Victor Davis Hanson's trajectory is one of the more sad stories in American intellectual life. He was once the most respected military historian in America—a classicist whose books on ancient warfare were required reading for serious strategists, a National Humanities Medal recipient, a scholar whose work appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and National Review back when publishing in all three meant something. His bibliography spans 16 books and hundreds of articles; Carnage and Culture made the Times bestseller list and was read by people who started wars. He was, for a stretch, the kind of conservative intellectual that even people who disagreed with him read carefully.
Then came Trump, and Hanson went with him. Completely, uncritically, and permanently. Over a decade of sycophancy so total it has soiled his reputation among anyone not in the tent. The scholar who once held power to account became its most reliable apologist.
His recent analysis of the war with Iran runs counter to almost every conventional foreign policy assumption, which isn’t automatically a mark against it. Conventional assumptions have been wrong before, and Hanson built his reputation on saying so. The argument’s seductive in its simplicity: remove the regime and the regional architecture of instability collapses with it. No Iran means no funding for Hezbollah, no petrodollars sustaining militias from Lebanon to Yemen, no pipeline connecting Moscow and Beijing to Middle Eastern disruption. He frames the strikes not as a military event but as strategic demolition—one node in a deliberate effort to dismantle the Iran-Cuba-Venezuela axis and, behind it, the broader China-Russia alignment that has organized global instability for 30 years.
It’s a sweeping argument. It’s also a fantasy dressed in strategic language. It assumes the regime's removal produces a stable, friendly successor rather than a power vacuum of the kind that turned Libya into a slave market and Iraq into an Iranian satellite. It assumes proxy networks dependent on Tehran simply dissolve rather than fragment, metastasize, and find alternative patrons—which isn’t what history suggests happens when you decapitate a state. It assumes China and Russia, having watched the strikes, conclude that accommodation’s wiser than escalation, rather than accelerating their own deterrence programs and drawing closer together. It assumes that the Middle East will behave the way a clean historical thesis requires it to behave. It rarely has. The man who spent a career demonstrating that war produces unintended consequence and human catastrophe on an industrial scale is now cheerfully predicting a surgical regional transformation.
What makes this damaging isn’t Hanson alone. A compromised scholar making an overconfident argument isn’t unusual. His analysis gets laundered through a chain of commentators—podcasters, columnists, political operatives—each amplifying the certainty and removing whatever residual qualification Hanson included. By the time it reaches the base, it’s not analysis at all. It’s permission for more strikes, unilateralism, more confidence that history is on the side of whoever is currently bombing.
The platform matters. Hanson is a senior contributor to the Daily Signal, publishing and hosting his own show there—the Heritage Foundation's media arm, reliable and prolific in its Trump cheerleading. He publishes at American Greatness, an outlet that didn't exist before Trump's 2016 nomination and was built explicitly to serve the populist nationalist movement. In 2019, the platform ran a poem titled Cuck Elegy—an anonymous, alt-right piece that the Washington Examiner, no liberal publication, described as "literotica masquerading as a poem," saturated in racist language. Ugly enough on its own. But the editors paired it with a photograph of David French and his wife Nancy—a woman who’d written about surviving childhood sexual abuse. A writer at the same outlet then mocked that abuse repeatedly, even exploiting it to sell her own book. The Examiner called it "rather embarrassing" for Hanson. The embarrassment, if it existed at all, was brief. American Greatness may traffic in shameless propaganda, but it’s influential—and has never encountered a Trump policy it didn't like.
Then there’s the Hoover connection, which is consequential. The Hoover Institution has staffed numerous jobs in Washington for Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Trump's first Council of Economic Advisors chairman Kevin Hassett. Hoover scholars have held private, closed-door briefings with the President's top economic advisers. In 2020, Hoover fellow Scott Atlas became a health adviser to the Trump administration, opposing lockdowns and mask mandates—an intervention subsequently condemned by the Stanford Faculty Senate. Hoover’s a pipeline. When Hanson—the institution's Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow—frames the Iran strikes as strategic genius, that analysis doesn’t stay on the page. It spreads, the Stanford address conferring a legitimacy the argument might not otherwise carry.
Hanson provides the intellectual scaffolding. The Daily Signal clips it. American Greatness amplifies it. MAGA-loving podcasters shed the nuance. His new book—The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement—arrives later this year. The machinery will do what machinery does.
