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.

A China Policy That Works—For America

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by Gordon G. Chang
 

Image credit: Poster Collection, CC 111, Hoover Institution Archives.

Last March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attempted to set American policy toward China for the next 50 years. Washington in its dealings with the Chinese state, he said, would be guided by the principles of “non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation.”

Nobody wants conflict or confrontation and everyone values respect and seeks cooperation. Tillerson’s statement, however, is misguided, as just about every assumption behind those words is wrong. America, therefore, needs a completely new paradigm for relations with Beijing.

http://www.hoover.org/research/china-policy-works-america

From an Angry Reader

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DR HANSON.

 TRUMP TRAITOR IS A RUSSIAN SPY.

I LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING HIM IN JAIL WITH THE ENTIRE ADMINISTRATION.

THE TRUMP JOKE PRESIDENCY IS GOING DOWN IN FLAMES.

TRUMP FIRED COMEY TO CONCEAL HIS RUSSIAN CONNECTIONS.

DEMOCRATS WILL BE IN POWER FOR 30 YEARS AFTER THE TRUMP DEBACLE.

 -HEIN

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear “HEIN”

There are three characteristics that identify writers suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome: the use of all capital letters in their writing (and sometimes as well repeated hyphenation marks), the resort to profanity, and the use of unsupported hyperbole. I congratulate you on suffering from only two of the three symptoms.

What is the aim of capital letters? And what makes you think Trump, who is no fan of Obama-era reset, is a spy for the Soviet Union? Did he approve sales of 20% of the U.S. uranium reserves to Russia, or receive huge speaking fees in Russia, while his wife was U.S. Secretary of State? Did he promise on a hot mic to a Russian official to be more “flexible” with Putin after he was elected? Please substantiate.

Trump fired Comey because he was a publicity hound and intellectually disingenuous; Hillary would have fired him on day one of her presidency.

After 2008 amid the Obama victory craze, James Carville (40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation) predicted a 40-year Democratic regnum; instead Obama within eight years had lost his party the vast majority of state legislatures and governorships, as well as the Senate and House, Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

I doubt any party will have a 30-year continuum of power.

For all your zeal, you never adduce any proof to support your charges of treason. Why not?

-HAN

Lessons from the Battle of Midway

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
America’s culture of spontaneity, flexibility, and improvisation helped win the battle.
Seventy-five years ago (June 4-7, 1942), the astonishing American victory at the Battle of Midway changed the course of the Pacific War.
Just six months after the catastrophic Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. crushed the Imperial Japanese Navy off Midway Island (about 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu), sinking four of its aircraft carriers.
“Midway” referred to the small atoll roughly halfway between North America and Asia. But to Americans, “Midway” became a barometer of military progress. Just half a year after being surprised at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy had already destroyed almost half of Japan’s existing carrier strength (after achieving a standoff at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier).
The odds at the June 1942 battle favored the Japanese. The imperial fleet had four carriers to the Americans’ three, backed up by scores of battleships, cruisers, and light carriers as part of the largest armada that had ever steamed from Japan.

Continue reading “Lessons from the Battle of Midway” →

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Victor Davis Hanson On Comey, Foreign Policy, And Life On A California Farm

May 10, 2017 By

 

http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/10/victor-davis-hanson-comey-foreign-policy-life-california-farm/

 

Severed Heads

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by Victor Davis Hanson//National Review
Far too many government officials never pay the price for their crimes and misdeeds: Clinton, Rice, Napolitano, Lerner … Comey is the exception.
President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.
Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.
But otherwise the firing was overdue.
The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.

Continue reading “Severed Heads” →

Can Trump Successfully Remodel the GOP?

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 by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
If Trumpism succeeds, it could replace mainstream Republicanism.
The Republican-party establishment is caught in an existential paradox.
Without Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist 2016 campaign, the GOP probably would not have won the presidency. Nor would Republicans now enjoy such lopsided control of state legislatures and governorships, as well as majorities in the House and Senate, and likely control of the Supreme Court for a generation.
So are conservatives angry at the apostate Trump or indebted to him for helping them politically when they were not able to help themselves?
For a similar sense of the paradox, imagine if a novice outsider such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had captured the Democratic nomination and then won the presidency — but did not run on either Bernie Sanders’s progressive redistributionism, Barack Obama’s identity politics, or Hillary Clinton’s high taxes and increased regulation. Would liberals be happy, conflicted, or seething?
For now, most Republicans are overlooking Trump’s bothersome character excesses — without conceding that his impulsiveness and bluntness may well have contributed to his success after Republican sobriety and traditionalism failed.

Continue reading “Can Trump Successfully Remodel the GOP?” →

Comey’s Overdue Departure

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The Corner
The one and only.
 by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
If a FBI director is doing his job, we probably should neither see nor hear of him much on television.
The FBI director by his very office holds enormous power. And like the IRS director, by definition he or she must show restraint given the vast resources at his discretion and thus the potential for abuse. In other words, we want a FBI director to exude coolness, stay dispassionate, and remain professional. I don’t think that has ever been a description that fit Director James Comey.
Comey’s nadir came in the summer of 2016 when, confused over the investigatory role of the FBI and the prosecutorial prerogatives of the Justice Department, he de facto turned the FBI into investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury in presenting damning evidence against Hillary Clinton, then nullifying it, then reopening the case, then re-reopening it and backing off — all in front of television cameras in the midst of a heated presidential campaign.
And then after doing all that, Comey confused the act with its intent, and as a veritable legislator reinvented statutes about communicating classified information by suggesting that even if one likely committed a felony, but did not intend to (not a proven assertion), then it wasn’t really a felony.
Comey’s behavior was never properly addressed. His recent performance in front of Congress likely sealed his fate. We do not expect our FBI director to whine, in teenager fashion, about being treated unfairly, as he alleged when Loretta Lynch dumped the Clinton e-mail scandal in his lap. (A good FBI director, of course, would simply have run the investigation, presented the findings to the Justice Department, and then have let them deal with it (if not Lynch, then someone else). Comey misrepresented the volume of Huma Abedin’s improper e-mails; and in general always fell back on loud assertions of FBI integrity rather than displaying it through his behavior and statements.
Nor did Comey have a reservoir of good will. Long ago, he acted bizarrely in the John Ashcroft hospitalization melodrama; he was responsible for the career of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who miscarried justice in the case of Scooter Libby (not to mention Fitzgerald’s own subsequent Conrad Black prosecution). His legacy is that Hillary Clinton paid no price for illegally setting up an improper e-mail server, destroying evidence, and communicating classified material in an insecure fashion.
Comey seems to think that he could freely discuss the charges of Russian collusion, but not so transparently the far stronger evidence of unlawful unmasking of Americans caught up in (or in fact targeted by) government surveillance — apparently in understandable fear that the Democrats and media posed the greater danger to his career.
Politically,Comey’s thirst for celebrity rankled his own bureau and, finally, achieved the difficult result of alienating both Republicans (who thought he was an Obama operative in service to Hillary) and Democrats (who thought he was a tool of the FBI, freelancing to sink Hillary). Usually being roundly distrusted would be a sign of disinterested non-partisanship. But in Comey’s case, the universal disdain was more likely rare unity that Comey lacked the temperament to run the FBI and had created a climate of fear that at any given moment a Comey press conference would destroy someone’s career without commensurate investigation and evidence.
Democrats, who despised Comey (see Hillary’s latest whine) and blamed him for Trump’s election, are already calling the firing cruel, mean spirited, and proof of a Trump conspiracy (why would Trump fire and set loose on the media the man who supposedly had handed him the election?); Republicans will shrug that long ago Comey should have been fired (the entire Clinton investigations, including the quid pro quo Clinton Foundation matters, were sloppy and amateurish), but the timing and methods of his firing seemed momentarily messy.
The proper analysis is probably twofold: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — roundly praised in bipartisan fashion (please read his detailed memo critiquing Comey’s performance) — wanted to start out with a clean slate and not have a damaged-goods FBI-director albatross around his neck for the next four years — in the contexts of the past recusals of Lynch and then Jeff Sessions.
Second, the surveillance/unmasking scandal remains a potential bombshell and it was probably felt that Comey (who was loquacious about the collusion charge, but suddenly silent about likely felonious unmasking) could not be trusted to conduct a timely, fair, and prompt investigation. (Would he have had another press conference announcing that surveillance statutes had been violated by unmasking, but that “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue such a case, supposedly given its lack of criminal intent?)
The hysteria will subside, because in the end Comey has no supporters left, and lots of critics — he will be missed by very few.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447471/james-comey-overdue-departure

How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps

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By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
Counting the ways, and Comey is not among them.
Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.
Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.
In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.
The Pretexts
We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.
Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.
From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.
Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.
In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.
As far as the Russians, they are Russians — always seeking to throw wrenches into the gears of U.S. elections. The Republicans claimed that their firewalls kept the Russians out of RNC e-mail; John Podesta using “password” for his password invited them in. And, of course, no one forced Washington journalists to collude through e-mail with the Clinton campaign, and no one ordered Hillary to jerry-rig a home-brewed server. The Russian-collusion bogeyman was probably as effective a campaign prop for Clinton as the supposed Russian-inspired e-mail revelations were for Trump.

Continue reading “How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps” →

Angry Reader

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From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

I don’t know anything about Stanley Baldwin, but I’ll assume your description of him is accurate. In that case, you have to stretch quite a bit to make Obama into Baldwin. For instance:

You call Baldwin a pacifist. Obama is decidedly not a pacifist. He is a Niebuhrian realist who was willing to bomb and assassinate. Just because he was given the Nobel Peace Prize and preferred diplomacy over the use of violence does not make him a pacifist or appeaser.

You claim that Obama, like Baldwin, seems “to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings” that “can be remedied through more talk and concessions,” and that Obama was opposed to strategic deterrence. Is this not a simplistic and one-sided view of Obama’s actions? He readily acknowledged the evil of organizations such as ISIS and sought the most effective ways to neutralize them—not only through “soft power” that appeals to hearts and minds, but also through military alliances, training local fighters, and through a much stepped-up program of drone warfare.

You fault Obama for Iran taking 10 US sailors into custody, but you fail to mention that the sailors were in Iranian territorial waters, were therefore legally apprehended by Iran, and that Obama’s calm approach got them released quickly.

You fault Obama for the uranium enrichment agreement with Iran despite the fact that the majority of strategists have hailed this as a great success; that most analysts believe that trying to bomb Iran out of a nuclear program would not have worked and would have led to far more dangerous problems.

You claim that when Assad “called Obama’s bluff” about the red line of using chemical weapons, that Obama “did nothing other than call … Putin to beg Assad to stop killing civilians with chemical weapons.” That’s not my memory of events. My memory is that the US was on the very brink of war with Assad when, during a news conference, Secretary of State Kerry was asked if there was anything that could prevent the beginning of US bombing. Kerry replied that Syria would have to immediately destroy all of its chemical weapons—something Kerry didn’t believe Syria would do. It was at that moment that Russia offered to destroy all of Syria’s chemical weapons. Obama, on balance, decided that was a better option than widening a destabilizing war with an uncertain outcome. Trump’s recent correct decision to bomb a Syrian airfield because of Syria’s recent use of chemical weapons was made possible by Obama’s red-line stance. Syria clearly violated the agreement, and Russia was exposed as a fraudulent actor.

North Korea building more and better missiles (and nuclear bombs) was not due to Obama’s policies. On the contrary, that was due to the blundering of Bush. Bill Clinton was in the process of a negotiated settlement with North Korea to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the Bush administration then torpedoed those efforts and instead threatened North Korea. There is no military solution to North Korea arming itself with nuclear weapons short of exposing South Korea and the North Korean population to mass nuclear carnage. North Korea will continue to pursue nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles as long as it feels threatened. If you have found some other magical solution, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not saying Obama made every right decision in Syria or elsewhere. He almost certainly did not. It may be he was too hesitant to use force in some situations. But that is a far cry from the blanket assertions you make in your column. And time may vindicate him rather than fault him. It may be that his complex strategy of diplomacy and military action was about as good as we could have done under the circumstances. In any case, I urge you to be more accurate, knowledgeable, and nuanced about the uses of diplomacy. 

Ryan Ahlgrim

Richmond, VA

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Ryan Ahlgrim,

When I listed various attributes of Stanley Baldwin’s agenda, I ended with “Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin.” And then I listed the areas of commonality, and most certainly did not include Baldwin’s pacifism as an Obama trait. Did you really read the column?

But that said, Obama’s targeted assassinations via drones and bombing of Libya had nothing to do with maintaining deterrence, which was largely lost after slashing the defense budget, appeasing Iran, letting ISIS, Syria, and North Korea fester, and offering various apologies and morally equivalent rationalizations to our increasingly bellicose enemies.

I suggest, Ryan, that it is not in your argument’s interest to invoke “ISIS”—given that Obama wrote the growing terrorist cabal off as a “jayvee” organization, and allowed it to sprout in Iraq and thrive in Syria, by foolishly pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of a largely quiet Iraq in December 2011. No need to elaborate on Obama’s Syria policies or his “redline”; the genocide speaks for itself. One can read Ben Rhodes’s interview about an “echo chamber” and a “know nothing” media that was easily manipulated for a taste of how foreign policy was conducted. I don’t think the foreign policy of Ben Rhodes, John Kerry, and Susan Rice (as opposed to that of Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster) was anything but extremely dangerous.

With all due respect, your assertion that Obama’s false redline empowered Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airfield is unhinged. Obama, John Kerry, and Susan Rice bragged that all chemical weapons were destroyed and that there were none left in Syria—as if they had any way of knowing, at best, and, at worse, must have known that assertion was untrue. Such statements were no more accurate than were Benghazi’s being caused by a video-maker, or Bowe Bergdahl being a POW who served with honor and distinction as alleged by Susan Rice.

Obama’s redline not only eroded U.S. deterrence (giving confidence to rogue states like North Korea and Iran to call our bluff), and led to hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in Syria, but also ushered in Russia’s return to the Middle East after a near half-century hiatus.

Ditto North Korea where you display the same historical ignorance. Bill Clinton bragged that his “settlement” would shortly lead to the dismantling of all North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Nothing of the sort happened.

During the Bush term, it became clear that North Korea had stealthily used Clinton’s naiveté to rush toward nuclearization; Bush did not threaten North Korea with force, but rather suggested that if it were to continue its trajectory, its behavior might lead to the nuclearization of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

North Korea does not starve its own people and build nukes because it feels “threatened” but because it has hit on a two-decade long winning strategy of getting a few nuclear weapons, acting deranged, and demanding bribe money—and it has worked brilliantly in winning attention, cash, and influence for an otherwise failed and genocidal state.

The 10 sailors, incompetently led, amateurish, and poorly trained, were experiencing mechanical problems in their tiny flotilla, were unfamiliar with the environs of Farsi Island, and wandered into the waters off an Iranian island in the middle of the Persian Gulf. What followed was a propaganda coup, as they were blindfolded, told to put their hands up, humiliated, video-taped and interviewed. The incident was emblematic that the Obama Defense Department was not on full alert in the Persian Gulf, that the Iranians assumed that the U.S. would not demand that the sailors be immediately released, and that Iran saw no downside to an iconic act of humiliation—part of their larger publicity offensive during the tragic Iranian negotiations, whose full details were hidden by the Obama administration and are only now leaking out.

Given recently released information about secret side-agreements and concessions in the Iran Deal, the 2016-2017 aggressiveness of North Korea, the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and Putin’s post-reset assertiveness, I don’t think it is wise to praise Obama’s foreign policy. And I stand by my obvious and unoriginal statement that Obama appeased enemies, and made the world a less safe place, especially for his own country.

Lead from behind foreign policy was, in fact, like Stanley Baldwin’s (read up on the well-meaning naïf), who left office self-satisfied after ensuring the world would blow up under the watch of his successor Neville Chamberlain.

In any case, I urge you to be more accurate, knowledgeable, and nuanced about the nature of deterrence and European history of the 1930s.

Victor Hanson

Selma, California