Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.
A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”
Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: this current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.
Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”
Election interference?
Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Zelensky into swing state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Trump and Vance to a left-wing magazine.
Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.
Her Democrat running mate, Governor Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.
Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f**king guy!”
What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?
It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.
Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel, Muslim-American voters who may determine the electoral college votes of critical swing state Michigan.
Democrat politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel—despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim-American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.
Two, for all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.
Three, Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the October 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.
So, what blew up Jack Sullivan’s quietude?
Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general.
It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise attacked and murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday.
Their slaughtering torturing, raping, and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.
Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number over 20,000.
It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until October 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.
During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.
For over three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past.
After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: attack the Jewish state and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.
And so they did in unison.
Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.
The final irony?
Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic—and endanger its very survival—and so will not agree to its own suicide.
Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the U.S. itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.
You just can’t despise the Biden-Harris administration enough. Biden, wrong on foreign policy his entire political career, a pathological liar and a “grifter”——there’s nothing admirable about him as a human being. VP Harris owns everything that’s good or bad from the Biden administration. …..But, I’ve having a hard time thinking of what good things they’ve done for the country. Harris is trying to remake herself from her marxist/liberal identity, but the “cat is out of the bag”. Could the Democrats picked any two worse candidates, Harris & Walz ? At least we know how the Trump administration ran the country for four years, and what it will look like for four more years if he’s elected again.
The long list of failures in foreign policy and relations of the Biden politicos is just astonishing when Harris proclaims “There isn’t anything that comes to her mind that she would do differently”. It is statements such as those that prove what a vacuous space she has between her ears. It frightens me to no end to think she could be our next President. Do you ever get the thought our great country is circling the drain with such examples of poor leadership?
As he faher is, so goes he son. Take one quick (I won’t torture you requesting a long and deep…) look at Biden’s infamous son. Now you know the father.
I don’t think Biden has the cognitive ability at this stage to lead his administration, but he sure has a lot of people in both the U.S and in Israel thinking that he supports Israel to a point. It just happens that his point of departure is when Israel gets serious about defending itself.
Harris is too stupid to see the reality of Iran’s terrorist regime. If she is elected, it will be horrible.
VDH –
Great analysis…as usual.
I imagine good ‘ol Willie Brown is fondly reflecting back on his steamy relationship with his thirty year younger concubine / paramour (whatever you want to call it) and how he lifted her career in California politics. I also wonder how many of the young women who consider Kamala their role model know about this little secret.
You may or may not be familiar with a quote from Willie Brown regarding his affair with Harris;
“we had the perfect romance; she loved me and I love me.” Who else besides an egotistical political hack with overwhelming self esteem make that statement in public? But it’s still hilarious.
From what I gather, Germany and India are the only ones helping Israel these days. That isn’t to say USA hasn’t helped a lot. It has. But cutting off or slow walking already promised weapons is like the expression that Israel is ‘left standing in the lurch’, or ‘dangling in the wind’. Where’s Richard Nixon when you need him?
Hello, VDH –
I absolutely love your podcast. On your October 10 episode, you encouraged everyone to vote for Steve Garvey. I live in Georgia; however, do you think I could come visit and vote for him anyway?
Thanks!
– John
Netanyahu has personal courage and tactical skill beyond Biden and Harris’ comprehension–and something more: faith, patriotism, focus outside their moral quagmire. Let Bibi bring biblical judgment to the barbarians; their oil, their centrifuges, their persons. Elites will wail and moan; the people will rejoice.
Israel, being an aggressive settler-state, has no choice but to resort to war to defend its political and societal aims. Since it desires to expand settlement of Jewish residents to intra-Arab locations it is bound to chafe with the remaining Palestinians, who have a long list of grievances against it. But as long as Israel retains nuclear weapons, it will be impervious to real assault from without. The lessons of the 1973 and earlier wars remain with it still.
Excellent analysis, Victor! To think there is a real possibility that Harris could be our next Puppet President is numbing.
Victor, I am missing your articles in The Epoch Times; will you be returning there?
As a longtime reader of your essays and an avid follower of your podcasts, I agree with 90%+ of what you have to say, except for one topic: your inexcusably skimpy coverage of the war in Ukraine. Your coverage of Israel’s conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah, by comparison, is overwhelming. I am puzzled by this imbalance. Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine is in its third year and yet you hardly talk about Russian atrocities and indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities. While Israel’s losses number in the thousands, Ukrainian losses are in the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, the Russian invasion has created over ten million refugees which in magnitude dwarfs anything Israel is experiencing. As Russia is trying to extinguish Ukraine and its forty million inhabitants, you hardly talk about it, and that to me is inexplicable.
Worse, you often seem critical of Ukrainian efforts to defend itself. For example, you absurdly blame Zelensky for postponing elections. How does one hold elections, Prof Hanson, when millions are outside the country or have been internally displaced?
Furthermore, the war in Ukraine has much broader and more serious implications for Europe, the US, and the world than the Arab-Israel conflict in the Middle East for one salient reason: Russia has nuclear weapons and has repeatedly threatened to use them. Israel, on the other hand, can take out Iran’s nuclear facilities if it chooses, while Ukraine is denied the capability to strike inside Russia.
I agree with your assessment of VDH’s blind spot (or soft spot) when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He has expressed admiration for Russians in general while ignoring the fact that it is the Russian people committing atrocities in Ukraine. Putin may have ordered the invasion, but it is Russian citizens, with some foreign help, who are on the front lines behaving like terrorists, while over 80% of the Russian population supports these actions.
Also, the high esteem he has expressed for certain individuals in this country who are nothing more than Putin’s PR representatives (such as MTG and Tucker Carlson) is hard to fathom from someone who normally has a very astute understanding of geopolitics and politicians.
I have also heard on one of his podcasts his opinion that Russia has some legitimate claim to portions of Ukraine. This seems absurd, considering Ukraine inherited its current borders from the Soviet Union (Russians). Additionally, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum was an international agreement in which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances from Russia (emphasis added), the United States, and the United Kingdom, which included respecting Ukraine’s existing borders. If Russia had a problem with Ukraine’s territory, they could have addressed it before the fall of the Soviet Union or during negotiations of the Budapest Agreement.
On this subject, Mr. VDH, you can do better.
Perhaps Mr. Hanson will speak for himself on this. In any case I will speak for my own self.
Bear in mind it was not the Russians who aced to change the borders established in the Budapest Accord. Remember, Ukraine from the river (Dneiper) to the sea (Black) was and had been for centuries par of Russia.. social, religious, political, language) yet it got ripped from her Motherland and smashed into the Ukraine. Twice since the 2014 Coup arranged by our very own Victoria Nuland the people of those areas voted to leave Ukraine and at least once each region to rejoin their former homeland.
Remember also that NATO was to never be involved in the Ukraine. It was HIS ONE factor that led directly and proximally to Russia’s decision to put boots onto Ukrainian soil. That agreement had been trashed.. and Russia was looking at the placement of nukes within easy reach of key parts of Russia.
I wached this dance as it played out, and knew at least two months before the reality was effected that Russia WOULD invade. if the process was not stopped…… much as our former President John Kennedy was ready to invade Cuba to remove the nukes Russia were putting there. I also watched this unfold on the nightly news.
In the wake of the First German War a process which became known as “balkanisation” developed. It was a foul plot o break up and destabilise many sets of nations. Any people group were broken up into at least three segments, and any piece of dirt was then to be occupied by three or more of these diverse people groups. No national cohesion, cultures split up amongst three or more nations,, and three diverse cultures were somehow supposed to peacefully coexist. Yeah, that worked out well, didn’t it? The Ukraine was just one more piece of ground with diverse cultures thrown together upon it People of the Donbas and the Crimea decided to reconnect with their former homeland.
I agree with Jaroslaw’s assessment of VDH’s blind spot (or soft spot) when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He has expressed admiration for Russians in general while ignoring the fact that it is the Russian people committing atrocities in Ukraine. Putin may have ordered the invasion, but it is Russian citizens, with some foreign help, who are on the front lines behaving like terrorists, while over 80% of the Russian population supports these actions.
Also, the high esteem he has expressed for certain individuals who are nothing more than Putin’s PR representatives (such as MTG and Tucker Carlson) is hard to fathom from someone who normally has a very astute understanding of geopolitics and politicians.
I have also heard on one of his podcasts his opinion that Russians have some legitimate claim to portions of Ukraine. This seems absurd, considering Ukraine inherited its current borders from the Soviet Union. Additionally, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum was an international agreement in which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances from Russia (emphasis added), the United States, and the United Kingdom, which included respecting Ukraine’s existing borders. If Russia had a problem with Ukraine’s territory, they could have addressed it before the fall of the Soviet Union or during negotiations of the Budapest Agreement.
On this subject, Mr. VDH, you can do better.
Of course Biden and Harris lie about their position on Israel, and more broadly, the Jews.
They are Leftists, progressives. And truth is not one of their values. Fostering their agenda is.
Mr. Hanson is it possible to correspond concerning the current state of American politics and your expertise in historic military campaigns? I am not advocating any particular course of action but more a historical perspective of elite ruler class inability to see their own vulnerability to those who disagree. I do not for a minute question their intelligence, but worry that they think that they are secure from any form of consequence or even harm to their physical well being. I am old and grew up where there could be consequences to actions that infringed on others. Sometimes physical, punching bullies stopped bullying. Is this lost on our leadership from a historical perspective?