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.

Trump’s Constructive Chaos

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by Victor Davis Hanson
Defining Ideas

Almost daily, President Trump manages to incense the media, alarm the world abroad, and enrage his Democratic opposition. Not since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office has change and disruption come so fast from the White House.

Let’s consider foreign affairs first. In response to North Korea’s nuclear threats to hit the American West coast, Trump promised Kim Jung-un utter destruction. And for sport he ridicules him as “rocket man.” ISIS is now on the run. The terrorist group has given up on its once-promised caliphate—in part because Trump changed the rules of engagement and allowed American generals at the front to use their own judgment and discretion on how best to destroy their enemies. Trump has bowed out from certifying a continuation of the Iranian deal and sent it back to Congress for reform, rejection, or ratification. In the case of the Paris climate accord, he simply pulled the United States out completely, reminding its adherents that the use of natural gas has allowed America to reduce carbon emissions far more dramatically than have most of its critics. As in the case of the Iran deal, the Obama administration never sent the Paris agreement to the Senate for a treaty vote.

Domestically, too, Trump has not been afraid to make major changes. In terms of the so-called Dreamers—children who were brought into the United States illegally by their parents and protected by the DACA executive orders of Barack Obama—for now Trump has sent the matter back to the Congress for proper legislative review. On Obamacare, Trump has issued executive orders to free up the health market and remove subsidies and monopolistic regulations on how health plans are structured and sold. His reasoning was that the Obama executive orders on health care were illegal, so revising them was necessary and legal rather than inflammatory. Continue reading “Trump’s Constructive Chaos” →

The Deadly Cost of Mutual Misunderstanding

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Hitler went to war without an accurate conception of the Allies’ strength. The Allies did the same without an accurate conception of Hitler’s ambition. Unprecedented bloodshed ensued.

Editor’s Note: The following is the third in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second World Wars. It appears here with permission.

 

Over 2,400 years ago, the historian Thucydides had emphasized the military advantages of sea powers, particularly their ability to control commerce and move troops. Not much had changed since antiquity, as the oceans likewise mattered a great deal to the six major belligerents in World War II. Three great powers were invaded during the war: Germany, Italy, and Russia. Three were not: America, Britain, and Japan. All the former were on the European landmass, the latter were either islands or distant and bounded by two vast oceans. Amphibious operations originating on the high seas were a far more difficult matter than crossing borders, or in the case of Italy, crossing from Sicily onto the mainland. The protection afforded Great Britain and the United States by surrounding seas meant that containing the German threat was never the existential challenge for them that it always was for the Western Europeans. The generals of the French may have always appeared cranky to the Anglo-Americans, but then, neither Britain nor America had a common border with Germany. The only way for Germany to strike Britain was to invade and occupy the French and Belgian coasts, as reflected both in the German Septemberprogramm of 1914 and in Hitler’s obsessions with the Atlantic ports between 1940 and 1945. Since the 15th century, European countries that faced the Atlantic had natural advantages over those whose chief home ports were confined to the North, Baltic, and Mediterranean Seas.
Continue reading “The Deadly Cost of Mutual Misunderstanding” →

Status Quo Blues

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

The public is turning away from the institutions that used to unite Americans — the NFL, mainstream news, late-night TV, movies . . .

 

The familiar cultural order of the last half-century is crumbling — partly because of larger forces beyond its control, partly from self-inflicted wounds, and partly because of the chaos following the election of the outsider Donald Trump.

 

NFL, Go to Hell?

In the early 1950s, the National Football League was small, poor, and not America’s pastime. It may soon become that way again — if it is lucky.

 

Since Colin Kaepernick opened the lid of the NFL’s Pandora’s box, the demons just keep flying out. The result is decreased viewership and attendance and the tarnishing of a multibillion-dollar brand.

 

To save their NFL investment, some networks now try to avoid airing the pre-game national anthem altogether. The alternative is to show dozens of confused and pampered multimillionaire athletes kneeling in defiance. The cameras only selectively scan the stadium crowd and detour around empty seats. ESPN talking heads glance sideways at one another in hopes that colleagues will cool their accustomed virtue-signaling social-justice rants that are as hypocritical as they are incoherent — rants that cost them viewers and maybe their own jobs.

 

The NFL in truth was living on borrowed time — a strangely anachronistic gladiatorial spectacle exempt from the nitpicking of a therapeutic society. Not anymore. Continue reading “Status Quo Blues” →

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From An Angry Reader:

You created this Frankenstein.

 You have a lot to answer for.

 G-d is looking down on you, and He is not smiling.

 You all are in your 80s. That’s the good thing in all this. Nobody lives forever and you all are a helluva lot closer to the “final reward” than I am.

 It will be wonderful living in a world bereft of you.

 “Not a threat, just a thought.”

 Daniel Weir

Washington, DC

 

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

 

Dear Angry Reader,

Actually if (a) Trump is Frankenstein, then (b) Obama created him by polarizing the country, ignoring the red states in-between the coasts, institutionalizing executive orders, commenting on ongoing criminal cases, allowing his administration to be plagued by scandals (IRS, GSA, VA, etc.), not investigating the Russian collusions of the Clinton Foundation (see the recent articles in The Hill), and bringing popular culture (cf. GloZell) into the presidential orbit.

Actually, I am 16 years from my “80s” and if there is to be a “final reward” as I think there is, then the end is not to be feared or what is left behind to be lamented.

Victor Hanson

Selma, CA

 

In Defense of ‘the Generals’

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The Corner

The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Recently there have been a number of quite different critiques from all political sides of Trump’s generals (Kelly/McMaster/Mattis), and also from a variety of angles (too narrow experience, an unhealthy overdose of military thinking, a “sellout” for working for the likes of Trump, etc.). While it is hard to know who exactly is to be praised or faulted for Trump’s foreign policy (e.g., Secretary of State Tillerson and, of course, Trump himself), the record is so far pretty clear — and pretty good.

 

Prune away the rumors of cabinet shake-ups, “adult in the room” melodramas, tweets, fake-news accounts, and inter-cabinet spats, and we are left with a once-ascendant ISIS now shattered and in full retreat; a new honesty about NATO and its funding; an unsustainable Iran deal now on hold and sent to the Senate where as a treaty it belonged; honesty in describing the threat of both radical Islamic terrorism and Iranian hegemony; greater security on the southern border; a restored relationship with Israel and the Gulf States, and an improving one with Jordan and Egypt as well; a workable and constitutional immigration scrutiny of would-be entrants from war-torn Middle East countries; a growing deterrent stance toward Russia and China rather than the rhetoric of “reset” and the “Asian pivot”; an active and growing allied response to the North Korean threat; the beginnings of an all-out effort on missile defense (rather than the prior open-mic presidential promises of a “flexible” post-reelection efforts to curb it in Eastern Europe); a determination to rebuild the military (slowly, given the still far too large annual deficits); some recent incremental progress in Afghanistan due to new rules of engagement; the real red line that Assad cannot use WMD against civilians; a far more adult stance toward U.N. hypocrisies; improved autonomy abroad through increasing energy independence and trading in natural gas; an out from a Paris climate accord whose goals the U.S. meets anyway through free-market solutions — and the emerging outlines of a comprehensive doctrine of “principled realism” that restores deterrence.

 

Of course, the world is in crisis and scary, current U.S. assets and means do not match our strategic obligations, responsibilities, and would-be agendas, and rhetorically the administration often seems at cross-purposes, but nevertheless American foreign policy is already in an undeniable trajectory of restoration, and much credit is due to the advice and conduct of Trump’s three generals.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/452780/trump-generals-mcmaster-kelly-mattis-foreign-policy-realism

The Axis Was Outmatched from the Start

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Hitler and his Axis cohorts couldn’t match their enemies’ resources to begin with. That they learned all the wrong lessons from military history while the Allies learned all the right ones doomed them.

 

Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second World Wars. It appears here with permission.

 

Starting wars is far easier than ending them. Since the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta and their allies, winning — and finishing — a war has been predicated on finding ways to end an enemy’s ability to fight, whether materially or psychologically. The Axis and the Allies had radically different ideas of how the wars of World War II would eventually conclude — with the Allies sharing a far better historical appreciation of the formulas that always put a final end to conflicts.

 

When World War II broke out in 1939, Germany did not have a serious plan for defeating any of those enemies, present or future, that were positioned well beyond its own borders. Unlike its more distant adversaries, the Third Reich had neither an adequate blue-water navy nor a strategic bombing fleet, anchored by escort fighters and heavy bombers of four engines whose extended ranges and payloads might make vulnerable the homelands of any new enemies on the horizon. Hitler did not seem to grasp that the four most populous countries or territories in the world — China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States — were either fighting against the Axis or opposed to its agendas. Never before or since had all these peoples (well over 1 billion total) fought at once and on the same side. Continue reading “The Axis Was Outmatched from the Start” →

The Method to Trump’s ‘Madness’

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By | American Greatness

The Democratic Party, as it did after Hubert Humphrey’s close loss in 1968, seems still to be misdiagnosing its 2016 defeat.

Democrats see too little identity politics rather than too much as their trouble, and thus are redoubling on what has been slowly shrinking the party into coastal enclaves.

Promoting Black Lives Matter and open borders, promising free tuition and tax hikes, opposing fracking and pipeline construction, pushing single-payer health care and an ever-expanding transgender agenda as well as abortion—these are not majority positions. Neither will embracing Hollywood, the media, or the NFL protests win over voters. Thinking (or hoping) that President Trump will implode, quit, be jailed, sicken, die, or be impeached is not an agenda.

Trump Compared to What?
When Trump promises to restore Christmas nomenclature, to build a border wall, or to bark back against the NFL, he bets that 51 percent of the voting public is likely on his side. Trump’s tweets may be cul de sacs. And they may diminish the traditional stature of the presidency, but they are rarely on the wrong side of public opinion.

The same holds true when in suicidal fashion he alienates those of his own party, many of them seemingly essential to his legislative agenda. Yet what is the logic of temporizing Republican senators who recently got reelected by blasting the Iran Deal, open borders, and Obamacare—apparently on the premise that their posturing votes would never really matter, given the likelihood of a liberal vetoing president? So far a Bob Corker, Jeff Flake or John McCain has not proven that he is more popular in his own state than is Donald Trump. Continue reading “The Method to Trump’s ‘Madness’” →

It’s 1968 All Over Again

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by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

 

The United States and the world appear to be reliving the language, politics, and global instability of 1968.

 

Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart.

 

The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism, and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative majority.

 

The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, civil unrest, defeat in Vietnam, and assorted disasters for the next decade — until the election of a once-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981 to 2001.

 

It appears as if 2017 might be another 1968. Recent traumatic hurricanes seem to reflect the country’s human turmoil.

 

After the polarizing Obama presidency and the contested election of Donald Trump, the country is once again split in two. But this time the divide is far deeper, both ideologically and geographically — and more 50/50, with the two liberal coasts pitted against red-state America in between. Continue reading “It’s 1968 All Over Again” →

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From An Angry Reader:

Dear Daniel Longo

Mr Hanson, we can only thank you for the correct verbosity and non overuse of the word anemic, as any student of creative writing or freshman English would appreciate the lesson in your overly wordy presentation; problem is, and this seems frequently to escape your need to be correct, whereas my Colbert may be vulgar in his choice of words, your vulgarity resides in your heart. I’ll choose the profanity every time; so, go f–k yourself and your filthy ideals.

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Daniel Longo,
Your first sentence is incoherent. Your argument is that while Colbert is explicitly obscene and crude, I am implicitly vulgar in my heart. But whereas I quoted Colbert’s vulgarity as proof, you provided no examples to support your unhinged assertion. You, like Colbert, are repetitive: after exclaiming that you prefer profanity, there was no  need to elaborate with profanity.  I have no idea what “filthy ideals” means nor do I imagine you do either.
Victor Hanson
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