Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Northern and central Italy are not on the southern Mediterranean. But somehow thousands of refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are everywhere here — as is true of much of the European Union. Some sleep on park benches. Many peddle knock-off electronic goods and counterfeit watches. Angry Italians shoo away refugee beggars from […]

For a time, reset, concessions and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm and face down enemies. That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks out. It […]

What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic […]

Why did Rome and Byzantium fall apart after centuries of success? What causes civilizations to collapse, from a dysfunctional fourth-century-B.C. Athens to contemporary bankrupt Greece? The answer is usually not enemies at the gates, but the pathologies inside them. What ruins societies is well known: too much consumption and not enough production, a debased currency, […]

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California Gov. Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929-34, 1976-77 and 1987-92 — more […]

Hillary Clinton apparently plans to base her presidential campaign on the noble goals of greater fairness and shared sacrifice. She has already lambasted vast differences in compensation. “The average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes,” Clinton warned. She is right — but can best appreciate that fact from her own career […]

Modern American universities used to assume four goals. First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry. Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — […]

The snarky quip attributed to 19th-century French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand — “It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder” — has recently been making the rounds to deride a letter written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and signed by 46 other senators. They wrote to the Iranian theocracy that any […]

Former CIA Director David Petraeus plea-bargained to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material after having given classified government information to his onetime mistress, Paula Broadwell. How was Petraeus’ transgression uncovered? By exposure of a non-government email account that he had set up with to communicate with Broadwell free of CIA […]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress on Tuesday to warn Americans of the anti-Western threats from theocratic — and likely to soon be nuclear — Iran. Netanyahu came to the U.S. to outline the Iranian plan to remake the Middle East with a new nuclear arsenal. His warning was delivered over the objections […]

World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it? The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and Communist Soviet Union all wanted to attack their neighbors. Yet […]

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as […]

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Eight million Israelis are surrounded by some 400 million Muslims in more than 20 states. Almost all of Israel’s neighbors are anti-Israeli dictatorships, monarchies or theocracies– a number of them reduced to a state of terrorist chaos. Given the rise of radical […]

Fifty years ago this Saturday, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died at age 90. Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop careers as a statesman, cabinet minister, politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian, and combat veteran. He began his career serving the British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer and ended it as custodian of […]

Western civilization’s creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights. Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer’s “Iliad” or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty […]

Gasoline prices are on the verge of crashing down to below $2 a gallon. The price of oil may dip below $50 a barrel. Even with renewed demand from a global economic resurgence, energy prices continue to fall. The U.S. has suddenly become the world’s largest combined producer of oil and natural gas. That fact […]

Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and […]

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools and the United States of America.” Apparently, late 19th century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when by logic it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today. The U.S. government […]

There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.   Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic […]

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud. Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them. Gruber apparently thinks such […]

Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami. One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week’s election results. Candidates in swing states who promised amnesties got no edge from such opportunistic posturing. Candidates who pandered to […]

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French “came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more […]

In October of 1962, America worried whether an untried young president, John F. Kennedy, could keep us safe from nuclear-tipped missiles from nearby communist Cuba. Today’s October worries are more insidious: the Ebola virus, the macabre Islamic State, a tottering stock market, a bellicose Russia, and a crisis of confidence in our government. Much of […]

Once upon a time, the liberal position was to reject the old discriminatory branding of people by the color of their skins rather than by the content of their characters. Not now. Political and career advantage is found in trumpeting — or occasionally making up — genealogies. Take the inexact category of Latino or Hispanic […]

At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values. A quite different French version sought equality of result. French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to […]

Normally, no one would care that in a recent Atlantic essay — “Why I hope to die at 75”– 57-year-old Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel argued that living to be 75 years old was long enough for anyone. After 75, Emanuel suggests, “We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.” […]

The so-called Islamic State has left destruction everywhere that it has gained ground. But as in the case of the tribal Scythians, Vandals, Huns or Mongols of the past, sowing chaos in its wake does not mean that the Islamic State won’t continue to seek new targets for its devastation. If unchecked, the Islamic State […]

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies and neutrals in the Middle East. In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. For a few weeks he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he […]