by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review History shows that a lack of deterrence, not loose rhetoric, spurs aggression. As tensions mount with North Korea, fears arise that President Trump’s tit-for-tat bellicose rhetoric with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might lead to miscalculations — and thus an accidental war that could have been prevented. […]
Are Wars Caused by Accidents? Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum—which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. Communities are tearing themselves apart over the statues of long-dead Confederate generals. Controversy rages over which slogan—“Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter”—is truly racist. Antifa street thugs clash with white
Diversity Can Spell Trouble Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers. ‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob,
Linguistic McCarthyism Read More »
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites. The Left-Wing Trump Haters About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental. The hard-leftist
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Image credit:Barbara Kelley “We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016 The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under
The Fire And Fury Of Presidents Read More »
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The new abolitio memoriae Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive
Our War against Memory Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness Every generation, in its modesty, used to think the prior one was far better. Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation” to remind Americans of what our fathers endured during the Depression and World War II—with the implicit message that we might not have been able to do what they
The Silliest Generation Read More »
Why is Everyone Suddenly Quoting Thucydides? By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness Currently, the historian Thucydides is the object of debate among those within the Trump Administration and its critics, who, like scholars of the last three millennia, focus on lots of differing Thucydidean personas. Did Thucydides warn in deterministic fashion about ascendant powers like
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning. The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal, collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger fundamental and
The Fifth American War Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review In Warsaw, the president delivered the antithesis to the fallacious, appeasing lecture Obama preached to the Egyptians. Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009 About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the
Trump’s Anti-Cairo Speech Read More »