Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished classicist, military historian, and prolific commentator on contemporary geopolitics. He s Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and nationally syndicated columnist whose commentary has been published in nearly every major media news outlet in America. He is also currently a senior fellow at Stanford University s Hoover Institution, where his work is often characterized by a natural integration of historical narrative and modern issues, as well as an appreciation for Western civilization s heritage. His deep family roots in California s Central Valley often inform his criticism of American immigration policy, agricultural policy, and the far left. As we navigate an era marked by rapid change and global uncertainty, Victor Davis Hanson s insights prove the enduring relevance of classical wisdom in today s world. Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special! In today s episode, we explore the ideological origins and historical analogies for our current political moment. From the reverberations of war in the Middle East to the merits of federalism and the consequences of a possible Trump victory, this is a conversation you don t want to miss. We are recording this pretty close to the aftermath of the Biden-Trump debate number one, and I d be remiss if I didn t ask for your takeaways on the state of the race and where we are as a country is now? Thank you so much for joining us and spending the time with us. - Yours Truly, Elyssa Thoenes, EJ Saines, Edith Wilson, Dr. Edith M. Wilson, Sr. and the rest of the team at The New York Times, John Avrahamson, and so on. - EJ & J.D. S. Hanson, and EJ M. Chaney, etc., etc. - Thank you for listening to this Sunday Special? - The Sunday Special by EJ and J.V. & EJ D.S. & R. BONUS EPISODE - THE PENARDO, THE PODCAST - AVAILABLE INCLUDE: & JUICY CHECK OUT THE PRAISE AND SUPPORTED INSPIRATION - FREE TRAINING AND LINKED TO A VOTING IN OUR INSTAGRAM AND PATREON AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORTED BY THE CHALLENGE AND OTHER LINKS AND LINKS - CLICKED IN TO OUR FACEBOOK GROUP
00:00:00.000It's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people.
00:00:11.000And he's blunt and they admire his authenticity and he's genuine and he can be crude.
00:00:15.000If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22 percent of the black vote and close the border and go back to an energy first
00:00:24.000paradigm and then use the DOJ to stop the cartels and interstate coordination of all this crime and restore deterrence, I
00:00:36.000think he could heal the country very quickly.
00:00:47.000He's Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist whose commentary has been published in nearly every major media news outlet in America.
00:00:56.000Hansen is also currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where his work is often characterized by a natural integration of historical narrative and modern issues, as well as an appreciation for Western civilization's heritage.
00:01:07.000His deep family roots in California's Central Valley often inform his criticism of American immigration policy, agricultural policy, and the far left.
00:01:15.000Hanson has authored or edited 26 books on matters ranging from the nature of citizenship to ancient warfare.
00:01:20.000His latest work, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, delves into the unsettling parallels between the conflicts of antiquity and our modern symptoms of decline.
00:01:28.000In today's episode, we explore the ideological origins and historical analogies for our current political moment.
00:01:33.000From the reverberations of war in the Middle East to the merits of federalism and the consequences of a possible Trump victory, this is a conversation you don't want to miss.
00:01:41.000As we navigate an era marked by rapid change and global uncertainty, Victor Davis Hanson's insights prove the enduring relevance of classical wisdom in today's world.
00:01:47.000Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.
00:01:50.000Professor Hanson, thanks so much for joining us and spending the time with us.
00:02:22.000If they get a new candidate, he'll have to up his game a little bit, but I think everybody's remarked it.
00:02:27.000I don't know what people in Gaza or Russia or China, North Korea, Iran are thinking, but let's hope they don't feel they have a window of opportunity to do something stupid.
00:02:39.000Because this president, we don't know who's running the country now, whether it's the Obama third term people or no one at all.
00:02:45.000Yeah, it might be Dr. Jill, who seems to be the most enthusiastic person in the room about Joe Biden's run in true Edith Wilson fashion.
00:02:52.000So this does bring us to the topic of Your latest book, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.
00:02:57.000I mean, I've been pointing out for months that I thought there was a significant possibility that this race would break open in June, July, August, that President Trump would start to gain a significant enough lead that dictators all over the world would see that window of opportunity you're talking about.
00:03:11.000That window of opportunity is now open, regardless of what you think happens with the election.
00:03:14.000Because even if you think that Biden's going to get reelected, that just opens the window of opportunity further.
00:03:19.000for nefarious forces because there's obviously a vacancy at the top of the American government
00:03:23.000and foreign policy is done almost entirely from the executive branch these days. So when you look
00:03:29.000at the world scene, how dangerous are things and where are the chief lines of danger?
00:03:35.000Well, you know, in the book I looked at four historical examples of complete
00:03:40.000civilizational erasure and there were common themes.
00:03:43.000One is that a society that is targeted or vulnerable has no idea that it is.
00:03:48.000It keeps reassuring itself that its grandeur is still there, it's still powerful.
00:03:53.000That has eerie similarities to the United States.
00:03:55.000They have no idea about the people who are attacking them.
00:03:58.000They don't know who Alexander the Great is or what he's capable of or Scipio.
00:04:02.000And we see that today when we were assured that Putin would never, never, never use a tactical weapon, although he said again and again that he would.
00:04:10.000That Iran would never, never, never get the bomb and use it as a first strike.
00:04:14.000And yet, for the first time in the history of the Jewish state, they sent over 320 rockets and missiles.
00:04:20.000We've had Mr. Erdogan in Turkey threatened to send missiles into Athens, send missiles into Israel, send missiles into Armenia.
00:04:34.000China has made a video talking about destroying Japan if it were to intervene and all of this is dismissed as rhetoric and it you know 99% of it may be but We're getting to a point now where the United States is the keeper of deterrence worldwide is no longer there for a variety of reasons.
00:04:53.000We don't have the economic clout with 36 trillion in debt.
00:04:56.000We're borrowing a trillion every 90 days.
00:05:01.000People don't remark at all that those are the soldiers of the white male rural demographic that died at two times their numbers in the general populations in god-awful places like Afghanistan.
00:05:14.000And Iraq, 75% of those fatalities came from that demographic that only represents about 34%.
00:05:22.000Yet we alienated them, Millie, Austin, calling them names, white supremacy, white privilege.
00:05:53.000Zelensky, We don't have a problem with outlawing political parties, habeas corpus, and elections.
00:05:59.000Collateral damage, Israel, you got to text people that you're going to might hit somebody.
00:06:05.000When they sent, when Ukraine sends missiles into the Donbass or Crimea, nobody says, did you hit civilians?
00:06:10.000So I don't know quite what explains that disconnect other than we have a large segment of the Democratic Party that is committed to overthrowing the Netanyahu government for some reason and doesn't like Israel in general and tries to, I guess, show daylight so that these actors, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran can get in between us and Israel.
00:07:34.000You know, ideologically, the case that I've made for why the left particularly despises Israel is because Israel is just an extraordinary example of how the victim-victimizer mentality that they've promoted is just a lie.
00:07:47.000It's why anti-Semitism has been rising at the same time domestically in Europe and in the United States also, is because the entire victim-victimizer binary, which is false, and the intersectional theory, which is false, which is that basically we can determine that if your group is economically unsuccessful that is due to some evil system of white
00:08:04.000supremacy and if your group is economically successful they must be the people who are the designers
00:08:08.000and beneficiaries of the system and so if you have a disproportionate number of jews who
00:08:11.000are doing economically well in the united states this means that they are the victimizers in a
00:08:16.000zero-sum game with regard to other minorities but they also happen to be in this weird
00:08:20.000area where it's very difficult to call jews victimizers considering that according to the hate
00:08:24.000crime statistics they're the most victimized group in the united states
00:08:27.000And the same thing holds true when you go to the Middle East, where you have wildly, disproportionately successful Israel with its $57,000 per year GDP per capita.
00:08:36.000Taking on the Hamas-dominated, Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Authority-dominated Palestinians who've made nothing but horrific choices for the last 70 to 80 years, impoverishing themselves, impoverishing their children, spending every aid dollar on building terror tunnels and stocking up with rockets.
00:08:51.000But the left-wing mentality says the Jews must be successful there because they're victimizing somebody.
00:08:56.000And so it must be that they are the actual bad guys over there.
00:08:59.000So I think that the hatred for Israel, the hatred for Jews, it crosses streams with the intersectional hatred for, say, white America in the left of the West.
00:09:10.000And they actually would like Israel to lose.
00:09:12.000They believe that Israel is an emissary of Western colonialist white supremacy.
00:09:18.000And so Israel is actually in the wrong for existing in that way.
00:09:24.000That was difficult, because traditionally Jews had suffered anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, and, of course, the Holocaust.
00:09:33.000And that was an obstacle for the intersectional, woke, Marxist binary people.
00:09:40.000But they were able to say, well, the Jews have, for high per capita income, their privilege, and we don't really care about the Holocaust.
00:09:48.000And they even played it down, and they're white.
00:09:51.000And then when they transferred that paradigm in the Middle East, They didn't look at the reality.
00:09:56.000There's 500 million Muslims in the Middle East and there's tiny little Israel, the only consensual society there, and they're surrounded by a sea of enemies that want to destroy them.
00:10:06.000Instead, they just looked at Israel versus this terrorist clique Hamas or Hezbollah and said, well, they're the overdog, they're the settlers.
00:10:15.000They had to think away or erase the idea that Israel is the underdog given the wider realities of the Middle East But they pulled all that off and the question is why did they do that?
00:10:26.000And you know, there's a long history Recent history of the left of being anti-semitism.
00:10:31.000I can't think of a major woke leader who hasn't said something about derogatory about the Jews.
00:10:37.000We started with Jesse Jackson, Jaime Town, Al Sharpton, put on your armor and come over here.
00:10:42.000Black Lives Matter with the glider posters that they issued.
00:10:47.000Ilan Omar, the Benjamins baby, all of ALC with a map with No Israel on it.
00:10:52.000So every one of these leaders of this woke movement has revealed that they're very anti-semitic in general.
00:11:11.000There's 10 to 20 billion dollars in endowed funding of these Middle East programs.
00:11:16.000And every time I look at their curriculum, at these programs.
00:11:20.000They're not Middle East historical, philological coursework.
00:11:24.000It's all anti-Israel, for the most part.
00:11:27.000And so, another thing I think it's explaining the campus, and people forget that, is at Stanford, just to take one example, we let in 9% of the incoming class of 2100 were white males, and 20% whites in general.
00:11:49.000Harvard, Princeton, all of these elite campuses.
00:11:51.000So what you're really seeing is, and that 9% of males, it's not enough for athletes and legacies and the kids of administrators and donors.
00:12:02.000And so what you've seen on these elite campuses that used to be meritocratic, the Jewish population has gone from about 25-30% down to 7-10%, while the Middle East and the foreign student body from China and the Middle East have just soared to almost 30, 40% of the student body, and then when you add that disparity, then you have your useful idiot, pretty poorly educated students, and they say, wow.
00:12:31.000The majority on campus doesn't like Jews.
00:13:17.000For the last three years, there has been no SAT, and there has been no comparative ranking of high school GPAs by the caliber of their high school education.
00:13:28.000So you have thousands of students at these campuses who were very insecure.
00:13:32.000The campuses themselves said, we had these standards that ensured we were going to be elite.
00:13:38.000Because of the rigor of the curriculum, and then when they destroyed the entrance requirements, all of a sudden the rigorous curriculum was impossible.
00:13:49.000Covertly, and without much media attention, they either have inflated the grades, 65% A's at Stanford, 80% at Yale, or they've watered down their curriculum, or they've added new courses.
00:14:01.000So a lot of the anger of these Middle East students and DEI students is that they're not able to do the work, and they feel very insecure.
00:14:10.000They're at these universities, and one of the ways that they square that circle is to be very active politically and suggest that they're victims.
00:14:18.000of white oppression on campus and I don't know how we're going to solve this other than to tax the endowments, get out of the student loan business, require an exit test, something really drastic like that.
00:14:31.000So, you know, one of the things that you talk about when you're talking about military policy and military history is, you know, what the future of the United States looks like.
00:14:39.000Obviously, we have military shortcomings.
00:14:40.000We've been pursuing the policy of technological advancement, but no actual restocking of the things that you need to do to make war, which, again, is actually not unique to the United States.
00:14:49.000It seems like a lot of Western powers are doing this.
00:14:52.000I was just there for a couple of weeks, and I was speaking with members of the military, and they had been so reliant on technology that they didn't actually have many of the basics.
00:14:59.000Whereas if you look over in Ukraine, the Russians are well stocked with World War II era armaments and so long as you don't care about how many civilians you kill, you can do precisely what you want as long as you have an endless supply of mortars from 1957.
00:15:11.000But I think this is one of the major disconnects that the West has experienced in terms of war.
00:15:19.000And that is that I don't think that the West understands what it means to win a war anymore.
00:15:23.000Since World War II, when the West basically said that was the war, to end all wars, we're not going to fight a war anymore in order to win.
00:15:30.000And the West really has not won a significant conflict in the post-war era.
00:16:38.000Instead, we have basically decided that war can be clean and antiseptic, because everybody in the end wants human rights, of course.
00:16:46.000And if it's clean and antiseptic, that means that it's easier for us to get into a war, and almost impossible for us to win one.
00:16:51.000As far as winning, laws of war don't change.
00:16:55.000The only way you win is you use a disproportionate level of force, and you destroy the enemy's ability, either psychological or actual, to make war against you, and then you submit them to terms that you impose on them.
00:17:36.000And he said we had dropped 20,000 pounds of incendiaries for nine months before the atomic bombs, and we were told if one person shoots at the planes, don't touch down, just go around and go back to Tinian, resupply and start bombing.
00:17:53.000And so the point was that We have peace today with Italy and Germany and Japan because we used a disproportionate level of force, and they knew that if they continued to make war, or if they didn't submit to terms, it was going to be the annihilation of their regimes.
00:18:10.000And then in our affluence and leisure, we think, well, we're beyond that.
00:18:23.000The funny thing is, they have a lot more respect, let's say, for Israel, when Israel is unpredictable, when Israel uses overwhelming force, when Israel doesn't really worry about the UN, and when Israel is very close, usually to a conservative administration.
00:18:43.000But the moment You get the left in, and they widen that gap, and they start to apply symmetrical criticism, or they single out Israel more than they do Hamas.
00:18:55.000And all these opportunistic actors, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, they jump in, the Middle East, Jordan, Egypt, all these, the Gulf, they start to triangulate.
00:19:26.000If you destroy Hamas, Hezbollah will cease and then you will turn your attention to Hezbollah and we will give you all the wherewithal.
00:19:35.000We wouldn't be having this conversation now.
00:19:39.000If they had done that, and I think a lot of them wanted to do that, I think Hezbollah and Hamas wouldn't be capable of fighting right now.
00:19:49.000It's very frustrating, and I don't know what's going to happen with Israel, but they've got a hundred thousand people who can't live on their northern border.
00:19:58.000They're engaged in house-to-house fighting in Gaza.
00:20:04.000We warned Iran about the nature of the Israeli counter-strike, so it's in shambles.
00:20:11.000And that was in the debate, you know, you could argue that Donald Trump should have brought in more detail and he had opportunities at each point to give facts and data.
00:20:21.000He did very well in some cases, but mostly it was just, this guy is the worst president in history.
00:20:27.000And you have to sympathize with him because it is frustrating.
00:20:31.000It's been a 360 degree destructive four years.
00:20:36.000And I don't know how... Sometimes I almost think they get in a room and they say, Well, yeah, we let in 10 million people, there's borders open, and how are you going to stop that?
00:20:47.000The remedy will be worse than the malady that we caused.
00:20:50.000Or, yeah, Israel's weak now, and it's surrounded, and that's your problem when you take over, and see if you like it.
00:20:59.000And inflation is high, but you know what?
00:21:00.000You're going to have to raise taxes on the people who deserve to be taxed.
00:21:04.000It's almost that the nihilism was intentional.
00:21:07.000And they knew that people wouldn't like what they did, but they thought they were going to hand off a revolutionary system, a Jacobin system, and then the effort to undo it would be catastrophic.
00:21:21.000We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
00:21:23.000First, you know, last time my kids were sick, it was actually kind of a pain in the butt to get them their medication.
00:21:28.000We had to get the prescription, then we had to go on over to our local CVS.
00:21:32.000It turns out that, for some reason, that CVS was closed, which was really rare and weird.
00:21:43.000First of all, it's not a simple first aid kit.
00:21:45.000It contains essential, life-saving medications that are often in short supply, like amoxicillin, Z-Pak, ivermectin, and more.
00:21:50.000It's like having an urgent care in your home.
00:21:52.000The Medical Emergency Kit includes eight doctor-prescribed medications and a comprehensive guidebook for safely treating over 30 illnesses and infections, like COVID, strep throat, pneumonia, bronchitis, tick bites, UTIs, and more.
00:22:02.000No doctor visits, no pharmacies, no co-pay.
00:22:04.000Every home should have at least one Medical Emergency Kit.
00:22:23.000So I want to talk about in terms of war, you know, the imbalance that now exists between defense and offense.
00:22:28.000So it used to be that, you know, the idea generally was that defense is easier than offense.
00:22:35.000Somebody has to come after you, you can defend your territory.
00:22:38.000But when you're talking about very high-tech powers and very low-tech powers, it turns out that actually offense is much easier than defense in a lot of these cases.
00:22:46.000A good example of this, because it's an ongoing military conflict, is what's happening between Hezbollah and Israel, or Hamas and Israel, versus what's happening, say, with the Houthis in the United States and shipping.
00:22:59.000It turns out that we're having to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against incredibly low-tech weaponry.
00:23:09.000So every time Hamas would shoot a $50 rocket, Israel would have to shoot a $50,000 projectile
00:23:14.000from Iron Dome in order to take it down.
00:23:16.000And again, I wonder how much of that goes to the underlying message that I was mentioning
00:23:20.000before about the West priding itself so much on its own view of human rights and its belief
00:23:26.000that that is somehow mirrored on the other side.
00:23:29.000And we've geared everybody in the West, all of our weaponry, toward exactitude, toward exact defense, toward high-tech.
00:23:35.000And meanwhile, our enemies, who don't give any dams at all about civilian life, their own or enemy, it gives them a real advantage in being able to do things like knock out massive ships that are going through the Red Sea and shut down entire shipping lanes that used to be considered crucial and are still crucial, actually, to the world economy.
00:23:52.000Well, defense and offense go through all, they're completely cyclical.
00:23:56.000You know, when the tank emerged, then it rained for about a year and a half, and then Panzerfaust, etc., anti-tank rockets.
00:24:04.000It goes back and forth, but you're right.
00:24:06.000In this particular cycle that we're in, that the Iron Dome is very expensive to knock down cheap rockets, the Houthis you mentioned, but that's only because we've self-imposed these conventions on us.
00:24:19.000If we were going to be imaginative, we could reverse that very easily.
00:24:23.000We could make their defense much more expensive than our offense, and I'll give you a couple examples.
00:24:29.000So, if we had an American cargo ship come through, and the Red Sea and the Houthis attacked it, And we had a couple of frigates, we would just tell the Houthis, if you do it again, we're going to take out on day one your entire electrical grid.
00:24:45.000If you do it again, we're going to take out your water supply.
00:24:47.000If you do it again, we're going to take out all of your harbors.
00:24:51.000And then we're just going to sit there for a while and see how you like it.
00:24:54.000And we could easily tell, Israel could easily tell Hezbollah, If you continue to do this, we're going to take out the main power grid for Beirut.
00:25:05.000And we don't really care about the consequences.
00:25:08.000If you continue to do that, we're going to block the harbors of Beirut.
00:25:12.000And that would be far cheaper than their offensive weapons.
00:25:19.000But we have self-imposed restrictions because as you rightly infer would be two seconds and global CNN or MSNBC without a reporter with a microphone in a mother's face saying that they're freezing to death and they have no power and yet it would take it would require a leader to say war is hell and this is you know General Sherman said if you do not
00:25:56.000They said he was a terrorist, a killer, and he destroyed the interior of the South in two marches through the Carolinas and Georgia.
00:26:05.000And then after the war, people said, oh my God, he was a genius.
00:26:07.000Grant lost 100,000 men fighting in Between Washington and Virginia in that horrible summer of 1864 and Sherman won the war without losing anybody and they hate it's what Machiavelli said people hate you far more if you destroy their inheritance than if you kill them and that tells you something that we have the ability if we really want to to make the Houthis pay a terrible price and we could do that and I don't know why we don't I
00:26:38.000And that was something about, Trump was very successful about that because they did, you know, under George Bush, they went into Georgia and Osatia, the Russians.
00:26:48.000Under Obama, they went into Donbass and Crimea.
00:27:18.000And then when it comes to domestic policy, that's simple stuff.
00:27:20.000And it turns out that it's usually quite the reverse.
00:27:22.000It turns out that foreign policy is a fifth grade playground.
00:27:25.000If you're the biggest kid on the fifth grade playground, then force or threat of force, credible threat of force, is what goes a very, very long way.
00:27:32.000And that's something that Donald Trump innately understands, like on a gut level.
00:27:35.000I remember I did a fundraiser for him out here in Florida, and this is exactly what he was saying.
00:27:40.000My favorite anecdote that he was telling was he was saying, you want to know the reason why Russia never went into Ukraine?
00:27:45.000It's because I told Vlad, I said, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you.
00:27:49.000And Vlad said, no you won't, Mr. President.
00:27:55.000I mean, well, I might is a pretty good answer when you're leading the world's most powerful military.
00:28:00.000And the fact that we're so shy about all of that, the fact that this is considered unsophisticated, it's incredible and stupid and it's also counterproductive.
00:28:10.000And again, I think it goes to a deeper ideological malaise that's set in in the West, which is that we do not think that we are different or special in any way whatsoever.
00:28:18.000And if we are different or special, it's because we're worse, we're meaner, we're more terrible.
00:28:22.000And the proof of this is that when we're... And what that means, again, it's that victim-victimizer equation of success with evil.
00:28:30.000And so the more we succeed, the more evil we are.
00:28:33.000And if we've won a war in the past, well, that's only because we're an evil nation, an evil civilization.
00:28:38.000And what's weird is that I'm starting to see this kind of horseshoe around, weirdly.
00:28:42.000You're starting to see it in parts of the right as well.
00:28:44.000I mean, there are prominent commentators on the right now who are saying, you know, how evil is the United States for having used the atomic bomb at the end of World War II?
00:28:52.000That to me is, it's historically imbecilic.
00:28:56.000I mean, there can be open debate over the necessity of the atomic bomb, but the reality is that the Japanese military was preparing to kill a million Americans when they got onto the isles of Japan.
00:29:08.000I mean, they already had killed tens of thousands of Americans on tiny atolls all throughout the Pacific.
00:29:13.000They showed no inclination to give up the fight before the end of the war.
00:29:16.000Even when we dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, there was an attempted coup inside the Japanese Yeah, I think it might even be worse than that.
00:29:23.000the emperor from going out surrendering. So this kind of notion that if only the
00:29:28.000United States had been a lot nicer during World War II, things would have
00:29:30.000been a lot better. I don't know where that's coming from other than a perverse
00:29:32.000view of the United States's role in the world. Yeah, I think it might even be
00:29:36.000worse than that. I think our problem is that we're culturally arrogant and we're
00:29:46.000And we think everybody wants to be like us.
00:29:49.000And when we were in Kabul, right before the humiliation, when we lost these 13 Marines, $50 billion in weaponry, we just handed over $300 million retrofitted air base.
00:30:36.000And there is a connection between democracy and freedom and technology and success, but they don't see that.
00:30:43.000And the more that we try to appease them and say to them, We're Americans and we want to help you and we're going to go in and we're going to go kill Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists, but we're going to build a park at the same time.
00:31:08.000They feel that, well, you didn't earn it.
00:31:11.000And you were given it, or you exploited us.
00:31:15.000So I think you have to be humane in the sense you don't want to...
00:31:20.000To be Hitlerian in war, and you don't want to kill people gratuitously, but every time that we have pulled back and tried to reason with people and try to show how magnanimous we are, they hated us and more people got killed.
00:31:34.000It happened in Iraq, it happened in Korea, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Vietnam.
00:31:40.000And that, unfortunately, we've imposed those values on the IDF.
00:31:45.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:32:47.000This is one of the things I think that's also kind of hilarious about how we in America perceive ourselves.
00:32:52.000I think that most Americans, they are willing to acknowledge the reality, which is that the things, when it comes to foreign policy, we don't love gratuitously ugly images on our TV.
00:33:04.000But the notion that America is deeply invested in human rights abuses, just everywhere we see them around the world, is obviously untrue.
00:33:13.000And the rest of the world takes our rhetoric seriously, but in reality, I'm not sure that they should.
00:33:20.000In other words, there are a lot of countries that are sort of trying to play up to what they perceive to be America's stated interests, Israel being the most obvious, where Israel says, well, you know, you guys keep saying that you want human rights, you want human rights, so we're being really, really exact with drone strikes, and we're hitting one guy in the car, but not the other guy in the car, and we'll show you the tape of it.
00:33:36.000And we're shipping in 3,200 calories per person per day into the Gaza Strip.
00:33:40.000And we're trying to facilitate this humanitarian aid.
00:33:42.000And for that, for their trouble, they're getting clocked across the head by the Biden administration.
00:33:47.000When in reality, it turns out the American people don't really care all that much.
00:33:49.000What the American people want and have always wanted is quick victory.
00:33:53.000Because that's a very human thing to want.
00:33:55.000It's actually, in many cases, the right thing to want, because it turns out that slow bleeds are far worse for a civilization than a quick victory.
00:34:01.000It's much better for a civilization to win a quick victory in the long term.
00:34:04.000I mean, the reality is that if the United States had drawn out, say, World War II rather than dropping two atomic bombs, not only does that end with probably a million dead Americans on the shores of Japan, it also probably ends with millions of more dead Japanese and the half-century-long occupation of half of Japan by the Russians who are coming from the north at the same time.
00:34:22.000It turns out that quick victory sometimes is a virtue.
00:34:51.000It's 20% maybe on one side, 20% on the others.
00:34:55.000And the other 60 or 70% put their finger in the air and they said, I have to be on the winning side.
00:35:00.000And that's an instinctual, primeval human trait.
00:35:04.000And so they look at a war and they think, who is going to win?
00:35:08.000And if I think this side is going to win, I want to ally themselves with it.
00:35:13.000That's what's so dangerous of what's going on with Israel and Ukraine, because with this new alliance of China, and Iran, and Russia, and North Korea, and maybe, you know, bad actors like Turkey, they're going around to the area, and they're going to Australia, they're going to the Philippines, they're going to Taiwan, they're going to South Korea, and they're going to Eastern Europe, and they're saying, look, the United States will not protect you.
00:35:40.000You may not like us, but we're the rising Sun and they're setting and if you're smart you'll make the necessary adjustments We're not asking you to be over.
00:35:48.000We're not asking to renounce them, but just you know gradually distance yourself they've made this argument to India, especially and we on the other side don't seem to fathom that and so that was what was tragic about the Gaza War had Israel Israel was really doing the United States the biggest favor and Possible much more than Ukraine even because if it had destroyed Hamas very quickly and Hezbollah Iran would be completely humiliated and when isolated and we would have had a new I think
00:36:24.000There would have been pressure to cut, once it was weakened, there would have been pressure to cut the oil and re-institute these sanctions.
00:36:32.000But when you don't act decisively, then people feel you're weak and they get afraid for themselves.
00:36:51.000It's not just a bunch of terrorist murderers.
00:36:54.000And that is very dangerous, what we've done.
00:36:57.000And so, Netanyahu, I feel for him, but he's going to have to somehow have enough weapons to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah And then not listen to this administration.
00:37:09.000And that's very hard to do, given their purse strings and the hatred they have within the administration, particular people, to Israel.
00:37:17.000So, you know, to go back to your book, and you mentioned one of the factors in how empires collapse and how wars descend into annihilation.
00:37:25.000And you said one of them is just people can't see it coming.
00:37:27.000And as you said, that's very obviously true in the United States.
00:37:29.000We're spending like there's no tomorrow in the assumption that there, of course, is a tomorrow, and that no matter what, we will always succeed.
00:37:35.000This is what modern monetary theory also suggested, is that no matter how much money we spent, there would never be an inflationary cycle.
00:37:40.000And then within three years, there was a massive inflationary cycle.
00:37:43.000It turns out that everything that goes up comes down.
00:37:45.000So what are some of the other factors when you're looking at empires that collapse or countries that are overtaken by new empires?
00:37:53.000What are some of the other factors that you see present in the United States?
00:37:57.000We mentioned finance, but you can't underscore that.
00:38:01.000Carthage that was destroyed was not the Carthage of Hannibal a half century later in terms of financial power and trade.
00:38:09.000Another is that as society gets weaker, and starts to decline, they put more interest in, and I know this is counterintuitive, but they want to have more allies.
00:38:21.000So take Constantinople and the Byzantines.
00:38:24.000The more they were unable to hold back Mehmed and the Sultan and his announced plan to destroy Constantinople, take it over, the more they said the Genovese are going to come.
00:38:36.000The Venetians will sail up the Dardanelles and save us.
00:38:57.000I hear they're marching up to the Peloponnesian, up the Peloponnesian.
00:39:02.000When they saw the actual disparity in forces and the nature of Alexander VIII, they just turned around and went home.
00:39:09.000And so I think in the case of the United States, we keep talking, I mean, it's very important to have allies, but we keep talking about NATO this and NATO that and our allies, but in some ways it's an admission that the United States is no longer preeminent and will not lead.
00:39:28.000And what we should be saying is we want all the allies we can, but if we don't have the allies, We still have the power to fulfill our foreign policy agendas.
00:39:37.000We've got the best military, the best economy in the world, the best tech.
00:39:41.000But as you start to weaken, you keep talking about coalitions and they never pan out because you see intrinsically somebody says to themselves, well, I'm a NATO partner of the United States, but when the United States starts to look weak, Then the NATO partner doesn't say, I'm going to step up and help them in their hour of need.
00:40:01.000The NATO partner says, well, I'm on the front ranks with Russia.
00:40:06.000I got to cut a deal with them or China has trade with us or something.
00:40:32.000When I was writing the chapter on Constantinople and I was reading all of these first-hand Italian and Byzantine Greek accounts, And it was just sad.
00:40:41.000Giussiani, the Genovese mercenary, kept saying, I know people are going to be on the horizon.
00:40:47.000They're going to come up right from the Aegean in the nick of time.
00:40:50.000And Constantine said, well, we have all these Greek-speaking communities.
00:41:01.000You think, no, they were never going to come.
00:41:03.000They weren't going to send help to a dying civilization.
00:41:08.000They were going to hold out on their own, and they all were destroyed separately, but they were not going to come.
00:41:14.000And so, that's what's kind of pathetic about the Sullivan-Blinken-Biden axis.
00:41:19.000They keep talking about allies, and we're going to do this, and coalitions, but people won't join us if they think you're weak economically, culturally, socially, and militarily, economically, you know.
00:41:32.000So, when you look at, sort of, the future of the country, it's very difficult to imagine, because America's never experienced it, the possibility of, like, an actual split country.
00:41:44.000We almost experienced it during the Civil War, obviously, but since the Civil War, we've not really experienced the possibility of a serious split country or a real foreign invasion since 1812.
00:41:54.000And so, what exactly would a decline of America Look like.
00:41:58.000I mean, you can see how America would decline economically.
00:43:13.000So already there's areas that our enemies have said, If you come in here, you would be attacked, and you're too risk-averse, and we're going to provide enough risk so you'll be averse to taking them.
00:43:27.000And when you look at the finance, I mean, Israel has an Iron Dome.
00:43:32.000Trump talks about, we need an Iron Dome, and we do need a sufficient, but do we have the money even to do it?
00:43:38.000And that gets back to Libby's warning that when the Maladay, when the Medicine is worse than the Maladay.
00:43:48.000I mean, can you really imagine people either raising taxes or cutting entitlements so that we can build a sophisticated air defense system against, say, North Korea or Iran that sent this?
00:44:01.000I think people would say you're either heartless or you can't do that.
00:44:05.000And one of the things that starts, always what happens is with decline, it happened in Rome across the Danube and the Rhine, You have this idea that you're in decline and there are vigorous people on the other side of the border and maybe if you just destroyed the border and they came in and they had got a whiff of your superior culture or in the case of late Roman Christianity, then they would become kind of an infusion of dynamism.
00:44:36.000That's kind of the American creed about legal immigration.
00:44:41.000It depends on assimilation, integration, and it can't happen unless the numbers are very small and the host is very confident.
00:44:50.000So when we let in 10 to 12 million people, And we think that they're going to work really hard, or they're going to make us compete with them, and they came from the poorest, most god-awful places.
00:45:04.000And that's a good sign of a decline, that you don't have a defensible border.
00:45:10.000And the reason that you don't is you have the wherewithal, but you think that you need an infusion of dynamism because you're a static, inert, ossified, calcified society.
00:45:19.000And that happened a lot in antiquity, in the Middle Ages.
00:45:27.000There is this growth of a, I know it's a tired word, administrative state, but if you look at the number of people who were permanently occupied at Versailles in the last years of the Bourbons, 15,000 are under Philip II at the apex, and then the quick decline of the Spanish at the escarole, 7,000 people.
00:45:51.000You look at the Kremlin and the Soviet Union, 10,000 people.
00:45:55.000And we have this, we have these judge, jury, and executioner people, whether it's, you know, Francis Collin and Fauci or Mayork, all these unelected people, and they're exercising a degree of power that vastly exceeds a congressperson or a senator's.
00:46:13.000And their only allegiance is to the ideology that created the administrative state and perpetuates it.
00:46:21.000And it's almost as if it's like a coup that's taken over.
00:46:25.000And it involves the media and academia and Hollywood and entertainment.
00:46:31.000And so, you wonder how the citizen is going to get back, the dying citizen is going to get back the preeminence of the citizen to say, you know what, we want to get rid of this Department of Homeland Security or Department of Energy or Department of Education, just because you're too powerful and you do too much harm.
00:46:51.000And they can't do it, and that happened to Rome especially.
00:46:56.000You can't afford it, they can't do it.
00:46:58.000So, just to sum up, when a society knows what it has to do and what's killing it, but it's afraid that the remedy would be too controversial or too difficult for the patient to handle, it does nothing.
00:47:11.000And then the maladie or the disease progresses.
00:47:16.000Every single person in politics knows we have to start.
00:47:19.000We could go back tomorrow to Simpson-Bowles paradigm that would have had us with a balanced budget and no deficit, you know, 15 years if we had adopted it.
00:47:30.000We all know what we have to do with the Pentagon.
00:47:32.000We all know what we have to do with the border.
00:47:34.000We all know what we have to do with crime.
00:47:36.000And yet we can't do it because we're afraid of being labeled a racist or xenophobe or sexist or transphobe.
00:47:46.000We're kind of ossified right now and existing on the fumes of the past.
00:47:49.000as clinger or deplorable or redeemable, dregs, chump, all of those pejoratives
00:47:55.000have been used. So we're kind of ossified right now and existing on the fumes of
00:48:00.000the past. Another thing is very strange about these societies in decline.
00:48:06.000They don't have a romantic version of the past.
00:48:10.000You would think that because they think they have extended the glory and they're still constant, they're still Justinian city, or they're still a Pamanondas of Thebes, but they don't really honor the past.
00:48:22.000They don't really say, we have to live up to what these people did.
00:48:26.000They have a I guess it's a modernist idea that we apply the standards of the modern age to the past and find it wanting, because they surely, when they talk about rejuvenation or restoration, they don't really articulate that we want to be Hannibal City again.
00:48:43.000When you look at, say, a map of the United States, so usually when you look at an empire decline, the map starts to change pretty radically.
00:48:50.000You see the Roman Empire shrinking and then you see it breaking into two.
00:48:55.000You see the Soviet Empire breaking and the map changes.
00:48:59.000When you look at the United States, it's difficult to imagine how the map changes per se in the same sort of way. Obviously we've got,
00:49:05.000we're very lucky, God has blessed us with extraordinary geography,
00:49:08.000we have autarkic economic power at a lower level of economic development, obviously, but we have dominance
00:49:13.000across an entire continent, we have Canadians in our north who are no
00:49:17.000external threat to us, we have Mexicans in our south who, you know, don't seem to
00:49:22.000have, they may have infiltrative power in some of the southwest particularly,
00:49:27.000but now across the nation, thanks to the drug cartels shipping people across the border,
00:49:31.000But do you foresee the possibility of a change to the map of America in the same way that there is a change to the map of, say, the British Empire or the Roman Empire or anything else?
00:49:41.000Well, it had been conventional wisdom that the salvation of the United States was the Federalist system, the idea that we were not America, we were the United States, and that we had a system, and the left, of course, hates that system, where the House was popularly elected and represented The people in the Senate represented the states so that, you know, they had six years of a term.
00:50:10.000And that was okay because the senators represented the state and their congressional representatives represented the people.
00:50:17.000And that would allow the states, if you didn't like something in one state, you could go to another state.
00:50:23.000There was commonalities, but there was enough respect for state autonomy that each state was experimenting in various degrees with consensual government.
00:50:33.000More freedom, less freedom, less taxes, more regulation, etc, etc.
00:50:38.000And then that was a safety valve so that the nation didn't explode.
00:50:43.000However, The problem with federalism is that when people conglomerate in one geographical area, that becomes a force multiplier, and you create two alternative systems.
00:50:58.000We saw that in the 1850s with the rise of the idea that even though 1% of the southern population own slaves, the other people, and most people suffered from it, both black and white.
00:51:10.000Black, certainly, but also white, poor.
00:51:13.000Nevertheless, there was a larger paradigm that they accepted, that the holy ground of the Confederacy, we don't want to pay for internal improvements, tariffs, or killings, all of that stuff.
00:51:25.000And they created a subculture, the red states, Mason-Dixon, south of it.
00:51:31.000And that was the only time that it really happened.
00:51:34.000But today, when we look at things, everybody is self-selecting.
00:51:39.000And so I think 10, I saw the statistics, 10 to 12 million Californians have left in the last 30 years.
00:53:19.000It's just a monastery of the mind where a whole half of the country is culturally, socially disconnecting.
00:53:28.000And the thing is that the North always, from the Civil War days, had all the advantages.
00:53:35.000They had the industry, they had the capital, they had Wall Street, they had Harvard and Yale, and then they had the West Coast and Oregon.
00:53:45.000And so you thought that that wouldn't be possible.
00:53:47.000And yet what's happening is you're seeing a red state antithesis that is draining the blue states of all the talent and using the old blue state model in red states.
00:54:03.000And the red states, in some way, are more like the North of the 1850s.
00:54:09.000And the blue states are more like the Confederacy in the sense they're obsessed with one-drop racism and the wokeness.
00:54:16.000They love to nullify federal laws, like sanctuary cities.
00:55:12.000So, yes, we're going to be in a very dangerous position unless we get a unifying type of administration in Congress.
00:55:21.000One of the things that would be fascinating about what you're talking about is that unlike the Civil War, where one side was insisting on the power of union and the other side wanted to break away, in what we're looking at right now, when I talk to left-wingers from California, they're saying to Floridians and Texans, go with God.
00:55:37.000And if you're in Florida or Texas, you're putting up lawn signs saying, don't New York my Florida.
00:55:42.000And so there's this sort of mutual belief that we're better off without one another
00:55:47.000that seems to be growing rather than minimizing.
00:55:50.000And in truth, the only thing that has historically ever papered over differences like that are
00:57:31.000But more importantly, he's hit on a paradigm of unity where he's trying to substitute class concerns and solidarity for race.
00:57:42.000So, for all the vituperation about he's racist and polarizing, what he's doing by going to black areas and Latino areas, and appealing because he has a natural empathy for working people.
00:57:58.000He is basically saying to them, you have more in common if you're in Bakersfield, California, or you're in inner Chicago with the people of East Palestine than you do with Joey Reed and Oprah.
00:58:12.000Because you're black and Latino, bi-coastal elite in the media, in Colleen Gray, in the universities.
00:58:19.000They're just, they have the same relationship to you that The people at Harvard or Yale do to East Palestine, the white elite.
00:58:30.000And you need to unite and make the majority, and we can And then he gives them an agenda.
00:58:38.000And the agenda is, we're going to close the border for you.
00:58:42.000And we're going to very quickly, and we can, mine rare earths, build nuclear plants, be the greatest gas producer and oil producer in the world.
00:58:52.000And that's going to help you and that's going to give us national strength.
00:58:57.000And we're going to get back the military because we're going to get all of these people, the middle class, and we're not going to emphasize race in the military anymore.
00:59:05.000And that's a radical idea, and I never thought that a Paul Ryan or a Mitt Romney or John McCain who were claimed to be so sober and judicious, they never attempted that.
00:59:22.000All Paul Ryan talked about was capital gains cuts, which I'm for, but it was just a That Republican Party had no ability to do that and yet it's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people and he's blunt and they admire his authenticity and he's genuine and he can be crude and they're starting to form this nationalist worker solidarity and I think
00:59:56.000If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22 percent of the black vote, that would require probably 30 or 40
01:00:03.000percent of the black male, or 45 to 50 of the Latino vote, and close the border, and go back
01:00:10.000to an energy-first paradigm, and then use the DOJ to stop this, the cartels and interstate coordination
01:00:19.000of all this crime, and restore deterrence.
01:00:24.000I think he could heal the country very quickly.
01:00:34.000I'm kind of confident because I'll just finish by saying it this reminds me a lot of the 1980 race with Carter and Reagan Carter You know everybody said Well, he gave us stagflation, inflation.
01:01:33.000And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?
01:01:37.000After that debate, and I saw that, and I was coming to that conclusion anyway, I do not want to be told what I can't do, and scolded, and hectored, and have all these unorthodox things mainstreamed.
01:01:50.000And whatever Trump is, this is our last chance.
01:01:52.000And I think you're going to see him blow up the election and win by about 9 or 10 points.
01:01:58.000But it won't be until August, I think.
01:02:00.000Well, that does put me in a good mood, and that's a good place to stop.
01:02:03.000Professor Hanson, really appreciate the time, appreciate your insight.