Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution’s Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, was named by President George W. Bush today as one of ten recipients of this year’s National Humanities Medals.

Until last year, for some 46 years, Iran enjoyed a North Korea-like reputation in the heart of the Middle East: always unpredictable, reckless, dangerous, inevitably to be nuclear, self-destructive, and nihilistic.

The mullahs came into power after the removal of the Shah and, subsequently, the interim secular socialists.

The theocracy’s only constant with the prior monarchical Iran was that it inherited near limitless oil and natural gas reserves, sophisticated arms, and the Shah’s modernized cities. It controlled the key strategic chokepoint at the Strait of Hormuz and enjoyed a geostrategically critical location between Asia and the Middle East. It fueled Iran’s historical chauvinism and pique that the millennia-long historical preeminence of Middle Eastern Persia was not fully appreciated by its Arab neighbors. So there were lots of natural advantages — and all for the most part squandered.

Under the camouflage of Shiite puritanism and otherworldliness, the ayatollahs proved even more corrupt (and far more incompetent) than the Shah’s entourage. They fought a destructive eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s overrated Iraqi dictatorship and showed they were mostly just as militarily incompetent.

Over decades, they killed and wounded thousands of Americans by bombing U.S. embassies, barracks, and bases in the Middle East–without directly confronting the American military. For years, they sent lethal shaped charge IEDs to the Shiite insurgents to slaughter and maim thousands of Americans in Iraq and to the Taliban to do the same in Afghanistan.

At the first sign of popular protests, the regime never hesitated to gun down thousands of unarmed protesters. And, of course, they were abject hypocrites — hating the West, damning the Great Satan — and sending their pampered children to universities in America. The apparat proved quite earthly in its desire for money, estates, foreign travel, and the good life.

Their general strategies were never hard to follow.

One, the theocrats’ prior familiarity with Americans under the Shah and in exile in Europe bred an irrational fixation with and hatred of the West in general that made them useful proxies for the grand designs of communist and then later oligarchic Russia, and later ascendant communist China.

Two, they were endlessly chagrined that the Persian Shiites had been overshadowed by more populous Sunni Arab neighbors that supposedly lacked their own historical sophistication and more legitimate claims of embodying and speaking for global Islam.

Three, their planned eventual destruction of Israel would ensure that theocratic and Shiite Iran regained its lost prestige and honor by finally accomplishing what the Sunni world had failed to do.

Fourth and finally, they sought to diminish the role of the United States in the Muslim world, drive it from the Middle East, and wage a virtual 47-year opportunistic war against American citizens and soldiers, with help from their terrorist surrogates.

Iran’s zenith in power and prestige came during Obama’s presidency (2009-17), and the so-called “Iran Deal” that they believed would guarantee them eventual nuclear power status.

But far more importantly, their massive acquisitions of air, land, and sea weapons and the empowering of terrorists, coupled with their passive-aggressive claims to victimhood, both scared and enticed former President Barack Obama into dropping sanctions. Soon, he was apologizing for supposed past sins and nocturnally sending them millions of dollars in Danegeld.

But worse by far, Obama thought he had squared the circle of neutralizing the supposed Middle Eastern Iranian juggernaut by envisioning it as an empathetic victim — and eventual friend if not ally.

So by 2017, Iran, for some reason, was considered all-powerful in the Middle East with its missiles, soon-to-be nuclear status, and Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi killers who would murder Westerners and Israelis year after year. For the last seven American presidents, the very thought of challenging Iran militarily had been considered taboo, all the more so after the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And in summer 2025, the Israelis and Americans first proved that Iran was indeed hollow.

So here we are, in March 2026, watching the systematic destruction of the entire five-decade facade of a supposedly invincible Iranian military, the systematic elimination of its theocratic leaders, and the dismantling of the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard terrorists.