President Donald Trump insists that Iran wants to make a deal and wants Americans to trust his handling of the crisis.
But there are still analysts who believe that the regime in Tehran is stalling and hoping that it can hold off long enough to where continued high gas prices and the U.S. midterm elections will force Trump to agree to concessions to avert what many see as a looming midterm election disaster.
Professor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at Hoover Institution. He was a recent guest on Life, Liberty and Levin on the Fox News Channel. He says at some point the U.S. has to change tactics.
"There are a lot of ways to stop it because militarily it's not a problem, it's a political problem. I think that the president can find a way to kind of square that circle,” Hanson says.
He suggests that Trump deliver a serious message to regime leaders — believed by many to be its military, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp — through traditional quiet channels, not social media.
“He tells them informally there's going to be a deadline to this nonsense, and you're going to regret it, and we're going to do enough damage to your economy and your military that it's going to take you a quarter century to recover, and we're going to leave a residual force that's going to keep that (Hormuz) Strait open along with the allies,” Hanson said.
Hanson says we can't continue to allow this stalling.
“Because they interpret survival with victory. I know that sounds Orwellian, but they do. Every day that they're still there, they say, ‘see, we took on the superpower of civilizational history, and we're still here, and they couldn't stop us.’ They give no context that all of our restraint is self-imposed. It’s not military. We can defeat them from the air as we were doing, but we've lost almost two months’ time in these negotiations."
Hanson says you can't believe anything the regime says, so it's difficult to negotiate with them.
