Rockets, Nuclear Weapons and Flag Burning

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhanson.com.
I'll tell you later in this episode why you should be subscribing.

We are recording on Sunday, the 28th of July, and I'm a lucky man. I am at the happy home of VDH.
I'm looking at him as I'm recording. This particular episode will be up on Thursday, August 1st.

Victor is back from his many many travels, and we're glad to have him here. Our previous podcast, we talked,

got up to date on so much of America's recent politics. Today's episode, a little eclectic, but we're going to talk about these recent

yesterday attacks by Hezbollah, murderous attacks again on Israel.

madness at the Olympics, and

some of Victor's

writings about foreign policy and other foreign policy matters. And we'll get to all of that after these important messages.

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Investment advisory services provided by Wealthfront Advisors LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, maybe we should take the most recent news first,

and that's Hezbollah. There was an attack from

Israel,

excuse me, attack of Israel from Lebanon, rocket attacks at a soccer stadium, slaughtered 12 young people.

I don't know that this is ever going to end, Victor, unless Israel's enemies are truly annihilated. What are your thoughts? Why did they do it now? That's the biggest question.

Blinken said he hopes this doesn't lead to further escalation. So why did they do it now? They did it now because

they did what Hamas did. They see daylight between Israel and the United States, and now with Biden's dementia evident for the entire world, his abdication from the

nominee from the campaign and the likelihood that Kamala Harris will be

the nominee, and she will be, and she is going to carry on the Obama deranged policy of empowering Iran and the Shia-Persian

nexus, which includes a lot of Shia Arabs.

I'm talking about from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza City, and that was supposed to balance Israel and the Saudis and create this tension that we would adjudicate. It was a crazy idea.

But that's what she's an advocate. So they look at this and they think, you know,

They're still pressuring Israel, and they may,

the West, but

this crazy administration may give Hamas a victory. Because if they get to cease fire and survive, that's a great victory for us.

And now with Biden doesn't know where he is, and he's still going to be president, and we got somebody in the wings that we didn't think had a chance. We thought Donald Trump,

well, now she may be president, and she's basically sympathetic to our cause, so it's a good time to strike. And that's what they did.

and they killed 12 children and there's going to be retaliation and

we'll see and the way that this administration works is if

there is a re if they go into October 7th and they slaughter almost 1200 Jews or they send rockets, they Hezbollah and Hamas and finally Israel's had enough,

the retaliation is always disproportionate because Israel knows what they're doing, and they're competent, and they have to retaliate. They're such a small nation.

But this administration looks at the retaliation and says,

it's disproportionate. You've got to take that blow.
And if you're going to respond and hit back at Iran, that they sent 250-plus vehicles, drones, missiles.

cruise missiles, ballistic, then you can have three. That's how they look at it.

And so they're going to be pressuring Israel now, look,

maybe you can take out one of their commanders, but don't go overboard. Well, the only thing that stops these people is disproportionality.

And the only thing that gave them peace with Hezbollah, sort of a peace from 2006 to now, they made the Shia sector of Beirut uninhabitable.

And that's where a lot of the missiles are in basements of apartment buildings or storage. And I think Israel is going to go in there and hit some of them.

I wonder, Victor, if proportionality was America's rule of thumb in 1941.

I don't think it was. I think the idea,

I don't think that anybody told Curtis LeMay,

I don't think that you need to bomb Tokyo again because you've killed more people than we lost at Pearl Harbor or Okinawa. So please don't do it.
We have to be proportional.

They scared the daylights out of the Japanese militarists. People had said those people that are in control of that Japanese government will never surrender.
You don't understand Bushido.

You don't understand Bansai ideas of victory. You don't understand their plans for world.

They're fanatics. They'll never...
They gave up.

They gave up.

After what,

the B-29 incendiary and the two atomic bombs, they gave up.

That was about the most disproportionate response possible to the aggression of December 7th. And Israel is going to, I mean,

I think it was the Interior Minister, I'm just quoting this from memory of

Lebanon, who said, we have to stop this tit-for-tat because we have not recovered from 2006, what the Israelis did to sections of Beirut.

Well, have they recovered from the explosions of the cash of

the American attitude is, well, Israel knocks the missiles down. Yeah.
So what's the big deal? Why do they have to respond?

It's like walking down the street and somebody tries to come up and slug you and hit you with a club or something and you ward it off. And then they go around the next block and you ward it off.

And then the next block that you ward it off. And then you finally flatten some guy and the police say, why did you do that? You were warding them off.
Well,

that might be the actual policing policy in Democrat-run cities in America. Victor, one last thing about Hezbollah Israel is Netanyahu's visit to the United States.

We touched on it just very briefly in our previous recording, but the,

I don't know, I'll use the word disrespect and disdain shown for Netanyahu increasing by the Democrats and by,

what's her name? Yeah, Kamala Harris.

This must play into, do you think this plays into the Hezbollah mindset?

Yeah, of course it does. Okay.

I just wanted to

put it for the record.

Kamala Harris is just

a continuation of the Joe Biden policy of Michigan. Remember,

the left impeached Donald Trump because he temporarily suspended congressionally approved aid to Ukraine because he wanted to ensure that they were no longer corrupt with the Biden family, and the left argued that he was using a political motive for his own personal gain, i.e., to embarrass the likely but not nominated opponent in 2020, and therefore he should be impeached.

Joe Biden suspended 3,500 bombs to Israel because he was worried about the 2024 vote in Michigan, given a quarter million people who would vote on the issue solely of Gaza. Okay.

And no one said a word. Kamala Harris is a captive of that reality.

And she will pressure, pressure, pressure. And then she will think, you know what?

I have set a new record. It's not you, Kamala.
It's the relief over Joe Biden. But $200 million, I was incorrect to suggest $100 million.
I think it's over $200 million came in in the last week.

And that came mostly from big tech, finance,

Hollywood.

And

yeah, that's who

she works for. And they are very far left.
Well, I don't quite understand.

Is it Jeffrey Katzenberg? I don't think people need to be a one-vote issue. So if you're a Jewish American, there's a lot of issues, and Israel shouldn't be the only one.

But if you do believe that the preservation of the Jewish state is one of your most important concerns, then it would be inexplicable that you would vote for Kamala Harris. Just inexplicable.

And somebody's going to say, I was

walking to my car on the way home today

to leave, and a guy came up to me and he wanted to argue about Israel.

And he was Jewish, and he said,

you said,

you wrote in a column that this is a very

key issue for the Jewish community. And he said, there is no Jewish community.
I have a right to vote for Kamala Harris, even if she's hard on Israel. I said, yeah, go ahead.

But then don't come back and say,

wow, Hezbollah and Iran and Hamas and the Houthis have open season on Israel. And don't think Israel is going to

go down

without a fight. Remember, there is a slogan called Never Again.
Right.

And they will take care of business if they feel they're abandoned by the West and they're going to be extinct and it's going to be a second Holocaust.

And that's exactly what these people, these lunatics are saying to them in the Middle East. I don't understand it.

I guess what I'm trying to say, I'm struggling for words, maybe brain fog, but I don't understand the Western mind and particularly the Biden left-wing Harris American mind that these people are terrorists.

They butcher people on October 7th. They say they want to do it again.
They say that Jews are pigs. They say they do all of these things.
And they're not shy about it. And yet

you elevate them to the status of a liberal democracy. And then they say it's netanyahu, netanyahu, netanyahu.
I wager that if there was any other Jewish

Israeli leader right now, they would be unable to deviate from the Netanyahu. Netanyahu's pressure comes from the right.

100,000 people cannot live on the border with Lebanon.

People want to deal with that. And so that's just a convenient vehicle for, I think, for kind of an anti-Semitic point.

Well, I would support Israel if it wasn't for Netanyahu, who's a far-right fanatic. Therefore, I don't like Israel.
No, you don't like Israel for a variety of reasons.

Netanyahu does not deviate since October 7th from any mainline politician.

There might be a few opportunistic people who mouth off, but if any of them were in power and they had the responsibility to protect the Jewish state, they wouldn't do anything differently than he would, if not more aggressively than he would.

Victor

colleges will open in three or four weeks, so I'm sure we're going to see a repeat of

college. I walked from my apartment on campus to my office and four months having people shout.

And it was a microcosm of the Middle East, Jack. There was a small group of Jewish students.
They had a table. They had literature.
They had some signs. They were perfectly polite.

They did not abuse people. They did not yell in your face.
They did not tear down the other side's posters.

And then you had a huge, large encampment that violated a whole bunch of university statutes. And they were rude.
They got in your face. They screamed.
They yelled.

They said things that you wouldn't want to repeat. It was eliminationist rhetoric.
They trashed the president's office. They took the historic Stanford sandstone, porous

building materials, and they wrote all of this Hamas stuff in it. And it permeated into...

the stone.

You can't

water it. You can't blast it off.
You can't airbrush it. You've got to take little tweezers and get each piece of particle.
I saw people working. So, my point is: this is that

what the campus is, is a microcosm of a small liberal democracy that plays by international rules. And don't tell me it's a pariah nation.

I went to Fallujah. I have seen cities in Iraq in two years of going there during the surge, and they

are,

I think, in some ways more devastated than Gaza is.

What countries do at war, whether it's the United States trying to boot out terrorists or get rid of ISIS, what we did in Iraq, or what we had to do in Afghanistan, or no, nobody's talking about what the Chinese or the Russians do.

But only it's the Jewish state. Only Israel gets the special treatment.

And

it's going to get worse because the people in the Middle East are very savvy and they look at this and they say, you know what?

Biden

is gone, but Harris is even more left-wing than he is. And she is enslaved.

She is captive. She is obedient to a small group of our supporters in Michigan that in this particular environment can control the Electoral College.
She's got no free will.

That's the way she thinks about it. So she's going to let us do what we want.

I don't know if that's correct. I'm not saying that's correct.
I'm saying that's the perception that they have.

Well, if we believe that this administration is the third Obama administration, if she was elected,

she'd be the fourth, I think, Victor. Just on the basis of who's on her team.

Everyone who's been on her team has gotten out of Dodge. They fired him or they quit.
She has the highest turnover in history. Yeah.
So any vice president. She had the lowest ratings in history.

That's a very good point. I mean, you come from Mars and you look at the last 12 months and you read and digest the news accounts and you talk to people from the left, and here is the truth.

This person is unpopular, unfriendly, not liked, completely incompetent.

doesn't understand English grammar and syntax, doesn't have any record of any positive contribution, and was knee-deep in the Biden hard left agenda.

And now,

suddenly,

she's brilliant, and she's going to lead the,

she led, she, out of her sheer personality, her magnetic personality, her brilliance, she's got the nomination. And a guy from Mars says, well, wait a minute.
She's never won a single primary.

She has never won a single delegate. She got out before the primaries even started.

She was flush with Hollywood cash in 2019. She blew it.
And as vice president, there was nothing, she was predetermined by Joe Biden. He said he wanted to hire a minority woman.

And that's how she, there's no record of achievement in California. So

that is one of the most amazing transformations that the media was able to pull off, given what they said about her and what the left said about it.

And they all said, well, Joe Biden's not that senile.

That was pretty savvy what he did. He did a Spiro Agnew.
He got himself a running mate that's so bad that makes him look good, and you want to get rid of him because you got her. He planned that.

Remember that? They all said that.

Well, Victor, we...

We've not talked a long time about another Democrat woman, and that's Jill Iden. And believe it or not, this monstrosity,

I was going to say monstrosity, that's not a right word to apply. This aberration that happened at the Olympics, at the opening ceremony.
Jill has some words to say about that.

And Victor, I think you might have some words to say about all this. And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Again, Victor, we are recording on July 28th.
This episode is out on Thursday, August 1st, but a week prior to the

publication date of this podcast was the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And I'm sure everyone

in the world knows what transpired there.

A drag queen show at the cost of

countless millions of dollars that replicated or mocked the Last Supper. Here in France, France was always considered like

the primary country, but likes to brag about its Catholic roots and its role as the

special top child of the church, home of Notre Dame, and now the scene of

this

just a terrible, terrible belittling of Christianity. And here's what Jill Biden had to say.
And I'm reading from

a tweet or an X, whatever it is, a post by a guy, Colin Rugg. I'm not sure who he is, but someone sent it to me.

Self-proclaimed Christian Jill Biden says the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, I guess she's over there representing the U.S., was spectacular. Doesn't know how the U.S.
will top this in 2028.

Quote, it was spectacular. I was thinking to myself, oh my God, oh my God, how are we going to top this? How are we going to top this? This woman is, well, anyway, Victor,

your thoughts on, you can say whatever you want about anything about Jill Biden, but should we be surprised that in 2024, an Olympics opening ceremony has gone down this road?

There's so many things. that come to mind about this.
I always thought that the transgender gay movement was live and let live. In other words, we have an alternate lifestyle.
We are human beings.

We want equality and we want tolerance. Yes.

But

and they felt that people who say that you're heterosexual and you're chauvinistic about your sexuality is wrong, even though that's the vast majority of people. Okay.

So now that has transmogrified into we're going to get in your face. And we are going to try to figure a way out to shock you.
So we're going to go into a Catholic,

France is still a Catholic country, there's still a billion and a half Christians, and we're going to try to think of what would get you so angry, the Last Supper, and we're going to turn it into a transgender circus, a Petronian satirica.

And we're going to get right in your face and we're going to say, do you like that? Do you like to see Christianity and Jesus mocked like that?

And we're going to get transgendered active, and we're going to mock it and mock it and mock it. And if you say one word, then we're going to go after you.
That's what it's about.

The funny thing is, the subtext of that is, I don't think there's very many transgendered athletes there compared to where they were in Tokyo.

So what's happened quietly, women and Olympic people who organ the International Olympic Commission and the French have said, you know what?

We don't want to go the way of Disney. We don't want to go the way of Bud Light.
If we get a bunch of biological men and we come and they're here and they win all the records and they,

it's not going to be good.

So what we'll do is we'll just stop this craziness of having biological men hijack women's sports and we're not going to let them do it, but then we're going to show that we're not transgender phobic.

So we're going to compensate by having transgender people showcase. That's another thing I think is a subtext.
The other subtext is

these people are very cowardly because they think that they're so bold. Remember the sisters of what was it?

Perpetual indulgence. They went down to Lost

Dodgers.

They all think they're on the cutting edge. They're not on the cutting edge.

They're cowardly because they understand that Christianity is Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, blessed are the meek,

and forgive, forgive, forgive, and they know there will be no consequences.

I would like them to

go to the Middle East and do that in the Middle East. Or they don't have to go to the Middle East.
All they have to do is go to Dearborn, Michigan.

Just go to Dearborn, Michigan at a mosque and do that skit again.

Jill Biden said they're going to top it. Okay, Jill, let's do it in Dearborn.
And we'll have a reenactment of a religious festival with the prophet. And

they'll mock him the way they did Jesus Christ. And we'll see what happens if you're really courageous on the cutting edge of societal change.
But you're not, because you're a coward.

And so they're not mocking religion. They're not doing anything other.
And

please don't bore us with, well, Islam is different. No, Islam is very, it is different, but not in the way you think.
It's not going to turn the other cheek.

And there's no such thing as an apostate, and you can't leave Islam and be safe in an Islamic community.

And so

I don't see a lot of Muslim women

who are engaged in this because they understand if they were engaged,

they would face repercussions from their family, from their community, and it wouldn't be pleasant.

It's a different approach to religion than Christianity. And the idea that they're bold on the cutting edge is just a joke.

They're opportunists that are publicity publicity hounds and the Olympics let them have it because they were worried they might disrupt something because transgendered athletes, and by the way, that's a bad term, transgendered athletes.

We're basically talking about one type of transgendered athletes, biological males who take steroids or

hormones or whatever the particular drug regimen is, in some cases surgeries, but they have gone through maturity and and adolescence, they've gone from adolescence, puberty, all the way into maturity, and they're biological males in terms of muscular skeletal advantages.

And they go into women's sports and dominate, sometimes to the point of causing personal injuries and things like volleyball, except, okay, we do not

repeat, we do not see biological women through puberty, adolescence, maturity, who then take hormonal therapies to become males and maybe some surgeries, we don't see them excelling in male sports.

We don't. They say they're males now and the few that do compete against males

that they lose. They lose every time.

And nobody wants to talk about that. So when you say transgendered athlete, you're talking about biological men who have transitioned through surgery or hormonal treatment to say they are women

and then they take advantage of their innate advantages to

compete at a level which they were not able to compete with as male athletes.

Victor, we're going to, maybe somebody, the only person, I mean, maybe a young Bruce Jenner could,

I mean, if he said that he was

female, then at least you could say, well, when he was a male, he won the decathlon. Or Maybe he'll win the women's decathlon if he was younger.
But that's a rare case.

You don't see spectacular male athletes transitioning and then become spectacular female. Yeah.
Well, Leah Thomas

didn't want to be 144th in the nation of the men.

It's a very cruel thing for all of these women who are competing and train hard and reach a level of excellence that's very competitive and then to see some biological male not not only take away

the olive wreath of victory, but more importantly, create a situation in which, if you object, then you are demonized and you're

ostracized. You can't even object to it.

Well, Victor, we'll bounce around on some foreign policy matters, but first I want to take a minute for our reliable and friendly sponsor, Hillsdale College.

Dear listeners, did you know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College? That is correct.

The first course, American Citizenship and Its Decline, is based on Victor's best-selling book, The Dying Citizen.

Then there's another course, The Second World Wars, which is based on Victor's best-selling book by the same name.

And then the third course, Athens and Sparta, is partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other, How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

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It's free and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to start.
Hillsdale.edu slash VDH. And we thank the good people at Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

And Victor, you're going to be be up at Hillsdale in a couple of weeks. Yes, ma'am.
We're going to do some more videos on the dying citizen.

Groovy. As I understand it, I hope.
I hope. So

I'll be there for a sojourn at the end of August and early September.

And then

I'm going to do a remote class on World War II for the Pepperdine Graduate School. Okay.
And it's going to kind of follow the Second World Wars, but

I think I'll be in Malibu for the first or second class.

Well, in person. If you've got to be somewhere, being in Malibu is

I had to be at a conference this past weekend and I'm lamenting that it, oh, too bad it had to be at Napa. Anyway, my friend, before I wanted to ask you about

some

trouble at our

not at our border, but in South America and Central America. But before that,

do you have any thoughts, quick thoughts about what's happening in Ukraine or any of the

positioning?

I discussed that at the epilogue of the end of everything, and I sort of did a brief review of all of the existential threats that Russian media generals and politicians had leveled against Ukraine, in particular, and Britain and the United States.

So now

a couple of things.

We are easing up on the avenues of retaliation or offensive operations with American weapons and NATO weaponry. And Vladimir Putin says if that is going to happen, then

in other words, he's basically saying you broke the rule of proxy war. You're using the proxy to attack the homeland of your rival in a way that

We were told in the Cold War, Cuba could not be used to attack the U.S. mainland.
And you almost went to

war over it. And he's threatened now today nuclear weapons.
And of course the response from everyone is,

he's crazy, he's threatening, it's empty.

Maybe so, but in nuclear poker, you don't,

the 99% surety is not quite surety because of the awful consequences of the 1%.

And if you keep doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and hearing 100 threats and it's 1% might be actualized, then you just get a pretty dangerous scenario. So that's happening.

The other thing is there's a lot of people in this campaign mode that say that Donald Trump's going to cut off all aid. He's talking about a deal.

They don't understand. They should go read, and I did when I wrote the Trump book, The Art of the Deal, The Art of the Comeback, all of that stuff.
He's a business person.

So you don't negotiate from a position of weakness.

So if anything, when he comes into office, should he win, he would probably, as he did last time, remember that he approved javelin offensive weapons that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were afraid to provide, and he threatened Putin not to invade, and Putin did not invade for four years, unlike the George W.

Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administration. They don't get it.
They keep making things up that's contrary to the facts of history.

So Donald Trump is going to to go in there and he's probably going to give him a lot of weapons and then he's going to call up Putin and say, Do you want this? Because I'll keep doing it.

So, let's make a deal.

Mike Pompeo co-authored an article where he outlined a deal that I had talked about, and a lot of people had.

And we know pretty much what it is, with one notable exception that I objected to one thing that I don't think is possible. In other words,

go back to the pre-February 24th, 2021 borders and that would give

the compensation that this murderous Putin gets to say that

until he invaded the future of Crimea and the Donbass was up for grabs and now it would be demilitarized but it would be under the control of the Russian Federation and the border would be demilitarized and then Putin would withdraw all of his troops back to where he was in 2000 prior to 2021.

He would go tell the Russian people if he could,

we lost 800,000. He won't tell them the truth, dead, wounded, and missing.
But you know what? Me and me alone did two things.

Now Crimea and the Donbass are ours forever,

and they're not going to be in NATO. This article by Pompeio said they should be in NATO.
I think that's a big mistake. I think we should arm them.
We should give them the wherewithal.

We should insist on any settlement as a demilitarized zone.

But South Korea is not in NATO.

We have a different agenda. A lot of countries that are much closer.
Israel is not in NATO. And I think most Americans, according to polls, would rather help Israel survive and defeat its enemies than

make us obliged to come to the aid of Ukraine should it find itself in a nuclear exchange with Russia. It wouldn't be an exchange.
It would be a one-sided.

So

we're not going to cut off Ukraine. If Trump were to be elected, he's going to use

the ability to hurt Putin to end the war in a way that the Biden administration, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, they're clueless.

Their strategy, remember everybody, is very different.

They see that Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, the Russian people, the villains of every Hollywood film, the horrible Russian people are

existential enemies in a way that China is not. And we don't really care whether Russia has created a new alliance axis with China, Iran, maybe India now.
So what? We're going to bleed them.

We're going to bleed them. These are awful people.
They had Russian collusion. They had Russian disinformation.
They had fear for

and we're going to... We're going to bleed them dry.
We're going to have a Sam, a Verdun. We're going to get them up.
So they're weak. That's what they view this war.

So if it's unending, they're perfectly willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

I'm not talking about all of them. I'm talking about the fanatics.

And you can't even discuss a peace.

The Pompeo article is a good first step, but I would not put them in NATO

or not on the border with Russia.

Okay.

Well, speaking of borders, or close to borders, our south, I don't know if we have a border anymore, but there's some interesting thoughts to be had from you about Latin America, Central America, South America, and the problems of our national security in those regions.

And let's get your thoughts on that, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I had seen an article in National Review by Hernan Albero.
It's titled Authoritarians Next Door. And essentially,

the case he makes is

our foreign policy focus is

Middle East, is

Ukraine. Meanwhile,

very close to home, where we remember, we used to have a Monroe Doctrine, Victor.

I think it's totally gone. We have Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other actors, and China very, very increasingly engaged in Cuba.

This is a real problem at our doorstep, and it deserves more attention. Your thoughts on this, Victor? Everybody should realize that Chinese strategy is exactly opposite of our current one.

We have about 450 bases, military installations, some very small, all over the world to project power.

But we don't really go into a country, I guess, because we feel it's imperialistic or whatever, and try to give it a lot of money and

nation-build or give it infrastructure. The Chinese are just the opposite.
They don't have a lot of military bases all over the world, but they're everywhere.

And they're building docks, and they're building harbors and they're building freeways and rails, and they're trying to take over basically, and they're making these countries en hoc to them.

They're not doing it out of philanthropy, but it so far seems like it's more successful because

they have a hold in Latin America that they've never had before. And the Panama Canal, et cetera, et cetera, is under Chinese influence.

We don't do that. We have troops around China,

in Japan, in South Korea, but they don't have the same insidious effect of weakening China. that this paradigm does.
And I don't think we've caught on to it yet.

And we haven't caught on to the Chinese approach to

their military deterrent.

Their attitude is to send 340,000 people here every year, students or green card holders, and have a 1 or 2% spy and get all of the technology that they can, go back, Xerox it, but do it, the implementation of that technology in a very different fashion.

They make lots of weapons, lots more artillery shells, lots more drones, lots more. They're doing what we did in World War II.

And we're doing what the Germans did in World War II. The Germans said, We have a V-2, it's the most sophisticated guided missile that's ever seen.
Nobody's ever done this before.

It's much better than the V-1.

The American of that age said, Okay,

what is the cost-of-benefit analysis of sending 2,000 pounds of explosive on that multi-hundred thousand mark machine when you could get a B-17, a B-24,

and you could get, you know, 10 tons at one quarter of the cost. And we made it, you know, we made a B-24 every hour at Willow Run.

That's what we did. We didn't try to build tiger tanks that weighed 60 tons or king tigers.
We built 50,000 Shermans.

We didn't try to, you know, just say we're going to make the most sophisticated jet in the world, the ME-262. No, no, we made hundreds of hundred thousand airplanes.

And that's what we should be doing. We shouldn't be making just these big fleet carriers.
We should be making tiny carriers, drone carriers.

We should have mother drone ships next to every carrier, just

a big, huge cargo ship that has 10,000 drones of different specifications and abilities in them.

And we should not just have

$135 million F-22s or $1 billion B-2 bombers, we should have a whole fleet of drone planes, you know, $5,000 each, $10,000, $20,000. It doesn't mean one or the other, but you have to be balanced.

So China's doing a lot of things that are very scary.

They really are, and they're gaining advantage, especially when Joe Biden said they're not really our rival. Remember that? Yeah.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
And under him, they've made enormous strides.

And they've been very, they were just absolutely Machiavellianly brilliant. I mean, they played the DEI and the minority, but during the COVID, you're racist to say it was at the lab.

You have a history of anti-Asian discrimination.

This coming from the most racist country in the world. Right after COVID, they went in and remember that? They deny African-American students in Beijing to go to McDonald's and

And of course they have the Uyghurs in camps.

But

that's one of the wages of this whole DEI woke. It's a kind of a propaganda that our enemies use to play the victim.
They graft it on the head.

You know, these Americans, they're so guilt-ridden and they're so insecure that we can really take one of their little tropes and play, and they will

react.

They'll go soft on us. That's their attitude.
Yeah.

Victor, you mentioned, I'm sorry to pop this on you here because you just mentioned the Panama Canal, but we've never discussed that. And Bill Buckley, my former boss, had a great debate

with

Ronald Reagan over handing the canal over

back in Jimmy Carter's administration. But was that a mistake?

Do you have a view on that?

Well, given the times, the post-imperial age, the left-wing government, Carter, the

downtrodden poor people. It was a corrupt government.
It's a drug cartel government. And now the Chinese own it.
And it's integral to the United States.

If you're going to have a trans.

Remember the argument was, well, it's too narrow. Well, they're updating it.
The point was that you had a platform that you could adopt to larger or more advanced avenues as time changes.

That was very weird because didn't Reagan say it's ours, we stole it fair and square?

And then it was really, John Wayne had had three Hispanic wives, remember, and he was for doing it. He gave commercials, as I remember.
He did?

I think he did, yeah.

But I don't know. It would require a level of confidence.
It was kind of like the British Gibraltar. There was a treaty there, and

the British have Gibraltar, but it's a legacy of the colonial period, so the Spanish are really resenting it. But it's a little different because the Spanish are allies in NATO, whereas Panama wasn't.

And the British, you know,

but it's a strategic piece of real estate like Gibraltar. Right.
I don't know.

The British argument was we're not going to give up Gibraltar because there's a fascist government under Franco for 35 years, and who knows what they would do and close off the only Western entry to the Mediterranean.

And we've kind of, it's our version of giving up Gibraltar.

And

that's very problematic. And there must have been a way where the Canal Zone and American territory and an American role in that Panama, not just for our interests.

A more adroit administration and a get-rid of Cyrus Vance, I don't know if he was the actual person involved in the dates of the

transaction, but if they had

imaginative diplomats, there was a way that the United States could have packaged that to say, look,

we're going to be a steward in partnership with Panama.

We built it, but we're not doing it just for us. We're doing it for all the nations so that they have equal access and we don't have foreign actors to come in.

And I think that would have been a lot worse.

Yeah.

Well,

Victor, we're going to stay on foreign policy. And you have a series that you've written for

the Blade of Perseus. And we'll have one final important message.
And after that, we're going to get your thoughts on what President Trump should do. We'll be right back.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor has a website, theblade of Perseus.
VictorHanson.com. You should go there, dear listeners, fair listeners, new listeners.

What will you find? You'll find links to everything Victor writes. His weekly syndicated column, his weekly essay for American Greatness, links to the archives of this podcast, to his books.

In less than a week from now, the updated 2024 version of the case for Trump will be coming out. And Victor's current bestseller, The End of Everything, you'll find links there.
And then there are the

ultra articles that Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus. You have to subscribe in order to read them.
And the subscription cost is $5 a month.

But if you get the annual rate, it's $50 discounted. So please do that.
And to tempt you, to wet your whistle, I wanted to share

that Victor has a just completed a series, What Should a President Trump Do? It's a seven-part series, and one of those, I've just picked this one, Victor, and you talked a little bit about this.

And if you want to talk about the entire series or any particular other episode, the columns, it's fun, it's your show, do whatever you want. But this one is about

part three is abroad. And essentially, it gets down to one simple matter, Victor: deterrence.

Remember what deterrence is, everybody? It's from the Latin word de terio, terrify someone so they they don't do something.

And the idea of deterrence is, there's a very famous maximum that people often quote, but it actually was from the 5th century,

late 4th, early 5th century military,

I don't think he was a strategist, but he wrote a compendium. His name was Vegetas.

about military affairs. And he said, vis

pacum prepare bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

And the corollary is equally true. If you want war, then prepare for peace.
And what he meant by that was that you never know what the intentions of someone,

what they are, but you do know one thing, that they're not foolish, they're not complete. Everybody says everybody's insane, they'll do crazy.
They make cost-to-benefit analysis.

So it's very important that everybody knows the relative power of everybody in the room.

So when you start arguing with people, the reason you're in a debate or you're in a classroom and people argue, there's a reason why people don't go club each other.

They're deterred. They may be deterred because they're smaller than the other person.
They may be deterred because they know if they do that, they get kicked out. But it's evident.

And it's not because they're Sermon on the Mount people.

And that's true of nations.

Looking back, just to take an example, Jack,

if you got into the mind of Adolf Hitler or General Tojo or Benito Mussolini and you said to them, Are you insane?

Why would you create the conditions in which the British Empire and all of its domains and all of the resources from South Africa to India to Australia to New Zealand to Canada and the second largest fleet in the world,

why would you alienate and push that huge

entity with the United States that by 1945 will have a GDP larger than all the belligerents in World War II put together, and will have a navy that has more tonnage and more individual ships than all the navies in the world, and you put them

together. And then to top that off, you put the Soviet Union, the largest area and the largest population, except for China, and you even put China in that ally.
Why did you do that?

And they would say, if they were on us, well, we didn't know what their potential was because the Americans were isolationists. They had an army the size of Portugal.

And the Soviet Union were collaborationists. They were under

the Molotov-Ribbentrop. They were our partner.
And the British were appeasing us.

Under Chamberlain, but especially under Stanley Baldwin, they were producing far less weapons than airplanes than we were.

In other words, what I'm getting at, Jack, is they all gave them the wrong impression. They were very, very strong, and they acted like they were weak, and Hitler made a miscalculation.

So, what we, the United States, need to do in the case of Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah, it says, we are very strong, and don't do something stupid. And what would that be?

Well, that would be if the Houthis go into the Red Sea, we would say politely, please don't interrupt international shipping.

Now, you do have a power grid, and you won't have any electricity if you keep trying to destroy the world's commerce and take it out. That's what the Israelis just did.

They took out all their dock works. They had been very sophisticated.
The Americans helped fund it. The Europeans,

the United Nations,

you should see those beautiful docks. They're gone.
And they're not going to be able to handle very efficiently the next Iranian freighter with drones. And

they haven't been too loud. And they know, and the Israelis no doubt told the Houthis, this is what we're going to do.
This is our capability. This is our Air Force.

If you do this again, your power grid goes out. If you do it again, this.
And that's deterrence. And you do that so you don't have to do that.
But when you're strong and

you don't apprise your rivals of your abilities, And you act weak, then they do something stupid.

And that's what's happening right now in the world. There was a reason why Hamas did not go into Israel during the Trump administration, because we know what Donald Trump would do.

He would say, You started it, and I'm going to give every bomb missile that Israel wants, and they will finish it. And

let them take the gloves off. And if he had said that in advance, they would have never gone in.

And that's what's really tragic.

And now, with a $36 trillion debt and a $1.2 trillion annual service cost, it's bigger than the defense budget and radical cuts and then mismanagement, woke Pentagon policies, 50,000 recruits.

Now we are giving an image of weakness and it's going to be very scary until we get some redress or

correction. Yeah, I like when I think it was Trump's

nomination confirmation speech, whatever, nomination, at the Republican convention. He said something to the effect of

those hostages better be home

before I am sworn in as president in January or else it's going to be held. I think he brags about that, but that is basically true.

And if you go on the internet and read these public accounts or you talk to officials involved, and I have

what he said

he did is in large part true.

By that I mean when he took out Solemni, he told the Iranians essentially this man was responsible for killing over 2,000 soldiers in Iraq through the strategy of importing shape charges,

blowing this up. And he's the head of a lot of terrorist killing, and he's not going to be around anymore.
And then Iran said to him,

this is loss of face.

We can't handle this. What are you going to...

And then they made a deal. And Iran said, we'll send a bunch of missiles toward your installations and you stay inside the gate and they won't hit you, but we'll tell everybody.

And there was some argument over whether they had traumatic injuries. You know, the shock hurt an American.
But basically, Trump then said,

okay,

do this, you know, this performance art little act on your part. But if you kill one American,

this is what we're going to do. And supposedly he said that with the Taliban.

He said, Mula Omar, or the hierarchy, here's where you live. This is what we're going to do.
We're going to keep Bagram. We're going to have 3,500 soldiers.
We're going to keep this base.

You run your little country. We don't care.
There's not going to be a pride flag at the embassy. But you leave our embassy alone and you leave Bagram alone, and we'll get along fine.

You kill an American, and we're going to hold you. And that worked.
It deterred them. It's deterrence, right? And that's exactly what Biden did not do.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of this. You know, again, we're recording on Sunday, and this episode is out on Thursday.
And in the intervening period,

he may still be president by tomorrow. Who knows? Joe Biden is supposed to announce some plans for the

reform of the Supreme Court, including

term limits and other things. So I'm hopeful when they come out, you and the great Sammy Wink will be able to do that.
Democracy dies in darkness, so we're the transparent

entity that has to go to the third branch of government and warp it in a way that really hasn't changed since 1869. Yeah.

And we're going to, that's when we had, as I understand it, nine justices. And now we're going to do what.
And remember in 1937-38, the court packing scheme by FDR was considered bizarre.

It was horrible. And even the Democrats voted against it in the House and Senate, and it was discredited.
Now they've taken a discredited idea and they've canonized it.

One last thing before we go.

Did you want, I just thought, did you want to talk about what they did at Union Station? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, absolutely, Victor.

I mean, of course, it's a tie-in with what we're going to see in another month on campuses. But the

replica of the Liberty Bell in Washington was vandalized dramatically.

Half of me thinks, Victor, like, where does we talk about insurrection? Like,

what is an insurrection? Aren't these people engaged in some form of insurrection and in the shadow of the Capitol? I don't know.

This is what is very scary. You wake up to the country and you say, is this the United States?

May, June, July, August, September of 2020,

$2 billion in damage, 35 killed and 14,000 people released. And Kamala Harris bragging that she's going to help bail them out and that these demonstrations are going to go on and on and on.
Nothing.

And then you look at January 6th was a one-day affair. Somebody said, well, Victor, that was an attack on an iconic,

well, they tried to storm the White House grounds. If the Secret Service and the Capitol Police hadn't got reinforcements, they would have gone into the White House.

And then we had, remember Representative Talib, they just took over the rotunda, the pro-Hamas demonstrators?

That was the occupation of the capital. I don't think anybody got arrested.
So then you have these people that, what, they destroy federal property, they burn flags, they deface monuments,

people were saying, yelling, screaming, the typical anti-Semitic stuff. They burn a federal flag, the property of the United States government.
They raise the Palestinian flag.

Many of them are here on student visas and green cards. It was all filmed.
They attacked a police officer, which is a felony.

Do we have any follow-up that these are the 35, 40, 50, 50 people we've looked at, we've identified?

The FBI spent a year with photo recognition technology to go after every single person who was on the Capitol grounds, at least to identify them. And if they couldn't charge them, to ruin their lives.

And they can't find 30 or 40 people who burned a flag, destroyed federal property, raised a, you know, took over a Union Station. Come on.

And that's what's really scary, this unequal application of justice and indictments and enforcement. It's really scary.
It's scary what they've done.

New York, Columbia University, of course, this is not federal property, but what happened to those vandalizers and desecrators of the campus?

It's so weird.

Everything this administration, I know people say you dwell on it, but we had the same thing happen with these retired officers who were subject to Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Justice, and they called Trump Nazi-like, Mussolini, a liar, architect of Auschwitz-type policies.

I was just thinking, does anybody believe if you had five right-wing officers who were retired, four stars, and Barack Obama was president, and they said said he is a Hitler figure. He is a movement.

They would, or if you had

a captain right now, and he insulted Joe Biden and called him a fascist in public, and had a press conference and said, Our president is a fascist. He's Mussolini.
He's a liar.

Don't you think those same generals would order that person to be court-martialed? Because the code says you can't publicly disparage

whether you're retired and subject to recall or active service, you can't disparage the commander-in-chief. So what I'm getting at is that it's all unequal, the application.

And then there was Peter Strook and Lisa Page. Oh, yeah.
My gosh. Payday.

So

does any...

I mean,

they were using communications that were government communication devices. And they said in an exchange, don't worry, Andrew, we'll take care of it.
It was clear evidence.

They said they were just in the middle of the night, they were just joking, but it was clear evidence that these FBI officials were going to take measures they felt, not us, they felt would ensure that Donald Trump could not be president.

That's what the text was. And all the other stuff was just gravy.
You know, you go into Walmart and they smell.

But they were using devices that... were not intended to plot the destruction of a political candidate.

And because they released them, now the Biden Justice Department wants to canonize them and make them heroes and pay them $2 million of our money.

And Robert Mueller, we remember, secretly removed them

from the, we didn't know about this, and he removed first Stroke and then Page and said it was for different reasons. It wasn't having anything to do with that they were entirely biased.

Remember Peter Stroke was sort of like Zelli. He was everywhere.

He was the one that interviewed Michael Flynn.

He was everywhere. He's still everywhere.
He's still everywhere. He's still on cable.
And he was defiant.

And now the Biden administration has made them heroes and has paying them. And rich, yeah.
And rich. And so I guess the moral of the story is you're an FBI legal counsel and you're an FBI agent.

And you talk and brag about the interim director has a plan. Don't worry, we have a plan.
So make sure that a presidential candidate shall not be elected.

And then you carry on in the workplace where you meet an illicit affair that's contrary to FBI regulations.

And then you're released because you violated those regulations, and now you're suing for not only

that your private romantic texts on government property were exposed, but you were they're also

pursuing unlawful dismissal.

If they were right-wing people and they had said that about Obama, that they wanted to find a way to make sure that he was never elected, they would be jailed right now. Jailed and right.

They have these other guys, and they're jailed and rich. They're on boards also.

I don't know.

This happened very rapidly. It started with Obama.

Eric Coulter, the wingman, you know, and we refused the congressional subpoena, and

Lois Lerner takes the fifth, goes after her political enemies. She's a hero.
And that just snowballed under Biden. And now it's a country that's jurisprudence is unrecognizable.
And it's a deterrent.

We're talking about deterrent. You're a young 30-year-old kid, you're going to Washington, you're going to go work for the bureaucracy, Senate, and you have to ask yourself, if I screw up, right,

and there's a conservative president, he doesn't care, they won't go after me if I'm liberal. But if I'm conservative and there's a liberal president, I could be bankrupt.

They'll go after me the way they went after Trump or the way they go after all these other people. They destroyed Papadopoulos.
They destroyed all those people.

I had a friend who worked in the Trump White House and just happened to be there, not engaged in any of these things. Cost

a couple hundred thousand dollars in legal bills. Where does that come from?

And remember when Fanny Willis went after Cleta Mitchell Legal Counsel on voter fraud, and she was on the call that Trump Trump inquired that there must, he didn't say create the votes, he said find the votes, and as if he thought they were existing.

She didn't say a word. I mean, on that phone call, she didn't say anything that was provocative or legally culpable.
And they knew that. And the same thing about the January 6th.

And they subpoena her for January 6th committee, and

she had to go down to Georgia. Remember reading that? Yeah.
And they almost,

they cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that was the whole point.
Right. To make an example and say,

you want to suggest that sometimes maybe

we do things that are a little irregular. Well, you're going to pay a big price.

Yeah.

Poor Scooter Libby. Hey, Scooter Libby.

He was the first victim.

I can't even think about what they did to him.

Actually, I think Elliott Abrams was a predated that because they just threw, what's his, I can't remember. Lawrence Walsh, was that him? Yeah.
He just threw

dozens of charges there.

Colin Powell knew that Scooter Libby was innocent because his own aide had told him that he was the one that had disclosed the, as I recall, the so-called, I don't think she was covert, but the so-called covert status of Valerie Plow.

It wasn't Scooter Libby. And Colin Powell knew it.
And he kept quiet. Was it a guy's name Fitzgerald, wasn't it?

I've told you this, haven't I? Pat Fitzgerald was my high school classmate. Oh my gosh.
And he went out to destroy Scooter Liberty's life.

And he partially succeeded. Any other person, I've known him, and he's really resilient, and he's a great guy, but

I don't think I could have withstood what he did. They just destroyed his means of income.

They sullied his reputation. And then when it was all over, you find out that

the Secretary of State of the United States' key aide knew

because he

had been a participant in the disclosure of her status. Armitage, right? I think.
Armitage, yes.

And that just did it for me with Colin Powell.

I liked Colin Powell. I was a big supporter of his.
But when I heard that, God.

Silence is violence. All right.
Well, Victor, my friend, you've been terrific.

What else do I have to say? Oh, yeah. About me, Jack Fowler, Civil Thoughts.
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Victor, once again, you've been terrific. Thanks so much.
Thanks, folks, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.