly, and that somehow that means you can't do anything about it, then what is the purpose of American foreign policy?
	What is the purpose?
	Again, I'm not saying there's no risk that attends to taking action.
	I'm saying that the greater risk would be a nuclear-armed Iran with terrorist cells all across the West.
	That's the bigger risk.
	Ben Rhodes, the complete buffoon from the Obama administration and the architect of his absolute sheer garbage foreign policy, particularly with regard, again, Ben Rhodes, top foreign policy advisor to President Trump.
	Ben Rhodes is a trash heap.
	This guy, his nickname in the White House during the Obama years was Hamas.
	I'm not even kidding.
	He put out a statement, quote, Trump's message to the world.
	If you have nukes like North Korea, I'll trade love letters with you.
	If you don't, I'll pull out of agreements you're keeping and bomb you with during diplomacy.
	Just devastating to nonproliferation.
	I'm sorry that Ben Rhodes' fantasy world has been dissolved and destroyed, in which he and his magical agreement, that by the way, would have let Iran have a clear pathway to a nuclear bomb after 10 years.
	That would be like this year, the pathway to the nuclear bomb would start.
	That that got destroyed by President Trump in one airstrike.
	I don't recall the Obama administration doing a good job with North Korea, do you?
	I don't recall that the North Koreans acting wildly differently than they did under President Trump.
	So those are the so-called pragmatists who some, I have to say, some seem to be hoping that something bad will happen to justify their opposition to the strike.
	And here you have to include people like Representative Hakeem Jeffries.
	Hakeem Jeffries put out a statement as well, quote, Donald Trump promised to bring peace to the Middle East.
	He has failed to deliver on that promise.
	What a scumbag.
	Trump failed to deliver on that promise.
	Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
	They've had an ongoing hot war with Israel for almost two years via proxies from seven different countries and Iran directly.
	And Trump has failed to deliver on the promise?
	Joe Biden created this.
	Barack Obama created this.
	Donald Trump ended this.
	Hakeem Jeffrey says the risk of war has now dramatically increased.
	I pray for the safety of our troops in the region who have been put in harm's way.
	What do you mean the risk of war has dramatically increased?
	The war has been ongoing since October 7th.
	It was going on before that with all of these terrorist proxy groups all over the region and the world.
	Jeffrey said, President Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force.
	Yeah, Joe Biden, I just have two words.
	Where was Hakeem Jeffries complaining about Joe Biden's use of the AUMF of 2002 in order to pursue military strikes against a wide variety of Iranian-backed foes and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East?
	First, the Trump administration bears the heavy burden of explaining to the American people why this military action was undertaken.
	He explained, they're pursuing a nuclear weapon.
	We had good intelligence to suggest that.
	The IAEA itself said they were pursuing a nuclear weapon effectively.
	And Trump bombed them.
	That's the end of it.
	But again, this is the supposed pragmatic concern that is actually, in reality, something else.
	It is, in fact, a latent and not so latent belief that America's foreign policy is inherently bad, that America is the nefarious actor in the world.
	It's wrong and it's stupid.
	One of the foremost articulators of this perspective would be Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas.
	So fresh.
	She's even fresher and facer, as I have said, than the venerable AOC, who's now an elder of the Democratic Party.
	Jasmine Crockett put out a 20-minute, I know, we watched it so you didn't have to.
	She put out a 20-minute Instagram post complaining about President Trump's military strike on Iran taking out their nuclear facilities.
	Here is one of the great minds of our time.
	This is the takedown.
	Everything since he has stepped into office has done nothing other than put us in harm's way.
	And there have been reporting about one of our special planes.
	Our special plane.
	How it recently left Louisiana and it had landed in D.C. And basically, if there is a nuclear war, the situation is that, well, he can be up in the air and sustain whatever.
	This guy doesn't care about us.
	And frankly, he should not be in our Oval Office when everything that he does is literally against everyone.
	Not just those that opposed him, but those that actually support him as well.
	I don't even know what she's talking about.
	I don't even know what there is to take down there.
	We sent our special planes.
	You mean B2s?
	Is that what you call it?
	The special plane?
	Yeah.
	I don't even know what to take down.
	Honestly, we were going to do a whole takedown segment.
	I don't know what to take down.
	She's not even speaking inarticulate sentences.
	Jasmine Crockett, this lady is considered one of the chief influencers in the Democratic Party.
	Let's listen to her continue.
	I know.
	We must.
	We must soldier on.
	So, first of all, if you're scared, that means that you truly understand the gravity of this situation.
	Second of all, I'm going to say this.
	We all need to be very cognizant and move in a way in which we literally have our heads on swivel because I personally believe that there are always people in this country that do not like us.
	And we know that we were caught off guard with 9-11.
	I don't know what is going to happen going forward, but I can tell you that it is very important for you to be very cognizant of your surroundings and to be very mindful of large gatherings.
	Okay, so I'd just like to point out at this point, she's a backer of Joe Biden's open border policy.
	If you like the idea of people who don't like our country and our country, you can blame Jasmine Crockett and people in her party.
	She is forcefully opposing President Trump's plans to deport all of these folks who are here on visas who hate the country.
	The same Democrats celebrating the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Colombia protester slash riot inciter.
	Those same people are the people who are complaining that now there's a terror threat in the United States.
	But how did that terror threat get here?
	What can we do about it?
	And then we do something about it and they complain about it.
	So maybe you should back Secretary of State Rubio in trying to deport the people who hate the country.
	Maybe you should support ICE.
	Maybe you should support the president of the United States in trying to target and remove all of the people who despise the country and want to kill Americans.
	But no, no, of course not.
	I'm not saying these things because I'm a Democrat.
	I'm saying these things because I am a black woman in America who just happens to be educated enough to know what the law is.
	And I can tell you that while some people want to disparage my credibility and act as if I don't know what I'm talking about, I can absolutely guarantee to you that if you Google war and authority and Constitution, you're going to see Congress.
	And this thing that's like on my chest tells you that I am a member of Congress.
	Wow.
	So did you know that she's wearing a necklace that says that she's a member of Congress?
	So that means that it's going to end up on her.
	If this is what the Democrats have to offer is this incoherent nonsense and that is their comeback to the president engaging in a singular strike in terms of magnitude and effect.
	Again, one of the most steadfast and clever moves I've seen a president make.
	Good luck to the Democrats.
	Good luck.
	Good luck.
	This is the best you've guys got.
	I'm astonished.
	Absolutely astonished.
	Joining us online is Professor Victor Davis Hansen.
	He is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
	He specializes in classics and military history.
	Of course, he is also the author of many great books, including the seminal book, Carnage and Culture.
	Professor Hanson, thanks so much for taking the time.
	Really appreciate it.
	Thank you for having me.
	So let's begin with the obvious.
	President Trump made what is, to me, one of the most audacious calls here I've ever seen a president make.
	It took a tremendous intestinal fortitude for him to do what he did.
	Obviously, him making the call in the face of not only domestic opposition on the left, but some domestic opposition on the right and international community that is completely spineless and useless when it comes to this sort of stuff is pretty amazing.
	But I think that the biggest thing here is that President Trump declared a contained mission that he sought to enact in the very best of circumstances.
	And it seems to me that he played this about as well as a human being could play this.
	Yeah, I think he did.
	I think it's very different than the 1991 bombing or the 2003 bombing or the misadventure in Libya than 2011.
	Those were all prequels for continued operations to get Saddam out of Kuwait or to remove Saddam in the later Gulf War or to have regime change in Libya.
	This was a confined, well-defined operation just to get rid of these nuclear facilities.
	And so now it's up to the Iranians.
	And by the way, it wasn't an easy operation.
	And we know that the Middle East is the graveyard of administrations.
	The failed rescue mission destroyed the Carter administration.
	I think the failed withdrawal from Kabul destroyed the Biden administration.
	It was 50% approval until then.
	And we know what happened to the Bush administration.
	So it took a lot of guts to order it.
	It was a very difficult, complex operation.
	And I don't think the critics, if you survey all of the critics, there's much to say.
	I mean, the MAGA people are not going to go anywhere.
	I mean, otherwise they'd agree with 85% of the Trump agenda.
	Even Tucker Carlson said if it was true, and it is true, that Iran tried to kill Trump, he would support an attack on Iran.
	So they're kind of incoherent.
	And the left, they're squeaking a little bit about constitutionality and War Powers Act.
	But these are the same people That destroyed Libya over five years.
	And remember that Barack Obama, the last day he was in office on January 19th of 2017, he ordered B-2 bombers without congressional authorization to attack Libya.
	So you just don't see any coherent logical opposition to what Trump did.
	So let's talk about that for a minute, because I think that so much of this was based on a complete misconception of whatever the Trump doctrine is.
	I'd said before that the Trump Doctrine is peace through strength, but you only utilize that where an American interest, a core American interest is at stake.
	And President Trump had said for decades at this point that a core American interest was Iran not becoming nuclear.
	He then proceeded to do what many American presidents have not done, give Israel the green light to go ahead and do what they needed to do in Iran.
	They essentially cleared the entire airspace for the Americans before we even got there.
	They did extraordinary work on the ground with Mossad.
	They took out an enormous number of missile launchers.
	They took out much of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, many of their nuclear scientists before we even arrived on the scene.
	And meanwhile, President Trump sort of sat aside and allowed them to do that.
	And he only came in and used the big American boot, the hammer, as he said, the midnight hammer, as the operation was called, when it was absolutely necessary.
	As you say, I don't even understand the sort of right-wing response on the isolationist side, because I was told by many people, including people like Tucker Carlson, that World War III would erupt from this.
	I never understood the logic of exactly how that would have to happen.
	I mean, in order for that to happen, there has to be a chain of events, a cascade of events, requiring supporters of Iran to come to Iran's defenses.
	And that did not seem like that was ever in the offing.
	This seemed, again, almost a perfect utilization of the credible threat of force by the president.
	Yeah, and what we would have expected is the terrorist tentacles to act, but Israel destroyed basically Hamas, and Hezbollah is neutered.
	There is no Assad dynasty anymore.
	They're completely gone.
	There is no Russian presence in the Middle East.
	They're gone.
	The Houthis have cut a deal with us, and they don't want to really get into a war again.
	So there are no Iranian defenses.
	So it's very hard to envision any of these subordinate terrorist groups having the same type of clout that they had before Israel neutralized them.
	And again, China and Russia aren't going to do anything.
	Russia looks at this and says, you know, I don't mind disruption in the Middle East if it increases the price of oil.
	And I got enough problems with Ukraine.
	China looks like this.
	Please, please calm down.
	We get 50% of our oil from the Middle East and the Gulf of Hormone.
	We don't want any of this trouble.
	So for different reasons, they're not going to do anything.
	Trump has really disrupted this Russia, China, Iranian Axis.
	And I don't think anybody in the world, even the worst regimes, really wanted them to get a bomb because they're so untrustworthy and erratic.
	I don't think countries like Turkey and Pakistan even felt comfortable.
	So they're going to talk a lot.
	They're going to criticize us.
	They're going to talk about Israel.
	But privately, a lot of people, especially in the Arab world, are going to be very happy as long as they think the damage was as extensive as first reported.
	What they're most terrified is that we wounded Iran, we didn't finish it off, and they're going to be retaliated against.
	So they're going to say all sorts of things publicly to try to pacify Iran until they're completely assured that they don't pose a threat to them.
	So I'd like to discuss this from a couple of different angles as far as the future.
	So one of the reasons I think it was very important for President Trump to do what he did is not just because he ends, presumably, the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon for the foreseeable future, but also because Joe Biden had destroyed America's credibility.
	The pullout from Afghanistan led directly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
	His sort of half-hearted support for Ukraine, enough to keep them alive, but not enough to allow them to achieve a natural off-ramp or victory, meant that Russia continued to push forward.
	And China was looking with greedy eyes at Taiwan.
	And now after this, if you're China and you're looking at Taiwan, you don't know what to think about President Trump because the sort of idea that the American president was just going to sit by and do nothing in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
	If America had a core interest in Iran not going nuclear, America certainly has a core interest in China not taking over Taiwan and depriving the world of the Taiwanese supply of the superconductors that are relevant to pretty much every American technology.
	So China appears to really be backfooted both because of its disruption in the oil supply, but also because President Trump has, again, restored a level of American credibility that's been gone for basically 15, 20 years since the end of the Bush era.
	Yeah, I think he's restored the same unpredictability, fluidity, volatility that convinced Vladimir Putin during the first administration to stay put for the first time since the Clinton administration.
	And that was very important.
	There's another thing.
	Trump had all he had given them a 60-day deadline, but Israel sort of intervened and fulfilled that threat for him.
	So there was all this talk in the United States about the tariffs and his own foreign policy, the taco talk.
	Trump always chickens out.
	That smear has kind of been laid to rest.
	Nobody's going to resurrect it now because they'd look ridiculous.
	So I think when he said, I'm going to give you one to 14 days, what he was really saying is the moment that'll give me a window to get all the assets in place.
	I'll give 48 hours to see if Israel comes up with any miracle way to handle it.
	They probably won't.
	But then I'm going to act earlier because if he had waited the whole 14 days, each day he waited, it would give them more time to prepare or less surprise.
	So he really did fulfill a threat, and that's going to silence both critics abroad and at home that said that he always chickens out, which he didn't do, but that was the narrative they were employing.
	And Professor Hansen, one of the other aspects of this is the future of Iran.
	So there's been a lot of talk, again, from sort of the horseshoe theory wing of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that suggests that American intervention is always a negative, that this was going to cause the collapse of Iran, and that was somehow going to necessitate the occupation of Iran by hundreds of thousands of American troops.
	Again, I think that is completely insane and specious.
	I saw no evidence whatsoever that President Trump wanted that.
	I see no evidence whatsoever that the Israelis are interested in somehow deploying hundreds of thousands of people to Iran in order to somehow manage a transition.
	That seems, frankly, psychotic to me.
	But it seems as though President Trump has said, listen, whatever happens in Iran next is going to be up to the Iranian people.
	Netanyahu has said the same thing.
	That is the proper solution.
	What do you think happens in Iran next?
	How interested should we be so long as they're non-nuclear?
	It's going to be up to them.
	We don't have a really, nobody has a good record when you bomb a country from the air or even invade, but even bombing them, whether it's hard for the people to rally around the people who are dropping bombs, even if they despise the regime.
	And it doesn't work.
	We got rid of Qaddafi.
	We got something worse.
	We got rid of by the air, mostly Milosevic, we got something somewhat better.
	We got rid of Saddam by the air.
	Maybe you could say now what's finally evolved after all that blood and treasure is better.
	But it's not a clear-cut thing.
	I think the biggest fear that the theocracy would have is coming from the military because they have taken out 20 or 25 of the top leaders that were most aligned with the theocracy.
	And then they have a list of who's next in command.
	If you're a military commander, you're saying to yourself, I've got to be on that list.
	And the guys that are overseeing me and always discipline me are dead.
	And they're dead because they stuck with the theocracy to the bitter end.
	And we've got to explain to the Iranian people that we wasted a trillion dollars over a half century on all of this nuclear facility, all of these terrorist subordinates, all of these sanctions and embargoes we lost in revenue.
	And it was all for nothing.
	So there's going to be a lot of anger at the military.
	And I think if you were logical, some of the military people would say, I'm not going to do this anymore, but we'll see.
	And if there is going to be a regime change, I think it would be probably from inside the military rather than popular folk test on the street.
	So Professor Hansen, the sort of biggest question here, I think, going forward is not just about America or China.
	It's also about the future of the Middle East.
	So clearly, the balance of power has shifted insanely in the Middle East.
	If you had said after October 7th that within a year and a half, Israel would have destroyed Hezbollah utterly to the point where Syria fell, that Hamas would be not only backfooted, but essentially defenestrated, that Iran would be so clear of air defenses that Israeli pilots would be able to fly unhindered sorties above Iran for literally weeks at a time at this point, everyone would have thought you're nuts.
	What it looks like in the Middle East is a new balance of power.
	What does that mean for the Abraham Accords, the future of Israeli-Arab relations moving forward?
	Because if the Middle East has shown one thing, it's that people really like a strong horse over there.
	Yeah, I think all of the Gulf states, some of the North African countries, all of these countries realize that Israel's profile has increased and it's not directed at them.
	The closest, the biggest argument they would have would be with Hamas, but Hamas is basically despised by the Palestinian Authority.
	There is no real...
	The Hezbollah people are despised by the Arab world.
	Iran is despised.
	The only problem Israel has is the same problem it had after the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War later, and then same thing they had on October 7th.
	They get very successful, and then they suffer a little bit of overconfidence and get lax, and they get surprised in the Yom Kippur War 50 years later to the very day they were surprised on October 7th.
	I don't think they're going to do it this time.
	I think they're going to realize that even though they seem invincible now, now is the time to be very vigilant and to not get overconfident.
	So, Professor Hansen, I mentioned earlier about Carnage and Culture, which I think, again, is a seminal work of history and also just general political thought.
	And the main thesis of that book, of course, is that there are dictatorships that often appear as though they have an upper hand on democracies during times of war.
	And it turns out, absolutely not, that citizen warrior cultures tend to rise up when they are stricken, and they tend to absolutely destroy their opposition.
	And I think that what we've watched between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump here is an absolutely perfect example of what you're talking about in carnage and culture.
	Again, you have a group of terrorists who pursues an evil attack on October 7th, and then you have terrorist groups joining in from all over the region, and Israel proceeds to destroy virtually all of them.
	And then President Trump comes in and with essentially one night of airstrikes, defenestrates a 40-year nuclear program in Iran and puts the regime perhaps on its last legs.
	I mean, the thesis in Carnage and Culture, again, was that democracies look weak from the outside, but once you push them, they get real tough real fast.
	I couldn't imagine a better proof than the last couple of weeks.
	Yeah, they have legitimacies because the people they voted for the regime or the power, the government that's in power.
	And that's not true of these other regimes.
	So they don't have any really legitimate, they don't have any consensus.
	So Netanyahu has a war cabinet.
	So he's getting all sorts of views.
	Some of them are self-interested and probably nihilistic, but a lot of them give him ideas and they thrash it out.
	Same with Trump.
	And the side that creates technology, and that's because of Western rationalism and freedom, freedom of dissent, freedom of entrepreneurialism, free market capitalism, all of that freedom creates superior technology and it tends to evolve at a more rapid pace than the people who are parasitical on it.
	I mean, Iran had all the westernized weapons it wanted, from nuclear materials to air defenses to ballistic missiles.
	And they can be very deadly.
	But if the West finally gets aroused and uses the full extent of the people who created the technology, they're much better at it.
	So Iran can say that they had air defenses they imported and they did all of this, but they could never have created a B-2 bomber and sent it 6,000 miles away to send these 30,000-pound bombs down a hole the size of a kitchen table.
	They just couldn't do it.
	It's absolutely unbelievable.
	Professor Victor Davis Hansen, thank you so much for your time and attention.
	Really appreciate your analysis, as always.
	Thank you for having me, Ben.
	All righty, folks, we've reached the end of the show.
	We'll be back here tomorrow with much more.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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