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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We're recording on Friday, August 27th, 2021.

This is the day following the brutal and murderous attacks in Kabul, which claimed the lives of 13 U.S.

servicemen, wounded many others, killed many Afghani citizens.

So today, we are going to spend most of the show talking about Afghanistan and the events of yesterday.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and the author of its new newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

And there is a website for it now, civilthoughts.com.

If you'd like to subscribe, please go there.

The namesake of the show, of course, is Victor Davis Hansen.

He's the Martin Ann Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

And for everything else about Victor, go to victorhanson.com, his website, The Blade of Perseus.

And there is a trove of original content there.

There's a new premium service.

So if you'd like to read Victor's original writings, do subscribe.

Also, you'll find the link for his forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen, which is out now in about five weeks.

So Victor, on today's program, we, of course, are going to talk about what's been happening in Afghanistan and also the Supreme Court's decision to tell the CDC that no, it does not have the rights to forestall eviction notices in America.

And let's get talking about Afghanistan, but first we're going to hear this important message.

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We're back with the traditionalist Victor.

I'm just going to go down kind of a list of things I think we could talk about related to Afghanistan, and then let's pick them up one by one.

We have, of course, the horrendous events of yesterday, August 26th, the bombings.

We have this backpadding by the Biden administration for these evacuation numbers, as if there's something wonderful going on with the scope of the numbers.

The president's speech on Thursday, the 26th, your assessment of it, the media's role in the few questions that were allowed, the time it took for the president to come out to actually address what had happened in Kabul.

Then we have the Taliban receiving the lists from the United States, giving the Taliban the list of those Afghanis who worked and helped with America over the last 20 years.

Is Kamala Harris Plan B?

She met with reporters earlier this week, I think it was before the bombing at an airport, on her way to some Asia trip.

And of course, she was cackling.

Does this, what's the political fallout for Donald Trump and maybe Mike Pompeo?

And Victor, one last thing.

While this brutality and savageness is happening on the other side of the world, Democrats in Congress are obsessed with spending trillions.

I just watched this long State Department and then Pentagon press conferences about the evacuation.

This is coming one day after 13 Americans were blown up.

And I'm trying to put together in my head all of the things I've heard.

And there's some general themes.

I think it's really important for our listeners to hear this and to see if they agree or not.

First is

General McKinsey yesterday said when he was commenting on the attack, and I don't blame him, he did not have a lot of specific information, but he said the United States was working in close contact with the Taliban, and they were providing security in a ring around the Karzai airport.

And while he didn't know what caused the breakdown, he didn't want to speculate that maybe the Haqqanis or the Al-Qaeda or the ISIS or all of these various subordinates of radical Islamic terrorism are connected.

And of course, they are.

And then he said, and we don't have any reason right now to suspect the Taliban.

Remember, these are the people who indirectly or perhaps even more directly were responsible for 9-11 because they have the same aims as we do and by that he delineated it he said on august 31st they want us to be completely out as quickly as possible and so do we so why would they impede that or obstruct that when our agendas and goals are the same i almost got in a wreck.

I was driving over to work and I thought, wow, they don't have the same agendas.

Their agenda is, we want you out as quickly as possible to get you the hell out of our country so we can go to what Taliban do, that is rape and kill and murder and terrorize.

And we want you out very quickly, but we don't want you out without humiliation and defeat and death.

We want to be out very quickly from the airport, but we don't want death and humiliation and destruction.

So our agendas are very much different.

And yet a Marine general wouldn't see that.

And then I turned on to the State Department, and the spokesman was very confident, far more confident in explaining what we're going to do after death and defeat than he ever was explaining in the middle of it, why we were going to avoid death and defeat.

But he says something, he says, you know, this is just spectacular that we got thousands out of this decrepit Karzai airport.

I listened and listened and listened.

I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.

First of all, you need to tell us how many people

are there

left.

I don't want to hear when I hear Chicago death tolls, as I said before, I do not want to know how many people were not shot in Chicago on Saturday night.

I want to know how many were killed.

So I want to know how many people are there right now.

And that information was not forthcoming.

He told us all of the heroic efforts, and they were heroic to get people out, but he didn't tell us what's left to do.

Like General McKinsey, he talks about the Taliban as if they're a legitimate interlocutor.

So we have given names of people that are still there, that we think are still there, and of our Afghan helpers and allies.

And I guess the idea is that they're going to knock on the door and say, Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith, I've been apprised by the U.S.

military that your turn is coming up.

So would you like to step outside and we'll drive you to the airport?

I don't think that's going to happen.

Or they're going to go up to what, Mr.

Afghanistan citizen and his wife and say, I know you were working with the Americans and I know we were at war, and I know you've been westernized, but they want you to go to the United States.

So I think that would be a good idea, and we'll help you get there.

I just don't think that's going to happen.

I think it's much more likely they're going to look at that list being Taliban and go through them and do what Taliban do to people.

But the idea that you're going to trust these people is a therapeutic to the nth degree.

Then I turned on this evacuation.

And in the midst of all of the detail about how we're bringing people in, we're told that we have have culturally sensitive food waiting for them at Dulles.

And I'm thinking, that's great.

I support that.

But a day after 13 people were blown to bits and their families have to hear this, do we really want to worry about whether there's culturally appropriate food?

And this comes after yesterday where the Army Major, Sergeant Major.

of the Army said that this was diversity, Women's Diversity Day, and he starts talking about diversity.

That's not the issue.

Does he want to tell me what the racial or ethnic breakdown of the 13 dead is?

Is that what he's talking about?

Because that's where we're going to go with this obsession about diversity and inclusion and equity and cultural sensitivity.

And then he says, when he's asked, oh, oh, by the way, they're offered COVID vaccinations.

But next question, are they mandatory?

Well, no, they're not.

Well, if you're a teacher in California, they most certainly are.

If you want to go back as a student to Stanford, they most certainly are.

If you're going to work for certain agencies, emergency rooms, corporations, they are.

And so, once again, in this therapeutic culture, we have one rule for citizens and one rule for non-citizens.

The emphasis is on what is superfluous instead of what's essential.

And so, what we don't ever hear, in addition to hearing all the things we don't need to know, is, I want to hear something.

I want to hear what happened to the $80 billion in equipment, because that is more more than the aggregate military equipment that we've given Israel in the last 40 years and almost the entire history in inflation-adjusted dollars.

I think we lost somewhere around 80 billion,

and we gave Israel over the lifetime of the Jewish state about 100 billion.

So think of that.

This was the greatest infusion of military hardware and weaponry to one entity in the history of the United States all at once.

Free.

Nobody's talking about it.

Nobody's talking about whether we should take Baglin back.

Do we have contingency plans?

Could we just swoop in, take Baglam, put a ring around it with our own soldiers, and then use it?

Nobody's talking about that at all.

Why in the world are we saying that this deadline August 31st means anything?

There's only one deadline, and that is when we get everybody out.

Do they have any idea that what the Taliban are doing, they're feigning as if they're a new Taliban, they're a moderate Taliban, they're a helpful Taliban, why they send wink and nod fashion people in to blow us up.

And then they want us out with as much destruction, as I said, and humiliation.

And then once we're out, they're going to be the old Taliban, and they're going to go after people.

And we're going to have a Bo Bergdahl all over Afghanistan.

And yet this military, I'm trying to think, is there a connection between the therapeutic mindset, the woke mindset, and the mediocrity of the military and the political and the State Department establishment?

Is it similar to the idea that we talked about before of airline CEOs lecturing us with their megaphones about IDs at ballot time, but they cannot ensure their planes either are on time or their wait call times are reasonable or they have jet fuel?

Or can Hollywood make any movie other than another comic book remake or a bad remake of a 1950s or 40s movie before they start lecturing us.

So this woke thing is a vast diversion as all totalitarian regimes are when they divert whether it's the SS or the Nazi ideologue monitoring what people say or it's the Comissars or it's during the McCarthy period.

And so we're spending time, labor, and capital on wokeness and fighting and white rage and white supremacy.

And if General Milley and General Austin just took a deep breath and said, how many hours have we prepped to lecture the nation and to draw up guidelines for diversity, equity, and inclusion versus a proper withdrawal plan from Afghanistan?

I don't think we'd be in the mess we're in.

Right.

How much time was spent on the plan to deal with the $80 billion of armaments left behind?

Victor Lincoln, I think it was yesterday, saw him on, or maybe it was the day before, but back on the back padding about this great evacuation effort.

And within the last week, we've gotten 90,000 people, et cetera, et cetera.

And you just mentioned the Sergeant Major of the Army tweeting about Women's Equality Day.

I wonder, at first when I saw Blinken blathering, I thought, this is distraction.

He's got nothing else better to talk about, nothing good to talk about.

He might as well try to...

you know, put lipstick on a pig here.

But I don't know, maybe they really thought that was a good thing to to raise in the midst of this madness.

They really are true believers.

I mean, that's one of the things Whitaker Chambers said.

You know, they really believe this crap.

I don't think they do because I didn't hear it.

I don't believe that they got up suddenly after the George Floyd shooting or killing, excuse me.

the death of George Floyd, and suddenly they said, you know what?

For the last 20 years, I've been thinking about wokeness.

I think that there was a mass hysteria, partly induced by the lockdown, COVID, the recession, the contentious election year, the 120 days of rioting, looting, and arson where most of the perpetrators were not punished, the January 6th turmoil in the Capitol, all of that put together, whatever, that was the fuse that lit this madness.

But I think when a sergeant major starts to tweet right after people have been killed about Women's Equity Day and diversion, or a Marine general has to talk about culturally appropriate food or the proper gender ratios from people coming or the assurance that we're not asking these people that we're going to support to get COVID vaccinations.

That's a reflection of a long-held commitment to quote-unquote diversity.

I think it's a finger in the wind.

And they said, after looking at what Miley said and Biden said and Lincoln said and Austin said and what the Congress in the majority says, I am going to be woke.

And I don't care what anybody says.

It's woke, woke, woke, woke, woke.

And I'm going to get promoted.

And then I get promoted, promoted, promoted.

And then if I want to retire, I go to General Dynamics, Lockheed, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke.

And anybody who says, wait a minute, no more, not this peak.

I'm not going to talk about any of this stuff until somebody guarantees we're not going to lose any more Marines and we're going to go on the offensive.

The idea that all of America's natural

offensive capabilities, the real innate advantages in the American way of war, and what is that?

Mobility, quick transportation, surprise, firepower, overwhelming artillery and bombing.

That's what we do good and open spaces.

What we do not do good is hanker down and be attacked in a known fixed place in an urban environment.

And so we're just going to stay there and doing everything that they do well.

They're controlling the landscape.

And what we don't do well.

Why not break out?

Why not go take Bagram?

Why not control the city for a while?

And then say, you know what, we may or may not give it back.

It depends on your behavior.

But we're going to get every single, every single American out.

And maybe we're going to process the people for the next six months in Afghanistan and make sure that before we send them to the United States, we know exactly who they are and if they're healthy and they're vaccinated, etc.

But why play into their hands on their terms and say, we're partnering with the Taliban and they're providing security and we don't really doubt that they're working with us.

And I don't think there's necessarily a connection between Al-Qaeda and, you know, ISIS.

That's like saying after 9-11, well, the Taliban and Mullah Omar, they weren't really bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

Well, yeah, but that's like saying, you know, the Hungarian Iron Cross or

the Austrian SS didn't have a formal connection with the German Gestapo or, you know, something like that.

They're all on the same side.

And why they hate each other and they kill each other, they'd much rather unite and kill us than each other.

Well, Victor, again, we're recording this episode of the Traditionalist on Friday, the 27th.

So fresh in our minds is what happened yesterday, the horror of yesterday, and that President Biden gave a speech yesterday evening, early evening, East Coast time.

So Victor, I'd like to hear a few things about this speech.

the length of time it took for him to actually come out and address the nation after this horrible attack And some of the daintiness media questions, including one by an Associated Press reporter that played up back to the president serving it up about this,

who did not die in service.

I mean, his son served, died of cancer.

But it's just kind of a

bit of a stretch, but it was a very,

until Peter Doocy got to ask a question at the very end, very lame interrogation of the president in the face of what happened.

So, yesterday's speech, Victor, any of those things or any other things you'd like to talk about related to it?

He said, I have a list here of the people I'm supposed to call on.

Yes, I mean, you're supposed to hide the fact that

you're supposed to hide the fact that's reminiscent of the campaign when he did the same thing.

You're supposed to hide that fact, you're not supposed to broadcast it, you're supposed to give the semblance that you know what you're doing in a press conference.

He can't do that.

And what I don't like about his press conferences, but and I don't like it about his personality, is that he has this He-Man

stuff.

And it goes back to what we talked about, the corn pop stories, the bashing the head of a kid who insulted his sister.

So I went in there and I went in that lunch counter and I slammed him.

Or the promise to Donald,

well, if he was there when I was in high school, I'd take him behind the gym.

Okay, Joe, tough guy from Scranton, but then he's not so tough when it comes to flipping and flopping and et cetera, et cetera.

So after destroying really this idea of a graduated sober and judicious withdrawal in sheer panic and maybe in political opportunism for some kind of bizarre September 11th parade or celebration that Joe did it that no other president can do, we get this, we will never forget.

Yes, that's good.

And we'll never forgive.

Okay, so what does that mean?

He gets angry.

It's Joe Biden's going to do what?

Take Bagwam Air Base.

That would be a way to avenge.

Yeah.

You could take Bagwam Air Force.

that would save a lot of lives.

Get a big armored column with a, you know, the sky dotted with 100 Apaches or something and go right in and pick people up and put them in a bus and then, you know, sweep your way into Bagwom and get them out.

Yeah, that would be two.

Take in a couple of B-52s and bomb the blank, blank out of all those Humvees, machine guns, grenade launchers, stuff that we can't bring out, or steal it back.

Yeah, that would be brave.

But this idea that, you know, I'm going to do this,

it's not good to talk tough and carry a twig.

Be quiet and carry a club.

Victor, any thought about the questions he got?

I think there were five or six.

But yeah, I'm picking on this AP guy.

I think what we're witnessing is when this whole disaster started about a week ago,

everybody was outraged.

And the first reaction of the media, as in some in Congress, was, oh my God,

we just suffered the greatest military humiliation defeat in the last 50 years.

Oh my gosh, everything, we hadn't lost a soldier in 18 months, and now we're at the mercy of the Taliban.

My God, we gave up $80 billion of equipment.

My God, we gave up the biggest Air Force base in Central Asia.

Oh my God, the whole country is controlled by the Taliban.

Oh my God, and Biden did this.

And people got angry at him for the first time, and they started asking him questions.

And good old Joe Biden from Scranton thought, you know what, I'll just do what I do with the campaign.

I'll give him, you know, no questions.

I'll talk a little stuff.

And it didn't work for the first time.

And then he got kind of angry.

And then people in Congress thought, hmm, I'm up in a

little over a year.

I'm up for reelection.

This thing, if it doesn't get sealed, I may lose.

This could be.

sort of my the Republicans 2006 midterms after the uh the insurgency in Iraq.

I don't don't want this.

And so they started to come out.

And then they all took a deep breath and said, you know what?

This is all we got.

And if we keep criticizing him and probing him,

this guy is frail and he's down now below 40.

When he gets to 35, that's curtains for about 90 congressional seats.

And it could be the biggest wipeout since, you know, 1938 or something

in the congressional.

So I think what we're seeing now is they're saying, okay,

we accept it he did something wrong but it's been so impressive with these flights we're trying to accommodate people with a culturally appropriate food and we're keeping track of gender and and you know this is women's equity day and joe biden is so sensitive that's where we are now with this media because the alternative is if they tell the truth given the low bar that's that they themselves, the media and the Congress, the Democratic-controlled Congress established for impeachment, he should be impeached.

Remember, they impeached Donald Trump on two counts, abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress.

Neither one was a felony violation.

They just said that that was an impeachable.

Well, if that's impeachable, one phone call to Ukraine and that's supposed to be abuse.

What is this?

When

Joe Biden now blames the Joint Chiefs and the CIA for not giving...

him the right intelligence or the right military options and they basically off record say the opposite.

I would just end by in a sane world, General, I know if this is a cliché now, but General Milley and General Austin would resign.

And I don't mean they would resign just

because of this military defeat and this insane plan that they had to withdraw from Afghanistan.

I say they should resign because they're on record.

of being very vocal and political and partisan and megaphones.

And I mean that when General Milley did a routine photo op and then said, I shouldn't have done that, and virtue signal, even though that was a lie, that all the other joint chiefs chairmen had done that, and that Donald Trump did not use tear gas or cleared out the grounds around the White House to do a photo op.

And that's not me speaking as the Inspector General of Homeland Security.

And General Austin, as General Milley, went before Congress and gave these loud defenses of we're going through the rosters, we're going after these white alt-right,

all white alt-right suspects.

We're going to deal with white rage.

We read Gentle Kendi and we're worried about hate crimes.

And they really wanted to be out there for their own careers and their post-careers.

And they wanted everybody to see that.

So they're on record that they're capable of that.

And yet they're not on record right now of being equally outspoken when it really counts about American lives.

Well,

but they should have resigned beforehand, even if

they said this was going to turn into the blank show that it turned into.

That was the point where their resignation should have come.

And then this.

We heard from General Hayden, ex-CIA director, that you should send all of the unvaccinated Trump supporters on the empty planes back to Afghanistan.

I guess he's saying where he retweeted that, I should say, where they're going to die.

Okay.

General McChrystal has been on record very critical of the commander-in-chief.

General McCaffrey has said that the commander-in-chief was Mussolini because he canceled a few subscriptions to the New York Times.

General Mattis said that there were Nazi-like tactics used by Trump in the way that, I guess, considering using federal troops in the way George H.W.

Bush did during the riots in Los Angeles, in which Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Rodney King riots.

Okay, so I could go on and on and on and on.

Admiral McRaven, remember, said he should leave sooner or later.

We've talked about all these.

Okay, this is the perfect opportunity.

You established the principle that retired military are not worried about the uniform code of military justice that discourages or indeed prohibits retired top brass from disparaging the commander-in-chief, because you've all done it.

Are you trying to tell me that considering using federal troops to put down a riot that was at the borders borders of the White House is

a revolutionary act in a way that turning over an entire $80 billion trove, getting people killed is not comparable to that.

Where are you people?

Why can't you get up and say, Joe Biden, who are you?

And did the 20, excuse me, 50 retired CIA agents that came out and told us Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation right before the election.

Can you come out now?

How about the 200 military officers that were retired and came out and said, Donald Trump is a clear and present danger, and we are worried, so you've got to vote for Joe Biden.

Where are they right now?

So once you go down that line and you politicize the military and we're doing it, and we really politicize, then they have lost all credibility.

And it's not just credibility of Americans.

It's credibility of Americans who support the military and the intelligence agency and the FBI.

And yet, where were they in this time of need where they could have offered learned commentary?

We had some.

General Jack Keene was very critical,

and H.R.

McMaster was very critical and weighed in.

And neither one of them had weighed in against their commander-in-chief.

McMaster worked for him, but he did not leave and suddenly trash his former boss.

I think everybody's got to make that distinction.

And I think he was to be commended that he tried to fit the MAGA agenda into the existing framework rather than just on the stealth to try to block it.

And General Keene was very articulate in explaining why this has been a disastrous decision.

And he's not really a political general.

He's been critical of Donald Trump sometimes before.

So that's what we need.

And yet this whole thing is a therapeutic screw-up and it's a politicized, weaponized.

disaster and it's the inevitable wage of taking the military or the intelligence agencies and weaponizing them and say, you know what?

For your own future, for your congressional testimony, for your promotion, you better sound woke.

You better Professor Kennedy.

I don't care whether you're writing a position paper on keeping the Bagma Air Force Base.

I don't care if you're writing an analysis how an extremist you might want to defend the Karzai airport during a withdrawal.

That's not important.

I want to know what the racial makeup of that Marine Force is around that perimeter.

And when you start doing that, you're no different than the commissars that would tell the Red Army, I think you're not really surrounded at Kiev.

You're not really in a pocket that the Soviet man is never surrounded.

And then they, you know, what happened?

They lost 650,000 people.

When you politicize the military, as we have done, then it's, and this isn't the end, Jack.

They keep saying August 30th, this is the beginning.

The beginning.

The beginning.

It's like saying that once they took the hostages, that was the end of it.

No, that was the beginning.

And once Reagan

got everybody blown up, 260-something in 83, we went out in 84.

That was the beginning of a series of attacks.

And we're going to see a lot more of this stuff.

And these Taliban that are so nice now and playing nice, and they have their little night vision goggles and their uniforms, and they're doing their adjut prop with, you know, pictures of Iwo Jima with Taliban and all this to get onto our skin.

And we're kind of amused by them, the new Taliban, well, they're working in concert with us, as soon as we're out, and we won't get out unless they've tried to humiliate us and hurt us even more, they are going to be the Taliban that the Taliban are and always have been, always are, and always will be.

Well, Victor, this was...

The madness of this week was preventable.

There's, as we just discussed, a ton of culpability, military aside.

But I think on a separate podcast, I think we should talk about political culpability of those Republicans who who helped get the commander-in-chief that we have today.

But politically, do you think this affects Donald Trump, harms him?

Do you think it affects or harms Mike Pompeo, who has talked about running for president?

I don't know that he would run if Donald Trump ran again, but as the person who led the treaty, whatever you want to call it, with the Taliban.

So their fingerprints are on something or not?

Is there fallout or not?

Yeah, their fingerprints are on something.

They're not responsible for this disaster.

It wasn't just on Joe Biden's watch.

Joe Biden precipitated it by an insane,

and it wasn't because he was being consistent with a Trump plan.

It was because he was being inconsistent.

Trump is on record.

You can go look at the videos.

He said that when people criticized them, that he was dealing with the Taliban, he said, if they do X, Y, and Z, we will do, you know, what we, what he did with Solomania or ISIS.

Okay.

And he had credibility because he did it.

In addition to that, he looked at the polls like all presidents do, as Biden does, and he looked and saw about 65% wanted Americans out after 20 years.

But he didn't do the hard work that could have affected public opinion by saying, yes, we went into nation building.

Mistake.

Yes, we probably should have got out years ago.

Mistake.

But we've got about five to ten million westernized Afghanistan citizens that have never lived under the Taliban.

They were born, you know, 20, 18, 17 years ago.

They are not really Taliban people, and they are pro-Western.

And more importantly, we've got the biggest Air Force base in Central Asia, and it's defensible.

And so when

He started to be told that by his generals, and he had gone down from about 12,000 very slowly down down to 25, 3,000.

They said, stop.

If you go any further and you give up Bagram or you give up air superiority or you pull out those contractors that are serving and maintaining the Apaches and jets and stuff, then the Taliban will sense that you're leaving completely and the Afghan National Army will have no confidence and dissipate.

So he stopped.

He did.

And he kept about 25.

I don't know how long he was planning to keep them had he been re-elected, but it was a stable, sustainable situation.

As everybody says, we hadn't lost anybody when Trump left office for a year.

And to show you the proof of the pudding, Joe Biden didn't lose anybody until he did this.

He kept saying, well, I was just, they were supposed to be out in May.

No, they weren't.

That was a day.

Trump wouldn't have followed it.

He didn't.

follow it.

Nobody would have followed it because it wasn't military feasible given what we knew at the time.

So he didn't get out in May.

And guess what?

Nothing happened.

It was still stable.

We still had the people at Baglam.

We still had the army with the expectation we were supposed to.

It was only when he decided to have his big parade or whatever the event was, he was going to celebrate after 20 years that this thing collapsed.

One other thing, though.

Joe Biden should be faulted for giving up Bagram and turning over thousands of terrorists all at once.

But when we were negotiating this get out of Afghanistan, we being Americans under the Trump administration and every all Americans, Donald Trump did release people that he should not have released, and they did negotiate with the Taliban.

Now, you can say that they had checks and balances and deterrence, and they did.

And you can say that Donald Trump would have bombed in a way Biden would have never imagined, and he would have.

But, nevertheless, when you start to negotiate with these people,

then you give them a quasi-legitimacy, as if they're statesmen and and they're not.

They're thugs and terrorists.

We should have said, this is what we're going to do and just done it.

And finally, the State Department press conference today talked about our allies, our allies, our allies, you know, and it was very subtle what they were saying.

We don't speak for our allies.

They're sovereign nations.

So they have to make the decisions on their own, whether they want to stay, whether they want to leave,

how they want to get their people.

We don't, and that is so disingenuous.

They're there, whether we want to admit it or not, because we're there.

Because after 9-11, when we were attacked, we said, okay, NATO, time to step up.

And we want you to go there.

And until last week, there were 8,000 of them.

None of them would have been there had we not been there.

All of them relied on superior U.S.

air superiority and support.

So the idea that when we just yank out at the middle of the night our forces and then we skedaddle and then we say, hey, you guys, we don't want to tell you what to do you're sovereign nations you just have you know what you can stay here if you want that is such

bunk it's just pathetic and

they're there because we were there they stayed there because we stayed there they're going to leave because we left and they depend on us whether we like it or not And that, yes, they are sovereign nations, but don't suddenly coerce them and job on them that they have to participate as NATO troops and they're going to work with us and don't leave.

And then suddenly when we we leave, say,

we're not responsible.

You're independent nations.

Well, remember when Biden became vice president, it was all about foreign policy gravitas that he was supposedly adding to the Obama ticket.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have.

We thank those who, of course, you're listening.

We thank you for that.

Those who go to iTunes and leave a review or five stars, please do that.

Thank you very much.

We greatly appreciate it.

Many people leave messages.

And here's one I'd like to just read.

It's Neon 8 TE, NEON 8,

put up the other day.

No apology needed.

That's the title of it.

I've been a fan of Mr.

Hansen's for years now, and I depend on his knowledge and insights to help me understand issues.

I was extremely excited when his podcasts went to three days a week, each with a different focus.

Then he added, the new website, I'm a very happy fan.

At the end of the traditionalist, VDH apologized for his vigor in sharing his opinions this week about the fall of Afghanistan.

None needed, and I am sure I speak for a lot of his fans.

I so appreciated his righteous anger at Biden and his inept administration.

It helps to have someone voice how most Americans are feeling.

So thank you, Mr.

Hansen.

He kept me from screaming and pulling my hair out.

Many more comments along these lines and other praiseworthy lines.

We thank folks for doing that.

We do read them.

Victor, thank you again for your wisdom, folks.

Do check out victorhanson.com.

Do subscribe there.

You will regret not doing so.

And do order the dying citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

You do that today.

You're going to have the book the first week of October.

Thanks so much.

And we will be back next week with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.

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