This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” podcast from Daily Signal.
2026 looks like it’s going to be the most tumultuous, geo-strategically significant and dangerous year since the fall of the Soviet system and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The whole world is in upheaval. Donald Trump is the catalyst of this. A lot of people, both in his base and his opponents, both here in the United States and abroad, blame him.
I think a few years ago, one European diplomat said, “Well, he’s a bull in a China shop, only he’s a bull in a nuclear China shop.” Maybe, maybe not.
But let’s just review what’s taking place right now. For the second time, we’re bombing Iran, and this time the negotiations clearly were not going to lead to this 47-year problem resolution.
Iran’s theocracy has no intention of stopping nuclear proliferation. It wants a bomb to dominate the Middle East, to intimidate the petro kingdoms of the Gulf, to show its dominance over Sunni Islam, and to destroy eventually Israel, threaten Europe for blackmail concessions and eventually us.
We’ve known that. Every president, all seven of them before Trump, said that, and they were going to take care of the problem or prevent it from exacerbating. None did anything.
Trump tried to negotiate, take out the nuclear facilities, and then he learned that they were still trying to, after the bombing: restore them, expand their Russia, North Korean, Chinese ballistic missile force, ensure that nobody would dare attack them again.
And Trump did. And this time his plan is to remove either now or so detrite the theocracy that it would erode in the next few months by a popular uprising or maybe have a Venezuela solution. Barring that, at least make it inert militarily.
This follows the [Nicolás] Maduro, what do we call it, kidnapping coup. We removed this communist thug, drug lord, shipper of dangerous opiates into the United States, propped up Cuba and was trying to spread the Chávez communist message throughout Latin America. It looked like he was succeeding under Joe Biden. Now the whole world there is different.
Venezuela doesn’t have Maduro. It has a strong government in the sense that they will keep order, and maybe they will have transitions to democracy. We hope so. But they are terrified of the United States that removed their government and told them they put the oil on the world market, they reform their economy, they get the Chinese out, and they will have a bright future.
This coincides with democratic revolutions in Central America, Chile, maybe Bolivia and Peru. We’ll see how those work out. And of course, Argentina.
So it’s a whole new Latin America. It’s experiencing a westernized constitutional system revolution. And again, the catalyst has been Donald Trump.
First, by telling the Panamanians, “We know what you’re doing. It’s not smart for you to do this, to triangulate with the Chinese. If you do it, we’ll take back the canal.” And he got results. And the result is China and Russia are now excluded from the Western Hemisphere.
At the same time, he’s pressuring the Cubans. They have no more subsidized oil from Russia. They know that their drugs—that they are intermediaries in smuggling and shipping to the United States—are being blown up on the high seas. There’s no more Chávez-Maduro free fuel, and their innately incompetent and inert economy is imploding.
And Trump is basically saying, “You saw what happened to Venezuela, you saw what happened to Iran. You’re not halfway across the world. You’re not down in South America. You’re right here 90 miles away from us. And this will be a cakewalk if you don’t try to reform and give your people a choice, an economic liberation, a political liberation, a cultural, social liberation.”
And it looks like they’re going to allow American businessmen, mostly Cuban Americans, to go back in there and invest.
If that happens and you start to see offshore companies, energy development, hotels, tourism, communism will die on the vine.
So what am I getting at? I’m getting at that there’s a world upheaval that Donald Trump sort of took a fuse and he lit it, and things are blowing up everywhere, and everybody is paranoid and crazy, and they’re thinking that he’s a disruptor.
And then we have the Ukraine war, and he has convinced the Europeans that you have to do two things that they don’t understand. You can’t buy energy from Russia. Maybe he’s lifted that because the Straits of Hormuz are closed temporarily. But you can’t subsidize the Russian war machine and then tell the United States that because of your suicidal energy policies, you have to do that. But you also have to have the United States step in and save you.
And so, we’re trying to find a solution, but one of the tactics that Trump is using, that’s very misunderstood. He is trying to say [Vladimir] Putin is a monster. Of course, he is. Don’t trust him. But I wasn’t the one that started this crazy reset. I was the one that got rid of the Wagner Group. I was the one that went after the oligarchs. I was the one that got out of the missile treaty. I was the one that gave offensive weapons to Ukraine, not you.
If that happens and you start to see offshore companies, energy development, hotels, tourism, communism will die on the vine.
So what am I getting at? I’m getting at that there’s a world upheaval that Donald Trump sort of took a fuse and he lit it, and things are blowing up everywhere, and everybody is paranoid and crazy, and they’re thinking that he’s a disruptor.
And then we have the Ukraine war, and he has convinced the Europeans that you have to do two things that they don’t understand. You can’t buy energy from Russia. Maybe he’s lifted that because the Straits of Hormuz are closed temporarily. But you can’t subsidize the Russian war machine and then tell the United States that because of your suicidal energy policies, you have to do that. But you also have to have the United States step in and save you.
And so, we’re trying to find a solution, but one of the tactics that Trump is using, that’s very misunderstood. He is trying to say [Vladimir] Putin is a monster. Of course, he is. Don’t trust him. But I wasn’t the one that started this crazy reset. I was the one that got rid of the Wagner Group. I was the one that went after the oligarchs. I was the one that got out of the missile treaty. I was the one that gave offensive weapons to Ukraine, not you.
If you could solve all of those things in one year, it would be unheard of. It would make [Ronald] Reagan’s achievement of destroying the Soviet Union, although it fell during the successor George H.W. Bush, it would look minor in comparison almost.
Think about this very quickly. This was not necessary in Trump’s political calculus. He had the midterms coming up. Eight or nine months when he went into Venezuela and Iran. That took a great risk to distract attention away from the economy. The economy had been moribund under Joe Biden, and it was starting to pick up, and he was bragging about the low cost of energy.
If you’re just a political animal, what you don’t do right before the midterms is go into two of the largest oil-producing countries in the world and, for the short term at least, ensure their oil is going to be reduced. And yet he took that risk.
And more importantly, he knows how Europe feels about it. Europe is so touchy because they have ruled out basically producing their own natural gas, their own oil. They’re very reluctant to follow the French example of nuclear power. And the result is they’re very dependent on imported oil, and they’re whispering to Trump, “Don’t do this, don’t be disruptive.” So he’s got a problem with this.
And then the MAGA base, remember, says, “No optional wars abroad.” And Trump is trying to say, well, these are using air power. I haven’t used ground troops. This is not Afghanistan. These are going to be short-term solutions to long-term problems. And in the future, if we’re successful, there’ll be fewer Americans abroad because we’ll have a greater number of American allies and friends who will be consensual.
They’ll be ruled by consensual governments. They’ll have free economies. And more importantly, they will have a different attitude or view of the United States, not one as a reluctant weakling or an unarmed or a Joe Biden, Barack Obama appeaser, but somebody who’s very unpredictable but follows up what he says, and they will be more likely to respect and join us. Strength radiates friendship, weakness repels it.
Finally, again, I think we misunderstood what’s going on. There are disruptions all over the world, but three quarters of them are reaching a consensus, an end, some type of resolution one way or the other.
I don’t know how they’re all going to turn out, but there is a good chance they could turn out with the United States in a preeminent position that we haven’t seen at least since WWII.
Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.
