Historian’s Corner

VDH UltraIf You Are Going to Taiwan, Then, Dammit, Go! Continued.

Victor Davis Hanson First, tell the Chinese that Pelosi is flying to China and will be escorted there militarily. Two, inform the Chinese that there is a new policy of reciprocity. Anything China outlaws in relation to America, America will outlaw to China. Farmland? If Americans cannot buy it in China, Chinese will not buy […]

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VDH UltraIf You Are Going to Taiwan, Then, Dammit, Go! Part Two.

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner Five. The Ukrainian war further whetted the Chinese beak. Our oil sanctions, thanks to huge Russian fuel purchases by India and China, are not working. Russia is now mercilessly grinding down the Ukrainians in a war of attrition. Europe is insidiously losing its enthusiasm for the war, as its winter

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VDH UltraIf You Are Going to Taiwan, Then, Dammit, Go! Part One.

Victor Davis Hanson “Gentlemen. If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.” Attributed to Napoleon So supposedly Napoleon reminded his generals of the need to go full bore to finish any planned campaign—or suffer the wages of perceived weakness despite the ambition of the agenda. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was unclear whether she should have gone

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VDH UltraThe Ridiculous Roadshow of Gavin Newsom

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner The California governor, on the scent of a progressive effort to ensure Joe Biden does not run in 2024, is touring the country. Oddly, he talks of a “free” California, as he tries to contrast his record with the terms of Texas governor Greg Abbott and Gov. Ron DeSantis of

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VDH UltraIsraeli Reflections (From Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem)

Victor Davis Hanson An Outsider’s Superficial Impressions For a supposed global recession, COVID pandemic, and war in Ukraine, Israel seems booming. Traffic is snarled. Tourist spots are full. Prices are high. People are upbeat. We talk about the ex-nihilo boom of modern China from a Maoist hellhole to a gleaming autocracy. But that was material

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VDH UltraNeutroning America, Part Two

Victor Davis HansonHistorian’s Corner In these three dark years, the military, especially the retired generals and admirals, soon were politicized as well. Suddenly it became normal to smear the commander in chief as Nazi-like, a Mussolini, or similar to the architects of Birkenau. It was as if the Uniform Code of Military Justice went the

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VDH UltraNeutroning America, Part One

Victor Davis HansonHistorian’s Corner One way of looking at America since January 2020 is to imagine that we were hit by some sort of self-created neutron bomb: the infrastructure remains, but the people as we knew them are gone. The COVID-19 plague killed hundreds of thousands, sickened millions, and left hundreds of thousands with bizarre

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VDH UltraPutin, Wounded but Deadlier. Part One: The Old Rules of Nuclear Powers

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner On the battlefields of Ukraine, the Ukrainians are getting stronger and the Russians weaker, despite their great disparities in population, GDP, and financial clout. That is both a good and an increasingly more dangerous thing. Russia is exhausting its munitions supplies faster than they can be resupplied. Ukraine is drawing

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VDH UltraA Brief Anatomy of Ukraine. Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson What’s Next? For the all the fog of war, the back-and-forth Biden/Putin boasting and name-calling, and the Russian goblin-talk of using nukes, we are beginning to see the outlines of a cease-fire. Before the invasion, Ukraine had mostly lost its Russian-majority borderlands and much of Crimea to Putin. After the invasion, Russia

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