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May 20, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:51
Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Trump Is Trying to Thread the Needle’ with Israel-Hamas War
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Where you get the tension is in two sections.
The Israelis say, we have emasculated for a year or two Hamas, Hezbollah, we're both working on the Houthis, and we have demonstrated you can go into Iran with impunity and destroy their air defenses.
We have a brief window.
It's now the time to take out all of these nuclear facilities.
They'll lie about it, they'll lie about it, they'll lie about it.
But you cannot deal with these people.
And the Trump administration is saying to them, we agree, but this is contrary to the MAGA covenant.
The MAGA covenant we ran on said no optional Middle East wars, no foreign entanglements, and it's always better to jawbone than to go to war.
That's the MAGA.
That's the J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson group.
What Trump is trying to thread the needle.
So he's saying to Israel, let's just get six or seven months of negotiation.
And the Israelis are saying it's a waste of time.
They'll not honor it, and they'll never give up this thing.
And he said, well, then if they won't give up, we'll negotiate to the point where they have to shut up or put up.
And if you're right, then we have a case to be made to our MAGA base.
We can say, do you want a nuclear weapon with these people?
They're going to threaten Europe.
They're going to threaten Israel.
They'll eventually threaten us.
And they're close with the Russians and Chinese.
And they're vulnerable now.
And we tried to have peace with them.
And we tried to have negotiations with them.
And they shut the door.
So I think that's what the Trump administration is saying, that we have to go through the motions.
You may be right.
And the Israelis say it's a waste of time, and I think sometime in the late summer or fall, they're going to conclude that you can't deal with the Iranians.
But they made the effort, and that was good public relations, and either we or the Israelis or both are going to take them out.
I think that's what will happen.
And that's going to be very controversial, because Trump is, as we said, a transactional diplomat, and he does not want disruption in the Middle East.
He does not want the price of oil to go high.
He does not want increased terrorism.
The Iranians have tried to kill him in the past.
We have an open border, as we discussed with Canada.
And he thinks, you know what?
I can deal with these people.
I killed Soleimani.
Everybody knew that he was a terrorist.
He was responsible for thousands of American deaths during the Iraq War.
Obama didn't do anything.
Even George W. Bush was afraid to get rid of him.
I got rid of him.
And then the Iranians wanted to retaliate and save face.
And I said to them, if you touch one American in Iraq when you retaliate, we're going to take out.
And he said he gave them a list.
You know, here's your harbors, here's your military.
So then the Iranians said, well, we'll notify you in advance.
Just keep everybody in your base.
And that's what happened.
And there's critics of Trump said, well, some Americans had some shell shock.
But basically, we knew the missiles were coming.
We stayed in the base.
And then Iran lied and told their people that they sent a barrage into Iraq to make the Yankee imperialists pay for what they did.
And that's how Trump is transactional.
And there was no war.
But the main point was he got rid of Soleimani without having a war.
I think that's how he operates.
But I don't think that that...
We did it with North Korea as well, and then Biden kind of let up on them.
But I just think if you are on record as Rubio and even Vance and Trump are, that they cannot enrich to 90% and they keep enriching, then there's no other solution.
And it's a very tricky operation.
I think the administration is also not convinced that they don't have bombs.
And they are at other facilities that have either just recently been discovered or there's other ones that haven't been discovered.
They keep talking about all of the places that we know about, but given what we know of the theocracy, there's probably a lot of places where they've been rich, and they may have two or three bombs, and that is also something they're very worried about.
That they could send it in to Israel.
And everybody says, well, Iron Dome will knock them down.
Well, the other day that Houthis sent one in, and it hit almost at the airport in Tel Aviv.
And if that had been an Iranian missile, they sent, I think, 500 total missiles in those two separate attacks.
And everybody said they knocked down 95% of them, but there were about seven or eight missiles that got through.
And if one had been nuclear, it would have been catastrophic.
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