VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

In 2017, the liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University found that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump administration was negative. The center found similarly negative Trump coverage at other major news outlets.

The election year 2020 has only accelerated that asymmetrical bias — to the point that major newspapers and network and cable-news organizations are now fused with the Joe Biden campaign.

Sometimes stories are covered only in terms of political agendas. Take COVID-19.

The media assure us that the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic has been a disaster. But their conclusions are not supported by any evidence.

In the United States, the coronavirus death rate per million people is similar to, or lower than, most major European countries except Germany.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Fall is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.

Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky.

Read the full article here

America—A European Power No More? Shifting Tectonics, Changing Interests, And The Shrinking Size Of U.S. Troops In Europe

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Josef Joffe in Strategika.

The Trump drawdown of U.S. troops in Europe is not the end of the alliance, but part of a familiar story. America’s military presence has been contested from Week 1—make that February 4–11, 1945. At Yalta, Franklin D. Roosevelt assured Joseph Stalin that the United States would soon depart from Europe. Its troops—three million at the peak—would all be gone in two years.

Read the full article here.

Is It Wise To Pull Out And Redeploy 12,000 U.S. Troops From Germany?

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Angelo M. Codevilla in Strategika.

President Trump’s decision to return the U.S 2nd Cavalry Regiment currently stationed in Germany to American soil (6,500 troops), as well as to redeploy mostly Air Force units from Germany to Italy and command headquarters to Belgium and Poland (another 5,600), will have mostly modest positive military consequences and has already benefited America diplomatically. The military consequences are modest because U.S forces in Europe have long since ceased to be potential combatants.  

Read the full article here.

Return Of Forces From Germany?

Please read a new essay by my colleagues, Peter R. Mansoor in Strategika.

On September 11, 1944, a patrol led by Staff Sergeant Warner L. Holzinger of Troop B, 85th Reconnaissance Squadron, 5th Armored Division, crossed the Our River from Luxembourg into Germany. Those five soldiers were the vanguard of a mighty Allied force that would within eight months conquer the Third Reich, thereby ending World War II in Europe.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Media bias is not new.

In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove? 

Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”? 

Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.” 

Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself. 

The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Almost daily, Greek and Turkish aircraft and ships fight mock battles over disputed oil and gas rights in the eastern Mediterranean.

Since the loss of much of the Christian Balkans to the Ottomans in the 15th century, Greece and what would later become modern Turkey have been rivals, outright enemies and often at war.

Mutual NATO membership and shared Cold War fears of Soviet Russia did not stop the two from almost going to war after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Still, the current escalation seems weird. Most territorial claims and disputes over borders were settled almost a century ago, and the two countries have had mass population exchanges.

Why, then, does the divide still run so deep?

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

There are some stunning indications that the supposedly satanic racist Donald Trump could be polling in some surveys around a 35-40 approval rate among Latinos and 20–30 percent among African Americans. Other polls are more equivocal but suggest an unexpected Trump surge among minority voters.

If those polls are accurate and predict November voting patterns, then Joe Biden could lose the popular vote as well as the key swing states by larger margins than Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College losses in 2016.

Indeed, some state polls by CNN and Trafalgar already show Trump to be near even in these purple states. The polling also suggests that, contrary to stereotypical exegeses, nonwhites of the large cities in the Midwest are not necessarily a monolithic voting bloc. So how can this be — given the Obama verdict that Trump is our generation’s Bull Connor, and the Never Trump assurances that the divisive Trump lacks the empathy and appeal of a “coalition building” John McCain or a BLM-sympathizer such as a marching Mitt Romney, and lacks as well the natural resonance the Bush family enjoys with Hispanics?

A number of things are going on that may explain some of these apparent mysteries.

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The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in The Hill

Vladimir Putin is a notorious risk-taker. Many of his ventures have paid off for him, but did his luck run out when a suspected plot to take out opposition leader Aleksei Navalny veered wildly off course? Instead of being pronounced dead from “natural causes” upon arriving on a flight to Moscow, as was purportedly planned, Navalny lies in a coma in a Berlin hospital, full of a poison accessible only to the Russian military and its Kremlin-successor security service, the FSB.

Here was Putin’s original plan, as pieced together by Navalny’s team:

Navalny’s political organizing in Russia’s Far East and the Belarus periphery was threatening to create a real opposition force in Russia’s parliament and regional governorships. Out of this concern, the Kremlin allegedly charged the FSB with poisoning Navalny in Tomsk shortly before his five-hour flight to Moscow. Most likely, Navalny ingested the poison; otherwise his travel companions would also have been exposed, too. Navalny was supposed to die en route. This appears not to be an attempt to frighten but an intent to murder. 

The plan went awry when the airliner’s pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk, ignoring a reported bomb threat. Once Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk, foreign leaders raised concerns about his safety. Under intense pressure, FSB officers (reportedly dressed as civilians) allowed Navalny to be flown to Berlin, where German doctors detected poisoning with Novichok – a deadly nerve agent used by Russian agents in other poisonings.

Putin widely touts his “power vertical.” By this, he means the extreme concentration of authority under his genial guidance. The “power vertical” rules out maverick forces that, say, might poison a prominent opposition figure without approval from the vertical’s top gun. In Putin’s power vertical, access to the world’s deadliest poisons, like Novichok, could be granted only by the person at the top.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Joe Biden and his handlers know that he should be out and about, weighing in daily on the issues of the campaign.

In impromptu interviews, Biden should be offering alternative plans for dealing with the virus, the lockdown, the economic recovery, the violence and the looting, and racial tensions.

Yet Biden’s handlers seem to assume that if he were to leave his basement and fully enter the fray, he could be capable of losing the election in moments of gaffes, lapses or prolonged silences.

So wisely, Team Biden relied on the fact that the commander-in-chief is always blamed for bad news–and there has been plenty of bad news worldwide this year.

That reality was reflected in the spring and early summer polls that showed growing discontent with the incumbent Trump, as if he were solely responsible for one of the most depressing years in U.S. history.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

It is not just conservatives at the recent Republican National Convention who wonder why the Democratic Party and its media appendages have not without qualification decried the looting, arson, violence, and occasional killing that have swept the nation’s cities.

Recently even left-wing CNN’s incendiary Don Lemon wondered out loud why Joe Biden and the Democratic powers have not at least tried to square the circle of deploring police overreach while at the same time going through the motions of condemning the utter lawlessness that often breaks out at dusk in Chicago, Portland, and Seattle, and now in smaller cities such as Kenosha, Wis. What Lemon praised in June, he now seems terrified about in August. But for that matter, most retired generals and media anchors who assured us in June that there were only a “small” number of violent protesters have long grown silent after the occupation of Seattle and the Alamo siege of the police precinct in Portland.

This fight of voter backlash about crime has infected the entire Democratic elite — glued to volatile internal polls that do not lie — whether it is Nancy Pelosi’s demanding no debates, Michelle Obama’s obsessing with “Vote! Vote! And Vote!” or Hillary Clinton’s urging Biden to never “under any circumstances” concede the election that apparently she now believes he could well lose.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

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