Mecca and the History of Islamic Warfare

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Hello, this is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Saturday show and we dedicate it to things, cultural and historical things.

And so this Saturday weekend show, we're going to look at the mecca that DC is and we're going to turn to Islamic conquests and then we'll look maybe at a little bit of the disaster of diplomacy in our world.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

Victor, maybe something a little bit optimistic because I know we're going to go into the Islamic conquests and suing in DC.

So these are not going to be light topics at all.

But did you have anything positive to start our podcast?

Anything positive?

More uplifting.

Yesterday I spoke for a local Congressman David Valdeo, who he was one of the 10 that voted to impeach Trump, which I disagreed with, but

he's able to be elected in a plus-five Democratic district.

A lot of you say, well, yeah, because he's a rhino.

But yeah, maybe, but

if you look at his actual percentage of his voting record, it's about 90% conservative.

So is 90% conservative better than 90% left-wing?

No, I mean, of course it is.

So

what I'm getting at is that there were people in the crowd that I sensed they want to win.

They're not DeSanto supporters.

They're not Trump supporters.

They're not...

aristocratic grandees that want to go back to Romneyism.

They just want to have sort of a make America a great agenda, favor the middle class, get tough on China, avoid optional wars, be Jacksonian, don't tread on me, no better friend,

no worse enemy, foreign policy,

become energy independent, tough on crime, deregulate, fewer taxes, budgetary discipline, all of that.

They all agree on that.

And I think if

they can unite, and I think they can, in in 2024, we can stop this.

And there's periods in history, whether it's the five good emperors or in the

third century, early fourth century in Rome or Constantine in Byzantium or Heraclius, a later Roman Justinian, where there have been periods of long renaissance in a society.

Every society declines.

It's like a human body.

The Greeks said, you age and decline.

But there's everybody has renaissance.

I think we're due for one.

I hope it can happen.

I think the left is really overreached.

I really do.

I think this whole transmogrification of a transgender dysphoric issue into

your children are going to trans, be careful, it's one out of five or s that has really alienated the Hispanic community, the poor white working class community, and the African American community.

And I think the border has scared everybody.

And I think gas price, I think everybody

will be sensible.

But I bought that in 2020, so I'm trying to be optimistic.

We're up against a lot.

Don't ever underestimate what $3.5 billion

and the control of Silicon Valley, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPRP, PBS, Network News, all three networks, Hollywood, professional sports, K through 12, academia can do.

That's a powerful opposition to deal with.

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, I have a positive thing.

I think the royal family has been graced with the knowledge that Megan Merkel is not going to show up at the King's coronation.

So there are things, good things happening to people in this world.

But let's turn to the DC

corridor where we have Trump suing Michael Cohen and Alvin Bragg suing Jim Jordan.

And I was thinking, wow, we have suing, suing, suing.

And it seems, as I said, like a lawyer's mecca.

And I was wondering, reflections on those specific cases and just the culture in general that is like this.

Kind of disturbing, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, Alvin Bragg knows deep down in his heart that he wouldn't have indicted Donald Trump in 2000 and 2005 and 2010, 2014, he indicted Donald Trump because Donald Trump was president and may be president again.

End of story.

And he used the law to manipulate that fact.

In other words, Donald Trump

is going to be cited

under a federal statute de facto of campaign finance

legality.

of which Albin Bragg has no jurisdiction.

He's trying to turn a misdemeanor of a bookkeeping or a misrepresentation on the books into a felony by saying he used that to break federal law, even though he used his own funds, and that he did not want to protect his reputation on a 2006 supposed sexual tryst, but that he did it to protect his campaign.

And

that's where we are.

And so people are trying to suggest that he's absurd federal power.

They want to bring him to court and said, this is a federal statute.

What are you doing?

And he's suggesting that they're interfering with third part of government.

And

I don't know what to say.

I just know that if people were to do that to the left consistently, they wouldn't like it.

And that's the big existential question that people have on the right.

When they expelled people from the Tennessee legislature, then Arizona did it immediately.

The Dems did.

They expelled a Republican.

And tit for tat, maybe that's what it's going to have to happen, but that will unwind eventually the Republic.

So that's not good.

But I don't know how you stop the left because they feel that they're so moral superior, morally superior, that they have a right, an exclusive singular right, an exceptional right, to use any means necessary because, as I said, their ends are so ethically

advanced and superior to the alternative.

And they assume, secondly, as a corollary, that they have an exclusive right to use any means necessary, whether the superficial of tearing up the State of the Union address on national TV, swarming the homes of Supreme Court justices, trying to pack the court or get rid of the Electoral College or denying Republican memberships on committees.

And they do all that on the assumption that the right has no comparable moral authority and then will not do that, wouldn't dare do that.

So only one side will do it.

And when only one side does it, the Republic survives because the other side has more responsibility as the adult not to retaliate in kind because to do so would destroy the family.

There you have it.

Given all of that, what do you think?

I know dysfunctional families don't work like that.

I think everybody does.

Dysfunctional families.

I've known parents that, you know, when I was in high school and college, if their kid was on drugs or alcohol, they said,

that's your problem.

You're a big boy now, and I'm not going to bail you out.

And you know what?

I like to drink too.

And the kid comes home, and the dad is in jail for DUI.

And he comes home and said, Well, you got drunk, son.

Why don't look at me?

I don't have to support you.

You don't have to support me.

And, you know, I'm mortgaging the house.

You're not going to.

That kind of attitude just destroys a family.

But that's what they assume we won't do on the traditional side.

Yes.

Well, given all that, what is your assessment or evaluation of the job that Jim Jordan is doing as he tries to confront these things?

He's got an enormous problem, though, because he's got a razor-thin majority with, you know, eight to ten seats, depending on who's healthy at the time.

He's got some rhinos, so he has a very thin,

as does McCarthy, the leader, the House Speaker, but

he has no executive authority.

So what I'm meaning, if they send a criminal referral about the Biden family, or if they s say that Bragg has done something that's contrary to

there's not a chance in hell that Merrick Garland would ever prosecute that.

And so

last time they had the majority under Devin Nunes, they had several criminal referrals.

I know that Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr didn't pursue many of them, but had they

If Bill Barr had taken that criminal referral, just to take one example,

we know that Andrew McKay, by his own volition and admission, lied four times under oath to a federal investigator.

Michael Horowitz told us that in the Inspector General of the Justice Department.

And yet he wasn't prosecuted.

But why wasn't he?

He was a conservative justice, and he didn't do it.

I guess he thought, well, you know, you don't want to criminalize the FBI, but that's exactly what they're doing.

So when you don't do that,

what do you do?

You destroy deterrents.

So, when Bill Barr did not prosecute Andrew McCabe for a confessed felony of lying to a federal investigator and with a dual responsibility that not just as a citizen, but as an officer of the justice system, should never do that, then what did that do?

That just eroded all other

deterrents.

So, all of a sudden, you know,

you know, other people, Jim Comey, can say, I can't remember 245 times under oath, or Christopher Wray can say, hmm,

yeah, we, we, you know, we spy on parents, or we go into Catholic churches, but you know what, or we go performance art and arrest

troll lifers, but what are you going to do about it?

We had a guy lie, you didn't do anything about it, you're not going to do anything about it.

That's what happens when you don't enforce the law.

Yes, yeah.

It seems like they're wasting a lot of money.

You know how we, as citizens, kind of get frustrated when we see our government seems to be inert.

They're just wasting money on lawsuits.

It's not going to come to anything.

Paying a lot of lawyers.

It's informational.

But I wrote a column this week.

I don't know if you saw it.

It was called Fiddling America Away.

And that was my point.

That we're in these tit-for-tats and we're obsessed with Duncan Mulvaney that we talked about.

And we're obsessed with what, I don't know, this Pearson charlatan does.

And meanwhile, meanwhile, we can get into that, the world abroad is falling apart.

The post-war order is falling apart.

And very quickly, I quoted that line.

A lot of people do, and the sun also rises, that he went broke gradually and then suddenly.

American foreign policy was hemorrhaging slowly and then it bled to death.

Suddenly.

Yeah.

This week was suddenly.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back back to talk about the Islamic conquest, and then we'll move on to the subject of your current article for American Greatness, the Biden 10-Step Plan for Global Chaos.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, the...

The next set of wars that we're interested in here is the wars that were speedy and vast of conquests by Islamic militaries.

They conquered from the Indus River all the way to the Iberian Peninsula across the southern Mediterranean and across the African portion of the Mediterranean

by

650 or just a little bit

later than that.

So that was very quick 20, 30 years.

So an incredible, almost revolution in warfare.

And I was wondering if you could help to explain how that happens or what happened.

Either one, I'll take.

Well, let's say up till 600, there was for a fleeting moment that the Roman Empire could be reconstituted on Greek auspices.

By that I mean, remember when the Empire formally vanished in 476, and that's vanished is the wrong word, eroded and was incorporated or fragmented in different kingdoms, the Byzantine Eastern Roman that was Latin-speaking, but officially, but more Greek-speaking naturally,

and it was the conservators of Hellenism that had all the great manuscripts in Constantinople.

That empire would go on for another thousand years.

But my point is this: they, under Justinian, were really in a renaissance.

They had built Haggius Sophia, they had codified

the law up to now,

and they had refurbished the walls, the theodicina walls.

My point is that they had taken back almost all of North Africa from the Vandals.

They had Egypt.

They had gone into Sicily and expelled the Vandals.

They had gone into Italy and expelled the Vandals from two-thirds.

They were eyeing Spain.

And then they had the...

the terrible bubonic plague and they lost half a million people and they petered out coincidentally with the rise of this strange religion that cobbled together elements of Judaism, Christianity under Islam.

And what was scary about Islam was the West had never seen anything like it because where Christianity was ecumenical

and transcended class,

Islam emulated that.

In other words, if you were a Gaul or you were a Numidian, and you were Christian, you were in the brotherhood of Christ.

It was not a Middle East-centered religion only.

The same thing was true of Islam, but what was different was there was no message of the Sermon on the Mount.

It was the 72 virgins and virgins waiting for you if you died conquering for the prophet.

So that was a dynamic Middle East religion that was ecumenical, and it just spread like wildflower and

wildfire.

And the result was that all of the Byzantine conquest in North Africa were wiped away within 100 years.

And then

the Umayyads,

Caliphate, I mean, they went into Europe, and we know we don't need to talk about Spain, but they went beyond Spain and they went into Tours and southern France.

And at that famous battle, Poitiers or Tours, 732, Charles Marchel the Hammer stopped them.

That was that famous point.

I think Gibbons said, had he not done that, they would be speaking Arabic in Oxford today.

He said that in the 18th century.

But at the same time, there was a series of invasions of the Eastern Empire, you know, not just what was left of the West, the fragmented West, but the Eastern and Arab navies twice in the 8th century, Islamic navies got close.

to the walls of Constantinople and they were just about ready to storm it and end the Byzantine.

And then two heroic defenses stopped them, partly with the use of pressurized napalm or Greek fire.

But the point was that suddenly

the world was very different.

And it had the,

I don't know what the word was,

the unintended

consequence that it started to unite the West under

a new idea, the Perrine thesis.

I don't know if you remember that French historian, but

there was a thesis that he published early in the, you know, a few years away, Henry Perrine, I think his name was.

And the idea was that there was no notion of a Western civilization in the West.

It was so fragmented, the Holy Roman, until the rise of Islam.

And then it started to coalesce and unify in opposition to an existential threat that was contrary to almost every element of Christianity.

And

that would be the story of warfare

for the next thousand years with the Seljuk Turks and then the Caliphate and then finally Ottomanism.

And Ottoman was the most dynamic of these manifestations.

And you could make the argument, I mean, they were in Vienna.

in the 16th century and

with the storming and assault on Constantinople in 1453,

all of the Byzantine Empire had been gone.

It was all of Anatolia.

It was Syria.

It was all the region.

It was up to the Crimea.

It was all of Eastern Europe.

It was Hungary even.

It was all the way into Austria.

It was raiding the shores of Italy, near almost up to Venice.

And the idea of a slave was S-L-A-V, was Slav.

It was the idea that there were so many white, blue-eyed, blonde Christian slaves that Slav was a synonymous term

for an indentured person.

I shouldn't say indentured, a chattel slave.

And yet

the West tried for in the four crusades, the fourth was a disaster because it was diverted, as you know, to Constantinople and destroyed the city in 1204.

And it took 50 years to get it back and never recovered fully.

That was one of the worst moments in the history of Western civilization.

But my point is that all of this together characterized most.

There were two characteristics of Western warfare

after the fall of Rome.

One was a new Christian, theocratic resistance to a dynamic religion that was as inclusive as Christianity, but was inclusive by a military element that they hadn't seen before.

I mean that literally.

I know that we're not supposed to be judgmental, but when you look at Christian documents in the 10th, 11th, 12th century, they were terrified of Islam because they lost a series of

important battles to them, especially the Byzantines at places like Manziker or in Eastern Europe at Mohács.

And there were certain elements of the Islamic caliphate under the Ottomans that were terrifying for Westerners.

They had never really ever experienced anything like the Janissaries.

The idea that you would go in to Christian villages and select a boy six to fourteen that was stronger, bigger, brighter, and that the parents, in desperation to save themselves and to have some chance of career for their son, would give him over to the Ottoman state.

Then he would be raised as a super warrior among a Janissary barracks culture and then unleashed back into these areas as shock troops of the Ottoman when they were in their teens and 20s.

How strange would that be to say, well,

if you're going to take my son, at least he's going to be powerful and maybe I can influence him if he's a grand vizier diplomatically or he's a janissary officer.

But at the same time, these former Christian Europeans are now the cutting edge of the Ottoman onslaught into Europe.

And then nobody had ever really understood the harem and the organized fashion that happened, that thousands of Europeans were brought into the harem.

And then the sultan and the aristocracy would have these liaisons.

And almost here was you would have someone whose whole mission was jihad against the West, but whose mother was probably a European convert.

And then

the lucky woman,

I should say unlucky, if you had a liaison with a sultan, you better make sure that you were the favorite wife because if you were pregnant, then your son or daughter would be liquidated once the favorite heir was chosen sultan.

And so there were things about the

Deir Shirme and the harem that were just baffling, or the mass execution of

prisoners.

I think the siege of Nicopolis, after they lost, they just lined them up and they beheaded them and beheaded them and beheaded them.

Not that there weren't atrocities on the European Christian side, but what I'm getting at is there was an element of just horror that if you want to understand Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and we didn't understand it because of the Serbian atrocities, but that went way back

to the Ottoman entry into Europe.

and the Albanians that were mostly converts to Islam and used by the Turkish government, the Turkish Ottoman government, as sort of the launching pad to go in and take over the Balkans.

And we couldn't figure out all of the hatred that went back to the

battles of Kosovo and Mohawks.

So that was pretty much what it was.

It was characterized, too, by a tendency for Europeans to have heavy cavalry and Byzantine cataphracts.

rely on

more like heavy infantry and for

Arab and Islamic armies and Ottoman to be more mobile, lighter cavalry, swifter, and more numerous.

The problem with the West was that they were dealing with a united Islamic front once Ottomanism

reified the idea of a theocratic Muslim nation that would be imperial.

And so all of the prior caliphates

had tried to achieve that goal, but Ottoman did.

And they were then sure that they used this term, the red apple.

The red apple was going to be Constantinople.

When they took that, it was going to be Vienna.

When they took that, the red apple or the prize was going to be Rome.

And they were fighting against people that, you know, 100 years' war in the 13 and 1400s, it didn't end after the siege of Constantinople.

So the two primary emerging European medieval kingdoms and end of the Renaissance were France and England.

They were wearing themselves out for 100 years.

So there was no counterpart to this Ottoman unity.

And then it started to fragment

at the end of the 15th century with Protestantism and then with the Orthodox estrangement after the fall of Constantinople and during the life of Constantinople.

So suddenly the West was dealing with

the Habsburgs and trying to regain the

Catholic war against Protestants versus Orthodoxy.

And it's all fragmented.

And then here you have the Ottomans united.

And that was

a very difficult time for

Westerners to

feel secure is what I'm saying.

And then all of a sudden, two things happened just to finish this.

Once

It happened before the fall of Constantinople, but in the 1400s, the Portuguese and the Spanish, but particularly the Portuguese, were starting to see that

with the demise of the Moguls and the rise of the Seljuk Turks and the Ottomans, it was very difficult to get into the Black Sea and trade with Russia and by extension into India and China.

Or the old Wia Ignitia through Thessaloniki all the way into Constantinople was shut off, and they started to experiment.

with these classical theories of a round earth.

So they were going down the coast of Africa to the Canaries and the Azores.

And then after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, that was completely shut off.

There were no more Byzantines, the Italians, the Genovese were losing their concessions.

And it was really funny because the Eastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the routes into the Black Sea that had been the source of wealth for the Byzantine Empire and for the Ottomans, suddenly became kind of a disadvantage because they were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the Atlantic ports.

And after 1492, when people discovered

A, the New World, and the riches therein, and under Magellan and others, that you could not have to go directly west, but you could go south, and you could go around the Cape of Good Hope into Asia,

China, and India by sea, and then that opened up all of Japan and the Philippines and the whole Pacific, then it was suddenly a backwater, and galley warfare was obsolete after Lepanto in 1571.

And the Ottomans just slowly deteriorated because they were not subject to the wealth or the dynamism of transatlantic exploration.

And at that point,

you can really see the West take off, and it's never really going to be after Lepanto, it's never really challenged again.

Maybe it'd be the second siege of Vienna, but

it was in command, And by the 19th century, the Greeks were able to be liberated.

And it was a declining area.

Now, you know,

history's funny.

The largest city today in Europe is Constantinople.

It's, I don't know, 15 to 17 million.

And Erdogan is sitting on that prized location that for 2,500 years has said to the world, we control the Black Sea at the Bosphorus, and we control entry and exit

to the Aegean through the Dardanelles, and we are east, west, north, south transit points of trade.

We've got pretty much it's been very advantageous for the Turks and they're a NATO power.

They say they're European and suddenly they're talking about

that

They're going to send missiles into Athens or they're sending weapons to Russia or they feel closer to Iran than they do the West?

So these old

syndromes continue to reverberate today in the same places, ironically.

Yeah.

You know, when you were talking, I was thinking, well, when they do conquer Constantinople in 1453, and for about 100 years after, they're in really a dynamic period

for the Ottoman Empire.

But they don't run over Europe completely, even though Europe is in wars, fighting wars against themselves, right?

So why do you think that is?

Is there some difference in the militaries between

that Western and Eastern military, if we can call the Ottoman and Eastern military?

Well, I wrote a book that was very controversial called Carnage and Culture, and I took key battles and I explored particular traits of Western society, constitutional government, capitalism, scientific research on fettered by religion, for example, the emphasis on heavy infantry, etc., dissent,

and suggested that when applied to the battlefield, that gave the Western advantage.

It didn't mean they were going to win in Constantinople or Mohawks or Nicopolis, as I mentioned.

It didn't mean that they weren't going to have

tragic

defeats, but it did mean this, that they were able to fight with a system that was not predicated on superior geography, terrain, individual genius.

What I meant was they could project power to Zululand, even if they had Lord Chelmsford an incompetent commander, even if it was 6,000 miles away from England.

The Zulus could not do that to Europe.

They could go into the Dardanelles in 1916.

The Ottomans were not able

to go into northern Europe without European.

It became parasitic.

So if you had brilliant Islamic scientists and they wanted to build a lighthouse in

Istanbul, they had to have permission from an imam not to be accused of rivaling the superior wisdom of the Quran.

That wasn't true in the West.

So what I would suggest to you is that almost every single major weapon system came from the West or was borrowed from the East and enhanced in the way the East had not imagined.

Take gunpowder.

Yes, it came saltpeter and sulfur carbon came from China, but

what made it it was used in fireworks and ceremonial explosions, but when it what made it lethal was Western trial and error response, counter response, capitalistic profit, and that gave you corn powder, that gave you arquebuses, that gave you flintlocks, that gave you percussion.

It was just a constant race to improve technology.

And that's true today.

If you look at the world today,

why is somebody in China, when you look at them, why are they wearing Western uniforms?

Why do they have Western metals?

Why do they have Western tanks?

They didn't invent any of that.

They didn't invent the tank.

They didn't invent the jet plane.

They didn't

invent the modern uniform.

Why are they emulating the West?

Why don't they have indigenous Chinese uniforms and indigenous Chinese weapons?

And that is sort of the story of this Western military dynamism.

It doesn't mean that the West is going to win.

It just means that

its dynamism is unique and it's coherent, and other societies will be parasitical upon it.

And they all think that they can improve upon it by not having the sturm and drag of constitutional checks and balances in democracy and republics.

But China does, that's what it thinks, that it's going to take Western technology and capitalism and graft it onto communist authoritarianism, and they won't have Dylan Mulviney to worry about, right?

Or Mr.

Pearson mouthing off in the Tennessee legislature with a bullhorn.

And they feel this is going to be more dynamic.

I don't think that's going to be.

I don't think that's true, though.

I think that we're going to, as long as we continue our system and we don't have this commissariat where woke ideology in the university says you can't research that or if you're going to do COVID you better research about the effect on marginalized people not the interior cellular structure of the virus once you start politicizing research and we'll be just like the alternative but

I can tell you it's a dynamic situation Hernan Cortez went in and destroyed Tino Chitlong in two years and at any given time he never had more than 1200 Spanish conquistadors.

He destroyed an empire of 4 million.

Horrible thing to do, perhaps, but the Aztecs were pretty horrible.

He did have a lot of claxical and help, but my point is, if anybody thinks that Montezuma could have created an Aztec fleet, mastered celestial navigation,

traveled all the way 4,000, 5,000 miles across the Atlantic, landed in Barcelona, and then stormed Madrid, they're crazy.

It wasn't going to happen.

So there's a difference in dynamism.

Everybody's sympathetic to Native American peoples.

So they were fighting a war, existential war, for the control of the North American continent.

In 1862, the West was still unconquered.

There were still major battles going on.

If did anybody think that when North fought South and they were

fighting

an existential war among Westerners and would kill 700,000 Americans, that Native American tribes would unite, have a constitutional alliance, have representatives analogous to the U.S.

Congress or the Southerners articles of the Confederacy,

the Confederate articles, I should say, and then have their own, take their weapons, their Spencer or Henry rifles that they stole, copy it, create an indigenous metallurgy and fabrication society, and then take advantage of that civil war and march on Washington.

They're crazy.

It was not going to happen.

Didn't mean they were not fierce warriors, but they didn't have that type of

warfare or social or political or economic or financial organization we have.

And this is something we don't talk about, but we all know to be true.

And so we, how do we deal with it psychologically in the left?

We just say it's evil.

Well, yeah,

they could have done it, but they were not evil.

They were nice to the environment.

No, they weren't.

If they wanted buffalo, they ran them over the cliff.

And they just

and they didn't have any power of refrigeration.

They didn't really master the idea of drying meat as jerky as well as Westerners.

And they took what they needed.

They took, and if they let carcasses rot.

And no, I mean, yes, the Westerners, well, they just shot buffalo and they just exterminated.

Yes, they did.

They were very culpable.

They shot the buffalo and then they fed it to the railroader people and then they took the hides and sold them, and then they left the skeletons to rot, except they didn't leave the skeletons to rot.

Settlers came out, and they collected the bones, and they ground it up and sold it to companies for fertilizer.

So, I mean,

it's not as simple as what we've been told.

And there's a reason why

the ultimate expression of all this is we've got seven million people coming from somewhat non-Western influences that are dying right now as we speak to get into this place.

And yet we have the elite of this country telling us that this is a toxic, horrible place and that people coming in and abandoning their culture, their homeland, eventually their language, their families

are

not doing it because they want to come here.

They're just forced out by people.

No, they're trying to get into a different system.

And so when you come in across the border and you get to a different system, if you don't change your habits, then you're going to replicate the system that you want to get away from it doesn't make any sense right

you know i i know it doesn't i talked once to a guy not too long ago and he

he was in a car and he was on the property and he was throwing all this trash or he had it in his car and i stopped him

and

Kind of the conversation was very tense, but I just said, why would you want to do that?

Why would you want to keep doing that?

You left Mexico because you don't want to do that.

You don't want to come to the United States and have the roads look like Mexico.

You want to become a U.S.

citizen with a, that's why you're here.

You don't want, I go along, you know, quarter mile away, and there's just litter on all sides.

I used to ride a bike.

I took a picture of a guy dumping, and I showed it to a highway patrolman.

I said, look,

he was out there.

You know, he kind of laughed and said he had better things to do.

But I was so baffled.

Why would people who are dirt poor poor come up here and then, in the country that they had chosen to live in, forget the legality of it all, but why would they then just come out and throw stuff on the sides of the roads every single day

when people don't do that here?

Because if they did, and if they continue to do it, it wouldn't be a place that they want to gravitate to.

And by the same token, we have a responsibility.

Why would people be fleeing socialism in Venezuela or Latin America or the Caribbean or Mexico and then come up here and then vote for socialists or have socialists welcome them in to destroy, to recreate Venezuela?

The only reason people are coming here is because it's a dynamic free market economy and

it's limited government and deregulated compared to the alternative.

But boy, if we go full socialist,

it's not going to be very inviting, I suppose.

There's only two things that are going to stop

illegal immigration.

It's not the left.

There's only two things that are going to stop it.

One,

that we're going to become just like Mexico and Latin America in the sense that our government, our economic system are going to be inadequate for the needs of the people, and people are going to say, why would I go up there?

It's no better.

Or two, that people are going to come here and they're going to realize that they've been sold a bill of goods by the left.

The left says to them, I gave you a bunch of free entitlements.

I massaged the law so you could come illegally and you vote for me in exchange.

They said, screw you.

I'm an individual.

I came up, forget how I came up, but I want to get something different.

And if they started to vote like Cubans, the left would say, oh,

time to close that border, one or the other.

Yes.

Well, Victor, we're on a break right now, or we need to get to a break.

So why don't we just take a moment, have a break, and come back and finish off with the Biden 10-step plan for global chaos?

Stick with us, and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, I'd like to remind everybody that they can find you at victorhanson.com.

It is called The Blade of Perseus.

It's your website, and we put just about everything that you do in podcasts and articles onto the website.

So please come join us either for a free subscription or if you would like the ultra material content,

please join for $5 a month or $50 a year.

And there is copious amounts of VDH ultra content.

So you know, make sure you join, I think.

All right, Victor, you just recently had an article in the American Greatness, Biden's 10-step plan for global chaos.

And I was wondering if you could talk to us about the results of Biden's policies or diplomacy, which has emboldened enemies, triangulating allies and calculating neutrals.

Well.

And that's a quote from your article.

Yes.

And today is Thursday, so I have it up.

And basically, I ask a series of rhetorical questions, right?

Why is Emmanuel Macron

cozing up to China and basically lecturing us, the United States, that saved Europe twice and saves it a third time through the auspices of American-supplied NATO?

Why is he saying we European?

He didn't say French.

He said we European don't want to get involved with Taiwan, China, no, don't be led by the United States.

Why now?

Why is Japan saying, you know what?

I got to buy Russian oil, forget the sanctions.

India said, well, we're already doing it and we already buy weapons through the United States.

And why is this crazy Lulu or whatever his name is in Brazil going all the way over to China and saying, it's kind of like out of Casablanca, this is the start of a beautiful relationship?

And why do we get this?

Why all of a sudden is Hezbollah active against Israel and Hamas?

And they're killing Jews.

Why now?

And

why is Turkey talking about sending missiles, as I said, into Athens?

And why is it selling weapons to Russia?

And why is Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia?

I thought it was our loyal friend.

Why is all of a sudden it has a non-aggression?

I've ribbon-tropped Molotov

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of non-aggression with Iran.

Why is Egypt sending rockets?

They're sending rockets to Russia.

Why is China, you know, it's like, well, you think China wants to take Taiwan?

You think China may feel bad about the virus?

No.

China is saying, listen, F you, we're taking Taiwan.

You got it?

Just a matter of psyching you out and wearing you down.

But at one moment, you're going to wake up and we've got Taiwan.

Get over it.

And as far as the lab, yeah.

It was under the PLA.

So what?

And maybe it leaked, maybe it didn't.

Maybe it was genetically engineered.

Screw you, it's our business.

Oh, a million Americans died?

That's your problem.

Screw you.

We're not going to talk.

Oh, that spy balloon?

Yeah,

we flew it over your country.

Yeah, yeah, we did.

It spied on all your military bases.

You shot it down.

Okay, but you think we're going to apologize?

Screw you.

So, you know, why is Russia, why can't Putin finish the sentence without threatening nuclear weapons?

And why did the president of Mexico?

Oh, it's a beautiful thing.

We helped 40 million people, i.e.,

two-thirds of them were illegally.

We broke your law.

And you know what?

I want them to all vote Democrat.

What?

You're interfering in the elections of a foreign nation after all the things we've done for Mexico?

So

why is this?

And the answer, of course, is there's no deterrence.

In just two and a half years, this doddering...

octogenarian that doesn't know where he is.

He slurs his words.

He has no idea what he's doing in Ireland.

He talks to dead people.

He shakes non-existent hands.

He's allowed the world to think that there are no consequences to destroying the post-war world order and the United States' custodianship of that.

Whether that was good or not, I don't know that.

But what did he do?

Count the ways.

That was my 10 steps, Sammy.

He destroyed Afghanistan.

That was the greatest humiliation in America, I think in American history, more so than Saigon.

And

he gave up a billion-dollar embassy with a pride flag, no less.

He got Americans killed.

He left Americans there.

He left Afghan loyalists there.

He gave over a retrofitted, remodeled, $300 million,

10,000-foot airway Baglin that was isolated and over an hour away, all by itself, a fortified castle, so to speak, with air transit in every direction, control of China.

He just gave it away.

And why?

Because he wanted to say that on 9-11, he pulled everybody out, the 20th anniversary.

And then the spy balloon, he lied about it.

He said they got no information.

And then they had a leap.

They did.

He completely lied about it.

Everybody knows.

In March, when they took office at Anguish, they walked in there, you know, blinking and sold and like, we're the new team.

We're the people everybody likes because we're not Trump.

And the Chinese said, listen, you're hypocrites.

You've got BLM.

You've got Antifa, you're chaos, you're racist, you treat people, screw you.

And they just dressed them down and they just, okay, okay, we see your point of view.

We don't agree with it, but it's sober and judicious.

That's okay with me.

And they were humiliated.

And the world watched that.

And then, you know, Russia, Putin, said, well,

I'm going to test this SOB.

So they started shutting down pipelines and stuff with cyber.

And Biden said, Vladimir, if you're going to conduct cyber warfare, please keep the hospitals off your target list.

You can't just do that.

And then, you know, when they ask him later, I think it was in January,

hey, what would you do if Russia invades Ukraine?

Well, it depends on if it's minor incursion.

He just comes across the border, nothing.

Well, that was like April Gillaspi telling Saddam she had no interest, the Americans didn't, in territorial disputes over Kuwait.

And then, you know, we have whatever you think about Mohammed bin Solomon, whether he ordered a guy to be dismembered in the embassy, he is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

He is a reformer.

He's got the second amount of oil in the world after we do, and we're cutting ours back.

And he's a big fish.

And if you say you will never meet with him because he's a illiberal tyrant, it's basically what Biden has said, then he's going to say, screw you, Joe.

I'm not going to pump more more oil before the election.

I'm not going to drain your damn petroleum reserve.

I ain't going to do it.

I want high prices just to spite you.

And I'm going to cut a deal with the Iranians.

How do you like that?

Because you're begging to get into that stupid Iranian deal and sell us down

the river.

But before you sell us down the river, we're going to sell you first because we're going to join the Iranians.

They're going to point their missiles at you and Israel, not us.

As far as the Abrams record, that's off.

And you'll like that because you wanted to sabotage it anyway with Trump.

And so we'll help you do it.

And that's where we are with them.

And then,

why didn't the, and then, you know, Kissinger said, Berita's memoirs do not make China closer to Russia or Russia closer to China than either is to us.

That's what's happened with Ukraine.

They're bragging about their beautiful, again, another Casablanca.

This is the start of a beautiful relationship.

And that's what they're talking about.

And they're ganging up on us.

And we have these idiots in this administration saying, well, that's good because now they're showing us their true colors.

You know, that's like Poland saying

it's really good that Russia and Germany are both invading because now we know who our friends are and the enemies.

You can't make it up.

And then, you know, he told the Palestinians, yeah,

I don't know.

Trump treated you kind of bad.

He moved the embassy.

We're going to give you $800 million.

Do what you want with it.

Oh, really?

And we're kind of, we don't like Netanyahu's government either.

And what happened?

And so Israel is kind of like Constantinople, 1453.

It's a little outpost of Westerners surrounded by sudden enemies.

And then the border wall.

So he just said, I'm not going to have one penny, not one foot for that border wall.

Okay.

So you don't want to enforce the border.

And you're going to stop catching release.

And you're going to kiss up to Obador.

and you can say you can apply from refugee status once you're here and you have six to seven million illegal entries in just two and a half years and the Pentagon where's where's the Pentagon and all this but it deterrence China Russia Iran well I finished the article basically

saying the Pentagon can't be trusted after Afghanistan it didn't tell us the truth about the balloon it didn't tell us the truth about what's going on in Ukraine Our chairman of the Joint Chief and Mr.

Austin, remember them?

They lectured us on white supremacy and white rage.

They gave us no data to suggest that that was an existential problem in the military ranks of a bunch of white recruits from, I don't know, Indiana or southern Ohio going around acting out their racist plots.

But that's what we were supposed to believe.

But we did find out that that same group that they demonized collectively had died at twice their numbers of the demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're not joining.

They're 12, 15, 15, not 12, 15,000 soldiers short in the Army.

And what is not coming out of the Pentagon, Sammy?

We don't hear, we have

120% recruitment.

We're forming a new Armor Corps.

Oh, we've got a new fleet of hypersonic missiles that are much better than Russia and China.

Oh, by the way, we finally did Star Wars.

We've got satellites and we've got lasers and we're protecting the U.S.

And you know what?

We've upped the requirements for combat.

You have to do 500 push-ups.

You have to run the mile in six minutes.

No, we're not hearing any of that.

We're hearing that we're going to pay for your abortion and we want transgendered officers.

That's what we're hearing.

And so

we've destroyed.

These are all self-inflicted disasters.

And that's why our enemies are looking.

They're saying more of this, more of this, more keep going.

Because the more you do this crap, the more Biden does this, the more that we

have a new alliance.

It's now China, Russia, North Korea, Iran,

and they have allies of yours that are defecting Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India.

And you know what?

We have half the world's population and most of the world's oil.

And you have no influence in Africa and South America.

And this is what we want.

And, you know, it's sort of the new Chinese order.

And I ended the piece by quoting that line in the Melian dialogue in Book Five of Thucydides.

Remember, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

And that's the whole logo of the Chinese Empire.

The strong do what they can,

that's us.

And you, the weak, will suffer what you must.

Yes.

Yeah.

Doesn't it finish with then

the

something somebody uses moderation?

There's three things.

Strong.

Poor little melons, I feel like.

Or is that the last thing?

No, the last thing is that we believe.

No, that's the last thing is treat, yeah, treat your treat your enemies with,

oh, I can't remember.

There's a

million dialogue.

The melons say, but if you're so mean to people,

you're so mean to people, then they're going to get angry at you and and they're going to unite.

It's going to be, and the Athenian, well,

I wish it were true, but unfortunately, you've misread human nature.

They're going to have respect for us, that we're athlete ruthless and destroyed you.

So nobody's coming to your

defense.

And they said, but

the Spartans, the Spartans don't do anything unless it's 100% sure it's your self-interest.

And then they finally say, but we have hope.

You guys had hope, Salamis, and all that.

We can maybe.

ah, hope, dangerous comforter, dangerous comforter.

And you would be wise that when you negotiate the collective survival of your people,

that you calculate what's in front of your face and concrete, i.e.

a huge Athenian fleet that has never once given up a siege, including what's going to happen to you, versus what might, could, should have happened.

It's not going to happen.

And of course, they besiege the city, they take it,

they kill all of the adult males or enslave them, they wipe them out, and then they put in Athenian colonists, and that's the end of NIL.

And I don't, people have argued for

2,000 years what the point of the dialogue was, to show you that realism

is something that we all must understand,

or that we all must understand it, but we hope it's not true because we want to be idealist, or or it's trying to show how awful the Athenians were when they go into that

mode of

amoral realism because right after you finish the dialogue, you end book five, you open book six, and it says this is the expedition to Sicily, which is going to end a catastrophic payback to the Athenian.

I've written about it a lot, but it's hard to know what the exact, there's so many fights and controversies over the meaning of the dialogue.

But apparently Thucydides took a minor siege because it was very minor given the number in the 27 and a half years, and he tried to magnify it into a moral lesson of the ages.

Very sad, the poor little Melian envoys.

They all want to be so polite, and they try to appeal to logic, hope, and idealism.

These Athenians: nope, nope, nope, where have you been?

Just like Stalin when

Churchill and the British and the Americans say,

you stole Poland in 1939, Joe.

You and Hitler connived.

Yes.

So we have to give Poland, when we create Poland, we've got to get you out.

No.

But there's not going to be much left to Poland.

Well, then take it from Germany.

Germany's took it.

Germany took half and we took half.

We're keeping our half and there's no more Germany.

So take a half from Germany and glow it onto the other half and they'll have a whole country.

And then they said, but and he created Ukraine, Western Ukraine.

People should remember that.

A thousand years Polish-speaking Western Ukraine, it was Polish until 1939.

And then all of a sudden it was Soviet Ukraine.

And then they said to him, Ah, but the Pope, the Pope will be very angry.

They're very good millions.

They said, the Pope will be very angry because this area has been Roman Catholic, not Greek Orthodox.

And now you're taking a huge swath of Polish Roman Catholicism, the bulwark of the the church, and you're giving it over to a

Soviet atheism,

a veneer over Greek Orthodoxy.

And what did Solon say?

How many divisions does the Pope have?

End of story.

End of story.

We are at a kind of a hard break today because I know you have things to do.

So thanks to the audience for listening to us.

We really appreciate you.

Everybody, thank you for listening.

We really appreciate appreciate it.

We'll see you next time, and yeah, we'll see you next time.

And this is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.