Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to return to this often contentious subject in the news of why the United States supports Israel.

I must come clean. I am not a Christian Zionist. I feel I’m a Christian, but I have no special advocacy to support Israel because it’s a biblical home of the Jews and, by extension, the Judeo-Christian traditions of which I am a member.

And I can even confess, as a rural resident who grew up isolated on a farm, I don’t recall anybody being Jewish. And I had never met anybody Jewish until I was 18 years old, when I went to the University of California campus at Santa Cruz, and for the first time in my life I met somebody who said he was Jewish.

So, I don’t come to this issue with any particular hidden agenda, whether it’s Christian Zionists—that’s a new term that’s in use now—or as an advocate of Jewish Americans or Israelis. I do it for one reason. I support Israel for one reason: It is in the interest of my country, the United States.

Now, why would that be? I’ll give you one example. In 2012, ’13, and ’14, the United States embarked on a joint missile defense program with Poland and the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe. You know that because in 2012, that same year, then-President Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic right before his campaign that he was willing to be flexible on missile defense in Eastern Europe, i.e., give it up, if Russian President Vladimir Putin would give him space before his reelection. I.e., don’t invade Ukraine or don’t invade anybody, like you did in 2008 with Ossetia.

Both of them kept the bargain. Putin didn’t invade and for two years kept—and Obama was reelected and they removed missile defense.

But what was the missile defense for? It wasn’t to protect us, it couldn’t from Russia’s 7,000 nuclear-tipped missiles. It was designed to protect Europe from Iran. They were paranoid that, unlike us, they were in a range of new Iranian missiles, and Iran was considered hell-bent on getting a nuclear weapon. So, it was in our interest.

Forget Israel, forget anything else in the Cold War vis-a-vis the prior Cold War between Russia and the United States. It was in NATO’s interest to protect the European continent from whom? Iran. And that made sense, didn’t it? Because Iran had killed almost, if not more, Americans than ISIS had or al-Qaeda had.

Al-Qaeda was responsible, via Osama bin Laden, for 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11, 2001. But Iranian Shia terrorists all over the globe had killed Americans. They killed Americans in Beirut in the Marine barracks in the embassy. They gave shaped charges to our enemies in Iraq and probably were responsible for over 2,000 American soldiers dying or being maimed.

So, they were existential enemies of America, and we had taken efforts well aside from Israel to protect our allies and ourself from Iranians and that theocratic, anti-American government.

There was another reason too. We tend to often favor democratic or consensual societies over their antithesis. That’s why all of the NATO governments now are consensual, our closest ally. That’s why Australia—we are a close ally in New Zealand. They are consensual. That’s why we are closer to Canada than we are to Mexico, because it’s more consensual. That’s why we are good friends now with Japan. It’s a consensual government in a way it was not during World War II. We’re a consensual government. We see a consensual government in South Korea. OK.

So, what is Israel? Israel is a consensual government. It’s surrounded by 500 million people of the Islamic world—Shia and Sunni, Iranian and Arab—that aren’t, they’re not consensual.

There’s only one government that is truly a free democratic government, and that’s Israel. So, it has affinities with the United States and interest with the United States that transcends anything to do with the 7 million Americans who are Jewish Americans. That’s just a given.

They are not directing American policy. They couldn’t unless Israel was democratic, consensual, Western, an outpost in a dangerous part of the world that has key resources for global prosperity with oil and, more importantly, is an enemy of our existential enemy that transcends any question of Israeli or Iranian animosity, and that’s the theocratic government of Iran that began its existence by taking Americans hostage and storming our embassy.

There’s another question as well as we have all sorts of quasi-allies, of course, that are not consensual, and we give them a lot of money. We give Jordan over a billion dollars. We give Egypt over $600 million. We give a country that can be very, very anti-American all sorts of help, fellow Turkish member Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Ankara. And we don’t require any prior litmus test that they be constitutional or consensual, but nobody seems to object to all the money we give these countries or all the support.

So, why would you not object for us offering military assistance to Turkey that isn’t consensual, fully, and still illegally occupies Northern Cyprus, but you would object to military assistance to Israel that is consensual and shares exactly the same enemies as the United States does? And these enemies are prior to and not relevant to Israel’s particular enemies. We would not be friendly with the Iranians, regardless of Israel. They took our embassy and they killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans for reasons other than we support Israel.

In other words, it’s in our self-interest to stop Iran from posing an existential threat to Europe, ourselves, from killing American soldiers, and for trying to disrupt and unsettle the entire Middle East, where 40% of the world’s oil is from. And that is well aside from the fact that Israel, the so-called Holy Land, is the foundation, the home, the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That is a reason, but it’s not the only reason, it’s not even the primary reason, nor is the advocacy of Jewish Americans. The primary reason we support Israel: It’s in our cold, hard, self-interest.

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