Victor Davis HansonEeyore’s Corner Once affluent and leisured societies achieve postmodern complacency, watch out! Survival leads to surfeit that results in utopianism that ends in a reversion to tribalism, anarchy, and chaos—and a return to the very primitivism from which a society once advanced. So the Greeks thought civilizations aged like people, through muscular adolescence, […]
Victor Davis Hanson Eeyore’s Cabinet NATO/Berlin NATO fed and petted the Putin tiger too. Germany fancied itself as a sort of NATO point of resistance to the U.S. Its public polls anti-American. Its politicians are culturally disdainful of America. Merkel’s reign ended in disaster, as she destroyed any chance of German energy independence from Russia
Victor Davis Hanson Eeyore’s Cabinet Putin, of course, is the guilty party for the ongoing destruction in Ukraine—in the manner that similar raptors like Hitler and Stalin caused the 1939 Poland catastrophe or China swallowed Hong Kong. We can talk all we want about British and French appeasement, American isolation, and Russian collusion that certainly
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals In March if it had rained some, or a first irrigation had not dried out, and one tried to get in the vineyard and disc too early, he often got stuck. And then things got interesting…. If you were mired in the middle of a quarter-mile-long, 12-foot-wide
Victor Davis Hanson A Child’s Garden of Animals When growing up, not all our pets and wild animal encounters were live. I remember all the tractors on the farm. At six, I used to go into the old horse shed just to stare at and sit on them. Many were named as if they were
Victor Davis HansonHistorian’s Corner C. Analysis. So why is the Left Saber-rattling? There are four choices, and they are not mutually exclusive: The Left knows that Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden serially appeased Putin. They privately accept that his invasion of Ukraine is a manifestation of their own efforts that weakened U.S. deterrence that
Victor Davis HansonHistorian’s Corner A. The Record of Leftwing Appeasement Consider the following. From 2009 until the recent present, the Left did the following: Appeased Vladimir Putin with “reset.” This included both the relevant laxity toward Russia—inviting Russia into the Middle East, bringing it into the Iran Nuclear Deal discussions, the Obama hot mic revelation,
Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner Alternative View #4: Paleo Putin Wait a minute. Putin is a dictator, yes, but have we recently cut off all dictators? Xi? The Saudi royal family? Castro, Inc.? The ayatollahs? At least Putin does not desecrate Christianity. At least Russians do not make apologies for their own country. Who fought
Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner There are four schools of conservative thought in Ukraine. Alternative View #1: Realist Deterrence Putin is a thug—period. Putin violated global norms. Putin is getting thousands killed for some stupid irredentist dream of restoring a lost Russian Empire. So, he must be deterred. He must be stopped. He must be
Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner Have We Learned Anything from Ukraine? 6) We have a 79-year-old impaired president and a vice president who is cogent but scarier. The former was nominated by the Democrats’ late primary season terror of woke candidates, the latter was the woke payoff for Biden’s nomination. Both nonentities likely convince Putin