00:00:00.000Hey everybody, the one man who could convince me to think differently about Ukraine.
00:00:05.000This hour, we go through the great Victor Davis Hansen's piece on Ukraine, one of America's most gifted minds.
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00:02:16.000Foreign policy can be very, very complex.
00:02:19.000It is not cut and dry, despite what the people on television try to tell you.
00:02:23.000Now, there's a lot of, let's say, uninformed people on television that are clamoring to try to get us into a no-fly zone or war, if you will, in Russia and Ukraine.
00:02:37.000We've obviously pushed back against that.
00:02:40.000There are very few people that I respect when it comes to writing about these issues and thinking deeply about what's happening on the geopolitical stage.
00:02:50.000One of those people, though, the only person that could probably make me stop, I shouldn't say only person, but one of the only people that could make me stop what I'm doing, drop whatever I'm reading, and take every word that is published seriously.
00:03:06.000There's one person that when he speaks about an issue of current affairs or foreign affairs, I say before I read it, I say he knows far more than I do, and I'm going to respect exactly where he's coming from.
00:03:20.000This person is someone that you've read and you've probably seen him on television.
00:03:25.000You see, he was not a political commentator for most of his life.
00:03:33.000You see, he spent the first 30 to 40 years of his life studying things that were ancient and beautiful and true.
00:03:42.000He is one of the most fluent experts when it comes to ancient warfare, Sparta v. Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the ancient Greek and Roman experiments in government.
00:03:55.000I'm of course talking about Victor Davis Hansen.
00:03:59.000Victor Davis Hansen is a military historian.
00:04:02.000He has become an almost, let's say, outsourced teacher of mine.
00:04:06.000He's not personally taught me anything as far as one-on-one, but I have taken many of his courses brought to you by Hillsdale College, including his citizenship course, which should be a required project for every single student in America.
00:04:22.000I have read many of his books, including The Dying Citizen.
00:04:27.000He wrote one of the most effective arguments in favor of Donald Trump.
00:04:33.000Victor Davis Hansen is not ideological, instead, he is philosophically rooted in things that are beautiful and true and eternal.
00:04:43.000His understanding of American history, his observation of human nature, his fairness when it comes to looking at current events is something that should make us all take pause and say, what is VDH saying about this?
00:04:58.000Now, the man who really discovered Victor Davis Hansen on the public stage was, of course, the great Rush Limbaugh.
00:05:05.000You can go back in the archives of the Rush Limbaugh program back in 2002, 2003, and he was like, who is this Victor Davis Hansen guy?
00:05:13.000Simultaneously, Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale College also had given him some positions at Hillsdale before anyone had heard of Victor Davis Hansen.
00:05:24.000Victor Davis Hansen coined the phrase muscular class.
00:05:28.000He is very focused on revitalizing the American citizen.
00:05:34.000So much of the kind of nomenclature that is used on the conservative political commentary side stems from Victor Davis Hansen.
00:05:42.000And the reason is that for 30 to 40 years, Victor Davis Hansen did not care about the popularity of his columns.
00:05:49.000He did not care about the perspective of what people thought of him.
00:05:54.000He was studying ancient history, military movements.
00:05:59.000His class on the Second World Wars at Hillsdale is phenomenal.
00:06:02.000So all of that lead up for this, which is when Victor Davis Hansen recently published a series of articles on Ukraine, I had to stop what I was doing, put my phone down and say, all right, I'm going to just look at this at a blank slate.
00:06:16.000I have so much respect for this man that no matter what he says in here, I'm going to entertain with an open mind, and I better have a good counter argument to what he says, because he has far more wisdom than the combined intelligence of the cable news, quote-unquote, intelligentsia.
00:06:34.000So I rarely do this, but I want to go through this article by Victor Davis Hansen, 10 Realities of Ukraine.
00:06:42.000We're going to go through piece by piece.
00:06:43.000And I'm also going to weave in some of the other articles he has written about this and an analogy that Victor Davis Hansen wrote about Vladimir Putin being like a caged animal.
00:06:57.000But we're going to go through this because we always try to keep an open mind.
00:07:00.000We want to get a better grasp of what is happening, and you should too.
00:07:03.000If you have a position that says we need a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or if you have a position that said we should not get involved in Ukraine at all, no matter what in life, you should always be open to the better argument.
00:07:15.000Now, you could entertain it for 30 seconds to be like, that's a bad argument.
00:07:23.000That is the philosophical and moral basis of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, which is better ideas need an opportunity to be spread and to be spoken.
00:07:33.000Ideas need an opportunity to come up against one another.
00:07:37.000Victor Davis Hansen, 10 Realities of Ukraine.
00:07:40.000One, Victor writes, reassuring an enemy.
00:07:44.000What one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more.
00:07:49.000Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolsters deterrence.
00:07:55.000But Joe Biden's predictable reassurance to Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not.
00:08:07.000Now, this is an interesting one for the neoconservatives.
00:08:11.000This is one for all the people that are clamoring for a no-fly zone.
00:08:15.000And I encourage Adam Kinzinger to all the people that are calling for a no-fly zone: why don't you go have a one-on-one conversation with Victor Davis Hansen?
00:08:23.000He knows a lot more about this than you ever will.
00:08:27.000Quote: No-fly zones don't work in a big power, symmetrical standoff.
00:08:34.000In a cost-benefit analysis, they are not worth the risk of shooting down the planes of a nuclear power.
00:08:41.000Professor Hansen writes, quote, they usually do little to stop planes outside of such zones shooting missiles into them.
00:08:48.000Sending long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine to deny Russian air superiority is a far better way of regaining air parity.
00:08:59.000So that's Victor Davis Hanson basically, quote unquote, get it shooting down the argument that Zelensky made in front of Congress, which is, please give us a no-fly zone.
00:09:10.000Please give us the ability to be able to control our skies.
00:09:14.000Victor Davis Hansen says, quote, no-fly zones don't work in a big power, symmetrical standoff.
00:09:21.000In a cost-benefit analysis, they're not worth the risk of shooting down planes of a nuclear power.
00:09:25.000That's someone who has studied more military battles and teaches about those military battles.
00:09:31.000Why is the sobering analysis of Victor Davis Hanson when it comes to the no-fly zones not contributed to the conversation or the narrative?
00:09:38.000Or is it just kind of like this outsourced video game?
00:09:41.000Like, it feels good, we're going to do it.
00:09:43.000Well, Professor Hansen says, you better stop short before implementing a no-fly zone.
00:09:48.000We're going to go through these 10 pieces of the master historian himself, the American patriot who understands history with wisdom and prudence and wants what's best for the American people.
00:09:59.000They're now saying it's Putin's gas price hike, which will be felt by the muscular class, the middle class, disproportionately.
00:10:40.000I decided to go back into the archives and wonder what was the message that the Biden regime and Europe was sending to Vladimir Putin when it comes to energy.
00:10:52.000I actually found this on Victor Davis Hansen's website that was written about one of his colleagues.
00:10:56.000Quote, in June, Joe Biden and German leader Angela Merkel agreed that the United States would not enforce its sanctions against Nord Stream II under sea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
00:11:10.000Biden and Merkel presented this as a way to repair German-United States relations.
00:11:15.000Although the pipeline is an existential issue for Ukraine, which will lose security leverage now, that vast Russian gas deliveries will now circumvent Ukraine.
00:11:23.000This is back in September, this was written.
00:11:25.000President Zelensky learned of the German-American agreement through the press.
00:11:29.000Similarly, Biden's one-on-one meeting in Geneva with Putin in June was received as a potential sellout of Ukraine.
00:11:37.000And that really wasn't covered very much, was it?
00:11:39.000Which is that there is a meeting between Biden and Merkel back in June where basically it was broadcast to Vladimir Putin, hey, you're going to get your pipeline.
00:11:49.000So what does that mean for the calculation of the sinister Vladimir Putin?
00:12:07.000And that's number three of Victor Davis Hansen's point.
00:12:10.000Europe and NATO members and Germany in particular have de facto admitted that their past decades of shutting down nuclear plants and coal mines and oil and gas fields have left Europe at the mercy of Russia.
00:12:20.000That is primarily because of the environmentalists and the climate change cultists.
00:12:27.000They are promising to rearm and meet their promised military contributions.
00:12:31.000By their actions, they're admitting that their critics, the United States in particular, were right and they were dangerously wrong in empowering Putin.
00:12:36.000In a headline that just came out in the last couple of days, Germany is now thinking of rebuilding coal-powered coal-fire power plants.
00:12:51.000Germany wants to get back to cheap energy immediately.
00:12:54.000If they only would have embraced an LNG strategy, liquefied natural gas, if they only would have partnered with the United States, maybe they wouldn't have had this geopolitical tiger in the cage that was created, which of course is Vladimir Putin.
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00:14:09.000Number four, on Victor Davis Hansen's article here, China is now pro-Russian.
00:14:14.000Beijing wants Russian natural resources at a discount, and Russia will pay for overpriced access to Chinese finance, commerce, and markets.
00:14:22.000Yet if Russia loses the Ukraine war, goes broke, and is ostracized at an international pariah, then China will likely cut the smelly Russian albatross from its neck in fear of a new Western financial, cultural, and commercial clout.
00:14:37.000So this is an interesting point, which is that China is now seeing more benefit in being aligned with Russia than with the West.
00:14:47.000Now, that's a dangerous dance, I have to say.
00:14:50.000And China, there's a lot of paranoia right now in Beijing.
00:14:56.000There's a lot of disagreement, I'm sure, happening in Beijing, and they're looking at this very carefully.
00:15:00.000First of all, they're looking at the cost, the human cost, the financial cost of what it would require to go take Taiwan, a land that you think is yours.
00:15:38.000They were a poor nation for the last couple hundred years.
00:15:40.000Now, you could go back into dynasties prior, and they were a fighting culture, but that has not been the case for quite a while.
00:15:47.000China became a peasant nation as the rest of the world industrialized.
00:15:53.000Mainland Manchuria was far from a military powerhouse.
00:15:57.000In fact, there is a psychological issue between the Chinese people and the Japanese, where there are still people in the Chinese nation that fear the samurai culture and fear the Japanese dominance of mainland China, which happened all throughout the 1920s, mainly 30s and 40s, which led up to World War II.
00:16:55.000So the Russian fighting culture, where they famously defeated the invasion of Napoleon in 1812, where Catherine the Great before that expanded her lands and her territory, where the Russian people were just about, I think it was like 35 kilometers from the Nazis taking over Moscow.
00:17:15.000And you could almost see the lights of Moscow in the distance at the furthest kind of panzer tank division and were stopped.
00:17:28.000And the Luftwaffe was doing bombing campaigns outside of the suburbs of Moscow.
00:17:32.000And the Russian people have great pride in the story of almost losing Stalingrad in a street brawl and turning the entire war back towards eventually the Western Front, finding the Nazis in Ukraine and pushing them all the way back to Berlin.
00:17:48.000There's a massive amount of intergenerational pride there.
00:17:52.000So you're dealing with two different cultures there.
00:17:55.000Now, I'm not saying the Chinese are not one to be taken seriously, but from a militaristic standpoint, from an etho standpoint, from a morale standpoint, the Russians are far superior.
00:18:08.000And if they're struggling in Ukraine, you better believe the Chinese military officials are saying, oh my goodness, I hope we don't have to fight anytime soon.
00:18:16.000Because we don't know what our people will do.
00:18:18.000They have not seen serious combat in multiple generations.
00:18:22.000The Chinese nation has not seen serious combat.
00:18:25.000The only examples would be intervening in North Vietnam on behalf of the Viet Cong or intervening, just throwing millions of bodies against the United States in the Korean War to help out the communist cause, which then created now known as North Korea.
00:18:44.000So something to keep in mind there, the differences between the Russian culture and the Chinese culture.
00:18:51.000Americans are finally digesting just how destructive the humiliating flight from Afghanistan was.
00:18:58.000The catastrophe signaled to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that Western deterrence had died.
00:19:03.000Now, I'll be very honest, we said this at the time, but it just kind of became this like program talking point on the right that I don't think we explored deep enough on this program where we said, listen, what happened in Kabul, what happened with the closure of Bagram Air Base, what happened with the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, that's going to send a message to China, send a message to Russia, do whatever they want.
00:19:23.000And we kind of said this time and time again, but it was not just true.
00:19:30.000Victor Davis Hansen writes, There's no surprise that Russia then sent missiles into a Ukrainian base near the Polish-NATO border.
00:19:37.000North Korea in January launched more missiles than in any month in its history, and Iran sent missiles into Kurdistan.
00:19:43.000China announces daily that it's just a matter of time until it absorbs Taiwan.
00:19:47.000The tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry sent to Ukraine by the West are still far less of the U.S. military handed over to the terrorist Taliban.
00:20:16.000Afghanistan cannot be used as a terrorist base that Afghanistan has become a Disneyland for terrorists to be planned for every contingency.
00:21:30.000Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says Americans should see Biden's outreach to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to get them to produce more oil as, quote, something that helps them.
00:21:40.000No mention of American energy production, no LNG exploration, no one powering the Permian, no one powering the Balkan, no empowering the Marcella Shale.
00:21:51.000The administration's reaching out to Saudi Arabia and to Venezuela, I think folks that many Americans might consider unsavory characters in this search for energy to kind of fill this Russian energy void.
00:22:08.000I think Americans should see the administration calling right now for an increase in supply as something that helps them.
00:22:16.000And that's what it's increased supply at home and increased supply around the world so that we can reduce the cost at the pump.
00:22:23.000That's your energy secretary who is captured by the green energy environmentalists.
00:22:27.000Number seven, Victor Davis Hansen writes, Putin did not invade during the Trump tenure.
00:22:32.000Although he had been more aggressive under previous American leadership with his attacks in Georgia, Ukraine, and Crimea, Russia stayed still when oil prices were low and fuel supplies in the West were plentiful and the United States was confident.
00:22:46.000Putin took note of increased NATO and U.S. defense spending.
00:22:49.000He feared low global oil prices and record oil and gas production on the American side.
00:22:55.000He was wary after unpredictable American strikes against enemies like ISIS, Abdul al-Baghdadi, and Iranian general Qassam Soleimani.
00:23:03.000The unpredictability, the inability to be able to know what Trump was going to do next, kept Putin in a passive posture, not an active posture.
00:23:15.000Not only is Biden weak, which is bad, but Biden is predictably weak.
00:23:48.000Quote: It is not escalation to send arms to Ukraine.
00:23:53.000The Russians far more aggressively supplied the North Koreans and North Vietnamese in their wars against America without spreading the war globally.
00:24:01.000Pakistan, Syria, and Iran sent deadly weapons, many in turn supplied to them by Russia, North Korea, and China to kill thousands of Americans during the Afghan and Iraq wars.
00:24:11.000And I have to say, Victor brings up a really good point here.
00:24:15.000You know, we have a couple Marines serving on our security team here.
00:24:18.000And I asked him, I said, what was the most common weapon that you guys had to fight back against?
00:24:22.000They said it at AK-47, obviously, Kalishnikov.
00:24:25.000And so even though Russia might not have been directly involved with troops on the ground in military strikes in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously we've been against the Iraq war, but I want us to win.
00:24:36.000I want America to win no matter what war we're in because we're patriots.
00:24:40.000I would never cheer for our defeat ever.
00:24:42.000But you think about it, if the Russians were generously funding weapon transfers against our troops in the Middle East, and that didn't quote unquote escalate their involvement, Victor brings up a good point that I really haven't thought to see a counterpoint to, then why wouldn't we also do the same in a conflict of theater that they're in?
00:25:04.000Nine, Putin may never fully absorb Ukraine as long as it can be supplied across its borders by four NATO countries.
00:25:11.000The United States deadlocked in the Korean War.
00:25:14.000We lost the Vietnam War and was stalled in Iraq and fled Afghanistan in part because its enemies were easily supplied by border friends on the assumptions the United States could not strike such a better.
00:25:25.000So basically, VDH is saying, look, it's going to be hard to conquer Ukraine because of the neighbors, because you can have an inside-out relationship with troops and movements and intelligence and weapons.
00:25:51.000And since we are not at war with Pakistan and we have this very bizarre relationship with Pakistan, to put it mildly, it gave the Taliban an advantage.
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00:27:05.000Victor Davis Hansen finishes the piece by saying, quote, it is not un-American to point out that prior American appeasement under Obama and Biden explains why Putin wished to go into Ukraine.
00:27:16.000Explains not why Putin wished to go into Ukraine, but felt he could.
00:27:20.000It is not treasonous to say Ukraine and the United States previously should have stayed out of others' domestic affairs and politics.
00:27:28.000If you guys are interested at all in the lead up to what happened in Ukraine, I encourage you to check out the Charlie Kirk Show podcast and our conversation with Pedro Gonzalez.
00:27:42.000So you guys have got to check that out.
00:27:44.000So, but let me read this also from a similar VDH piece, which, again, this is a pretty amazing argument.
00:27:50.000So, Victor Davis Hansen compares Vladimir Putin to a caged animal.
00:27:58.000He says, quote, when a zoo tiger tears a human being apart who is an incautious visitor, we assume the big cat is a natural killer that is always hungry and looking for food, yet needs some sort of opening to spring free.
00:28:13.000If he kills and swallows a bit of an unfortunate gawker, we usually assume the tiger is capable of such savagery anytime he is empowered.
00:28:21.000But again, he must be aided and abetted to act on the innate nature.
00:28:25.000So we don't necessarily blame only the tiger for being a carnivore and prompting the tragedy.
00:28:32.000Given his predictable predatory nature, we also turn our attention to who or what allowed the killer to satisfy his hunger.
00:28:41.000Does the culpable include the incautious visitor that got too close to the guardrails, the lax zoo that poorly managed the big cat enclosure, or even the zoo architect whose originally poorly designed exhibit helps to allow such an eventful catastrophe?
00:28:57.000So what is Victor Davis Hansen saying here?
00:29:00.000He's saying that, oh yeah, Putin is a savage animal.
00:29:04.000He's a savage tiger, and he has at his core a desire to eat and to prey on anything that comes into his cage.
00:29:14.000But he's also saying, what about the numbskull that gets too close to the carnivore?
00:29:19.000What about the numbskull that starts poking the tiger?
00:29:22.000Don't we factor that into our calculus?
00:29:25.000Now, why would Victor Davis Hansen be mentioning that?
00:29:28.000Well, he's mentioning the Lindsey Graham and John McCain types who said it's time to go play offense.
00:29:34.000Do we have that tape of Lindsey Graham?
00:29:36.000It's a perfect time to play that if we can.
00:29:41.000Where when Victor Davis Hansen talks about quote-unquote poking the bear, when Victor Davis Hansen talks about we need to play offense, that's the same thing, that we need to try to irritate the tiger in the cage.
00:29:58.000And so when we look at the Ukrainian-Russian situation, this is Putin's war.
00:30:17.000Did the United States and NATO open the cage by giving false hopes to Ukraine that they would join NATO?
00:30:24.000Did the United States poke the tiger in the cage by saying we're going to put nuclear weapons on the border of Russia?
00:30:33.000How would you feel if you live in Houston, Texas, and the KGB, the Russian government, would overtake the Mexican government, displace the Mexican leader with a Russian sympathetic leader, and put nuclear weapons on the Texas border?
00:30:53.000How would you react to such an action?
00:30:56.000Play Lindsey Graham, please, but play it only for 30 seconds.
00:31:33.000Imagine a Russian politician going to Mexico City or Ottawa, taking over the government, displacing it through a pseudo-color revolution, and saying it's time to play offense against America.
00:31:44.000It would be wrong if we invaded Mexico, but you would have to say what would be the conditions and the poking of the tiger that might have led to that.
00:31:54.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.