The Classicist: War

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist.

We are recording on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021.

It's the first day of fall.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis Hanson is the star, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Everything Victor writes, every appearance he makes, you're going to find it or links to it at his website, victorhanson.com.

The Blade of Perseus, there's a lot of material on there that you need to subscribe to in order to read.

We'll talk more about that later.

We have here on the classicist, we tend to talk about Victor's pieces at American greatness and some of the pieces he has written for his website.

And that's what we will do.

First, we will get Victor's thoughts on the death of a friend and colleague, Angela Cotavilla, and we'll do that right after this message.

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

We are one of the three shows under the umbrella of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

The other is one other is the traditionalist.

I do that with Victor, and the great Sammy Wink does the culturalist.

We thank everyone for listening.

Victor, I know you were a friend of Angelo Cotavilla.

I know he wrote frequently for

Strategica, the important online journal that Hoover Institution publishes and that you oversee.

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share about Angelo?

I do.

You know, Angelo Cotavilla died on Sunday.

He was 78, 1943 to 2021.

There were a lot of misinformation at first how he died, that he was hit by a drunk driver.

He was walking and sightswiped.

But it seems to me that if you look at the, I've been trying to find the police reports.

He drifted off the side of the road and there was a semi park there that shouldn't have been parked there, but there was no culpability.

And he hit it and died.

But and that was a great tragedy.

I mean, if you look at his life, he came as an immigrant from northern Italy when he was 12.

And he was variously, he had a PhD in strategic international relations.

He was well before I got there in 2003.

He had been at the Hoover Institution as a senior research fellow in the 80s.

He went to Boston University, was a professor.

He was a commentator.

He wrote 10 or 12 major books.

He had up near Plymouth, California, which is in the foothills, sort of east, northeast, maybe directly east of Sonora, the Mariposa, north of Mariposa area, foothill about 2,000, 3,000 feet.

He had a vineyard there.

And I got to know him really well.

First of all, when I had supported the Iraq war in 2003, he'd written me kind of a sharp note and thought it was a mistake, but it was a very learned note.

And he'd been kind of critical of things I had written.

So about eight years ago, we at the Hoover Institution under then Director John Rayson, he asked me, you know, he says, Victor, this is war, revolution, and peace.

That's our theme.

And you're a military historian.

Why aren't we having some institutional?

And I said, just tell me, John.

So he said, let's form a group and let's get the best group of people we can get.

And we'll raise the money.

You and I will raise the money.

And we travel around the country for the year and raise the money.

And then we decided to pay people a little bit of higher standard word.

And we had an online magazine, Strategic, which you've referenced a lot, Jack.

It's been a very successful venue under the managing direction of my assistant, David Berkey, and Bruce Thornton, who's the editor.

David's the managing editor.

I guess I'm the editor-in-chief, but my duties pale in comparison to theirs.

But nevertheless, we brought him into the group as one of the inaugural members.

And boy, it was a really,

it is, it's still in existence.

It's an action-packed electric group.

I mean, you've got Ed Lutwack, you've got Walter Russell Mead, you have Neil Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, Barry Strauss, H.R.

McMaster, Jim Mouse.

You have all different points of view.

And we have guests and we have people that come into the arena, so to speak, and then they address us.

Well, Angelo was the most incisive questioner, sometimes the most cutting.

And he had no orthodoxy that one could think of.

He was a heterodox thinker.

He was kind of a contrarian, but he was extremely learned.

And what I mean by that, Jack, is that he would give a long excursus on the advantages of the strategic defense initiative that he had advised the Reagan administration, usually in the context of correcting somebody who was wrong, he felt in referencing it.

And then we took our 15-minute break and he would come over here and say, Victor, what is this classical Latin term for this northern Italian dialect?

And I'd answer him.

And then the next thing he says, so you produce fresh grapes and raisins and I produce wine.

Now tell me exactly the differences in cultivation technique when you're preparing.

And I'd say, and he was kind of forceful.

I said, do you know anything about Jabrelin?

Do you know anything about Gurley?

No, I don't.

I said, let me instruct you, Angelo, and try to tit for tat.

But what was always so nice about him was that when you had these butt-to-butt, head-to-head conversations, and at dinner, we always would have everybody to dinner.

We still do.

And yet he would be, he would seek out the people that he had been most confrontational with, and then in friendship, wine, he was very affable.

He's known in his later years, he was known for a lot of early work.

He wrote that, I think it's the best introduction to military strategy and war called War, Means and Ends.

And it's co-authored by a very gifted UC Berkeley, now late professor, Paul Seaberry.

But that book, if you want to know a very, very historically accurate impression of why wars start, why deterrence breaks down, how wars are conducted, why they end or why they don't, read that book.

It's just a brilliant.

introduction.

But then in the last 15 years,

he began to focus sort of like David Brooks did with Bobos in Paradise, but in a much more, I think, sophisticated and analytical fashion on what he called the

elite or what I think other people, Joel Kotkin has called the cleric.

or the ruling class is the word he used in his best-selling book that Rush Limbaugh, the introduction in the paperback, the ruling class.

And his thesis was whether it was due to the hollowing out of the interior or globalization that focused on the coast and enriched them or the undue attention that we gave to university degrees, the brand or the letters after your name rather than the actual content of your knowledge acquired during university training.

He really came to have contempt for this ruling class.

And these are the people with degrees that are influential in corporate America, corporate boardroom, primarily left-wing and wealthy.

And he really dissected that ambiguity or paradox of very very wealthy people virtue signaling their hard left fides on the understanding that none of the consequences of their own crackpot ideologies was to be taken seriously because it never applied to themselves but he was very successful on that and i just want to finish jack but he was a very courageous guy he was a very athletic person in his youth and he got a virus after i think he told me and i don't know if i can remember the stories right but after hard training or running he had a lingering virus that infected his heart so at middle age he had a heart transplant at Stanford and then he recovered but those were the earlier days when they had very strong immune suppressant drugs right and through a series of aging but also I think some diagnostic testing that was not

that we would not do now that second heart his first transplant was infected and even though he was an at an age where he probably in his, I think he was in his early 60s at the time, would not been able to have a second transplant or couldn't endure it, they had been culpable, they being the team.

And I don't want to say that without evidence.

I'm not sure that that story,

these are the accounts that I've seen, but I've never seen written documentation.

So somebody was culpable because the heart was rejected a little earlier than anticipated.

So they allowed him to get at an advanced age a second heart.

That would be his third heart that he lived with.

And the drugs were not so immune suppressant as they had been earlier and he did very well on them.

But what I'm getting at is that when you would talk to him, there was never any self-pity or oh look what I've been through or oh my

I didn't say I didn't mean to say that because I didn't feel well.

He just was completely oblivious.

And I one time said to him, So you have to take these very difficult antibiotics because you're taking immune suppressant drugs.

He said, You're supposed to, Victor, but I have a life to live.

I have things to write.

I have places to go.

I can't take these dangerous classes of antibiotics.

So

he had a very strange devotion to his discipline.

And he was one of these last people that I would call a polymath.

He knew a lot of languages and he read literature.

And he reminds me in many ways in that same group.

There are four or five people that are very controversial in military analyses

and literature, and I would rank among them, they tend to be similar.

One is Ed Lutwack that could be polarizing, but he's absolutely brilliant, eccentric.

Another is Ralph Peters, with whom I disagree with, but I have sometimes, I agree with him a lot, but he's another polymath, brilliant guy.

Also, he's been a former military officer.

Another person that is unduly criticized, I think, is Douglas McGregor.

I mean, whatever one thinks of Douglas McGregor, McGregor, the guy is an absolute genius.

He's fluent in German.

He understands literature.

And what I'm getting at is these types of people are very important to our intellectual debate in the country because they're, I don't want to say they're not connected, but because they have been outspoken in the past or because they have not been afraid to voice views, even if it's pro-Trump or anti-Trump, they tend to get stigmatized as troublemakers or heterodox thinkers.

And Angelo fits in that category, but yet we can't ever not listen to them because it's almost as if they become liberated.

And I know that when I've listened to McGregor, either in person in a conversation or on television or with Ralph Peters or with Ed Lutwack or with Angelo Cotovia, another one is Williamson Murray, all I have been is taught, elucidated.

because

they're true intellects.

And I think we really lost one with Angelo because despite his sort of concern in his late 70s with heart issues, he did not slow down.

And I don't know what was the cause of his swerve, and we'll find out later, no doubt, but it's a great loss because he had many years of productive exegesis enlightenment that he could have offered the country at large, as he did our group at Hoover.

Thanks for that, Victor.

You were on a Hoover video.

I don't know if it was Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge.

It was?

Okay.

Yeah, we just finished it.

Okay, so you and Peter and H.R.

McMaster were on talking about,

it's called A Lost War and on Afghanistan's past, present, and future.

Listeners can find it on your website, also on YouTube, on Hoover's website, et cetera, uncommon knowledge.

But you made a strong case for why

the policymakers of America who were in favor of

staying in Afghanistan, how they failed to convince the American people, that maybe they didn't even try to convince the American people of what the case was for staying there for 20 years.

So would you, in a nutshell, a big nutshell, if you need to, focus on that, what went wrong

for the case of making the case?

Yeah.

There was a case to be made.

Yeah, there was.

We had a debate, and I think that 60% of the topics that were raised by the host, Peter Robinson, General McNMaster, and I agreed on, i.e., you don't abandon Begram Air Base in the middle of the night.

Whatever your views about the sustainability of the project in Afghanistan, whether as in the case of HR, I think he wanted a longer or maybe a perpetual base.

And I felt that after 20 years, the case had not been made to spend $50 million a day in Afghanistan.

But if that case were to lead

us to withdraw, there was a way to do it over three to four to five years that might have given air support and sustained that either sustained the government or allowed people to get out in safety and not leave 85 million dollars of train invested equipment with its training there so we had a lot of things in common we disagreed and what you're mentioning things that we disagreed on i i should say one thing that i've been very critical of

not that I matter, but I've been very critical of the retired military class, whether they were in the Joint Chiefs or not, for interrupting the chain of command, but more importantly, importantly, violating Article 88, and that is disparaging the Commander-in-Chief.

And I will say that in all of these things, one thing that I felt as I reviewed the career of H.R.

McMaster was he never, after leaving the service, has disparaged the Commander-in-Chief personally.

And second, he was trying to translate the MAGA agenda into existing venues.

Now, some of you are going to say, well, he wasn't a MAGA person.

He wasn't.

But he saw his mission mission as to institutionalize what Trump was trying to do in the sense of, if you don't want to get in between Kurds and Turkish allies, and I don't think we should have, and I think Trump was right about that, then he would say this is position one, two, three, four, five.

If you do one, I think this will happen.

If you do two, and then if his position was not accepted, he didn't leak to the press and say, oh, that SOB.

So I think he's in a very different category than a lot of the people that are very critical.

But what I tried to make in that video, and I welcome people to look at it, it's on my website and the Hoover website, is that

we went in there for three missions very quickly, Jack.

We went in there one to kill Bin Lad, and we eventually did that, although not immediately.

Two, to dispose of the Taliban, we did that successfully, and then to create the conditions under which they could not return to practice their terrorists.

And we did that.

but at great cost, but somewhere because of our success, maybe, or the cost or our attention, that mission naturally, and I don't mean that in a proving fashion, it naturally metamorphosized into we're going to create a consensual society.

And somewhere along that 20-year trajectory,

that ended up with a gay pride flag at the embassy and George Floyd murals and gender studies.

And not just gender studies, multi-million dollar investments in these progressive woke issues.

And I don't know whether that was the military feels that they had been successful since 2015 when they were not so kinetically involved or we had not lost a single soldier during the last 12 months of the Trump administration and the first six months of the Biden administration, and yet the government was still there.

But what I'm getting at is they were not honest with us that this project

20 to 30 million dollars a day was not sustainable.

And by that, I mean at some key point, remember we had the Obama surge where he announced in advance when he was retiring them, retiring the surge, which was ludicrous.

At some point, the military should not have kept saying progress, progress, progress, achievement, achievement, achievement, success, success, success.

Future is rosy.

That's what people like Millie and Austin did.

and other people.

They kept telling us that this was going well, kind of like the South Vietnamese Army in 1975 under Vietnamization.

And that is not accurate when you remember that the President of the United States said to the President of Afghanistan, and this is sort of eerie because it's basically what the House impeached Donald Trump for, although he was far less culpable, when Joe Biden said, Look, whether it's bad or good, I want you to tell people that it's good, even if you know it's bad.

And, you know, we give air support, so you better listen.

In other words, he was making a contingency that the president should lie or do something that he wanted rather than to extend a bipartisan policy of air support.

Remember, Trump had been impeached for supposedly saying, investigate the Biden crime syndicate, or I'm going to hold up aid.

And he didn't hold up aid.

He didn't say that explicitly.

But nevertheless, what I'm getting at is there was no clarity.

There was no cost-to-benefit analyses.

And in that tape,

I tried to make the point, we're in a drought right here.

The water table has dropped 50 feet.

I can look out my window right now and I can see houses where they don't have water.

And those are 20 to 50 to $60,000 a well.

And this is all over the California.

Most people are poor, that are experiencing these problems.

There's whole communities without water.

I could go on about flooding in the South.

I could go on about fires and people wiped out.

So we're running a $30 trillion aggregate debt.

So it was incumbent upon the military to come to the American people and say, look,

we are spending $10, $15 billion, $20 billion a year.

They have $85 billion in our equipment.

It's very important that we do this because if we don't do this, the Taliban is going to come back, al-Qaeda and ISIS will come in there, and they will kill us.

Again, we have to do this.

And it's the only place in Central Asia that we have a base.

And back when we put $300 million in it, we put a billion dollars in the embassy all we need is about 2,500 Donald Trump reduced as you should from 12,000 down to 3,000 but we've got these wonderful NATO allies there's 8,000 of them and with their 8,000 and our three 35 to 2500 whatever the actual figure was we have 12,000 people and we can sustain this with air power at this wonderful base and it's worth that cost And we also, whether it was right or wrong, we've got about 10 or 12 million people who are at risk because they become westernized.

Whether that was smart or not, it's too late now.

They're westernized.

But they never made that argument.

They just said, it's my way or the highway.

And so when they do that and they don't tell us that it's rough, that's difficult, that this is the cost-benefit, this is the good side, this is the bad side, they never did any of that.

So the American people said, you know what?

It's off my radar.

Nobody's getting killed there.

Nobody's getting killed there and the government's still in power.

And how much are you spending?

I don't really know.

So keep doing it.

But

I'm getting kind of tired of it when people get killed.

And every once in a while, people would get killed.

And every once in a while, people would say, you're spending 25 billion.

Why there's not enough money in Fresno County for water.

But nobody made that argument.

That's what they have to do.

And it doesn't do any good to say, well, we have 150 bases all over the world, as I mentioned in that tape,

because You have to defend every one of them then.

And

I can say, yes, Korea, South Korea is absolutely a successful democratic power.

I know it took a long time, 70 years, but it had advantages that Afghanistan did never have.

And North Korea was a dagger at the heart of post-war Japan.

And it was on the borders, the Korean peninsula of both the Soviet Union at the time and communist China.

And it was key to the American defense of democracies, what would become Taiwan or Australia or Japan or South Korea.

So there were geostrategic arguments for NATO and Western Europe or the protection of South Korea.

But I don't think you can use those arguments and transfer them just to Afghanistan unless you're creative and you can really, it's really important.

But when you have an asleep at the wheel military, or I should say, excuse me, the listeners are saying now, wait a minute, Victor, you idiot.

They're not asleep at the wheel.

They're very active.

They're lecturing the Congress on white rage.

Kindy, Professor Kindy.

So they were, and they were scouting out supposed white supremacists among the ranks of the military while they were losing Afghanistan.

Maybe if they had just paid a little less attention to internal audits of U.S.

citizens and more into the declining or deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, they could have saved it.

But I blame the military, and I really do.

I expect that from politicians, but the military, the military has to explain to us exactly what the actual state of events are on the ground.

And if you have to resign your particular posting, that's fine.

When I say resign, also, Jack, we say, well, they never resign.

You know, we're not asking them to resign.

One lieutenant colonel did.

That was very brave, but we're not asking them to resign from the military and give up their pension.

I think we've only had one general in the 20th century, General Edwin Walker, who did that, who was a complete nut.

But I don't, we're just saying, you know, step down from your current billet.

Just say you have to tell the truth, and the truth is antithetical to the untruth official policy.

So, therefore, you're resigning that particular commission.

You'd be punished, but you won't lose your rank or your pension necessarily.

We can't even, we don't get that at all.

So, they're all complicit in this.

I say complicit because how can the American people be told by Joe Biden, the president of the United States, that this has air cover and it's powerful and it outnumbers 300,000 to 70?

He kept saying that, and Joe Biden doesn't know where he is.

So, he was getting fed fed that from the military from secretary of defense alliston and chairman of the joint chiefs his chief military advisor outside of chain of command general milley and it was all untrue the complete lie why he was telling us they knew that this thing was dissolving rapidly and it just imploded it blew up it melted most people said you know the united states is leaving

and they're not going to protect me and I'm a westernized Afghan and I got to get on that grab the wheels of that C-17 and get the hell out of here before they kill me and my family.

Well, Victor, this touches on a lot of what you've written about for your big weekly American Greatness essay.

You also write a shorter piece.

So, the big piece you wrote in the prior week was called The Afghanistan.

I hope I said that right.

Afghanistan of America.

And you talk at length there about the military.

Now, I'm not calling you out here because you actually do call here, given the charges made in the Bob Acosta, Bob Woodward book, Peril, about General Milley, a couple of things you wrote here.

You wrote, one, Millie has been reduced to a caricature of a caricature right out of Dr.

Strangelove and is himself a danger to national security.

You also wrote, Millie should either deny the Woodward charges and demand a real apology or resign immediately.

And the final thing, little sentence, yet Millie did not act in isolation.

There's a lot more about this essay that we should be talking, we'll talk about.

But

Victor, if you want to take on this aspect of the essay with Millie, please go ahead.

Well, I don't think it's a question, Jack, or our listeners, of if he's going to resign.

He's going to resign because if we tune out all of the anti-Trump hysteria from the left, say this is a man of virtue and conscience that saved the Republic.

What he did was illegal and you can't hide the fact.

And what I mean by that is if you look at the 1947

statute that pertains to the Joint Chiefs, which is in reaction to the 1942-43 creation of them, and how it's narrowed, not expanded, their mission statement in 1953, and then completely reified and articulated in even greater detail in 1986, it's very clear what they are.

They're the highest ranking officers of each of their services.

And they serve in this chief as an advisory role.

They tell the president, here's option one, just like the National Security Advisor does in more diplomatic and military contexts.

But they tell him, these are what we recommend, but if you want to do the other things that we don't recommend, these are the consequences.

But it says explicitly they are not in the chain of command.

That's a fancy term for saying the president of the United States orders the Secretary of Defense to take military action.

When he takes military action, he does not call General Milley.

General Milley is by statute forbidden from interfering in that process.

Then he tells the regional or theater commanders how to do it or what they do or takes a recommendation.

So what did General Milley do?

Number one,

he says, and he I should say Woodward and Costa say, and he has not denied, he talks to Nancy Pelosi.

she basically calls bill bar a fat slav and trump a flat slav and trump's a non all that stuff and he agrees with her ha ha

forget that and then she says he's crazy and he's dangerous but remember he's talking she's talking about a president who got a lot of criticism for not taking out the iranians when they were attacking saudi arabia or one of our ships or an israeli ship and one of ours or

he did not take action when they were begging him to go in there and and stand between the Kurds and the Turks in Syria.

He was the first president in my memory, and I haven't looked at the historical data closely, but I'm pretty certain that he's the first president that has not inaugurated a major war in my life, adult lifetime.

So the idea that he's crazy and he's trigger happy is just the opposite.

He's a businessman.

He does not want to spend money or treasure our lives if it doesn't work out in a cost-benefit to the greater interest of his country.

Okay,

forget that.

That's what Millie says that he's a danger.

And how does he say that?

On the prompt of the opposition leader in the House of Representatives, the senior-ranking opposition leader in the Congress, Nancy Pelosi.

So then he goes to military staffers and he assembles them in a room and he says, This is the protocol.

This is the procedure.

You are not to do anything that doesn't go through me.

That's against the law, what he just said.

He doesn't interrupt the president.

He cannot do that.

And then he goes and calls on two occasions his Chinese counterpower and tells him essentially that democracy is messy, et cetera, et cetera.

In other words, he apprises a de facto enemy that there is turmoil within the U.S.

government.

Why do we want to tell the enemy that?

If they think we're in disarray, will they do as they did, fly in greater frequency into Taiwanese airspace or go into their territorial waters as they did?

Is he culpable for that?

He gave them a bird's eye view of the dissension, he thinks, yet people in the room said there was no dissension when they were discussing this problem.

I think General Kellogg has testified to that or mentioned that, that Donald Trump did not do anything untoward.

In any case, he apprised them.

Then he did something else.

He said, if we were to

be aggressive or attack, I would warn you in advance.

Who's his loyalties to?

The elected president of the United States?

How does he know what's going on?

How does he know that China has not already done something?

How does he not know they're not arming a nuclear weapon or they're not building 100 silos pointed at the United States?

They are, in fact.

And so he's now appropriated not just the chain of the command, but the diplomatic efforts of the president of the United States.

And then he's violated code 88 of the Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

He's on record of saying to people in positions of power that Donald Trump is a mein comp Hitler-like figure.

We know he went up to Michelle Obama right after the inauguration and said, I'm so glad this guy is gone when Joe Biden was inaugurated.

We know that he lied about a photo op when the media said, oh, Jonald Trump ordered tear gas and he ordered federal troops to clear Lafayette Square so he could brag about in a photo op.

And the Inspector General of the Interior

Department said he didn't do that.

And yet, Milley started a whole chain reaction in which following that, that,

because he said, I am so sorry, I don't do photo ops.

And then he leaked to people that I think I should resign.

As I said earlier, promises, promises.

But think about it.

All of a sudden, General Dimpsey and General Millen and General Mattis and General McCow, they all came out and damned the President of the United States for even considering.

using federal troops to quell the violence that spilled almost under the White House ground.

And they were absolutely quiet after January 6th when we put 25,000 troops, federal troops, around the Capitol for a mythical white supremacist insurrection, which in fact was a deplorable riot demonstration by a bunch of buffoonish people who killed no one other than lost Ashley Babbitt, an unarmed military veteran who was shot under mysterious circumstances, and an officer that was falsely said, officer sicknick that died of natural causes, who said was killed by the demonstrator all that was false so what i'm getting at is that think about it he apologized for something that didn't happen he did not correct that apology when the inspector general's report refuted his hypothesis he started an avalanche of public invective against his commander-in-chief in violation of article 88

He said that federal troops, it would be a travesty to use them to quell civilian disturbances, although we had in the past and we would shortly do it under joe biden in the future to his silence he violated a legal statute about the chain of command both calling the chinese and warning them or tipping them off about insecurities and disruptions he felt in the american administration as well as violating the use of nuclear protocol procedures that can only come from the president and existing statutes.

And then in addition to that, he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in this advisory capacity that should have been advising us to do what?

Keep the eye on Afghanistan, keep the attention on this festering wound that's going to blow up.

And so he was the advisor essentially that gave the president this erroneous view.

And I don't know who's lying.

Either Mealy says he did tell Biden the truth or Biden says he didn't get the, they both have conflicting stories, but somebody is lying.

because whatever information they were acting on led to the greatest disaster strategically and militarily in the last 50 years.

And with all of that, now he's combative.

And I'll add a little dessert to that, and that is he gets before Congress under oath.

And when asked about all of the contemporary challenges for the military, he dwells on white rage.

And then in an incoherent fashion, he says, well, you know, I read Marx and I read Mao, and I do it to read.

the enemy and to understand the mind of the enemy.

That's why I read Professor Kendi.

And I'm thinking, what?

What in the hell are you talking about?

You just said you read the enemy, the enemies of Western freedom and capitalism, because you want to understand what you're up against.

So that's why you read Professor Kendi's.

It's an antithetical test, but you just endorse what he's saying.

Because you said, and Secretary Austin says, you're going to go through the ranks and get white rage.

How incoherent is that?

You know, either Kendi is a sympathetic author that you want people to read, and that's why you put him on the recommended list, or he's an enemy like Mao and Marx that you're supposed to read so you can understand how pernicious he is.

But you're mixing it because he's way over his head.

And I could go on, but he's going to have to resign because if he doesn't resign, Jack, think of it.

There is no joint chiefs as we know it.

They're just completely a construct.

They do not follow the law anymore.

They violated three series iterations of law.

There is no more uniform code of military justice.

Article 88 is a joke.

We might as well jump the whole thing because he's violated that and violated that and nobody's said a word.

He is the nominal advisor that sets military advice to the president of the United States, not chain of command, implementation, or operations.

They take their orders from the commander-in-chief who gets advice from General Milley.

And either he did not dissent or he did not dissent loud enough to prevent that catastrophe in Afghanistan.

And finally, he is on very shaky ground.

As I said, I know it's going to bore the people at Nalzium, but when you say that there is white rage and you're going after white supremacists and you don't adduce evidence, you don't say this many people in the service have Nazi swats because these people are doing this, and you're attacking the white, middle, and working classes that die in proportion, twice the numbers in the population in Afghanistan and Iraq, twice that number.

This issue came up in the dispute, I shouldn't say dispute, but the discussion with H.R.

McMaster.

I think I was misinterpreted or maybe I wasn't clear.

My fault.

I'm not saying you should think that way.

We do not want to think about race proportions, but that's the way that we are in the military now.

Proportional representation, disparate impact, this number of colonels, that number of majors has to be this gender and race.

If you're going to do that, then you're going to end up with people saying, my God, the white working class is overrepresented by a factor of two in deaths in these wars, and yet you're now saying that they're the most suspect and culpable cohort and you're in the military.

That whatever the morality or ethics of it, it's stupid because you're attacking the breadbasket of the U.S.

military combat arm.

You're saying to the people and the families who die disproportionately, you're automatically under suspicion and we're going to root you out.

And you're going to be much more likely to be looked at rather than the radicals in BLM or in Tifa who happen to be in the military.

That's insane.

I could talk, you know, for an hour about, you know, and I know a lot of listeners say, well, you're not in the military.

It doesn't really matter.

It's like me telling them, as I said in the past, don't talk about food policy.

You've never been on a tractor, or you can't discuss the ancient world because you never read Greek.

So I don't like the argument from authority that you just can talk about something if you have a position of authority within that.

But the authority is a civilian.

It is.

I'm a civilian.

Our listeners, many of them are civilians, and we have a right to expect more from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He's nominally, nominally, not operationally, but nominally the highest ranking military officer in the military.

And I know that he's a tragic figure, and I have no personal animus against him.

It must be a very difficult job.

But

like he's a very John Brennan, James Clapper figure, where these people go in and they become zealots as they were for the Bush administration.

Then the Obama administration comes in and they flip flip completely and become zealots and are out.

And that's what he did.

And so his political commentaries were based on the particular polls of the president's in power.

And to be very cynical, he bet on the wrong horse because although Donald Trump's left office with 40%

approval rating, he seemed to be a hero of the left, he's now going to take the rap by his same supporters of a very unpopular president, Joe Biden.

And

again, it's not a question of if he's going to resign.

He's going to have to resign.

Maybe he's going to wait until it all blows off and quietly resign or have a health issue or something, but you cannot have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who violated the law, knowingly violated the law.

And remember, this is not a hostile interviewer.

This is not a gotcha book.

It's only for people in it who are conservative or Trump supporters.

This is a sympathetic look at people on the left who, the theory goes, had to deal with the perils of the Trump administration.

So either they solicited a very receptive General Milley or General Milley to an intermediate and said, I got a story to tell you guys.

So when I heard this, I said, you know what, there's no way in hell he's going to deny this because he wanted to give this information to let his view be heard.

Because he knew why?

Because when they were writing the book, Trump was unpopular, Biden was good old Joe Biden Scranton, and General Milley had a new lease on life as a man of the left.

And when you start doing that in any aspect of your life, when you start to calibrate your ideology, your public commentary, your writing just on who's popular and who's not, it's not going to work, believe me.

Well, Victor, I had hoped we could talk about this terrific two-part, it's a mega essay, if you combine it at all, that you've written for the for VictorHanson.com.

It's called Reflections on 2020, the Worst Year in the Last Half Century.

Maybe the great Sammy wink when she does the

culturalists can raise that with you.

That is privileged content, but it's very important, I think, for our listeners to know about it and to read it.

But back on the American Greatness essay, The Afghanistan of America, there's so much in here.

Victor, let me just quickly say you begin by simple sentence, the United States should be at its pinnacle of strength.

And then you, through the essay and

various focuses, one of the focus was on Millie, to talk about how we are kind of emulating the country we just abandoned.

One of the things you talk about in here is called tribal lands.

And I don't want so much to talk about immigration.

It touches on this.

We have Afghanistan

the border as well, turning the United States.

into a pre-state whose badland borders are absolutely porous and fluid.

Now you can talk talk about whatever you want, but

that word, term, pre-state, I find very interesting.

I have a feeling it actually may be part of what you've, one of the themes or something that goes through the dying citizen.

Would you talk about what do you mean by pre-state?

Well, in the dying citizen, I'm trying to explain to everybody that citizenship is rare in history, it's fragile, it takes constant nurturing, protection, and without it you have nothing.

And what you have is something like Afghanistan.

You have no border, just badlands where people drift in and out.

You have tribalism where people self-select on the basis of their superficial religion or racial composition.

And you have no middle class.

You have poor people and very wealthy people.

You have no constitution.

You have people like the Taliban just get together and, you know, like Plato said, even thieves believe in democracy because when they divide up the loot, they always vote who gets which

who gets the most so they have they just have no constitution to guide them and they make things up as they go well we went over there to stop that apparently I don't know when that more as I said earlier I don't know when the message changed from punitive realism to nation building but perhaps a lot of men and women of goodwill said, you know, to just keep the Taliban from coming back, we've got to give an alternative.

If that was so, then we didn't do that because what were we telling them?

We were reflecting values at home that were not the mission.

Okay, take borderlands.

You guys can't have a nation state of people coming in from Iran or going back and forth from Pakistan.

But you know what?

We don't have a border here either.

We can't lecture you because there is no southern border.

It's a construct.

We've got two million people scheduled this year just to walk in without a passport.

And then at the same time, we were trying to tell them, you know, you have to have a president and an elected cabinet, and then they dictate to the military.

The military, your military, have to be civilianly controlled.

They're not Taliban people that walk into the president's office with an AK-47 that then set rules as both commanders and civilians.

But yet...

we just talked for 20 minutes, Jack, that we're losing that very concept here.

And then we're supposed to tell them, and we were trying to tell them, look, you guys, Afghanistan hasn't worked in the way that we would, it's very arrogant by the way it hasn't worked because you're pashtun's first or tajik's second or uzbek's third but you're you're not afghans

and then the people who were lecturing them are what

we are whites we are asians we're latinos we're african americans but we're all tribalists and we're going to apply to school based on our dna badges and we're going to get higher and proportionally representated and we're going to have ceos saying I'm going to virtue signal.

We're a tribal society.

So, what I'm getting at, Jack, very quickly is that we were in the midst of unraveling at home.

We have no borders.

We're tribal.

Our civilian-military relationship is being shattered.

And yet, here we were going across the world to try to inculcate what we think would be an ideal state, but we couldn't even do it at home.

So, why would it work abroad?

And you know, it reminded me:

if you look at the British Army or the the British Navy circa 1850 to 1870, it was in the Mediterranean.

It was in Asia.

It had the largest navy in the world.

It was on the coast of being the British Empire.

But Charles Dickens was writing about London, David Copperfield, great expectations.

And what is the London that he's writing about?

It's

impoverishment, class warfare, disease, filth in the heart of the empire.

It reminded me when 1973, right after the Yom Kippur War, I applied for a visa.

I was a student in Greece and I went to Egypt and got in in 1974 and it was right before they kicked out all the Russians.

And there were Russians everywhere.

And I sat down and talked to some of them that spoke English.

And they were saying something that was very interesting to me.

They were saying, off the record, I suppose.

They had a couple drinks and I was only 20 and they said, you know, here we are in Egypt and we're all over the world and we have this big airport.

And have you been to a Russian city to Leningrad?

I said, no.

And they said, you should see what the people live like.

They have nothing.

We give better things to the Egyptians than we do to our own people.

And what they were saying is that these empires are hollowed out at the core.

So, yes, we have 150 military bases all around the world.

Yes, we spend $800 billion in the military, but it's really affected as I get older to see that in a military cost-benefit analyses, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq or or Syria or Libya or wherever we have these interventions, not the small ones, but the major ones, that they come either at the expense of or ignored by or relevant to the fact that we're running $30 trillion in aggregate national debt and $2 trillion a year in deficits.

And the people at the heart of the empire are not in good shape.

I just got back from Hillsdale College, a wonderful college, and I try to ride my bike in the countryside.

One of my friends, Al Philip, and I ride all the time.

And you should see southern Michigan, Jack, or northern Ohio.

It's hollowed out.

These towns, they're in a little renaissance now, but the factories are closed, the old mills closed.

Everything is, there's people living in poverty.

You go to my hometown of Selma, there's no upright harvester.

There's no Fruhoff trailer.

There's no Delmonic Cannry anymore.

And, you know, it's not that people, they didn't learn to code.

So what I'm getting at is we hollowed out this country and yet we're supposed to spend all of this money on the idea that all the coastal elites are so well off we have plentiful plentitude of resources i think the military they need to take a deep breath along with the new york washington nexus of media government foundations corporations whatever they are and say you know what man we we've got to really be careful because A, we don't have the resources anymore to spread the American gospel gospel around the world.

And B, maybe it's cause and effect I'm mixing up, but we're diluting the American gospel when we try because we better get it right at home because we are becoming a tribal society and one that increasingly has a dysfunctional military command and increasingly has no borders whatsoever.

And we have 50 million people that were not born in the United States, legal and otherwise, residents.

And we have 27% of the population of California was not born in the United States legal and otherwise and we have an enormous task of assimilation integration intermarriage and we the host are not doing that and so that's what I was trying to write in that essay kind of like Dickens London with red coats all over the world what Kipling said you know spreading the we're not doing that but what he meant was the white man's burden of civilization and yet was saying it was rotten or bankrupt or exhausted or that great poem Recessional where he looks at the fleet the annual gathering of the British fleet and it's the height of the British Empire on the eve of a couple more a decade before World War I and you can already see that it's overextended and it's going to decline and so

you know whatever metric we use and as I said earlier in the talk when you give $85 billion in training and investment in weaponry to the Taliban you're still broke and you cannot afford your next $13 billion carrier or your next $90 million $35 million, and you could have bought 900 planes with the money you gave to these terrorists, or you could have funded Israel for another 70 years of military assistance when you cut off their iron dome, or you could have built six of these Gerald Ford carriers.

There's something wrong psychologically, spiritually, morally in the country.

Listeners, go to victorhanson.com.

You will see amongst the features on the website is Eeyore's Cabinet.

And that is for Eeyore's Cabinet.

You wrote this just really impressive two-part mega essay.

I tried to actually do a lot of research with a reader.

I know that it's just a website, but a lot of readers pay $5 a month by the FHIR paywall.

And so I thought to myself, if they're going to make that investment, me, I'm going to spend six or seven hours and really try to get data and get a long account.

What you've written here is exceptional.

Actually, Victor, if I was making the marketing case, I would say the amount of content content you are probably writing on an annual basis for your website is

the equivalent of 10 books.

It is just so much and it's so wise.

But I'd recommend folks, even just stick your toe in the water for $5

introductory offer there.

This Eeyore's cabinet, Reflections on 2020, the Worst Year in the Last Half Century, is marvelous.

Victor, that is just about it.

Do recommend also on the website, folks should click on the link for the dying citizen.

It's out October 5th.

You should order it now, and it will be there on October 5th, publication date.

A good friend of mine, a great public intellectual who is reviewing this book for publication, told me it is a deeply important book, and it is so wonderfully written.

He said, I cannot stress enough how important this book is.

But

we'll read the review when it comes out.

But that said, I do want to, of the listeners who go to iTunes and leave reviews, five-star reviews, thank you very much.

Some folks leave messages, and here's one from M.

Theleman, M.

Theleman, titled Knowledge is Power.

Dr.

Hansen provides the context for constructive political discourse with facts and historical perspective.

When I am frustrated by the woke talking points of the MS mainstream media, I turn to the work of Dr.

Hansen, books, lectures, podcasts, essays, etc., to gain an understanding of the real issues at hand and how these issues have been dealt with in the past.

Thank you, Emmetleman, for that.

I would like to thank anyone who actually takes, listens to this request and goes to civilthoughts.com, sign up for the weekly email I send out.

I try to have a dozen or so worthwhile pieces we've come across in the previous week that I think would be of interest to folks.

Also, Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

That's where I hang my hat.

Maybe you'll be interested in some of the things we're trying to do to strengthen civil society.

So thanks again, Victor.

This has been a wonderful talk as usual.

On the other talk we did, we recorded today on the traditionalist.

I hope folks will have listened to that.

This is the classicist.

We learned more about Victor's riding skills and his horsemanship, which was totally surprising.

I surprised to learn that.

Thanks so much, all.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Jack, and thank everybody again for listening.

I appreciate it a great deal.