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.

The prognosis of the Iran war is now so couched in politics that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Donald Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the U.S., or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018-19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60-70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it–then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political. This time, the U.S. is not sending Marines to fight house to house in Fallujah or to scour villages on the ground in Helmand Province — losing hundreds in casualties and fighting in circumstances favorable to jihadists and terrorists.

Instead, the administration is restrained in its use of force only by concerns about the war’s effects on the U.S. economy, global oil prices, domestic gas prices, the midterm elections, and the political fortunes of vulnerable Republican members of Congress.

Militarily, the U.S. has choices. The Navy can continue demining the Strait, rotate patrols of U.S. and allied warships through it, allow allied and neutral shipping to pass while blocking Iranian-bound ships, and periodically strike Iran whenever it attempts to disrupt shipping — including clearing its coasts of missiles and drones.

In other words, Trump can flip the Iranian strategy of selective entrance to the Strait, with the key difference that he has the wherewithal to carry out such a calibrated blockade, and Iran does not. World opinion will be with him, for economic reasons and, should Iran seek to stop him, for its breaking the ceasefire and thus justifying the rain of retaliatory bombs that will descend upon it.

Or if Iran restarts missile and drone attacks on U.S. military and allies in the region, the administration can warn Iran that it will lose its oil facilities on Kharg Island as well as dual-use generation plants — until it relents.

Regime change

Iran lost most of its 47-year-old, multibillion-dollar investment in weapons as well as its military-industrial complex.

To rearm will cost the regime dearly — and that vast expense will be unpopular with a restive populace short of food and fuel.

It will be hard for whoever is running the country to reestablish its military arsenals and multibillion-dollar subsidies to Arab terrorists. Indeed, Iran’s subsidized proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — may be left orphaned, despised by the Iranian people, and perhaps even more hated by some of their former Gulf co-sponsors.

The odd myth of Iranian military invulnerability is shattered. And that loss of face, too, will have consequences soon at home and abroad. The Iranian people will further grow angry that the one nationalist argument made by the Iranian mullahs — that at least its half-century, half-trillion-dollar military buildup sent shivers throughout the Middle East, terrified the West, and gave global cred to Iran — has now also imploded.

Winners and losers

The eventual beneficiaries and casualties of the war will become clear over the next three or four weeks, hinging on whether the U.S. concludes that those in charge are worthless negotiators who, if Iran persists in attacks, will have to be persuaded by further force.