Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?
Iranian pro-government supporters participate in an anti-Israeli rally on Enghelab Street to express their support for Palestinians, in Iran on Oct. 18, 2023. Hossein Beris/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Victor Davis Hanson
Updated:
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Commentary

Iran understandably believes it’s riding quite high.

It’s flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb—and might use it soon.

The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies such as Russia and China.

Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it’s feeding the Russian war machine by exporting its own drones.

Tehran proudly supplied and funded Hamas’s savage murdering of Jewish children in Israel.

It eggs on its other pawn, Hezbollah, to launch a reputed 100,000 Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel.

It constantly provokes the United States—mostly by veiled threats to unleash anti-American terrorists in the Middle East and perhaps inside the United States itself.

But above all, Iran is giddy over the appeasing Biden administration.

President Joe Biden resurrected the unhinged Obama administration plan of empowering a “Shiite crescent”—of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, including Hamas.

This U.S. idea of a radical bloc would supposedly birth “creative tension” and thus on autopilot balance the dominance of our friends in Israel and the Gulf regimes with our new Iranian clients. Yet the logical result of such madness was the massacre we saw in Israel.

President Biden put pro-Iranian envoy Robert Malley—now under FBI investigation—in charge of begging Iran to restart the disastrous Iran Deal.

The anemic Biden administration has reportedly replied only four times to some 83 Iranian attacks on Americans.

President Biden lifted sanctions allowing Iran to garner tens of billions of dollars in new oil sales—to be routed to all of Israel’s terrorist enemies.

He sought to pay ransom to Iran to get back five American hostages—at a cost of $1.2 billion per captive and a green-light for Tehran to take more.

The Biden administration restored in aggregate $1 billion in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, despite the long history of radical Palestinian terrorism.

This mollification of Iran also led its appendages Hamas and Hezbollah to believe that if any of them started a war against Israel, then Iran would guarantee their victory and the United States would do nothing—and likely force Israel to do the same nothing.

Yet a delusional Iran still isn’t fully aware how its loud bragging about and support for its client Hamas’s barbaric killing of Jewish civilians have put it into an unprecedented dangerous predicament.

For the first time in decades, there is no nation that can restrain Israel from destroying Iran’s pawn Hamas—not after it butchered 1,400 Jewish citizens while radical Palestinians in Gaza keep celebrating the slaughter and promising more such savage mass murdering.

Iran’s other proxy, Hezbollah, still issues blood-curdling threats to launch missiles. But it privately knows that if it hits Israel with them, Beirut will resemble something far worse than its rubble of 2006 during the previous Middle East war.

The world despises Iran and now finally accepts that it cannot be appeased. Arab nations don’t want Gazan refugees anywhere near them, nor do they want their terrorists whom Gazans one-time voted into power.

Even Europe abhors Hamas’s precivilizational butchery of Israeli civilians.

Russia, Iran’s new patron, will be of little help to it—bogged down in Ukraine and hemorrhaging under sanctions and global ostracism. And Moscow hasn’t forgotten its own long violent history with Islam.

China cares only about the delivery of Middle East oil, calm sea lanes—and injuring the United States.

Otherwise, Beijing has no desire to risk its economy by pushing an Iranian theater war—especially when China has jailed a million Uyghur Muslims in forced labor camps.

If the two huge U.S. carrier groups parked in the Eastern Mediterranean are attacked by either Iranian or Hezbollah missiles, public opinion will force even President Biden to retaliate. And the response will not be street-fighting block to block in Tehran or Beirut.

Instead, it will be a medieval rain of destruction on either or both from the air.

After the Afghanistan humiliation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese flagrant spy balloon mission over the American heartland, 8 million illegal aliens waved in across the southern border, and “woke” hysteria, Americans may have finally woken up to the fact that they dangerously—almost fatally—have squandered prior hard-won deterrence and must reboot.

To play its global jihadist role, Iran must always keep upping its terrorist ante and constantly louder threats.

It assumes the Middle East is business as usual—when it’s insidiously becoming just the opposite. An appeasing President Biden isn’t driving events but being driven by them, whether he knows it or not.

The Iranians have little clue that they and their vassals are one stupid missile volley or one reckless intervention away from a devastating Western response that wouldn’t necessarily be “proportionate.”

And such a retaliation would be welcomed by Iran’s numerous enemies, privately applauded by its small number of supposed “friends,” and largely shrugged off by its even fewer allies.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
Author
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Mr. Hanson has written 17 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” “The Case for Trump,” and “The Dying Citizen.”
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