2018

Strategika Issue 50: Pakistan’s Partnership with the United States

The United States and Pakistan: Frenemies on the Brink Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Peter R. Mansoor in Strategika. For much of its short seventy-year history, Pakistan has managed to thoroughly mismanage its strategic relationships with great power patrons, regional competitors, and non-state clients. It has […]

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Rough Riders

Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes. The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. George Marshall remains the epitome of understated and quiet competence. The alternative and more controversial sorts are the loud, often reckless and

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What Randa Jarrar Teaches

The following piece is by my colleague, Craig Bernthal. Since Randa Jarrar fired off her disgusting tweet about “the witch,” Barbara Bush, being a racist, I, like other members of the Fresno State English Department, have received about a dozen emails asking, alternatively, how we could have participated in hiring her, and then, what we would

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Revolution and Worse to Come

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block. On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump

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Respect Unearned

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Washington’s self-righteous establishmentarians talk of professionalism when they act unprofessionally. They refer at length to their intellectual and professional pedigrees when they prove incompetent. And they cite their morality and ethics when they possess neither. And then, adding insult to injury, when the public expresses abhorrence at their behavior,

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When to Wage War, and How to Win: A Guide

Victor Davis Hanson // New York Times What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy? The term is mostly an academic one. It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape. “On Grand Strategy,” by John Lewis

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Trump Seeks Middle Ground in Foreign-Policy Balancing Act

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The best course is to use overwhelming military force only when the interests or credibility of America and its allies are on the line. Was the latest round of airstrikes in Syria a one-time hit to restore deterrence and stop the future use of chemical weapons, or was it

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Colluders on the Loose

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee . . . If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington. Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia

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Donald Trump, Tragic Hero

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review His very flaws may be his strengths The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable

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Dueling Populisms

Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Populism is seen as both bad and good because people disagree about what it represents and intends. In the present age, there are two different sorts of populism. Both strains originated in classical times and persist today. In antiquity, one type was known by elite writers of that time

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