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.

America The Weird

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Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution

On first glance, America does not seem that exceptional. Like China and Russia, it is a superpower. And, also like those countries, it is huge territorially. It shares many affinities with Europe. And, like China, Japan and Germany, the United States is an economic powerhouse. And yet, it is a nation unlike any in the world.

In general, outside the West, few of the seven billion people alive today enjoy human rights and the protection of property. The rule of law and freedom of expression are taken for granted in Europe and the United States, and residents there enjoy both economic prosperity and physical security. These exceptions to the global norms of repression, autocracy, tribalism, sectarian violence, and fundamentalism are found only either in the West proper, or in a few Westernized nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Read the full article here.

The Trump Land Mine

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.

Read the full article here.

05-02-18 Angry Reader

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From An Angry Reader:

Fake Claims. WE HAVE A CONGENITAL LIAR AS A PRESIDENT. HE HAS SCAMMED THE US WITH TAXES AND BANKRUPTCY. HE IS A SERIAL ADULTERER AND SEXUAL PREDATOR. EVEN AS I TEXT HIS BUSINESSES ARE PROFITING FROM MY HARD EARNED AND MEAGER INCOME. HE IS A NARCISSIST AND EGOTIST. AND YOU CRITICIZE MUELLER???? CLEAN UP YOUR OWN (to quote the president) “SHIT HOUSE” FIRST. THEN START ON MULLER- IF YOU HAVE ANY TIME LEFT.

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Dear Angry Reader Louise Roam,

I will give you a “9” on the angry reader OUTRAGE scale. You hit almost all the right buttons:

All capital letters? Check.

Obscenity? Check.

Strings of ad hominem slurs instead of an argument? Check.

Misspelled words and incoherent grammar and syntax? Check.

How exactly are the President’s businesses profiting from Louise Roam’s hard-earned but “meager” income? All presidents are egotists and narcissists; do you remember Obama’s various boasts that he would cool the planet and lower the seas, or that he was more adroit in his various fields of political expertise than were each of his various advisors and aides? Do you remember the faux-Greek columns, or the first-person pronoun monotony?

“Muller” (sic) is federal special counsel. If he cannot appoint disinterested attorneys to his team, or follow the mandate for which he was appointed, or stop deliberate leaks from his staff, or control the amorous passions and wild communications of his various subordinates, then he is not deserving of respect due simply to his appointment.

It is hard to calibrate whether Trump’s crudity is unusual for a president or amplified by the biases of the media and our current 24/7 social media culture. Certainly, he has not jailed video makers, surveilled Associated Press reporters, weaponized the IRS to hound his political appointments, or warped the FISA courts to monitor U.S. citizens and unmask their names for the purposes of harming a political opponent. I am waiting for proof of Trump-Putin collusion; but in the meantime, I do not think there is any doubt that the Hillary Clinton campaign hired a foreign national (Christopher Steele) to find dirt on her opponent. Steele in turn likely purchased gossip and dirt from operatives of the Russian government, and then he used contacts in the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and State Department to ensure such unsubstantiated smears were leaked to the media before the November 2016 election, in hopes of either altering it or at least providing “insurance” for the Clinton campaign.

When you write an angry letter, please try to be logical and rational. If any of the above seems unsubstantiated to you, please explain where and how. Meanwhile, ranting with capital letters and foaming about are no substitutes for an argument.

Victor Hanson

If Only Hillary Had Won . . .

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Leakers and lawbreakers rewarded with Clinton-administration jobs — and the American public none the wiser about deep-state corruption

There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.

The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.” The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.

Read the full article here.

The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers.

The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

In one direction, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.

Read the full article here.

Strategika Issue 50: Pakistan’s Partnership with the United States

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The United States and Pakistan: Frenemies on the Brink

Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Peter R. Mansoor in Strategika.

For much of its short seventy-year history, Pakistan has managed to thoroughly mismanage its strategic relationships with great power patrons, regional competitors, and non-state clients. It has waged and lost four wars with a larger and more powerful India, supported terrorist organizations that have destabilized Afghanistan and conducted deadly attacks in neighboring India, and alienated its long-time American ally.

Read the full article here.

 

Pakistan: Murderous Ally, Patient Enemy

Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Ralph Peters in Strategika.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership—the country’s decisive elements—view the United States as a danger to be managed and a resource to be exploited. Its approach to bilateral relations is predicated on three things: The (correct) belief that U.S. interlocutors do not understand the region; the conviction that, eventually, the U.S. will leave Afghanistan; and Pakistan’s need for hegemony over Afghanistan—not only to check India’s strategic moves but, more importantly, to guarantee Pakistan’s internal cohesion.

Read the full article here.

 

Pakistan: Neither Ally, Nor Enemy

Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Bing West in Strategika.

Last April, Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill, a distinguished diplomat, summarized American policy toward Pakistan. “Every time a new administration in Washington comes to office,” he said, “they get worried about Pakistan, which has a stockpile of nuclear weapons. The US Secretary of State then visits Pakistan and meets the top leadership. He is systematically lied to by Pakistan’s leadership, and this goes on for about two years. In the third year, he tells his colleagues at the (US) State Department that Pakistan’s leaders have been lying to him.

Read the full article here.

 

Rough Riders

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Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution

America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes. The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. George Marshall remains the epitome of understated and quiet competence. The alternative and more controversial sorts are the loud, often reckless and pro-fane, pile drivers. Think Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt. At given times and in particular landscapes, both profiles have proven invaluable

Read the full article here.

What Randa Jarrar Teaches

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The following piece is by my colleague, Craig Bernthal.

Since Randa Jarrar fired off her disgusting tweet about “the witch,” Barbara Bush, being a racist, I, like other members of the Fresno State English Department, have received about a dozen emails asking, alternatively, how we could have participated in hiring her, and then, what we would do to get her fired. For the record, I had no part in the former and am impotent with regard to the later. This is now President Castro’s baby, and all I can say is, good luck, sir. I suspect she will be the albatross around Fresno State’s neck for as long as she wants to stay.

The Barbara Bush tweet, which is clearly protected political speech under the First Amendment, and for which Jarrar should not and cannot be fired, doesn’t really get at the problem she poses, which is how the university deals with racial hatred aimed at whites?  To fully understand why Jarrar poses this question, you have to look beyond the Barbara Bush tweet to her other declarations on twitter and Youtube.

Continue reading “What Randa Jarrar Teaches” →

Revolution and Worse to Come

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block.

On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump himself has gained ground. Yet good news is bad news to the Resistance and its strange continued efforts to stop an elected president in a way it failed to do in the 2016 election.

Indeed, the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.

Read the full article here.

Respect Unearned

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Washington’s self-righteous establishmentarians talk of professionalism when they act unprofessionally. They refer at length to their intellectual and professional pedigrees when they prove incompetent. And they cite their morality and ethics when they possess neither.

And then, adding insult to injury, when the public expresses abhorrence at their behavior, they accuse critics of unprofessionalism, a lack of patriotism, or reckless demagoguery.

A James Clapper can lie to Congress under oath about intelligence surveillance of U.S. citizens; a John Brennan can lie about CIA monitoring of U.S. Senate computers, or mislead Congress about the absence of any collateral damage in the use of drones. Yet we are supposed to give both further credence based on their emeriti titles or to believe their current Captain Renault-like outrage over President Trump’s lack of presidential decorum? But what in their past has earned them the moral high ground?

Read the full article here.