Hope For America

Victor Davis Hanson

No one has been more concerned than I about the current state of America—enormous debt, unfunded liabilities, DEI and tribal chauvinism, blue-state/red-state growing antitheses, the new right anti-Semitism coupled with the predictable old left anti-Semitism, the rise of an imperial China, etc.

But there is much to be thankful for and excited about as we head into 2026.

America is turning now and finally to legal-only immigration. In historic fashion, illegal immigration at 2021–24 rates of 10,000 entries a day—without legality, audit, background checks, or little apparent desire to integrate, assimilate, and acculturate—has ceased. The influx has not abated, but rather astonishingly simply ended.

All the blue-chip economists who predicted in March–April a Trump trade war, tariff wars, supply implosions, stock market collapse, recession, stagflation, hyperinflation—are being proven wrong.

The latest data show an astonishing GDP growth of 4.3%. The inflation rate of Biden’s last months of 3% had dropped to 2.7%—far lower than Biden’s four-year average of 5.2% per annum. The stock market and retirement accounts are at record levels. Gas prices have gone down from a four-year average of $3.40 per gallon nationwide under Biden to nearing $2.90.

The military has an abundance of recruits, not a 40,000–50,000 shortfall that in the Biden years was declared irreversible and symptomatic of gangs/drugs/obesity/competition from private enterprise, etc. In fact, the crisis was caused by DEI bias and vitriol, the political weaponization of the Pentagon, and the disastrous humiliation in Kabul in 2021.

There is finally talk about restoring U.S. naval dominance through new shipbuilding and Pentagon procurement reform. Quantity, not just quality, is a new Pentagon mantra, echoing the strategies that won World War II, when America saturated the Allied cause with planes, tanks, and ships in near limitless numbers.

Abroad, Iran will not have a bomb as once deemed certain in 2025. Its terrorist proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, are in retreat. There may be a ceasefire in the Somme/Stalingrad-like Ukrainian War, where perhaps 1.5 million casualties make it the worst conflict in Europe since World War II.

There is a real excitement in the U.S. about AI, robotics, genetic engineering, and a host of new technologies. The tech lords are slowly realizing that their role is to ensure American preeminence in all new emerging fields, not to descend into political partisanship and mimic Hollywood and the media in Pavlovian political vitriol.

Energy-wise, the U.S. is now the greatest producer of natural gas and oil in the history of civilization—and poised to regain our once preeminence in nuclear energy with fusion generation breakthroughs. The government has given up on the Chinese-fed green debacle of subsidizing inefficient and unreliable solar and wind with Chinese imported panels and turbines—while China builds 2-3 coal and nuclear plants a month.

Our universities are beginning to realize that they were corrupt, both in the mercantile sense and in their political weaponization of higher learning. The elite campuses were rife with unchecked anti-Semitism, administrative bloat, and flagrant Civil Right violations. Even worse, they caused $1.7 trillion in student debt by convincing millions to go into debt and join a legion of degreed unemployed, with expensive, empty degrees that neither instilled analytical skills nor ensured broad general education.

So be confident about the year 2026 that will usher in better days…