VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every bit as childish, peevish, and absurd as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

So, we are now back to the existential issue of the entire Trump phenomenon: to what degree did the Hillary Clinton campaign collude with high-ranking Obama officials, and the top echelons of the FBI, CIA, and the national intelligence apparatus, to surveil, defame, and hope to derail Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by unlawful means?

Who in the federal government then continued Clinton’s efforts after the 2016 election to disrupt and indeed attempt to destroy the Trump transition and presidency?

Eventually, someone will sort out whether that post-election effort on the part of federal officials to abort the Trump presidency, abetted by the media and #TheResistance, was a simple follow-up to the Clinton-DNC-Perkins Coe-Fusion GPS collusion against candidate Trump—or a sick preemptive attempt of the administrative state to smear Trump as a “Russian asset” because of their worries about the exposure of their own prior criminality and Trump’s iconoclastic agenda.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling Communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists, and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.

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Please read the following article by my colleague Paul Gregory in Defining Ideas

A cursory examination of the Steele Dossier should have convinced the CIA or the FBI that it was fake news. Any residual doubt would have vanished after learning that its author, Christopher Steele, was an opposition researcher paid by the Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump. That our most sophisticated government officials acted as if the Dossier were legitimate leads to only one conclusion. They were a knowing and willing  part of the Democratic and media smear of a presidential contender, and then president, that paralyzed U.S. politics for three years.

We now know that the Steele Dossier is bogus. Inspector General Michael Horowitz drove the final stake through its heart. He found that the Dossier was compiled from hearsay and third-hand gossip from two low-level sources and that they denied the testimony attributed to them. The only “verified” information that Horowitz found was available from public sources.

Let’s review the story of the Steele Dossier and ask whether clear-thinking unbiased persons in media or government would have taken the charges in the Dossier so seriously as to use it as the roadmap to Russian government officials’ purported alliance with Trump employees and campaign aides to help his election.

The widespread use of the term “roadmap” is telling. It suggests, yes, there  must be something to the charge that Trump colluded with an enemy power. We’ll find proof if we follow the clues that Steele has given us.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

No sooner were Democrats’ Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election.

After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million in costs, special counsel Robert Mueller’s much praised progressive “all-star” team of lawyers and investigators found no evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. Trump did not warp the 2016 election, and so he had not unfairly defeated the supposed sure-winner Hillary Clinton. But again those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Adam Schiff is starting to wear on his own. He may be the darling of leftwing cable news. But like a moth to a candle, the California congressman is sucked into the camera lights, without realizing how he is scorched and consumed. He hijacked the Democratic House impeachment effort and then did the same in the Senate. As the inspiration for the entire farce, he is the man most responsible for the ensuing damage to the country and his party.

Remember, Schiff wanted to rush through impeachment in the House before the holidays and, in part, was responsible for not getting proper authorization to issue subpoenas to witnesses. He then politicized the calling of witnesses, and selectively leaked testimonies taken in the House basement—only to whine about partisanship when he wanted to slow down the impeachment trial in the Senate. In other words, he objected to the same sort of partisanship that he had introduced into the inquiry.

But what will be the status of a post-impeachment Schiff, once the impeachment farce has lost its luster? 

Thanks in part to Schiff, President Trump is polling more strongly now than when Schiff began the circus in September. 

Thanks in part to Schiff, the erstwhile frontrunner and best Democratic presidential chance, Joe Biden, is left hemorrhaging from impeachment’s never-ending embarrassments about Hunter Biden. 

Thanks in part to Schiff, Trump now enjoys more party solidarity than any recent Republican president. 

Thanks in part to Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been made irrelevant, and the formula that won the House in 2018 is ancient history. 

Thanks in part to Schiff, Trump rallies have gone ballistic with about 40 percent of his audiences including Democrats and Independents.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.

Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.

My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbon dioxide will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.

In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union’s line that the march of global Communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

One of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.

Schadenfreude, irony, paradox, and karma are various descriptions of what happens to revolutionaries, and unfortunately the innocent, who suffer their collateral damage when radicals of any stripe use any means necessary to achieve supposedly exalted ends.

Three of the most moving — and terrifying — passages in Greek literature involve such ironic payback. In the third book of Thucydides’ history, the historian relates a murderous civil war (stasis) between oligarchs and democrats on the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu). He laments how morals and laws are destroyed in a cycle of madness, all to achieve short-term gain while depriving both parties of sanctuary when the tide one day turns against them.

When extremism becomes normal, there is no prior normal. In his fifth book, Thucydides describes the destruction of the small island city-state of Melos, in a riveting dialogue between the Athenian invaders and the Melian defenders. After concluding his account with the Athenians’ destruction of Melos, Thucydides immediately, in books six and seven, describes the Athenian catastrophe on Sicily, in which the invading and soon-to-be-trapped Athenians play a similar role to that of the doomed Melians, and the victorious Sicilians are no more magnanimous to the defeated than were the once-victorious Athenians.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The Left has shown that the collusion exoneration last year by the heralded Robert Mueller investigation—all 22-months, the “dream team,” and $34 million of it—meant absolutely nothing.

Nor did it matter that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz found no justification of “collusion” in the Steele dossier to justify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants it issued to spy on Carter Page.

Both the Mueller and Horowitz investigations confirmed that even the partisan and warped FBI “Crossfire Hurricane” intrigues could find no Russian-Trump collusion.

And yet the House impeachment managers cannot finish a sentence without exclaiming “Russian collusion,” as if it has now transmogrified into some exotic foundational myth.

Remember, no sooner had Mueller found no collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin and no actionable obstruction than the progressives narrative was recalibrated into Ukrainian quid pro quo—albeit after brief detours in “Recession!” and “Racism!”

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Since World War II, the United States has identified a number of national interests in the Greater Middle East, a region often defined quite loosely as the Arab nations (including those of North Africa), Israel, and sometimes Turkey, as well as Iran, the Horn of Africa countries, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

During the Cold War period, from 1946 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, American bipartisan foreign policy identified a strategic need for the region’s petroleum. Gulf oil was seen as critical in augmenting America’s own seemingly finite supply or ensuring the free world’s access to it. Thus was born the post-war U.S. realist interest in the Middle East — a region that after the 15th-century discovery of the New World lost the strategic global position it had held since classical antiquity.

The United States backed most prominently the House of Saud and neighboring Persian Gulf monarchies and dictatorships on the rationale that they would endlessly pump oil and sell it to the West at a fair price. British Petroleum enjoyed a more or less controlling oil interest in Iran, and U.S. oil companies had a free hand in Saudi Arabia; both nations maneuvered with other regimes to develop oil-exporting industries. The ensuing conspiracy theories, coups, and succession scraps of Arab and Persian strongmen fueled a half century of “Great Satan” chanting and the burning of American flags on the Middle East street.

At various times, U.S. presidents sought to deny the Soviet Union the ability to harness the region’s resources and thereby leverage Western oil-dependent economies. Most notable was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s success, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in flipping Anwar Sadat’s Egypt from being a Russian client to being a de facto American ally. For all practical purposes, the Russians stayed ostracized from the Middle East until Secretary of State John Kerry in 2012 naïvely invited them back in after a roughly 40-year hiatus — supposedly to help monitor Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian depot of weapons of mass destruction. Huge new finds of Russian gas and oil in the 1980s and 1990s had made the Middle East less important to Russia, although regional chaos that spiked oil prices and hurt Western economies was always welcome to Moscow, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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