Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized Trump’s economic policies, particularly his ongoing “trade war” with Canada, over the past several weeks. And certainly, the tensions are regrettable. Trump’s trolling of the insufferable Justin Trudeau, with talk of Canada becoming the “51st state,” perhaps only galvanized the Canadian left. It unfortunately may ensure that the only real hope for a Canadian return to normality, the election of Pierre Poilievre, may be lost.
That said, does the WSJ truly believe that the current $1.7 trillion budget deficit stacked on top of $36 trillion in national debt and an annual $1 trillion trade deficit are sustainable in any fashion? Do they believe any Republican president would have survived the midterms if he cut or “reformed” Social Security? If so, consult the fate of the recommendations of left-wing Barack Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission (“The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”).
DOGE, the effort to demand either symmetrical or no tariffs, closing the border, the rare minerals agreement, etc., are all controversial, even desperate efforts to stave off insolvency.
NAFTA was sold on the promise of trade equilibriums, eventually leading to no tariffs and rough parity. Yet Canada currently runs a $60 billion surplus largely because of its energy sales and selective tariffs on U.S. agriculture and some manufactured goods. That sum might be tolerable from a friend and not worth the acrimony, even with the present massive trade and budget deficits—if it had occurred in isolation.
But it did not. The Canadian surplus is force multiplied by its chronic refusal to spend a measly 2 percent of its GDP on defense. Canada could have easily offered a partnership with the U.S. to explore joint missile defense or shared Arctic Ocean naval patrols with a new fleet of Canadian and American icebreakers.
But it did nothing of the sort.
Worse still, no Canadian leader can offer any defense of their policies, such as: “We believe a $60 billion surplus with our free-trade American partner is justified, and we also believe we are further correct in not spending our promised 2 percent of GDP on defense.” Their veritable retort of “Trump is a monster” is no defense at all.
And there is wider context still. Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens. Most of them enjoy some sort of subsidy from the American local, state, and federal governments.
Its trade surplus has ballooned to over $170 billion, largely because of opportunistic partnering with the Chinese to avoid US duties on imported Chinese-produced goods.
No one truly knows the full cost of an open border paid in American blood and treasure to Mexican cartels—70,000 lives and $20 billion annually?
Add up our northern and southern neighbors’ various surpluses and one could argue that $300 billion flows out of the U.S. to our so-called best friends and supposed partners in a so-called free-trade agreement supposedly designed to promote “free,” if not truly “fair,” trade.
Did any of the appeasements from the prior somnolent Biden administration—printing money, open borders, kindred socialist and green programs, USAID reckless generosity, and no concern over massive trade deficits—have any effect on either Canada or Mexico?
Or was Biden’s appeasement interpreted as weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated?
All Mexico has to do is promise to reduce its surpluses down to say $20-30 billion, patrol its side of the border, and bar the importation of raw fentanyl product from China. It could also stop its citizens from swarming the border and accept a 20 percent U.S. tax on remittances. But once reciprocity is lost, any attempt to restore balance is often mischaracterized as aggression, allowing the former victimizer to recast themselves as the blameless victim.
We are also currently watching massive demonstrations in New York to protest the ongoing deportation effort of Mahmoud Khalil. He is not a U.S. citizen, currently residing in the U.S. as a green card holder/former student visa resident alien.
He has led protests, often turning violent, at Columbia and in New York on behalf of radical Palestinian groups, including Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.
Surely, he knew that, as a guest on American soil, he has no inalienable right to enter and remain in the U.S., especially if the State Department believes there is “a reasonable ground to believe that [his] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
It would be difficult to imagine a more anti-American group than Hamas, which currently holds several U.S. hostages and openly boasts of the mass murders it carried out on October 7, 2023. That awful date sparked mass protests from both Americans and Middle Eastern students in support of Hamas killers. The slaughter and, along with Israel’s response to it, ignited the worst epidemic of anti-Semitism in a hundred years, predominantly driven by American campuses and, in particular, tens of thousands of guest students from the Middle East.
When the ACLU and liberal congressional representatives protest and work on behalf of Khalil, what is their rationale? Are they at all worried that Hamas murdered American hostages and still holds several? Is it really in the U.S.’s best interest to welcome students from radical, anti-American countries, such as Syria, Iran, or Gaza, to American campuses, to see them champion anti-American terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and help fuel a climate of anti-Semitism and attacks on Jewish-Americans? Does the ACLU realize that our elite universities are fanning the worst anti-Semitic outbursts in memory? If black students were targeted in the same manner as Jews, would it remain similarly silent?
So, is this really what the left is fighting for? Why doesn’t the new Democratic Party and its street brigades simply be honest and say, “We support the efforts of radical Palestinian foreign students even when they openly champion Hamas and intimidate Jews, and so welcome their constructive presence and protests on American campuses”?
There are many problems with leftist-inspired immigration protests. The foremost is hypocrisy, usually couched in anti-Americanism. In places like Los Angeles, protestors burned the flags of the country they demanded to remain in while waving the flags of countries to which they seemingly refuse to return.
If America is such an intolerable place, why did 12 million knowingly break the law to enter it? The entire theme of today’s ethnic studies programs on U.S. campuses is a story of how awful America is, was, and will always be. And yet these are the very university loci that are the most strident about welcoming into the U.S. illegal aliens. Should they not be down at the border warning of the white toxicity that awaits any illegal migrant?
There is another sort of hypocrisy at work.
Left-wing elites in Washington, on campuses, in the media, and among the foundations and NGOs are rarely subject to the consequences of their own open-borders philosophies. It is one thing to virtue signal a world without borders that welcomes in millions of its impoverished, but quite another to help feed and house them when they show up in Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu rather than in the Rio Grande Valley, the San Joaquin Valley or the inner city.
The latter places do not traffic in cheap rhetoric but deal with swamped healthcare faculties, housing shortages, insolvent social service budgets, spiking crime, overcrowded schools, increased gang activity, and overtaxed infrastructure—issues one would expect with the sudden addition of 12 new San Franciscos in just four years under Biden.
Finally, regarding Ukraine, Trump is receiving a lot of criticism for the hot-cold treatment of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. He used both verbal and policy leverage in hopes of forcing Ukraine and Russia towards negotiations—a task that has historically proven to be impossible without U.S. coercion. One can easily criticize Trump for being overly naive about Vladimir Putin’s ultimate intentions or any strategic resolution of the war that only Trump seems to wish to end.
But again, what is the alternative to his efforts?
Is to keep feeding the ongoing current Stalingrad desolation where 1.5 million dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians have fought for three years without any end in sight? Do we really want an endless war that has created a new alignment of anti-Western Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and, at times, a number of Middle Eastern, South American, and Asian opportunists?
What is the European alternative plan to Trump’s?
The old Biden notion “as long as it takes”—as if the Europeans may finally mobilize and send two million soldiers the way the U.S. did in 1917-18 to break up the deadlock of the World War I Western Front?
Do Ukrainians have a secret reserve of manpower to send another 10 divisions to the front?
A new wave of 5,000 drones to hit Moscow and do the sort of damage it is now suffering?
Non-U.S. NATO fighter aircraft number around 2,000. So, is it the plan of France and the UK to spearhead some 1,000 European jets and send them to Ukrainian bases, where they will fly ground support missions and conduct strategic attacks on Russian infrastructure to stop the stasis?
The answer is no.
There is no other plan but the current one of a 500-million-person proximate Europe screaming at the 335-million-person distant U.S. for not doing more to aid the now 30-million-person Ukraine fighting against the 145-million-person Russia.
Before one can fault the herky-jerky, art-of-the-deal Trump effort to find a stable peace and stop the slaughter, his critics must at least chart a plan for victory, explain the cost in lives and treasure, and outline exactly the eventual goals of reclaiming all the 2022 borders or the 2014 borders. Instead, we hear only ‘this won’t work,’ ‘that can’t work,’ ‘this is stupid,’ ‘that is naïve,’ but never a comprehensive defense of the EU/Biden/Zelenskyy policy or some enlightened replacement for it.
On matters of trade, immigration, and foreign policy, we are witnessing a counter-revolutionary effort to erase the madness of the Biden revolutionary years. Then unnamed and largely unknown radicals, under the veneer of a waxen effigy president, hijacked the country and imposed upon it the most radical and nihilist agenda in the past century.
The current correctives are not easy or pretty. But the alternative to the prior status quo was not the status quo at all, but a Jacobin nihilism that had led only to insolvency, civil strife, the destruction of the southern border, at least two theater-wide wars abroad, and the end of the U.S. as we once knew it.
I think what stood out to me most was the way it challenges the idea of accountability in policymaking. It’s one thing to push for change, but it’s another to follow through with realistic, long-term solutions when those changes create new issues.
Hanson’s argument about rising crime, border issues, and economic instability being direct outcomes of progressive policies is hard to ignore, especially when we’re seeing real-world effects play out in everyday life. I don’t think it’s about left or right at this point; it’s about leadership that’s willing to own both the wins and the unintended consequences.
That said, I do wish the article explored potential solutions a bit more rather than just pointing out the flaws. It’s important to highlight the problems, yes, but moving forward means suggesting constructive paths out of the mess too.
The rest of the world believes that the United States should pay the restaurant check because it is the richest guy at the dinner table.
Here’s a fascinating 20-year-old proposal from Warren Buffett on a tariff alternative that sounds like carbon credits for trade–I think it could work!
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/growing.pdf
The left has nothing to offer because they hate America and they hate Americans. These are the people who were the bad guys in the first kingsman movie.
KEEP ON, KEEPIN ON Professor Hanson
The Democrats have tacked so far left over 30 years that they are now radicals. Where we see problems they see end-results.
White-hot Democrat Trump-Musk hate is also a base neighbor-hate of MAGA beyond 2016/2020 levels. They commonly play Henry II footsie — “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” — on social media, ie, the woman who just YouTubed or Instagrammed that something ought to be done about Elon.
I’ve no doubt they’d gladly toss people into a Jacobin-Bolshevik death device to get a 6-week guaranteed Euro-style vacation in the name of “quality of life,” while reducing population for Green levels.
Dr. Hanson ends with the phrase, “the end of the U.S. as we once knew it.” They’ve achieved that goal already. At 63 I certainly don’t recognize any of this. It’s what comes next that concerns me now, and I’m growing less fussy about how Trump and Trump’s successors will take care of business.
The question seldom asked by disdainers of Trump’s pillaging of the institutions: What precipitated this emergency root canal? Is the dentist merely a greedy psychopath operating on healthy teeth, or did the patient perhaps neglect a few toothaches for a few too many years? I sure hope Trump doesn’t break the economy, or cause so much collateral damage that Dems retake Congressional majority at midterm; but we didn’t arrive at this crossroads by accident.
I’m also a 61 advent to earth. And I see the rotting of all that could be good in America. It’s problem we have to grow thru as a race. How to bring accountability. It’s a thorny vexing balance to attain liberty. The quality of the individual may be critical and if so we may not prevail. The cost of liberty may bed too high for enough citizens to pay to keep our republic.
The Trump Choice: Disruption or Decline (or Defeat, Destruction, or Doom-take your pick). I choose Disruption until somebody comes up with a coherent and workable alternative.
Have the democrats ever solved anything? Good question.
Wow, Mr. Hanson has gone way outside his areas of expertise again.
His ignorance shows.
Mr. Hanson conflates budget deficits and trade deficits, a mistake worthy of a stoned high school student.
If a country consumes more than it produces, it must necessarily run a trade deficit.
If you cut the trade deficit with Canada, it will increase somewhere else.
You can, of course, create a recession to in order to decrease domestic consumption.
You can use the government to take money used for consumption and channel into productive investments that the free market will not make. The idiotic CA high speed rail line and USDA biofuels are non-productive investments. NOAA is a productive investment. Basic scientific research is a productive investment. Trump and the Doge clowns make no such distinctions. Every cancer death that could have been prevented by some more research is on the shoulders of Mr. Trump and the supporters of his 3rd rate economics
Mr. Bronner,
I’m not seeing the conflation of budget and trade deficits in the column. He was responding to what the WSJ had reported. He clearly explains the trade deficits we have Canada and Mexico.
BTW, the Trump administration has not taken away money for cancer research, that is a false left-wing media narrative.
Brilliant assessment of this dilemma, I have one personal issue-my paternal ancestors came from Quebec/France and Ontario/Scots. When I filter the behavior of the Canadians, I recall the adage about the difference between a canoe and a Canadian which is that canoes tip.
Victor concludes his article with a summary of the American left’s policies and states that the “Jacobin nihilism that had led only to insolvency, civil strife, the destruction of the southern border, at least two theater-wide wars abroad, and the end of the U.S. as we once knew it” is striking in its conclusion, “the end of the U.S. as we once knew it.”
Perhaps that’s the point of the madness, the destruction of America and its replacement with something else such as secular globalism.
The implications of secular globalism are vast. What will be is unknown, but what is known is that what the Left promotes in America today is in direct contrast to what the Bible teaches.
The first rule of economics is that resources are limited. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics. For the entirety of the 21st Century both parties have ignored the first rule of economics and practiced the first rule of politics. Bush with his War on Terror, Obama with the Affordable Care Act, and the most destructive of all, the last four years of corrupt Biden surrogate’s closing the economy in the name of public health, underwriting a war in Europe in the name of democracy, opening the Southern border in the name of equity, and subsidizing the “Green New Steal” in the name of survival, just to name a few and with all the resultant consequences. The Left’s solution…funding it all with a morally and financially bankrupt economic policy known as Modern Monetary Theory, which proposes that sovereign governments that control their own currency are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to government spending because they can create money to pay for it.
The anti-Semitism of the left is consistent with the anti-Semitism recorded in the Bible including its last book, Revelation, where in chapter 12, Satan’s history of opposition of Israel and its future persecution continues.
Victor is correct that such discrimination is supported and promoted by the American left and would not be tolerated by them if it was directed at Americans of African ancestry. The left’s hostility towards Jews is consistent with Satan’s opposition throughout history and his enmity towards God.
What people don’t seem to understand about Trump is that he shines a spotlight on issues in order to get people to talk about them.
Look at the awareness and conversation he brings to: Greenland (Truman of all people, and not the first, had advocated buying it from Denmark), NAFTA ( a treaty which most Americans only took for granted, if cared about at all), Russia (not an adversary, not an object of fear and not an enemy) and Tariffs (an External Revenue Service to possibly eliminate or mitigate the Internal Revenue Service).
His ability to get us to view issues from a new angle is brilliant.
And for all that, MAGA is a dirty four letter word to be spat out of their vile mouths.
Undoing the damage done during the past four years and more will mean some unusual and sometimes radical departures from policies of the past. You must disrupt in order to advance, as any general will tell you. I do not always understand what is happening and why, but I know it must be different than the immediate past.
Writing from Canada I completely agree with your analysis of the present strife between the two neighbours and formerly good friends and would even add that Trudeau foolishly and undiplomatically never missed an opportunity to thumb his nose at Trump during his first term or badmouthing him behind his back at international gatherings. That being said it is wrong to make light of the fact that largely thanks to Trump’s flamboyant antics, the trolling etc. the Conservatives who up until the trade war were leading the Liberals by 20 points may well lose the election to the Liberals under the leadership of their newly anointed leader Mark Carney. This is no trivial matter. Carney is a dyed in the wool elitist glabalist who is much smarter than Trudeau and could take Canada right off the cliff. And how could that be good for America. We fought shoulder to shoulder in both World Wars and Korea and Canada punched above its weight. My late father in law was summoned to Washington to be honoured for his heroism in Korea. We are neighbours and natural friends and if Trump’s jokes ruin that friendship it will be no laughing matter!
Leftism/progressivism is immaturity expressed as a worldview. They have no alternatives, except tantrums.
Well stated! Succinct and, unfortunately, accurate!!
The Obamanoids who infiltrated our government during Joe’s 4 year-long nap have done irreparable damage to our government institutions, our culture, and our country. But let’s not forget this Long March began when Hillary was running the administration while Bill was busy chasing skirts all around the White House. It was she who flooded the agencies with Alinsky-dedicated academics who took cabinet positions and oversaw the hiring of thousands of fellow travelers who burrowed deep into the fabric of our once great institutions, giving rise to the Deep State. It was she who perfected the revolving door between those America-hating academics and operatives and the major media outlets. And it was she who started and funded the war against Donal Trump with her forged and fraudulent RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA! campaign. I’m sure Joe had no idea what was going on right under his nose while the Easter Bunny was leading him by that nose around the Rose Garden.
Yes, excellent summary of Trump’s (et al.’s) heroic counter-revolutionary effort. Yet I do worry about Trump’s eddies (51st. state, birdbrain, etc.; Achilles’ heel? Nemesis? I don’t know, you’re the classicist).
The fact that you mention them proves they’re working. Trump’s enemies are thus distracted by fluff like renaming the Gulf of America instead of meaningful reform.
51st State strategy is just to eventually eliminate friction in trade with Canada. They have outrageous tariffs on the US. End game is to eliminate all tariffs, both ways, with CA. As an American, I have no real interest in acquiring Canada, particularly the worthless Eastern part. But they have vast natural resources that we need access to.
A lot of good in the article, some bad, particularly when it comes to the Middle East. But the fundamental idea that we cannot go on as we did in the past, and that it needed the disruption initiated by Trump et al to capture attention that should now be directed at helping proposed solutions work or coming up with alternatives that might be better,
Thank you, Victor. Your understanding of the situation is Master Class!
Great article! One correction. The 11M illegals are ones processed. There’s another 11M who came under the radar
I’m beginning to wonder if the Left’s real motive is to prevent Trump from brokering peace. Because if he does, the next election might turn out even worse for them.
The foundations for the Leftist revolution in the US were many decades in the making. It includes the damage to our economy, our educational system, our public institutions, and our legal system. They thought that Obama had their final move queued up for HRC, they were sure of a win, and then we elected Donald Trump. His first term was an educational experience. Then the Left stole the 2020 election, put a senile puppet in the oval office and proceeded to gave its operatives free reign with the autopen while Biden drooled over his ice cream. We now have a battle-hardened President, a veritable political General Patton, but the damage is widespread and longstanding. There is a long road ahead.
We are still at war. Certainly there is elite and foreign influence and money in play, I consider the EU elites and the CCP to be my enemies but in the end we are at war with ourselves. Let’s hope we can pull our heads out in time.
Well said, sir, as usual.. Keep up the good work.
Thank you VDH for yet another excellent summary of the Left’a inability, or worse, to propose any positive solutions to very complex problems they created.
Roger, an excellent summary. Thank you.
Victor.
In the not-too-distant future you will do commentary on Gold and Silver and the definition of “money”.
You pose a question in your title and answer it in the last sentence. If you believe that America was founded in 1619 it all makes sense. And the solution is to destroy what exists and start over. When you view America & the world thru the left’s filters they are behaving as perfectly rational actors.