Author: Victor Davis Hanson

The world seems to be falling apart. Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to his nuclear arsenal and warns the West not to “mess” with Russia. The Middle East terrorist group the Islamic State keeps […]

President Obama doesn’t know much about history. In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. He also believes history […]

Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Missouri, has tragically followed a predictable script. On average, more than 6,000 African-Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 […]

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — Cyprus is a beautiful island. But it has never recovered from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island — the most fertile and formerly the richest portion. Some 200,000 Greek refugees never returned home after being expelled from their homes and farms in Northern […]

The Obama administration often denies any responsibility for the current global chaos or claims that it erupted spontaneously. Yet most of the mess was caused by, or made worse by, growing U.S. indifference and paralysis. Over the last five and a half years, America has had lots of clear choices, but the administration usually took […]

Nearly 70 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1944, Lieutenant General George S. Patton took command of the American Third Army in France. For the next 30 days they rolled straight toward the German border. Patton almost did not get a chance at his summer of glory. After brilliant service in North Africa and Sicily, fellow […]

The summer of 2014 will go down in history as the season when America fell apart. Let’s take a tour of the disasters. Germany in 2008 enthusiastically hosted candidate Barack Obama for his so-called Victory Column speech. Now, Germans suddenly sound as if they are near-enemies of the U.S. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly was furious […]

No one knows just how many tens of thousands of Central American nationals — most of them desperate, unescorted children and teens — are streaming across America’s southern border. Yet this phenomenon offers us a proverbial teachable moment about the paradoxes and hypocrisies of Latin American immigration to the U.S. For all the pop romance […]

In his first term, Barack Obama all but declared victory in America’s Middle East struggles. As he precipitously pulled out all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq, the president had his own “Mission Accomplished” moment when declaring the country “stable,” “self-reliant” and an “extraordinary achievement.” Those claims echoed Vice President Joe Biden’s earlier boast that Iraq somehow […]

So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007-08 surge? Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein. One can […]

Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” are now tearing apart the country, leaving medieval savagery in their wake. Obama partisans are blaming the Bush administration for going into Iraq […]

Soon we shall get to the bottom of the swap of five Taliban kingpins from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for one Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. In time we will learn whether Bergdahl really served with “honor and distinction” and was “captured on the battlefield,” as National Security Adviser Susan Rice has stated. Or whether, as […]

  Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities’ international reputations.   For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education […]

Seventy years ago this June 6, the Americans, British and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 B.C. About 160,000 troops landed on five Normandy beaches and linked up with airborne troops in a masterful display of planning and courage. […]

Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki cannot get a handle on the recent scandalous treatment of veterans in VA hospitals, where more than 40 sick men were allowed to die without proper follow-up treatment. A cover-up allegedly followed. When the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal broke under the George W. Bush administration, heads rolled. So […]

Nigeria’s homegrown, al-Qaeda-linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts that it will sell them into sexual slavery. Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general. For years, Western aid groups have […]

  Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy and a high rate of alcoholism.   Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way that he has wrecked most of Russia?   Doesn’t Russia have enough land for its diminishing population? […]

  Sometimes doctrines just vanish, once they appear as naked as the proverbial emperor in his new clothes.   Something like that seems now to be happening with affirmative action. Despite all the justifications for its continuance, polling shows the public still strongly disagrees with the idea of using racial criteria for admissions and hiring. […]

We should ask Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the same question once posed to Sen. Joseph McCarthy by U.S. Army head counsel Robert N. Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Reid is back in the news for denigrating the peaceful supporters of Nevada […]

Solving the illegal immigration problem should not be hard. No one knows how many foreign nationals are residing illegally in the United States — estimates range from 11 million to 20 million. But everyone understands that it is an untenable situation that must be addressed. The two extreme positions of the Left and Right probably […]

What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs? Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity? Or, if global warming were the fault of mankind, you trusted that the slight increases […]

No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd. Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted. State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. Now he […]

Americans now have more computer power in their smart phones than did the Pentagon in all its computer banks just 30 years ago. We board a sophisticated jet and assume that the flight is no more dangerous than crossing the street. The downside of this complete reliance on computer gadgetry is a fundamental ignorance of […]

What would a president do if he were furious over criticism, or felt that his noble aims justified most means of attaining them? Answer that by comparing the behavior of Richard Nixon to that of an increasingly similar Barack Obama. Nixon tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies — […]

President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics and reason is being waged on behalf of politically correct politics. After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he focused on curtailing semi-automatic “assault” rifles. But there […]

Don’t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history. Don’t dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don’t ever consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don’t even try […]

Diversity has become corporatized on American campuses, with scores of bureaucrats and administrators accentuating different pedigrees and ancestries. That’s odd, because diversity does not mean any more “variety” or “points of difference,” at least as it used to be defined. Instead, diversity has become an industry synonymous with orthodoxy and intolerance, especially in its homogeneity […]

The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” gave us the word “Orwellian.” That adjective reflects a vast government’s efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself. America, of all places, is […]

Despite recent sporadic rain, California is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old canard that California could withstand two droughts — but never three — will be tested for the first time in memory. There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra […]