Posts By Author » Victor Davis Hanson

It’s 1973 all over again
16 May 2013 12:05 am

In Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles.

True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration — the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney — all at various …

Hoping for change in Syria
9 May 2013 12:05 am

Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down?

Muammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship had then just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage was “lead from behind,” the blooming Arab Spring and social-media types calling for democracy in the streets of Cairo.
The Muslim Brotherhood was proclaimed to be largely “secular.” Echoing the pseudo-disavowals of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini years earlier, …

The monotonous Middle East
2 May 2013 12:05 am

Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the trading nexus of three continents — Asia, Europe and Africa — and vibrant birthplace to three of the world’s great religions.

Middle Eastern influence rose again in the 19th century when the Suez Canal turned the once dead-end Eastern Mediterranean Sea into a sea highway from Europe to Asia.
With the 20th century development of large gas and oil supplies in the Persian Gulf and North Africa, an Arab-led OPEC more or less dictated the foreign policy of thirsty oil importers like United States …

The D-word
25 Apr 2013 12:05 am

Deportation has become a near-taboo word. Yet the recent Boston bombings inevitably rekindle old questions about the way the U.S. admits, or at times deports, foreign nationals.

Despite the Obama administration’s politically driven and cyclical claims of deporting either a lot more or a lot fewer non-citizens, no one knows how many are really being sent home — for a variety of reasons.
There are not any accurate statistics on how many people are living in the United States illegally. And how does one define deportation? If someone from Latin American is …

Postmodern prudes
18 Apr 2013 12:05 am

More than 500 people were murdered in Chicago last year. Yet Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel still found time to berate the fast food franchise Chick-fil-A for not sharing “Chicago values” — apparently because its founder does not approve of gay marriage.

Two states have legalized marijuana, with more to come. Yet social taboos against tobacco smoking make it nearly impossible to light up a cigarette in public places. Marijuana, like alcohol, causes far greater short-term impairment than does nicotine. But legal cigarette smoking is now seen as a corporate-sponsored, uncool and …

Iran’s North Korean future
11 Apr 2013 12:05 am

The idea of a nuclear Iran — and of preventing a nuclear Iran — terrifies security analysts.
Those who argue for a preemptive strike against Iran cannot explain exactly how American planes and missiles would take out all the subterranean nuclear facilities without missing a stashed nuke or two — or whether they might as well expand their target lists to Iranian military assets in general. None can predict the fallout on world oil prices, global terrorism and the politically fragile Persian Gulf, other than that it would be uniformly bad.
In …

After Obama
4 Apr 2013 12:05 am

We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential outcome.
There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the prior eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering bipartisan sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.
In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs …

Iraq a convenient scapegoat
28 Mar 2013 12:05 am

Bring up Iraq — and expect to end up in an argument. Conservatives are no different from liberals in rehashing the unpopular war, which has become a sort of whipping boy for all our subsequent problems.
The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently enumerated countless pathologies that followed Iraq. Yet to examine her list is to learn just how misinformed we have become in our anguish over the intervention.
Noonan writes of Republicans: “It [Iraq] ruined the party’s hard-earned reputation for foreign-affairs probity. They started a war and didn’t win it.”
We …

America’s big fat advantage
21 Mar 2013 12:05 am

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won’t, at least not quite yet.
“Peak oil” and our “oil addiction” were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?
The oil and gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves either previously unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological …

From affirmative action to diversity
14 Mar 2013 12:05 am

Sometime in the new millennium, “global warming” evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced “climate change” could better explain almost any weather extremity — droughts or floods, too much heat or cold, hurricanes and tornadoes.
Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative action” into “diversity” — a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions of a liberal society affirming illiberal racial preferencing.
In an increasingly multiracial society, it has grown hard to determine the racial ancestry of millions …

The California ‘Mordida’
7 Mar 2013 12:05 am

California now works on the principle of the mordida, or “bite.” Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state.
Gov. Jerry Brown made that assumption explicit in his latest back-and-forth with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who keeps luring Californians to lower-tax, higher-employment Texas. Recently, Brown said of Texas, “Who would want to spend summers there in 110-degree heat inside some kind of fossil fuel air conditioner?”
Translated, Brown’s retort meant that despite California’s sluggish economy, high taxes and poor services, …

American recessional
28 Feb 2013 12:05 am

Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States — like an insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past — was bound to re-examine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile.
The president’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary was a sort of Zen-like way of having a Republican combat veteran orchestrate a reduced military. In fact, Barack Obama has nurtured …

Gilded class warriors
21 Feb 2013 12:05 am

In his first term President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the one-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha’s Vineyard and the nation’s most exclusive golf courses.
Obama never quite squared his accusations that “millionaires and billionaires” had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of “corporate jet owners,” “fat cat bankers” and Las Vegas junketeers.
Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after “the few,” and “the wealthiest and the …

Why do societies give up?
14 Feb 2013 12:05 am

Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization
One recurring theme seems consistent in …

Incoherent immigration reform
7 Feb 2013 12:05 am

Nothing about illegal immigration quite adds up.
Conservative corporate employers still support the idea of imported, cheap, non-union labor — in a strange alliance with liberal activists who want the larger blocs of Latino voters that eventually follow massive influxes from Latin America.
Yet how conservative are businesses that in the past flouted federal law — and how liberal are activists who undermined the bargaining power of American minimum-wage, entry-level workers, many of them minorities?
The remedies for illegal immigration under discussion are just as incoherent. If the government now plans to offer …

War is like rust
31 Jan 2013 12:05 am

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.
Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated — usually through a balance of power, alliances and deterrence rather than supranational collective agencies. But it never seems to go away entirely.
Just as otherwise lawful suburbanites might slug it out over silly driveway boundaries, or trivial road rage can escalate into shooting violence, so nations and factions can whip themselves up to go to war …

Europe’s wishes came true
24 Jan 2013 12:04 am

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly “war on terror” and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.
The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer …

The war between the amendments
17 Jan 2013 12:09 am

The horrific Newtown, Conn., mass shooting has unleashed a frenzy to pass new gun-control legislation. But the war over restricting firearms is not just between liberals and conservatives; it also pits the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution against each other.
Apparently, in the sequential thinking of James Madison and the Founding Fathers, the right to free expression and the guarantee to own arms were the two most important personal liberties. But now these two cherished rights seem to be at odds with each other and have caused bitter exchanges …

When big deficits became good
10 Jan 2013 12:10 am

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush’s chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’”
In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush’s continued Keynesian borrowing: “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card …

2012: When dreams died
27 Dec 2012 12:04 am

The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky dreams.
Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change in the hope that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran for re-election neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises.
Instead, Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious …

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