VDH Predicts a US Victory

A summary of military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s perspective on Gulf War 2026:

Victor Davis Hanson has spent fifty years studying how wars end. When he says the tide is turning, it’s worth listening to why.

His argument isn’t based on what the Pentagon is saying. It’s based on how everyone else is behaving.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀. VDH’s rule: Europeans never agree to go anywhere near a conflict unless they think the winning side has already been determined. They didn’t help in the early days. Now they’re starting to move. That movement is not idealism. It’s a calculation. They’ve looked at the battlefield and decided which way this ends.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗼-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris — these governments have survived for generations by reading the regional climate with precision. When they expel Iranian military attachés, when they intercept Iranian missiles over their own capitals and say nothing about American strikes, when the UAE reaffirms its $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the United States mid-war — they are not making ideological statements. They are placing bets. And they are betting on the United States.

𝗔𝗹 𝗝𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗮. This is the one that should stop you cold. Al Jazeera — the Qatari state media network, historically critical of American military action, the network Tucker Carlson and the anti-war right love to cite against Israel — is now calling the U.S. bombing campaign brilliant and effective, and saying it has been underestimated. When the media outlet of a nation that hosts both the largest American air base in the Middle East and a Hamas political office starts praising American military effectiveness, the message is unmistakable: 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘯.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. A-10 Warthogs and Apache helicopter gunships are now flying strike missions in Iranian airspace at will. VDH’s point: you only deploy those aircraft when there is effectively no air defense left to threaten them. They are slow, low-flying, close-support platforms. Their presence confirms what the Pentagon has been claiming — Iran has no meaningful air defense remaining.

Iran’s strategy now is rope-a-dope. Run out the clock. Wait for American public opinion to shift. Hope the midterms create political pressure on Trump to stop. It is the only play they have left.

VDH’s conclusion: if Trump sees it through — and he believes he will — the regime falls. Not in years.

I am deeply skeptical. I will also point out that the track record of military historians has been uncharacteristically poor in recent years. VDH predicted a quick Russian victory in 2022, then predicted a Korean-style long-term standoff. Both Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind predicted Russian defeats in Ukraine. The reason is not because these are not smart, very well-educated men, but because the changing nature of warfare is very difficult for those who are experts in the previous forms to correctly read.

5GW, which is drone warfare, is a very different kettle of fish. So I don’t think these past signals necessarily mean very much at all, although it may explain why the US strategists are confident enough to send a pair of Marine Expeditionary Units to attack Iran on the ground.

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OpenAI vs Anthropic

As is usually the case, the big two of AI are rapidly taking shape, with the only real question being who will play the role of the number three spoiler, Grok, Gemini, or some as yet unknown player.

Both companies are now building AI that acts inside applications rather than generating text about them, and six launches in eight days confirm that the two labs have arrived at the same conclusions about the future of their products.

But as the capabilities of their tools approach parity, everything else about these rival titans is rapidly diverging. In the span of three weeks, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history and signed a classified-use agreement with the Pentagon. Anthropic simultaneously lost its military contracts and was designated a supply-chain risk, then launched a $100 million enterprise push backed by private equity talks.

In January, this publication argued that OpenAI and Anthropic had chosen fundamentally different financial strategies. What we are seeing now is a concrete expression of those strategies. How each company is financing itself is now shaping its trajectory more than anything it ships…

As ChatGPT and Claude approach functional parity, enterprise customers are gaining the freedom to choose between them based on whom they wish to buy from rather than which tools they need. Upstream cloud infrastructure, vendor commitments, political exposure, and long-term flexibility will become increasingly important factors in any given company’s choice of AI platform.

It’s become obvious that Facebook badly misplayed its hand despite its initial advantages. The $80 billion they sunk into the idiocy of 3D avatars to no avail, including rebranding the company around it, would not only have gone a long way into AI investment, but is likely to go down in business history as one of the all-time corporate catastrophes with Blackberry ceding the mobile phone market to Apple and Bill Gates failing to notice the importance of the Internet in The Road Ahead.

It also underlines the falsity of the idea that Zuckerberg was ever a technological boy genius rather than the CIA catspaw that everyone now understands he and the founders of Google were. Anyhow, read the whole thing there.

In other AI-related news, I’m very pleased to observe that Claude’s one-million-token context window is now available through the web interface as well as through the API. I’m already making excellent use of that, as it should reduce translation time by as much as 50 percent.

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Israeli Tail Wags US Dog

It is beginning to dawn upon the Short Fake Trump administration and the AIPAC lobby how disastrous it has been to let finally Israel call the shots for the US military. This is what happens when you hand tribalists who have never in their entire history had any responsibility for actually running a society the keys to the sort of power that is usually in the hands of civilized peoples.

Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid. This of course came directly after Israel had assassinated Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Council Ali Larijani in a strike that was said to have also killed upwards of 100+ civilians in the vicinity, as it leveled the apartment block he was in, and possibly even surrounding buildings.

This led to Iran immediately escalating with strikes against energy targets in both Israel and the Gulf, particularly hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas hub said to be the world’s largest. The strike was successful and was said to have done massive damage to the facility, which took 14 years to build and some experts are writing is irreparable.

But the most significant development from this sudden firestorm is the revelation that the US did not in fact authorize or participate in these unilateral Israeli strikes, despite earliest reports indicating they were done in tandem. Rumors filtered in throughout the day until Trump finally confirmed it himself in a social media rant wherein he appeared to tongue-lash Israel for its impudence, while simultaneously threatening Iran with more barbaric destruction.

Reports continue surging forth about Trump being furious at Israel for igniting this regional firestorm which has wrought economic havoc that continues spiraling out of control. Israel is obviously escalating the conflict deliberately in order to ensure no off-ramp exists, and that US—and preferably its Gulf allies—commit to a total and decisive destruction of Iran.

Israel is doing this via two simultaneous strategies: first by eliminating all the “moderates” and rational people within Iran’s leadership to ensure that only hardliners remain who will push for maximum punishment against the region. And second, by crossing Iran’s “red lines” in hitting its most sensitive economic and energy sites in order to spur Iran’s retaliation against equally critical sites throughout the region to ignite as big a firestorm as possible which can engulf everyone and coerce the entire world into “finishing off” Iran once and for all.

But as even leading neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol have begun to realize, Israel’s actions are at least as likely to inspire the entire world into finishing off Israel once and for all. Especially since everyone knows it is Israel, not Iran, that is the main source of conflict in the region. Even if Iran is defeated, then Israel will immediately proceed to war with Turkey.

The problem is that now that Israel has started this war, neither the USA nor the Israelis can call it off, because no amount of escalation dominance is capable of forcing Iran to stop. And the retardery of Trump threatening Iran for responding to the actions of Israel is astonishing in its pointlessness. If you’re the dog, then you damned well better control your tail.

The USA informed Iran that they consider their military objectives achieved and are preparing to exit the conflict soon, noting that Israel still has some operational tasks to complete before its withdrawal from the war. However, Iran completely rejected this message, stating that it is not interested in its content and will continue the war until it achieves its own long-term goals aimed at preventing the recurrence of such conflicts.

I don’t see what could effectively prevent the recurrence of another such conflict without a) the withdrawal of the US military from the region and b) the cessation of US military support for Israel.

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No Children, No Economy

By the time the next economic depression bottoms, it will be illegal for women to not have children in many countries:

Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:

People aren’t having any children.

US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.

It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.

Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.

The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate – every payday, every year, for four decades – begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.

That’s why the central planners of the world turned toward mass immigration. You need consumers to keep the GDP growth going, and with fewer children, there were going to be fewer consumers. Of course, the problem is that the macroeconomic models don’t account for quality of consumer, so it’s only very recently that the mainstream economists have begun to realize that lending to immigrants from grasshopper cultures is absolutely guaranteed to crash the banking system because none of those loans will ever be repaid.

And this is just on the consumption side. Imagine what lowering IQ, time preferences, and productivity does on the production side, although you don’t need to imagine it anymore. We already know what a calamity diversity and inclusion have turned out to be for the US corpocracy.

Indeed, based on a 2025 Danish study, it may even be necessary to ban paid female employment. Such a policy would indubitably be sexist, anti-feminist, and currently illegal in most Western countries. But no one living in any society that elects to show up for the future is going to care what the norms of a few long-dead 21st-century societies happened to be.

Egalitarianism is already conceptually dead. It won’t be many more decades before people stop believing in it.

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Kill All You Like

Iran insulates itself against the decapitation strategy and forces attrition war on the Epstein Alliance by announcing detailed succession plans for its major government and military roles, each running between 3 and 7 levels deep depending upon the specific role. This is obviously in response to Clown World’s reliance upon decapitation attacks resulting in cheap and easy initial victories, although such victories don’t tend to persist long as evidenced by the failures of the Afghani and Iraqi occupations.

This should suffice to demonstrate to both the USA and Israel that their basic military strategy and core objectives have been rendered irrelevant, and it is time to abandon the bellicose rhetoric and realize that they are not even capable of winning this war.

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The 4-Day War

I remembered the US-Iran war was only supposed to last four days when it first kicked off, but it’s become very hard to find any references to those statements now that the war is approaching its third week.

The United States government had told Turkey through official channels that the war on Iran would only take four days, Asli Aydintasbas, a Washington-based Turkey expert, said during an interview on Sunday.

“Turkey and some of its allies were told, through official channels, that this operation would take days and be completed in four days,” Aydintasbas, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview with the Serbestiyet news site. “You cannot tell a Nato ally that you have made a four-day plan and then extend the operation to 14 days. In a sense, this was also a betrayal of the regional countries.”

This is why I barely pay any attention to the mainstream media anymore. Not only are you not informed correctly, you’re constantly being gaslit about what the media itself said the day before.

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Even Nukes Don’t Win Air Wars

Larry Johnson points out the historical failure of a much more intense air war on Japan and its consequences for the probable failure of the Epstein Alliance’s war on Iran:

Anyone who thinks a massive bombing campaign will compel the Iranians to surrender and dump the mullahs, does not know the history of Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945. The US bombing of Japan started in earnest in March 1945 and continued through August 8, 1945. The conventional bombing killed an estimated 500,000 Japanese — mostly civilians. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August added as many as 226,000 to that macabre sum. Yet, it was not the bombings alone that prodded Japan to surrender… It was the Soviet entry into the war that forced Japan to surrender.

In doing this comparison, consider this: Iran is almost 5 times the geographic size of Japan, and Iran has 91 million people compared to Japan’s population in January 1945, which was an estimated 72 million.

Not only that, but the Japanese had been actively trying to surrender for six months before Hiroshima. Iran, on the other hand, has made it very clear that the US and Israeli militaries can kill as many mullahs and generals as they like and it won’t even slow down the Iranian missile onslaught.

The best thing Trump can do is declare victory and exit the Middle East. Israel is not the USA’s responsibility, defending it is not in the US national interest, and regardless of what happens, it will be much less of a problem if the USA stops funding it. The fever dreams of the Greater Israel Zionists is what caused this war, and Americans are no more concerned about the Zionists being wiped out than they were about the Nazis being wiped out.

Zionist != Israeli. Israel does have a right to exist, but so do the Palestinians and the Arab tribes. Israel has absolutely no right to the so-called “Greater Israel” which is far more expansive than any amount of Middle Eastern territory ever controlled by an Israeli or Judean king.

But appeals to historical claims are irrelevant. Iran is not going to surrender and Iran is not going to stop bombarding both Israel and US bases until its demands are met. The short fake Trump should be offering Iran a deal it can’t afford to pass up, not simultaneously declaring victory and crying for help from the Swiss Navy.

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A Notable Resignation

While the Epstein Alliance is trying to win an air war by assassination and cover up the much-rumored death of the war’s primary architect, principled Americans are refusing to continue serving the Fake Trump administration’s Israel-First agenda:

President Trump,

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.

In your first administration, you understood better than any modem President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS.

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.
Joseph Kent, Director, National Counterterrorism Center

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if we start seeing principled generals and admirals soon following suit. This is not America’s war. This is quite literally Israel’s war and it was beyond stupid for the US military to get involved in a military contest that it never had any reasonable chance of winning in the aftermath of the failed occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Remember, those failed occupations represent the optimal ceiling of a war with Iran. The war is undeclared, unconstitutional, and extremely unpopular with the American people. No amount of rhetoric, appeals to Christian Zionism, or false flags was ever going to change that, or change the fact that the global respect for the US military been significantly, and perhaps permanently, damaged.

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Aegis Destroyer Reported Sunk

There are a number of reports that the USS Carney has been sunk after being struck by an anti-ship missile. The sinking has not yet been confirmed, but the details of the report of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer going down in 23 minutes are very precise.

Centcom has not yet confirmed the loss of the ship, although based on the extreme censorship being practiced by the Epstein Alliance, it’s unlikely that it would be confirmed anyhow. We may not know for weeks or even months how badly the US Navy and Air Force are being damaged by the Iranian forces. The fact that the few assets that can’t be hidden are badly damaged while all the assets that can be are reportedly almost entirely unharmed tends to indicate that the losses are considerably worse than are being admitted.

There are also reports that Israel has managed to kill a few more replacement leaders, including the security chief Larjani, despite the complete failure of the decapitation strike strategy.

Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani has been assassinated in an overnight strike by the IDF, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has claimed. Tehran has not confirmed the top official’s death. The Israeli military has also reported having killed the commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary force, Gholamreza Soleimani, and other high-ranking members of the group.

I don’t know how or why anyone is going to be impressed by a military continuing to pursue a strategy that not only doesn’t work, but doesn’t appear to even slow down the other side’s ability to continue escalating the war.

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Why the US Navy Retreated

It’s not just because there is a real risk to their ships. It’s because the Epstein Alliance no longer has reliable air superiority to risk entering Iranian airspace:

Russia just delivered a $900 million integrated weapons package to Iran.

  • 4 S-400 battalions with 384 missiles
  • 24 Iskander-M launchers threatening every US base in the Gulf
  • 8 Bastion-P coastal systems with 64 anti-ship missiles
  • Nebo-M radar that can detect stealth aircraft at 600km .

The Pentagon has privately admitted: “Assume all offensive operations are now contested.”

Russia just delivered a weapons package to Iran that makes everything America has built in the Middle East over the last 40 years strategically obsolete. Russia delivered an integrated $900 million combined strike and defense architecture that the Pentagon has privately admitted it cannot defeat.

$900 million, 27 cargo aircraft, 14 days of continuous airlift operations flying from three Russian military airfields directly into Iranian territory.

The largest single weapons transfer between major military powers since the Cold War. And the contents of those aircraft changed the rules of engagement for every American soldier, sailor, and pilot operating within 2,000 kilometers of Iranian borders.

Here’s what landed in Iran. The S400 Triumph air defense system, four complete battalions, 32 launchers, 384 missiles capable of engaging targets at ranges up to 400 km and altitudes up to 30 km.

The system that NATO has spent a decade trying to counter and has never successfully penetrated in combat conditions.

The USA and Israel are rapidly approaching the same strategic state that Ukraine is already in, which is that continuing the war only ensures that they will lose more comprehensively. The problem is that Iran is far less willing to make any deal with either the USA or Israel than Russia is with Ukraine.

And it won’t be long before the Asian front activates.

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