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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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