What Exactly Was Iran Thinking—Or Not? › American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson
Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had. Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.
There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East. Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.
The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy. Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.
Hamas has been reduced to a subterranean terrorist remnant.
The Houthis’ tit-for-tat encounters with Israel and the U.S. are systematically turning their Yemeni enclave into an impotent dump. At its present rate, the Houthis will likely soon launch their last rocket at Israel or the Red Sea in a country without fuel, electricity, and ports.
Iran itself, last year in a disastrous air war with Israel, lost its air defenses and is now more or less impotent and defenseless against Israeli air incursions. Its oil income has been slashed by 70-80 percent by the renewed Trump sanctions and ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Israel can destroy all of its oil industry if it wishes and, apparently, send operatives inside Iran itself as it pleases.
Most of the Arab Sunni world is now losing its accustomed fear of Iran. While the weary pan-Islamic solidarity boilerplate of the Middle East remains the same, privately, most Arab nations rely on the U.S. or even Israel to deter Iran—and predicate their own foreign policy on the degree to which they do just that.
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https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/16/what-exactly-was-iran-thinking-or-not/
