Looking Into the Cauldron

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show and welcome to the Friday edition where we do our news roundup for the week.

We are podcasting on Thursday and the president has just given his State of the Union address.

Ukraine is at war, China is on the sidelines, and Iran is in the boilerplate.

And we will get to these things and more after these messages.

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Welcome back, Victor.

I know I ask you how you're doing all the time, but this time I'm curious if you're up for all of this international discussion.

I know that you seem, as I talk to you these days, to want to retreat to your Volterian garden sometimes.

I do have a big garden.

It's an acre inside a wall I built to wall off the world at one time in my life.

But I'm very upbeat, not about the world scene, but we're going to expect a March rain tomorrow and the next day.

And I always believe in the last five years of March miracles.

When I was growing up here, the rain and snow came in December and January.

And we were all said it doesn't do that as much anymore, but it does come in March sometimes.

And so

we have...

We're very lucky.

I should tell you, I've got a lot of emails, Sammy, and people say, who is Sammy?

And I've just sort of told them that you, not that I'm Rush Limbaugh or you're both snerdly, but you're sort of the snerdly producer to the show.

And then at one point, you evolve beyond producing it to the interviewer.

People say, well, why doesn't Sammy tell us who she is?

I said, well, Sammy, she's a fish that swims in a very progressive lake.

And she wouldn't want to be devoured by sharks.

But she does have, she has a PhD in French intellectual history.

She's taught a number of prep schools on the East Coast and in California.

And

that's the history of that.

That's the history.

I think then she'll remain obscure after that, huh?

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's go ahead.

All right.

So let's start with the State of the Union since that's what's just currently happened.

And for me, I'll just tell you and then you can elaborate on.

It seemed like a cloud of promises and a sea of words and missed words and misspoken words.

And he seemed to do two things in that.

He suggested a reversal of the course on all things that the voters dislike about what he's doing.

And then in all of his rigma roll about the Ukraine, it seemed to me that he was trying to suggest that America is leading with this scene here.

And I get the feeling he just wants to be in with the winner because we'll talk about the Ukraine later, but it seems that we might be the winner if we are on the Ukrainian side.

But those are the things I noticed in his speech.

And so I would like to hear more from you, Victor.

Well, he didn't do what I think a lot of our listeners would have liked him to do, and that would be to top the German chancellor, Mr.

Schultz,

who essentially said

in no uncertain terms that Germany had been wrong with their green agenda, that it was amoral, because not only did they increase the price of heating fuels and transportation fuels, but they made the country dependent on an aggressive power like Vladimir Putin.

And their dollars were fueling the weaponry that were killing Ukrainians.

And they weren't going to do it anymore.

And not only were they not going to do it anymore, they weren't going to engage in arguments with us about whether they made their 2% promises, a meager number, but nonetheless, the number they never would reach.

And they persuaded others not to attain that promise.

And so they just flipped.

So did Finland and Sweden.

You know, we thought Biden might come in and he might say, you know what?

The past is the past.

We are going to transition to green fuels, but if we rush that by cutting back development on the 1 million barrel a day at Anwar, or we don't get another million or two out of new federal leases, or we don't get a million in from Alberta through the Keystone pipeline, and then we're going to have to beg, beg, beg, and we're going to give more and more money, a billion dollars a day to Vladimir Putin.

He gets richer every day.

He's got more wherewithal, and we have less.

So, I am now announcing a radical change in U.S.

energy policy.

I am also announcing a radical change in U.S.

defense posture.

It's important to have social justice everywhere in the country, especially in the Pentagon, but we don't have the resources.

We don't have the resources to spend and obsess and fixate on equity, diversity, and inclusion, or ferret out white rage or white supremacy.

So we're going to emphasize battlefield readiness, and I can guarantee you we'll never have another Afghanistan.

Well, that was kind of the stuff that you would want to hear.

And instead, we didn't hear any of it.

This war, we don't know much about.

We've mentioned in the past that in the Middle East or in the Balkans or in Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya, it seems like it was a clarion call to independent journalists, New York Times, NPR, PBS, CBS.

They were all flocking there and they were in combat.

And we don't, they're not there.

So we don't know what's going on.

And we have this iconic column that sits there of, you know, it's various labeled 20 to 40 miles, et cetera.

And we want to know, well, why isn't it being blown up?

And the answer apparently is that

for all the talk of javelins, they hadn't gotten any until recently, except for those five or or six hundred that trump sent them and which remember biden did not they did not that was what camilla harris said they only she said the other guy they haven't invaded since biden was vice president duh so

i guess what i'm saying is that we hear seven eight ten it's almost like an auction every day 12 000 javelins 200 000 a piece the shells are 80 000 they're pouring in but they're not pouring in enough to make a difference to blow up that column that is intending to circle Kiev.

And it may happen as we speak, but it does show you that the Ukrainians should have been stockpiling this stuff in November and December and January.

And we should have been airlifting it in mass, and we didn't.

So that's something that you would thought that he would have said that.

He would have said, this is a new Berlin airlift.

He didn't say that.

And what he also did say,

Sammy, is that he had a little checklist.

And he's here, here's his mindset.

Uh-oh, I'm facing a historical wipeout in November.

Every single issue that I have, open border, critical race theory, inflation, high gas prices, Afghanistan is underwater.

And me, Joe Biden, is no Bill Clinton.

I can't feel anybody's pain.

And more importantly, I'm not young, dashing, charismatic Barack Obama that can lift my unpopular issues out of the dumps in the way that Bill Clinton did in 1995 and Barack Obama did in 2011 after they were wiped out in the midterms.

Instead, he's thinking to himself, oh my God, in my dottage, I'm a force multiplier of unpopularity of my policies.

So what does he do?

And he says, I'm also a captive.

They won't let me out.

The squad has me in a cage.

So does Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth.

They feed me little things through the bars, but I can't, I don't have any free will.

That was the Faustian bargain I made.

I wanted to be president.

They got me the left-wing base support.

I promised to turn over the president.

They imprisoned me, and now I'm a doddering stooge, and I can't do anything.

So what I can do is the following.

I can go down a checklist.

And we need a secure border.

No details.

And we need to be energy independent.

And we're going to be forceful abroad.

We're going to fund the police.

We're going to fund the police.

yeah that's a good point we're going to fund the police after he himself said they were going to defund it and carjacking i guess that might be a little different that might be hmm carjacking smash and grab it's getting into places like atherton and the stanford shopping center and carmel california and malibu and beverly hills and the upper west side Cambridge.

This is getting out of hand, getting too close to the Biden family and my friends.

So that was the subtext of that.

But I'm not going to just center him.

I think the whole, everybody, it's kind of a tired trope to say it's, we don't need it anymore.

But I wish they would just send out a little tweet with: here's my campaign talking points for the midterms, and I don't have to talk to you.

Because then you get, this was the sorriest group of people behind him.

I thought, here is 79-year-old Joe Biden that is non-composment.

Here is Camela Harris, who I don't know what we call her, but she's Campos Mentes, but that's scarier that she is.

It would be much better that she was non-Compos Mentes, because then when she has this whole baby talk about the geography of Ukraine, we could say, well, she's just crazy, but she's serious.

And she's looking on and she's kind of mouthing words when Joe loses his mind when he calls the Iranians.

And by the way, Sammy, everybody says he said Iranians for Ukrainians.

And I politely protest because I went back and looked at his lips and played it.

And he said, the Uranians, as if they were people from the planet Uranus.

So I think that's important.

But anyway, she corrected him.

She mouthed Iranians.

And I think that's very important because they have this strange relationship.

Could I enter something here?

Because nobody of all these commentators I've been watching or reading has said anything about Kamala Harris, who had the I am presidential look on her face the whole time and not the giggle pot look, you know, look or

I think she's being, I think she's so angry because they have used her.

And I'm not trying to outthink this, but I think a lot of our listeners are smarter than I am.

And they've already figured it out that she is our Spiro Agnew, that she was appointed to be a mediocrity as an insurance policy, that when you start to think that you want to get rid of Joe Biden because he doesn't know where he is,

think back to people wanting to get rid of Richard Nixon and they said, well, oh, no, it's fiery.

And to get rid of him, remember what happened?

Suddenly a federal attorney appeared out of nowhere and said, oh, by the way, I can remember when he was governor of Maryland and he did a lot of bad things.

Let's indict the SOB and get.

Good old Jerry Ford in there.

And when good old Jerry Ford was in there, they said, he's a good guy, and we're getting rid of Nixon.

And that's why he said, because he's saying to everybody, if you get rid of me, you've got Kamala Harris.

And so they've given her a Susan Rice role.

Not that I'm suggesting that they're racist or sexist and they pick on black women, but remember Susan Rice is when they wanted somebody to go out there and lie, they being the Obama and Clinton administration and Biden, they didn't go out there.

Lie about Benghazi, send out poor Susan rice five times on the talk shows to swear that it was an impromptu riot and it had nothing to do with al-qaeda and

you want her to lie that all the wmd are gone in syria she will raise her hand and run out there and lie and she did that on about five occasions and that's what camela harris is doing now they put her out you got a problem at the border camella go down there and lie and say the border is secure you got a problem with nato allies you've never been to Europe.

This is a good chance to get your first taste of Europe.

Go over there and lie that everybody's on the same page.

That's what she does.

And I think she resents it.

And so they're trying to both humiliate her and tell people, but keep her on.

They're saying, look at her.

Every time she does that little swarmy school mom, this is Ukraine and it's kind of in Europe, i.e., I think it's in Europe.

And then there is Russia and it's bigger and they have a spat.

And then the whole country is, when when they hear those clips, I mean, they're thinking, oh my God, anybody but this woman.

I would rather have Joe Biden and his dottage than her and her clarity.

So that's what that was about.

And then there was Nancy Pelosi, the Fox person, I guess it was, who was the one that said that she was a fly and she had her little hands as if they were fly insect type claws and she was

Raymond O'Royal.

Oh, you've watched that.

So that's what he, yeah, that's what he, that's what she was.

She's had some kind of orthodonta work and

uh i think she's reaching the toxic level and there must be a level because i mean botulism is a deadly disease it comes you know from certain types of food and when you extract it and you keep injecting it to your face and you do it every day

i'm just being facetious but there has to be a max like radiation you get to a maximum botox and i think both biden and she have hit it because it's affecting her so her face her mouth her little fly hands i didn't know what was going on.

It was sort of like her bragging during the lockdown that she's got $10 cord ice cream, pint ice cream in her $40,000 combo refrigerator.

So that was who's running the government.

I mean, you looked at that and it was pretty scary.

Yeah.

Well, I just thought, wow, after listening to it and thinking about it, I thought, wow, is this speech supposed to be memorable?

And I thought, well, there's nothing.

None of them are, though.

In his defense and Biden's defense, I mean, Trump would go on like, you know, he went on for an hour and a half.

And none of them should give it.

They should, if they're going to give it, just give it 20 minutes.

And it's just a ritual now.

It doesn't

mean anything.

Like, one of the best things that Trump did, and he didn't get credit, was, and he did it for personal reasons, I know, rather than if they had loved him, he would have loved to been at the White House correspondence dinner.

But he kind of destroyed that by not going because he knew they were going to use it as an occasion to destroy him.

But it was a complete celebrity-studded farce satiricon and nobody nobody i mean it's it's gone i think yeah it can't be resurrected who wants to watch a bunch of celebrities and want to be journalists that are unprofessional and they're report age go there and then pal around and be on television yeah and then i went to one i went to one and i was teaching at the naval academy in 2003 and somebody called me and good friend said we have tickets we have an extra one you want to go and i ended up right next to robert deval and that was the only reason i went because i looked at the seating chart and i could ask him about his movie roles

and then he was very funny so that was a good thing i love lonesome dub yeah oh yeah that's a great series he didn't like he didn't like me asking him questions about that put it this way he liked the first five

But I'm a fan of Westerns, in particular Westerns.

And he's been a great actor.

All right.

let's move on then.

We've talked a little bit about the Ukraine because his speech was on the Ukraine, but I have some further questions beyond what we've said, because I've said in an earlier podcast that it just seemed to me like good old-fashioned imperialism, where you fight for more than you want and you settle for the less that you get.

And it looks like now the cities are posing a little bit of a problem for Putin.

And that's my sense.

And what is yours on that?

Well, let me just, if I can do it

very quickly, I think, you know, there's this fancy word everybody use, irredentism.

It's from a Latin, but through Italian, a word.

Irredentism means the unredeemed, land that is yours, you think.

It's a psychological mechanism when a country is weak.

and insecure or people are a leader can demagogue them and they're saying we wouldn't be this way if we could recapture the old lands and the big example it's all come from the 20th century and that was uh the megala idea that was the greek idea lutherus menizalos and others said you know what we can recreate the byzantine empire after world war one we fought on the right side we got spoils and from bulgaria thrace we have a land bridge all the way to constantinople we'll invade asia minor we'll push back the turk the ottomans are done for The Turks are

British.

And French diplomatic and military support will ensure.

And then we'll have an Aegean lake.

And

we have Crete,

and we're going to have Cyprus.

And it blew up outside of Anchor.

And it was a disaster.

And the Turks just savagely butchered Greeks.

It was horrible.

And then I lived on Osiasmi Cross, Asia Minor Street in Athens and talked to people.

And as I said before, all of these people in their 80s and 70s, this was in the the 1970s would tell me oh mr hansen you understand that the archangel i gotta be careful because i mentioned this to jack fowler and you bit my head off because i said mark but michael was going to come down i think it was michael to come down and marbelize the last emperor, Mr.

Palaeogolus, and take him away out of the sanctum of Santa Sophia.

They believe that on Black Tuesday, 1453, they would come back again.

But the point I'm making is this is very common.

Mussolini, remember in the 1930s, he had Mar Nostrum, RC,

and there was going to be a new Pax Romana.

And anybody who spoke Italian, whether that was in Trieste or in old, what we call Dalmatia or Albania, or even Greece, Corfu, Libya.

Somalia, he was going to make this huge Mediterranean.

Remember what he said?

He said, I am being handcuffed.

There's two handcuffs on the Italian future.

One is Suez and one is Gibraltar and we're locked in here.

We can't get out.

So he built this huge navy and then all of a sudden the French navy disappeared.

The British had to destroy most of it after France collapsed and he had the biggest navy for a while and it was going to be the new Roman Empire.

And then there was Hitler and Hitler said in an irredentist fashion, anybody who spoke German, I don't care where they are, They can be in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.

They can be in East Prussia and Poland.

This is what he called a historical mistake.

They can be in the Alsace-Lorraine.

They can be in the Volga River, way over there, you know, 1,500 miles in north.

They are part of the new Third Reich, and I'm going to get them and bring them back.

And Milosevic said, you know, in the 90s, there's going to be something like the 15th century empire, the Great Serbia, and Montenegro and Kosovo and Bosnia.

Those Serbian populations are going to aggregate and we're we're going to create the grandeur of the past.

And so, this is what he's doing.

He's saying, you know what?

It's not just the Soviet Union.

He's saying, anywhere the Russian language is spoken, the Russian Orthodox Church is commonplace and Russian culture exists.

I don't care whether it's in Georgia or Satia, eastern Ukraine, western Ukraine, Crimea.

I will recombine all of you into Mother Russia.

And that's what he's doing.

He has a rule, though, Sammy.

He says, if they are pumping oil,

the United States, the Saudis, et cetera, and the oil price is low and I don't have a lot of revenues and they're not dependent on Russian oil, I don't move.

If they don't have a president like Biden or Obama, somebody who's deterrent, unpredictable, scary, I don't move.

If NATO is in disarray and Germany is telling everybody, you know what, we're not going to pay 2%, nobody else is going to pay 2%.

The German public poll, as they do now, they would not mobilize if asked under Article 5 of the NATO Charter.

And the United States defense budget has been cut, then they move.

And that happened under George W.

Bush, logged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with high oil prices in 2008, with the meltdown on the horizon.

That happened with Barack Obama, high oil prices, the apology tours, the hot mic, inviting the Russians in to the Middle East, you know, failing to sell weapons to Ukraine, Hillary Clinton's jacuzzi button reset.

And it happened with Joe Biden telling people, please don't hack it.

Oh, if you're going to hack, just don't hack those companies, or please Vladimir pump oil, or, you know, Afghanistan was a wonderful logistical success.

That invites him in.

And then when he comes in to finish this monologue, I rant, Sammy, he has a plan.

And the plan, as we've seen in the first three or four days, is exactly what he did in Georgia and eastern Ukraine in Crimea.

And it usually works.

You go in with shotgun missiles and you show and you have some artillery strikes and you come across a border and you have commandos

and everybody panic.

Oh my God, this is Vladimir Putin.

And they fold.

And then you have irregulars or sympathizers, colluders are running around Kiev and they're doing things.

And then

the comic president who was a comedian, he just folds.

And he said, Joe Biden, please give me a ride home.

I got to get out of here.

And that's what he expected because then it worked.

But then it didn't work because Zelensky turned out to be a Churchillian figure.

And he said, I don't need American ride out.

I need American weapons.

And all of a sudden, he wouldn't quit.

He was all around, his picture was all around the global media, but it was always from a different location.

And Putin is in a bunker.

I think he's on steroids.

He looks moonfaced now.

And everybody has suggested my phone, especially, but he's not well.

I don't know if that's true.

But he's not crazy, is what I'm trying to say, because he has a backup plan.

And we know what the backup plan is when this shot and awe doesn't work.

He did it in Chechnya with Grozny.

He says, if they didn't work, then just level the town, get in the big artillery pieces, blast it to get bits, kill thousands of people, and then we will have a Carthaginian peace.

We'll just come in with our armor, and everybody will be dead or dazed.

And we'll say, you know what?

This puppet we brought along, he's a mean SOB, and he's going to kill you unless you listen to what he's doing.

The difference is he's got a country of 45 million people, and that's big.

It's hard to do, but that's what he's trying to do right now.

And Iran is watching this, and they're thinking, hmm, we're going to get this bomb in about a year.

Should we use it against Israel?

And China's going, wait a minute, we kind of wanted to see how this is going because with Taiwan

and they're asking questions, Sammy, they're saying, Will the Taiwanese fight like the Ukrainian?

Is there a Zelensky somewhere in Taiwan?

Will javelins and stingers be poured in, airdropped into Taiwan from Australia, South Korea, Japan, the United States?

Will the Taiwanese fight like the Ukrainians?

Will the world sanction us?

Will our our Chinese billionaires not be able to get in a yacht or use ATM?

Will our 350,000 students be sent home?

This doesn't look good.

So they got their finger in the air and they're watching to see what happens with Ukraine, as the Iranians are.

And they want to know if the sanctions will work and they want to know if the weapons will get there in time.

It's kind of like a world.

tragic performance on the stage.

And we're looking at now it's all been in reductionist fashion.

It's down to a convoy for some reason.

And the convoy sits there, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And the world says, yes, it's going to be destroyed with javelins.

And then the world says, no, it's not going to be.

Yes, there's a plane that's no, I haven't seen any pictures of it.

It's breaking up to circle around.

No, it won't circle.

And we don't know, we don't have enough information because I don't know what happened to journalists.

Maybe they're.

Scared.

Yeah, they were very brave and they were very active and they were ubiquitous when it was a matter of the steel dossier and Bruce and Nellie Orr and the Mueller bombshell investigations.

But when it's a life and death situation of giving the West accurate information about Ukraine, they're just

not there.

What did you say before that they haven't left their Italian cappuccino cafes?

Oh, I don't think, I don't know.

I don't know where they are.

The people who are going to probably tell us are the independent.

journalists, you know,

younger people that don't have anything to lose and they don't have PC editors and et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, Victor, let's take a moment for these messages and then we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And since you have introduced the idea of China, I wanted to go ahead and turn to China and their response.

And a few things.

I, you know, I really didn't watch the Olympics and feel like, well, given what China's done with COVID, why would anybody who's been in two years of lockdown want to watch Olympics in that country?

You could add the Uyghurs to that.

But so I didn't notice them starting or passing.

And now they are looking at, as you said, Putin and they're trying to assess.

But they've held they're holding positions.

For example, they're not part of any sanctioning of Putin.

They claim, in fact, that they were unaware of an invasion plan.

They abstained in a vote in the UN to reprimand Putin's invasion.

And so I was wondering your thoughts on what are the Chinese up to with their current position?

Remember the rumors that Joe Biden shared intelligence with the Chinese to arouse them or to win their support because he said, my God, the Russians are marshaling on the border of Ukraine.

And they proverbially turned it right over to the Russians and said, I don't know what you're doing, but the Americans know more about what you're doing than you do.

So what they're doing is they're watching.

And they would very much like this thing to succeed.

If they succeed, then China says, ah, the Russians, we could be the head of the UN security in our rotating chair.

Right when we take a Taiwan, big deal, they won't kick you out.

Putin's ahead of the UN Security Council right now.

and they're saying you know what it's a little messy but and the financial thing stuff bites but in about a year from now putin will be the new catherine the great he'll say i restored ukraine made a little messy i had to get a little you know not saying i didn't muss up my hair a little bit but i they're dead now and they're not going to come back and i own ukraine and i'm right on the border of four nato countries and germany will crawl back schroyer will come into my office and kind of slither under the door as he does.

We can, he's pretty big.

He'll, I don't know, come through the vent.

And he will say, I'm back with Gazprom and I got the Germans back on board and they're ready to buy that natural gas.

And that's what he thinks.

And that's what the Chinese don't know yet.

So the Chinese are saying, man,

if it goes well, it's tolerable.

We can take the financial hit.

And we have so much more leverage in the United States than the Russians do.

Russians in the United States are portrayed as gap-toothed, tattooed, crazy, white rage, white supremacists,

you know, czarist or something.

They're the enemy of every single movie out of Hollywood.

Yeah.

Yeah, they are.

And they're always fighting some marginalized person, a black person, a Latino person, a beautiful you know, Asian woman, a white muscular actor, an impressive black actor, but it's always this white supremacist, awful country versus our multiracial, multicultural, sophisticated, morally superior.

That's Hollywood.

Except, we're told now that Hollywood does kind of call out actors depending on their skin color, because the Chinese, racist, though they are,

don't like darker skinned actors.

And Hollywood is only too happy to comply with that, apparently, for the money involved.

And we have the NBA, Mr.

Kerr, Steve Kerr, LeBron.

You know, Chinese are no worse than we are.

We have school shootings.

They bump a few heads with the Uagers, but they give us $5 billion too.

So what I'm getting at is they look at all this and said, we are so much more leveraging America than the Russians are.

We have so many more joint ventures.

We have so many more people.

We have so many more students that they couldn't do.

to us what they're doing to the Russians.

We own the world.

We've got the money.

And so that's not going to to apply and then they're looking at taiwan as i said earlier and they're thinking nah we'll see what these ukrainians will do i don't know if the taiwanese will fight like that you know they've got one of the lowest birth rates in the world and they're kind of fat and lazy their terms not mine don't mean fat physically but fat on the land and it's a long way from america They don't have a land border.

They have to bring it in by sea or airdrop.

And we're really unsure of America's commitment to them at this point aren't we we created taiwan because after the mao revolution we told the soviet union do not move do not let mao do not move on taiwan

and that was a contentious issue in the 50s that almost brought us certain islands you know

is that matsu was one of them that almost brought us into a nuclear confrontation so we have historical ties with taiwan we have a much larger taiwanese community in the united states from from Taiwan and Hong Kong than we do Ukrainian even.

So we'll see.

It's similar, but the Chinese Communist Party and the Iranian theocracy are both looking at this.

The Iranians are saying, hmm,

sure like to send a missile because it'll be like kind of like Ukraine.

It'll be messy.

They'll hit us back.

We have, you know, we might lose 20 or 30 million people, but, you know, for the rest of our

existence, this generation of Iranians will be saying, these were the Persians, these were the Shia,

these were the Iranians that said to the majority in the Middle East, the Sunnis, the Arabs, we were not scared.

We alone took on the Zionist devil and we destroyed him.

He doesn't exist anymore.

That's what they're thinking.

And they want to see what the reaction to the world is.

They wouldn't do anything if somebody said to them, you do that, and we'll help nuke you or something.

All the dogs a person has,

you have dogs, I have dogs.

Everybody has dogs.

And when one dog starts to fight and starts to lose, all these dogs that you were thought were such purebred sweetheart dogs, they turn into dingoes or something, or coyotes or wolves.

They just jump in.

And do they fight to protect the poor little dog on the bottom?

No.

They want to get their little bite and take off an ear or take off a paw and say, I did my.

And that's the way Iran and that's the way China.

So they're watching this tragic, you know, the whole world is a stage, as Aristotle said, or supposedly quoted.

And these characters are now Ukraine, and they're the protagonist, and the antagonist are Putin.

And the player, the orchestra is Ukraine, I guess, or the stage is Ukraine.

Well, since you've introduced the idea of Iran, I would like to then turn to Iran and the reification of the Iranian nuclear deal, the one that started in 2015.

And then, of course, Trump said it wasn't worth it at all and so walked away from it.

But it seems to be that the key issues are the extent to which sanctions by the world will roll back from Iran itself, the uranium traces found at undeclared sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And this is a funny one, at least in the news.

A sticking point is, will the United States stick to its side of the deal?

And I thought that was funny because it seems like the Iranians never stick to their side of the deal.

So why would they be worried, right?

But will there ever be a deal in this Iranian nuclear quagmire?

Well, the Iranians look at the deal that they had with the Obama administration in 2015.

It was a treaty, and they knew it would never pass the two-thirds in the Senate, so

which I guess is down to 60.

But they just said it wasn't a treaty.

So they just changed the name and they rammed it through on a bare majority vote.

But the Iranians look at it in two ways.

They say, we do not want a messy proliferation pathway.

If there's a Republican or a deterrent president, then we have to cheat, we have to lie,

we hide things,

and we want to get it out there because we never know where they're going to nuke us or have a Stuteneck virus or do something.

And it's going to be hard to do.

When we have a progressive, we make this deal.

We are all are are gentlemen.

We wear nice Western clothes.

We meet them in Paris.

Sometimes John Kerry comes out of nowhere, da-da-da-da, and we were all smiles.

We're the happy face of the Ayatollahs, the Westernized Iranian elite.

And then they make a deal.

And then they just cheat.

And the only sacrifice in it is that they're guaranteed that we will not take it out.

And they guarantee they won't get the nuke on the watch of the person who made the deal.

So if we go back on this deal, they will tell Joe Biden, as long as you're president, you will not be humiliated, but the next guy, we're going to have the nuke.

And that's what they prefer.

They wait a little bit, they act sober and judicious, and then they go,

get going, get going, get going, and they're going to get a nuke.

And it's tragic because there was no reason to go back into this.

There was nothing you were going to get out of it.

And when you dropped the sanctions, and think about this, they were flat broke.

They barely survived COVID and the economy.

I mean, the bottom dropped out of their oil market.

The sanctions really hurt them.

And now what are you going to do?

You're going to allow them to sell oil when it's $110 a barrel.

They're going to make a fortune.

And where's that fortune going to do?

It's going to go fund Hezbollah.

It's going to fund Hamas.

It's going to fund Naswala.

It's going to fund.

every thug in the new Shia Crescent from Tehran all the way to the Israeli border and to the Mediterranean.

And there was no need to do that.

And then, I don't know how to say it, it's almost spite this foreign policy because we also had this Abrams Accord.

And we were right on the verge that major, you know, the Kuwaitis, the Saudis, the Jordanians, once these people started to join, they were going to join.

And there was going to be a de facto the enemy of my enemy is my friend alliance between Israel and these Arab countries for a solid front against this.

And Biden came in.

I don't think he knew what he was doing, but Obama did.

He wanted a Shia, Persian, Iranian crescent to balance the Arab Sunnis so that, and his affinities were with the proverbial underdog, the Shias and the Persians.

They were more revolutionary and romantic than the House of Saud, as far as Obama looked at it.

But now we've just destroyed that too.

It gets back to this original theme, Sammy.

If you're Joe Biden and somebody comes in on Inauguration Day and say, look, Joe, I hate the United States and I want you to destroy every blank, blank aspect of it.

And you only have 13 months.

Now, Joe Biden proved to be a genius, a maestro.

He thought, hmm, I can destroy that border.

And he did.

It doesn't exist.

People coming across as if they own it, no vaccination, no test.

Then he said, I'll destroy the energy.

I'll get 2 million barrels right off the top, gone.

And people forgetting we were increasing.

We would have been up to 14 or 15 million barrels.

It was sustainable for 40 or 50 years and more, federal leases, Keystone, get rid of that.

And then somebody said, well, that's not enough.

That can't hurt America.

Why don't you start calling everybody who's white in the military, who dies at, you know, white males twice their percentage in the population, call them supremacists.

Ferret them out.

Say they should read Professor Kendi's book.

divide the country in half, defund the police.

That'll help.

Then just fold like a tent in Afghanistan, turn over that stupid one billion dollar embassy that 400 million dollar refit at bagram get rid of the 80 billion dollars in weapons turn them over to terrorists run don't care whether you lose 13 and then destroy deterrence and maybe you'll get a war with uh russia or you might get a war that's what i'm thinking that's what he did And now we're stuck with seven and print money and modern monetary theory.

The more money you print, better off everybody is.

People have a Passbook account.

They got that money through unsavory means.

They don't deserve it.

They need to spread the wealth.

So with zero interest and 7.5 inflation, they're going to lose their Passbook at 7.5% a year and give money for people to stay home and inflate.

And people who deserve money, but don't have it will get it.

And that's where we are.

It's almost a systemic assault on the country economically, military, politically, culturally.

And it's it's all been in 13 months.

And then when I hear people, I mean, there was, I won't mention his name, there was a Fox person who said, that State of the Union was pretty fine talk.

I thought, oh my God.

And then I hear that Van Jones, oh man, this was inspirational.

I thought, wow, Jeff Bezos gave you $100 million.

You don't have to lie like that.

You can do anything you want.

It's very depressing.

where we are now.

And we're just starting.

This has all been like a tsunami the last 13 months.

We haven't felt the full effect and the synergy of energy destruction, foreign policy deterrence destruction, security at the border destruction, the currency destruction, the debt destruction, the racial relations destruction.

It's all magnifying.

And I'd like to hope and tell our listeners that

Boy, if you're ever going to vote, vote in November, because 10 pickup in the House or two or three senators is, even if it gives you a majority is not going to do it.

You need an overwhelming referendum.

And beware that when Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million last time, that was just penny ante this time.

They're going to give a billion.

Yeah, I get a sense these Democrats think that we're all fat and happy and that we could do with a little suffering and starvation, but I think they forget the people that are on the margins that aren't so fat and happy at this time.

The Democratic Party is wealthy people now.

They're wealthy people.

They don't care about

the nation is very important to those who are near and in poverty.

And we do still have some of those and they just really do not care about.

He said to buy an electric vehicle, I was in Menlo Park two weeks ago.

They all have Teslas, but they're what, 70 or 80,000.

You have to wait a year.

And then electricity is up to 26 cents a kilowatt.

It's not that much cheaper.

And so what he's basically saying is, I respond to the wealthy bicoastal wing of my party, and they're immune from any consequences of their ideology.

So they want Stephen Chu, $9 a gallon gas, and they're going to get it if it continues, but they don't drive that much along the coast.

They take either trains or their electric cars, and they want high electrical prices, and they have the money to pay it.

They love high taxes.

They have the income for that.

They love prep schools.

So no charter schools, no homeschooling for the Hoi Paloi.

So that's how they think.

And I don't know what's going to happen because gas was $6 this week in Los Angeles.

I'm going to go up to Palo Alto on Monday.

And when I left 10 days ago, it was $4.80

for regular.

It's going to be maybe $6.

And they're really destroying the ability of the American middle class to just get in a car and drive somewhere and have a nice vacation or come home and be cold and turn your natural gas thermostap up to 73 or something for the evening.

They're destroying that.

And there was no need to do it.

There's no need to do it except spite.

But Joe Biden won't feel that.

I bet his pool is still heated.

Yeah, I'm sure it is.

Or he loves to swim naked, naked.

I was going to say,

naked and shocked Secret Service detail.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's take another minute for some messages, and then we'll be right back to talk a little bit about Germany and its role in Europe these days.

So let's have a break.

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Welcome back.

And so for last topic, I was wondering if you would speak a little.

We always see Germany coming in here and there in our discussions, but we haven't really ever talked about Germany's position in Europe.

And I know that it's the strongest country economically and so then very influential, but it has a strange role in Europe because it's so dependent on the energy from Russia.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on that.

You know, I confess that I've been very hard on Germany.

I have.

It's not out of any dislike of Germany or the people, but I understand that they, and I'll be blunt, they started three wars, 1870, 1914.

I know somebody's going to get angry and give me some historical revisionist point.

I understand that the French really egged them on, whatever.

But they...

They were at the heart of conflict in Europe and they're angry.

And there was, what, 18 million killed in World War I and 70 in World War II and they feel terrible about that.

Okay.

And they disarmed and they counted on the U.S.

nuclear umbrella and NATO to protect them from themselves.

Remember Lord Ismay's dictum, NATO shall be created to keep Russia out, America in, and Germany down.

And they understand that they are a very capable, dynamic, industrious people, and they can't be kept down.

And eventually,

that prosperity and that security that they create within the boundaries of Germany has a natural tendency to be fortified by arms.

And once you're fortified by arms, you get this irredentist idea that, you know, there was something called Alsace-Lorraine, there was something called Prussia.

And, you know, much of Poland on Western Poland was German.

A lot of parts of France were German.

Austria was in the Angels.

We get that.

So all of that is the historical background.

But what gets me is that they shut down plants, nuclear plants.

They shut down natural gas plants.

And then they expect a cloudy, cold country to have solar and wind.

And when they don't get it, they buy gas at a billion dollars a day from this thug, and then they lecture us on the morality of climate change, why they are pretty much financially responsible for egging him on in financial terms into Ukraine, and then they refuse to spend a measly 2% of their GDP on defense, even though they promised they would do it.

And then they become advocates for other countries of the 30-nation membership also to say, well, if Germany's 80 million people and they've got the

fourth biggest economy in the world and they're not going to pay, why should i and that's what they do and then i look at the pew polls i look at them every international pew poll that comes out that's one of the first things i look at and it's just didn't start with trump it started didn't start with obama it was already starting before that but we're at a point now with about 55 percent of the germans do not like americans or at least poll that they prefer russians And when they're asked in other polls within Germany, would you like to fight for Article 5, i.e.

if Poland was attacked, would you go in there?

60% say no.

How can you have an alliance with the largest financial power in the center of the alliance, which the alliance was created around, both to protect and to keep from hurting others?

But how can you have that country being so angry at the protector of it, the United States that provides 30% of the entire budget and puts Germany under our nuclear umbrella.

And then all of a sudden, when Ukraine happened, Merkel is now out.

She was a disaster, whatever anybody wants to say.

She was a total disaster.

At the end, she shed her exoskeleton, and she showed that underneath she was a communist moth.

She was always an East German person, and she had that status totalitarian mindset, and she did a lot of damage.

I know that Obama thought he could charm her, but she hated Trump because from the day he got in office, he said, this is unsustainable, that you people demand that we protect you and you don't pay even 2%

and yet you send money to Putin, who is the one arch enemy of the alliance.

And you want me to protect you while you subsidize your enemy?

And so that's where we were.

And then I was mentioning the pupils and they're so negative.

So when the new Chancellor Schultz gave this lecture, the other day, and I basically, I don't want to go through it all, but I read it twice.

And it's sort of, he didn't quite say say it this way, but if I could extrapolate it, was we were wrong on green energy.

We were wrong on weakening NATO with not meeting our fair share.

We're going to meet our fair share.

We're going to urge other people to meet their fair share.

We were wrong on that advocacy.

We're going to rearm.

We were wrong on that.

We're going to give offensive weapons to Ukraine.

We're going to give them anybody we feel like.

We were wrong on that too.

And we're going to work with our American allies.

I'm thinking, well, you just said something that you denied for 20 years.

So you're basically saying that all those years when Obama said free riders, he was right.

When Trump said that basically you're deadbeats, he was right, because now you're admitting it.

What were the last 20 years about?

We're trying to talk to you.

And I'm glad they're back.

And then now somebody's going to write me and say, Victor, they're back.

Hi, Johnny.

Back.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Jack Nicholson, Germany is back.

And what that means is, oh my God, the leopard tank is a pretty good tank.

When are we going to have the jet version of the Fockewulf 190?

And when is the Tiger tank in recarnate?

And, you know, where is the Gwaderian and where is the von Manstein in this country?

Because they're there.

And that's what people are going to say.

That's what I have a feeling of.

I get the feeling that there's something stealthy going on there.

They're sitting in the background, but they've got something brewing underneath that German skin of theirs.

Well, we had some brilliant people who formed post-war NATO and Europe.

I remember that.

So if you look back at what went on there and the discussion between Truman at Potsdam and the British, Churchill and then Attlee, and then you look at a lot of the diplomatic moves, it was basically cut Germany in half, and that will stop a re-emergent Prussian militarism.

And that lasted until 89.

And then when it was recombined, there was the other reality.

And that other reality is that it was within NATO.

And then the next reality is that it was in the EU.

Now, all three of those things were deterrence from traditional German irredentism.

And to use another word, I'm kind of infatuated with that word this morning.

But they don't apply anymore because NATO has become basically Germany.

The EU is basically Germany.

What Germany says with NATO, they did.

What Germany says with the EU, it does.

And Germany is not divided.

It's united.

So there was one further bridal on German ambition, and that was

two countries in NATO and two alone other than the United States are going to have nuclear weapons.

And that's France and Britain, but not Germany.

And that will be the great question in the next 20 years.

When they say they're going to rearm and all of this, if they become nuclear, then we're back to 19th century Germany or early 20th century Germany.

That's the one thing that

survives of the people who created the post-war order and that, as I said, the slogan, Russia Out American, and Germany down.

Yeah, yeah.

And so we now in this podcast, we've just reified that 1990s when they started talking about Germany reunited.

Oh, no, we've got a monster on our hands.

And they kind of stayed quiet until, who knows, until when they're still a little bit quiet, but that monster may come out again.

Yeah, well, I mean,

put it this way, if you were an ethnic reductionist, when I go to Florence and I have a cappuccino, the Italians have a two-hour lunch and they're very friendly.

Same is true in Spain.

When you go to the Netherlands, everybody, you know, they're one of the most capable people in the world.

When you go to Britain, you just think, I thought Britain didn't work anymore.

I thought that the British have lost their manners.

I thought that it's not.

It still works.

And then you go to Germany and you get this impression that somewhere over there in Berlin are all of those Kurds and Turks, and they're ever going to be fully intermarried, assimilated, and integrated.

And they lecture you on race, but you're never going to see Susan Rice or Condoleezza Rice as Chancellor or National Security Advisor of Germany.

And

they keep talking about the United States or, I don't know what, bullies, but you go and talk to Germans at, you know, at restaurants and everything, and they're pretty rude.

And I have a lot of Germans' friends, so I don't mean that as a stereotype.

So I don't know.

You remember what Hitler said about it?

Remember what Hitler wrote about in his crazy.

Everybody should read Table Talk, the transcripts of his maniacal nighttime ramblings, but he was really worried about the United States.

I know he said we were cowboys and that Gwadarian with one division could stop the cowboys on the coast of France.

But he also said, I'm very worried because the American army's got Germans.

And he would do rant and say it's the largest minority in the United States.

And they're big strapping boys from our farms that, you know, had six boys and they had no food and they were tough and they were hardened with poverty.

And they went to the United States and they just took over the country.

And now it's one of the tragedies of history that our Germans that are sophisticated and and have been acculturated and and a little soft now they have to meet these american germans storming on the beach that are six feet i mean he really went all into that so he had a lot of crazy ideas that's for sure well victor i want to thank you for coming out of your garden for this hour to fill us with wisdom on international affairs it's been a fascinating hour thank you thank you oh victor i forgot to say something go ahead semi you are the martin and Nilly Anderson

military history and classics at the Hoover.

Never know.

I'm the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And your website is victorhanson.com.

So you can join us there.

Thank you.

And

I always say to everybody, nothing is.

forever.

So I take a podcast very seriously.

I take my column very seriously, books, Hoover, and I have the idea.

I guess it's from farming when I, just to go on one last excursion.

I had a Santa Rosa orchard, four acres.

We really needed the money.

And my brother and I and cousin, we had pruned the whole thing ourselves.

We had thinned it, fertilized it.

It looked beautiful.

We had what we used to call two by three by four.

Three by four Santa Rosas, they're almost like a small tennis ball.

They were beautiful.

And that year, that loan year, the price was about $14 a box.

And on that little four acres, I looked at each tree.

I thought we're going to get about 800 boxes an acre, and that would be 3,000 boxes.

We could make 30,000 since we did all the labor ourselves.

We could walk away with $25,000.

And I was already thinking, hmm, new Massey 265,

a new Domri's 10-foot disc.

I can get rid of that little stupid warp used pack tank that blows up on me every time I drive it.

I can get rid of that old Oliver.

I can get a, you know, Ford, 5,000.

I had all these these ideas.

And then it got right around

bloom was wonderful.

The bees did their job as we thought they'd do.

It was cross-pollinated.

It looked beautiful.

We thinned it, as I said, and the plums were growing like crazy.

It never, ever

hails in late April and early May.

The crop was going to be ready about June 15th.

And all of a sudden, this big black cloud came over the San Joaquin Valley.

In those days, they didn't have these guns that we have, these sonic guns that you shoot, you hear them, and they break up the hail and make it into salt, so to speak.

But it started to hail.

I drove around and I noticed that two miles from my house, it wasn't hailing.

A mile from my house, it was starting to hail.

At my house, it looked like I had mothballs coming down.

And within 20 seconds, it shredded that entire orchard.

It just destroyed it.

And when it was all over, it was 20 minutes later.

The wind had taken this freak storm out.

It was sunny.

We went out there and the leaves were on the ground.

Half the fruit was on the ground.

And 10 days later, what was not on the ground looked like it had the worst case of acne, each plum, and you couldn't sell it.

And it destroyed the whole thing.

And after that, I said, as long as I'm on this earth, I'm never going to count on anything, anything.

And I could match that with raisin crops that were lost in 80 and

82 and 79 and 78.

So I said to myself, nothing is for sure.

You can be fired.

All of you should remember that.

Tenure doesn't mean anything.

Job security doesn't mean anything.

There's nothing for real in this world.

Somebody who doesn't like you, or some lapse on your part, some human frailty that can come out in nemesis fashion.

So you have to get up every morning and enjoy the day and say,

I live today, Wixie.

And have moderate expectations.

Yes, and don't ever let Ubis land on your shoulder and incur or invite a nemesis because it'll come.

So be humble and pay attention to every station in life.

But I had that idea.

So when you said, oh, I forgot, you're the,

I thought,

are you trying to insinuate something that I have been fired today and I had a call that I didn't answer?

And it's possible.

It really is possible.

I've said something.

This podcast probably is not popular at Stanford.

Yeah, well, I'm not in control of that.

So I feel sure that you haven't been fired today.

And with that, we'll have to say goodbye here.

Okay, thank you.

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

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