Posts By Author » Victor Davis Hanson

Let sleeping Germans lie
17 May 2012 12:04 am

The newly elected French Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is warning Germany that Mediterranean ideas of “growth,” not Germanic “austerity,” should be the new European creed. No surprise there — reckless debtors often blame their own past imprudence on greedy creditors, especially if the latter are supposed to be guilt-ridden over causing two world wars.
All over Europe, the gospel is that tight-fisted Germans are at the root of the European Union meltdown: They worked too hard, saved too much, bought too little and borrowed not at all. All that may be …

Chameleon Nation
10 May 2012 12:04 am

Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable moment. It was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly a decade — apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of 1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that she had “high cheekbones.”
Not long ago, University of Colorado academic Ward Churchill …

Cabinets gone wild
3 May 2012 12:03 am

We’ve had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations — Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind — but never anything quite like the present bunch.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.” Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his …

Decline or decadence?
26 Apr 2012 12:04 am

Almost daily we read of America’s “waning power” and “inevitable decline,” as observers argue over the consequences of defense cuts and budget crises.
Yet much of the new American “leading from behind” strategy is a matter of choice, not necessity. Apparently, both left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy and right-wing Jacksonians are tiring of spending blood and treasure on seemingly ungrateful Middle Easterners — after two Gulf wars, the decade in Afghanistan, and various interventions in Lebanon and Libya.
We certainly have plenty of planes and bombs with which to pound Syria’s …

When administrations implode
19 Apr 2012 12:04 am

Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos takes hold, whether self-induced or as a result of an outside crisis.
Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president resigned in the face of certain impeachment. Gerald Ford could not whip inflation and was not re-elected. One-termer Jimmy Carter was undone by the Iranian hostage crisis and skyrocketing oil prices.
For a time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan’s second term might not survive the Iran-Contra …

Enemies of the people
12 Apr 2012 12:04 am

In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of “hope and change.” That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.
Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.
Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear …

Freedom or Fairness in 2012?
5 Apr 2012 12:04 am

2012 should prove to be an ideological election about the economy. Not all campaigns are so clear cut. Sometimes moderate Republicans raise taxes (like George H.W. Bush did); at other times, pragmatic Democrats cut spending (like Bill Clinton did).
But this year, Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, will run an ideological campaign calling for smaller government and fewer taxes against an equally ideological President Obama, who wants more government and higher taxes. In this divided red state/blue state era, the supporters of each candidate demand no less and will have …

The second oil revolution
29 Mar 2012 12:04 am

The world was reinvented in the 1970s by soaring oil prices and massive transfers of national wealth. It could be again if the price of petroleum crashes — a real possibility given the amazing estimates about the new gas and oil reserves on the North American continent. The Canadian tar sands, deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, horizontal drilling off the eastern and western American coastlines, fracking in once-untapped sites in North Dakota, and new pipelines from Alaska and Canada could within a decade double North American gas and …

Faith-based energy policy
22 Mar 2012 12:04 am

When the summer driving season starts soon, and tension heats up over Iran, gas may reach $5 a gallon. Nothing bothers voters more than paying an extra $20 or $30 every time they fill up. In times like these, they soon might prefer even an oilman in the White House to an ideologue whose opposition to new oil development seems more religious than empirically based.
All presidents, of course, usually get the blame or praise when the price of gas skyrockets or plummets, just like they own a bad or good …

Who’s to blame in California?
15 Mar 2012 12:04 am

In so-called “March in March” protests, thousands of students in California universities recently demonstrated in outrage over spiraling tuition costs.
At both the California State University and University of California multi-campus systems, tuition hikes in recent years have far exceeded the national average. Meanwhile, universities slash classes, cut key research, and rely even more on exploited and poorly paid part-time lecturers and graduate-student teaching assistants.
Yet against whom, exactly, are these cash-strapped students demonstrating? After all, their college faculties are unionized, largely liberal and sympathetic to their plight.
Campus administrators likewise want more …

Sick and tired of the Middle East
8 Mar 2012 12:03 am

Americans — left, right, Democrats and Republicans — are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after prior failures.
The United States had long ago supplied Afghan insurgents, who expelled the Soviets after a decade of fighting. Then we left. The country descended into even worse medievalism under the Taliban. So after removing the Taliban, who had hosted the perpetrators of 9/11, we promised in 2001 to stay on.
We won the first Gulf War in 1991. Then …

History never quite ends
1 Mar 2012 12:04 am

The European Union and the United Nations, as well as globalization and advanced technology, were all supposed to trump age-old cultural, geographical and national differences and bring people together.
But for all the high-tech veneer of the 21st century, the world still looks a lot like it did during the last hundred years and well before that.
After the Greek financial meltdown and the emergence of German financial dominance, Europe once more obsesses over the so-called German problem. Should Europeans admire the industry of the German people, or fear that such competency …

Jeremy Lin: Achievement trumps identity politics
23 Feb 2012 12:04 am

Jeremy Lin is the New York Knicks basketball sensation whose so far brief but amazing performance on the court has set the world on fire in a mere month.
Most NBA superstars are not 23-year-old Harvard-graduates. And they are rarely devout Christian, second-generation Taiwanese-Americans. The fact that Lin is an anomaly has guaranteed both sensationalism and controversy, at least some of it politically incorrect. Take professional boxer Floyd Mayweather’s recent remark that “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he …

Please, a little honesty about illegal immigration
16 Feb 2012 12:04 am

President Barack Obama recently assured El Salvador that the United States would not deport more 200,000 Salvadorans residing illegally in the United States. As the election nears, and the president looks to court Hispanic voters, he also created a new position of “public advocate” for illegal immigrants. His duties would appear to be to advocate that millions circumvent, rather than follow, current federal law.
The administration has also said it will focus enforcement only on those who have committed crimes — with the implicit understanding that it is no longer a …

Iran 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0
9 Feb 2012 12:04 am

On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Barack Obama once called for a “reset” policy with Iran. Supposedly, the unpopularity of the Texan provocateur George W. Bush and his administration’s inability to finesse “soft power” had needlessly alienated the Iranian theocracy.
After all, the widely quoted but highly politicized 2007 National Intelligence Estimate claimed that Iran had ceased work on a bomb in 2003 and would not have a weapon for the foreseeable future. That flawed analysis fueled another popular talking point: that the Bush-Cheney warmongers were looking for more phantom weapons …

The un-Obama
2 Feb 2012 12:04 am

Barack Obama’s favorability in the polls falls when he is himself — overexposed, hard left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion.
Then a strange thing happened. Obama largely went quiet. Often he was out of sight, vacationing in Hawaii or golfing. It was almost as if he learned that the less he was seen or heard, the more Americans liked the idea of Obama as president rather the reality of his constant “Make no mistake about it” and …

Fidelity and the presidency
26 Jan 2012 12:04 am

The news media seem obsessed with the serial affairs of a younger Newt Gingrich back in the last century. The anger of his second of three wives mysteriously became national news on ABC’s “Nightline” on the eve of the South Carolina primary. Millions watched Mrs. Gingrich II complain that Newt and the present Mrs. Gingrich III had done to her (while ill) just about the same thing that she and Newt had earlier done to Mrs. Gingrich I (while ill).
Do these marital dramas involving our leaders matter that much? At …

Civilization in reverse
19 Jan 2012 12:25 am

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.
News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.
Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer …

Defense spending is a shovel-ready investment
12 Jan 2012 12:04 am

President Obama just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.
Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement a now familiar stereotype of Obama’s desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bowing to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin …

2011: Out with a whimper, not a bang
6 Jan 2012 12:01 am

It proved as hard to break up the bankrupt European Union as it was to create it. For all the hundreds of stories predicting the imminent end of the union, insolvent Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain still hung in. Apparently if these debtors keep promising to end their spendthrift ways, quit calling the historically sensitive Germans bad names, and welch only on serial billion-euro loans — rather than default all at once on massive trillion-euro obligations — the Germans will keep doling out enough money for the EU to whimper …

Who Is Brett Kimberlin?

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