Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Trump Way of War’ Is About Settling Scores and Deterring America’s Enemies

‘HUMBLING’: Markwayne Mullin Reacts to Being Appointed Next DHS Secretary  

‘PUT ON ICE’: Jeffries Cheers Noem Ousting, Vows to Fight for Removal of Bondi and Miller

Trump Says Kristi Noem Is Out as DHS Secretary

Trump Says Kristi Noem Is Out as DHS Secretary

Supreme Court Ruling Is Welcome News for Immigration Judges

Democrat Tells GOP to Stop ‘Demonizing’ Illegal Immigrants in Front of Child Victim

Immigration Enforcement Saves Lives

Foreign Adversaries and America’s Classrooms

US Military Power Does Not Match Threat Level, Report Finds

 InternationalCommentary

Next Steps for the US-Guyana Strategic Partnership

 InternationalCommentary

Cracking Down on China’s Trade Cheating the Right Way

‘PUT ON ICE’: Jeffries Cheers Noem Ousting, Vows to Fight for Removal of Bondi and Miller

Democrat Tells GOP to Stop ‘Demonizing’ Illegal Immigrants in Front of Child Victim

Fetterman Joins GOP to Block Iran War Powers Effort 

Democrats Take Heat Over ‘Fake Sympathy’ for Angel Families in Noem Hearing  

What Just Happened in Indiana Could Reshape How Schools Teach—and Test—Students

Why Is Virginia’s Redistricting Referendum on Pause?

Georgia Voters Support SAVE America Act—Even as State’s Democrat Senators Oppose It

Ohio Voters Send a ‘Clear Message’ With Support for SAVE America Act Provisions

US Looks to Gain ‘Complete Control’ of Iran’s Skies

On Iran, House Members Draw Battle Lines After Classified Briefing

Hegseth: Iran Strikes ‘Not Iraq,’ ‘Not Endless’

BREAKING: Trump Says Khamenei Is Dead. What Happens Now in Iran? 

 International Commentary

Russia Operating ‘Systematic Child Abduction Operation,’ EU Ambassador Says

Meet the People Fueling Chaos in Minneapolis, New York, and Beyond 

OH BABY! Couples Could Make Big Money on Trump Accounts

What Comes Next for Venezuela? State Department Official Explains

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Laid Out America’s Comeback While Democrats Sat Silent

International Commentary

Victor Davis Hanson: Another Iran Quagmire Might Mean Big Losses for Republicans in the Midterms

International Commentary

Victor Davis Hanson: The Real Reason Iran Won’t Negotiate

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Cost-Benefit Analysis for Striking Iran

Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Trump Way of War’ Is About Settling Scores and Deterring America’s Enemies

Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show." His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers. Contact him at [email protected].

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

We’ve seen Donald Trump’s punitive action, preemptive actions, in his first term and now in his second as well. And there’s a general pattern here, a Trump way of war, we could call it.

One thing that’s central to all of his action is they’re geostrategic. Pressuring the Panamanians to divorce themselves from China. Making sure the Venezuelan oil does not go to Russia or China by changing the government and kidnapping, capturing, Maduro.

Things like that suggest that the current Iranian operation has targeted China, but it’s a major supplier of Chinese oil. China’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest supplier of consumer goods, material goods to Iran. It supplies weaponry to Iran, and Iran has become a client more of China now than Russia. And it may be lost to China as Venezuela was, and maybe Panama was.

You’re starting to see a pattern. These are wars of reckoning. People say, “Well, why are we attacking Iran?” and Trump’s way of reasoning, he’s settling up old scores. Panama was getting away with murder through a previous administration, maybe including his own, by stationing or allowing the Chinese to have strategic locations on the Panama Canal.

It was time to say no more. [Nicolas] Maduro was getting away with literally murder. Sending drugs, working with the cartels into the United States, sending hardened criminals into the United States as well, illegal aliens. And it was time to say, “You’re not going to cause a Castroite Latin American Communist Revolution. We’re going to stop it.”

And it was past time in Trump’s way of thinking. All of these wars are in that way. Same thing with Iran. They have killed more Americans, as we all have been told, than any other terrorist clique or operation. Going back even before the Iran-Iraq war, before our incursions in the Gulf War.

At the very beginning that government was birthed on the idea of taking American hostages and then subsequently blowing up our embassy, blowing up Marine barracks, involvement in Khobar Towers, using proxies like Hezbollah to hijack planes, assassinate Americans.

It was time, in other words, to even up the score. These take place during negotiations. Notice that Trump was negotiating with Iranians during the summer hit on their nuclear facilities. He was negotiating with them in this current war. He was negotiating with the Venezuelans, and that is his characteristic.

He’s saying to these different entities, “I want a peaceful solution.” And even if he didn’t want a peaceful solution, the idea that he is negotiating lessens the criticism that they are preemptive, or preventative, optional wars. In other words, he can say, “Well, I wanted to make peace, but the negotiations broke down.”

Notice their top-down attacks. They go after [Qasem] Soleimani in the first term, or [Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi, or they go after Maduro or they go after [Ali] Khamenei. The idea is, everybody in the world should be on notice. That the people themselves are not culpable. They are Shanghai coerced by these terrible leaders. And I, Donald Trump, will get rid of the leaders and start with the top rather than the bottom or the people.

And that’s a very successful strategy. Of course, there’s no nation building. Donald Trump ran against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The MAGA base says, “We don’t want forever—optional—wars, especially in the Middle East.” So there is no pretense that there’s going to be a gender studies program on Iran, or there’s going to be George Floyd murals, or there’s going to be a Pride flag over the U.S. Embassy in Iran.

There’s no cultural imperialism. No desire to say we were going to make democracies all over the Middle East. We’re not going to do that, and therefore, we’re not going to have boots on the ground. We’re not going to have ground troops unless emergencies.

There’s a weird exit strategy too, that Donald Trump has in all of these. He determines when the war starts and when it ends. I don’t know if he’s going to be successful in all these cases, but he takes out the Iranian nuclear facilities, and everybody says we’re going to be in an endless tit-for-tat struggle now in the summer of 2025.

And what happens? He allows Iran a performative art hit on American base in Qatar, and then he says, I want to make Iran great again. And that’s the end of it.

After the death of Soleimani, the same thing.

Already, prematurely, perhaps, he’s already talking about negotiations with Iran. And what that does is it sort of dampens the criticism of him. Just as he went to war in the midst of negotiations, he doesn’t say, “Well, negotiations will not work.” Maybe they will. And we can end this, but the war will start and end when he sees as favorable terms to the United States.

An eighth aspect of the Trump way of war: There’s no effort to go to the United Nations. No United Nations, no International Criminal Court, no EU consultation. NATO, we consult with them in matters European, but nobody talked about NATO.

The idea is that there’s very little trust that these platforms that are multilateral have the wherewithal or the ability or the desire to take prompt, decisive action. And they will only clog up the process if you consult them, and you hinge your decision making on a foreign entity.

Nine, there are showcases for U.S. arms. Have you noticed that? Everybody’s talking about the greatest, biggest, strongest warship in the history of civilization, the Gerald R. Ford. New Ford-class carrier, 105,000 tons of displacement, $13 billion, maybe 4,500-manned warship. Very impressive. We’re talking about our new kamikaze, one-way drones that we haven’t seen before.

You’ve seen the maps that the Pentagon has released that have been replicated by the news outlets. They show Iran in the middle. And then there’s American assets all the way in the Indian Ocean. They’re in the Red Sea, they’re in the Mediterranean Sea, they’re in the Gulf of Oman, they’re in the Straits of Hormuz, they’re in the Persian Gulf. And they’re all focused, fixated on Iran.

It’s surrounded. And they want that to be known that only the United States has this type of weaponry and this reach and these resources.

And finally, there’s no, I don’t know how to put it, but he’s not hiding U.S. self-interest. Of course, he talks about it’ll be much better for the greater Middle East, but we wouldn’t have gone to war if it hadn’t been for U.S. interest.

And what is U.S. interest? We’re sick and tired of the Iranians attacking our allies, but more importantly, as the biggest killer of Americans. We don’t want them to hijack planes anymore. We don’t want them to stage assassination attempts in New York or in Washington against either dissidents or foreign entities like the Saudi ambassador.

We don’t like them to capture hostages and torture them. We don’t like them sending lethal arms to kill Americans as they did during the Iraq war. We don’t want them to kidnap people in foreign countries or in Iran and hold them as hostages. We’re just sick of it. And it’s in our interest, in Trump’s way of war, to end it.

Will all of this work? I don’t know. It’s very hard to say, “I’m going to decide when a war starts and I’m going to decide when a war ends and we’re not going to have ground troops, and we’re going to go across the world and settle scores.”

And yet, as we’ve seen before, the Trump way of war worked to get Soleimani, the Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the architect of the Iranian terror state. Mr. Al-Baghdadi, who was taken out and ISIS was bombed, proverbially, into rubble. A clear end. A clear beginning, a clear end.

The Wagner group. What were we going to do with them. This was a Russian entity. We killed more of them than any moment in the Cold War. I think 200 Russians were killed by Americans, and it followed the same script that I just outlined.

We saw the same script during the first Iranian incursion in summer, and now we’re seeing it again. It’s a very strange idea. War doesn’t change because human nature is immutable.

So we know the rules of war, but the actual practice of it, that is not the struggle between humans and political entities to use the force of arms to persuade someone of your own political, cultural, religious material agenda. That’s immutable.

But how you do it. What are the tactics? What are the strategy? What are the weaponry? Have change, and no one has changed them more than Donald Trump.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

‘MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS’: Trump Announces Joint US-Israel Operation Against Iran

Victor Davis Hanson: Another Iran Quagmire Might Mean Big Losses for Republicans in the Midterms

Iranian Foreign Minister Says Progress Made in Nuclear Talks With US

Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE

Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.

The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.

In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.

The Tony Kinnett Cast

The Daily Signal Podcast

© 2025 The Daily Signal Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

We use cookies on our website. By using our website, you consent to cookies.  Learn More .  

© The Daily Signal