The Ben Shapiro Show - September 02, 2026


The Iran Strategy Is Working. Here's Why.


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

205.3

Word count

1,639

Sentence count

116


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 The Rial is now worthless.
00:00:01.000 The Strait of Hormuz is largely open.
00:00:03.000 Iran is being forced into desultory missile launches.
00:00:05.000 Those are facts, despite the New York Times or the economists' best efforts to tell you that somehow Iran is winning.
00:00:11.000 There's no metric by which Iran is winning.
00:00:14.000 The best you can say is that the United States is not winning fast enough.
00:00:16.000 But the United States is, in fact, winning.
00:00:19.000 We're breaking down the latest updates out of Iran, how the U.S. military is enforcing its control of the Strait, and what President Trump has to say about it.
00:00:25.000 Let's dive in.
00:00:26.000 I spoke briefly yesterday about the fact that the president seems discombobulated and unstrategic.
00:00:31.000 In his narrative approach, a lot of comments are saying, What about the war in Iran?
00:00:34.000 How's that contributing to Republican unpopularity going into the election?
00:00:38.000 And of course, the fact that we are in a war that has now lasted from March all the way until September has confused people.
00:00:46.000 It's the reason why I thought that the MOU and the unilateral ceasefire were bad ideas.
00:00:52.000 If you are going to win the war in Iran, that also requires you to explain to the American people that you actually are winning.
00:00:57.000 And one of the shocking things that's actually happening right now is that the United States, believe it or not, is in fact winning.
00:01:03.000 And there's a reason why President Trump is no longer seeking a renewed MOU with Iran.
00:01:07.000 And the answer is because the United States has successfully reopened the strait to a large extent.
00:01:14.000 Not only that, the United States' sanctions are really biting.
00:01:19.000 The Iranian rial is now 2.1 million to the dollar.
00:01:23.000 Last night, the United States struck Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz.
00:01:26.000 Again, Iran is trying to re control the strait because they've lost control of it.
00:01:31.000 And the United States is stopping them.
00:01:32.000 The president says the strikes are large and powerful.
00:01:34.000 And in retaliation for the Iranians' failed attempt at adding sea mines to the strait, which currently has no mines, they have been completely removed or detonated.
00:01:41.000 And the Iranians shooting eight missiles, all successfully knocked down at our military base in Jordan.
00:01:45.000 If the failed nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level.
00:01:50.000 But it will not be the biggest attack of them all.
00:01:52.000 That is waiting in the wings.
00:01:53.000 And when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
00:01:57.000 Trey Yingst, who is Fox News' Middle East reporter, had a call with President Trump, and he explained what the president is thinking.
00:02:05.000 I just spoke with President Trump, who indicated that if the Iranians respond to these U.S. strikes against their country, the president said they'll be hit much harder.
00:02:15.000 He went on to say today's strikes were a very big hit.
00:02:18.000 And if it goes a third time, they're going to be totally wiped out as a country.
00:02:23.000 Now, I asked the president what was hit tonight in Iran, specifically in the southwestern part of the country next to the Strait of Hormuz.
00:02:29.000 President Trump says a lot of radar and added that they were trying to rebuild the radar systems, and the United States was watching.
00:02:37.000 And then just before they completed this construction, that's when these strikes took place.
00:02:43.000 The president says the USS George Washington, that new aircraft carrier that arrived in theater last week, is loaded to the gills with ammunition.
00:02:51.000 And he indicated that they have enough to continue this fight against Iran, again, if the Iranians do decide to respond.
00:02:58.000 As for any sort of possible agreement with the Iranians, President Trump says, I think an agreement with them isn't worth the paper it's written on.
00:03:05.000 We gave them a lot of chances.
00:03:08.000 He is right about that.
00:03:09.000 Treasury Secretary Scott Besson points out that we are having massive economic success against Iran.
00:03:15.000 Again, you have gigantic, there's video emerging from Iran of lines that are probably miles long waiting to get gas because they have tremendous shortages.
00:03:22.000 Like all the shortages are beginning to bite.
00:03:24.000 Essentially, there's nothing left in the country.
00:03:27.000 And now it's only a matter of time until the regime is faced with some sort of internal challenge.
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00:04:34.000 Here was Scott Besson talking with Larry Kudlow about all of this.
00:04:38.000 Well, Larry, to be clear, the economic outcomes could not have happened without the initial kinetic success.
00:04:47.000 Yes.
00:04:48.000 So, you know, kinetically, we destroyed their Navy, we destroyed their Air Force, a large portion of their missile and drone inventories, and more importantly, Probably 85 or 90 percent of their factories that have the ability to rebuild those.
00:05:03.000 So, they have been extreme, they are in extreme distress militarily, but financially, we are starting to see.
00:05:14.000 You interviewed me at the Economic Club of New York in the spring of 2025, and I said, we are going to collapse the Iranian currency.
00:05:23.000 It was at 800,000 to the dollar.
00:05:25.000 It's shot through 2 million now.
00:05:28.000 So, they don't have access to hard currency.
00:05:30.000 Inflation is through the roof.
00:05:33.000 Now, he is right about all that.
00:05:35.000 Again, the administration needs to explain what's happening in Iran and how the United States actually is winning at extraordinarily low cost against a key American opponent.
00:05:43.000 Besson, by the way, points out that the Strait of Hormuz won't even be a choke point in a couple of years because everybody is building pipelines that go the other way.
00:05:52.000 We could see the Iranians are trying to use the Strait of Hormuz as a choke point.
00:05:56.000 It's not a choke point for the U.S., but it is a choke point for many other countries.
00:06:03.000 But that will be bypassed in two years.
00:06:06.000 In two years, the Strait of Hormuz will be like a worthless piece of water that the oil will be going on pipelines across land.
00:06:18.000 So, again, there's a lot that the Republicans can say going into 2026.
00:06:22.000 And one of those things is that actually Iran is losing.
00:06:26.000 And that needs to be repeated.
00:06:28.000 And the president put out a statement I'm not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported.
00:06:32.000 I couldn't care less if they signed a worthless to them agreement.
00:06:34.000 I like our position now much better with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait and their economy totally collapsing.
00:06:39.000 They're just playing out the inevitable.
00:06:41.000 When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?
00:06:42.000 Now, obviously, it's easy for the president to say that, given the fact that last time the Iranian people rose up and tried to fight, 50,000 of them were murdered in the streets.
00:06:51.000 But there aren't going to be a lot of choices for the Iranian people in the very near future because when everything runs out, how does the Iranian regime pay its own fighters, for example?
00:07:00.000 Now, it is being reported that Iran is seeking help from wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, Russia.
00:07:04.000 Because it turns out the Russians, as always, are the bad guys.
00:07:07.000 They're not our friends.
00:07:08.000 They're not wonderful Christians who are looking to simply.
00:07:11.000 Enforce rigorous sex roles or anything like that.
00:07:13.000 The Russians are a nefarious force in the world.
00:07:15.000 According to the Financial Times, Russia has been secretly supporting Iranian missile development since 2023.
00:07:21.000 And the goal was to help Iran develop missiles capable of taking out U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in the Middle East.
00:07:26.000 So if we had waited around for long enough, they would have ended up with that kind of weaponry.
00:07:30.000 They had apparently tried to develop a ramjet propulsion system that would allow Iranian missiles to fly at several times the speed of sound.
00:07:38.000 That would give Western air defenses less time to react, increasing the impact of such an attack.
00:07:41.000 So again, the Russians were perfectly willing to help out throughout all of this.
00:07:45.000 Russia, Iran, China, they stand behind all of the world's major conflicts at this point.
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