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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host and star and the namesake of this show.

Victor Davis-Hanson 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.

Part of Victor's gig at Hoover requires him to oversee this military group, and they publish regularly an online journal.

Victor is the...

Let's call him the editor-in-chief of Strategica, and there is a new issue out, and it's important.

And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on its topics and plenty more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, the issue number 85, as you know, I'm telling you stuff you already know, but our listeners don't know, is out for Strategica.

It came out on June 1st.

It's Alliances Hostile to American Interests.

That's the theme.

And the background essay, there's always a background essay to every issue of Strategica.

This is written by Edward Luttwach, and it's on the United States, a nation in need of a leader.

There are two other pieces in this online journal edition by Robert Kaufman and Miles Yu.

But I think it's very interesting what Lutvach has presented here and certainly a question he poses

that's a great opportunity for you to give your thoughts.

So let me just share with our listeners.

And by the way, go to the Hoover website.

That's hoover.org and search for Strategica.

And as a whole, there's 84

preceding issues, and I think many of them, Victor, are quite timeless and informative.

Anyway, this is Edward Lukvach's piece,

and he begins it with this paragraph.

And I think it's really interesting.

At a time when the overall power of the Russian Federation has been very greatly diminished diminished by its failure to swiftly conquer Ukraine, as all had expected.

And the overall power of the People's Republic of China has been eroded by the cruel exposure of its broad technological limitations following some rather narrow U.S.

export denials.

That's two.

Russia, China, three.

While Iran's immiseration,

aggravated by adventurism, has deprived its regime of public support.

That's three.

Four, even as Brazil and Turkey, once rising powers of great potential, are stagnating, and finally five and six, while North Korea, Korea's boasts, succeed one another without effect, and South Africa continues to decline into a failed state, why, this is the essential question, why do many Americans believe that the relative power of the United States has greatly declined.

Victor, that's a really, you know,

with that background, and I'm going to assume you may, well, you, I mean, I shouldn't assume anything, but you agree with Lippfox's take, but it really is an interesting background to pose that question.

All these other,

these threats, quote-unquote threats to America seem to be, you can make the argument they're in decline.

Yeah, we're in decline.

Victor, what are your thoughts and anything else you'd like to say about the other attending pieces?

Well, every

Strategica strategica is a group of about 40 uh permanent members and they are political analysts diplomat former diplomats generals colonels uh military historians public policy op-ed writers and i pick them

for their diverse views.

I don't mean diverse in the boutique sense, but the fact that they disagree with each other a lot.

And so we bring them out once a year for a three-day hash it out.

And then everybody is required to do certain things.

And one of them is to participate in the issue strategica.

It comes out every three and a half weeks where we get one principal topic.

We have a poll, we have study questions, but the key of it is that we have a background historical

longer essay.

Then we have two takes on the issue at hand, some of them antithetical to one another.

And then we, to participate in the annual meeting, you have to write many essays.

And I try to keep in my mind some of the

topics that will come up during the year.

Then we bank those essays.

And then the members as well participate.

If you go to the Hoover website, you'll see that we have book reviews of military classics.

And then we ask one person to write each week for a month

history in the news, that is what in the past makes sense of a military or diplomatic development in the present.

I'm the editor.

David Berkey is the managing editor that runs the day-to-day process of it.

And then we have Bruce Thornton,

scholar who helps

with the editing and critiquing the content.

And then Megan Ring, one of our staffers, also helps in the preparation of

the actual issue.

And it's pretty exciting.

This one was prompted by the idea that that knowingly or unknowingly or default, we are creating a counter alliance to NATO or the West or the United States.

And it violates the seminal principle, cynical if you want, but the realist principle of Henry Kissinger that China should never be closer to Russia than it is to us.

And the auxiliary was that never.

should Russia be closer to China than it is to us.

So it was a triangulation principle.

And now, now, partly because of the Ukraine war, partly because of inept leadership, we're seeing a new alliance of Russia, 7,000 nuclear weapons, the world's largest geographical country,

with China, the world's largest country by population, 1.4 billion, very

quickly closing in on us as the second largest

GDP economy in the world and

possesses about 2,000 nuclear weapons.

And its navy, by, if we tonnage in ships, is larger than ours now.

And now their surrogates, or I shouldn't say surrogates, or subordinates,

include Iran that is rapidly getting, I think as we speak, it already has the ability to produce a nuclear weapon.

It seems to be supplying drones to Russia in its efforts against Ukraine,

steadily supplying them.

I think China, it's

China is buying Russian oil at a discount.

I think it's stealthily supplying Russia with components necessary for weapons.

North Korea seems to be a member of that

de facto alliance.

It's got probably somewhere between 10 and 20 nuclear weapons and the ability now to hit the West Coast of the United States.

And it's run by a complete lunatic.

And then we have members of the former American

coalition, formally and informally.

In the case of Turkey, a former member of NATO and the largest military other than the United States in the 30-person alliance,

24-person alliance, nation alliance.

And then

we have Saudi Arabia, a staunch U.S.

ally, and both of them have been gravitating toward China or Russia or both.

And so these were the essays that people wanted to comment on.

And Edward Lutwax was, well, wait a minute.

Russia has been harmed by this war.

They probably lost over 200,000 dead.

They've suffered billions of dollars in material losses.

The Federation is uneasy.

Its member subordinate states, they're thinking this is going to be bad if Russia loses and maybe we should break away like Ukraine did.

They've hurt their exports of natural gas to Europe.

It's going to be very hard for them to continue at the prior rate of export.

And

it's not doing well.

And China, after locking down the economy and the fact that its population is peaking at 14.4 billion and will decline rapidly as it's got the oldest per capita population in the world.

And it's going to be overtaken, I think, in five years by India, maybe if not sooner in population size.

India, remember, is an English-speaking country and has enormous potential for

offshoring Western factories, given it has a language

component and it's not communist.

So Lutwack was saying that there are intrinsic weaknesses.

So why hasn't the United States taken advantage of this?

And why vis-a-vis China or vis-a-vis Russia or Saudi Arabia or Turkey?

Why aren't they gravitating toward us?

And the answer is that decline is a choice.

It's not faded.

And he suggests that we've got a $33 trillion debt.

We printed $2 trillion for COVID.

That was unnecessary.

We're running a $1.5 trillion.

When Joe Biden says, I cut a trillion dollars, well, it's because he had the largest deficit in history.

So if

you're planning to print $3 trillion and you cut a trillion, it still means you've got the largest deficit in history, but you brag that you cut.

And

so we're doing this to ourselves.

When he talks about military spending, we say, oh, we're froze military.

It's terrible.

But is it terrible?

Do we really need three more $15 billion aircraft carriers that are online to cost, you know, $50 billion?

Or if you think we do need them, would you rather have the three aircraft carriers or the $50 billion you gave away of military equipment in Afghanistan?

So what he's saying is that the Pentagon, the more you feed money to the Pentagon, whose members at the highest rank seem to gravitate to Raytheon,

General Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed, which suggests that they have expertise that these defense contractors value to

do what, to influence purchasing after they're retired, given their contacts in the Pentagon.

And do we really?

And then, you know, the irritants, Lloyd Austin said under oath that the Pentagon doesn't fund drag shows.

And all of a sudden, we find they're everywhere.

And now they're in the embarrassing position of trying to cancel them as hurriedly as they can.

So, are we spending the money we give them before we give them more?

And I can't get into the whole essay, but the thrust of it is we're suffering from self-inflicted wounds of physical irresponsibility, social chaos.

We're an affluent and leisured society that easily could take advantage of the weaknesses which are existential and intrinsic to these rivals of our, but we're not doing it.

And the result is that when we don't pump oil that we have in abundance or natural gas, and then we demand that other countries not only do what we don't, but export it to us before an election, that radiates cynicism and weakness, and it detaches our allies from us.

That's some of the things Lutwak.

Remember, Edward Lutwak is a very skilled,

he wrote a very weird book about how to commit a coup.

If you want to commit a coup,

and he actually gave you the steps to do it.

He came into prominence when he was very young.

He wrote

the grand strategy of the Roman Empire.

He wrote another one about eight years ago the grand strategy of the byzantine empire but he has 30 or 40 books on military policy analysis he's been a soldier he's been a confidant to governments he's a military analyst he's i think he's been selling arms as well he's done everything

he's a very

renaissance man yeah he's a very renaissance man he speaks about seven or eight languages people find him very difficult to get along with because i mean he feels that he has a presence that deserves people to listen, given his accomplishments.

And it's hard to argue with that.

So it's a very good essay.

And

the other essays, Miles Yu, everybody remember, he has an essay.

He is a professor of history at the U.S.

Naval Academy.

And he was Mike Pompeo's point man at the

State Department for four years

as an advisor, translator on all things China.

He grew up in China and he was at Teneman Square and we escaped

with his life and got his family out.

And he is targeted by the Chinese government.

He can never go back into China.

And he's got to be very careful to visiting countries on the periphery of China because they despise him for what he writes about

what's really going on in China and how dangerous it is and what an Orwellian nightmary society it is.

And Bob Kaufman, if people remember, he wrote about the Bush doctrine, the Obama doctrine.

His forte is trying to sum up a particular administration's foreign policy.

And he was very disappointed and very critical of what Obama did, which is important when we get to the issue of

what's going on with the Iranian Navy.

But in any case, I urge everybody to go to the Hoover website, and you can easily find Strategica there and then

see what you think of all these essays.

Victor,

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So Victor, you mentioned the iranian uh navy and that's we're going to pick up and it's along the same the lines obviously what we've just been uh hearing you talk about with uh the the strategic uh new issue so here's a headline uh i'm looking at uh piece by sahar tartak uh in national review from two days ago from when we're recording persian Gulf states to form joint navy in coordination with China.

Here's the first paragraph.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, in coordination with China, will form a joint navy to protect security in the Persian Gulf.

Qatar's Al-Jadid news website announced this past March.

China, Russia, and Iran held joint naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, near the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Top Saudi and Iranian diplomats also met in China for the first time in over seven years in April, confirming the reopening of their embassies and consulates and resuming direct flights and visa facilitation for citizens.

Victor, I mean, like,

this is, are we in another world?

China is forming navies with this cabal of nations, some of which hated each other.

I mean, thank you, Joe Biden.

Thank you.

Well, put it this way, and

I'm not exaggerating.

There are a lot of reasons to to impeach Joe Biden.

His family is utterly corrupt.

The Biden's income cannot be correlated.

Its stated income cannot be correlated with the lifestyles and expenses that it incurred.

Joe Biden

has

cynically, as we talked about last podcast, drained the strategic petroleum reserve,

tried to cancel student debts for

advantage in the latest, last midterm.

He's opened the border and destroyed it.

I shouldn't say open.

He's destroyed it.

We have 7 million illegal entries.

He's destroyed energy self-sufficiency.

So there's a lot of reasons, but this is the worst.

By that, I mean he inherited,

inherited in 2021, a relatively stable Middle East.

Israel

had been given enormous

help by the Trump administration.

And by that, I mean the embassy, we were beyond controversy.

It was now in Jerusalem where it belonged.

No one in their right mind thought Israel would ever give back the Golan Heights and be attacked from that strategically advantageous position.

That was settled.

We had cut off all the $700 million

to terrorist organizations

routed via the United Nations.

Most importantly,

we had created a new coalition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the North African moderate states, even Sudan, and many of them either had officially joined in a de facto alliance with Israel and worries about Iran

or would do so shortly.

Then Joe Biden came back and he brought with him the Obama foreign policy team.

So once again, we saw Susan Rice all of a sudden and we saw

Jake Sullivan and Blinken had been, you know, connected to Biden in that administration.

And guess what?

He blew all of what I said up.

And why did he do that?

He did it because the Obama-Biden initiatives were based on a crazy, insane, dangerous premise that the Sunni

monarchies and conservative regimes and Israel did not listen to the United States.

And they mirror imaged their conservative, the Biden-Obama conservative opposition at home.

They didn't represent equality, diversity, and inclusion.

They were not the type of enlightened

nations that we perceive.

But Iran was, Jack, Iran that kills homosexuals and goes after women and will rape women de facto.

The government people will, who oppose

any woman who opposes strict clothing regulations or appearances, et cetera, Sharia.

And so that is who they thought that we should empower.

And one of the ways that they empowered them was the Iran deal.

But they also favored them with the idea that the Shia

Persian minority

and its satellites in Hezbollah, Hamas, Lebanon, and Syria would balance, check, play off Israel and the Saudis.

And this would be creative tensions.

So when the Saudis wanted arms from us or Israel

would not pull back from the West Bank, then we would say to them, well, do you want to deal with the Iranians and their bloc?

They've got got a lot of missiles, Israel.

They can blanket your country.

So it was a really sinister, awful thing to do.

And now

it blew up in their face because remember, Joe Biden demagogued Saudi Arabia

during the campaign in his first year over the

tawdry execution of

Mr.

Khashoggi and a Saudi Arabian embassy.

We just said, well, they're no good.

We're not going to talk to them.

No way, no how.

And then he humiliated himself, but we're going to talk to them.

Yes, any way possible, because I need their oil because I'll lose the midterm if gas is too pro.

And they got sick of it.

And when the Iranians looked at us, they thought, wow, these guys will do anything to get back in the Iran deal.

Even though they know we're almost going to get a

bomb, they're as stupid as John Kerry.

And we have nothing but contempt for them.

And we don't like, you know, they're very far left and they think they favor us, but we don't like the stuff they're doing, the transgendered stuff and all that and gay stuff.

So I think we'll just make a deal with the Saudis.

They're Muslims like us.

I know they're Sunnis.

And so what we did was we mirror imaged bringing Russia together with China.

number one.

Now we brought Sunni with Shia, number two.

And now we put them both together in an anti-Western, anti-American alliance.

And that's hard to do, but Joe Biden did it with his demagogic, self-righteous, incoherent, unhinged, senile rhetoric, and the utter incompetence of Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and the busybody activities of Greensar John Kerry and then Susan Rice poking her head, the whole

sorry bunch.

And that's where we are now.

And what was the effect of it?

We're going to have a navy

that will be right at the,

I think the Saudis are crazy myself because they're going to have a Chinese-Iranian navy, which is going to have more ships in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

And they're going to control the straits of our moves.

What's going to be interesting is when this bunches out, the Bidens, what's going to happen?

Because they're not suddenly going to go become pro-American.

We're going to send a couple of big carriers into the Persian Gulf.

And what's going to happen?

And it'll be very interesting.

The Chinese are very vulnerable, and they're trying to absorb our position.

And

what was the solution to this?

The solution is to open Anwar,

get going on Keystone again, have more federal gas and oil leases, explore nuclear energy.

keep going with you know electric cars if you want wind and so that's fine but get your fossil fuels down and become energy independent and that you don't need the Middle East.

And so your policy toward the Middle East will be, A, you want it open for world consumption and especially exports to your allies in Europe.

And B,

if China and these countries push you, you will have a presence in the Middle East that's optional, not required.

And it gives you a lot of choices.

But

this is going to be one of the worst legacies of the Biden administration.

And

I just can't believe that he would deliberately push Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies into the lap of China and Iran and to the point where they're going to have a joint navy.

And we already know the Iranians are harassing American ships.

They all have.

During the Obama administration, they did.

They shot down a U.S.

drone.

Obama thought it was too provocative to blow it up after it was shot down.

And it was reverse engineered and became the prototype for a lot of their drone industry today.

So

it's so incompetent and derelict, you want to ask yourself, is it deliberate?

Do they really believe that the United States is such an awful flawed country that it no longer deserves a foreign high profile and that countries that are more deserving of that role, like China and Russia, should shepherd in their group of nations instead of Israel or Japan or South Korea, that these countries are more, I don't know what they are, more revolutionary, more egalitarian, more Soviet.

Well, look,

I just saw a tweet, Victor, about, and I called it up, about what it means to be involved with China.

And this is some guy posted here.

It's about the Congo.

So we know China's very involved in Africa.

China leaves Congo high and drive after ravaging its mines for a decade.

Congo held 8% of the world's cobalt reserves.

Chinese companies mined over $10

billion in 10 years.

The deal that Congo had with China was 50% of the workers doing the mining were supposed to be local.

That never happened.

China was supposed to put in $3 billion of infrastructure.

It put in

only about $800 million.

And he ends it with the hashtag, wake up China.

But this is what it means to leave the nations of the world.

Well, we're kind of leaving them to China anyway, many nations, but to do this,

to

empower them militarily

throughout the world.

It's just,

I just go back to thinking, whatever Joe Biden, first of all, and I'll shut up in a second, right?

But this is a continuation of the Obama policy, as you said many times.

You know, this starts with Obama, not necessarily Joe Biden.

But Joe Biden's also main strategy to me has always been chaos, destruction.

He was always that way.

He was always incompetent.

He was arrogant.

He had a mean streak, Joe Biden going on, and he was a liar.

I'm not defaming him.

He lied about his resume.

He lied about his college

preparation or lack of such.

And just this week, he lied again.

He was lying again that his son was killed in Iraq to garner empathy.

He lied again about that he had an offer to go to the Naval Academy and he would have been a

football prospect.

It was a complete lie.

He lies about everything and nobody seems to call him on it.

And

it's very hard to understand these people because you get on the oil in the Middle East

or

They're telling us here in California that natural gas and oil will be eliminated.

Okay, so we're going to go go Tesla, we're going to go electric cars, but

that's going to have a huge demand on our grid, as we've all talked about.

So they're not talking about nuclear power, which they don't approve of, even though it's clean burning, doesn't create heat.

They know that wind and solar cannot produce the amount of electricity that would be needed.

to fulfill their dream of everybody plugging in at night and

charging their electric vehicle.

So they won't create the necessary sources of electricity.

We know that precious metals like cobalt, but especially lithium, would be necessary for many of the ingredients of this transition to green power, and yet they will not allow us to develop it.

At the same time, they won't allow us.

They're allowing either one of two things.

They either allow China to go into these countries and exploit their natural resources.

They do that a lot, or

they themselves then try to buy it on the open market or to see if

people overseas will produce what we want.

And that's a very hard argument in cases of strategic materials or oil.

When you say to a foreign country, I need what you have, and the foreign country says, but you have it.

Yes, but we don't get our hands dirty.

We feel that mining would disrupt the countryside or pumping natural gas would.

And they say, but you don't care about us doing it?

No, you're third world, you're used to that stuff.

But we,

we who live, you know, in Cambridge, Mass, and we live in Beverly Hills or Malibu, we don't get our hands dirty.

We want what you have, you get dirty and produce it, and we'll buy it.

Well, we don't have the money, we'll borrow it, the money, and buy it from you.

That's the that's their position, and it's just lunatic.

And it would be so easy again to

pivot and to reboot just to start

anwar up just to make sure that we're in line with canada and the pipeline let the cypriots and the greeks and the israelis finish the east med pipeline have new leases

opens up some of our big mine uh mines that we know that can mine these precious materials that we have.

Go back to the Nevada nuclear waste dump that was, nobody ever said it wouldn't work.

And we could easily put fissionable spent materials or fusion spent materials in there.

So we have the ability to do it.

But this is the problem with the left.

It's all ideology.

Ideology trumps all practical considerations, all real needs of real people.

And so this Biden character has destroyed energy and

energy,

independence, self-sufficiency, and he's done so by empowering our worst enemies and the worst countries in the world in Iran, North Korea,

China, Russia, and he's taken illiberal regimes that we had

working relationships in Saudi Arabia and especially Turkey, and he's driven them to the dark side, so to speak.

And

I don't understand why people support this.

I guess because he's on the left and they're on the left, but it's been a disaster.

And the funny thing under under Trump,

we had a working relationship and Kissinger terms with China and Russia.

We were playing them off against each other.

We had told Russia, don't screw around with us.

We killed 200 of the Wagner group in Syria and really scared the crap out of them.

We had told Chi not to tamper with.

Taiwan.

No need to get into the little rocket man.

We've talked about that in North Korea.

We took out Solemani and Baghdadi and the Middle East and Iran was very scared of us and behaved and we had the Abrams Accord.

It was all working.

This is a good reminder.

We could use the same topic in the case of judicial appointments.

But for all of you out there that are shocked of Trump's crudity, undeniably crude and crass, and you thought, I just can't vote for this person, you were not voting for Trump or Biden.

You were voting for two opposed ideologies.

The ideology that has given us the open border student loan cancellations,

green power tyranny, teachers' unions, the COVID lockdowns versus smaller government deregulation, individual liberty, and realist deterrent foreign policy.

And so when you go into that poll in 2024, you should make

that clear to yourself that if you vote for these people on the left, this is what you get

and there is an alternative and that may not be the alternative you want it may not be pretty but it's an alternative

politics is the art of the practical victor and uh the kingdom of heaven is not unto this earth so people uh people

knew damn well what was going to happen when they when they voted in uh 2020.

hey uh victor you mentioned the wagner group and let's get more

more of your thoughts about that right after this important message.

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back with the victor davis hansen show i'd like to remind our listeners to visit the blade of perseus that's victor's official website you'll find it at victorhanson.com it is the repository for links galore of victor's appearances on uh radio shows other podcasts sometimes there's some video appearances there uh links to his books, at least descriptions of the books, and of course, links to when he writes for American Greatness in a syndicated column, and his ultra pieces.

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So, Victor, we hear a lot about the Wagner group

and

some of its tactics, not only

at fighting, but its tactics towards its own members.

And

what just who just really constitutes this

entity?

It seems brutal.

It seems like it's a private army.

It seems like it's Putin's private army.

That's what it's comprised by criminals.

I mean, what is the wagon?

It's a private military group.

I think they even have an acronym, PMC.

And

it's designed to go all over the world and to identify Russian interests.

And Russian interests are defined by illiberal regimes that have problems with their neighbor or internal dissidents, or they

are other regimes that may have assets, natural resources that Russia needs,

or friendly regimes, again, that need help.

And it's based on the idea they need plausible deniability.

So it's the Wagner group.

And it tends to be ultra-orthodox, ultra-patriotic, ultra-nationalist, this

19th century idea of czarist Russia.

And it's run by that Jutkin guy.

And

he's disappeared as far as the media is concerned.

And now we've got Prigozin?

Pragozin?

Prigozin.

And he's the de facto head of it.

And

he was, you know, a criminal.

He's been in prison, I think, kind of a thug.

And he's a food producer.

And he got to know Putin.

And he expanded the idea of this private military company.

And I think they've named it Wagner because of of

the association of Wagner, the

composer with nationalist themes or far-right themes,

vis-à-vis national socialism, and what Hitler did with Wagner.

But anyway,

it operates in a way that the

Putin government can say we're not part of it.

It came into prominence, as I remember, during the 2014 annexation of borderlands, and particularly the Crimea.

And they were very successful there because people were not expecting that Putin would actually, and I was, I think our listeners were, because they knew that Obama was president and they knew Obama had got caught on the hot mic saying, tell Vladimir to Medeved, he said, tell Vladimir that if he eases up and behaves during my reelection campaign, my last election, then I will be flexible with military

anti-ballistic defense in Europe.

Translated, that means, tell Vladimir not to do anything stupid that makes me look weak until I get elected.

And once I'm re-elected and he doesn't do anything stupid, then I'll cancel missile defense and screw over the polls and the checks.

And then he can do whatever he wants.

I'm elected.

And that's exactly what he did.

2014.

And he sent the Wagner group in there.

And that time, they maybe had 10,000.

And there's supposedly people, you know, there's all this fame and myth and

notoriety about them.

They surrender their passports.

You don't know who they are.

They're former

special services in the Russian army.

They work in cahoots with the Russians.

They're funded by oligarchs.

And they're very deadly.

And they showed up in Syria, remember.

And to our credit, I think Jim Mattis was defense secretary.

He just gave the green light.

If they get near our compound, blow them up.

And we have that eerie tape where the U.S.

Marines and associated troops unloaded on them and stopped them.

They have reappeared in the Ukraine with taking an old Stalin idea that Stalin emptied the prisons during the Great Patriotic War.

So, as he called the resistance to Nazism.

And there's a great passage in Crusade in Europe, as I remember by Dewite Eisenhower.

I think I mentioned on a podcast where

Zhukov brags that he uses former prison convicts and people in the Soviet army to clear mines, i.e., he just sends them into a minefield, they blow up, and then the tanks are safe.

But that's an old tradition in the Soviet army of using convicts.

So they sent anywhere reported 20 to 40,000 convicts for this Russian offensive.

And we hear that most of them got killed.

And now Prigozin is angry because

he feels that the military saw him as a rival, so stealthily cut back on ammunition, artillery shells, armor, light weapon ammunition, bullets, and that caused him not to do as well as

he could.

Now the reputation of the Wagner group is not so good because they didn't do well.

A lot of people have said, well, it's no different than Blackwater, the old

mercenary

American unit that we contract military contractors that we used in Afghanistan and Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan.

It's a little different in that that was a way of saving money and not having to form new units to do the stuff that these guys were trained for, even though they were very highly paid.

But it wasn't necessarily, we didn't send them into places that we wanted culpable,

deniability of culpability.

In other words, they didn't go commit coups or go kill people and we said that.

And the second thing is we didn't send them in because they were more skilled than the U.S.

military.

I know a lot more special forces, but there were still a lot of special forces.

When the two times I was in Iraq and I met people in Blackwater,

they were very scary, but they were no more scarier than the people in the U.S.

military.

In fact, there was a little resentment against them, whereas people in the military thought if they get in a jam, they're going to call for U.S.

air support to get them out of there.

So it was different.

It wasn't an off-the-table,

shadowy group that did stuff that Russia would be embarrassed if it came to light.

And it was not a group that might have been more successful than the regular military, as was supposedly the case of the Wagner group, who was better trained than the recruits in the Russian army.

And so I don't know what's the future of us, but it's taken a hit in its reputation.

It brings up the larger question of what's going to end up in ukraine i think everybody's lying about the casualties we had a report about three months ago from sources in ukraine at our hoover working group that there have may have been somewhere around 400 000 dead on both sides in aggregate including civilians some people have suggested there might be five or six hundred thousand civilians ukrainian dead and russian dead wagner dead

and

it's a little strange to hear Austin and Millie and the left, especially on blogs and in the popular culture, some of the neoconservatives that egg this on and brag about it and say, wow, we're really filling our geostrategic goal of hurting Russia.

I think we probably are.

And Ukraine is really developing the best military in Europe, and it will be a very valuable member on the front line when we put it in NATO along with Finland.

We'll have hundreds of miles on the Russian frontier and this is going to be wonder.

I'm very skeptical of all this because of the asymmetry between 145 Russians and only 40 million Ukrainians in a country 30 times larger with an economy 10 times larger with very powerful allies

like China.

and Saudi Arabia maybe even and

Iran.

And so are we going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian as a surrogate?

The left is usually always talking about humanitarian concerns, but they don't seem to care about the death count.

I know people on the left that are just wild.

They're just, we've got to go on to Moscow.

And the drone attack on a Tony district in Moscow was just something to be celebrated.

But ultimately, in this type of border war that started as a border war, now it's an existential war for the survival of Ukraine.

And we saw that in Vietnam and we we saw that in Korea.

To win that war,

the invaded country cannot be on the defensive.

At some point, it has to be proactive or preemptive.

And by that, I mean it's understandable that if they want to win the war, they're going to send drones into Moscow or they're going to bomb with drones, supply depots, or they're going to have Russian-speaking Russian citizens on the border who hate Putin that they're going going to help fund stealthily so that they go in, blow up bridges inside Russia, or they're going to have to sink more ships of the Black Sea fleet.

And what I'm getting at, if you do that,

this is not 1950, considering MacArthur thinking about doing that to China, which he later thought was a bad idea.

This is not Vietnam, you know, trying to stop China from sending supplies into Haiphong.

This is the modern age where Russia has 7,000 nuclear weapons.

And almost every day we hear some Russian grandee, whether in the Polar Bureau or

the Duma, whatever archaic or present name we use for a governing council, threaten two places, the United Kingdom and us.

And they say, you know what, if Putin is a war criminal and you put him on trial at The Hague, you'll get a missile in 10 seconds.

And the problem with all this is that we write it off as just nuclear saber rattling, empty talk, Putin's a blowhard, all of his subordinates are a blowhard.

But I've never seen the threshold of nuclear profanity so low.

And everybody is getting in on it.

We're going to nuke you.

We hear it all the time.

Iran, just in the last six months, on three occasions, has said they wanted to nuke Israel.

And we've heard North Korea back at it about nuking the United States.

And we've heard Turkey threaten Greece and say the Greeks are going to wake up and missiles are going to pour in.

And we've heard Pakistan tell India, anytime a smaller power is bullied, they have the right to resort to nuclear weapons.

And then we've got, of course, Ukraine, and we've had China threaten nuclear weapons about

Taiwan.

And what do I mean by threaten statements such as, we want to put everybody on notice, should you come to the aid of this criminal breakaway state, China reserves all options to persuade you to keep out.

The Russians are cruder.

They just talk about burning up London or blowing up New York.

But we all laugh about this, but I have never in my lifetime seen so much loose talk about nuclear weapon.

Yeah.

With the backdrop of, you know, all the

America's weakened

stance in these regions and our present.

He's no man, he fell down, but you know, damn, that really symbolized

this whole problem that we yeah, I think that's a good point.

People on the left have not, they've never understood human nature.

They want human nature to work a particular way when it doesn't.

And it doesn't change across centuries.

And they need to read the historian Thucydides to understand what it's like.

It's not that he's cynical, he's realist.

And when Biden stumbles or when he stumbles on the ramp to the plane or the other day at a ceremony he trips over a sandbag, he says, or he bumps his head or Mr.

Obadore has to help him down or the Chinese prime minister has to steer him in the right direction.

And when he

wants to print $4 trillion and when the military abandons Afghanistan and 50 billion, all of that, all of that does not make people

happy abroad.

It doesn't make them think that we're a consensual nation that openly airs our problems.

It conveys

a sense of weakness.

And their attitude toward that is not,

I really like the United States.

I feel sorry that it's weak.

So I'm going to be extra careful not to add to its worries.

No, they don't.

And when we're magnanimous, as the left thinks we're magnanimous, we're sending, what is it, $1.2 billion to China and Russia to promote climate change, transgenderism, and stuff like that.

We sent, I think it was

$700 million we spent in Afghanistan to promote gender studies at universities in Afghanistan.

We did the same thing with Pakistan.

We mentioned ad nauseum, the pride flag that flies over our embassy as it's taken over by the Taliban.

We talk about the George Murray flag.

They don't, that doesn't win people's hearts and minds.

I'm sorry.

The left seems to think that everybody in the world admires us because we promote Transgender Day or

George Floyd.

They don't.

They think that we're crazy or divided and we should, that magnanimy should be considered weakness to be exploited, not to be reciprocated and kind.

And so that's where we are with this administration.

But we always are when you get an Obama or Clinton.

It's the same attitude.

There were Democrats of the past, Harry Truman,

finally FDR,

people like that,

who felt that they could be, they understood human nature and they could be deterrent, but they don't exist anymore.

They're long gone.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more

little topic for your thoughts on it.

That has to do with the budget deal and how it affects the military.

And we'll get to that final topic right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

So, Victor, I know on a previous podcast with the great Sammy Wink, you discussed Kevin McCarthy and the,

I said, the budget deal is a lead-in, but

the debt

negotiation that McCarthy included with Joe Biden and

was approved by both the House and the Senate.

But there's a Wall Street Journal weekend edition editorial that's out yesterday.

And again, we're talking on Sunday, the 4th.

So this came out on June 3rd.

And I think the journal has been generally, and some of its columnists,

commending of McCarthy and what he was able to achieve.

But lead editorial

this weekend was that is about the downside of the budget deal and

it has to do with the military spending.

And even though the deal

gives a 3% increase to U.S.

military spending, it really is a loss because that's pre-inflation.

So,

you know, we're going to, when we need to be doing more,

we will actually be doing less.

Richter, any final thoughts for this program about

this, or if you want to expand on anything else related to the McCarthy

Biden deal?

Well, it is true that it's an actual cut in the defense budget, but the problem we're having is that there were not a lot of Republicans that rushed to the cause of increasing defense spending.

And it's sort of analogous to the FBI budget or the CIA budget or the IRS budget.

And I don't think people in the Pentagon at the highest ranks understand that their constituency that

wants a lot of shells and bombs and planes to keep America safe is conservative, Republican, traditionalist America.

To the degree they're flirting now with left-wing support for the military, it's not for military efficacy.

It's for fast tracking a social hard left transgender, race, identity politics, gender, sex agenda, that abortion agenda that otherwise has to go through the sturm and drag of a legislative process.

And they look at the military and they think, well, you know what?

Some general can just snap his fingers and wah, he got everything we want if we can get to him.

And we can get to him by, you know, saying, you know, we don't really care if you go to Raytheon after

you're.

defense secretary or we'll hire you as a corporate board and you can speak about pride day four that kind of stuff so

I guess what I'm worried about is that when the military looks toward the Republican Party for its traditional support, it's not there.

And it's more likely if you listen to guys like, you know, Jim Jordan or Matt Gates, they're saying, well, why are we spending money on drag, I know it's a small amount, but.

drag queen shows or diversity workshops or subsidized abortions or transgendered surgeries paid by the the Pentagon?

Or why are we leaving $50 billion in military hardware supplies programming in Afghanistan?

Or why are we emptying our strategic arsenal as Taiwan looms on the horizon in Ukraine without any sense that we're going to either increase the defense budget,

because we're...

if the left is so in favor of a preemptive strategy in Ukraine, then increase the defense budget.

But they're not.

And the right is saying, well,

yeah, you're depleted your shells, your javelins, because you're giving everything to Ukraine.

And if anybody suggests that, you think they're pro-Putin.

So they have a political problem.

And it really got back to, I think it started

in 2020

when

most of the

luminaries of the retired officer corps at the highest level began to break the

Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 82.

Is it 88?

I can't remember, but they violated that says that retired officers are subject to the code and shall not disparage their

commander-in-chief.

So when you have some of the most renowned and distinguished people in the military of the last 20 years

saying

things

like the President of the United States should be removed from office the sooner the better.

The President of the United States is a Mussolini.

The President of the United States is a liar.

The President of the United States is Nazi-like.

The President of the United States, as I said, is a Mussolini.

The President of the United States is a coward.

And

the President of the United States has no authority to put federal troops into the to quell civilian disturbances when Colin Powell offered to send Marines and that offer was taken up by George H.W.

Bush during the Rodney King riots.

You add all of that together and then you, for a fill-up or dessert, you have Mark Milley talking, bragging about he went over to his desk and picked up the phone and called his Chinese counterpart to warn him that Trump was on hinge and that Trump gave him an order he thought thought was dangerous, he'd tell the Chinese communists first.

And then when you add to that that sorry spectacle of Austin and Mark Milley pontificating about Professor Kendi and what they were going to do to spot white rage and supremacy privilege without presenting an iota of

evidence, and then you wonder why, oh, and then after all of that, wow.

We're short 16,000 Army recruits.

I wonder where they are missing from.

Oh,

we're short 4,000 people in the Air Force.

Well, how did that happen?

And so I think that's all put all that together.

And the Pentagon has got to wake up that to ensure a budget that fulfills our strategic needs, it's going to have to reboot and go back and try to mend fences with the people who support it and the soldiers who are most likely to join and to re-enlist, I should say.

And they're not doing that because they're woke.

And, you know, all Joe Biden did was, give you one example, he contextualized the COVID outbreak.

He would never say the truth that that was a gain of function virus in part funded by Anthony Fauci.

And it leaked from the Wuhan lab.

And the Wuhan lab was controlled by the Chinese.

People's Liberation Army.

And the Chinese government suppressed all information.

And people traveled throughout the world that were infected from Wuhan, and they couldn't travel anywhere else in China because they knew it was dangerous.

So they sent them all over the world.

And we're not going to dare say all that.

And we're going to parrot the Chinese lie that a pangolin or a bat spread it by accident.

And the balloon came across the United States and Alaska, but it was too cold.

It was too, the water was too deep.

It was too dangerous.

It went into Montana.

It had no effect whatsoever.

Oh, yes, it did have an effect, but then it went south.

No, it went east.

And all of those lies about the balloon.

And

then we do all of that.

And then we wonder why this week a Chinese frigate tried to ram an American ship or a Chinese fighter jet tried to get too close to an American

jet.

or why Lloyd Aston was very eager to meet his Chinese counterpart.

And they said, nope, see you, you, wouldn't want to be.

No.

And Austin said, well, this is not, this is a very,

very unfortunate development.

You think?

You think, General Austin?

You think?

I wonder why they said, screw you, we're not going to even talk to you.

And I wonder why they,

what if you said the next balloon that comes into our airspace is going to be blown up, but you better be careful because we have balloons too.

Or that might have had an effect on them.

And, but you appease the communist Chinese and then you adopt a woke agenda.

Then you offend the people who are dying twice

at their demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then you come back and say, hey, we don't have enough money.

We want more money.

And the left's saying to them,

you don't need any more money.

All you got to do is put on drag shows and pay for abortions.

And who cares about shells?

We got you where we want you.

Oh, Yvey.

This is a little Eeyore-ish, but you know, it's the reality.

It is.

It's the reality.

I'm a big supporter of the military.

I think that

from one star to captain, we've got the finest soldiers in the world.

But I really feel for them because I think something happens when they get to Washington and they get stationed there either as liaisons or in the Pentagon or they want to get promoted.

But after two, three, four stars, they become politicized and they are fish that know the temperature and texture of the Washington water and they and they swim accordingly.

It's difficult to think of the military as a bureaucracy like

the DMV, but

it is.

It is.

Yeah, it is.

Well, Victor, that's all the time we have left today for

imparting of your wisdom, which was, as usual, wonderful.

I want to thank you for that.

I thank our listeners for listening.

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So thanks all who do that.

And thanks to all who also take the extra time to write comments.

We read the comments, not only on Apple, but also a lot of people leave comments, Victor, as you know, on

your website, The Blade of Perseus.

So here's one comment worth sharing.

And it's from Marco Polo, 2278, who writes, it is an honor listening to America's truth teller and wise man, Mr.

Dr.

Hansen, speaks out about what is happening to our great republic.

way he makes way for a clear overview of what we face and how to stop it whether we as a collective society of american citizens can get together and make the right decisions to save ourselves is the most important question facing our nation today one thing's for certain if we do not act we'll face many years of communism to put it plainly Thank you, sir, Victor, for every topic you decide to discuss.

Marco Polo 2278, thank you for your comment, Victor.

Thanks for your wisdom.

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And thank you, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and I much appreciate it.