War and Economic Superpower

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist,

and a commentator on culture and politics.

And this show today is going to be on politics and some of the latest questions we have on deck, Kevin McCarthy's speakership, and

what else?

And the Ukrainian war.

So we will get to that.

But first, let's take a few moments for some messages and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Hello, Victor.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing very well.

I'm doing very well.

And I've just finished two pieces for the Ultra

website.

One is on the aggravation.

of Queensland healers that

I've spent most of my life having and why I like them and why they drive me absolutely blank blank crazy

and

then

age and being on a farm and I was fixing a door the other day and I counted how many doors on this farm open to the outside from a building and I came up with 19

and

just trying to fix one door and I thought to myself, oh, I've got 18 more because they all are ancient.

all these things it was it was a big long whine

but uh other other than that um

i i had a good day today and i had a good week it's been really raining very hard here

and the climate i don't we call them climate denialists they call other people that but they're the climate denialists because They were the ones assuring us that we were never going to have a wet year again.

This is not a wet year.

This is a hyper-wet year.

and i'm pointing my finger at jerry brown

emeritus governor and gavin newsom and the california legislature because we passed

over five years ago a seven plus billion dollar bond and had we just done that what the bill the voters wanted and that was the sites reservoir in the Sacramento area in the Los Banos Grandes south of San Luis Reservoir in Temperance Flat

above Millerton Lake, bigger than Millerton Lake.

I think it's

600,000 acre feet.

And then the other two together are almost four.

So we would have had 5 million acre feet.

So all this water that is going out, the San Joaquin River and the

Sacramento River, it would be

very much needed.

We could store it.

But you know what they're doing?

They're saying the reservoirs cannot be topped off because the snow melts coming in March.

So they're letting the water go out rather than put it in the reservoirs.

Absolutely insane.

It is insane.

It's these, there's no such thing as, I think everybody agrees with it.

There is no science, as they say.

Follow the science.

I am the science, Dr.

Fauci said.

These people are anti-science.

They don't believe in the science.

They are cult figures.

They are guided by this green, secular,

atheist, agnostic religion, humanism.

And they don't care anything about science or logic or data.

And so you can talk to them about climate change and they don't care.

John Christie, a brilliant scientist, has been doing it for years.

They don't care about

any suggestions that the

vaccines did not quite pan out as advertised.

Not saying there wasn't some efficacy, but you can can get infected as I have been three times after being vaxxed twice, and you can infect people.

And so I could go on and on, but

this science that I had just read actually that this was going to be another last year, 2022.

But we were told that the scientists told us this was going to be a

flash in the pan, wet December, and then it was going to peter out, and we were going to be in a drought, just like last year.

It doesn't really matter now because I think we're up to 150%

in many areas of annual precipitation where this last storm went finishes.

So there's enough, unless we have 80-degree weather, there's enough water and

precipitation to get us through.

But you'll never hear that because it has to be a...

It has to be a perennial melodrama, psychodrama for these people.

And that's the only way they get things done.

Okay.

Well, that's, yeah, so that's the pulse on your view and on

California as well.

But let's turn to the pulse on the Congress and look at Kevin McCarthy and the speakership.

What is going on there?

I mean,

I hope I speak.

maybe as one of your listeners might say as well.

It seems to me let's just get beyond this and I want to talk about what they're going to do once they get beyond is what I'm hoping for.

But what are your thoughts on this

stasis on the speakership?

Well, I just literally got off Tucker Carlson

as we were recording this.

I think we were kind of in agreement.

And I think there's something salutary of letting these people vent and saying, you know what, we want to be able to remove a speaker more quickly than or more easily than the past.

We want it guarantees that we're going to have a

budget-balanced house, at least on our side.

We want to make sure you're going to investigate Hunter and the border and Afghanistan, Ukraine.

That's all fine.

And that's maybe it's historic, and they've been doing that.

But now it's 48 hours.

What do we got?

11 votes?

And here's the problem, Sami.

Number one, who do they want?

Because they've established the precedent that 20 people can block anybody.

So they can get to their ranks and say, hmm,

we can block a group that's 10 times larger than ours.

So we'll get, we'll put somebody forth.

And they don't understand the rules apply to them.

They can't do it.

They can't nominate anybody.

None.

So basically, it's, you know, it's

rebel without a cause.

They want to go speed toward the cliff, and the other guys are speeding, and then they'll see who folds first.

But meanwhile, there's this Cheshire cat grin by the Democrats.

They voted for Hycum Jeffrey.

He got more for Speaker than did Kevin McCarthy.

They're just lucky you have to have a majority, or he would be Speaker.

And they don't have any

rebellion.

I mean,

there was not one person.

When they get those talking points, I'm not saying to be like them.

I'm glad that there's more discussion and raucous on the Republican side, but you're dealing with hardcore Jacobins.

It's sort of like the constitutional monarchists thought they got rid of the Bourbons, and then they didn't have any idea.

They were squabbling, Danton, et cetera.

And they had no idea who they were up against with the Robespierre brothers.

And the same thing after the overthrow of the Tsar.

Kerensky was this and that.

They were arguing and they looked at this Lenin guy and he broke no dissent.

And that's what the Democrats are right now.

They're hardcore leftists.

Somebody says, hey, I don't think we should give money to Ukraine.

What was there?

18, 19 people signed a letter.

Nancy

Pelosi metaphorically lined them up in the guillotine and beheaded them all.

That's it.

Nope, no, no, you're not.

And here, and you can see it on when you make the misfortune of just channel surfing those msnbc or cnn or even network news it's uh bombshell it's a bombshell bombshell developments or the wall walls are closing in on donald trump walls are closing in on donald trump walls are it it's perfect party discipline i'm not saying this to emulate them i'm trying to suggest to the Republican, do you have any idea what you're up against?

And so when you're fighting and squabbling, you look at those people, they're smiling, you look at the press, they're in a full-scale propaganda war.

That's number one.

Number two, they don't have any candidate, as I said.

So you can talk all you want, but the moment they nominate anybody from the Freedom Caucus, there's going to be, I don't know, 20, 40, 60 people who were elected in districts that voted for, you know, Joe Biden in the popular vote.

And they're going to say, uh-uh, no, we don't want that nut.

We don't want that person to be Speaker.

So they're going to do to them what they're doing to Kevin McCarthy.

That's two.

So it's kind of a nihilism, if you think about it.

And I think it's healthy for 48 hours.

I said that on Tucker, that, you know, to get everybody, get it out of your system to make McCarthy know that he's not liked completely and that he's got to be inclusive, blah, blah, blah.

And And then the other thing is, they keep talking about talking to a Democrat,

i.e., maybe we can get a vote.

If either side cuts any deal with any Democrat, then they're done as a party.

They got over

3%

greater popular vote in 2022 from the American people.

And they were voted to go in there and stop the madness.

We can't stop the madness.

We lost the presidency.

We can't stop the madness in the Senate.

We lost the Senate.

The only branch of government is this slim margin in the House.

And everybody's hopes and dreams are on that majority.

The shipwreck of our dreams was the Senate and Mitch McConnell wasting money, you know, in a civil war in Alaska, not funding Blake Masters, not really really giving anything to Dr.

Ozel.

It was too late, whatever that, you know, we've lost those.

And now we've lost the two weapons in the House arsenal when you have one-third of the government and a slim margin.

You can shut down the government or tell people that this budget is out of control.

Well, they weren't there.

They pushed that through before these House members were sworn in, the outgoing House and the Senate.

So they can't stop the budget.

That was their own.

So they have one last

chance, and that's investigations.

They can subpoena it.

They can call people.

They can find out.

They can put Hunter Biden under oath.

They can put Dr.

Fauci under oath.

They can put Mark Milley in the Afghanistan under oath.

I'm not saying they can elite anything, but they can get a lot of information.

They can put James Comey back under oath.

They can put Christopher Wray back under oath.

They can find out what happened to the FBI.

But

they're not doing that right now.

They haven't even sworn in the people who were elected.

It's already into the second week almost.

We're ready, we're coming up on the second week of January, and

there's no functionality.

And so

everybody's looking at this and said, you know what?

We voted for you people.

And we voted for you to stop the border and to stop

the crime and to stop the spending and to stop this madness of cutting back on fossil fuels.

And we know you can't do it completely because you have to have a bill through Congress that he will veto and then you have to override and that can't happen.

But we want you at least to vote for the legislation so that the Democrats and the Senate

oppose it on the record and Joe Biden opposes it on the record.

And then we want you to investigate it.

And yet they're not doing that.

So they've broken their bond with the American people.

And when I hear these people, they get up there and, you know, they

Matt Gates,

what's he?

He's going to nominate Donald Trump.

He's going to give a big speech and waste the time on every minute he was talking.

I was watching him on TV.

I thought, well, why don't you be working?

Why aren't you working on subpoena?

Donald Trump's not going to be the Speaker of the House.

What's the point?

What is the blank, blank point?

And I know that Kevin, I know Kevin McCarthy.

I know that people have legitimate criticisms.

He's been there 14 years, but, but

he won the House.

So

look at the whole 360 degrees.

The Republicans lost the Senate.

They should have won the Senate.

You can argue about Herschel Walker or Oz or Blake Matt, whatever.

But had they used their money wisely and then had they united

and had Mitch McConnell not said, well, you know, you need good candidates and that's what, and given money for that Lisa Murkowski Civil War and all that stuff, if he had just concentrated on just two races,

they could have won Pennsylvania and maybe they could have won Arizona.

And he didn't do that.

And I don't want to get into the Trump election, but

that party did not understand that we have been witnessing a revolution where 70% of the people do not vote on election day.

And they were completely caught again in 2020.

But you know what?

Kevin McCarthy make fun of them in 2020 when it was a losing year for the Republican.

Guess what?

They lost the Senate.

They lost the president.

He picked up 14 seats in the House.

He didn't take it back, but he picked up.

And then this year, when you lost the Senate again,

he picked up nine seats.

And so my point is, if you think he's so bad, then make the argument that

he should have got a bigger margin in the House, but he was the only person that did anything positive.

And then you had what?

You've had November, December.

Was it, as I said earlier,

it's like rebel without a cause.

You're trying to go over the cliff and see who flinches first and jumps out of the car.

And

so I don't get it, and I'm getting tired of it.

48, 72 hours, fine.

Let's get it.

You know, Tucker had a good point.

He said, you know, a little humiliation.

And I said, this will be good for Kevin McCarthy to bring him down to ground zero and say, you know what, I have to be very careful what I say and do.

That's always positive.

But we've been there now.

And every hour you are empowering those Democrats.

They're not Democrats.

They're hardcore leftists, socialists.

Well, you know what?

I heard

who's happy about this, Sammy.

Who's happy?

Well, there are people who are very happy.

And I can tell you who they are.

Just everybody go to Politico, go to the Washington Post,

go to the analysis on Channel 18, excuse me, PBS, Channel 18 here in Fresno County, And

they're happy, or go to the Dispatch, listen to Jonah Goldberg, go look at the bulwark and Charles Sykes, the Never Trump.

They love it.

So there's a lot of people that like this.

And so that's what the 20, that's where the 20, that's their audience that are applauding.

But I think most conservatives who voted to stop the madness, the Biden revolution, are not happy because they're wasting time and they've made their point and it was salutary and helpful, sober and judicious, whatever adjective you want.

And now it's time to close ranks and bring those people and put them under oath and find out what's been happening with Twitter and the FBI and the Biden $50 million profit machine and

whether Mark Milley really did call his Chinese counterpart and tip him off and he thought Trump was great.

There's a lot of things we need to know about, and this is not not the way to get it.

Yeah.

You know, I was listening to, or I've been hearing that the

those who are against McCarthy have demanded private things for themselves.

And I saw that young Colorado representative go on.

I think her last name is Bobert.

Yeah, Bobert.

I've spoken with her.

I've been on a venue where she was speaking.

She said that what they were trying to force with McCarthy is get the budget under control and get the border under control.

And that was what she said their requests were.

And so I was wondering, I mean, that sounds absolutely reasonable.

Like, doesn't McCarthy already want to do that?

I mean, why are we even having to ask him?

So, here's the thing: well,

he's not Speaker of the House, right?

He's never been Speaker of the House in his life.

So, he's been only a minority leader.

And when John

Boehner

lost,

you know, when he had some conservatives push back, he quit.

And then Paul Ryan came in.

And in 2018, they lost over, what, 42 seats?

And he quit

because he couldn't take the conservative base.

And so this conservative base, and Kevin didn't quit, did he?

He stayed in there.

He's fighting.

He's trying to accommodate them.

And he hasn't had any power whatsoever on any budget.

They ran through this budget before the new Congress was sworn in.

It was the old people, the old Congress.

So, yes, if he goes in there and he does what Mitch McConnell does and makes photo op appearances with Joe Biden and greenlights this thing, this

horrific omnimus bill, then he deserves to be kicked out.

But he hasn't done that yet.

And maybe it's good that they reminded him that he can never do that.

But that only takes 48 hours.

And now it's it's counterproductive and i think it's i don't think that he's going to allow that to happen but you only have one third of the government and of that one third

you know you've you're down to five votes there was a nine nine switch but it's really five votes

You know, they lost five.

We picked up

five votes.

And so you got to be very careful.

If you're Nancy Pelosi

and and you've got sort of a commissar system where you don't allow anybody to deviate whatsoever, or Nancy calls you in and says, you're not going to be on any committee.

You're not flying home in my private plane to California.

That kind of stuff.

Or the public plane, I should say.

So the point I'm making is that they need to, Kevin hasn't done that.

He hasn't been dictatorial.

And you have a good point.

We don't know what they want, but the rumors are coming fast and furious that they go in there and they want to leapfrog over the seniority system and cut me a deal i want that committee i want my friend on that committee i want this well then somebody else is going to come in and say i voted for you and i have 10 years more seniority than that person in the freedom caucus and you just leapfrog them above me so he's he's got to they've got to be a little realistic yeah yeah absolutely Victor, let's go ahead and take a moment for some messages, and we'll come right back to talk a little bit about the Ukrainian war.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

So, if we can turn to the Ukrainian war, I don't know if you had anything more you wanted to say about McCarthy.

I hope by Monday morning, the subpoenas start flying out.

Yeah, okay.

So, on the Ukraine war,

back to it,

I keep hearing these reports that the Ukraine has Western weapons, has Western defenses, etc.

And it just seems like it's getting closer and closer to, well, Russia may finally make a decision to draw the West in some way into the war.

And I was wondering at this point, what are your thoughts on that or other things on the Ukrainian war?

Well, two things are they're in a stalemate,

as we know, along the borderlines.

But here's what's happening: is that Russia is pouring 300,000 additional troops, and they're not properly trained, but they're people.

So they have more troops on the ground than Ukrainians.

But the Ukrainians are battle-hardened, and they have a cause they believe in, and they're fighting on their home territory, they believe.

So that's a

that's of some advantage.

Again, I keep saying they don't have the 130th the size of Russia.

They have about one-fourth of population.

They have one-tenth of GDP.

But you start pouring in European NATO weaponry in the United States and you get up to nearly

$250 billion.

And these weapons are better than Russians.

Then you start to see some dramatic changes, like these high-marred missile systems that can put a missile within a foot of something.

And

you get a drones and sophisticated drones.

They say there's six, seven hundred thousand Russians.

They're right next to an ammo depot.

Let's blow it up.

And I don't think 80 people died.

I think it's more like two or 300.

And so they're doing things like that and they're getting very good at it.

But the question is, are they getting very good at it to achieve the results that

their strategic doctrine now demands?

And what they've said is, uh-uh, it's not going to be like February 23rd, 2022.

We're going back to 2014.

I guess the subtext is that Obama didn't do anything for us.

He just said, you know, tell Vladimir on that hot mic and sole in 2012.

He said, tell Vladimir,

I need some space and I'll be flexible on missile defense.

And he didn't do anything.

And then Vladimir said, okay.

I won't embarrass you.

And

you dismantle missile defense in Eastern Europe.

and

I won't go into Ukraine until, I don't know, 2014 and don't say a word about it.

And we didn't.

Nice deal.

You get it.

And so the point I'm making is that

Russia

is

entrenched there.

It's been there for, what, seven?

No.

since 2000, you can argue all the way back to 2014.

So they've been there for going on nine years.

And the idea that you're going to push all of those people out with the resources that you have is going to be very difficult.

And then you've got to get assurances that you've got enough artillery shells, that you've got a Patriot

platform.

You know, those are a billion dollars, each one.

And each missile, I think, is a million dollars.

And they've got these sophisticated German systems that...

I think they fire 30 millimeter cannon at drones and missiles that are very effective.

But, you know, the the artillery is made the ammunition is made i think in switzerland and switzerland won't let them be resupplied because they're neutral so the point i'm making is that

ukraine's strategic objectives are not yet compatible with their diplomatic uh environment they haven't said to the united states and Germany and France and NATO and the EU, we're going to need a couple of billion dollars more,

a couple of hundred billion, excuse me.

And to get these people out, we're going to have to do stuff.

We're going to have to blow up barracks, kill a bunch of 18-year-olds, and we're going to have to sink a couple of big ships in the Black Sea Fleet.

And we're going to have to hit some oil depots and ammo depots inside Mother Russia, maybe even Belarus.

Who knows?

And

what are they going to say?

What are we going to say?

We're going to say what?

Yeah, go ahead.

Here's another $100 billion.

You're founding democracy in Ukraine.

And

I just think at some point, the American people, as we sink into recession, and Zelensky has this expanded strategic vision of where he wants to be, but he doesn't have the tactical wherewithal to achieve it, that he's going to be making more and more demands on us.

And at some point, somebody's going to stand up and say, the emperor doesn't have any clothes because our strategic interests are not identical to ukraine's

we they are identical in the sense that up to a certain point we want them to stop putin and inflict harm on his dictatorship and promote the environment in which a democracy could emerge

but at some point when you get to the

you get to the critical red line that you are attacking russians in russia with american weapons and these weapons cannot be stopped.

And Putin,

you know, as he sits in his cubicle, he says to himself, I would have won this if it hadn't been for the United States.

And our argument has been always: well, you did it to us in Afghanistan, and you did it in Iraq, and you did it in Vietnam, and we didn't go to war.

He knows that.

That's why he hasn't done anything yet.

But I'm not sure that that's going to be, I mean, at some point, he's going to get desperate.

So my point is, we need to sit down with Zelensky and say, what do you want to do to start talking to Putin?

Do you want to, you've lost probably 100,000 people, you've lost 8 million people who have left your country.

You probably lost a trillion dollars in GDP.

What do you want to do?

Do you want to get every single Russian out of all the borderlands?

You want to get 20% back, 30%?

Tell us what you want to do.

And nobody's talking like that.

They think,

you know, I understand that war, there's a fog of war, but at some point, somebody's going to have to say, what?

As soon as we had Pearl Harbor, Churchill and the Atlantic Charter, I mean, it was kind of naive and idealistic, but they basically have a doctrine.

It's going to be Europe first.

The United States is going to attack Germany, which hadn't attacked us, first, and it's going to make Japan, in theory, a secondary theater that had attacked us.

That was very controversial.

And we're going to have an unconditional surrender on like World War

I.

And

then he gave an outline of what we were going to produce.

And that was pretty much almost immediate.

But we haven't heard that.

We haven't heard what our American goals are in Ukraine.

And somebody needs to say, you know, 300 billion, 500 billion, whatever it takes, we'll keep to the last Ukrainian, we'll give you a trillion dollars.

But at some point,

you just can't say, oh, I'm for democracy and I'm morally super.

There's something weird about this whole thing is what I'm trying to get at.

Very clumsily, I admit, but you have all these leftists who are anti-war demagogues.

And these are the people who voted against, you know, the first Gulf War.

These are the people who voted against the Afghanistan incursion or retaliation.

These are the people

who have always been against

the military budget.

And all of a sudden they're saying,

why don't we give them five Patriots?

Why don't we have more missiles?

Come on.

We've got to give them everything they want.

We've got to go over there.

Where's our advisors?

We need advisors over there.

It's the weirdest thing in the world.

I can tell you why they're doing it.

Because

I have a theory, but I'd like to hear yours first.

That

they have been fighting a war here in the United States against Donald Trump, where they say he sided with

he is corrupted by Putin.

And now they're fighting a war basically against Putin.

I mean, obviously not.

And it's even sicker than that.

They feel that

as

Wiley Coyotes, they had Roadrunner's.

neck.

They had their arms around his neck.

And every time he went deep, deep and he got out.

And they had Putin, they feel that they had him with Russian collusion, then they had him with the Alpha Bank Kings and then they had him with the Russian disinformation and Hunter's laptop and then they got him off Twitter and they never could prove anything about Russian collusion and Putin is evil.

So now they've transmogrified all of that disappointment.

to we're going to show everybody that we are so morally superior, even if we couldn't prove that Donald Trump was in league with this evil Putin, we're going to destroy the evil Putin.

We've got Trump now with the taxes, and we've got him with Mar-Lago, with the special prosecutor, but now we're going to go after his partner, Putin.

And that's, if you took Putin out of the equation and just had,

oh, I don't know, a Russian oligarch in there that invaded Ukraine, probably wouldn't be nearly as emotional to the left.

They wouldn't, I mean, they wouldn't, they would deplore it.

I mean, come on, it wasn't, was it?

I don't have to speculate.

So, Mike McFaul was ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration.

He was the architect, you know, he's very proud of that.

He was the architect of Reset, right?

But that came right after the invasion of Georgia-Ossatia.

So, when he went in there, why didn't they say, hmm, He went in there.

Putin did.

And then when he went into eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014,

why didn't we send all these weapons to him, to the Ukrainians?

They wouldn't even send him offensive weapons, which was so ironic about the first impeachment.

They impeached Donald Trump for putting a six to eight week hold on offensive weapons, which he approved, which they did not.

And they got the offensive Jalvin weapons, which they never got onto Obama.

So my point is, why didn't they go after Putin in 2014 when he went in there?

And the answer was he was not tainted in their mind with Donald Trump.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

So,

one further question on this.

I was reading in, speaking of Politico as a left-wing magazine, of course, I read left-wing stuff, so I can talk to you and see what you have to say about it.

You haven't had a conversion or something.

You've gone to the dark side.

No, I have not.

But this article was arguing that

in fact, Zelensky's speech, claiming that it was an investment in democracy, was right and that the Ukraine is a

coming democratic, well, is a democratic state.

They didn't even, and the only reason that it hadn't been such was because it was under Soviet-led corruption and kleptocracy earlier.

So that basically it said that the Soviets had corrupted the Ukrainians and now they would be different.

Sort of, kind of, maybe.

I mean, it was 1991, right?

Yeah.

Berlin fall,

the Berlin Wall fell in 89 and the Soviet Union was broken apart completely by 1991.

So they've had over 30 years.

And as we learned from the first impeachment and the prior election of 2016 and Hunter's own laptop stories, they were utterly corrupt.

When Joe Biden, remember all that raggedy?

I went over there and I said, Look, I looked at my watch and I said, you know what?

I want that guy fired.

And son of a bitch, he was fired.

That was just utter corruption.

I mean, and that first

impeachment was corruption.

And their ambassador in 2016 was writing op-eds and was in conhoots with

Hillary Clinton's campaign.

So

if they wanted to be a, I don't don't know, a model democracy,

they could have been like Poland, maybe,

or maybe, I don't know, other parts of the Soviet Union that have broken away.

I mean, Estonia and Lithuania and

Latvia seem to be pretty transparent societies.

So, I mean, I'm giving them some credit, but I mean, it's not as if they were a paragon of virtue suddenly or that

the

Russian Federation made them undemocratic.

So that's a little, I mean, he did a, I think he suspended habeas corpus, and there's no press freedom right now in Ukraine.

You can't be an independent journalist and criticize,

you know, it's kind of ironic because a lot of our information about the disastrous operations that the Russians are conducting.

You know where that's coming from?

It's from Russian bloggers.

And they're free to blog.

Putin hasn't put them in jail.

And I think he's using them because he's using them to criticize the generals.

If he criticized Putin, they'd be in trouble.

But nevertheless, I don't think you can be a Ukrainian journalist and go to the front and start writing exposés of negligence and incompetence.

So it's not quite

that we're on the side of quote-unquote democracy.

It's better than the alternative,

the former Soviet Union must dash Russian Federation.

But I'm just suggesting that there's been 200,000 people dead there, and it's ruined the economy of Ukraine.

And we have lost a strategic triangulation vis-a-vis China.

And we are pushing India and China and Iran and Turkey.

together and Russia in a kind of a weird alliance.

We need to think about all of these things.

And so I would like, you know, I'd like to say word in Verdun.

This is the song.

This is the stalemate.

And

start negotiating, do a Paris peace talk for a year or two and do something.

But I don't think that Vladimir Putin has the technology and the morale in his armed forces.

to take all of that land and occupy it.

I don't think the people in there want to be there anymore with the Russians.

And I don't think that Ukraine, even with its generous allies, has the ability to expel every Russian out of there.

I don't know where that demarcation, 38-parallel type demilitar zone is, whether it's 90% of the borderlands, 55% of what he took in 2014, but it's somewhere.

And they need to negotiate to find where it is to stop it.

And then they need guarantees.

They need to tell Putin this country is not going to be part of NATO.

And that's in our interest.

If this country was part of NATO right now, we'd be in a nuclear war, basically.

So we don't want it in NATO.

If the EU wants to incorporate it, all

the better.

But we've got to understand that Russia is not going to allow a

Russian partially or majority, minority, I don't know quite how we want to phrase it, Russian-speaking country that had been part of Tsarist Russia, Soviet Union, the Russian Federation for centuries, it's not going to let that into an anti-Russian, pro-Western,

fully integrated with Europe society right on its doorstep.

I just don't see that happening, not unless there's a radical change in the Russian government.

And so we we need to say to Putin: this country is not going to be part of NATO, but in exchange for that, you have to respect the new boundaries.

And we have to give, you know, security guarantees.

We'll see how that works.

Yeah, we'll see how that works.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take another break and come back and talk a little bit about the world economy and the role of China in that world economy.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

And Victor, I know that you're writing a new book right now.

And I was wondering if I could give you a little time to

advertise it.

Yeah, I've got.

What's it about?

Yeah.

I talked about it with you once, and Sammy.

It's called The End of Everything.

I'm about halfway.

I had that detour where my,

I'm looking at the chapters I tried to write during the long COVID episode, and I've got to redo them because some of them are lunatic.

But I have the, you know, I'm trying to show that it's very rare in conflict to destroy not just the army and declare victory, but to destroy the entire civilization, language, religion, so it doesn't exist anymore.

And there are a lot of studies on apocalyptic scenarios by volcanic eruptions or climate change or just simple, you know, redrawing or redefining the map so that there is no more Yugoslavia or there's no more Prussia.

But I'm talking about something different, that a war starts to escalate.

You can see where I'm going, vis-a-vis Ukraine.

It starts to escalate and unknowingly you get into an existential

situation where if you lose, you're going to be completely wiped out.

And that's what happened.

to the

probably the oldest and most hallowed city-state of the 1500 polis in Plasma Greece, Thebes, when they had no idea who Alexander the Great was.

So when they rebelled and he came down there, they might have thought, well, you know, when we lose, we'll have terms.

No, he destroyed the entire city and he killed thousands of them and enslaved every other person.

Let the house of the poet Pindar survive, supposedly maybe a temple or two.

And the same thing.

And I've that's so that's the first chapter and the same thing with Carthage.

I think the third time, they didn't really have a choice in some ways if they wanted to live on their feet, but they chose, I mean, to live on their knees.

They didn't want to, so they chose to die on their feet, but they were completely obliterated.

So you could say that there was some Punic spoken or there was a cult of the god Baal somewhere, but not in Carthage.

There were no more Carthaginians.

And the same thing was true, I think, of Byzantine Greek-speaking Orthodox culture in Asia Minor.

Not that there weren't, you know, a million or two remnants of the Byzantine Empire, but on Black Tuesday, 1453, they wiped out

what was left of that civilization.

And they put minarets on Agia Sofia, and that's it's a straight line to Erdogan.

And then finally,

I did Tenochtitlan.

And I don't think that Montezuma had any idea what was in store for him when he allowed 450 conquistadors with

Cortez, who was a certifiable military genius into his city.

And then at the epilogue, I'm trying to suggest that there are places in the world today where people are very vulnerable.

One is Greece,

11 million people right next to Turkey, and without historical...

baggage.

And another is Armenia.

Armenia only has 3 million people.

And they have been in the, you know,

Azerbaijan, they've been in a war with them, and that's a Turkic-speaking country.

And the Kurds are, what, 18 million, but they're spread out, and they're completely at the mercy of four host countries.

So it's, and then we go to Ukraine.

So it's not out of the ordinary to think that what happened in history can happen again with a people.

The elephant of Rome, of course, is Israel, because we had Mr.

Rafanjani saying it was a one-bomb state three decades ago.

And, you know,

the Iranian theocracy's

public propaganda is always whatever it takes, we've got 120 million people.

And they've probably got, I don't know, 200 nukes.

So they can nuke us and nuke us and nuke us and we'll still be here.

But thank God Allah put half the Jews in the world in one place.

And that's a one-bomb state.

So

there is a frightening scenario.

Yeah, that's very frightening.

Yeah, it is.

And if Hitler had not been stopped,

or if he hadn't gone in the Soviet Union, it would be very doubtful that there would be a sizable Jewish population anywhere, except in the United States, and to a lesser extent.

There wouldn't have been any Jews in Europe.

Well, let's go ahead.

Oh, go ahead.

Sorry.

No,

that's what the book is about.

And it's,

as I said, I'm going back.

I had a multi-contract with Basic Book, and I did two contemporary books, The Dying Citizen, The Case for Trump, and then World War II.

And this is finishing that four quartet.

Yeah.

Do you know its publication date?

Or

yeah.

Usually I always figure a year.

I don't know why that is in the age of computers, but it's always a year.

They have a fall and spring catalog.

So I think the due date is June.

And as I finish today,

there's a long introduction, long epilogue, and four case studies.

I've done two of the case studies and the introduction and the epilogue.

I have two more to do.

I think I'll make the June

unless I get done.

I get the Wuhan virus again, which I have the third time.

I'm starting to also talking about science.

I'm starting to gravitate, not to conspiracy theory, but I've been reading a lot of data that is very peculiar: that more people have died from COVID who were vaccinated than not.

And that's probably because older people who were

vulnerable,

and then their lifespan was closer to the end, their age was.

And then there's also some data

coming out that people

who

have never been vaccinated

don't get COVID, I think, the second time as easily as people who have been vaccinated.

That's more controversial.

But what I'm getting at is that original thesis that was advanced by John Yannidi's, Jay Bachari, and Scott Atlas that was just announced, Martin Kullendorf, that

when you have the entire virus

structure and the immune immune system reacts to that, it creates a different type of immunity than

reacting to the spike protein alone.

And when you flood your body with spike proteins through the R messenger RNA type of vaccine, we don't quite know the effect of that.

So, and I'm speaking as somebody who supported the vaccine.

I was vaccinated twice and yet I got COVID three times, so I'm prejudiced.

Yeah, okay.

Well, let's turn to China.

And I was looking at some

discussion of China, and the assumption is that China is moving to the,

you know, to be the strong country in the world economy.

And that, and the argument was this: that the state-private partnership system is a much stronger economic model

than the

prior, just the complete free enterprise.

And in fact, it said in this article that the view that free trade is virtue and protectionism is sin has been the bane of the U.S.

policy and diplomacy,

you know, world diplomacy.

So I was wondering what your thoughts were on this idea that China is the dominant state and that the

or the dominant economic model and the idea of a state private system is is the better better system better or it's going to lead to a stronger state in the long run yeah i think you're referring to that tablet article by michael lynn yeah that just came out and it it's not quite a resurrection of robert wright the clintonian leftist who said you know a managed economy with a partnership kind of like Japan Inc.

And so that was a big, that was the big mantra in the 90s that, you know, GM, look at GM and those gas guzzlers and look at the Toyos and Hondas.

But we found out what happened to Japan, Inc.

And then we were told that the EU was the model.

The Euro got up to, what, $1.55.

And right during the Iraq war, when we were in trouble in 2008, Europe, Europe, Europe, the Euro,

they managed

the government gets in and they get all of their captains of industries and they say, we'll give you a concession here and here and here.

And here's our state policy and da-da-da-da-da.

And we've got to protect this group and that group.

So

that was the fall.

But it's not new.

They said that during the Soviet Union in their five-year plans.

They said, wow,

I should backtrack, but they said it during Mussolini during the Depression.

They said, man.

Look at the autobahns in Germany and look at Mussolini's done with modern architecture and highways and trains running.

It's managed capitalism.

The same thing is true of the Soviet Union.

Look at what they did with wheat production.

And then it was, wow, look at Japan, Inc.

And then it was, wow, look at the European.

So you got to keep it in context.

Now it's China.

They don't make these stupid mistakes because the government and business are the same.

He's not quite making that argument, as I understand him.

He's trying to make the argument that free market, unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism incurs a lot of cost

if everybody's not doing it.

In other words, yes, if everybody's in the arena and they've all got a shield and a sword, let them go to it and you'll get the best warrior.

But if some people are unarmed, they're going to get killed.

And what he's saying is that we advance free market capitalism and these other countries take it seriously and they have a nationalist capitalism and they're killing us because we take the hit and it's time for us to do to them what they do to us sort of and i think that's that's the argument and the problem i have with it though is you can separate the industrial sector and the private

enterprise sector from the government and still have wise economic policy.

And by that I mean, I think Trump showed you that he wasn't creating state industries, but he got, he tried to shock us and say we're going to have to clamp down on China.

But if you start picking winners and losers and

you stifle entrepreneurialism

or

you have a

commissar system like we do now.

And I mean that.

Think of Stanford University when all we have these brilliant people there, and they are investigating everything from brain tumors to alternate fusion energy, but you've got 15,000 administrators to 16,000 students.

And all of these diversity and equity and inclusion, they're like Soviet commissars.

So they're intrusive.

And they are warping the market of ideas.

So you don't want that.

You don't want that at all.

You don't want

the 1937 Raisin Administrative Committee Act, where the Roosevelt, it's still in effect.

The Roosevelt administration says, well, you know, there's five or 10,000 raisin growers and they don't know what they're doing.

And the price of raisins is $30 a ton.

So we're going to tell you how many raisins that you can sell in the United States.

And we're going to call it the reserve and free tonnages.

Free tonnage?

Oh, we'll say 50%.

So you're Mr.

Davis and you have 100 tons.

The government says 50 of those are ours.

The other 50, you get, you know, sunmaples sell and you'll be paid,

but you're not going to get any for the other 50.

We're going to send it overseas.

We're going to feed soldiers with it.

We're going to give it to foreign aid.

And if that's still not enough to get rid of it, then we're going to, you know, dip it in brandy and give it to cows.

And they did.

And when I was farming full-time, there was always a reserve tonnage, and they own it.

The government owns it.

They come into your place and say, you know what, Mr.

Hansen, you have 200 tons of raisins, and you've got to take them all into

your packer, but you don't own them.

And if you say, you know what, I'm just going to take half on the free tonnage and I'll just keep the other half here.

No, you don't own those raisins.

From the moment you had a bloom on that grapevine in late March, you didn't know it, but

those were our grapes.

We own them.

Maybe your property, maybe your vines, maybe your farming, maybe your risk, but we own them.

You do not own them.

Ultimately, we own those raisins.

And we're going to take half of whatever this committee decides, we're going to take that percentage from you.

And we're going to dump it overseas so that the domestic market price stays high.

And that's what they do.

And that's managed capitalism.

Everybody see that?

It's managed capitalism and it doesn't work.

They tried it with oranges.

It doesn't work.

They've tried it with every other commodity.

Cotton, when I was a small boy, my dad farmed cotton.

And there was a cotton allotment.

And we were so lucky to get a 17-acre cotton allotment that allowed the government said to you, you can pound, we're going to let you plant cotton and then artificially reduce the acreage to keep the price up.

The market's more, yeah, the market.

I mean, everybody, so everybody went out and planted almonds, right?

Yeah, I was just going to say that.

Okay, and that's free market.

So that's free market.

And the market, yes, they did.

And the market says, you know what?

If you've got almonds and they're over 25 years old and you're not producing 3,000 pounds an acre, you're not going to make it at $1.53 for almonds.

And if you're out on the the west side and you're paying $3,000 an acre

per acre foot, you're not going to make it.

And they're coming out and the market is adjusting.

And it'll be much more effective than a bureaucratic, you know,

Soviet style that said, well, we're going to let you plant 50,000 acres.

This, we're going to forecast that.

I mean, neither system is perfect, but the private sector is more effective.

But what Lind is trying to say is, okay, but you have to have a government that has the interest of the majority of Americans first,

not just the capitalist entrepreneurial class.

So that means, what would that mean?

It means if they steal stuff, and they do,

then you

reciprocate.

If they take your copyrights or your patents, or they dump materials on the market below the cost of production, you cite them, or if they manipulate the currency exchange so that they can favor greater exports, you react in the interest of your own people.

And I get that.

That's absolutely true.

Or if you want to attract capital and industry from Europe and they're paying 50 cents a kilowatt hour, the equivalent in Euros, then maybe you can try to

have more federal leases.

We're not doing it, but it would be wise, Trump did it, to lower the price of natural gas so you could generate electricity at a cheaper cost.

And then maybe an aluminum smelter or calcium nitrate or ammonium nitrate plant would relocate here.

And that's the government helping the industry, but not controlling it and not

interfering with it.

It's trying to help Americans.

Yeah, definitely.

The free market system has its advantages in some ways.

Anyway,

that's what I think he's arguing.

People should also read David Goldman, and he was a brilliant guy, and he writes from the financial side on China

and especially

percentages of the budget and RD research and development.

And his argument is that we get really angry at all these things that the Chinese are doing.

They're dumping, they're manipulating the currency, they're stealing our patents, they're stealing our copyrights, they're stealing our research and development that they don't have to do.

But

people have done that to us all the time.

And the real problem that we have is us.

The problem,

my dear Caesar, is not in the SARS.

It's in us.

And what he means is we are spending a historic low of our GDP on research and development.

You look at these great universities, Harvard, Michigan,

University of Texas, UCLA,

they're not spending.

The government's not encouraging and

they're not researching to the extent that they have in the past.

Part of it is we're a a therapeutic culture, but we're really going to have to step up.

And he's saying that.

And when you try to subsidize or mask that failure, then you contribute to it.

So what I think the series of essays he's been writing the last two years is something like, don't just put tariffs on Japanese computers or

chips or something.

Make better chips, make better computers, and then drive them out of business with a better product.

Because even though they have these advantages and cheaper labor

costs, we can automate.

We have artificial intelligence.

If our universities are so much better,

you know what I mean?

So that's what he's saying.

And I think he's right about that.

We've got too many psych majors, too many sociology majors, too many environmental studies majors, too many gender studies, too many black studies, Asian studies, you name it studies, leisure studies, rec studies, and not enough STEM stuff.

They all became woke and it's kind of like a zombie thing.

It's not like a...

It's a drag on the economy, I can tell you that.

Every time I'm trying to look at a classical secondary work,

when I look at a German, you know, a history of Rome or an article on classical military, and I see Germany, oh, from the late 20s, but especially after 33, all the way to 45,

it's worthless.

It's just completely worthless because it's going to be contaminated by the Nazi government.

And it's usually going to be on racial categories or whether this particular Greek certain state was of this particular race or the Hellots and all who what was the racial pedigree of the hell it's just worthless

So you've got to be understanding what Wolf does.

Yeah, what Wolf says.

It's taken a, it's like a vacuum cleaner that vacuumed the minds of an entire generation that blew their brains out.

I'm talking across the board.

So if you're in English or you're in

French history or you're in...

medieval studies and you look at these journals and what they're publishing and it's transgenderism in 1250, you know,

was Charles Martel Gay, Richard the Lionhearted, Hattery Boy, this kind of stuff.

It's just worthless.

And that's it's worthless.

And they write about it as though it's all completely new, as though nobody else.

It's

just a bastard extension of Michelle Foucault and Gary Dalekon and phallocentric power machinations who constructed the reality, all that crap.

And

it's just a waste of investment.

And it's really sad because had we not been doing all this stuff and if we'd quit it right now,

I mean,

do we really need thousands of diversity czars?

What are they doing?

It's not that they're neutral.

I wouldn't mind if we just paid a guy to be a diversity, equity, inclusion, gave him $150,000, $200,000, and just say, go over there in campus and read a book and don't bother anybody.

But they're negative impacts.

They go in and they disrupt research and teaching and instruction.

And they make all these cycle domains.

And they're everywhere.

They're in corporate America.

They're in the government.

They're in the university.

They're in K-12.

So it's a commissar.

We don't have the guts to admit it that we did this to ourselves, but it's very similar to the Russian commissar system.

Well, Victor, we're coming to the end of the time, but I did want to ask you about Pope Benedict XVI.

And he recently passed away.

And what I was reading on it was Pope Francis gave a homily to him and hardly even mentioned Benedict himself in the homily.

So it was kind of weird, but we're sad that he has passed away.

Did you have anything in the last couple of minutes to say?

Well, you know,

Pope Benedict XVI was a scholar, and he was a polyglot.

And he wrote very sophisticated exegesis on not just on church doctrine, but, you know,

he he went back through the history of the church.

He was,

gosh, he was an expert on St.

Peter and

how to the Pope's office.

And he talked about

even the dress and the customs of the liturgies and the bishops and the cardinals and how this grew out of

the late Roman Empire, the political, the basilica.

So he was a student of the early church, is what I'm trying to say, both the material church and the philosophical underpinnings, and how that classical tradition, that pagan tradition

through people like Jerome, but especially Augustine, how that was transmogrified in the church.

He was brilliant, but he was kind of a scholar.

He wasn't a guy who was, you know, like Pope John.

the second, you know, a Polish pope that was a man of the people, vigorous, skier, and all that.

You know, he was 95 when he died.

But when you say, and I wasn't aware quite, you know, I had heard that, but I wasn't quite sure about Pope Francis, if that was a snub.

But

remember, just take one topic, how much the church has changed.

So

Pope Benedict, if you got, say you're dealing with I don't know, at that time it was AIDS.

He was trying to say that if you're married and you're faithful to your marriage vows and

you follow chastity, then you're not going to get AIDS.

Whereas Francis would say, who are you to judge?

And

we're causing all kinds of stress on the gay community by suggesting that who are we to say that their type, that community or that constituency's sex is any more likely.

That's what I'm trying to say.

And he's an intellectual lightweight compared to Benedict.

And he's a socialist.

He comes out of the Argentine leftist movement.

And so he's not faithful to church doctrines, but I'm trying to say he's not a scholar

and he's a political activist.

And I don't know what to say, but he said things.

Benedict had to leave because he was getting into topics that you don't really want to get into in the modern world, like gay marriage and homosexual lifestyles

and

technology and all of that.

He was starting to

abortion and everything.

The Catholic Church under Francis is sort of

indistinguishable between HHS and NIH and the WHO

and

the campus provost.

That's kind of what the Catholic Church's hierarchy is right now.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, thank you so much for all your

insights into current world events and problems.

We're very appreciative of that.

Thank you for

hosting and thank everybody for listening tonight.

I've had a sinus infection, so I've got a list tonight.

My face,

so I sound funny, at least I do in my headphones, but it's because I've kind of stuffed up.

You don't sound funny at all.

You're good.

I'm just fine, Victor.

Okay, good.

All right.

Okay.

Well, thanks, everybody.

This is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everybody.