Wokeness and Warring in Geopolitics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, and Victor Davis-Hanson, the star and namesake, is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Much of what he does can be found at victorhanson.com.

You should visit that website.

I will talk more about it a little later.

There's a number of things we're going to discuss today or get Victor's views on and some of the recent pieces he's written for American Greatness, a syndicated column.

And there's a great piece in the newspaper, The Epoch Times, about Europe collapsing.

And I think getting Victor's views on that is something we'd all like to hear.

And we will hear them right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor,

I am a subscriber to the Epoch Times,

the weekly newspaper because they carry your column.

and we are going to talk about the column

that is in the new issue.

But there's a really interesting piece by this

Finnish economist named Tumas Malinen,

and it's titled Europe is Bound to Collapse.

And if our listeners will just indulge me for a minute, I think this is really interesting.

And of course, I'd love to get your assessment.

He writes, I've been watching with horror, with horror, the escalation of the economic situation in Europe since about mid-February.

On February 21st, I published a short Twitter thread detailing the economic worst case scenario for Europe if the war between Russia and Ukraine would break out as it did.

The forecast had 10 stages.

One, the West would be likely to respond with sanctions.

Two, Russia would respond by shutting gas to Europe.

Three, this would lead to a massive spike in energy prices in Europe, pushing the continent into a recession with high inflation pressures, stagflation.

Four, inflation would reach double digits within two to three months.

Five, asset markets would fluctuate heavily first, then crash.

Six, rampant inflation would force the European central bank to raise rates in a rapid manner and stop the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program

and quantitative easing.

QE.

Seven, the European banking sector would crumble.

Eight, sovereign yields would explode.

Nine, the Eurozone would unravel.

Ten, Europe would fall into a depression.

So

Malinen writes that many of these things have happened.

One, two, three, four, and six

about his forecasts, and he fears all of it is going to come true.

Victor, I know you don't have a crystal ball, and

much of this is economics, but much of it is

political and

military.

None of it, I think, would have been happening if Joe Biden hadn't been president.

But Victor, the point here, Europe is in a really, really bad way.

I think it is.

What do you think?

Is Europe in a bad way?

What do you think about this?

The way I

look at the EU is this, that we're what, 29 years from that Maastricht agreement that really founded the EU and transformed the European common market into this super continental monstrosity, which expanded into southern Europe.

And then we're,

you know, we're since the 2008 meltdown, when we thought that the so-called pigs, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Italy were not going to make it.

They did make it.

And so the point I'm making, Jack, is that on the one hand, there's this statism, this socialism that now tolerates no dissent.

And you can see it with the disdain.

They're going after Hungary now, and they want to cut off a lot of its EU enumerations.

And it's this inefficient controlled economy with an aristocracy running it that's exempt.

go down to the French coast or the Spanish coast, or you see these grandees at, you know, these huge homes, and

they're not paying inheritance tax they have all sorts of ways to get around the EU that they've fawn over but my point is this

by any law of economics that should have imploded it didn't because on the other idea this Napoleonic Caesarean conglomeration of all Europe that was the dream of all tyrants has given them some efficiency they don't have to have thousands tens of thousands of border patrols visas more people are speaking a common English than ever before.

They have a common currency.

They don't have all the exchange rates.

So they've got an inefficient system superimposed on all of these little, sort of like the United States, if we had 50 independent countries.

And by having the United States, we have a much more efficient system.

And for a while, i.e., three decades, that compensated for the innate fallacies and disasters of socialism.

And now I think it's coming due.

And we've had two generations of Europeans and we've had the European work ethic and we've had the European work week and the European ideological green disaster.

And so we're in a point now where

the Euro is back where it started.

So

at the turn of the millennium, that period, it was one-on-one, dollar euro.

And then everybody, because of the Iraq war and we were importing oil, and everybody got up to dollar forty higher.

Everybody said that is the future.

Well, no, we're back to the it's a rough equivalency, which means it's really bad for Europe.

And then, second, they have no energy.

I should correct that.

They have energy, there's a lot of offshore oil, there's a lot you could frack natural gas in all places like France, but they won't use it because it's ideologically incorrect.

And

when you don't have this sort of Bill of Rights imprint, this emphasis on individualism, free market capitalism, the sanctity of private property, et cetera, you've got an aging population and you've got a stagnant population and you've got a fertility rate that is even lower than ours.

Ours is down to about 1.7, theirs is down to about 1.3 or 4.

So it's a shrinking, ossified, aging society defended by the United States and our appendage, which we call NATO, which is 70% us.

And now

the TAP came due with it, with the Ukraine war, and they have no energy.

And your Mercedes or your Siemens or all of these drug companies, all of these auto companies, Fiat,

they're operating at a worldwide global deficit because of energy costs superimposed on high labor costs and lack of productivity.

And the only thing that keeps it alive is in comparison to what?

To China's problems.

It's starting to see its GDP is lowing.

It's an aging population.

It's going to decline in the next 30 years by

300 or 400 million.

They've got the Weger problem.

It's a parasitical state.

It cannot create new innovations without stealing it from other countries or Russia, enough said.

So comparatively, it's not, but when you compare it to what the United States could be and was just a few years ago, they're in bad shape.

Victor, I'm curious, a little side here about you and Europe.

Is there any,

of course, you studied and

spent a lot of time in Greece?

I know you've been all over.

Is there any place you particularly like,

any country?

And is there any country you particularly dislike?

Because I got a country I dislike over there.

But

you don't have to answer.

I like the countries that conservatives might think you would not like.

Such as.

Okay.

I found the Italians as pro-American as anybody, and that's borne out now.

When I first went to Europe in 1973, Greece and Italy were.

stridently anti-American, and Germany was stridently pro-American because it had an existential stake in our relationship.

But Italy, there's something about that area from Rome all the way up through Tuscany, all, you know, to Florence.

It reminds me of the San Joaquin Valley or the foothills of the sea.

It's absolutely our Napa.

It's beautiful.

And I love being there because of the farming and the food and everybody.

And the same thing is true about Greece.

The thing about Greece is it's a socialist country, but nobody's a socialist.

They're the most highly individualistic people in the world.

And the reason it kind of works is not because of what people say about Greece.

Oh, they don't follow the law, it's just chaos.

No, it's because they don't follow the law that the law is chaos.

But they have all these individual geniuses.

And that's why when they go to places like the United States, they're absolutely brilliant.

And some of the most productive immigrants in the world, probably the most productive.

So I love Greece.

I love Italy.

I don't know much about France.

Sammy, you know, and some of our conversations, she talks about French culture.

She speaks French, but from my limited knowledge, I've been to France a lot, mostly on military history places.

I've toured the entire country almost, but I like the French people.

I like them historically.

I love Britain.

I love the English people.

And so Britain.

France, Italy, Greece, somewhat Spain.

I don't know enough about Spain.

I've been there a lot, but I like the Eastern Europe.

I like the Czechs, the Hungarians, Romanians.

I have a problem, to be frank, with Germany.

Yes, thank you.

Yes, I have.

And I'm not just saying this.

I've been there over the last 25 years, and I've watched that population change.

And people think it has something to do with Donald Trump.

It did not.

It started much earlier.

And it was a combination of the United States

understanding that after unification, there was no longer, and

the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, we, you know, that huge presence of 350,000 troops was no longer necessary.

And so we were down, I don't know what it is, 30,000, and they're mostly supply, logistics, hospital people and a big base.

And so the Germans now can reassert themselves in a way that they couldn't before.

And that reasserts, I find that reassertion

frightening.

During the Iraq war, they called us Nazis.

They went on this green tirade and started condemning anybody.

They shut down nuclear plants.

They shut down coal plants.

They shut down natural gas.

And then in typical German fashion,

they have this sort of updated Molotov-Ribbentrop thing with Putin where Schreuder cuts this deal basically

as the German lackey on Gasprom's board, and they mortgage their security future, which Trump told them that they were doing.

And now they give big speeches about,

you know, they have to help Ukraine, but when it comes down to dollar to dollar, let's show me the money, they don't.

And when you go to there, I have never, let me put it this way, I have never been to Germany and I've been there about 10 times in my life, 12, where I have not had someone,

and that someone can be an intellectual, can be a professor, can be a media person, can be a politician, can be a general, or it can be a waitress or a waiter, has not had to weigh in about the United States.

And if I was a reductionist, a reductionist, I would say they have never gotten over the fact they started two wars and lost both of them.

And I never thought that

people used to tell me that.

you i said that's absurd they're very sophisticated uh enlightened people and they are and as a classicist i say this very carefully because you know

in my own field of military history whether it was droysen or delbruck or kromai or waith geschichte der kriegfuhr you know all of these things these were the classic works of scholarship that were unparalleled anywhere in Western Europe or the United States from say 1880 to 1920.

And that our whole PhD system was patterned after the German doctoral dissertation and all of that.

And so when I look at classical, you know, Villanova is the greatest classical scholar that ever lived.

So I have a lot of respect for German scholarship and the German Enlightenment.

I understand that

they were never incorporated into the Roman Empire.

So there grew up sort of a tacitian, we're on the right side of the Danube and the Rhine, and we are a blood and soil nation.

That of all European countries, you can identify a German by the way he looks or the way his language was never

Romanized, I should say.

And they were very proud of that, as we know from the intellectual tradition of Hegel and Nietzsche and Spingler.

And I won't get into the darker figures after the 1930s.

But

there's something about that historical context, both ancient, medieval, and 20th century, that is disturbing.

And

the way that they treat other people in the EU

is not surprising.

They run the EU like dictate, by dictator.

And the EU

is synonymous for Germany.

And NATO,

in terms of its European partner, is the same.

If Germany in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2020 had said

Vladimir Putin represents an existential threat, even though the Cold War is over, even though we're united, even though there is no more Warsaw Pact, that those countries are for the most part

in the EU.

Nevertheless, we're going to meet our promised

contributions of 2%, then everybody else would have.

Instead, they did the opposite, Jack.

They refused to spend on defense what everybody had promised to spend as far as GDP investment.

And they, under the table, Wink and Nod made sure that no other countries did as well.

And they're bullies.

They bully Eastern Europeans on immigration, on religion, on energy.

They bully Western Europeans.

And they have some really crazy, I mean,

Read Caesar's invasion of Germany or read Tacitus, and there's some crazy ideas that come out out of Germany.

And there is some crazy ideas about environmentalism and the Green Party.

It's almost pre-civilizational.

Go back into the Ardennes, I mean, to the

Black Forest and live naturally.

And that characterizes a lot of German history, this radical environmentalism, and back to nature in a very destructive fashion.

purity almost.

And so, yeah, I'm going on a rant.

I know there's individuals.

It's all right.

People like the Hanson rants.

Well, I mean,

I happen to be a big supporter of Israel.

And

I, you know, as I said before, I've never met a Jewish American that I knew of until I was 18.

So it wasn't like I grew up with Jewish people.

But

some.

I admire what Israel has done.

I feel that, you know, half the world's Jews

wouldn't be here if it was for Germany.

All of them wouldn't be here, what they did.

And when I read about German anti-Semitism, or I read about the Munich massacre, or I read about German tilt in the Middle East toward the Israel's enemies, or I read about

certain things that go on, I can't even grasp it given their history.

And so

I have that.

My father, you know, was a wonderful person, but he was a man of strong opinions and principles.

And I was told by him, Victor, as long as I'm living, don't buy a Japanese car.

Victor Hansen was killed on Okinawa.

I

fought there.

But I was also basically told, I mean, we had an old,

he found a wrecked Mercedes and put it in the garage once and tinkered with it.

But other than that, he didn't want to buy a German car.

And the reason was what they had done in World War II and what they had done to members of our family that were killed.

And then a lot of people are going to say, well, you think you're sophisticated, Victor, and you're back to this bloody shirt.

No, I'm not.

I'm just saying I grew up in the 50s in the aftermath of World War II.

And what Germany had done to the world for the second time was on everybody's mind.

And when I came of age and I started listening to the hard left coming out of Germany, not to mention East Germany, And I thought, wow, given that record, you'd think there would be a little bit more contrition.

But I'm not asking them to be constantly apologetic, but even when they were giving restitution or

some type of war guilt compensation, they did it in the context of begrudgment, you know what I mean?

Or contextual, just like World War I.

They invade Europe, they destroy parts of Belgium and France for 70 miles, and then when they have reparations, they claim that that caused World War II because they inflated their currency to pay off what they owed in cheap dollars and ruined their own economy and other people's economy.

And then they created the big lie about the Jews and the socialists stabbed in the back when the German army was defeated and humiliated on a one-front war after the collapse of Tsarist Russia and

the deal they made with Lenin at Brest-Latabit.

So

all of that is on my mind, and I love German culture.

I love its classical scholarship traditions.

I go to the museums there, but there's something about that place.

I don't know what it is that I can't quite reconcile.

Well, Victor,

if I may, just quickly, and then we should move on, talk about some of the columns you've written.

There's a good friend, well, he was a friend, Tuvia Tennenbaum.

I met Tuvia because he wrote occasionally at Gatestone Institute, but he was was a columnist in America.

He was an American-based columnist for Die Zeit.

And

some German publisher asked him to go to Germany and write a kind of a travelogue book.

And Tuvia is Jewish, but he can pull off as anything.

So he went over there and he acted like he was from Palestine or Jordan, you know, something like that, that he wasn't a Jew.

And he said,

remember, he's going over there to write a travelogue.

It has nothing to do do with Judaism or anything.

You just talked about within a minute of having a conversation with various people there, you know, commenting about America.

He said, you know, very quickly, within a minute of talking to people, they've got to bring up the PLO, I mean, excuse me, the

Palestinian cause, et cetera, never attacking Israel.

No, never attacking Jews, but attacking Israel and Palestine.

It's just crazy.

I'm talking to someone about how you doing.

And within a minute, it's about Israel and Palestine.

So he wrote a book.

He turned his travelogue into a book called Catch the Jew.

And he did a follow-up.

I sleep in Hitler's Room.

It's a very disturbing look at what's really

just below the surface of a lot of Germans.

And

it wasn't new.

I mean, in World War II, it was the

emerging alliance that was curtailed by Turkish practicality that they saw the Third Reich was going to fall before they became allied to it formally.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Jerusalem was propped up by the Nazis, who was an utter anti-Semite and was just salivating over the death camps.

And, you know, what they did in Greece was just atrocious.

If you go to a modern town like Hanya,

they completely made Hanya and Crete Juden Frei.

They got rid of every Jew and sent them on a train to,

you know, the ones that weren't killed at sea, they took them all and dumped them off

on the rail lines in mainland Greece and Athens and got them right into Treblinka.

And there were no Jews.

There's a little tiny quarter today, a very historic quarter.

A UN, I think Nico Stravilaka is a very good art historian, who's a teacher of mine, kind of restored it.

But otherwise,

if you go to Greece and see the way, you know, just very quickly, because I know we're running short, I was in Thessaloniki at the University of Thessaloniki a long, long time ago.

I won't give you the date because

I'm not, I think it was 2004 or 2005.

And I was asked to give some lectures in Greece.

And I gave a lecture on the current geopolitical situation following 9-11.

It was right after 9-11.

And there was a protest of Greek communist students.

And they were very strong PLO.

And they said that, you know, they came in and they were screaming and yelling outside.

And then the students

were careful and polite.

You know, you're kind of on the ground floor and then in the European classroom, there are semicircles that rise above you.

And they knock on their, you know, they knock with their fist on the table.

And they were pretty clear to lock the doors.

But then they were even worse than the demonstrators and attacking.

I thought they were very rude.

So finally, I said, I'm going to stop.

And they were all 20.

I said, do you have any idea where we are right now?

And they said, no.

And I said, this university was built on the center, synagogue, cemetery

of Jewish culture in Salonika-Tessaloniki.

You understand that, don't you?

And you understand that the Nazis came in here and occupied.

They killed a lot of Greeks, but there were a lot of people who helped them.

Not a lot.

nationwide, but a lot in Thessaloniki.

And this area was bulldozed after the war.

And we're sitting right now on top of what were once Jewish graves and a Jewish community.

And this university, ugly as it is, I said that because it was a concrete monolith that it's been a little bit improved, was helped with marshal funds.

So you're basically

taking the high moral ground with me because I'm supposedly a dirty American that's a neo-colonialist when my country, A, helped save Europe, including you, and B, you repaid that kindness by expropriating a Jewish quarter which was exterminated and which you have no idea of their history.

You have not a care in the world that there's angels right now floating in the air amount of us with Jewish voices.

Can you hear them?

It was really kind of funny and moving.

And they stopped.

And then I said, and that's it.

I'm done.

And I walked out.

Touche.

Yeah.

And

that's not to say I wasn't treated.

I spoke at the American Agricultural School, I spoke at the College of the Balkans.

I had Debbie Casas, a wonderful dean there at the time.

I had a wonderful time, but at that particular moment at that university, I was appalled.

Well, Victor, we're going to move on and talk about the global ramifications of woke.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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So, Victor, you have a recent column, and I'm looking at it in the same Epoch Times that we talked about the earlier piece of, and it's titled, The World Wants No Part of Woke, but It's Glad We Do.

So, this is, there are great global ramifications to our wokeness, or

it's certainly a tool to be used by our

enemies, and they are using it.

Victor, would you talk about this column?

Well, let's just define terms.

Woke is this doctrine that all inequality, that means you listener A and you listener B are not equal, is due to somebody's culpability.

That is, it was deliberate oppression.

And therefore, an elite guardian class, not subject to the ramifications of their own ideology, is going to determine who is the oppressor, who the pressed, who the victim, who the victimizer, and then divide up the spoils accordingly, hiring, admissions, money, transfers.

That's woke.

And it's not merucratic.

It's the enemy of merit.

It's the enemy of free speech.

Anything that might disrupt that paradigm cannot exist.

So our enemies look and they think, wow, the wokes have decided that the world is heating up to a boiling point and the elite need to jet all over the world to Davos with John Kerry, et cetera, on their jet planes to stop people from doing that.

And they're going to tell us how we're going to live.

And one of the ways they're going to do it is cut back natural gas,

oil, coal that have made the West hyper-competitive, cheap energy, and made civilization bloom around the world.

And they're going to stop it really abruptly.

And China is saying, hmm, the more those idiots do that, the more for us.

And India is saying, hmm, the more the Europeans do that, the more we get Russian gas on the cheap.

This is wonderful.

This is wonderful.

And then they think, wow,

the more that they have a diversity, equity, and inclusion czar, and Stanford, where I work, has got dozens of them.

I got a letter from an alumni, I think I mentioned to you, Jack, that he had computed the increased cost.

He approximated at Stanford.

He thought it equated to about $5,000 per head in tuition.

of every student.

But they're everywhere.

And the Chinese look at that and they think, this is wonderful this is kind of maoism that they are not going to promote the most brilliant physicist the most brilliant astrophysicist the most brilliant engineer they're not going to hire the person who seems to be the best mathematician but they're going to use commissar criteria just like the old soviet union cultural revolution like Mao did and we know what China was like with Mao is not like it is now we dropped that part of the communism and so they think this is wonderful, the United States is doing this.

And then they look at our obsession on race and they think, wow,

multiracial democracies don't work.

Brazil doesn't work.

India doesn't work very well.

And guess what?

If we encourage that, the United States won't do it.

Oh, COVID, Wuhan laboratory,

level four, travel ban on any city for a Chinese traveler out to go from Wuhan anywhere else, but free to go to the United States and spread this plague.

You're a racist for even mentioning the word Wuhan.

Racist, racist, yellow peril, shame.

And

they love rope and race because they throw it back at us.

This is the most racist society in the world, China.

And then they look at education.

I think, wow,

their

children, if you look at international standards of math proficiency, computation proficiency, literacy proficiency, knowledge of the world about them proficiency.

They are one of the most ignorant populations in the world.

You know why?

Because their public schools are just indoctrinating people and wasting time and hiring mediocre teachers, and we love it.

We like to steal everything they have at their technical universities, but one thing we don't steal?

We do not steal the text of Judith Butler, and we don't go into the new historicism of the Stanford History Department, and we don't go to the Ivy League and copy their sociology departments.

We don't want anything to do with them because they're not merucratic, and we know there's no absolute standard of excellence that we can steal.

And we like that.

We like that because it creates dissension and turmoil and wrecks that economy.

And we love those 120 days of riot and mayhem and losing arson.

So they like woke.

They like every aspect of it.

And

I don't, I wish we'd wake up, but

we need a Marshall Plan.

So, I mean,

we have a level of ignorance in K through 12 that's just appalling.

The average student each year knows less and less about the world about them.

Right.

Even I, you see these tests that, you know, eighth graders took in 1910.

And you're like, I might fail this test myself and I went well yeah and yeah I know and you go you look at these uh

you know you look at these tick tock or YouTube videos of some guy with a microphone the streets of Chicago or New York or Washington they ask people how many states in the United States or don't you like the foreign country called California or what is the national language of Nebraska they have no idea none because they have been passed through this mediocre public school where all these teachers go off topic and talk about themselves all the time.

And another thing we don't talk about, Jack, about woke, but I think it's a subtext, but it's a real theme of woke.

It is a passport, a get out of jail card for lazy, ignorant people.

Because if you're in K through 12 and you're just teaching woke, woke, you're not teaching math, which is hard.

You're not teaching a novel of Hemingway or a play of Shakespeare, which is not easy.

You're just talking about oppression and this group and that group, ad nauseum, and and how you were so tormented.

And the result of it is

we've got 330 million people, but what keeps the country going is about 40 million of our engineers, our researchers, our doctors, our architects, our master electricians, our master plumbers, our master carpenters, a particular professional and researcher.

You can't wing any of those things.

You can't wing it.

You can't say, you know what?

This circuit is

not woke.

I am going to bypass it.

You can't do that.

Or you can't say two and two is just a construct.

It doesn't really mean four all the time if you're an architect.

And so

that's what's saving the United States.

But the rest of the educational conglomerate, it's pretty much ruined it.

And I'm sounding pessimistic, but.

That's what I was trying to convey in that article, that our enemies love us to be woke.

And even our competitor, like Japan and Europe, kind of are amused by it because they look at the United States and they think of that wonderful constitution, that wonderful, those wonderful natural resources, that wonderful tradition of individualism.

And they think, wow, they're throwing that all away.

And that's wonderful because they're not quite what they used to be.

That used to just trounce us in terms of economic or trade competition.

Well, Victor, I don't want to give a short shrift to an important topic, but we have just a few minutes left, and you've written another important piece

for American greatness.

It's titled Ukraine with a Whimper or a Bang.

And I want to get your thoughts about this right after these important messages.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, as I mentioned before, the commercial break, you had peace last week, Ukraine with a whimper or a bang, and the subtitle of this,

Putin deserves what he's getting.

But that moral and strategic victory is still a very different story from America sliding into a nuclear confrontation with a desperate autocrat.

Victor,

yeah, tell us why you're not going to be able to do that.

I think everybody, I know,

yeah, there are people on the right that I get a lot of angry letters from because I think it's a pretty good clear moral

difference between an autocratic dictatorial Putin who invaded and is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to destroy Ukraine, which is run by a corrupt, but a potentially salvageable consensual system.

There is a difference, and he is the aggressor, and it behooves us to support the Ukrainians to a point.

But

Shock and all, Thunder Road, February 23rd, that is over with.

Russia lost that stage one.

Stage two, Verdun, the Somme, war of exhaustion, a war of attrition, sort of what Hans Delbruck called, you know, the war of attrition.

That is ending.

Now it is becoming a more fluid mobile war because

even though Ukraine was,

what,

one-fourth of the population, not even one, it was about one-third of the population, one-third to one-fourth of the population of Russia.

It had one-tenth the GDP, it had one-thirtieth of the area, but it was drawing on the cumulative potential of the U.S.

and EU economies, and that started to kick in.

And it became better supplied with more sophisticated intelligence, weapons, and know-how than the Russians.

And after all, their heart wasn't in it.

Okay, so then there's these agendas now as we get into stage three, and that is the counteroffensive that says it's going to push out this much larger army from Ukraine and redraw the map since 2014.

So we're not going back to the status ante quo 2022.

We're going back to the status quo ante

2014, which means we're going to push all the Russians out, apparently, of the Donbass, the borderlands, and the Crimea.

Russia feels it has historical claims to the Crimea, going back to the Crimean War and World War II, siege of Sevastopol, von Manstein.

We've talked about that.

Okay.

Here is, I think, the American agendas, and I think they're not compatible with one another.

Agenda one, they want Ukraine to win.

We're all with that.

Number two, in theory, Russia has no business invading Ukraine on February 23rd, and they're going to be pushed out of any territory.

Okay.

Agenda three, they're going to go back to what, when there wasn't one Russian soldier inside Ukraine prior to 2014, including areas that are 70% Ukrainian.

Okay, in theory, yeah.

But how are you going to do that?

Point four, to do that,

that is to fight mother Russia now, because that's what they're going to repackage this.

No longer are they the failed Russian expeditionary army all out 1904, 1905, 1921 in Poland, 1939 in Finland, 1980 in Afghanistan.

No, no, now they're Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler invading them.

That's what they're going to say.

And they may have a point if to get every Russian out, They're going to have to do what, Jack?

They're going to have to sink the Black Sea Fleet.

They've done that, a couple of capital ships.

They're going to have to hit targets inside Russia that are staging areas and fuel depots.

They've done that.

They've run patrols.

And at some point,

we're dealing with somebody who is evil, erratic, and sits on somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 nukes and will be totally humiliated.

And his options, think about it, are:

A, declare

defeat.

I screwed up.

I can't win.

And he won't be in office if he says that.

Some fire general, some bankrupt billionaire, once billionaire oligarch, the Russian street won't put up with that.

So that's not going to happen.

Number two, I'm just going to keep blowing stuff up, just like I did in Chechnya for 10 years, just like I leveled Grozny in 2002, I guess it was.

Okay.

But Ukraine's not Chechnya.

It's huge.

Chechnya was like this little million and a half person state.

It was just, I don't know, what, 8,000 square miles?

It was just a fraction.

It's hard to destroy the infrastructure of Ukraine.

He can't do it.

Okay, then he's going to say it's no longer a special military operation.

It's a real war.

We're going to draft the Russian people.

We're going to draw on a population of 150 million.

You think they're going to put up with that?

To go over and die with Ukraine?

I don't think so.

So, at what point does he say you're not going to take every single inch of Ukraine back

and you're not going to bomb a oil refinery, a staginary inside Russia, no matter what I've done, and you're not going to sink one more billion-dollar Russian ship on the Black Sea or else, and that's where we are.

And I hope everybody understands that because our bipartisan elite is saying, well, he's not going to he wouldn't dare use a tacular, nuclear way.

He wouldn't dare.

The Chinese wouldn't let him the iranians would be frightened no i don't think so i don't think so i think he's capable of anything so we've got to be very careful and ask ourselves are the united states we're giddy now because we're winning and we should be giddy and the ukrainians deserve all of our heartfelt thanks and more power to them but once they get close to mother russia and once they start going on the offensive in areas that Russia considers Mother Russia, no matter what the cause.

And I'm always been an advocate of disproportionate use of force to achieve victory, but they are a non-nuclear power, and Russia is a nuclear power.

And whether we like it or not, they are our proxy now.

And I know a lot of people are going to say, well, this is only what Russia did to us in Vietnam, and even Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially Afghanistan.

So they have it coming.

Yeah, but that wasn't on the border of the United States.

This is on the border of Russia.

And so at some point,

if he gets humiliated and there's attacks inside Russia and on the Black Sea, he's going to do something.

And we've got to be very well prepared.

And I wrote that column.

And, you know, a day later, Joe Biden warned Putin

not to use a tactical nuclear weapon.

But Joe Biden warned Putin not to use a tactical weapon in the context of A,

the complete humiliation that he achieved in Afghanistan and the worst military defeat in 50 years for the United States.

B, with his chairman of the Joint Chiefs on record of calling up his Chinese counterpart and warning him that his commander-in-chief might be erratic and therefore he'd warn the Chinese.

And C,

with the U.S.

Army meeting only 50% of its recruitment targets and 45% of Americans in a shocking reversal expressing good confidence in the United States military.

Why?

Because the United States military, as we saw from the testimony of Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, has a different agenda than what we think its agenda should be.

And they know that.

So when Joe Biden says, don't use a nuclear weapon, they think, hmm, is this the U.S.

military that we were terrified of?

Or is it the woke military?

Or is it the military run by that crazy Mark Milley?

Or is it the military that ran from Afghanistan?

What is it?

maybe we should find out so that's where we are and people should be very careful i have a lot of really good friends that would sharply disagree with me and they say victor what happened to you we we're going to defeat them we're going to chase every russian out we're going to humiliate them this is going to cause the fall of the putin government and if we have to hit their oil depots in russia they start it they deserve it if they lose every ship the more yeah Okay,

go ahead and do it and see what happens.

I hope nothing happens, but I'm not sure that that's going to be the case.

Really, Pandora's box.

Well, Victor, we're kind of out of time except for some of the usual things we do at the end of the show, and one's a little unusual.

Not that I don't have any,

I should be apologizing at the end of every episode for things I said stupidly or wrong in previous episodes.

But,

you know, we asked listeners to submit questions for some recent

podcast that we recorded when Victor was away teaching at Hillsdale.

And Richard sent one in.

It was about Vietnam.

And Richard is, wow, he's a big VDH fan.

He went to Fresno State, and one of his great

disappointments in his life, I should say regrets, is that he never took a class with you while you were teaching there.

I was a knucklehead liberal in those days, is what he writes in an email to me.

Anyway, he had asked a question about Vietnam, and I mischaracterized the question when I posed it to you when we recorded one of those podcasts.

And you answered a fine, but

it was known that that was a mischaracterization of your stance.

So I screwed up in that way.

It kind of embarrassed Richard from afar.

So I told him I would apologize and the podcasts are mischaracterizing.

So I've done that.

And I am sorry, Richard.

So that said,

we have people that listen to this podcast on

various platforms,

Google Play, Stitcher, et cetera, iTunes,

Apple Podcasts.

So if you're on Apple Podcasts, you can leave a review.

You can rank the show between one to five stars.

And practically everyone leaves five-star ranking.

And many people leave comments.

We read the comments.

Here is one.

It's by

Skipinardo

or Ski Pinardo.

I'm not sure which one.

Skipinardo.

It's titled The Nearby Table.

I've often thought of how lucky one would have been to be sitting in a table near enough to have eavesdropped on the conversations between Mr.

Hansen and Mr.

Sowell, Thomas Sowell, when they would lunch together.

With regard to this particular episode, Now he shifted, I now feel guilty that I've never been fond of raisins.

I think that I will work toward acquiring an affection for them.

I certainly have a new appreciation for their production.

We did talk about, you did talk about it, Victor, on a recent podcast.

And again, you've got a five-part series.

I mean, it's just terrific, folks, about

the brutality, I think, of growing raisins once upon a time.

I mean, Mama Mamia,

what effort that took and what risk that was involved.

It's a beautiful series on VictorHanson.com.

Anyway, Ski Pinardo, thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts with us and everyone else who does the same.

We appreciate it.

Thank you, Victor, for once again sharing terrific wisdom.

I hope this particular podcast is not broadcast in Germany.

But if it is, tough noogies.

Thank you very much, my friend.

Thanks all.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.