Author: Victor Davis Hanson

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to “Old Europe.” How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us “old” when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration! Yet […]

Two terrible September days sum up the first decade of the new American millennium. The first, of course, was Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden’s suicide terrorists that morning hit the Pentagon, knocked down the World Trade Center, killed 3,000 Americans, and left 16 acres of ash in Manhattan and $1 trillion in economic losses […]

The rise of a German Europe began in 1914, failed twice, and has now ended in the victory of German power almost a century later. The Europe that Kaiser Wilhelm lost in 1918, and that Adolf Hitler destroyed in 1945, has at last been won by German Chancellor Angela Merkel without firing a shot. Or […]

There is a revolution going on America. But it is not part of the Tea Party or the loud Occupy Wall Street protests. Instead, massive new reserves of gas, oil and coal are being discovered almost everywhere in the United States, due to revolutionary methods of exploration and exploitation such as fracking and horizontal drilling. […]

From 2007 to 2009, a surge of 20,000 troops under the generalship of David Petraeus saved a mostly lost war in Iraq. Petraeus’ counterinsurgency doctrine helped win over the population, as the surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq’s government and military. Despite occasional violence, fewer Americans have been killed in Iraq in 2011 […]

Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking grandma’s castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to. By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit and well-educated, he knows all sorts of […]

Recently, an open mic caught French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American President Barack Obama jointly trashing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sarkozy scoffed, “I cannot stand him. He’s a liar.” Obama trumped that with, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.” In one of the most bizarre op-eds […]

Richard Nixon went to Red China with political impunity. Had a Democrat tried that, he would have been branded a commie appeaser. To this day, liberals cannot conceive that during the two world wars, progressives like Woodrow Wilson, Earl Warren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt trampled on civil liberties in a way unimagined by Dick Cheney. […]

First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at “the few at the top,” who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the “1 percent” who are responsible for the current economic mess. “They” apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are […]

Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing “cap-and-trade” legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America’s traditional carbon energy use. The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy — a good thing if […]