A Writer's Process and NATO's Origins

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

This is a special edition we're doing.

Victor is going to be away.

He's going to be traveling.

So we've gotten listener questions, and we're asking them, some of them, of Victor, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

His official home on the internet is called The Blade of Perseus, and its web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you a little more about that in a moment.

Victor,

there are some questions about how you write, how you gather your news.

We're going to talk if we have time.

I hope we do about, of all places, Finland.

And we'll get to all these things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, Catherine Wormert writes

that she would love to hear about his writing process, unbelievable amount of work he delivers every week.

Exclamation point.

How does he do it?

Question mark.

And I think, Victor, since we mentioned this on the previous special episode, this is the second of four we're doing.

And you've talked about this in the past, but if you also give an idea to our listeners, many of them are new, of how you get your news every day.

What's a typical news gathering process on a daily basis for Victor Davis Hansen?

But talk about how you write.

You're a machine.

I mean,

you write so much copy.

It's staggering.

But tell us how you do it.

Well,

try to plan.

I mean,

I look at it writing as a zero-sum game.

If you're in writing, you're not doing something else.

So, and sometimes people, and I typically write three ultras a week for the paywall.

That's 2,100 words.

That's for the website.

We'll talk about that a little later.

And then I write 2,200 words for

American Greatness for Monday morning.

And then I write 800 words for

my syndicated column.

It also appears in American Greatness.

And then I try to write another, so that's

basically 5,000 words.

And then I try to write another 1,000 to 2,000 for the new criterion.

I'm working on always working on articles.

And then I probably write 5,000 words a week.

for my book.

So I'm always working on a book.

So I just finished this rough draft of the end of everything,

how war becomes annihilation.

And that's 110,000 words.

It's a little harder with long COVID because I had no energy, but I do about 10,000 words a week.

But my point is this,

that everybody said, that's the machine, or you say that, but you really do give up a lot.

So my wife and I do not go out to dinner.

I wish I could do more and I'm planning to do more, but maybe once every two weeks at the most.

And we usually confine it.

I don't have a social life at Stanford, so I come home and all my friends are here.

And so we will go out maybe.

Growing up, I always tried to justify it by getting kids.

My kids, I didn't spend enough time with my kids.

I was there with them physically.

They would come in, my daughter would sit.

I have a picture of my late daughter sitting on my lap, you know, I was typing over her shoulders.

And I typed in airports, I typed everywhere.

I typed at Little League.

I must have typed, I wrote the entire

soul of battle at high school baseball games, literally.

In fact, my son got so embarrassed because

all it was mostly Hispanic team, all Mexican-American guys.

And they say, Who is the crazy guy up there

who has this computer and he's just typing?

He has a stack of books.

And my Bill goes, I don't know who it is.

And finally, go, Billy, it's your dad, isn't it?

But let me, let me try and narrow this a little bit, though.

You write a book, and I think

what I read when you have a desyndicated column, that is essentially how you type it.

That's how it comes off the keyboard.

And it's pretty much written in whole paragraphs and thought out.

Oh, I guess.

There's not like Charles Krauthammer would say, I asked him once, would you write for something for national review?

And he's explained his writing process.

You know, his column took him like like 18

edits.

He went over and over, but you're not.

Oh, no, I know.

What I do is coming out of you naturally, I think.

Well, I use

the 48-hour rule.

So if I have a deadline, 48 hours before I don't, I get an idea and I just write it out.

And I can do 2,000 words in 25 minutes.

But I would not show that to anybody.

And then the next day I go through, or the next, next say eight hours later, I go through with spell check.

I clean it all up.

And then the next

iteration, I go through with 10, and these are 10-minute iterations.

And then I go through and online and check the facts and do.

I don't have anybody that edits them, except at the magazine, they do have an editor.

But

then I do that.

And then I let it sit there for 10 or 12 hours.

And then I go back and try to,

you know, rhetorically get it to be readable.

I really try to make it interesting

as I define interesting.

So that

I can do it.

Is the final 2,000 words 90% of the original 2,000 words?

I'd say 80%.

80%.

Still, to write that much copy in that short a time, Victor.

But it's like, I mean, it's a talent.

I'm 69, so it's like asking, it's asking,

you know, an electrician, my God, when I saw these guys, we had

two

Juan and Armando, good friends of ours, that were wiring our house.

And I'd say, oh my God,

how do you go in that spaghetti of knob and tube and cut it all out?

And then you dim, dim, dim, dim, and you've got this, you said, Victor, I do this for a living.

And so it's the same thing.

I couldn't do this at 28.

I was just laborious.

But now

I can do it.

I keep interrupting you because this, I'm sorry, it's fascinating.

It's different to write a 2,000-word article.

It's much harder to write it.

It's much harder to write.

Yeah, it's much harder to write 800 words than 2,200, actually.

And then the other thing I do on books, I do it very differently than most people.

But I had talked to some people I really admired writers.

And

I wrote John Keegan once a letter, and he gave me an idea.

And I would always,

when I would, be around great writers, I always said to myself, shut up.

You don't have much to say.

And what you say,

you'd better off be quiet.

Just listen and absorb.

So if I was around Martin Gilbert, the historian, or John Keegan, or I met Stephen Ambrose, I would try to listen to them.

But I'd always ask the same questions you're asking.

But what I came up with very early on is when I get a topic, I just sit down, I take no notes at all.

I just read books.

So on this book, I'm doing a chapter on the Aztec conquest, the fall of Constantinople, the fall of Carthage in 146, and the fall of classical Thebes.

And I just read everything I can.

A lot of these things I've known about in the case of antiquity, but I just read maybe for six, eight weeks, maybe four or five thousand pages, but I don't write anything.

And then when I feel that I really know that, and I'm reading the same thing over and over again in different authors, and I always try to read primary sources first.

Then I sit down at the computer and I don't try to do footnote.

I just write an essay for 40,000 words.

And I picture that as the core of an onion.

That's the core.

And then I take all the books, articles, I go search.

I have now a research helper, David Berkey and Morgan Hunter.

And I say, these are the areas.

Can you get Xeroxes or will you get online links?

And I tell them what they want and they search libraries and then they send it to me.

And then I go through each one of them and I go back to that 40,000

word original.

And each book is a layer of the onion.

So I subtract, add, modify, reject, incorporate things I've learned specifically when I footnote.

Then I start adding footnotes.

And then I get another book.

And then I'll get an ancient source.

And I just keep doing that for maybe six months.

And then that original 40 thing magically grows by about five to eight, 5,000 words a day.

And And all the documentation is there.

And I have no notes.

I don't, I do it all in my head as far as the outline and everything.

And then when I'm done, I put it away for two or three weeks.

And then I say, now I'm going to have eight or nine iterative, another item.

I'm going to go through for the whole thing for grammar and syntax.

And then I'm going to say, I'm going to go through style.

Do I repeat my vocabulary?

Do I have interesting vocabulary?

Do I have long paragraphs, then short paragraphs, then really variety, variety, variety.

So I do it on style.

Then I go back again and I say, now I got to do content.

And I start with the idea that if I'm writing about a historical thing, there's going to be errors.

So I say to myself, there must be a hundred errors in this in spelling because I just wrote an essay and then I'm not, I wasn't looking.

So I say to myself, you're going to get all the brothers of Montezuma or cousins or nephews' names right.

So I just look at them and I say, I know that's wrong.

So I find, I check it and I do a word search on the whole book and I go through like that, fact-checking.

And then

I finally, then when I'm all done, I have people that I trust.

So I send a copy to my wife.

I send Bruce Thornton, my colleague for 30 years or 21 years in my case.

He was there 35 at Cal State, great classicist, author of 12 books.

I have him read a copy.

And once in a while, I'll have somebody else read a copy.

And then I have my two research people, Morgan and David, read a copy.

And Megan helps too.

And they find things.

And then I send it off.

And then it starts all over again because then you have line editing, you have content editing, and then line editing.

And then, you know.

Well, the problem you have, you write so much.

And I know this from our discussions.

I hate to say, Victor, you have a problem, but you, you, like,

take the Second World Wars as a book.

When it was published, it was how many words?

But how many words?

204.

Well, the contract said 170,000.

I submitted about 270.

So I think I fudged and argued and they kept about 210, 220.

And I had to cut 50,000.

Some of them I used on my ultras, but not a lot.

I lost a lot of that.

I had a whole chapter on intelligence and then I cut that.

And then I got some reviews that said, well, this is a good book, but you should have talked about intelligence.

Anyway, I try to do that.

And, you know, I also try to be, you know, everybody says I'm going to write a book or I'm going to article.

But I had a grandfather always tell me, Rhys Davis, you got to calibrate, Victor.

When you say you're going to come out in the vineyard and you're going to help me dig weeds.

We got to ask what that means.

That means two minutes per tree and we're going to do a whole row of 100 trees.

So we're doing 200 minutes.

So I want you for three hours.

And I'd never thought like that before because I was young.

And And so when I do these things, I say to myself, like this book, I said, okay, Victor, you're 68.

You're going to do 110,000 words.

If you're going to do 30 hours a week,

52 weeks is 1,500 hours.

Do you really want to sit there for 1,500 hours?

on your body, not getting exercise.

And then the worst thing you can do is turn on a laptop after eight o'clock.

And I've been doing that now for a year and a half, where my wife will watch TV or be reading, and I will be typing into eight, nine, ten of them at night.

And then when I go to bed, I just can't shut it off.

My mind races.

So it's not good for your health.

And so now I've come to the conclusion that you're 69.

If you're lucky, you have maybe eight or nine more years.

Do you want to do this the rest of your life?

You've done 26 of these books.

Can't you just say enough is enough?

And can't you enjoy go up to your house in the Sierra, see your grandkids?

grandkids so i'm trying to learn at this late age that i probably overdid it and it takes it put it this way when you're in a room and you're typing and all these thoughts come you know what was cortez different like than scipio africanus why was scipio africanus different than scipio nausica to what was the extent of child sacrifice in carthy when you have all these ideas racing when you're driving and you can't get them out of your head kind of makes you insane And then it takes a toll on you.

You can't just relax and clear your mind.

So I've always tried to do that.

My wife can sit down in an hour meditate and can be out cold.

And if I can do that, I've tried that.

And the only time I can do it is if I go have acupuncture for long COVID, I go there for 30 minutes and they have to wake me up.

That's the only time in the day I've ever been able to do that.

And I'd like to learn how to do that and relax because I look back at this 26 books and teaching, you know, five classes a semester, four classes, five, 10 a year at Cal State Fresno.

Yeah.

Traveling all over the United States for the Hoover fundraising.

And

I don't know.

You think, why can't you just, I don't have, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have lived the life that I did.

I put that way.

Okay.

Well, I'll just say the life you lived has been beneficial to Western civilization.

And I don't think many people, well,

you should read my opinion.

You're not entitled to an opinion on that.

Well, it's my opinion.

But

let's move on, my friend.

No, you're going to, life's going to be better, and

you will smell the roses a little bit.

But first, we're going to talk about what you do when you get up in the morning at six o'clock.

And we're going to get to that right after these important messages.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, the second of four special episodes we are recording to take up the slot when Victor and

his merry band of fellow folks, I think he'll be on a Hillsdale College cruise.

And our readers have very kindly submitted questions that they would like Victor to answer.

So, Victor, I know you talked about this once before on on a podcast, and it's what you get up at six in the morning is when you're going to be able to do it.

Oh, I got used to it.

I got a coffee at 4:45.

Okay, well, and you and you begin your day of several couple hours anyway of assessing news, of you know, finding out what's going on in the world today.

So, that's one of the questions, Victor.

How do you acquire

news?

Well, I try to every morning read for two and a half hours hours and

have coffee.

And

I know, you know, it's

what I try to do is have gradation.

So I say, what does the populist press say?

What are people who are not PhDs or journalists and they're not with marquee?

What are they saying?

Kind of like blogs, right?

And so, and I try to do left and right, the loony left too.

But so I I go on things like hot air or red state just to see what they're saying, right?

And I know that I get kind of, I go to the ace, you know, ace of spades.

In fact, I saw the other day that he said I was a lurker, meaning somebody must have told me that I mean it.

But I like, I know, I know he gets a lot of criticism, but I really like his style, Ace.

And I think he's a brilliant guy.

And he puts things on there that are important to be aware of.

so i do that first for about 15 minutes and then i try to get the marquee i used to read the new york times i can't do it anymore i can't stomach it so what i try to do is

i read the wall street journal cover to or online cover to cover so to speak i try to read um

local websites in this area for local news.

And then I go up to what I would call call partisan websites that are either, I look at political just to see what they're saying.

If I want an encapsulation of shotgun approach, I really like Glenn Reynolds.

So I try to look at what he does.

And there's a guy that is there.

I don't know if you know him,

Ed Driscoll.

He's a wonderful guy.

I knew him when he worked at Pajamas Media.

I really like him, but they post things.

And so I try to see what captures their attention and then i try to read things uh like political on the left but then i'll look at uh i just have a soft spot for power line i really like john henicker and scott johnson and steve hayward always have so and and they they have a they're very witty and they they're well written and scott knows a lot about music for example scott is one of the loveliest men on the planet

i'm very fond of him i am too i am john and Scott and Steve.

I like a lot.

And so I read them religiously.

In fact, sometimes I'll just skip toward them first.

I read The Federalist.

I read,

yes, John.

Yes, Jack, I do read National Review.

And I'm not on the paywall.

You say I'm on the paywall, but you've not

given you a gift subscription, but we have to figure a way that you can.

We like

our ex-colleague Andy McCarthy.

And so I like to read that.

And then

I do that.

And then I try to look at longer essays.

And I try to do left and right.

I try to see what the left is saying in Atlantic.

And that's kind of hard to stomach.

I read the New Criterion.

I read the American Spectator and things like that as well.

And I read the, then I want to see sort of partisan, edgy stuff.

I read the day.

I like Ben Shapiro.

I read the Daily Wire

and I read the Daily Caller.

And when I get done with that, it's about two hours.

I go to things like Quillette and see if there's anything.

Oh, that's a terrific website.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Long essays there.

And then I get, I'm on about, I don't know how I got on, I'm on about

50

subscription lists, you know, of news aggregators left and right.

So I'll see things that come in.

Roger Kimball's a close friend, and he'll send me his daily stuff.

And I always like to read Roger.

So

I put it all together and I would say 65% is conservative, 35% is a lot.

I get into an insight into what the left,

you know, so if I think they're going after the court and I know they have talking points, I just know that they're going to go after Clarence Thomas.

They're going to rationalize showing up at the Supreme Court.

They're going to talk about packing the court.

They're going to talk about

14th Amendment or they're going to try to use lawfare.

And I'd like to see how they formulate

that narrative.

So that's what I do for about two and a half hours.

And then during the day, I keep up.

And I usually do maybe each day, I take four or five interruptions.

And for 10 to 30 minutes, I do the Epic Times podcast.

I do Megan Kelly's podcast.

I have some old favorite guys that call me

Don Crowe.

Yeah, John Bachelor.

I do try to do each week.

Don Crowe, I have a kind of a group of about 10 journalists.

I just did,

I did two today.

One was a local guy who I really like.

And

so I try to do that podcast.

And then I try to do three, I try to limit to three or four Fox newses a week.

I want to remind people when you write me

or you attack me and say I'm a paid lackey of Fox.

I do not get paid.

I'm not a paid analyst.

That's all gratis.

And that came in handy when Stanford targeted me and I tried to explain to them I was not getting paid.

Not that a lot of left-wing people are being, they are being paid by CNN that are Stanford professors.

But nonetheless, that's a pretty,

I think yesterday was a Sunday and I think by the time I did podcast and

I wrote my column and I wrote my ultras and I also gave some just some friends who wanted some advice.

I wrote 16 hours.

Oh my gosh!

So, okay, wow, that's staggering.

That's staggering.

All right, well, Victor, I have one more

writing back to the writing, and then also a question about NATO and Finland.

And that we will get to those questions right after this final important message.

I'm back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, a special episode.

Victor, you told me once, I told you once that I wrote this piece for National Review.

It was the back page, the Happy Warrior column.

Yes, I remember that.

And some of my colleagues, and the first word in many of them was I.

And it was I, I.

It was like a mariachi band, you know,

and I thought,

just can you not put the word I in there?

So the piece I wrote,

even though I'm saying I now, I'll be damned if I have the word I in there.

And it was about seeing the Milky Way.

It was actually, I'm very happy,

proud of the piece, but the word I was not in there.

And you,

you are very rare to use the word I.

And I try not to do it.

And you had some professor discuss this with you at one point.

Would you tell us about that?

Well,

I had a thesis advisor that I don't think was very fond of me.

And I've had that experience a lot, but Michael Jamison.

But he was a beautiful stylist.

He was a great classicist.

He was a student of Greek religion, ancient Greek religion.

And we battled back and forth, probably because I was going on weekends to the farm.

And I wasn't, you know, I didn't go to the opera in San Francisco.

I didn't want to go to Greece and drive around on archaeological sites because.

you know, my grandfather was 86 and I was working on the raisins or with my dad or something.

But anyway, anyway, we didn't get along, but he taught me a lot about style.

And he always said, it's variety, variety, variety.

And so if you're going to use the word I, make sure you haven't done it for 30 pages or 40.

And so I

rarely do it.

And if I do it, it's just for emphasis.

Same thing.

That's what writing is about.

It's when you break the canons of grammar and syntax deliberately.

So it's for emphasis.

I know that I

had this discussion once with John Keegan in Washington.

He and I were at a vent,

and I said, you have a very strange style.

I saw you said you were talking in very refined polysyllabic, Latinate vocabulary about a battle.

And then you said, and this was no small beer.

What was that for?

He said, I try to use an Anglo-Saxon colloquialism to break up and shock the reader and derail him from the sophisticated vocabulary.

And you have to do that.

And so people like that, I were very formative.

And that's how I try to, I never use the word I

unless I'm doing it for emphasis.

Right.

And I use the archaeologist.

I try to use archaic, archaicisms, like one would say once in a while.

Right.

I try also

in each long column, I try to think of a polysyllabic Latin word that people are not familiar with, but with a rule, I'll only use

So that rather than to be ostentatious and to show off, I'm trying to introduce a vocabulary word that somebody might say, well, I read that guy's piece and I learned a new word today, but just one.

Very, very Buckley-esque, yes.

Yeah, just one.

But never more.

And then I also say to myself, who is reading this?

And I try to write paragraphs that are different, that people that are, you know, have college training might enjoy, who read a lot, and then people who don't read very much can understand and find it accessible.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that's very

instructive, I think, to any listeners out there who

are putting pen to paper.

Variety, variety of variety.

I also, you know,

I was a

I got a PhD not in archaeology or history, but in classical philology or the study of the classical Greek, Roman and language, Roman and Greek languages, Latin and Greek.

And one of the things you have to do is read

ancient students of rhetoric and style, Longinus on the sublime or quintillion.

And it's just fascinating to hear what they say and read it and experience it.

So I always say to myself, if you use the word constitution, to take one, don't use it more than two.

But I have students who will say, we're going to,

the American Constitution was ratified in 1783 or 70, you know, something.

They'll say, the American Constitution has three parts of government, and they'll use Constitution until you want to vomit.

Right.

And it's very hard to have a circumlocution or a thesaurus, but you should be able to, and that goes down to the word, to the sentence.

So you can have a sentence that can be five sentences long, five lines long, and then you don't want to have five of them in a row like that.

Have a sentence that's too long and then have one that's just subject, verb, predicate, three words.

Or then have a paragraph that's, you should have, you should never have a one-sentence paragraph.

You should never have a one-page paragraph.

But break up, so when you look at that page, they're short, long paragraphs.

And then try to change.

We have two vocabularies in English.

We have the Greek and Latin vocabulary, and we have the Anglo-Saxon Germanic.

We all know that, don't we?

So you have a formal word, urinate,

and we know that's Latin, comes actually from a Greek word.

And then we have piss.

We have fornicate, the F word.

We have defecate, the S word.

The Anglo-Saxons are the crude form of the language.

And so, what you want to do is

you want to mix up that type of vocabulary.

I also read Orwell.

Every once in a while I go back to read his essays on style.

And he's a big enemy of foreign words and things like that.

And I try not to do it too much.

So

I try to read a lot of handbooks, ancient and modern, on style, E.B.

White and all that, about how to write.

I think when you get older,

you don't cease to do that.

Yeah.

Well, I think not that we should elaborate on this, but if you can look back at something you wrote 20 years ago and not cringe, I think

that's

a good thing.

So, Victor, okay,

we're running out of time, but we have maybe a few minutes here.

It's a big topic, but a few minutes.

And it's a question from Johan Wickman.

And Johan is a Finn.

I'm not sure if he's living in Finland and he he he kind of asked about your thoughts on the history of NATO etc but I mean you could write a book about that but Finland and Sweden are

in the pipeline to being you know joining an expanded NATO I guess let me let me take what

Johan asked and and make a little finish angle on it.

What what would you think of the benefits of Finland joining Finland's, you know, obviously its border with the

Soviet Union, excuse me, with Russia is extensive.

He also said Finland has a magnificent artillery component.

But what would you think of the up benefits or not of Sweden and Finland joining?

And if you have any other thoughts about NATO today versus its intention, what its original purpose was.

Well, NATO, remember, was formed in 1949, And the first Secretary General was a brilliant British general, Lord Ismay.

And he was a confidant in Churchill.

He actually wrote, actually, I think he wrote a brief biography of Patton.

It was very rare for a British general to like Patton, but he did.

And he said the mission of NATO was threefold, to keep Germany down, Russia out, and America in.

And what he meant was that World War II had been caused, he felt, by American isolationism in part

and the failure of appeasement to harness Germany

and the wild card of Russia that had signed the non-aggression pact of August 23rd, 1939.

So NATO would be then keeping Russia out of Europe, making sure that Germany did not, for the fourth time in 100 years, i.e.

the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, leave its borders to attack another European country, and to make sure the United States would be engaged.

And that's it, it so from 1945 until now, we haven't had a full-scale world war as those were.

We've had this Ukrainian war, which is so there's 31 members.

The problem we all have with it is that we keep adding members with the narrative that that adds strength.

But it also adds vulnerability because Article 5 of NATO, which we invoked, I think after 9-11, says that that if a NATO country is attacked, not if it goes attack somebody, but if it is attacked,

all the other nations have to come to its defense.

Well,

the more nations you have, and the closer they are to bellicose enemies, enemies that are volatile, like Russia or,

you know,

well, like Russia, but also when you have Middle East,

that suffices.

Then are you going to come

if you've got a small Slovakia or a small country that says, you know, are you going to get somebody having cappuccinos and, I don't know, foreigns to flock over to Slovenia and die for them or Lithuania or something?

So there's exposure there, and we see that with Ukraine.

If it had been a NATO member, we would have a nuclear confrontation right now because we'd be sworn to protect its sovereignty.

So that's a problem.

And so there, and then the other problem very quickly is there was a deal

partly at Yalta, but reified at Potsdam.

I don't mean it's written, but the general deal with the Soviet Union and the fact that they had five times as many troops in Eastern Europe and the Soviet borders on Europe than we did after the war was over, that we could not save Eastern Europe from communism.

Everybody said, well, Churchill gave it away, or Roosevelt gave it away, or both of them.

We didn't have the manpower to protect the

Czechoslovakia at the time, or Poland, or Romania, or Hungary, etc.

But we did get some concessions.

When he violated all of his post-war

accords, Stalin,

we were able to get Finland

and Austria as neutral countries that would not have have Soviet control directly over them with the proviso that they would not join the Warsaw Pact and they would not join NATO.

Well, that's a little problem, and that's why Finland and Austria are a little different than their European neighbors.

The second provisio was that although we had lost those Eastern Europeans, we were going to reach into the neighborhood of the Soviet Union and insist on both the Ataturk traditions in Turkey, but a secular Turkey at the time and Greece, and they were going to be Western.

In other words,

even though the Soviet Union could have absorbed them, they would not.

And so

that explains a lot of NATO, why Finland was not in it, why Austria is not in it, why Greece and Turkey are in it, and they're very exposed.

Okay.

The other thing about NATO was it was also on spoken that there would be an ability to tampon down historical rivalries within NATO.

It wasn't just keeping Germany down, as the French wanted.

There were auxiliary understandings, i.e., that Britain and France, and only Britain and France in Europe would have nuclear weapons.

That was aimed at Germany.

And

that Turkey and Greece would both be in NATO.

So

Turkey wouldn't bully Greece, much bigger, much larger.

And Greece is exposed in the Aegean.

So there were certain contours of NATO we don't even appreciate today.

The final thing about Finland was

in the so-called winter war, remember after Hitler had digested

Poland

and he was still under the auspices of the

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of non-aggression, he went into Finland.

to carve out land that he felt should have been Soviet.

There's always a contentious 800-mile border.

And they got their nose chewed off.

They went in in November and they lost a half a million casualties.

And the Finns were on skis.

They were, I mean, the greatest marksman in the history of assassination, wartime assassination was a Finnish sniper.

I think he killed over 500 Soviets.

But they just absolutely decimated Stalin's army.

And finally, the David Goliath thing in modern warfare.

They did.

And then they had to go in and clean up.

And so they

Mannerheim,

the Finnish president made a deal, basically that

if the Soviet, when they had an armistice and Russia wanted to get out, I mean, they knew they couldn't take over Finland.

They wanted to just take some territory, but they said to them, you will not attack Finland.

Finland, you will not stage an attack.

against Russia and we will not invade you.

So then when Finland allied with Germany and Germany went in and was surrounding Leningrad, right on the Finnish border, the Finns said to the Germans, we're not going to go in to any area of the Soviet Union.

We will help you control your northern flank,

but we don't know if you're going to win or not, and the Russians will invade us.

And you know what?

By and large, Stalin, after the war, kept his word because the Finns had not actively, even though they were pro-German and they were Finnish pilots.

This is all a wordy background to what the questioner is saying.

Yes, they have

they punch way above their pay grade.

I think they have 15 to 2,000 artillery pieces.

They have drones.

They have sophisticated F-35s.

They have 70 or 80 F-16s and F-35s.

And if every country in the West was like Finland, NATO would be unassailable.

So when they join,

then that's a plus because they know how to deal with the Russians.

They've dealt with them.

They've made accords with them, but they're sick of being bullied and they're scared of Putin and they saw what they did in Ukraine and they want help.

But if we come to a war, they will fight like hell.

And they're a lot better, even though they're much smaller, they're a lot better prepared than Ukraine.

And the same thing is true of my ancestors, the Swedes.

They have an independent arms industry and they make wonderful fighters, SAP fighters.

They've got a whole military.

I know you're going to say, Victor, you're just an idiot.

You're just a Swedish chauvinist.

They're socialists.

All they want to do is go to the nude beaches in Greece and hang out with Greek gigalo.

We're not going to do it.

We saw, we saw what they make great butter cookies.

Yeah, you know, those awful ryecrackers and stupid Electro-Luxe vacuum cleaners and your ladybug Volvos and all that.

No, no, no, no.

Charles the 12th,

Gustavus Adolphus, they were among the most Vikings, they were among the most warlike martial people.

And they're very competent.

And

they're tough and they know the Russians and they're scared now of the Russians.

So if we can get them in NATO, those two countries will be more of a plus than a minus.

Turkey's holding it up.

In a perfect world, we shouldn't have Turkey in there.

because it's an Islamic non-democratic nation now.

It's not out of Turkish secular state.

It's got the largest military in Europe, but it's flirting with the Iranians.

It's flirting with the Russians.

It's flirting with the Chinese.

It's supplying weapons to Russia against Ukraine.

We have a very ambiguous relationship about our

ossified but big nuclear weapons that are in Sarlak Air Force Base down there near the Syrian border, where every once in a while people around

Eridoyan will say, well, you know, the United States is not going to take those weapons out of Turkey, meaning they've been there so long, they're kind of ours.

And in a national emergency, we might just take them.

And when they had that coup, it was very ambiguous.

It was very ambiguous whether the U.S.

had absolute sovereignty.

And I think we're trying to take them out piecemeal.

It's kind of scary.

And then I think it was three months ago, Erdogan

lectured the Greeks, you're going to wake up one morning and missiles are going to be in your face coming from Turkey.

And he said things such as Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands, Samos, Lesbos, to the north of them, are really Turkish.

And so, and they've never been Turkish.

So even they held out against the Ottomans a long, long time.

So my point is that it's a very tenuous, but

I sympathize with small, vulnerable Eastern European countries.

and Western European countries.

But when you talk about NATO, 70% of the military budget is the U.S.

90% of the nuclear deterrent is the U.S.

And if there is no U.S., there's no NATO.

It's just a fact.

And countries like the Belgians or the Ducks or Luxembourg, all those small little countries in the West, the idea that they're going to field muscular,

you know, troops and go all the way to the Greek border or the Bulgaria, it's not going to happen.

It's going to be an American and to a lesser extent, British operation

and Eastern European.

I know that we got in the faces of Putin with getting the Warsaw Pact members into NATO, but

man for man, the Poles and the Hungarians and the Czechs, they'll fight.

And I think the Russians know.

If you look at it on paper, NATO is a really formidable military force as far as total aircraft.

It's not the problem with

the wealth.

It's whether the young people of Europe are committed to the defense of Europe in

a serious fashion.

But that's like the young people of Britain after World War I before World War II.

Were they committed?

No,

by the famous Oxford debate, we will not fight for king and country.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have.

I do want to,

I think I forgot to do this.

My short-term memory is really short-term problem today.

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Victor, thanks for the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening, and we will be back.

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Thanks for listening.

Thank you.