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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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Trump Is Cutting Old Gordian Knots

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed. When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through

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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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Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Beltway’s sober and judicious foreign-policy establishment laments Donald Trump’s purported dismantling of the postwar order. They apparently take the president’s words as deeds and their own innate dislike of him as disinterested analysis. But is the world really imploding after 70 years of supposed “calm”? (Disregarding the Korean

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Our Unelected Officials’ Distortions

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review On March 17, former CIA director John Brennan tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. . . .

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03/28/2018 Angry Reader

From An Angry Reader: Mr. Hanson, About 15 or 20 years ago, I used to read your articles voraciously. I sent them to fellow graduate students—nearly all of whom were overwhelmingly liberal—in order to give them a jolting shot of truth. That was then, this is now. I recently took a peek at some of

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Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers?

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of

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Camouflaged Elites

Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary. An anonymous and

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