War

An Avoidable Great War

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Far from being inevitable, World War II resulted from the Allies’ failure to muster their combined resources and power in the service of deterring Hitler.   Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth and final installment in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The …

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The Deadly Cost of Mutual Misunderstanding

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review   Hitler went to war without an accurate conception of the Allies’ strength. The Allies did the same without an accurate conception of Hitler’s ambition. Unprecedented bloodshed ensued. Editor’s Note: The following is the third in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second …

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In Defense of ‘the Generals’

The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review   Recently there have been a number of quite different critiques from all political sides of Trump’s generals (Kelly/McMaster/Mattis), and also from a variety of angles (too narrow experience, an unhealthy overdose of military thinking, a “sellout” for working for the likes of …

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Are Wars Caused by Accidents?

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. …

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The Need For Missile Defense

by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas America’s great advantage when it entered world affairs after the Civil War was that its distance from Europe and Asia ensured that it was virtually immune from large sea-borne invasions. The Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans proved far better barriers than even the forests and mountain ranges of …

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Linguistic McCarthyism

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, …

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Trump — And the Use and Abuse of Madness

By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Fiery and unpredictable rhetoric can be a powerful strategic tool, but only if it’s not habitual. Occasionally insanity, real or feigned, has its political advantages —largely because of its ancillary traits of unpredictability and an aura of immunity from appeals to reason, sobriety, and moderation. Rogues often try to …

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