Victor Davis Hanson: Socialism guarantees failure and suffering – So why do so many Americans support it?
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News Multiple forms of socialism, from hard Stalinism to European redistribution, continue to fail. Russia and China are still struggling with the legacy of genocidal communism. Eastern Europe still suffers after decades of Soviet-imposed socialist chaos. Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Venezuelaare unfree, poor and failed states. Baathism — a synonym for pan-Arabic […]
The Trump Doctrine: Deterrence without Intervention?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East. From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — […]
The Military-Intelligence Complex
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the […]
Is California Becoming Premodern
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds. Consumers blame the […]
Anatomy of 2020: Weighing Issues, Candidates, and the State of Our Union
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the 20th century, no Congress brought impeachment proceedings against a first-term president facing a reelection. Both the Nixon and Clinton efforts were aimed at reelected presidents, perhaps on the theory that there was supposedly no other means of bringing them to account once they had been elected twice. […]
Our Bankrupt Nomenklatura
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Donald Trump is now in the midst of another coup frenzy that has the Left accusing him of being crazy. But he already took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. It was a simple cognitive exam and he aced it, as would most people. The Left, remember, had called in […]
Our Untenable Alliance with Turkey
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review There are about 5,000 members of the U.S. military, mostly airmen, stationed at the huge, strategically located air base in Incirlik, Turkey, northwest of the Syrian border. The American forces at Incirlik are also the custodians of about 50 B61 nuclear bombs. Data on these weapons is classified, but […]
Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common? In a word, 21st-century higher education. A pernicious cycle begins even […]
Why Do They Hate Him So?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Joe Biden claims he wants to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up. Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) jokes that she would like to go into an elevator with him and see Trump never come out alive. Robert De Niro has exhausted the ways in which he dreams […]
Is America Becoming Sinicized?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Alittle over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The results of Deng’s revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China […]
Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish Ironies
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Outrage met Donald Trump’s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan’s expeditionary forces. Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding and abetting Kurdish terrorist separatists […]
On the Whistleblower Kerfuffle, Imagine a Different Scenario
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Imagine . . . If in early 2015, some White House staffers transcribing confidential presidential calls were disturbed about one conversation that President Obama had with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif. The two allegedly had confidentially discussed the staggered release of some $1.7 billion in withheld U.S. dollars to Iran […]
The Strategies of Targeting Trump
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness There is no logical Democratic explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democratic Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project. After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan […]
Anti-Trump Psychodrama 10.0?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review What do the Kavanaugh hearings, Jussie Smollett, the Covington kids, the Mueller investigation, and now the Trump phone call all have in common? Staged melodrama, media collusion hysteria, progressive demands that justice be served immediately, promises of walls-are-closing-in blockbuster revelations from new witnesses, supposed surprise revelatory documents, fusions between […]
The Madness of Progressive Projection
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Strangest among all the many melodramas of the last two weeks were the blaring headlines that President Trump had dared to talk with the Australian Prime Minister—and referenced the role of foreign governments and in particular Australia in U.S. electoral politics in 2016. Given the hue and cry of […]
Keep It Steady and Cool with Iran, America
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Expect more desperate Iranian efforts to prompt a U.S. military response in the Persian Gulf. Trump’s sanctions have cut off 90 percent of Iran’s oil revenues. Soon Tehran’s shattered economy will be followed by more pent-up domestic unrest of the sort that Barack Obama ignored in 2009, when he […]
Impeachment Coup Analytics
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election. “To defeat him at the polls would do history a […]
Why the Impeachment Frenzy May Only Strengthen Trump
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Contrary to suggestions by some, most Trump supporters are not automatons or blind supporters. What bothers them, and should bother others, about the latest Ukraine hysterias is the familiar monotony of this latest scripted psychodrama. The whistleblower admits to hearsay (“I was not a direct witness to most of […]
The Death of American Citizenship
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The American Founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government, with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens. Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted on the premodern side by the legal […]
Book Review: Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West by Raymond Ibrahim. Da Capo Press, 2018. Pp. 297
Please read this book review from my colleague Terry Scambray // New Oxford Review Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West by Raymond Ibrahim. Da Capo Press, 2018. Pp. 297 We judge individuals by what they say and what they do. We judge cults, religions and ideologies the same way; that is, by their doctrines and […]