The United States could eventually regard Israel as an enemy if Democrats win the presidency and current political trends continue, conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson warned in a Daily Signal interview published Wednesday.
“I can envision a point where Israel will become an enemy of the United States, at least in the eyes of this government,” Hanson said.
Speaking to Tony Kinnett during election-night coverage on Tuesday, Hanson raised the scenario while discussing the prospect of Democratic control of Congress followed by victory in the 2028 presidential election. His warning concerned the direction of a future administration.
“The entire Democratic Party is tainted with antisemitism,” he claimed.
“We will restore Hamas’s funding,” Hanson said, predicting that a future administration would remove the Houthis’ terrorist designation and side with forces hostile to Israel.
He did not identify in that passage which funding arrangements he meant. Hamas is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, and Treasury guidance distinguishes prohibited dealings with the group from authorized humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians.
The Biden administration revoked the Houthis’ terrorist designations in 2021, citing humanitarian concerns in Yemen. It designated the group as Specially Designated Global Terrorists in 2024. The Trump administration restored the separate foreign terrorist organization designation in March 2025.
Hanson urges decisive action against Iran
Hanson also called for further strikes against Iran and criticized the administration’s handling of the campaign, arguing that repeated shifts between negotiations and bombing would deepen Republicans’ political difficulties.
Describing the message he believed Washington should deliver to Tehran, he said: “I’m done talking to you people. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go in there, and we’re going to take the B2S, and we’re going to hit Pickaxe Mountain.”
Pickaxe Mountain is a deeply buried nuclear-related complex south of Iran’s Natanz enrichment site, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.
Hanson’s proposed approach combined further strikes with tighter sanctions, support for Iranian ethnic opposition groups and efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. He argued that Washington should then withdraw from active warfare and allow isolation and internal pressure to weaken the regime.
He said earlier presidents had avoided the risks of confronting Tehran.
“There was a reason that seven presidents flaked out on Iran,” he said. “They all said you had to bell the cat if you were a mouse, but nobody wanted to put the bell on the cat.”
Hanson argued that Trump should have prepared Americans for the scale and risks of the campaign. Describing the case he believed the president should have made, he said: “We’ve got to do it and I’ve got to take a risk because if we don’t, our children will be faced with a nuclear weapon.”
He criticized assurances that the conflict would soon be over and argued that the administration had failed to explain its objectives consistently.
Iran and the economy as tests for Trump
In a separate analysis published in The Free Press on Wednesday, Hanson argued that Trump would retain substantial freedom in foreign policy despite Republican losses, while predicting that Democrats would block judicial and Cabinet nominations.
“He will succeed or fail on whether the economy takes off and he achieves the denuclearization of Iran - and quickly,” Hanson wrote.