The Six-Day War and More on Israel

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

Today, we're going to talk about the Six-Day War, the war fought between Israel and three Arab states, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria.

And when this podcast is published, Victor will be on a trip in Israel.

So I thought maybe it would be a good idea to have him talk about some of the major events in Israel for our podcast, which we're recording more than a week ahead of time.

So hold on there.

Let's go to some messages and then we'll be right back to talk about the six-day war.

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Victor, the six-day war seems to me the most important event in Israel, but at least one of the most important events in Israeli history.

And I know that you're on a trip and your trip will probably take your clients into the areas and into the discussion of this six-day war.

And I was wondering maybe if you could give us some thoughts on the six-day war beforehand, or this will be, of course, podcast at the time that you are in Israel.

So I thought it would be a nice little discussion.

Since its founding in

May 1948, it had had

an immediate war for its survival in 1948-49.

And then it had the 56 sort of misadventure with the British and the French over Suez,

kind of collapsed the Anthony Eden government when Eisenhower did not support that.

So this was the third war, and it was from the 5th of June to the 10th of June, 1967.

And the essentials of the war were very clear.

Nasser, the great pan-Arabist, had this vision that everybody who spoke

Arabic from all the way from Algeria, Morocco, Libya, to the Middle East in the sense of, you know, Jordan, and even the Gulf would be combined under one

pan-government, kind of a caliphate, with its headquarters, of course, in Cairo.

And it wasn't, I mean, this was before, this was not Islamicist.

This was a secular kind of Baathist, but pan-Arabist, not Baathist particularly, but pan-Arabist.

And one of the

ways it was going to gain credibility was to destroy Israel.

And it already gained some credibility because it took credit falsely so for expelling the French out of Algeria.

So it was high.

It was confident.

And they began building up all of 1967, their forces, vis-a-vis Soviet supplies.

And as you know, the Red Sea goes up northward, it narrows into the Gulf of Suez, then it becomes a Suez Canal on the eastern side of Sinai.

But on the western side, there's a dead-end sort of

Tehran Strait, T-I-R-A-N, and that goes all the way up.

And on one side is Sinai, the north, and then to

the east or to the right is Saudi Arabia.

And then there's a little sliver.

And then Israel has a little tiny sliver at Elat, and that's a very critical port.

So that means that Israeli shipping doesn't have to go through the Suez Canal and therefore was not contingent upon Nasser's control of the Suez Canal.

And they threatened and tried to close that.

And that was the ostensible, they promised they would close the Strait of Tehran to all Israeli shipping.

And that meant Israel would have no access to non-Mediterranean shipping, i.e.

getting into the Indian Ocean.

And so they preempted.

And when you look at the chart, I was...

13 years old when that happened.

I used to look at the McClashy papers and they'd have diagrams every day with tanks and soldiers and planes and all the countries that had little emblems.

And then it was little Israel.

I'd run to my mother and I'd say, mom, they have 500,000 people and Israel only has 250, 250,000.

Mom, they have 700 planes and the Israelis only have 200.

Mom, they have 3,000 tanks.

And she'd always say, yes, but there's people operating those machines, Victor.

Just remember that.

It's kind of funny to be out in the middle of nowhere and have my mother and daughter so attuned as that generation was to foreign affairs.

But nonetheless, they preempted.

They knew that if they waited for the strike, and they had a multi-pronged attack on Egyptian airfields in Assina in particular, and they wiped out the Egyptian air force.

They completely destroyed it.

And they did that because even though they had a third of the planes that Egypt and Egypt had some very good MiG-21s, MiG-17s, et cetera.

But the Israelis, like the Germans in World War II, if I could use that ill-apt comparison, they were able to get three to four sorties out of each plane.

They could land eight to ten minutes later, they were back into it.

Whereas the Egyptians were only doing one or two sorties a day.

So even though they had 200 planes, they had four or five hundred as far as sorties went.

They wiped out all of the air.

Once they did that, the Egyptian

invasion through the Sinai lost air support.

And then they were able to turn their attention to destroying the Syrian Air Force and the Jordanian small air force.

And they did it without any U.S.

weapons.

I mean, they were all basalt French Mirage jets mostly.

And they had some old World War II upgraded Sherman tanks, a few pattons, some French and Centurion British tanks, but they were not well equipped.

Yeah, I was just because my understanding was that the Israeli

Air Force took out all of those planes before they even got into the air of the Egyptian planes, over 200 of them.

So the Egyptian Air Force never even got off the ground.

Some did, but they were shot down for the most part.

I mean, there were people, not that they weren't good pilots.

That famous Assam or whatever his name was, the Pakistani volunteer pilot, he shot down two Israeli planes.

He was a folk hero for the rest of his life in the Arab world.

I mean, the Muslim world.

But

yeah, and they destroyed all of the tarmac.

They had special French-made bunker-busting, I shouldn't say it tarmac-busting bombs that made it impossible for anybody to take off to land again.

So they took out that air force.

They lost air superiority.

They were naked.

And then the Israelis in another day took out the immediate threat from Syria and Jordan.

And once they did that, by day three,

they were able to turn their air force from air parity to air superiority to air supremacy, which meant then that when you have air supremacy, you don't have to use your Air Force to knock down or to

neutralize another Air Force.

You concentrate 100% of your efforts to destroy ground troops.

Remember, everybody, that that is the key of every Air Force since the history of 1915 onward is air supremacy.

Because, you know, we don't eat, we don't live, we don't drink water in the air.

The only purpose of an air campaign is to eliminate all opposition in the air so that you're not attacked from the air, but more importantly, use assets in the air to destroy what counts on the ground.

And that's what the Israelis achieved very quickly.

It was brilliant.

And then once they did that, even though the Egyptians had, in many ways, they had superior planes, they had superior upgraded T-34 and later model Russian tanks, they had

anti-aircraft missiles.

But after that,

the Israelis were able to destroy the Syrians

on the Golan Heights.

They were able to destroy Jordanian efforts.

The Jordanians shelled inside Israel.

They tried to attack and they were completely failed.

They got back into East Jerusalem.

They restored Temple Mount.

Nobody thought they'd ever be able to do that.

They got the West Bank.

They got Gaza, and they got the entire Sinai.

And so

six days later, the Russians and the United States, the United States wasn't directly involved as they would be in the Yom Kippur War of 73, but the West, let's say, and the Soviet Union oversaw a ceasefire.

The Arab world was humiliated.

Nasser resigned and then by popular claim, came back.

And then shortly later, he had a heart attack.

And everybody thought that was the end of everything.

But there were some problems that victory posed for Israel.

It had a very small, I think it was 6 million people at that time, and it had enormous territory.

And there were a lot of people within Israel who felt that they had now reclaimed Greater Israel or biblical Israel, because so many of the toponyms in the Bible were in the Gaza, West Bank, Sinai area, and now in the Golan High.

And now it was all Israel.

The problem is they didn't have enough population or they didn't have big enough enough economic product to securely defend those new areas.

And what they thought would happen was

they would then go to the Arab world and say,

if you negotiate with us

to recognize the state of Israel, then we will have a...

a graduated concession and we will cede back to you in increments all of these areas, even at the time, the Golden Heights, the West Bank, and we will use this to guarantee our integrity.

And of course, the Arab world, humiliated to shame, wouldn't do that.

And so immediately they started a Cold War after the Six-Day War, terrorism.

That was the rise of Arafat, et cetera.

And this would all lead to the 73 Yom Kippur War.

And the other thing that was a byproduct, it gave Israel enormous international prestige.

And so the United States got into the picture and they said, you know what, we're fighting in Vietnam Vietnam and our South Vietnamese troops, they just don't fight.

Well, if we had an ally like the Israelis, they fight.

So all of a sudden, we became, the French were eclipsed, they wanted to be eclipsed and we became the main guarantor and supplier of military weapons after the war to Israel.

You know, as you narrate that

war to us, it reminds me that the Israeli Defense Force has a sort of mythical

presence, I guess I would say, or a mythical sort of sense of this Israeli Defense Force.

And I was wondering if you could comment on how does the IDF rank among world military forces to maybe demythologize it and make it somewhat more real to us.

Well, I mean,

it's a very strange army in the sense that

its

numbers in combat, if it's not mobilized, are not that great.

A quarter million.

At this time, it was probably 200,000.

It's surrounded by people that had an aggregate, the Arab world of a million troops.

But what was brilliant about the Israelis is that whether they had 50 or 100,000, they have a reserve system where they're able to mobilize a nation in arms and get up to 500, and now

500,000, now well over a million people.

I mean, people, they can't sustain that very long.

People have to leave their jobs as business people or teachers, et cetera, or

bus drivers.

But they have an ability to get a, and because everybody has military service and they have training during the year, they have people who have been in wars who are civilians who can get right in there and actually be mentors to the regular army of 18 to 20 year olds.

So they're deadly in that sense.

But more importantly, they have a camaraderie where I think the key to it is

a private, sergeant, corporal can say to a captain, and they can call them by their first names even.

And so they violate traditional European and American standards of military discipline and chain of command.

But out of that,

they have a familiarity that encourages spontaneity and

flexibility.

And so if you're on the battlefield and an Israeli corporal or he sees something, he can go to the captain or go to the captain can go to a general and say,

we don't want to have a fixed, set, static, orthodox plan.

We're here.

Give us a chance.

And so they have a lot of, sometimes it, you know, it can

be very dangerous when Sharon kind of on his own just takes off to Cairo in the Yom Kippur War after crossing the Suez.

But it's a very effective.

mechanism.

And then they have a very unique ability to take traditional armaments and adapt them to peculiar needs and warfare.

So even though they don't have the GDP of a Raytheon or General Dynamics or Lockheed, they can take those products and

use them, the structures of them, to adapt and modify and make them even more lethal.

And so they're a force multiplier.

And that war, I mean, my gosh, you have 800 tanks in the Arab world in aggregate probably had, I don't know, 25 to 3,000 of them.

One thing to remember, though, that one of the legacies of the Six-Day war was it created such optimism and high expectations that the Israeli intelligence was such that they would always spot a mobilization.

They would always know when the war was there.

They would be able to become a nation in arms and preempt if they had to, and they were invulnerable that people kind of forgot two things when the Yom Kippur War happened.

One, It wasn't an easy war because of the odds against them.

There was almost a thousand Israelis that were killed And it was very small population, and they, I know they killed, you know, 15 or 20,000 of the enemy, but, and it was lopsided, but they lost, I think, 400 or 500 wounded.

So it wasn't as easy as the spectacular six days said.

It was brilliant.

And then when you look at the Yom Kippur War, I think they lost 3,000 or 4,000 and everybody said it was a disaster.

But actually,

they inflicted far more punishment in the Yom Kippur War.

But what I'm getting at is that their expectation is they had to win on day day five, day six.

And when the Yom Kippur War went to 20 days and they took more than a thousand deaths, you know, 3,000 plus, then people said, oh my God, we lost.

They didn't lose the Yom Kippur War.

If Kissinger had not gone over there with the Soviets, they would have destroyed the entire Egyptian Third Army in about 24 hours.

I'm talking about an entire army, not a division.

you know, not 16 or 30,000, but you're talking about 50 to 100,000 men would have been dead.

That war had to gone on in the Yom Kippur War, 30 days, they would have destroyed, for all practical purposes, the entire infrastructure of Damascus and Syria in general, and they would have destroyed half of the Egyptian army in the field.

And so it's kind of improper to say great six-day war, bad Yom Kippur War.

It's more like extraordinary six-day war race

expectation that we are invulnerable, that anything slightly less than invulnerable is a defeat.

Yeah.

All right.

Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then we'll come right back and talk about why the Israelis wanted to secure Golan Heights, Sinai, and the West Bank.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

So

these

are all my questions, so I don't know how important they are, but

I always wondered why is it they in the peace treaty, they took Golan Heights, Sinai, and then the West Bank from the various powers of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.

And do you have some ideas on that

well they didn't take it in a peace treaty in the in the sense that 1948 49 israel was it was just recognized where the war stopped the armistice that became a so-called green line and that was an indefensible territory when you go to the tel aviv airport and you see how close

other countries are to Israel, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it's scary.

So what happened was that their enemies said to themselves, Israel has no strategic depth, none.

And remember, they had the Sinai.

So they're right next to the Israelis.

And they had East Jerusalem.

So they're just a few hundred yards to west for Jerusalem.

And they had the Golan Heights.

So they're looking down at Israel from

the heights.

And it's, you know, it's 700 miles.

I guess it is 700 square miles.

When you have the Golan Heights and gosh, you're looking right down the sea of

Galilee, and you can be in, what, I don't know, 40 minutes, you can overrun Israel from the north.

And so you can see what its enemies were thinking, a pincer movement, as was envisioned in 67, where the Egyptians are coming right into Israel directly from Sinai, which was their land, and the Jordans are coming right in.

uh to west jerusalem just a few hundred yards from east jerusalem and the golon heights is a staging area with the advantages of not just proximity, but altitude,

then it's an indefensible country.

And once they were able to save themselves from existential destruction, let's make no mistake about it, had they lost the 67 war, they would have destroyed every Israeli person, man, woman, and child.

They would have driven them in the sea by their own admission.

So once they did that, they said, never again.

We're never going to do this again.

So whatever we have to negotiate, whether, and then remember what's happened over the last few decades, they gave away, they gave back all of the Sinai.

They gave back eventually in 2006, all of Gaza.

And they said, that's it.

So now they have the Golan Heights, and that prevents an attack downhill into the heart of Israel.

They have parts of the West Bank that give them a little strategic depth.

And so that was that was the idea.

And

who could blame them?

I mean, no, yeah.

You need to have a defensible border.

So, but they've been negotiating with those areas ever since, it seems like.

Or am I under an illusion that they sort of negotiate with the Golan Heights?

Maybe not, but with the West Bank, I mean, they ended up splitting the

or leaving actually the West Bank with Jordan, right?

Yeah, well, first of all, they're not under the Trump administration.

They looked at the situation in Syria.

It's a no man's land of Hezbollah and terrorists and ISIS and Soviet, Russians and the Assad

horrific government.

They said, there's no way in the world Israel is going to give back the Golan Heights to those people.

And, you know, it's 3,000, I think, on Mount Hermon.

I don't, somebody listening who knows Israel better than I do, but I've been up in the Golan Heights.

I've looked at the 67 and 73, where they almost lost it in 73.

And it's about 3,000.

You can see Mount Hermon and it gets down to about 1,500 feet.

But the point is, it's kind of a large area and it controls

Israel, but it also controls Syria because they, I mean, in the Am Kipper War, had that gone on another two days, they would have been in Damascus coming down from the Golden Heights.

Speaking of someone that lives right below the Sierras, 30 miles away, it supplies about 20% of the watershed for Israel.

And so it's a strategic, very important, and it looks kind of like Napa Valley on the foothill side.

So it's a very rich agricultural area.

It's beautiful.

It's strategically irreplaceable.

It has water.

And they're not going to give it up.

Gaza is a different, it's one of the most, I think it's one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Gaza is.

And so when Sharon gave that up,

thinking that that might be land for peace formula, it wasn't.

As soon as he gave it up, they destroyed all the international and american philanthropic philoframpic you know greenhouses and everything it was it's a disaster it's a mess egypt doesn't want any part of it and so they gave it up and they gave the sinai back too and they gave the sinai back the sinai is a different story they gave it back sadat got killed for it but when they got they did get peace with egypt and

Egypt has honored that peace.

So what they got from giving back the Sinai was a strategic buffer zone with the Arab world

to its east and south.

And so, they,

I know they gave away, but that was very hard to control and it was very thinly defended.

And once they gave it back to Egypt and got the recognition from Egypt of its existence, they have not been invaded or attacked from Sinai except for terrorist attacks that is unauthorized by the Egyptian government.

And they think you can make the argument that the Sisi government in Egypt is pro-Israel.

And I think you can make the argument that the government in Jordan,

if it's a question between Iran and Israel, they're on Israel's side.

Same thing with the Gulf state.

That was one of the tragedies of the Abrams Accords, that that did not have a chance to reach fruition, or we would have had eight or ten Arab nations firmly in league with Israel to deter nuclear aggression, which I think is inevitable from Iran.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a issue of the displacement of Palestinians and then Syrians.

And I think that's one of the things that continues the argument or the disputes between Arab states and the Israelis is that there's been this mass displacement.

In the six-day war, once they took those areas, 325,000 Palestinians

evacuated the West Bank and 100,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

And I was wondering your thoughts on

this as a cause of discontent with Israel.

Well, it obviously is for the Arab world.

And

with that said,

nothing in my experience has been more surreal than to be in Israel with an IDF member and driving along uh what was then the wall.

They were building a wall and seeing it get up to northern Israel and being stopped by a demonstration of Arab villagers who were demonstrating from any proposed

concession of 1949 Israel, 48 Israel back to the Palestinians so that each acre conceded from Israel would be reciprocated by an acre around Jerusalem.

You see where I'm going, Sammy?

In other words, hundreds of Arabs were in the street walking traffic saying,

under no circumstances do I want to go back and live under the Palestinian authority?

I may be an Arab nationalist, but damn it, I'm in Israel and there's a million of us and I want the protections of a constitutional system and a vibrant economy and a non-corrupt economy, even if it is Jewish.

And so that was kind of a striking for me because I thought, wow, what's going on when I saw this?

So that's one thing.

The other thing is that if you look at the number of people who were ethnically cleansed from the entire, I mean, there were probably 300 to 500, the numbers under dispute,

Jews that were living in Egypt, a few in Libya, some in Morocco, Algeria, some in the Gulf states, not a lot, some in Jordan, some in Syria, and they were all forcibly removed and sent packing with nothing.

And so they were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.

My point is, not that that doesn't happen in war, but why aren't they called refugees?

For that matter, roughly,

why do we call East Prussia?

We don't use the word East Prussian refugee.

13 million people after World War II who had been in areas of East Prussia

and Sudetenland, et cetera, for 500 years, they walked back to Germany.

Now, they deserved it, maybe you could say, because of the Nazi regime, they may or may not have supported, but 2 million of them died.

And so you dump 13 million refugees, but nobody ever calls them refugees.

They were assimilated.

And where, if you go to Israel today, and I'll find out in 24 hours, but I don't think somebody's going to say, I'm a refugee from Damascus, I'm a refugee from Cairo.

They consider themselves Israeli citizens.

So refugees is a relative term.

I mean, one of the things that did happen was

there was no Palestine.

There was this area that had been taken on the west bank of the jordan river from jordan

and so the jordanians lost territory and they were willing

they didn't want to have a buffer uh and a volatile ongoing sword with israel so once people fled from that area they fled into what once it was controlled by Israel, they fled into Jordan.

And once they came in Jordan, they tried to force the Jordanian government to,

you know, fight with them.

And then the Jordanian government and others basically said, there is no such word Palestinian.

You're Jordanian.

You've always been Jordanians.

You were just Jordanians that were living near Israel.

And they said, yeah, but we lost our homes.

So now we're going to call ourselves Palestinian and we're different than you.

And then they had a civil war.

And

at that point, Jordan said, we're no longer the representatives of the West Bank Jordanians.

Now they want to be called Palestinians.

They are Palestinians.

Go to it.

You're on your own.

And that was one of the results of the Six-Day War.

Yeah, it sounds like the whole issue is once again, sort of a repeat of how the left treats things.

It's not really the issue itself.

It's merely a method by which they can gain some sort of

advantage.

I think you're right.

I'll make a controversial statement.

A lot of listeners may disagree with me.

But as a general rule, in our planet of 8 billion people,

there is no symmetry when it comes to Jews and Israelis.

In other words, what is normal behavior, unfortunately, or tragic behavior or extraordinary behavior everywhere else does not apply to Israel.

So what do I mean?

If you left Israel 70 years ago because of a war, you're a refugee forever and you have claims on, you can dangle your keys like Edward Saeed and said, this is my home.

If you left, as I said, Germany, or if you're right now a Cypriot Greek who was kicked out of Belopais or Nicosia by a Turkish invasion, the world does not recognize you.

You are a refugee, but the world doesn't recognize that.

It's only enemies of the Jews who are refugees.

If there's occupied land, occupied land, and that's what Cyprus is, a large chunk.

That's not occupied land.

Only the West Bank is occupied land.

And if

Israel

in an operation in the West Bank kills a civilian, then that's a war crime.

In a way, it's not true of other countries that commit war crimes all the time.

Look at Russia.

Do you see anybody in the UN saying, I have, you know, half of all

UN General Assembly resolutions were condemning Israel for a while.

You see anybody in the UN say, let's have a UN every single day about Russian war crime?

No.

Or Chinese war crime?

Or the Uyghurs persecuted people?

I haven't heard anybody say that.

Who are more persecuted?

The Uyghurs or the people in the West Bank?

And yet we never hear about the people, the Uyghurs in vis-a-vis the West Bank.

I'm not trying to mitigate it, what happens in war, I understand that, that it's terrible, but there's something asymmetrical about Israel that we say it's not anti-Semitic, but why do we apply these particular

rules to Jews that we don't apply them to other people?

I've never understood that.

Yeah, me neither.

Well, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and talk about strategic locations since we've addressed the Goan Heights in particular with Israel.

But let's look at the Suez Canal and maybe some other places.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

So I had one more thing as I was looking at this subject here, since, you know, strategic locations, and this goes beyond Israel now, to the strategic naval points in the world today.

And so some reflection on

what the significance is still of the Suez Canal, for example, or the Bosphorus Straits or the Strait of the Straits of Malacca and sometimes the Straits of Hormuz, but and even things like the South China Sea.

I was just wondering if you could give us some assessment of maybe

what are the most important strategic points and just how important are they in you know they're naval and so how important are they today

as a general too much uh well we don't have enough time to go into that yeah which have been written on it but yeah as a general rule

defines a strategic point or we could call it a choke point.

How about that?

You can choke off is wherever China is interested.

And that's the end of the story, basically.

If China is interested in the Panama Canal, why is that?

Because they can stop all maritime traffic between the American East Coast and West Coast by controlling the Panama Canal, which they do now.

And believe me, if we ever got in a time of war, they would shut that off in two seconds.

Look at the Mediterranean since we've been on the Middle East.

Classical

strategy, as we saw, particularly in World War II, but even earlier, there was always one way in, you know, it's six miles.

Anybody goes to Gibraltar and looks over across to North Africa can see that it's six miles.

Remember the movie Das Boot?

It was just, it was so treacherous.

And that is a choke point.

Whoever controls Gibraltar can, that's why the British don't want to give it up before their lease expires.

And once you go into the Mediterranean, there's four or five stepping stones that control north-south traffic.

And you have to have control of them if you're going to conduct operations either in southern Europe or northern Africa.

And they are Sardinia,

Malta, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus.

The western ones are more important

because they're closer to Western Europe and that usually has a greater economy in the modern world.

In the the medieval economy, you can make the argument that Crete and Cyprus were more important.

But in World War II, to take one example, the British kept on Cyprus, they kept Cyprus, they kept Malta,

and the Germans got Crete, they kept Gibraltar, and they kept the exit at Suez.

So if you want to control the Mediterranean,

the sea between these

continents, then you control the exit and the entry at Gibraltar and Suez, and you have a doorway north to south when you have Malta, and you have, and they took Sicily, you know, by 1943, and they just said, you know what?

Who cares about Crete?

Once we already have Cyprus, and now we have Malta, we have Sicily, and the Germans are not going to be supplied in Algeria, Morocco.

They're just not going to be supplied anymore by 1943 because they've got to go over the airspace or the sea space of Malta.

And they're never going to stop that.

The British will stop stop that and they're not going to get out, they're not going to be resupplied from occupied France because they have to go through Gibraltar and they're not going to import oil or get any imports coming up from the Red Sea because of Suez.

That's a good example of why there are choke points and you can see why the Chinese are very interested in these harbors.

They can't do much in Crete because there's a huge NATO base.

There's a big base in Sicily, but they control the port of Piraeus and they have installations in Naples.

You know, peacetime, supposedly they're building infrastructure.

Straits of Hormuz are another question altogether.

To get into the Persian Gulf, you got to go right under

the nose of Iran.

And that was one of the reasons, and that's where 40% of the world's oil comes from.

And so if you're going to worry about some crazy government in Iran shutting off 40% of the world's oil supplies, then you better have either an Iranian ally like the Shah, Shah, or if you lose him, then you better detour an enemy like the theocratic government there.

As you remember, that point of land that just it just sticks right, it's like a mountain.

You have to make a curly cue to get around it.

And it's very easy to shut off.

Kind of ironic now, at least before Biden took office, that

the United States had kind of made that irrelevant for us, us, because we were completely self-sufficient in oil and natural gas.

And that was increasingly of interest to the Chinese and the Europeans.

Our interest was keeping it open for the Europeans to continue to import oil and for the Saudis and our allies in the Middle East to be able to export oil and have vibrant pro-American economies.

And then indirectly protecting China's oil imports.

But China is very worried about that because as long as we're oil

independent, you know, you can see in a war with China, we could cut off their 40%, you know, it's about 40%, 35% of their imports.

Yeah, yeah.

Most of those come out of Canada, don't they?

The imports to China of oil, I believe.

I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot of it comes from the Middle East.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, that was a perfect answer for a very broad question.

I really thank you for that.

I know your listeners, thank you.

And we're going to call it the end of the day for this Saturday on May 28th.

This is being recorded way before, but I think it'll be perfect for a Saturday weekend edition.

So thank you, Victor.

Thank you.

And thank everybody again for listening.

And

I am going to be back to normal so I don't have rain fog and these sudden,

I don't know what they are, blank outs I do once in a while on this podcast.

I don't think anybody notices a blank out, so you're okay, Victor.

Okay, I can't.

All right, thank you.

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