The Lessons of the Versailles Treaty
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Treaty of Versailles was signed in Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. Neither the winners nor the losers of World War I were happy with the formal conclusion to the bloodbath. The traditional criticism of the treaty is that the victorious French and British democracies did not listen […]
The Economy, Father of Us All
Victor Davis Hanson // Nationals Review Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news “unexpectedly” and “surprisingly” improves or stays steady — in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent), and a record-high stock market. […]
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why. “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black […]
America does not have to be perfect to be good (despite what radical progressives tell us)
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News The summer season has ripped off the thin scab that covered an American wound, revealing a festering disagreement about the nature and origins of the United States. The San Francisco Board of Education recently voted to paint over, and thus destroy, a 1,600-square-foot mural of George Washington’s life in […]
The Selfish Actors of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Almost every party invested in open borders proves utterly selfish, without regard for the legitimate interests of others or of the law itself. The Illegal ImmigrantThe immigrant is the pawn of Latin American governments who view him as inanimate capital, someone who represents thousands of dollars in future foreign-exchange […]
Of Progressive Carnivores and Cannibals
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Obama-era Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes embraced just 11 years ago by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. The parameters of marriage, in Obama’s words “between a man and woman,” has now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to […]
Strategika Issue 59: U.S.–China Trade Tensions
Trade War 2.0—China Sets Sail to Import Innovation, Export Governance Please read a new essay by my colleague, Christopher R. O’Dea in Strategika. By agreeing to restart stalled trade talks at their meeting in Osaka last week, President Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping averted a new round of punitive measures in a trade conflict […]
Democratic Candidates Are Running a Race of Authenticity
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness An epidemic of false identities, massaged resumes and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics’ contention that she was no more […]
A Modest Immigration Proposal
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) believes that American detention centers that house illegal aliens — over 1 million illegal arrivals during the last six months alone — are similar to “concentration camps.” A storm of criticism met her historically fallacious comparisons. Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her Hitlerian reference by […]
Would President Joe Biden Become 25th Amendment Material?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Ispeculate only because since January 2017 our popular culture and intelligentsia have suggested President Trump is crazy and should be removed under the 25th Amendment. Apparently, accusations about the mental health of presidents and would-be presidents are now legitimate political attack strategies under the new progressive rules. After all, […]
Democratic Candidates Aren’t on a Winning Track
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents. Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a […]
Iran and the Levels of Global Power
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the current American–Iran stand-off are a number of global players. That is hardly new, but what is novel is that, for the first time in decades, there’s almost no power that can obstruct or alter U.S. efforts to confront Iranian aggressions in America’s own time and fashion. In […]
The Anti-Trump Circus
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature. The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, […]
America Can Afford to Stay Calm with Iran
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The U.S. asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace. Antiwar critics of Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast […]
Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many […]
We Hold All the Cards in the Showdown with Iran
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness In May 2018, the Donald Trump Administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump […]
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 […]