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.

From Resistance to Nullification to What Next?

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By Victor Davis Hanson — National Review

Trump’s critics ratchet up to insurrection, but Trump’s tax reforms and our growing economy could derail their dreams.

George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W. Bush — like Jerry Ford in 1977 and Ronald Reagan in 1989 — did the same when Barack Obama assumed power in 2009.

Unending Presidencies

Recent Democrats emeriti — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — apparently had a different vision of the post-presidency, unlike the quiet retirement of Lyndon Johnson back to his ranch in 1969. The three saw politics in more Manichean terms, as an existential struggle far too important to cease at the end of a presidential tenure.

Carter freelanced abroad for 30 years in successful quest for a Nobel Prize, but he often undercut presidential diplomacy. He regularly weighed in on the shortcomings of his successors — in a way he would have deeply resented had either Ford or Richard Nixon done the same.

No sooner had Bill Clinton left the presidency than he and Hillary Clinton began the grand plan for a return to the White House in 2009, and, after a setback, then again in 2017. Theirs was a two-decade long post-presidency of glad-handing, politicking, and, to use a euphemism, quid pro quo fund raising.

Barack Obama has already weighed in, including while overseas, on the shortcomings of his successor. His aides, led by Ben Rhodes, are at the forefront of the “Resistance” to thwart the Trump administration. Susan Rice and John Kerry comment regularly on supposed Trump foreign-policy blunders, as do James Clapper and John Brennan — usually in proactive fashion to deflect news accounts that may reflect poorly on their own past tenures. Continue reading “From Resistance to Nullification to What Next?” →

It’s Worse Than a Crime . . .

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The Corner

The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

I agree with most commentators that Michael Wolff’s sensational mythologies in Fire and Fury will be largely forgotten within three weeks — with one caveat (see below).

 

Wolff confirmed what most already knew about the Left’s abandonment of standards of journalistic integrity in order to “prove” that Trump is unfit (an “oppositional” Jim Rutenberg or Jorge Ramos had already warned us that “the norms of journalistic objectivity” in the case of Trump no longer necessarily entailed disinterested reporting [as opposed to the straight reporting, say, of Susan Rice’s post facto explanations for Benghazi or for the echo-chamber Iran Deal]), while Wolff’s most sensational charges that Trump can be gluttonous, naïve, and narcissistic were long ago either rumored or detectable within Trump’s own tweets.

 

Instead, the only point of interest in Fire and Fury is how someone like a Wolff in sheep’s clothing ever talked his way into the West Wing — sort of in the manner that an otherwise savvy General Stanley McChrystal once allowed the flamboyant, left-wing late Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone into his inner circle to sensationalize off-the-record venting about the Obama White House.

 

Three explanations are plausible (and not mutually exclusive): Some in the Trump West Wing (perhaps worried about post-Trump careers) wanted to establish their maverick fides and undermine their own president; or some wished to sandbag their own rivals in the administration; or some were simply so naïve, so egocentric, or so outright stupid to think that they could charm someone with Wolff’s record and flip him into writing a book that would make them look fairly good.

 

The first two Talleyrand-like “crimes” of disloyalty are what we expect from West Wing intrigue, but the third is unforgivable as a blunder.

Will Nuclear North Korea Survive 2018?

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Given several rapidly developing geopolitical factors, North Korea may look much different by the end of the new year.

 

For good or evil, we may see radical changes in North Korea in 2018.

 

The beefed-up United Nations sanctions by midyear could lead to widespread North Korean hunger, as well as the virtual end of the country’s industry and transportation.

 

In the past, the West had called off such existential sanctions and rushed in cash and humanitarian aid on news of growing starvation. Would it now if the bleak alternative was a lunatic’s nuclear missile possibly striking San Diego or Seattle?

 

To survive an unending trade embargo — and perhaps to avoid a coup — Kim Jong Un would likely either have to recalibrate his nuclear program or consider using it.
Continue reading “Will Nuclear North Korea Survive 2018?” →

Is Trump Really Crazy?

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By | January 8, 2018
American Greatness

Michael Wolff’s sensational exposé of the supposed chaos of the Trump White House is no doubt largely a mix of fantasy, exaggeration, and some accidental truth. The postmodernist author even admits that his own methodologies defy verification, and so leave it up to the reader to distinguish his facts from fiction.

Wolff’s theme is that Trump is hopelessly petty, childlike, and uninformed. The few adults in the room around him—primarily, we are asked to believe, Wolff’s chief source, Steve Bannon—must cajole, pamper, and flatter him to get anything done, when they are not backstabbing one another.

Fair enough—Trump certainly may be naïve and uninitiated. No one doubts that he is thin-skinned and far too often goes down Twitter cul de sacs. But Trump’s naiveté is not quite what Wolff thinks.

Rather, no sane president should ever have let a writer with Wolff’s dubious and often discredited background into the White House. That such a rogue was even allowed through the door raises the question of administration sobriety. Continue reading “Is Trump Really Crazy?” →

Criticisms of Comey and Mueller Aren’t ‘Character Assassination’

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The Corner

The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

 

In his efforts to refute Charles Cooke’s recent exposé of Jennifer Rubin, I was surprised to see David Frum, in passing, attack my Hoover colleague, legal scholar Peter Berkowitz (a “Sean Hannity–style character assassination of James Comey and Special Counsel Robert Mueller”), for suggesting, in a prescient October WSJ opinion column, that the Mueller investigation into Russian collusion may well be ethically compromised (in its zeal to go after those not accused of collusion)—in even greater fashion than was the Comey investigation of Hillary Clinton (in its absence of zeal to indict for clear violations of U.S. intelligence law).
Continue reading “Criticisms of Comey and Mueller Aren’t ‘Character Assassination’” →

The Great Experiment

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

We’ve gone from hard left, under Obama, to hard right, under Trump. Judge the ideologies by their results.

 

Most new administrations do not really completely overturn their predecessors’ policies to enact often-promised ideologically driven change.

 

The 18-year span of Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy was mostly a continuum from center-left to center-right, back to center-left. Kennedy was probably as hawkish and as much of a tax cutter as was Eisenhower.

 

The seven years of Jerry Ford to Jimmy Carter were a similar transition — or even the twelve years of George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton. The deck chairs changed, but the ship sailed in mostly the same manner to mostly the same direction.

 

Even the supposed great divide of 1981 did not mean that Jimmy Carter had been as left-wing as Ronald Reagan was right-wing. Carter’s fight against inflation and renewed defense build-up was continued in part by Reagan. George W. Bush was not as markedly right-wing as Barack Obama was clearly left-wing. In sum, there have rarely been back-to-back complete reversals in presidential agendas. Continue reading “The Great Experiment” →

A New Year’s Toast To The Old Breed

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by Victor Davis Hanson
Defining Ideas

The late World War II combat veteran and memoirist E. B. Sledge enshrined his generation of fellow Marines as “The Old Breed” in his gripping account of the hellish battle of Okinawa. Now, most of those who fought in World War II are either dead or in their nineties.

Much has been written about the disappearance of these members of the Greatest Generation—there are now over 1,000 veterans passing away per day. Of the 16 million who at one time served in the American military during World War II, only about a half-million are still alive.

Military historians, of course, lament the loss of their first-hand recollections of battle. The collective memories of these veterans were never systematically recorded and catalogued. Yet even in haphazard fashion, their stories of dropping into Sainte-Mère-Église or surviving a sinking Liberty ship in the frigid North Atlantic have offered correctives about the war otherwise impossible to attain from the data of national archives.

More worrisome, however, is that the collective ethos of the World War II generation is fading. It may not have been fully absorbed by the Baby Boomer generation and has not been fully passed on to today’s young adults, the so-called Millennials. While U.S. soldiers proved heroic and lethal in Afghanistan and Iraq, their sacrifices were never commensurately appreciated by the larger culture. Continue reading “A New Year’s Toast To The Old Breed” →

Civilization’s ‘Darkest Hour’ Hits the Silver Screen

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by Victor Davis Hanson//National Review

A masterful new film shows how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany in May of 1940.

 

The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk.

 

The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost the confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.

 

Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.

 

About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.
Continue reading “Civilization’s ‘Darkest Hour’ Hits the Silver Screen” →

Nagging Questions for the Special Counselors

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The Corner

The one and only

By Victor Davis Hanson//National Review

 

1) If the FISA Court orders to explore the purported Trump-Russian collusion were predicated on phony Steele/Fusion GPS documents and suppositions that prove largely untrue (Comey himself testified under oath that he could not verify their contents), then are subsequent transcripts of court-approved surveilled conversations somewhat poisoned? And, if so, not permissible to be used in collation with later sworn FBI statements to prove inconsistencies, lying, or obstructing? Would someone like Flynn eventually have grounds to appeal his confession?

 

2) Given the overwhelming progressive consensus by summer 2016 that Trump was not going to be president and that his likely post facto blame for his defeat would fall on deaf ears (Obama before the election had both predicted that Trump would not win and that he would have no grounds to complain of outside interference in the results), why did the amateurish Clinton-created Fusion GPS dossier win such a shelf life, to be peddled around the FBI, discussed by the Obama White House, bandied about by the intelligence agencies, and worked on by the spouse of a DOJ high official?
Continue reading “Nagging Questions for the Special Counselors” →

The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership

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by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

 

To everything, there is a season.

 

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 alternate and more controversial sorts are the loud, often reckless, and profane pile drivers. Think Andrew Jackson of Teddy Roosevelt. Both types have been appreciated, and at given times and in particular landscapes both profiles have proven uniquely invaluable.

 

Grant/Sherman

Both Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were military geniuses. Grant was quiet and reflective — at least in his public persona, which gave scant hint that he struggled with alcohol and often displayed poor judgement about those who surrounded him.

 

Sherman was loud. He was often petty, and certainly ready in a heartbeat to engage in frequent feuds, many of them cul de sacs and counter-productive.

 

Sherman threatened to imprison or even hang critical journalists and waged a bitter feud with the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

 

Too few, then or now, have appreciated that the uncouth Sherman, in fact, displayed both a prescient genius and an uncanny understanding of human nature. Whereas Grant could brilliantly envision how his armies might beat the enemy along a battle line or capture a key fortress or open a river, Sherman’s insight encompassed whole regions and theaters, in calibrating how both economics and sociology might mesh with military strategy to crush an entire people.

 

For all of Grant’s purported drinking and naïveté about the scoundrels around him, his outward professional bearing, his understated appearance of steadiness and discretion, enhanced his well-earned reputation for masterful control in times of crises.

 

The volatile and loquacious nature of Sherman, in contrast, often hid and diminished appreciation of his talents — in some ways greater than Grant’s. To the stranger, Grant would have seemed the less likely to have had too much to drink and smoked too many daily cigars, Sherman the more prone to all sorts of such addictions.
Continue reading “The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership” →

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