Victor Davis Hanson | America and the World, 2017-2018

good evening everyone welcome to what's been a wonderful week here at the college with a CCA seminar and now we cap it off with this final lecture by Victor Davis Hanson my name is Marc Colt off I am the chairman of the history department here at Hillsdale College where I'm a member of the faculty and that gives me the privilege of introducing to you this evening speaker Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Lily Anderson senior fellow in residence and classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution he's a mirta's professor of classics at California State University Fresno where he founded the classics department most importantly this evening he is also the Wayne and MRSA dusky Distinguished Fellow in history here at Hillsdale College we're now for the last 15 years he has traveled to our campus to teach popular courses in military history and classical culture every September dr. Hanson earned his BA in classics at the University of California Santa Cruz he attended the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and earned his PhD in classics from Stanford University among other awards dr. Hansen has awarded been awarded the National Humanities medal in 2007 and the Bradley prize in 2008 he has written or edited 23 books including the other Greeks the family farm and the agrarian roots of Western civilization the soul of battle who killed homer the demise of classical education and the recovery of Greek wisdom Mexifornia a state of becoming which he he talks about the themes of that book regularly I recommend it highly also a war like no other and most recently his book the second world wars his twenty-fourth book scheduled to appear early next year will look at the presidency of Donald Trump beyond his many books he is the author of hundreds of articles book reviews scholarly papers and editorials covering diverse topics so that range from ancient Greek culture agrarian themes and military history to foreign affairs domestic politics and contemporary culture these have appeared in almost every publication that matters including the New York Times Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times International Herald Tribune New York Post National Review Washington Time Washington Post's I could go on many others and he frequently appears in on television and radio for NPR PBS Newshour Fox News CNN and others but beyond these many professional and scholarly achievements Victor Hansen has become a dear friend of many and we at Hillsdale have been especially blessed by his magnanimity generosity and kindness even as we have benefited from and delighted by his quick mind his good humor and his uncommon loyalty Thank You Victor please join me in welcoming our friend thank you very much for that kind introduction I wish it was a little less kind so I wouldn't have pressured not to disappoint you but what I'd like to do is put a context into the Trump foreign policy because we can't really calibrate what's going on through the media or the opposition I saw some adjectives and nouns that a chaos disruption overseas but to understand I think the Trump foreign policy we should see how we got to where we are now and what were the conditions both foreign and domestic that created Donald Trump and created his foreign policy we start with the so-called post-war order that was the brilliant creation of American diplomats Dean Acheson George Kennan George Marshall Harry Truman Eisenhower after World War two and remember what the the rationale was that we had made we had made a distinct mistake after World War one that for a variety of reasons we didn't stay engaged we allowed the Imperial German army to surrender inside France and quickly came claimed that that armistice was a de facto victory because they surrendered in somebody else's territory we didn't follow the advice of John J Pershing a general folk to go in and occupy Germany as we did in World War two so we're not going to do that again at the end of World War two we also had an ambiguous relationship with the Soviet Union we had felt that the Soviet Union and 30s was imploding the communism didn't work the show trials the purges of the military class and especially the 20 million that died in the collectivization so it was an odious creation and yet more odious when it formed the non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler on August 23rd 1939 and then the inexplicable happen we were still at peace and Germany invaded the Soviet Union and we made a decision as early as October of 1941 we forget that before Pearl Harbor that under the newly passed lend-lease legislation we began sending massive aid to this Soviet Union even as we understood that was very dangerous to do should it defeat the Third Reich which we hoped it would we would have a problem indeed we did have a problem after the conclusion of world war ii we thought to ourselves we're gonna stay engaged and it was a great thing that we destroyed the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire but in the process of that we've created another monster and it's as godless and dangerous as the Third Reich and it's Soviet global communism and unfortunately one of the tragedies of world war two is that the Soviet Army is now not a thousand miles away from the English Channel there is no free and autonomous Eastern Europe was one of the great tragedies we went to war for the freedom suppose we being in the Allies first Britain and then later in France and then later us but the concept was to keep Eastern Europe free ie Poland from German aggression and we ended up ensuring that it would not be free and we moved the borders of the Soviet Union not just to Germany which had there had been a buffer now these communist satellite wars our packs were not just at the border of the the old German Empire they're now in an interior border right on the edge of what we call West Germany and they were 350 miles from the English Channel and they had 500 divisions and our strategy of fighting World War two had been the great Soviet juggernut who will kill two out of every three German soldiers will not have a Navy it will not have an Air Force it will not have a u-boat Air Arm it will not fight in Italy it will not fight North Africa it will not fight Japan but it will just stay there and like a bulldog destroy the German army and they did but again the paradox was when the war was over it was the biggest army in the world we had a hundred divisions in Europe and they had 500 and they were Pope poised to go right into the chain and they could anytime we want it they wanted so we said we're going to check Soviet power both to a nuclear deterrent and we're going to fight pay any price as John Kennedy anywhere any how to stop this menace and remember one of the reasons that we did it we said that there is no other alternative Japan is destroyed it's not the Japan of today not the third-largest economy it's got a zero economy and Germany is destroyed it's not the fourth largest economy of today it's destroyed and there is no Chinese miracle 15 million people have died in China from Japanese occupation Dargis economy as it is today and there is no you EU that France has been occupied and nine other European countries west and the East Eastern Europeans there's nobody but us in Great Britain and Great Britain has decided to national their steel nationalize their steal their oil their communications or health in Rome and they're not going to be in a position to take advantage of a world market at their feet it was only us if we didn't rebuild Europe nobody else was so we created these post-war institutions the World Bank the general agreement on tariffs and trade the United Nations you remember NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization remember the motto of NATO keep Russia out general Ismay said keep America in and keep Germany down and that that theory that paradigm that blueprint that we crafted these brilliant diplomats worked wonderfully for forty five years and that by that I mean the Chinese Communists did not absorb all of Asia they turned on the Soviets as we wanted the Soviet Union did not take Europe and we paid a terrible price for that we spent between four and five percent GDP and sometimes we peaked at ten and twelve in Vietnam in Korea we lost over ninety thousand dead more than the European theater of operations Normandy to Germany in World War two in places like Korea and Vietnam and we became the world's policemen and it worked so in 1989 40 left Lee 45 years 44 years after it this this idea of a post World Order worked and it should have been done we're done we did what we wanted to do and indeed people said with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Berlin fall Wall fell in 1989 the United States won the Cold War Ronald Reagan's deterrent policies during the administration of successor George HW Bush journey Germany was united remember against the objections of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 it was United Francis Fukuyama wrote his landmark I guess it's a landmark book I wouldn't necessarily agree but in 1992 it was called the end of history it took the theme that Hegel had remarked at the Battle of Jena and 1806 when Napoleon marched in and he said basically the old order is over with Anna Paulette and the partly onic idea of a revolutionary society of equals will now be the paradigm that throughout Europe history is over as we knew it there's no other paradigm to what Napoleon uh sure did Fukuyama said whether we like it or not and we do like it we won the Cold War and there's no alternative to free-market capitalism and constitutional government and freedom of the individual and there's not going to be any more war we won and no sooner had he written that then the Balkans exploded and as you remember he was writing that just he year after the first Gulf War in which we found out that Saddam Hussein might have gotten nuclear weapons we don't know but the Middle East was not stable and they didn't think the world the end of history had come Milosevic did not think the end of history had come Noriega didn't think the end of history had come and so the Iranians did not think with their hostage at the end of history had come so we had this post-war idea that containment and being the world's policeman that continued in to a new phase and the conditions which created it no longer existed there was no longer a third reich to defeat and there was no longer a soviet union to contain but we again felt we were now the hyper power the unit power was not a bipolar world was a unipolar nobody had as much strength as we did and we were going to continue the success at great cost to us and expense because it was going to be much cheaper than the alternative so we said we were going to protect the free world we didn't even use that word anymore because of course at the end of history everybody was going to be free but we were going to be the leader that so much very similar to what Rome was you classicists might remember that Edward Gibbon said the greatest period of prosperity in the history of civilization was the hundred years starting with the m4 Nerva Trajan and Hadrian Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius in which there was no war there was no famine and there were no contentious issues because all of mankind seventy million people within a million square miles were all in the same page and that was a vote again and again that that's what we were after 1989 and 91 so we were going to be like Rome and every once in a while jagira or Mithra daddy's or Vercingetorix some thug in Panama as I said or some thug like Saddam Hussein or that they would sprout up and we would hit them down for the sake of the world and this world order that it was still pretty much what it was after World War two and all of these hollowed in institutions NATO you and we would not question and then we had 9/11 and 9/11 was strange and the anniversary of course was yesterday but the Japanese and the Germans and the Soviets had never taken down a high you know high rise right in the middle of Manhattan or killed 3,000 Americans so this was a new threat and we thought well the new war against terror will be operated in the same way we we fought the Soviets will still take on the burden this responsibility the burden of defense of the West against radical Islam it's a ill liberal doctrine that threatens Western freedom but what we didn't realize is due to our very success in the first phase of 45 years and the second one and remember this second phase since 1989 we're still in that we're in the 30th year of it before after the fall of the Berlin Wall and we're still supposed to be the keeper of the values of the West to defeat the Soviet unit now it's transferred to these local thugs and radicalism but the problem is did the world change and were the premises of the post-war world order where they still valid and there were starting to be disturbing indications that while we still respected these institutions and we subsidize them and we intervened for the world order and we spent more than the next 19 military budgets in the world and we still lost Americans all over the globe other people didn't think that we were doing this for them or our enemies did not think the end of history was here so we started to examine the last four or five years certain questions I mean they were they were they were not cut and dried issues the new world order the post-war world had assumed remember that democratization would put us in this end of history so we had a country like China we said to ourselves there's a billion people we need to bring it into the family of democratic nations and according to people at the Hoover Institution where I work the more affluence you have the more you have a free market even if it's a quasi free market the more liberalisation inevitably follows so we said to ourselves over the last thirty years if they cheat baby in the Chinese on patents it's okay they're eventually going to be wealthy and then they'll be democratic if they cheat on copyright there are wealthy there'll be democratic if they dump on the world market it doesn't matter if they run up a 350 billion dollar surplus it doesn't matter if they go into the Spratly Islands and violate local treaties with the Philippines or Vietnam Japan doesn't matter because they're getting wealthier and they're getting more like us they wear suits and ties they come to Silicon Valley it doesn't matter and all of a sudden we decided I don't think that we said collectively I don't think they're gonna become democratic in fact I think they're using free markets at the direction of the government to be the next Soviet Union they're becoming more powerful than we are and yet the status quo of the post-war order the Council of Foreign Relations the main think tanks Brookings American Enterprise Institute Hoover Institution the government department at Harvard the council and all these people said no no they're gonna be they're gonna be they're going to be democratic they're gonna eventually going to be one of us and we have to take that hit remember also what the rationale of the post-war war order was that since the rest of the world is flat and they're not they don't have the wherewithal to be the global policeman and the global economic power in the global market for new newly recovering countries to export and run up surpluses we do we do we do we heard that for 75 years we're so powerful we're so rich we can do it and we can take a 350 billion dollar surplus with China we were so rich we looked at Europe well Europe was not the same the last 10 years as it was this a EU this European Union we thought was going to be a common market and then it was going to expand to sort of a common alliance it was going to be an adjunct maybe of NATO we didn't realize that this was some kind of Bonaparte as utopian scheme that they were going to outlaw a war they were going to open their borders to the people of the world they were going to be leaders in climate change they were going to disarm they were going to have and act basically a democratic socialist paradigm and we were going to defend them and they were going to get very angry that we defended them and we said to ourselves if we can do this so if if Germany has a sixty five billion dollar trade surplus with us or during the 2003 war if the EU all of the countries have dammed us and they France votes against it it's okay because this is the post-war order that's what we're supposed to do and then we said Germany is the most powerful country it's got 80 million it's it's historically been dangerous but we solved the problem because it's in the EU and it's in NATO then people started to say well wait a minute the last ten years the pew the Pew poll said that Germany poles of all countries in Europe the most anti-american under Obama was 53% of Germans like the United States today it's 37% it Italians like Americans at twice over his Germans and as I said they're running a 65 billion and they have dictated financial terms to the southern credit debtor nations Greece Italy Spain Portugal they have dictated immigration issues to Poland Romania Hungary and the Czech Republic they have dictated the conditions of brexit to the UK and they have told us we're spending 1.4 percent of our GDP on defense and we're not going to go up and meet our promises at two percent and we've said to them if you don't invest two percent how are we going to get the Belgians and how are we gonna get the Dutch and how are we gonna get the Norwegians to do it and meet there because they follow your lead and you're cutting a potentially large deal with Putin at four hundred billion dollars in yet you want us to defend you from Putin what's going on this doesn't this isn't part of the post war didn't it wasn't supposed to work like that and then we looked at Russia and we thought at the end of communism Yeltsin is a is one of us we've sent of all of our Harvard economists over there Russians are meeting us they love us they're gonna make Harvard a Yale there it's gonna be a liberal democracy it's got oil and that didn't happen it sort of became an autocratic oligarchic you know let's be it's an orthodox country it's deeply religious it it didn't seem the liberal country that we had counted on we looked at the EU to take the entire EU and we said wow the demography is not even replacing its population it's one point for half of the churches are empty it's a secular country they have no means or ability or desire to assimilate intermarry or integrate Muslim immigrants it seems foreign to us but that's not supposed to be part of the post-war order and the subtext of all this was we can do it because with the wealthiest country in the world but under the tenants of globalization which were went hand in glove with American post-war leadership people started to say well I'm starting to catch on to globalization and that is we take a big to 365 billion dollar hit with the Chinese 65 billion with the Germans 75 billion with the Mexican government 75 billion second only to Germany excuse me to China it's bigger than the German and we let 330 million excuse me 30 billion dollars in remittances go back to Mexico half of whom are being subsidized by the US government the people who send that money back but we can do it we're wealthy we can be a NAFTA we have the Canadians or wonderful people if we have a small fifteen billion dollar definite thats not a problem if germany has the largest account surplus in the world larger even than china in terms of financial service in the whole picture at over three hundred billion we can do it and then we started to look at places like Hillsdale County or southern Fresno County and we started to see something that was very striking that we I say we it wasn't we it were people that we wrote off as nuts that were questioning the post-war order or were disruptive our chaotic they started to say certain things and they said I've come to the conclusion that under this second phase of the post-war order we have an ossified foreign policy and military policy and strategic policy that doesn't fit this changing world that doesn't fit the new China or the new EU or South America didn't become all democratic it's because it's reverting to socialism or the more we reach out to Iran it's not working but what is happening is that anybody who has a job that involves muscular labor and that job can be xeroxed overseas it will be xeroxed overseas and this divide is is destroying this country culturally socially geographically because we're creating two very wealthy cultures from Florida to Boston and from La Jolla to Seattle and they're in culture in taste in affinity closer in the west coast to maybe Shanghai and Tokyo and the east coast to London in Paris than they are to Hillsdale this is the this is the interior culture and these interior culture people that work assembling products or the industrial heart of America that won World War two that had a greater GDP than all the other combatants and allies together have been hollowed out because they can have their job replicated and the people in the coast can china can't build a Stanford University yet Japan still hasn't figured out quite - to match our hedge fund as one person I gave a talk not too long ago a very angry person that said mr. Hanson you wake up one morning and find somebody did your column for half the price from South Korea I said no that hasn't happened yet he said when it will you know how I feel and the point was that we were sorry to say that these were the deplorable ''s clingers Expendables they were the losers of globalization we went the next step and said it wasn't just that they lost out but they deserved to lose down they didn't move they took math it was almost as if they they developed the pathology and then the industry left rather than what really happened industries left and then they developed the pathologies so this post-war order had not caught up to these new global realities and we tried to adjust 2009 to 2016 Barack Obama came in with a new foreign policy and give him credit he understood that the old George W Bush going into Iraq or Afghanistan or Georgia it's not the same thing anymore but he took he took this evidence and he came up with a very disturbing conclusion and he said the reason it's not working is our fault because we try to impose our will on people and who's to say that the United States Democratic liberal Society is any better than what's in Iran and you know we always bought back these Gulf monarchies in Israel but maybe Iran should be a legitimate hegemon and maybe we should who were to say that we can dictate to them when they get nuclear weapons so we'll do this around deal and we got a the reason that we haven't had a Palestinian solution is that because we've been backing the wrong people the Israelis are intolerant or a liberal and it doesn't really matter that we have capitalist countries in Latin America maybe Venezuela and Nicaragua or Cuba has a better paradigm and the EU is pretty good we should be more like the EU than the EU should be like us and he didn't address the people in the interior he furthered that diagnosis they deserved what they got so now we've spent 25 minutes and you can see what's going to end up somebody comes along and says he's on a stage with 16 Republican nominees he has no military experience and he has never served in political office and he doesn't give a blank blank about the Council on Foreign Relations he doesn't care about NATO he looks at this as a businessman and he says it's a bad deal he looks at optional Wars like a reality TV show they have there if you go into somewhere you usually get bad ratings and it doesn't work out on a cost-benefit analysis so that's what's his idea about going into Libya for example and so he's not wedded to any of these things and he starts to look at the world empirically that's changed radically from the post-war orders second phase was supposed to deal with it and he add the Obama aberrancy and he starts to come up with crazy ideas crazy to them maybe not so crazy to us and he said I like NATO all they got to do they're wealthy countries the GDP of Europe and the populations greater and just pay what they promised don't pay as much as we do but just pay we pay 4% GDP into military expending you pay too if you don't know how to do it and we're gonna leave well I don't think he was gonna leave but that was what he said and he said to Mexico you know what we might have to close the border we might have to yank out some of the factories and the trade deals and we might have to put a tariff on products that are sent back people said you can't use the word tariff that's not part of the post-war order and basically Trump said well I don't really want to pretend that's art of the deal I threatened I threatened I threatened and they'll back down maybe from 350 billion surplus to 2 billion that's a victory but nobody never thought like that before he was endangering the post-war order and he looked at the world throughout and he started to come up with a foreign policy and they actually memorialized it in 2017 if you take looked at the strategic plan of the United States and national security assessment written by HR McMaster and his team it's pretty much called principled realism and it is a complete rejection of 75 years of foreign policy of the United States and it's predicated on the idea that foreign policy and domestic policy are inseparable and there were certain shibboleths there that we should recognize for what they are China the wealthier it's going to be is going to be more autocratic the Palestinians are never going to be democratic until they on their own throw out their corrupt elite and we can't help them do that anymore and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan are probably not going to be democratic but they're better than the alternative in Iran radical Shia you know messianic expansionary Islam and Latin America is likely to be communist as capitalist but if we have our druthers we're going to support capitalist states and not communist and you start to read it you it was termed Jacksonian don't tread on me foreign policy and what that meant was I think if you read it carefully it means we're not going to seek trouble in the world we're not going to be the world's policemen but we are going to deter our enemies and we will strike back if they strike us back and we may have to preempt once in a while and that will make a safer world and it might have the same effect but we're not going to claim that every single struggle in the world is of interest to somebody in Hillsdale County because we've seen where that leads economically domestically and we're going to start be asking for we have two doctrines of the new Jacksonian ISM as I understand it I'm not being an advocate I'm trying to explain to you this one is if what they are doing doesn't matter why did they do it if you thinks trade surpluses don't matter then why does Germany want them why don't they just be like us and say they don't matter we'll run a deficit with you who cares well who has the trade surplus we'll just take the tariffs on you know American cars and we'll do the same thing as you guys have you have two and a half percent on the audio will have two half percent in the four or if China if trade deficits don't matter we'll run up a three billion dollar bill ioan dollars surplus and China will have a three and that was sort of the logic that Trump of course used that was the first thing and the second was that I'm going to calibrate foreign policy in terms of how it affects people this was kind of scary sometime and that mean if we want to stay in Afghanistan what is the effect on the people have to go over there what's the effect on the US budget and is it really possible to turn Afghanistan into Carmel California and if so at what cost that was the that's in this the principle realism and so what made it even stranger was that once we saw this new Trump foreign policy that said I'm looking at everything empirically NATO is 65 years old if it works here I'm willing to subsidize it if you guys want to participate NAFTA is there but it's not written in stone I'm willing to keep going if it's reciprocal I'm willing to still trade with China if they get out of it if they don't if they follow the rules and the way that we follow the rules and everybody said but we always took a hit we always took a hit for the greater good he said it's not the greater good and we can't afford to take the hit we've done it for 75 years and we've hollowed out the interior so that was a very powerful message that got him nominated in ways that 16 other brilliant candidates did not see and it's enraged the establishment in the university and the think tanks and the foundations and the political bipartisan establishment and yet he wrote it all out it was it's not just herky-jerky it's written right out an assessment that we have a new principle realism for a radically different world that doesn't look anything like our foreign policy that was formed in 1945 for a very different world and if I could sort of summarize it and just a phrase it's Jim mattis gave a speech once and I think he summarized it it's no better friend no worse enemy that the world is not full of neutrals anymore and there's not going to be a global community and there's not going to be utopian we're situation or there it's not going to be a postmodern globe where we're all climate change advocates and we all believe and gender rights and it's not going to happen there's going to be local differences there's gonna be tribalism there's going to be chaos all over the world as there is as I speak right now and what we're going to do is pretty much look at people that we have more than less in common with and support them they're going to be our friends and people we feel are disruptors or don't like this American system we're gonna be enemies too and that's going to make actually because we're a unique exceptional country and we have better judgment than these global organizations like the UN that's gonna make a safer world abroad and it's going to have a don't tread on me X don't attack the United States don't point missiles at Portland Oregon don't cheat on trade don't fortify that or something might happen to you and we're gonna make that decision with the allies that we can and by ourself if we must let me just finish by saying there's two other things I think are very important to understand this end of the post-war world and why this strange fellow from Manhattan real estate entrepreneur was able to craft a message that kind of fit the world as we see it rather than the world as we would like it and yet it had dramatic electoral ramifications because he appealed to people who were the losers of globalization and resonated with one is you would think that it wouldn't work because he would be ostracized by all the institutions that fed people into a typical Republican administration so you see all of these notable diplomats they have billets at the most prestigious things and they write op-eds almost every day he's doing story in the world anybody who would serve in that administration we should be ashamed and yet when you look at the four or five architects or tasked with carrying this out they're the finest finest foreign policy team since we've since in World War two you'll never find a better defense secretary than James Madison Peale is a brilliant if you look at his activity compared to a John Kerry or Rex Tillerson or Hillary Clinton there's no there's no comparison if you look at nikki Haley what she's doing at the UN if you look at John Bolton his national security place these are all excellent point how can that be and it's because there were a lot of people in Washington who were not duly appreciated because they saw that the post-war order was not working to a vastly changed world and when they spoke out against that they were ostracized or that you had to bring people from different walks of life into that administration and I'll end with the comment we talked about the Trump economic boom or the Trump revolution but I would suggest you do that what we're doing in foreign policy is far more radical and far more important because it's the only system that we can see that we've seen that has a answer or at least address things that were considered either not our business our insolvable so we we just look at the world knew and we say think about it we're liberated you cannot get out of there and deal why not he'd never sent it to the treaty he never had it ratified by the Senate we got out it's over with Mitt Romney would have never done that you cannot say that the Palestinians are not refugees why the Volga Germans were refugees the same year they were are they still called refugees 13 million Russians walked back East Germans to Germany they were refugees are not anymore why the Palestinians special they're not no more refugees no more embassy Jerusalem has always been the historical and iconic capital of Israel just move it you can't do that just do it so we did it and on and on and on and that's a very liberating attitude and it's starting to have much more ramifications even than the booming economy which is part and parcel of the foreign policy so I guess what I'm saying in conclusion is that this foreign policy besides being principle realism and looking for allies and then accepting that people won't like us and shouldn't like us and we don't like them and they should we shouldn't like them it's also saying the world is back to 1946 again and we're looking at it empirically and we're trying to come up with new solutions and some of the solutions should have been done a long time ago and rather than be radical and revolutionary they're way overdue thank you very much Thank You dr. Hansen we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you we have a question to the speakers right did I understand you to say that there is an outline of rational coherent foreign policy paper and has never been publicized and never been explained how did that I can I can assure you that if you go on to Google tonight and you look at the national security assessment or national security policy you'll see that it was released in December of 2017 it was authored by HR McMaster and the term that's used the most as the word principal realism and the theme of it is that the United States is looking at everything from a new point of view and not locked into a post-war order that no longer mirrors a situation that we have what why is it that everybody doesn't know that well John John Bolton knows it and Trump knows it and Pompeyo knows it and that's why there [Applause] so that that's why they're saying certain things that they're not supposed to be saying they're saying North Korea cannot point missiles at Portland and San Diego and then extort us it's not going to be a situation and they're saying the Iranians are gonna have to have spot inspections they're not going to use that four hundred billion dollars that they're going to get in the next 20 years from this deal to subsidize terrorism and there is no as far as we're concerned Palestinians are gonna have to come up with their own government and deal in a bilateral but we're not going to subsidize that project and on and on and on and NATO is going to have to pay that's all in there and it's the idea is that it hasn't been good for the people that we're dealing with to subsidize them psychologically or financially and there's never been a power in history that that subsidizes other powers that they like them for that so if you want to know why the Europeans don't like us sometimes are they ankle bite us it's because we subsidize our defense and if we can become full partners with us they'll like us more but they won't unless they have forced to human nature being what it is we have a question to the speakers left in terms of trade has bought chain had a major impact on the way we view our trading partners in terms the way we deal with our trading partners because with blockchain we can now detect cheating on the part of the Canadians and the Mexicans and in terms of transshipping things I think it has there's been a lot of things that have changed our ideas of trade one of them was that you remember when Barack Obama said what is he going to do have a magic wand and bring jobs back they're gone and he quoting him literally not just figuratively and so we said in this new way of thinking why isn't it possible you go to Europe I go to Europe we see people working American work pretty hard why can't an America know how if we can build the world's best universities and jets why can't we have the best industrial sector and so if it's a free if it's and we have the technology as you point out to ascertain who is cheating and who's not cheating and why would they want to cheat if cheating doesn't matter that's what we've been told and if cheating does matter and we're willing to accept it because it's for the good of the world it what if it isn't for the good of the world what if we're just empowering the Chinese Navy in a way that we wouldn't if they were had to deal according to the normal commercial protocols everybody else has to do but we had gotten in such a rut that just to suggest these things was and atham and the final thing is if you think if you try to tell Mexico we'd we'd like to help you and we want to bring you up to Canada's level of prosperity and I know that we used to think that that was by running up these huge trade surpluses but it's really your fault you're not transparent you don't have an independent judiciary you don't have property rights you don't have truly constitutional elections and when you do you'll be as prosperous as Canada but in the meantime we're not going to subsidize it anymore and so when you start to talk like that what mechanisms do you have other than sobers and judicious diplomats met at a summit and both said it was helpful and constructive that's what we did and so Trump comes along and part of the deal you know he uses the t-word tariff but there is no other coercion you can use except a threat to do the unmentionable so now he's a protectionist and all that but what he's trying to do is act crazy and unstable and then somebody and his economic team or his national security team goes eh he bothers me anymore than he does you but you guys in Europe or you guys in Japan or you guys I'm trying to deal with us before you have to deal with him so that's what he's doing he wrote about it I mean if you read art of the deal order to come back all those books it's pretty transparent the only thing I'm worried about is the enemies read the books do and they're gonna say you know what he's bluffing we have a question near the center of the room Thank You fellow California native I'm Walt a legal immigrant Tuukka Florida you focus on foreign policy but do you have a view on the convention of states as a viable to amend the Constitution well I mean in theory yes but when you get them all together as we know we don't know what's going to happen so they're all most states are like individual voters and so I know things are bad but I can imagine they could be a lot worse and so what protects us is the Constitution that we've had for we're in our third century so I I don't want to do that yet so I'd say no on that but maybe it's because I've seen how democracy works in California and everything that's destroyed the state is was voted on by the the people or the legislature or it was enacted by the court so I understand your frustration but I don't think you want to get a bunch of states together and then - I'll just add very quickly what's dangerous about this sectarianism this red blue it's a it's not like the sixties words left right it's more like the 1850s because there's a geographical element that's a force multiplier it's not just that when I go back to California the way people talk and eat and their the way that they're there their lifestyles are the hipsters what's the streets of San Francisco in Michigan or Ohio but they're the same as the coast and the in the West and East Coast and so we're creating two cultures that are not just culture but they're geographically distinct and that's what we did in the Civil War and so when you see the Trump rallies and then you see the people who are standing up at the Kavanagh hearings and screaming you've got two people who live in geographically different places and they don't like each other they don't have much in common so it's kind of scary very scary we have a question up right here yes do you have any thoughts on the change in our monetary policies over the last say Oh pre Bretton Woods to now and what will happen in the future I know that's a lot of topic that kind of thing how we manage money I know we'll never go back to gold standard thing I didn't mention is that part of the second phase of the post-war order was predicated on taking serious debts and making them almost unsustainable so George Bush almost in seven years not quite eight he doubled the debt and then brock obama ran is a physical conservative and said you took the back bank of china credit card you remember that i said and you doubled and then he doubled the debt and that was all predicated on near zero interest rates so if you look at the amount of money that we were paying when obama left office and to service a almost twenty trillion dollar debt it wasn't all that much more than Bill Clinton was paying at 7% interest for a six trillion dollar debt but we got to the point where we thought zero interest rates was a new norm and one of the things we've seen with Trump is the interest rate starts to go up a little bit it's actually helping the economy because we basically confiscated about three trillion dollars over the last twenty years from people like yourself that save money and you put it in a passbook account you got zero interest and then people were able to borrow borrow money very cheaply so that's starting to end a little bit and it's going to be very tricky because if we have this labor six million jobs are going on filled we have the economy's heating up it's probably going to grow at nearly four percent GDP and inflation and we have this big debt and yet there's not too many things you can do if we get into an economic crisis because we've used them all we have a big debt we have almost low interest what else are you going to do to stimulate the economy so I think we've got a trump at some point if he gets reelected it's gonna have to pivot and do some things that might be called deflationary or at least in dress address entitlements and debt and budgetary concerns because if the budget deficits are not sustainable the Social Security system is not sustainable and to to rectify that is pretty dramatic and it's going to cause a lot of hurt to people but it's gonna have to be done now or will be done much more abruptly in the future we have a question toward the back of the room yeah I something you mentioned brought me back to something very mundane back to the fundamentals as a former coach fundamentals are very important you mentioned the importance of the Constitution the Constitution by our last president was considered an obsolete document he mentioned that more on more than on once at one occasion executive orders have been abused by many presidents they were meant to be used within the agencies that answer to the president have extended beyond that and then you have the judicial branch that has taken over the executive the Congressional and its own branch it's the judiciary is out of control at this point what can how can we look at this in a way that we can start to get back to the fundamentals well it's a very good question you see because in some ways Donald Trump was created by Barack Obama and by that I mean when Donald Trump has been very successful with just one big signature tax package but what has jump-started this economy is a series of executive orders I don't know the constitutional al aliy of each one but what he's done is he's deregulated he's opened up a noir he's had an executive order on stone he's muzzled the EPA and he's using the executive branch in lieu of the legislative branch and he's he's been thwarted by the court so he's trying to get you know conservative constitutional judges but it depends on I guess he would say they made the rules and I'm using them now against them but I don't know to what degree Trump has violated any executive order that I know is one of the ironies that were in this political system were saying well Donald Trump was saying the fake news he's heard them but he hasn't he hasn't monitored the Associated Press journalist he hasn't monitored the emails of a fox reporter he hasn't weaponized the IRS to go after people he hasn't jailed a video maker he hasn't gone into a FISA Court and said I'm not gonna give you the complete story about this dossier so and his his rhetoric is alarming but when you actually look at who was alarming was a malicious Obama because he took these the CIA the DOJ the FBI he took all of these these deep state permanent bureaucracies and he he really tried to affect the outcome of the 2016 election with John Brennan and and clapper and Comey and all and mccabe and yet any monitored people and he did a lot of very radical things he said he couldn't be a king twenty-one times are to the effect of that and then he went around and did dhaka and the dreamer act and pretty much destroyed federal immigration law and then he said he allowed these cities to say and I'm living one that's a sanctuary City if Hillsdale tomorrow says I'm a sanctuary city anybody in Hillsdale Township does not have to follow federal gun registration just go buy a gun nobody's gonna get worse sanctuary city or you know what if you see a 3 spotted towed that's on the endangered shoot the thing in the head this is a sanctuary city you can imagine what California would say but it's all one way they can they can nullify and you can see where it goes it goes back to the nullification crisis of 1826 of South Carolina in the 1850s so we've just coming off a very radical president that for some reason his supporters now are shocked that Donald Trump he hasn't done what he's what Obama did but he sounds radical but I don't I don't pay much attention I don't think we should it's what people do not what they say question to the speakers left would you mind sharing your thoughts a little bit about the coming midterm select midterm elections maybe best-case scenario and worst-case scenario and what we can do as conservatives well the worst-case scenario would be that some of these liberal prognosis are right about the Senate that they could take the Senate and that would mean they'd have to win races like the Cruz race or something if that would happen they would impeach him in the house and then we would have an acrimonious impeachment in the Senate with a lot of pressure on moderate Ben Sasse like Republicans to join what would be a majority already to get six votes and that would pretty much stall or destroy the Trump agenda that would be the worst case scenario I don't think they would impeach him but it would be long and drawn-out much more than the Clinton impeachment the best-case scenario is we usually lose I think it's 27 seats in a midterm election the first year that Trump somehow would would buck historical trends he lose four or five seats in a house he retained the house he retained the Senate and that would be seen as a devastating setback to this what we saw at the Kavanagh hearing or the anonymous op-ed or the Woodward brook that whole cycle of D legitimizing the president so which is which it just depends on two things and I don't have the answer to it nobody seems to and that is how in a midterm election how mobilized are the Trump base in other words when they see the Cavanaugh hearings are they read about the New York Times so they say that's terrible but it's a midterm or they say that's so terrible I'm going to go out and vote for my candidate and then we don't know the effect of all these things on the independent so-called voter we found out in 2016 that just think for a minute in 2016 the night of the election the New York Times published three polls and they said there's 1% chance that Trumpkin when there's nine percent chance and there's 16% and we're not even a mention Nate salt of silver he's so pessimistic he's giving Trump 27% chance of winning that's where we were so we're hearing this it's kind of eerie we're hearing the same thing about the midterm blue wave Trump is people get sick of him but we don't know whether that same that same phenomenon is there it seems to me that I don't when I see people and they're for Trump they don't want to talk about it whether or not for Trump they yell about it because they understand the social consequences of each and if that is still true that I think he's being underreported by two or three percent and the people who support him more but we're gonna have to wait to the midterm any final questions I don't know how we are in time yeah sir I've heard you talk about Athenian society and the quieting that took place there when a good chunk of its people became dissatisfied with the culture that did not represent them do you think we have that going on now and essentially how do we get back to being friends with each other yeah well you're speaking to someone that grew up with three siblings and two first cousins that were part of my family and of my four siblings if it's this gonna be aired I guess it might be on tape two of them voted for I suppose Bernie Sanders and two voted for Hillary Clinton so and they they made me they made me aware of it but and so what we want to do is when we see people who vote differently than we do we don't want to make that the sole criteria of how we treat each other we can say there's all different factors that lead to that wrong decision on their part but and we don't want to hold a grudge we don't want to hold a grudge so what I try to do is if I have to give a lecture and somebody disrupts it or somebody yells or I get I mean I live in California I work at Stanford so I'm in a situation with nine out of ten people don't agree with me and one or two will come up and tell you that so you want to not take it seriously you don't want to have a vendetta you don't want to warp your soul and that's what would happen you don't want to end up hating and yet you don't want to be a pacifist either you have to be firm and you because if you're not firm you don't help the cause you don't help the people that trust as you do but you don't want to end up hating somebody or despising somebody you know so I try to look for the good part and everybody I hope they treat me the same I do think though that I'll just end with this comment there's something about the current left the progressive left that's holistic in a way that the right isn't by that I mean people who are conservative they were willing to put politics in a simple part of their life but they have spheres subordinate spheres that are not contaminated by politics you don't really care what the politics of a football player are you would like to see the Oscars or the Emmys just to give the print that you don't want to hear a lecture at the Miss America contest you want to turn on late-night comedy and not be lectured but the left feels that because their goals are so noble of radical egalitarianism that it justifies any means necessary and that means that the university's entertainment Hollow in every aspect of our lives in a very Orwellian way has to be politicized and weaponized and that's what we're all upset about we don't want a war we just want to say our discord we just want to say give us some peace so out once we get out of the political realm when we go to a football game or turn on music or watch a TV show we don't have that 24/7 indoctrination and for them they can't do that because they feel they're morally superior and there are war and me any means are justified because of their noble goals that's the difference between us [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 533,713

Rating: 4.7867932 out of 5

Keywords: vdh, victor davis hansen, hillsdale, hillsdale college, freedom, america, liberty, politics

Id: yoAz6o4bUIA

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/amkaps]

Interesting speech by Professor Hanson. He talks about the decline of the post- ww2 order. He explains the Trump doctrine as a combination of nationalism and principled realism. First he goes a little bit into history to provide the background and from there goes on to unpack the situation as it relates to geopolitics today. He talks about NATO, welcoming China into the World Trade Organization, the flawed efforts to invade/nation-build Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, and then the 2008 financial crisis as the cataclyst for the eventual decline of the globalized world order.

[u/DukeofDixieland]

Is he giving speeches to test ideas for a new book? His books are pretty insightful as long as you keep in mind he's mostly writing as a Neocon.