Regime Change by Any Other Name?

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Truth or consequences? Obama skated for far worse misdeeds.

Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election.

There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers. Continue reading “Regime Change by Any Other Name?” →

Challenges And Opportunities Facing The Trump Administration’s China Policy

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Strategika
Image credit: Poster Collection, CC 112, Hoover Institution Archives

by Miles Maochun Yu
Strategika

In general, America profoundly lacks interest in communist ideology, a phenomenon Karl Marx would have called “the poverty of ideology.” As a result, our China policy by and large has failed to take into sufficient consideration the primal forces that motivate Chinese communist leadership in foreign and domestic affairs.

This lack of understanding of China through a communist ideological prism has also led us to believe that China operates more or less the same way the U.S. does. Therefore, if we bring China into rules-based international communities such as the World Trade Organization, we expect it to follow the rules of international trade regulations, just like the United States. Or, if we open up our markets to the Chinese, they will do the same in response. Related to this American belief is the prevailing idea that human progress and political freedom can be achieved through economic prosperity and that if we help China become economically vibrant, then democracy and human rights will eventually arrive in China—it’s just a matter of time.

To read more please click on link: Challenges and Opportunities

An Optimistic U.S. Foreign Policy

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by Victor Davis Hanson// Defining Ideas
 
 History teaches us that during war and international crises, just when things were looking most grim, they were oftentimes already getting better.

Consider the dark days of World War II. Seventy-five years ago, 1942 started out as an awful year. The United States and the British were still reeling from the December 1941 Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Singapore would fall in February 1942 in an ignominious defeat; and the American bastion at Corregidor surrendered in May.

For the first four months of the war, Japan had run wild. Or as two Japanese analysts, Masatake Okuymiya and Jiro Horikoshi, put it: “Japan took more territory over a greater area than any country in history and did not lose a single ship.” By June, the Japanese Empire stretched from the Aleutian Islands to the Indian Ocean, and from Wake Island to the Russian-Manchurian border—the most expansive Asian Empire in world history.

Things were no better for the Allies in the European theater. In August 1942, German soldiers climbed Mt. Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus, as the German army neared the shores of the Caspian Sea, and one of the richest oil fields in the world. The vast Third Reich stretched from the English Channel to the Volga River and from the Arctic Circle southward to the Sahara by the summer of 1942.

To read the rest of this article please click on the below link.

http://www.hoover.org/research/optimistic-us-foreign-policy?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-05-19

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?” →