Read VDH’s COVID, Cancel Culture, and the Commander-In-Chief which recaps his publications this week in American Greatness, The Classicist, and the VDH Podcast.
Week In Review
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.
Trumpism—Without Trump?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically.
Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.
His nonstop complaining about the stolen “landslide” election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. Joe Biden’s current Democratic majority Congress was the result.
Americans were assured by Trump’s impeachment Senate prosecutors and the media that the January 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone. So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisors and cabinet members loudly resigned in disgust.
War and Peace: from Thucydides to Biden
Victor Davis Hanson // The Classicist
Victor Davis Hanson explores how military history can illuminate current foreign policy challenges, delineates which nations pose the greatest threats to the United States, explores the role that human rights should play in international affairs, looks at the changing shape of America’s alliances, and provides a reading list for future commanders-in-chief.
Do Biden’s ‘tough new sanctions’ give Putin Nord Stream 2?
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill
Western media is greeting the Biden administration’s Russian sanctions as “signaling a tougher stance on Russia than under former President Donald Trump.” Vladimir Putin likely thinks otherwise.
It looks as if the Biden administration has blinked on Putin’s key foreign policy objective — the completion and operation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, delivering Russian gas to Europe. The sanctioning of a few Kremlin officials is petty change compared to the decade-long profitable effects of Russian pipeline politics.
Indeed, the new U.S. sanctions do freeze foreign assets and impose travel restrictions on a number of Russian officials associated with the attempted poisoning and sham imprisonment of Putin opponent Aleksei Navalny. Yes, these are significant figures in the Kremlin hierarchy (the chief prosecutor and the head of internal security forces), but they are not the inner-circle kleptocrats that Navalny’s team wanted to see sanctioned.
Largely overlooked in media coverage is that the Russian ruble strengthened after the announced sanctions. Why? As the Russian news service TASS reported, notably missing from Biden’s actions were new sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 undersea pipeline connecting Russia’s northern gas fields directly to Germany.
“Trumpism without Trump
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically.
Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.
His nonstop complaining about the stolen “landslide” election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. Joe Biden’s current Democratic majority Congress was the result.
Was COVID-19 Our Neutron Bomb?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs.
The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness.
In some ways, COVID-19 was our neutron bomb. When we reach the now politically incorrect, taboo term “herd immunity” through vaccinations and antibodies, and when the virus ceases to be a pandemic, the lethal tally may have exceeded 600,000 Americans.
If so, the nation will have lost more countrymen than were killed in World War I and World War II combined—with thousands more suffering disabilities, from “long haul Covid” to stress and psychological impairment from losing livelihoods and lockdown cabin fever.
The illustrious Stanford Left turns against three of its own not on the Left. @VDHanson
West’s ‘wokeness’ helped Russia to redefine a ‘prisoner of conscience’
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill
By forcing the standards of “wokeness” on a Western institution like Amnesty International, the Kremlin has weakened Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny as he begins his almost three years in a penal colony near Vladimir (190 km from Moscow). Everyone understands he is a political prisoner, isolated from Russian political life. That is the definition of “prisoner of conscience,” which Amnesty International has chosen to withdraw from his name.
Navalny, the major opposition figure to Vladimir Putin, was a public relations challenge for the Kremlin even before his run for Moscow mayor in 2013. Through his Fund for the Battle Against Corruption (FBK), he has exposed the corruption and criminality of the Kremlin leadership. He barely survived the poisoning carried out, allegedly, by the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service (FSB); he returned to Moscow from treatment in Germany, only to be sentenced by a Russian kangaroo court to two years and eight months in a labor colony. To the Kremlin’s irritation, Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Poland’s Lech Walesa. Amnesty International, itself a Nobel prize-winning organization, added Navalny to its list of “Prisoners of Conscience,” whose honor roll includes Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Kremlin could ill-afford to have a principled political prisoner in its penal colonies, revered Mandela-like by the international community. Therefore, its disinformation machine — masterful at discrediting persons inconvenient to the regime — switched into high gear. For Navalny, a young and attractive family man with teenage children, the usual charge of pedophilia would not have stuck. Instead, the Kremlin played on Amnesty International’s “own scruples,” as one writer put it.
The Kremlin attacked Navalny for “racist” anti-migrant statements he purportedly made a decade or so ago. The attack was handled largely through foreign journalists associated with RT — a Kremlin-directed international news and TV network — in various countries.
Beware the Biden reset as a predicate for Iran predation. @VDHanson
Was COVID-19 Our Neutron Bomb?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs.
The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness.