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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mueller at the Crossroads
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017 in reaction to a media still gripped by near hysteria over the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. For nearly a year before Mueller’s appointment, leaks had spread about collusion between Russia and the Donald Trump […]
Five Catastrophic Decisions
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review 1) The Obama administration’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to come into Syria ostensibly to stop the use of weapons of mass destruction. The latter did not happen, but after an over 40-year Russian hiatus in the Middle East, Putin has recalibrated the region, and Russia will be far harder […]
The Ideology of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist. Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten […]
The Limits of American Patience
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any […]
A Response to Kevin Williamson
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the past, I have often enjoyed Kevin Williamson’s essays. Even when I found them occasionally incoherent and cruel, I thought it hardly my business to object to a colleague’s writing. But I gather, under changed circumstances, such deference no longer applies, given that in Williamson’s very first column at The […]
Trump Is Cutting Old Gordian Knots
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed. When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through […]
The New Last Refuge Of Scoundrels
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson famously used that line in an attack on William Pitt for supposedly advancing his agenda under warped pretenses. During the McCarthy era and the 1960s anti-war movement against Vietnam, when leftists were called unpatriotic, they offered Johnson’s line as […]
Strategika Issue 49: The Value of Economic Sanctions
Sanctions: The Record And The Rewards Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Josef Joffe in Strategika Why are sanctions so popular? Because “there is nothing else between words and military action to bring pressure upon a government,” explains Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s long-term ambassador at the UN. It […]
Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Beltway’s sober and judicious foreign-policy establishment laments Donald Trump’s purported dismantling of the postwar order. They apparently take the president’s words as deeds and their own innate dislike of him as disinterested analysis. But is the world really imploding after 70 years of supposed “calm”? (Disregarding the Korean […]
Our Unelected Officials’ Distortions
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review On March 17, former CIA director John Brennan tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . . […]
03/28/2018 Angry Reader
From An Angry Reader: Mr. Hanson, About 15 or 20 years ago, I used to read your articles voraciously. I sent them to fellow graduate students—nearly all of whom were overwhelmingly liberal—in order to give them a jolting shot of truth. That was then, this is now. I recently took a peek at some of […]
Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of […]
Camouflaged Elites
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary. An anonymous and […]
Our Long History of Misjudging North Korea
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review There’s a lot to learn from seventy years of failure to stop the Kim regimes’ aggression. North Korea has befuddled the United States and its Asian allies ever since North Korean leader Kim Il-sung launched the invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Prior to the attack, the United […]