The Classicist: Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor

35m

Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler talk about some myths, moments, and men in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, especially the Japanese General Yamamoto, Japan's imperial culture, and Japan today.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Listen and follow along

Transcript

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Monday, December 6, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the namesake, and star of the show is Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's many things.

He's a military historian.

And today, we are going to look at an anniversary happening tomorrow and talk about Pearl Harbor right after this important message.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property.

And you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, titlelock.com/slash victor.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

Tomorrow is December 7th and 80 years to the day, the Japanese military navy attacked the U.S.

port at Pearl Harbor, sneak attack,

and devastated the American Pacific Fleet, not entirely.

It also attacked American forces in the Philippines 10 hours later.

This is something Victor has written about before at length, especially in his book, The Second World Wars, but he's a kind of a new discussion about Pearl Harbor and misremembering it.

And he's written a piece for American Greatness that was published yesterday.

You'll find it on AmericanGreatness.com.

Victor, Misremembering Pearl Harbor, the subhead for this piece is titled, The Tactically Brilliant but Strategically Crazy Attack on Pearl Harbor, Unleashed Incalculable Fur Against a Once Sophisticated Japanese Empire, which foolishly attacked the United States at peace.

Victor, what prompted you to write this essay?

Tomorrow is, I'm speaking, Jack and I are on Monday.

So tomorrow is the 7th, and that'll be December 7th, that's the 80th anniversary.

But also what prompted me was two things.

We don't study American history in general and military history in particular.

So I would bet if we asked 10 people on the streets, only three would know what Pearl Harbor was.

So that's number one.

And number two, to the degree that we do teach it and we do talk about it, it's usually that this prompted a race war, or we cut off oil exports to Japan and forced it in, or we were part of a colonial empire in the Philippines.

All quarter and eighth truths.

The truth was that the Japanese Empire was an expansionist, brutal, sadistic empire.

It would kill 15 million people in China and 4 million people in Asia, and it had subdued and enslaved Korea.

And it looked toward the Pacific,

and it saw all of the natural resources, oil, rubber, tin, ores, coal, all the things it needed for its empire.

The only problem was there were Europeans there, and that meant Somebody was going to stop them.

But then something happened, Jack.

Hitler invaded on September 1st, Poland, and within a year, France was gone and the Netherlands was gone as independent entities.

And that meant the oil-rich Indonesia, what we call then

the Dutch East Indies, places like Java, et cetera, were wide open.

And that meant rich, rich Southeast Asia, the breadbasket, Indochina, I should say.

the breadbasket of the region was no longer under French control, at least Vichy France it might have been.

And then the British were the only people that had survived Hitler and they were beleaguered and they were struggling and being bombed and etc, etc.

And people thought, well, we can get all of rubber-rich Malaysia and Singapore.

So That's why they started the war was to get resources and to extend their Asian, China, Korean empire all the way to Hawaii.

The only problem was the United States was on the way.

And although we didn't have a bigger Pacific fleet than Japan did, we had a bigger overall fleet.

They were third in the world behind Britain, which had the largest.

Now, had they, as I said in the article, had they just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor and attacked and taken Singapore and Malaysia as they eventually did, and taken Indonesia as they did, and taken Southeast Asia, which they already basically had,

and then maybe even the Marianas and other places they took, I don't think we would have done much.

I think we would have, we were in a very isolated, but attacking on a Sunday morning without a declaration of war during a time of peace, killing,

you know, over 2,400 Americans, that outraged America.

And it was tactically brilliant in the sense of how do you go almost 4,000 miles in midwinter on choppy seas and when you have spies everywhere and nobody apparently saw these six fleet carriers missing from Tokyo Bay and Yokohama and they were able to observe radio silence and communicated in foul weather through flags and lights but not radio and then after sending two waves into

Pearl Harbor they got away and they'd had very few losses you know three dozen planes or so So it was tactically brilliant.

But strategically, it was a disaster because all of a sudden they brought in a power against them that would eventually have more ships, whether we adjudicate that by the number of warships or the total tonnage than all the navies in the world combined.

The American Navy was larger by 1944 in August, September, October.

And by December, it had a larger GDP than the Soviet Union, Britain.

Germany and Japan and what was left of Italy combined.

So how you figure that out.

And as I said in the piece, Admiral Yamamoto was considered a tragic figure and a brilliant guy and a haiku poet and all that, but he was the architect of this disaster for the Japanese.

Victor, could we talk about, there's a number of things here to questions to ask, but let's talk about Yamamoto because, yeah, that's what you call him, that he is considered the tragic hero and has been portrayed as such, the Yamamoto myth.

To the disdain of some people listening, I just have to read this.

What is said about Yamamoto on Wikipedia, his Wikipedia entry?

It says, he promoted a policy of a strong fleet to project force through gunboat diplomacy, as opposed to what the army wanted to do.

This stance led him to oppose the invasion of China.

He also opposed war against the United States, partly because of his studies at Harvard and his two postings as U.S.

naval attaché.

He could speak English fluently.

Yamamoto traveled extensively in the United States during his tour of duty there, where he studied American customs and business practices.

And one more thing, Yamamoto opposed the Japanese invasion of Northeast China in 1931, the subsequent full-scale land war with China in 1937, and the tripartite pact with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in 1940.

Now, this, I think, is...

People want to find out.

I'm doing a research paper.

I have to do a report on World War II and Japan and Yamamoto.

This is what people are going to go go to.

And this makes him out to be, yeah, a tragic hero.

But you say he's not.

No, part of what they miss is that there was an enormous rivalry between the Navy and the Army and the Army Air Corps.

And the Army did not have tactical parity with the West.

So when they were fighting along the Mongolian border, in August of 1939, they were really taking a beating by the Russians.

And that was especially true when Hitler stabbed them in the back and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of August 23rd, because that unleashed all of Russian's forces to concentrate in the east.

Of course, they were going to reciprocate in April of 1941 by having their own non-aggression pact that Hitler would later regret.

But my point is that their tanks, their artillery, their automatic weapons, they had some good mortars, but they were not up to Western standards.

And they were only really

able

to be successful in Malaysia against undermanned forces without air power.

As long as they had air power and air cover, they were pretty good in 1941 and 42, or when they could dig in under coral and concrete.

But they were not a mobile, deadly army like the American Army or the Russian Army, the German Army, or the British Army.

The second was that in the Navy, they did have parity.

When you look at their battleships or their carriers, they had more than the United States and Britain, and they were excellent.

They had excellent night vision.

They had a better torpedo than anybody in the world.

Their destroyers were phenomenal.

And they were way ahead of us in terms of seasoned pilots, carrier pilots.

So Yamamoto made the argument, I will resign unless I get to my sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the Navy is losing out because the Army is bogged down in China.

And the Army wanted to almost go into Russia.

And remember, on June 22nd, there was a big argument among the Japanese military planners and diplomats whether they should break their April 1941 non-aggression pact and attack Russia from the east.

And of course, Hitler and people around him at first didn't want them to do that.

They thought, well, we're going to overrun them in six weeks.

We don't want to give the spoils to the Japanese.

But by December,

January, February of 1942, they most truly wanted the Japanese.

And Yamamoto wisely said that would be a disaster to fight on land against the Russians.

I'm not sure if it would have been given two Axis armies from both sides.

But I know that it was a disaster listening to Yamamoto and

doing just enough damage and killing enough Americans to enrage America, but not doing enough to materially hurt the United States war effort.

The other thing he didn't understand was that under the three Carl Vinson Naval Act in the 1930s, the entire fleet that would replace the one damaged, you know, five battleships sunk, four damaged, it was already in motion.

So we were scheduled by late 42 and mid-43 to start delivering Essex-class aircraft carriers.

And

we would start North Carolina battleships, and then finally, you know, the Iowa-class, four huge battleships, the best in the world.

The Belayo submarine, the Gato submarine, they were better than anything in the world.

So that he didn't realize that what they attacked on Pearl Harbor were pre-1920, and some of them were dreadnoughts.

So they were old, slow battleships.

And the carrier Saratoga, enterprise and lexington were not there so yeah what are your thoughts about that had what if they had been there and had been well that would have been a different story because we needed the enterprise and

and the lexington and the enterprise would fight four months later in early may at the battle of coral sea and they sunk one light carrier.

They damaged a heavy carrier and they kind of wiped out the air crews of another one.

So when they fought a month later at Midway, they were down one light carrier and two heavy carriers and instrumental.

And the Lexington, remember, was sunk at Coral Sea.

And that was instrumental that the Lexington and the Enterprise were there.

Had they been at Pearl Harbor, it would have been pretty bad.

I don't think we would have won Coral Sea and they would have landed at Port Morsby and they would have been, Australia would have been in big trouble.

And at Midway, remember, we had Enterprise and

we had Enterprise and Hornet

and Yorktown Yorktown was sunk it was damaged at Coral Sea but it it was miraculously patched up but we lost that at Midway So I guess what I'm saying is that it would have been a disaster.

The two big carriers were battlecruisers.

They were the Lexington and the Saratoga twins.

And under the naval limitation treaties, they were converted from battlecruisers battlecruisers of 38,000 tons, huge ships into carriers.

They had a lot of problems.

Their smoke got into the crew members' quarters and stuff, but they were huge.

They even had eight-inch naval guns.

So they were big.

And then we rushed right before the war, we rushed a new class of

Yorktown or Enterprise carrier.

They're only about 20, 22,000 tons, and there were four of them, the Yorktown, the Enterprise, the Wasp, and the Hornet.

And as you know, all all of them got sunk except the Enterprise.

The Enterprise was the only aircraft carrier that fought basically the first days of the war, and it went through the entire war and was not damaged.

Victor, I'd like to remind our listeners about the Second World Wars, and they can find a link to that in other books at your website, victorhanson.com.

Victor, let's talk about, you mentioned before, you know, the fleet slipping out of the Japanese harbors.

It seemed like there was no intelligence.

So I'd like to talk about miscues of the day right now.

And then the attack on the Philippines, which happened, I think about 10 hours after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack.

The Philippines was not a sneak attack.

And yet it seems that General MacArthur mishandled.

the initial response to what he knew was coming.

I could be wrong, but what are your thoughts about the American intelligence operation, were there failures, and MacArthur's handling of the news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked?

Well, actually, the Americans had broken the Japanese naval code, Purple Code.

So

they understood that something was going to happen in the next week or so around Pearl Harbor.

Some people thought that it might be the Philippines.

Some people thought it might be Pearl Harbor.

Some people thought it might be San Francisco.

Some people thought it was just Little Wake Island.

But there was enough information there to suggest, because of our, we had really good decoders and to suggest that something was up so i guess that what i'm trying to say is that we did as well as we could

by uh knowing something was up we didn't we should have you know noticed six carriers were missing from japan's ports but that's another story there's a lot of criticism that we had these primitive radar stations that picked up some of the some of the flights coming in and the first two waves, and they didn't notify or they were confused, or they thought they were a B-17 squadron that was coming in.

The problem,

though, once the battle started, we didn't have enough quality fighter craft, the P-40s or P-39s, all of them.

They were not anywhere near the zero.

And our battleships were, as I said, old and ossified.

And yet, if you look at the failure tactically, even though it was a brilliant tactical victory, they needed at least two more waves, authorities.

So they had one and then two.

And then they sort of was Admiral Nagumo, who always panicked in times of stress.

And he said, you know, we're taking some losses because they didn't have a very good pilot training program that would train Japanese pilots in a mass scale like the Americans did.

And so they were very worried about losing their pilots.

So they did not have a third or fourth strike.

Had they done that, they probably have lost another 20 planes or so, but they could have taken out all of the oil, stored oil and fuel for the entire Pacific Fleet for six months and any other complementary expeditionary force or anything.

And they didn't do that.

They could have wrecked the harbor.

They could have wrecked the dock works.

They could have wrecked the machine shops.

They could have wrecked the airfield.

They didn't do that.

And so tactically, everybody got angry and they woke up and said, wow, we were going to replace these battleships in six months anyway.

And you know what?

If we had known about it and these eight battleships had steamed out of Pearl Harbor and they'd gone way out in the high seas to meet them, they had no air cover and their radar was very primitive, if not non-existent.

They were slow and they would have probably been die-bombed and killed on the high seas.

And instead of losing 2,400, we probably would have lost, you know, 10,000 or more.

And so it was an ironic battle, but strategically was what came away with the idea that we were going to go to war with Japan.

And then no one can figure it out why Hitler declared war on us,

because there was no sign that the United States was going to declare war in Germany or Italy.

In fact, you know, as everybody said, why would we fight Germany when they haven't attacked us when Japan has?

And then when Germany declared war on us on the 11th, and we right away reciprocally declared war on them.

People said, Well, I mean, Germany's second because they haven't attacked us, so we're going to go with the people who attacked us.

And of course, it was just the opposite, the official policy, Europe first.

Although, for all the talk of Europe first,

we were pretty brilliant how we did it.

We were such, so wealthy and so powerful that we sent certain forces to the Pacific and certain to Europe, you know, Hellcat Corsair fighters, eventually to the Pacific, most of our carriers, all of our Marine divisions, a few crack army, but not the most.

And then we sent most of our B-17 strategic bombing and heavy armor, archilly and army divisions to the European theater.

But it was a shock that suddenly people woke up and thought three days later, now Nazi Germany is declared.

What do we do to them?

Speaking of Nazi Germany, Victor, you write in this piece, and again, it's called Misremembering Pearl Harbor.

It's available at American Greatness.

You wrote this.

The United States had further lost deterrence in Japanese eyes because it did nothing when its chief allies, Britain and France, were attacked by Nazi Germany in 1940.

The former bombed in autumn 1940 and spring 1941.

The latter conquered in seven weeks by the Wehrmacht in May 1940.

Now, this is the main point here.

More germanely, Japan believed that with the German army at the time of Pearl Harbor, just a few miles from the suburbs of Moscow, the Soviet Union would likely fall within days.

Victor, is that a coincidence in a sense?

Or do you think,

let's say the Soviets had withstood the initial attacks from Germany and German troops were not in Moscow suburbs, do you think Pearl Harbor, the attack on America, would have happened?

Sorry to throw a such hypothetical at you.

Japanese diplomats did not give up-to-date, daily, credible intelligence about where Germany was.

They were so giddy, the Japanese were, about Hitler's success that when he invaded the Soviet Union, they were always a week or two behind.

You can actually say that in late November, even though they had gone further in, they were in big trouble.

But I think it was on December 1st or 2nd, the famous Wehrmacht claimed that they saw the spires of the Kremlin, or somebody said that they were within a few yards of the first subway station in Moscow.

It's all enshrined in Nazi lore, but that's the kind of information they got on the 7th.

Whereas the actual situation was they were already overextended and there were troops coming probably from Siberia.

They'd already made that decision the Japanese were not going to attack.

from the east and they were bringing thousands of troops over in the coldest winter in 50 years.

And so they had no winter clothing.

So then they were going to withdraw 50, 60, 70 miles.

But that happened in the latter part of December.

So the Japanese really did think that there was a good chance that Germany, as it had done with its 11 other wars in Europe, was going to knock out the Soviet Union and there would be no need to go into the East.

And they hadn't been invited anyway.

Little did they realize that had they not attacked the United States

and had coordinated with Hitler and tied down 250,000 Eastern Russian troops, Siberian troops as well, and sort of going back into the Mongolian area and stuff,

then

the Wehrmacht would have done pretty well and

they wouldn't have been bogged down, either one of them, with us.

But it was that decision at Pearl Harbor, and Hitler didn't know about it.

He didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was.

He asked Pearl Harbor, where's that?

Oh, this is so great.

We don't have a very good service navy, you know.

And

he didn't.

And so when he looked at Japan, he saw this tremendous defeat of the Americans at Pearl Harbor.

He thought, well, they're going to tie down the entire American fleet.

And we know this is exactly what we need.

And it just turned out to be crazy.

Victor, back on the Philippines, what happened on December, I don't know if it was December 7th, that

Philippine time, or December 8th, but it was was 10 hours or so after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Is there any defense of MacArthur or the military leadership of the Philippines for allowing what transpired that day?

MacArthur had a

propensity to be surprised, and he was at the Philippines, even though he'd been given warning.

The main problem with him was that he suffered from overconfidence and then underconfidence.

And so he would get surprised and he was completely surprised at Philippines, even though that he had, he heard about it, you know, on the radio from, I don't know, CBS News.

So there was a lot of chance to, they had a whole bunch of these P-40s.

They weren't a great fireplane, but they were better than what P-36s and P-39s and the rest of them.

But they had them all parked, you know, wingtip to wingtip, and they did not evacuate them to other fields that were more distant from the trajectory of attack.

They had radar that told them that the Japanese bombers were coming.

And I think they had two or three squadrons of B-17s there, and they were easily machine gunned and taken out of action.

So yes, his air force was completely, I don't know who you would blame, but it was Brereton and Sutherland.

And I guess you could even blame, he was a very good commander, Emmin O'Donnell, Rosie O'Donnell, I guess.

I mean, he he blamed them, I should say.

So

the same thing happened, Jack, in Korea, where

Giddy, after the Incheon success, MacArthur, in September of 1950, he said we can go all the way to the Yalu.

And people had cautioned him and said, you know, the Yalu River, the Chinese border to the north, as we go north, it's getting colder and the Korean Peninsula widens and we have more territory.

And then we have to garrison our march and we'll have fewer troops at the spear point and we're getting very close to Manchuria.

Oh, they won't invade.

They would never invade.

Oh, they're and they invaded in November, December 1950.

And the same thing happened to the Philippines.

Oh, you know,

all during August, September, he could have been in a war footing.

And then finally, you know, he was asked to leave and he escaped.

And then when you look at what he did later, you can argue that he shouldn't have gone back to the Philippines, or at least in the manner we did.

But he was very successful.

His sort of alternate plan to go

into,

you know, Dutch East Indies and go around and then take Philippines and then go over to Formosa

and launch an attack on Japan that way rather than the island hopping directly toward Tokyo, the Nimitz marine plan.

He was a very difficult person.

He had an enormous self-regard and that led to overconfidence.

And then he would kind of panic and think that, you know, it was hopeless.

If you look at the actual number of American troops on the ground in the Philippines and the number of troops that attacked them, and the same thing would be true of Singapore and Malaya versus the Japanese, the Americans, the British were not in a bad situation.

They just kind of panicked and they were, I don't know what, overconfident, but underconfident.

And then when they got attacked, it was, oh, we got to go to Corregidor.

And then when they got to Corregidor, they found out out the guns were not pointed, just like the Singapore guns, in the right direction, and they didn't have enough aircraft power.

And I mean, they held out courageously for months until April.

But MacArthur was always surprised and he was always great in his recoveries.

Yeah.

But speaking of overconfidence, Victor, and you've written about Japanese confidence, actually line here that you boiled it down to a confident and cruel Japanese empire.

Let's talk about their confidence and where it came from.

So, I mean, it's 1941 and they're thinking, okay,

Korea, China, we can control Southeast Asia, the Dutch Indies, Burma, Thailand, India, Australia, and actually run these places, not just have influence over them, but to occupy and run them.

I mean, this is a monstrous confidence, but it had it.

Where might that have come from?

I mean, I don't know if this is a good way to look at it, but go go back to japan in 1900 was there something about the japanese political social mindset that you could see connecting to wanting to have this kind of massive global hegemony were a very confident culture and they had no problem with emulation or cultural appropriation so

after the reopening or the opening of japan in the 1860s and 70s, they discovered very quickly that they were inadequate as far as Western powers.

And so they sent about a quarter of a million engineers to Britain over the next 20 years to copy, just sort of like the communist Chinese do now, British nautical engineering, British military, naval organization.

And they did the same thing with land forces, first to France, and then after France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War to Germany and to copy German tactics, tactics, German organization.

And they were very good at it.

And they were so good early on, I mean, in 1905, they blew up the Tsar's fleet in the Russo-Japanese War.

So after that, they shocked people.

And they were very bitter about World War I.

They were on the Allies' side, and they sent a fleet into the Mediterranean to make sure that the Central Powers did not.

you know, bother the British colony.

And they didn't get anything out of it.

They thought they were going to get spoils or they were going to get divide the loot up at Versailles and they didn't.

And they were very bitter and they were very confident as they saw other fleets in World War I and they had copied and they made, I shouldn't say they just copied, they copied and improved where they could.

And in terms of optics and range finding and long-range artillery and night fighting.

Boy, in those five battles, the so-called sea battles of Guadalcanal, the first two or three, they were very good.

And so they were very confident people and they were westernized.

But my point is they didn't have any, oh, wow, we're selling out our culture.

I mean, there were dissidents, but they just felt whatever works will take it and make it better.

We don't care where it comes from because we're a superior race.

That made them kind of like the Chinese today, where the Chinese attitude is, we're the superior race, but we will buy and steal and

assume and appropriate from any inferior race that we feel is ahead of us.

Well, let's talk about Japan and 2021.

That'll be our final question right after this important message.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com/slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Classicist.

Again, we are recording on Monday, December 6th, looking ahead to tomorrow, which marks the 80 years to the day of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

Victor, it's 2021.

Japan is part of the coalition of nations, Australia, United States, Korea, India, that are counterbalance to Red China.

But Japan has its hands tied still somewhat militarily based on its surrender and treaties post-World War II.

I guess the question I want to ask is: should Japan in 2021 have a little more military muscle to be a better counterweight to Red China?

Well, they already are.

They're starting to build carriers.

Kind of scary when two of them are called the Kaga and the Akagi, two of the six flagship carriers that were at Pearl Harbor.

But yes, they are rearming, and they're doing it in concert with the Australians and the Taiwanese and the South Koreans and the Americans in India.

The problem is that all of their increased military spending, all of these, the team or the quad or whatever term they use, is less than it's about a half of what China is spending alone on military increases.

So the idea was that the United States was going to pay attention to China's neighbors and encourage Australia and Philippines and Vietnam and Taiwan and Korea and Japan, except Australia and India.

And then under our leadership, then we would have ports, bases, missiles, naval assets that were each very much smaller than China, but all together equal or bigger.

And then that would hem China in.

That was the idea.

But the Asian pivot didn't work too well under Obama.

And we've cut military spending and the Afghan war was a disaster.

And the old Kissinger credo that Russia shall not be a better friend to China nor China to Russia than either one is to us was kind of destroyed under Russian collusion hopes.

So it used to be that we tried to play Russia off China and vice versa.

But now they seem to be working in concert against us.

And there's a sense, I'm very worried now because I think after Afghanistan and cuts in the military, and you listen to what NATO countries are saying about the aggression in Ukraine, you get the impression that the United States is not up to it.

And China knows that and Russia knows it.

And I think Russia is going to move.

It's either going to put the squeeze on, starting with Ukraine, just put the squeeze on them, mass troops on their border, harass them the way China is doing with Taiwan, and then until they finally say, okay, please, please, here's some concessions, or they're going to go in there.

And I don't think the United States or NATO is going to do much about it.

That's what they assume.

Well, Victor, that's almost all the time we have for this episode of The Classicist.

A couple of things, though, to raise.

Again, so many listeners go to iTunes and leave a five-star rating.

We're very grateful for that.

Some even write comments.

And here's one from the other day by Gonan Delete.

And it's titled Farming Episodes.

Thank you for these discussions of farming life, which you had with Sammy Wink recently.

The longer the episodes go, the better.

I wish Victor and Sammy would go on for 10 hours, to be honest.

As a little kid who rode on the front of a sickle watching the bar with amazement, the power and precision of these machines, these were the happiest times of life.

We weren't obsessed with being careful or hay fever or falling.

If they fell, they fell backwards, not forwards.

We learned to be agile and hang on.

American ingenuity has improved improved life, but not made it happier.

All the best to you, Victor, Sammy, and Jack.

Thank you, gone and delete.

To all our listeners, please visit victorhandson.com.

That's the Blade of Perseus, his website, where you will find a tremendous amount of original content.

You can only read it there.

So please subscribe.

$5 a month, $50 for the year.

You'll find links to Victor's books.

And as I've said before, like, with the Second World Wars, The Dying Citizen, many of them make excellent gifts.

And of course, for your own private library.

As for me, please consider visit civilthoughts.com, sign up for the newsletter.

It's free.

We don't ask anything.

Just we send you 12 or so interesting links a week, things we think might entertain you.

Victor, thanks so much for this special discussion on Pearl Harbor.

We thank those who have served and those who serve there and elsewhere.

And we will be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thank you, Jack.

And I know all of our listeners know a lot about Pearl Harbor.

And I urge them all to tell your children and your grandchildren to keep up that tradition of being informed about America's history because it's in danger of being lost completely among our new generation.

And what happened in Pearl Harbor should never be forgotten.

Okay, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks again.