The China-Iran-Border Matrix
Victor Davis Hanson // Nationals Review President Trump and Secretary Pompeo have worked the U.S. into an advantageous position with a consistent policy toward bad actors. We are now at a point that even left and right agree that China’s rogue trajectory had to be altered. And while progressive critics of Beijing now are coming […]
America’s First Third-World State
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review ‘Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc. Rather, the […]
When Normality Became Abnormal
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer. Everyone […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Why are the Western middle classes so angry?
Victor Davis Hanson // Bozeman Daily What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s election and the “yellow vests” protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning […]
The 2020 News Cycle Will Look Very Different
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Russia collusion narrative and associated Robert Mueller hysteria are all but over. Mueller’s obstruction of justice narrative involving the non-crime of collusion is ending, too. Donald Trump’s tax-return psychodrama is going the way of the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment and the comical in-house coup […]
The FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion […]
Greece Finds New Footing as a Player on the World Stage
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness ATHENS—After Greece temporarily hosted a pair of U.S. military drones, Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos said last fall that, “It’s very important for Greece that the United States deploy military assets in Greece on a more permanent base.” Indeed, Greece just took delivery of some 70 military helicopters that […]
Is Germany Becoming Germany — Again?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The more things change, well, the more they . . . So it is with the perpetual German resentments of the U.S. Recently German chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us of that German fixation, when she made some astounding statements to the German media that revealed what many Americans had […]
Tired, Boring—and Dangerous—Celebrity Death Wishing
Víctor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Recently, New York writer Fran Lebowitz told Bill Maher on his HBO program that the U.S. government should turn President Donald Trump “over to the Saudis, his buddies—the same Saudis who got rid of that reporter.” Lebowitz thought it was cool to imagine on live television that the president might be chopped up […]
Trump Has Become the Democrats’ Great White Whale
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax […]
Strategika Issue 58: Current U.S.-Israel Relations
Trump And Israel Please read a new essay by my colleague, Barry Strauss in Strategika. The Trump Administration has changed course in various ways from its predecessor when it comes to relations with Israel. Among other things, the current American government has moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the […]
Trump’s High-Wire Act of Reestablishing Deterrence without War
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Donald Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, […]
Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama […]
Federal Rats Are Fleeing the Sinking Collusion Ship
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible. One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump. Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted […]
Victor Davis Hanson: US-China Confrontation Will Define Global Order
The United States is at a crossroads with an increasingly aggressive China, which could define America’s security and the international order for decades to come, Hoover scholar Victor Davis Hanson says. Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, studies military history and the classics. Last year, Hanson won the Edmund Burke Award, which […]
The Epidemic of Electronic Deletions
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review There are lots of ways to adjudicate the present political divide over the collusion hoax. One method might be to see whether those targeted by Robert Mueller had ever begun accusing each other of “collusion” to save their own skins. That did not happen. Even the perjurer Michael Cohen, […]
He Did It, Not Me!
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his mandate of “Russian collusion.” He […]
Our Modern ‘Satyricon’
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower. The novel survives […]
China’s Brilliant, Insidious Strategy
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The Chinese Communist government does not have so much a strategy to translate its economic ascendance into global hegemony as several strategies. All of them are brilliantly insidious. On matters of trade, China is always flexible in responding to critics of its asymmetrical, 30-year mercantilism. In the initial stages […]
Is Russia Preparing A Gas Nuclear Option?
Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory published by Forbes Vladimir Putin is noted for taking surprise action, which confronts his victims with a fait accompli. They must then either accept the new unfavorable status quo or react in a way that they would consider too risky. Putin has employed this playbook in Georgia, […]