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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 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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The New Last Refuge Of Scoundrels

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson famously used that line in an attack on William Pitt for supposedly advancing his agenda under warped pretenses. During the McCarthy era and the 1960s anti-war movement against Vietnam, when leftists were called unpatriotic, they offered Johnson’s line as

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Strategika Issue 49: The Value of Economic Sanctions

Sanctions: The Record And The Rewards Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Josef Joffe in Strategika Why are sanctions so popular? Because “there is nothing else between words and military action to bring pressure upon a government,” explains Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s long-term ambassador at the UN. It

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