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.
Germany’s negative attitude toward the U.S. long predates the rise of Trump.
Berlin — Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days.
According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world.
Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti–European Union views.
The Democrats are following the lead of the progressive media — together, they now form the anti-Trump brigade.
Is there a Democratic-party alternative to President Trump’s tax plan?
Is there a Democratic congressional proposal to stop the hemorrhaging and impending implosion of Obamacare?
Do Democrats have some sort of comprehensive package to help the economy grow or to deal with the recent doubling of the national debt? Continue reading “The Fusion Party”→
Rarely in the last half-century have so many elite conservatives and intellectuals been so estranged both from a Republican administration and from those who voted for it—neither have they become so animated in their antipathy and disgust for a sitting president.
During the 2016 election, and the current Trump presidency, there have appeared four implicit tenets to the conservative “Never Trump” position that, we are supposed to understand, justified not voting for him, actively opposing him, or voting for Hillary Clinton:
1) The character flaws of the inexperienced and uncouth Trump would eventually nullify any positive agenda that he might enact; not opposing such a boorish character undermines one’s reputation as an empirical and fair-minded conservative; Continue reading “The Nightmares and the Realities of Never Trump”→
Hillary and Bill Clinton were a proud, progressive power couple who came into big-time state politics on promises of promoting “fairness” and “equality.” It did not matter much that very little in their previous personal lives had matched such elevated rhetoric with concrete action. And so the ironies and tragedies that followed were not altogether unexpected.
The theme that united the subsequent tawdry reports about the Clinton cattle futures scam and Whitewater was an overweening lust for money. The Clintons seemed to feel entitled, in the sense that their education, sophistication, and taste deserved the sort of peace of mind, enjoyment, and security that only comfortable circumstances could provide, and which was taken for granted among the rich progressive environments in which the Clintons increasingly navigated. They had arrived and they “deserved” it. Continue reading “The Obamas and the Clinton Road to Perdition”→
Prague — The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio.
About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions.
The Czech Republic, to take one example, joined the European Union in 2004. But it has not yet adopted the euro and cannot decide whether the EU is wisely preventing wars of the past from being repeated or is recklessly strangling freedom in the manner of the old Soviet Union — or both.
The obligation to honor the war dead has often conflicted with the need to make distinctions among them and their causes.
By Victor Davis Hanson// Wall Street Journal
A few years ago I was honored to serve briefly on the American Battle Monuments Commission, whose chief duty is the custodianship of American military cemeteries abroad. Over 125,000 American dead now rest in these serene parks, some 26 in 16 countries. Another 94,000 of the missing are commemorated by name only. The graves (mostly fatalities of World Wars I and II) are as perfectly maintained all over the world, from Tunisia to the Philippines, as those of the war dead who rest in the well-manicured acres of the U.S. military cemetery in Arlington, Va. Continue reading “What We Remember on Memorial Day”→
Normally, I would find a credentialed resume such as yours quite impressive and interesting, however, the deluded and incredulous nonsense I witnessed you spouting on FOX News with Tucker Carlson, that Russian involvement with the Trump campaign exists only as a ‘trumped up’ Dem Big Lie to destroy a narcissistic buffoon unqualified for the office to which he conned his way into, exhibits your resume to be a sham. It’s not that I disagree with you–it’s because you’re so overtly full of it and only serving to make a bad situation facing the country worse.Continue reading “Angry Reader”→
In general, America profoundly lacks interest in communist ideology, a phenomenon Karl Marx would have called “the poverty of ideology.” As a result, our China policy by and large has failed to take into sufficient consideration the primal forces that motivate Chinese communist leadership in foreign and domestic affairs.
This lack of understanding of China through a communist ideological prism has also led us to believe that China operates more or less the same way the U.S. does. Therefore, if we bring China into rules-based international communities such as the World Trade Organization, we expect it to follow the rules of international trade regulations, just like the United States. Or, if we open up our markets to the Chinese, they will do the same in response. Related to this American belief is the prevailing idea that human progress and political freedom can be achieved through economic prosperity and that if we help China become economically vibrant, then democracy and human rights will eventually arrive in China—it’s just a matter of time.
History teaches us that during war and international crises, just when things were looking most grim, they were oftentimes already getting better.
Consider the dark days of World War II. Seventy-five years ago, 1942 started out as an awful year. The United States and the British were still reeling from the December 1941 Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Singapore would fall in February 1942 in an ignominious defeat; and the American bastion at Corregidor surrendered in May.
For the first four months of the war, Japan had run wild. Or as two Japanese analysts, Masatake Okuymiya and Jiro Horikoshi, put it: “Japan took more territory over a greater area than any country in history and did not lose a single ship.” By June, the Japanese Empire stretched from the Aleutian Islands to the Indian Ocean, and from Wake Island to the Russian-Manchurian border—the most expansive Asian Empire in world history.
Things were no better for the Allies in the European theater. In August 1942, German soldiers climbed Mt. Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus, as the German army neared the shores of the Caspian Sea, and one of the richest oil fields in the world. The vast Third Reich stretched from the English Channel to the Volga River and from the Arctic Circle southward to the Sahara by the summer of 1942.
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