Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian’s Perspective

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By Barry Strauss
Strategika

Buy War Bonds Poster WWII
Image credit: Poster Collection, US 1684, Hoover Institution Archives.

Preventive wars and preemptive strikes are both risky business. A preventive war is a military, diplomatic, and strategic endeavor, aimed at an enemy whom one expects to grow so strong that delay would cause defeat. A preemptive strike is a military operation or series of operations to preempt an enemy’s ability to attack you. In both cases, a government judges a diplomatic solution impossible. But judgment calls are debatable and preventive wars often stir up controversy. Preemptive strikes run the risk of arousing a sleeping enemy who, now wounded, will fight harder. Yet both preventive wars and preemptive strikes can succeed, under certain limited circumstances. Consider some examples. Continue reading “Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian’s Perspective” →

Preemptive Strike Or Preventive War?

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by Williamson Murray // Strategika
 

Image credit:Poster Collection, US 1696, Hoover Institution Archives.

With the troubles bubbling over on the Korean Peninsula, as the North Korean regime approaches possession of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the United States, two words, preemptive and preventive, have gained increasing currency. While similar in meaning, their context is crucial in understanding their applicability to the current crisis. And here, as is so often the case, history is a useful tool in thinking through the possibilities. A preemptive strike usually carries the connotation of attacking or destroying substantial enemy capabilities, in some cases with the hope that it will so wreck the enemy’s military forces that he will not be able to use them effectively, should war result. In the largest sense, those who execute preventive strikes have usually understood that their military effort, no matter how successful, would lead to a conflict of some indeterminate length. Thus, the two words are directly tied together in that preemptive strike almost inevitably will lead to what the attacker in most cases regards as a preventive war.

We, of course, have been down this road in the recent past. In response to 9/11, the Bush administration in its National Security Strategy for 2002 boldly stated that the United States “must be prepared to stop rogue states and their territorial clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.” That statement led directly to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the aim of removing Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction as well as the possibility that he might eventually possess nuclear weapons. Well, there were not any weapons of mass destruction and the United States almost immediately found itself mired in a totally unexpected quagmire—a quagmire at least unexpected by the administration and all too many of its military advisers. The ensuing insurgency against the United States and its allies as well as the civil war between the Sunni and Shi’a religious constituencies proved to be a nightmare for American strategists and policy makers. In retrospect, the result of the Iraq invasion seems obvious, but it was certainly not so at the time. Continue reading “Preemptive Strike Or Preventive War?” →

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites.

 

The Left-Wing Trump Haters

About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.

 

The hard-leftist hatred is visceral; it is multidimensional; and it is unalterable.

 

Trump is rich, crass, showy, a white male, and 70. As the anti-Obama, he punches every progressive button in existence. A candidate like Trump was not supposed to exist any longer in the 21st-Century Age of Obama, much less should he have ruined the anticipated progressive Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum. Trump’s accent is outer-borough and seems to exemplify for Trump haters the gaucheness of the golden trump name stamped all over New York. The Europeans have utter contempt for Trump, and that embarrasses leftists especially.

 

Unlike some Republican politicians who wished to be admired by cultural progressives, Trump prefers baiting the Left and its media appendages, as if to remind them that he prefers to overturn the entire progressive project of the last eight years — if not on ideological grounds (Trump not so long ago voiced a number of centrist and liberal views), at least out of tit-for-tat animosity. Unlike a restrained presidential Bush or a sober Romney, the president answers in kind — and trumps — the boilerplate leftist charge of “fascist!” and “Nazi!” leveled against him.

 

The Trump haters dominate our media and the universities, the entertainment industries, Silicon Valley, the billionaire green classes, the foundations and the brigades of professional foot-soldier activists, identity-politics operatives, and the Bernie Sanders shock troops. They are frenzied because they think their 1,000 cuts have finally hit arteries — only to see Trump revive in Nietzschean fashion, emerging stronger for the wounds. To come so close to ending this nightmare only to realize they are at the alpha and not the omega of their efforts intensifies their hatred.
Continue reading →

Equal by Catastrophe

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By Victor Davis Hanson//Inference Review

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Princeton University Press, 528 pp., USD$35.

Scheidel argues that history offers few peaceful antidotes to the accumulation of property, money, and leverage in the hands of the few. “For thousands of years,” Scheidel observes, “civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality.”2 Civilization is the culprit; its absence, the cure. Scheidel wrote the book as a warning to progressives: “If we seek to rebalance the current distribution of income and wealth in favor of greater equality, we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past.”3 Continue reading “Equal by Catastrophe” →

The Fire And Fury Of Presidents

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by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas
 

Image credit:Barbara Kelley

“We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016

The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under criticism and claimed he had not been tough enough. But American leaders have always resorted to such blunt talk in exacerbating circumstances such as the current one.

Recall Bill Clinton’s now widely quoted remark that it would be “pointless” for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons because using them would mean “the end of their country.” Likewise, President Harry Truman once promised Japan a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Japan apparently got the message that there was no way out but unconditional surrender. President John F. Kennedy referred publicly to an “abyss of destruction” during the Cuban crisis.

To read more: http://www.hoover.org/research/fire-and-fury-presidents

 

The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies?

 

Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.

 

In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.

 

Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.

 

But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk. Continue reading “The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead” →

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From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center:

 

Cf: (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/22/american-freedom-alliance-event-blames-immigrants-california’s-destruction)

 

“They keynote speaker for the event was Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institute (sic) fellow and author of Mexifornia, a book that romanticizes the California of old, when whites were a large majority of the state’s population. Davis Hanson (sic) talked about how in parts of California, you can go 10 miles in another direction and it ‘looks like you’re in a different country.’ Hanson also attacked California’s Democrats, saying:

 

We don’t want assimilation so we’re going to give you as much amnesty, sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, we’ll do whatever we can so you can remain tribal in your outlook. Your tribal racial and ethnic identity is essential, not irrelevant to your character.

 

Hanson also expounded upon the reconquista conspiracy theory promoted by anti-immigrant activists. It stems from the ‘Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,’ a document produced by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) in the 1960s calling for Chicanos to reclaim land. It is not endorsed by any mainstream groups, but for nativists it serves as the genesis of a conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.

Davis Hanson ended by saying, “The state is regressing into a Third-World country.” He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, ‘When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?’”

________________________

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center,

 

A few preliminaries: Mexifornia, written nearly 15 years ago, was not a romance about “white” California, but a warning that if assimilation, intermarriage, and melting-pot integration continued to be caricatured and eroded, and if massive immigration continued to be illegal, non-diverse, and not based on ethnically blind meritocratic criteria, then one day California would be faced with ethnic polarization, given its various ethnic groups, large numbers of struggling newcomers without legality, English, or high school diplomas, and a state unable to meet its commitments to ensure first-rate public education, infrastructure, transportation, and safety for all its residents. I feel the book was prescient; if you disagree, find an argument instead of using the buzz word “white.” Continue reading →

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From An Angry Reader:

Dear Prof. Hanson,

 

I read your analysis of Trump’s electoral prospects with some interest:

https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/14/anti-trump-bourbons-learning-forgetting-nothing-time-2020/

Since I’m a centrist Democrat, I will emulate your advice about Trump’s tweets – namely, I will ignore the barb-filled bromides you level against Democrats. (Which may greatly satisfy you and/or your audience emotionally, but add nothing to the persuasiveness of your argument.)

 

That said, I was the only one of my liberal friends who believed that Trump had a real shot. That might arise from my extensive experience as a volunteer for my party in a deep red state. (Indiana, which we local Democrats affectionately refer to as the “Northernmost Southern State.” Remember what JFK said about DC? Here, we are blessed with northern winters and southern culture.).

 

I am most certainly not saying that Trump is doomed. However I think your analysis, while insightful, is missing a number of critical factors. My bottom line is that Trump has essentially no margin for error. He has to pick up one or more voters for every voter he loses.

 

You get credit for observing that Trump’s support is probably little diminished since election day. However you fail to note that there is a very small slice of his voters who are definitely gone: these are the disenchanted Democrats who either voted against Clinton, or who felt that Trump was on the side of the “little guy” against the “Wall Street elites.” Will economic growth (such as it may be), trade tweaks, or massive deportations keep them? Not unless their own personal situation improves. And it’s unlikely that it will if they live in the “forgotten America:” the only sector that appears to be benefiting is mining and minerals, and this is probably not enough to compensate for the collapse of retail.

 

You imply that minority voters are going to ignore Trump’s tweets and dog whistles to the same extent as white voters due to economic growth (speculative) among other things. Perhaps, although if we continue to see these racially-tinged episodes such as what happened recently in Virginia, the African Americans who stayed home in some of these urban areas like Detroit, Philly and Milwaukee might not do so again. They are also going to notice some changes at DOJ, such as the return to more severe sentencing policies and increased enforcement of marijuana laws (which African Americans rightly see as a cudgel).

 

Asian-Americans like myself are not impressed by Trump’s push to restrict legal immigration. We remember the Chinese Exclusion Act, and are not as easily influenced by economic growth (such as it may be), since we are already better off than the population as a whole. We also skew Democratic as you know, and are just as influenced by Trump’s exploitation of ethnic animus for political purposes as other voters of color.

 

Latinos and Chicanos might like some of Trump’s policies on illegal immigration, and might also be influenced by whatever economic growth he achieves, but Trump’s ambiguous stance on DACA, his battle against sanctuary cities, and his objective of making immigration enforcement more unpredictable are sewing a great deal of fear into their communities. Ironically, Trump is actually deporting fewer people than Obama, but he is unlikely to make that argument. And as far as restricting legal immigration goes, that’s not likely to play well with these voters.

 

Everyone who will now fail to get a raise because of DOL’s rejection of Obama’s rule that changes the minimum salary for “managerial” workers (who will not get overtime) is going to notice it.

 

GLBTQ voters, while a small share of the population, are not going to forget Trump’s tweet about transgendered members of the military. This group is obviously particularly sensitive to such things and unlikely to dismiss it as another example of Trump’s “erratic” tweeting behavior. Those of us who are heterosexual may not notice this, but Trump’s tweet represents the first step backwards after decades of progress. It’s a bit like a synagogue being burned down: trust me, Jews notice such things. (Mormons probably think likewise, it comes from the perspective of being a historically despised minority.)

 

Speaking of being a historically despised minority, I don’t have to say anything about Muslim voters, do I? Some may have neglected to show up last year because they thought Trump couldn’t win. Won’t happen in 2020. And BTW there are a lot of Muslims in Michigan.

 

There will be 15 million potential new millennial voters in 2020. Broadly speaking, they skew more liberal and more Democratic in their preferences than the population as a whole, and are much more concerned about the “hoax” of climate change. At the same time, Trump’s core age demographic of senior citizens will represent a smaller segment of the voting population, as older boomers and “silent generation” voters die off. The rural areas that are seeing alarmingly high rates of premature deaths among whites will be most severely affected.

 

You do make a good point about the possibility of new voters from Trump’s core demographics, especially rural white Evangelicals. Many of these voters believe that Trump is a “blessing” from God, and may even regard him as part of a new “Holy Quaternity,” or at the very least share the “Flight 93” concerns of Anton (i.e. America is being overrun by un-Godly and un-white people to the point where the foundational culture of the nation is at stake – you know, like the Irish and Italians were threatening it back in the nineteenth century). White Evangelicals already vote at much higher rates than the general population, and skew Republican by a 5-to-1 or greater margin. If Trump is re-elected, this asymmetry will have to become even more extreme.

 

I’ll close by making one final point about the Democratic party. No screed penned by you or anyone else is going to change the fact that Democrats are likely to put their chips down on health care, which is an issue that affects everyone. The chances of Trump and Republicans in Congress working with Democrats to remedy defects in the ACA seem remote at best. The American health care system is going to continue to deteriorate, and Republicans will have little to offer here except blame and deflection.

 

So here’s the bottom line. Trump has the devotion of rural white Evangelicals plus other elderly white voters to count on, and there is always the possibility that their already-stratospheric turnout rates can be pushed even higher. He may stand to gain from economic growth (although this might not help him much in the parts of the country where he’s strongest). But at the same time, he has no margin for error, he is not broadening his base, Clinton’s not going to be on the ballot, and there are a lot of demographic groups which might be more inclined to turn out against him next time.

 

I agree with you that no one should be counting their chickens here. But your presentation (minus the mean-spirited nature of the invective) fails to acknowledge the entire panoply of potential factors.

 

—raj

 

———————————————————

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Raj,

 

Your letter is long so I cannot answer it in detail. When you allege “barb-filled bromides” and “mean-spirited nature of the invective” you must give examples to have any credence.

 

I have always said in a 50/50 country that Trump has no margin of error; my argument was instead that forecasts of his demise are premature given that the formula that won him the election of 2016 so far has not disappeared.

 

His chances hinge on the economy continuing to improve, rallying his base, curbing his erratic and extraneous editorialization, and appealing to minority and women voters to increase his respectable prior margins (in Republican terms).

 

But your exegesis leaves out a point I made; Trump will be running against somebody and he or she may be even worse a candidate than Hillary. As I wrote, look at recent DNC heads—Perez, Ellison, Wasserman-Schultz, Brazile; they are either unhinged, profane, or mired in ethical scandal. The Democratic Party is also at war with itself, in the fashion of 1972 when McGovern ensured a Nixon victory. Never underestimate the stupidity of either party to nominate a candidate that cannot win (McGovern, Dole, Mondale, etc.).

 

When activists go after Lincoln busts, or demand the end of the Jefferson Memorial, they do Trump an enormous favor. The country was rightly repelled by Nazi and Confederate regale in North Carolina, but also by the now serial leftwing violence on campuses and the sort of assassinations that we saw at Fort Hood, and Dallas, and shootings against the House leadership in DC. As I also wrote, some of Trump’s policies that are caricatured—ending illegal immigration, bringing back jobs, a muscular foreign policy, and lowering taxes—appeal to all people regardless of their ethnic identifications.

 

Your analysis is marred by psychodramas. Returning legal immigration to a meritocratic, legal, and diverse enterprise at levels common of 15 years ago of 500,000 a year (we are at record levels of foreign born currently in the U.S. in a manner that has not been typical of our long history) is hardly exclusionary. Why the exaggerations, given the U.S. is the most welcoming of all nations to immigrants and will continue to be, albeit in legal fashion?

 

Obamacare, passed without a single Republican vote and with serial mistruth about the inviolability of doctors and plans, is going broke on its own. Trump did not create that monster.

 

And why the patronizing caricatures of Trump’s so-called white evangelical voters? You sound like those who slurred them as clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables. Past groups did not arrive illegally. And the melting pot not the salad bowl was the model.

 

Trump’s base rallied to Trump not on the basis of race (most of his primary challengers and Hillary were white), but because his campaign appealed to those dispossessed by globalization and caricatured (as is your wont as well) as ignorant. When Obama was elected, were you worried he appealed to racial solidarity (remember his faux-inner city patois, though not as clumsy as Hillary’s), and therefore achieved record bloc voting at unprecedented rates? I think his “get in their faces,” “punish our enemies,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” etc. were all intended to rally his base. Racial polarization was part of the Obama electoral plan and it worked well for him twice, although disastrously for his party that lost most state offices, Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

 

Democrats’ problem, as I wrote, was that Obama’s base was not transferrable to Hillary, given that some of it was based on racial fides, but his downside (polarizing the white working class by associations with the like of anti-Semites and racists like Rev. Wright or Al Sharpton) was.

 

—vic

Our War against Memory

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

The new abolitio memoriae

 

Back to the Future

Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive — only to be despised the moment they dropped.

 

After unhinged emperors were finally killed off, the sycophantic Senate often proclaimed a damnatio memoriae (a “damnation of memory”). Prior commemoration was wiped away, thereby robbing the posthumous ogre of any legacy and hence any existence for eternity.

 

In more practical matters, there followed a concurrent abolitio memoriae (an “erasing of memory”). Specifically, moralists either destroyed or rounded up and put away all statuary and inscriptions concerning the bad, dead emperor. In the case of particularly striking or expensive artistic pieces, they erased the emperor’s name (abolitio nominis) or his face and some physical characteristics from the artwork.

 

Impressive marble torsos were sometimes recut to accommodate a more acceptable (or powerful) successor. (Think of something like the heads only of the generals on Stone Mountain blasted off and replaced by new carved profiles of John Brown and Nat Turner). Continue reading “Our War against Memory” →

The Silliest Generation

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By | American Greatness

Every generation, in its modesty, used to think the prior one was far better. Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation” to remind Americans of what our fathers endured during the Depression and World War II—with the implicit message that we might not have been able to do what they did.

For the Roman poet Horace to be a laudator temporis acti (“a praiser of a past age”) was a natural if sometimes tiring inclination. His famous lines at the end of his Ode 3.6 on moral degeneracy run, “Worse than our grandparents’ generation, our parents’ then produced us, even worse, and soon to bear still more sinful children”—and managed in just a few words to fault four generations for continual moral decline.

Yet what is strange about the present age is that our current generation uniquely believes just the opposite. Apparently, we believe that most cadres before us were not up to our standards. Indeed, we are having to clean up their messes of racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, as well as environmental desecration and global warming.

Even their statues must fall as bothersome reminders of their moral depravity. And the way they come down would do either Hitler (who carted off to Germany the French dining car in Compiègne that had been commemorated as the site of the 1918 armistice) or Stalin (who primitively photo-shopped out each year’s new enemies of the people) proud. Usually our generation kills the dead by the mob or a frightened mayor in the dead of night—rarely by a majority vote of elected representatives, referenda, or the recommendations of local, state, and federal commissions and carried out in daytime. Continue reading “The Silliest Generation” →

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