Victor Davis Hanson - The Father of US All - Booktalk

stitute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson talks about the father of us all his latest book of essays on war in history Capitola book cafe in Capitola California is the host of this event it's an hour ten minutes [Applause] thank you very much for coming out on a Sunday night in Santa Cruz this isn't a Santa Cruz topic war and conflict but nevertheless here we are and I thought what I do is speak for about 35 minutes and then welcome as many questions as we can get in these are essays that I wrote some have over the last decade some are quite new and have never been published and they have one theme and that is where as human nature is unchanging throughout the millennia warfare itself is mistakenly thought to change every decade in fact I try to argue the theme of the book is that I don't think Wars changed much at all sort of like my grandfather used to tell me on the farm that he could push up I could push a button and get 1500 gallons of water he had to hand crank a pump and get three gallons of water but he turned to me once and said the water hasn't changed any the essence hasn't just a delivery system and the same is true of high-tech warfare because it's a human Enterprise and human nature remains constant through the centuries the same principles apply and therefore it's it's valuable we don't like to study military history today in fact we can look at a lot of studies there are about 200 peace and conflict resolution programs in the United States and I think there's five or six formal military history program about 1.8 percent of all professors identify themselves as military historians now why is that part of it is the post-vietnam sixties generation where we had a new concept in the West whereas before from the Greeks onward people objected to particular Wars but not necessarily war itself the I guess I could use that phrase some people thought there and no matter how horrific war was there was a certain utility after all it could end things like Nazism Italian fascism Japanese militarism chattel slavery or the threat of war could stop something like Stalinism but after Vietnam and also in the nuclear age where war had raised the specter of complete Armageddon people object to the idea of war no longer would they agree with the Greeks that the Persian War was good they were attacked they were defending a lothario or their freedom Peloponnesian War was bad because Greeks were killing each other First Punic War was understandable third Punic War was bad we have sort of jetson that idea and in the modern or postmodern 21st century we have this idea that all wars bad that's another reason why we don't study military history too often why should we because in most bookstores there's a section military history and believe me it's got more books than race class and gender section it's got more of than farming it's got more even than environmentalism so the public has this makar of interest in warfare why should though we formerly study war I think I'll have to go back to the Greeks for two or three reasons we should remember that history is storia meant inquiry but de facto it meant inquiry about war so almost every history that the ancients wrote who started the formal discipline in history was about war Herodotus and the Peloponnesian wars the acidities in the Peloponnesian wars Xenophon's force century Wars and the end of the Peloponnesian War Polybius and the Punic Wars Livy and the Punic we could go on and on and on and know what a theme throughout all of these histories are unlike us they believe that not all events were equal we're sort of in a relativism a period of relativism we don't want to adjudicate one event as being any more or less serious or important or memorable than another not so the Greeks every time that you start a Greek history whether it's Herodotus or Thucydides Xenophon they tell you why their war is more important than somebody else's war and they have various criteria so many people were affected cities were changed governments fell but there's one common theme and that is war itself is more important than other events it's almost as if time and space are collapsed so that people who are very young and have a long period of life to live give it up and that's an aberration this is the thing about warez fathers Barry sons it shouldn't happen and so if we could make the Greeks come alive they would say yes 1939 is more important in 1929 even with the depression 1944 was a more important year than nineteen forty-seven 1918 was a more important here than 1911 by virtue of these cataclysmic Wars it changed people's lives and rippled events rippled out from them as never before so one reason that we should study military history I think is because we could go back to the ancient idea that events are different in war that's when revolutions take place that's when technology explodes that's when ideas appear and disappear at rapid speed unlike peacetime a second is a moral issue I was driving over here today to the coast from the valley and past the cemetery and I think today we're in danger because we have divorced ourselves from our military past it's not that our young people do not know what Gettysburg is or they don't know what the Bulge is so they don't know what Normandy beaches they don't know what world war two is they do not know what civil war is much less would they know what Okinawa Iwo Jima or Bella wood is they have almost complete amnesia about all of the 18 20 year olds 23 year olds who died so that they could have takeout pizza and watch Oprah to be crass about it so a society that has no sense of commemoration and has no idea the singular exceptional nation nature of their own culture is dependent or hinged on a thousands of people who were willing to die for the idea of the United States it seems to me that it's a very a moral thing to do for an entire generation not to have any commemoration of events in the past when a lot of people waged their all for us to live in relative peace and then a third of course is its didactic war can teach us about the present wars and more importantly the future Wars doesn't mean that history repeats itself exactly but as long as you predicate that premise on the idea that human nature doesn't change then war in the past will be of some dig tactic value as the acidity of teaching us about conflict in the present that's a very controversial statement and I discussed that in one of the essays I had a debate once where a person from a peace and res and conflict resolution program got very angry and said that human nature had changed and I asked him to what degree maybe it was brain chemistry through video games or increased nutrition or perhaps were indoor people something had accelerated this Darwinian process so that we're kinder gentler folk and were not subject to these age-old appetites and impulses but he couldn't adduce any proof for any of that and as we speak there are about 15 wars going on worldwide more people have been killed after world war two than during world war two and so if we study wars of the past then maybe we can have some notion about how to ameliorate their severity that is prevent them from being all destructive and that's the last point that i want to take off now and just walk us through some of the essays in the book in a chronological fashion about war in general what starts them what makes them actually break out how do they evolve how do they end and what we can learn from them first thing that i think the modern mind is just intent on wrongly is to try to find a material reason for every war that breaks out there has to be I when I was a student over here at Santa Cruz everybody told me there was oil off the shore of Vietnam and that's why they over there in Korea there must have been all off the shore of Korea but so often the study of wars in the past show us that there's almost no material reason there can be but believe me Germany for example has about 3 million people more than it did in 1939 and it's got about 20% less territory does any German talk about Leben's room today the here the Germans saying if we just don't have Poland we can't survive you don't hear it I know that the Falklands was a silly World War bore has the great novelist said to bald-headed men were fighting over a comb but if you think about it there may be some oil off there but that was not about material resources the Japanese are quite successful today without resurrecting the co-prosperity sphere Saddam Hussein has all the oil he had all the oil in the world without going into Kuwait and Iran today has 200 years of natural gas reserves there's no reason why they need nuclear power they need nuclear power about as much as North Korea does which whose people were eating grass just a decade ago but if we go back to study wars in the past we we start to see some disturbing trends that they tend to be about perceptions of Honor perceptions of fear perceptions of self-interest irrational appetites and motivations and so Germans had convinced themselves by 1939 that they had to prove something to themselves to the poles to the Czechs to the British to the French Saddam Hussein was furious that he had fought the Iranians why they'd quit he's watched him and he felt that he was bearing the burden of Sunni Arab nationalism fervor against these Persian Shiites and that queries were just sitting there and not helping them I don't know what the Falklands was about but it had a lot to do with a unpopular dictatorship in Argentina that whipped up popular fervour over the so called Malvinas and in turn the British had the reputation of the British Navy going all the way back to Lord Nelson and so that was a war of Honor and most of them are sometimes you look at the 30 or 40 Wars in the Greek 5th century and they do break out over usually over land a very interesting thing becomes apparent the lands worthless it's usually the borderland from Thebes or Athens or Argos of Sparta one side could very logically say let's have a United Nations let's have enlightened people discuss this let's divide it 50/50 maybe we could take the Falklands and have East Falkland I in Westphal can die and everybody can get along but people aren't that way think for a minute if any of you live in the suburbs when I was writing this book I came across a lot of interesting articles I was looking for about human interest stories about suburban fighting you'd be surprised a number of homeowners get in feuds with their neighbors over things like leaves blowing under their lawn and some of these escalate to the level of physical violence anybody who's an outsider looks at this and said why would people who have a half a million dollars in investment worry about whether three or four leaves keep blowing on or a route goes under somebody's driveway or a dog barks on Sunday because they become manifested as perceptions of honor our pride or seriousness or perceived self-interest and I think that's what we have to remind ourselves so often that logical rational Nations will do illogical things Russia did not have to go into South Ossetia there's no reason for it does anybody think today that China needs more people or rocky Taiwan or it can't survive what in the world is that about why do they are they so paranoid about Taiwan makes no sense at all if you go and look at the Greeks and the Turks fighting over the Aegean some of these islands are not very fertile but they're very fertile in the imaginations of millions of people in their self sense of self-worth so I think that's a good thing that we can remember about war I say good because that can instruct us on what to look out for and do not expect everybody to be logical because nations are just conglomerations of people people are irrational and infantile and emotional well what everybody has dis dis disagreements what makes them actually go to the next stage of pulling the trigger and devolving into organized violence the suburban heights that fight over the leaves blowing necessarily don't go have fistfights that's an oddity I wish I could tell you that the two servants suburban Heights don't fight when their leaves are blowing on one side of the other the boundary line because they're rational people and they discussed it and they decided to agree to disagree or they've talked to the neighborhood suburban homeowners association and they've given a ruling often that's not the case often somebody is prominent in the community or somebody works for the post office and they know that if they get caught beating somebody and get a felony arrest they're gonna lose their job or they're gonna shame their family in other words there is a deterrent that sounds so neon dearth all as if our limbic brains have not evolved over that beyond that idea of deterrence but let's go back to some of those events that made no sense the Falklands why did they invade when they did probably because the British had symbolically withdrawn one submarine tender probably because of people a few people in Parliament had thought as a part of reaching out they would use the word in Malvinas instead of the Falklands probably because a new Prime Minister was female and in the much yzma cult culture of Argentine politics they thought that she would be weak and fat chance they didn't know it was Margaret Thatcher but in any case the sense of deterrence was lost and that made Mad Dog Mendez and the Argentinians take a chance that they otherwise by rational analysis would not have take taken why did Saddam Hussein go into Kuwait it made no sense I mean the United States and our allies can fight wars where there's no obstructions flat terrain we had supplies it was just almost lunatic suicidal even and the answer is that he probably thought that a inadvertent remark from an American ambassador April blessed be it said that had said reportedly that the territorial dispute between Kuwait and the unite in Iraq was of no interest or little interest the United States and he felt that nobody would say things why did Hitler go into Poland in September 1939 why he would say why didn't I he was one of the most shocked people in the world that their acts that actually started a war he read mr. gurbles and what other commentators inside the Reich said why did they want to go over Poland they didn't go over to war with chuckles of Archaea they didn't care about Silesia they didn't care about the Anschluss they did not care about the Rhineland they didn't care about any of these things they didn't care that we broke all of these post-world War one agreements and so the sense of deterrence had been lost and when you lose a sense of deterrence then that invites people to take risk that they would not and that's very very important to remember because every once in a while very educated enlightened people in the West feel that everybody can be on the same page the promise of the Enlightenment is with enough education and learning and discussion we can all think as if we're in the Harvard faculty lounge or we're all it's does in the Stanford library having coffee or something that's not true there are going to be from now until tomorrow to the end of time for verbal bad actors that will act if they think they have less to lose than not acting and what checks them is not the United Nations Commission on Human Rights unfortunately but it's the fear of a bigger stick or that that they take the gamble it will not be worth it they may be irrational to want to take the gamble but they're very rational in adjudicating whether it will succeed or not a couple of things that when these wars then break out I've noticed in the last decade that we've used words that are really neutral things like preemption multilateralism unilateralism preventive warfare and we've given a moral value to them in other words I think most people in the audience tonight would say well we I'm supposed to think that unilateralism is bad is bad and multilateralism is good preemption is always bad but these are just empty concepts that are descriptive in nature there never been ethical think of the Soviet the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that was the most multilateral coalition of the war everybody from Italians to Spain Spanish to Hungarians to Romanians to Germans joined in to gang up on Russia and had we had a unilateral preemptive strike against Hitler let's say in June of 1939 there was far more infantry divisions on the Western Front among the Allies especially France than German than German and they could have easily gone into great swaths of western Germany had they preempted so let's remember that these terms that now have become so politically loaded throughout history have had no real value sometimes it's good to stop a bad guy by pre-empting him sometimes a bunch of bad guys that are in a coalition give multilateralism a bad name one of the most unilateral States was who was who it was Churchill's England in 1939 it was all by itself it unilaterally was taking on Germany Italy and most of Eastern Europe another thing that happens in war and I'm trying to reflect essays in the book is that this notion of military error and that came up again in Afghanistan and Iraq and I think it's a symptom again of a postmodern society that is used to things working and working very well and very rapidly you have 500 channels on your television set you can call Kenya tonight on a cell phone we go home we can we can find out anything any bit of information in the world on the Internet in point two seconds and therefore we extend that assurance to war itself so when we go to war which is what the stuff of the unpredictable emotion young people most people don't let their 18 year-olds drive their family car much let less put them on a deck and guide a 120 million dollar plane into a parking stall so you have youth you have stress you have emotions and things happen that we don't anticipate in war but our generation used to this peacetime surety that everything must work and we must be comfortable and we are affluent leisure have lost any sight especially with the dearth of military history that that has never been the case in any war so we had a national outcry as we should over lack of up-armored Humvees we had a national outcry over supposedly insufficient body on what we didn't have a Nash national outcry Oh was wait a minute these are lapses we always have lapses in war what we do and we have lapses in war we discuss them and then we enter a cycle of response counter response and we have to beat the enemy in this cycle therefore we will get up armor and get better body armor and drone surveillance and better counterinsurgency and better intelligence to stop the OEE before the ID gets shaped charges from Iran and blows up the MRAP or the Rhino or the improved armored Humvee and it sort of goes around and around and decide that not the side that doesn't make any errors everybody makes errors but the side that reacts to them the most quickly and the most calmly wins as it happened in Iraq thank for a minute I was shocked when I would read in the New York Times all of these supposedly nefarious people who didn't have up-armored Humvees I thought why would they a Humvee was always sort of a beefed up Jeep it was behind the lines transportation nobody could anticipate as nobody ever anticipates before war the nature of the actual fighting nobody understood there would be no fronts once the insurgency started and Humvees would be on the front lines the key then was to react to it think for a minute the Normandy campaign of June 1944 the Americans and the British and the shape planners knew the almost every minutiae about the wind velocity and direction for the landing they knew the water currents they knew the water temperature they knew the size of the sand on the beach everything was planned it took a year to plan it was one of the most brilliant campaigns less than 3,500 dead on date on d-day and they got it was the largest invasion of Europe since Xerxes in 480 it was brilliant they got an entire army several Corps on the beach and ready to go to Berlin and then what happened they basically stayed from June 6 to the end of July six weeks and they didn't move why because somebody had not done a little research and discovered that on the other side of Omaha beast was something called the hedgerows and the Bocage and these were ideal for defensive troops with superior anti-tank weapons dug in Panther tanks sophisticated warriors from the Eastern Front that were dug in and we lost eighty thousand casualties before we broke out and how do we break out Cobra we can call it Cobra 1 because we've used it for Cobra 2 in Iraq we use b-17s as a tactical bombing weapon and what did we do we killed dozens of Americans and wounded well over a hundred and then once we decided it's not smart to bomb perpendicular to our own lines we did it again with the benefit of hindsight and we killed more Americans other words to break out of Normandy Beach we had to kill a lot of Americans in a horrific accident and we killed the highest-ranking General on the European front Lesley McNair a three-star general more importantly we lost several hundred in exercises leading up to detail and that generation had grown up what during the Depression they wanted a nice steak they usually had to get their hands quite bloody to kill it they didn't really all have flush toilets and their way of thinking life is nothing but tragedy and error and the side wins that will overcome at the most rapidly not our generation it's very very hard for us to accept that tragic view of the world when most of our lives are therapeutic in nature with enough money with enough leisure with enough education with enough technology we can control every facet of a war and that's what we we try to do a couple more things and I just want to finish by talking about how these wars end one of the things that I've written about in the past is that the West with its emphasis on constitutional government individual freedom separation of religion and government this triumph of secular rationalism creates high technology superior military discipline and all things being equal it can project military power in ways that its adversaries cannot doesn't mean they're gonna there's not going to be a little bighorn or it's lawanda there was always going to be setbacks but smaller numbers of troops farther away from home can exercise military power in a way that its adversaries or enemies usually don't there's a reason why the Zulus are not in the Tim's and the British in 1879 or in Africa there's a reason why Montezuma does not sail into Barcelona there's a reason why indigenous peoples were not able to kill as many Americans on in their frontier fighting then were lost in one or two battles of the Civil War there's a reason why Britain lost more people in the Battle of the Somme then I had an entire century of colonial fighting and this is called Western warfare if you will but in our time in space what's very interesting is the way that we're checking it now how people are checking it in Afghanistan checking it in Iraq checking it in Somalia and they're doing in the exact way that people check rieckhoff lights and roman legionnaires and Crusaders for the last 2,500 years first the thing to remember is Westerners tend to be going further from home with tenuous logistics and they tend to have a higher standard of living it just is England even even than the Dark Ages had a higher standard of living than Africa or the new world probably the Greeks you had to ask an Athenian warrior to go into a Tolia it was a much higher standard of living in Athens than a tribal backwater of Greece and that means this notion of asymmetry starts to take place if you have a helicopter pilot and he's emailing his child and his wife from a suburban home the United States he's a beneficiary of a quarter million dollar education he's in a three million dollar Apache and one of 11 children shoots him down with an accidental shot from an Archie RPG and Ramadi and that falls in moral ethical terms the loss is equal but this society being leisured and affluent will interpret that loss of the VA the major the emailing the kids the suburban existence and it'll be more Grievous to their cause than Iraq will given that life is often nasty brutal solitary and shortened arrive so one of the ways that you check Western dynamism is you create situations where the affluent intruder invader is made by this process of asymmetry asymmetrical warfare is made to feel the losses far more than the people who were less affluent another is that there's not really a concept of a unified West think of the Ottomans for they were very successful because Europe was trisected between Ottoman ISM Catholicism and protestantism and that has not changed on the eve of the 2003 war you could make the argument that Russia and France sign some of the most lucrative oil deals with Sabri very vehement in their opposition to the United States at the UN and as we speak of the West today it's all it's not just trisected it's fragmented and one of the ways that you can defeat a Western power that has more sophisticated technologies ally yourself with if you're the Ottomans you want to fight Lepanto will then start harboring your ships your galleys at Toulon because the friends are not necessarily in line with the papal States or Spain or Venice another thing that you can do is a consensual Society is based on self-critique long before we've ever heard of cindy sheehan or michael moore there were people like Euripides and Aristophanes that made fun of war and so anti-war movements if the war is that an optional war if it's deemed not necessary if it's deemed on indie Western peoples are very impatient they want to get back to making money and enjoying the good life and if you can draw a war out then you have an enormous advantage as well and finally you can be I don't this sounds culturally chauvinistic but you can be parasitical on technology just because you can create a sophisticated drone and you know how to repair it and you can design predator 1 2 3 doesn't mean that the enemy can't get a hold of one and figure out how to use it all the components to an AED come from the West just because somebody in Afghanistan Kent doesn't know the physics of a garage door opener or a cell phone doesn't mean that you can't import them and cobble together from information on the Internet a successful device that will be very successful in asymmetrical warfare so what we're seeing in this particular century is the triumph of Western military dynamism but for a variety of historical forces are checking its utility it's the world of nuclear weapons so we don't see as many conventional World War two - Korea type struggles in the past and I think increasingly it's going to be very hard for Westerners to use conventional military power given the expertise of a similar - asymmetrical warfare by people who choose to to stop them finally how do these wars end and we have an axis of evil remember that ill-fated term I think David Frum coined it and in it was Iran Iraq and North Korea notice who wasn't in it Germany Vietnam Japan all enemies why weren't they in it well whatever you think about the military efficacy of our effort in Vietnam I think it was very good actually but it was strategically inept and we lost that war what was the war for it was to create a non communist cell that could evolve into something like South Korea the variety of reasons that failed the issue was adjudicated is now united under North Vietnamese communism so they're no longer an enemy they were not in the axis of evil we all know the story with Japan in Germany and Italy they weren't in the axis of evil but think who was again at the time Iraq was we had fought the 1990 - 91 war that was not resolved we mistakenly thought the strategic aim had been to free Kuwait now the problem was that you had a dictator who had attacked four of his neighbors and had an uncanny ability of translating an enormous petroleum wealth into sophisticated weaponry of all types and that would endure and and plague people as long as he was there so that was a bellum interrupt him so to speak and who else was in it North Korea I think was kind of wise for Matthew Ridgway to suggest that once they had pushed the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists back across the 38th parallel in March April 1951 that we sort of stayed there but a classical military historian would say wait a minute the issue was not resolved you think the issue was the 38th parallel the issue was whether you were going to stop Chinese expansionism and North Korean communism which were antithetical to Western values in that particular part of the world and so we have another bellum interrupted so the grandchildren of the great people who fought at the a liver or they fought at Inchon are now under the specter of a North Korean nuclear weapon and finally we had Iran in some ways you could say that the taking of the hostages in 1979 set off a series of events where Iran found itself in a cold and a sort of lukewarm and sometimes in a hot war with the United States and that has not been adjudicated so we're sort of in the situation but the Romans were between Punic War One Punic War two Punic War three that there's a timeout if you're the Israelis and the Palestinians are their allies you have 1947 1956 1967 1973 1982 2006 why each side takes a breath starts to rearm tries new tactics tries to enlist new patrons and allies especially now with it demise the Soviet Union and its nuclear deterrent and then they go at it again and they will go at it forever just like the Punic peoples and the Romans went out it forever until one side wins and one side loses and you have something like world war 2 or world war 1 or the civil war if you can imagine that terrible summer of 1864 after the wilderness the crater called Harbor Jubal Early's raid on Washington DC Lincoln was not only going to lose the election to McClellan he was fighting in a rebellion among Republicans with John C Fremont and he had Horace Greeley damming him every day and he was just completely demoralized because people who have no real what independent way of thinking or ideology they follow the pulse of the battlefield by 1864 the Army of the Potomac had almost been destroyed and so it looked like the war was going to be what return to the status before the conflict at Fort Sumner and there would be two democratic entities one would be slave-owning in one wooden and then that would be plagued us for the next 150 years and then Sherman takes Atlanta on September 2nd he sends a message and so those famous six word Atlanta is ours and fairly won and then you can't find anybody who is not for Lincoln and Lincoln has renewed support Ian's the war and that's what usually happens with these Wars they have to be decided militarily and then you have to adjudicate the peace and what it Coulee else can we learn about military history I'm afraid to say that it's not very encouraging about human nature how it reacts to war but it seems to be that if you want to guarantee another war then be brutal to the enemy that you defeated and humiliated or just as dangerously so Magnum entity to an enemy that doesn't feel he's defeated we all talk about Versailles as if it was a great injustice but if you look at the terms that Versailles it was not nearly as bad as what the Germans inflicted on the Russians in 1917 their peace treaty or what the German central staff had General Staff had talked about in 1914 when they thought they were going to take Paris now the problem with Versailles was the German army was never beaten the German army surrendered fifty to sixty miles inside France and Belgium and so it walked back it could have been defeated in six more weeks finally after losing two million Allied soldiers and having a million Americans transported from April 1917 to summer 1918 we were making enormous strides we were going to go through the alsace-lorraine go into Germany defeat the German army occupy the German homeland tell the Germans that nobody it was nobody's fault with their own they had been defeated and then being magnanimous stay on and Shepherd in some type of consensual government we did not do that and what happened and the Germans walked back and said we've never had an enemy soldier we never let an enemy soldier get into German territory but we were stabbed in the back by Jews and communists and as general folk said this Versailles is not a prescription for peace as a guarantee of war in 20 years who's almost right to the ear so it seems that if we look at these Wars you cannot try to be magnanimous before the enemy is defeated you have to defeat him humiliated him ensure that he knows he was defeated it was his own fault and then reach out and try to reconstruct society that's going to be very difficult in our own postmodern society for a variety of reasons because we have a moral stricture that we considered very immoral and rightly so to inflict that level of violence on an enemy to make them see sting and desist and then be magnanimous what we're more likely to do is be magnanimous before the enemy has even been defeated and we saw that in the Iraqi war where one day we were at the end of three weeks we had defeated Saddam everybody was coward looked like we were gonna win and suddenly people were American soldiers were stringing telephone wire they were painting schools they were reaching out and the enemy said you know what we're still here we just dissolved nobody's gone after us we're looting they don't do anything and they went right back on the offensive I think that's going to be very hard in the Wars of the future among Western populations because for a variety of reasons they're not willing to inflict a level of damage on an enemy to humiliate them with the expectation that then they can be constructive and help them get out of there in a post-war depression they can get out of it I don't see that happening it's going to be very very problematic in the future and we've seen it already in places as diverse as Somalia and Lebanon let me just finish with a final thought why does all this sound some of you were frowning at me like I walked out of a lunatic asylum but why does this seem so foreign to us and so repugnant to our sensibilities and I think if we get back to the promises of the 18th century French and British Scottish enlightenment that we felt that we had finally reached a level of civilization in which capitalism high-technology the arts of diplomacy interconnectedness between nations had created a utopian sense that we war was behind us and for us to see these wars they become a referendum on the Enlightenment when they start to break out we think my gosh the UN failed or George Bush said round dead or alive or smoke them out or bring them on or somebody has to be blamed for a warrant rather than seeing these things as organic Organic entities and that as Plato said the natural order of things may be conflict rather than peace pieces of parenthesis and what's very hard for us children the Enlightenment to admit is that it's very hard to keep the peace it takes constant vigilance and peace is an aberration a welcome aberration but it's only a result of vigilance and deterrence and when that proposition is presented to the American people or any affluent Western society especially in Europe they become very very depressed and feel that the people who are bringing them that bad news in some ways are themselves morally suspect and the result of that is we're going to have more Wars and we can even ever imagine unless we wise up and we learn the lessons that have been pretty much standard in the West since the Greeks thank you very much as I mentioned before we will be recording so if you have questions please raise your hand and wait to ask your question until I give you the mic and also if we can ask everybody to be respectful of your time and at the time of the author and your fellow guests we appreciate that question so you said that deterrents when you lose deterrence problems lie ahead how does that figure in with Iran now that we're doing nothing which is kind of never take any action and we keep making threats but we never back it up with anything and they're getting more and more belligerent so what is what do you see the future in that situation when I start to read public opinion commentary in the major newspapers by supporters of the administration using the word we can contain Iran that's a fait accompli I think this administration has admitted that Iran is going to be nuclear and that all the talk about the missing Imam and wanting to anil annihilate Israel are just the the stuff of nuclear poker but they will be subject to the laws of deterrence I think 90% of me thinks they will be subject to deterrence but 10% says they won't and if I was an Israeli and I saw a recent poll that said 26% of Israelis would emigrate if Iran became nuclear I think that's the idea behind it that Iran wants to have a sword of Damocles and every six or eight weeks have mr. Ahmadinejad or someone like him threatened to annihilate Israel and say hi just kidding and then people are supposed to live under that situation so it would be intolerable and we have a bad choice and a worse choice a tragedy in my way of thinking is we had a popular uprising last year and I think that whereas George Bush would not have been the charismatic globalized leader that could have galvanized support for these for the demonstrators Barack Obama was he could have really gone around the world said these people may not be wanting american-style democracy but they are tired of theocracy and we need to support them and he voted present and that was a great opportunity loss because now we're stuck with the bad and the worst choice to use military operations to eliminate that you're going to I think start a wave of terror terrorism and Israel's gonna be showered with missiles from Syria from the West Bank perhaps even from Iran and if you don't they're gonna become nuclear and that's going to perhaps lead to two or three Sunni Arab countries becoming nuclear it's going to result in blackmail not only of Israel but European countries as well so now we're in a proverbial bad and worst choice and I think this particular administration is somewhat embarrassed was as you said they gave four deadlines remember it was you better stop this by the United Nations meeting in September of last year you better stop this by the g20 you better stop this by the face-to-face negotiations you better stop this by the first thing you're nothing's worse than being loud and carrying a small stick it's not a protest basically I agree with you the problem is human nature for sure and the second problem is that people don't understand that but my question is you say warfare hasn't changed but I want to suggest that the the advent of robotic warfare more in some sense does change war in our relation to it yes well it does in the sense when I say it doesn't change it just accelerates the window of choice making that whereas before you would make a choice and it both sides were subject to constraints of time and and you had time to discuss it and regurgitate it a so to speak and then the public didn't find out about it believe me if if CNN was on the beach at Normandy it would be it would have been a different war but the people who were ordering the robotics they're out somewhere outside of Las Vegas for example they have a Predator drone and they're making decisions about whether to blow up somebody or not that decision even though it's instantaneous and it's done at a distance it's still the same decision of and there's gonna be somebody who's going to have a counter drone and there's going to be somebody who's gonna say wait a minute these drones are just killing each other these robots let's get at the human somehow who's ordering it or creating them and at some point if somebody has the ability they're gonna send a terrorist squad into Vegas to blow up that thing and then that's going to be unchanging because human nature is unchanging and I think this is very important because there's a lot of talk about nuclear disarmament in this administration and I think that would be great my problem with it is that they don't make the distinction that it's the tool they think it's the tool and I think it's the person or the nation that has a tool we lost a million people to machetes in Rwanda nobody thinks that they want to outlaw machetes in fact I'll go so far as to say that more people have died from machetes and nuclear arms since for Oshima I'll even include Hiroshima more people have died since 1900 from machetes and nuclear weapons but nobody wants to outlaw machetes and every time throughout history somebody if they're in Greek times they wanted to outlaw missile weapons or they wanted to outlaw catapults at the beginning of the Hellenistic period or the church wanted to stop crossbows especially Arco buses all of these were a were mechanisms of killing people at random well you wouldn't have face-to-face gallantry or people of the lower classes killing Knights and every single Universal globalize statute failed after World War one we said we'll never use poison gas again the reason we didn't use it in World War two is both sides had had it and said whoever uses it first is going to get a bigger gas attack in metalli Asian it wasn't because of any Geneva Convention the Egyptians used it in Yemen and as we know Saddam used it so I think that all of these remind us that whatever the weapon is whatever the robot is whatever the latest sophistication there are they are run by people and people are subject to predictable patterns of behavior and predictable ways of deterring deterring them there's only one way to stop a person from using a weapon or if it's a robot that make a better robot yourself or have a robot and let's send them a message that if you use that robot my robots going to be much meaner than your robot I was worried if you comment on a couple of statements that have been made in history one was by Frederick's of great for Bismarck I don't recall which maybe you do the conducting foreign policy without guns is like dancing without music yes and also Ronald Reagan's statement of I don't recall ever being attacked because we were too strong well I think what we don't like some of these statements because they remind us that they're we have the suspicion that the people who are saying them are saying them not for instruction but is shamanistic Lee or triumphantly are they because they have the greater weapon and therefore they're saying that the weapons dictate reality but it's not true all of the frederick the great bismarck wrong wig and they all understood something that what gets people killed unfortunately in wars are sophisticated highly educated people who feel that their adversaries are just bystanders operate on the same principles that they operate on but believe me Barack Obama's and I'm light and enlightened thinker who went to Occidental and Columbia and Harvard law and taught Chicago Law School but he operates in a different landscape than mr. Ahmadinejad mr. Chavez mr. Assad when he went to Cairo and he gave that soaring speech and where he really exaggerated American misdemeanors and played down the Islamic world's felonies and gave them credit for it quite striking Western Renaissance in' and enlightenment sophisticated Islamic medicine tolerance and cordoba during the Inquisition all these were in some ways fabricated and he did that because he wanted to reach out and say look I'm sophisticated I'm empathetic there's no reason for us to fight and what he didn't understand is and their way of thinking there's a lot of reasons to fight we feel that the West is decadent that it's highly leisured that it doesn't believe in anything we've seen that in Europe and we think that we can readjust the world map at your expense because you can't stop us and even after the El Arabia interview even after the Cairo speech even after the euphemism overseas up contingencies operations man-made disasters even after the promised is closed on Guantanamo even after the promise to tried KSM even after reading mr. Mutallab his Miranda rights where are we we had more terrorist attempts in the 15 months of the Obama administration and every year prior until 2001 the enemy does not interpret that as I said earlier as magnum entity they see it as weakness and to admit that seems to mr. Obama and his enlightened cohort to be a referendum on our own failure as civilized people I think it's very dangerous when you have highly educated people who take it upon themselves to to think what the enemy thinks I think I know pretty much what bin Laden and doctors always hear they kind of remind me of some neighbors I had to farm next to and the more that I promised them not I would say to them please don't take the water it's not your turn on the communal ditch there's no reason for educated people like ourselves of fighting over three days of ditch water makes no sense and the reply I got more or less was if you don't like it stop me and the only reason that they stopped stealing was when I was able to show them and it wasn't in their interest to do so [Music] you seem to think like you said that countries that country is supposed to be like United against this and it's in 1933 Hitler wrote a book my campuses in the in that books you know he said we will destroy and kill all Jews will homosexual all Negroes you know and the Israel was a state not the country this time move them a year in in her book wrote that to power some other countries non country year and in question my question is why the you know the United Nations not involved in just stop the war the United States United Nations it's not new it's a concept that evolved out of the League of Nations and it evolved out of earlier European programs or there are even certain types of associations in the ancient world like it but none of this works unless you have a global policeman because people will say dude Italians do not go into Abyssinia Japanese do not go into Manchuria Saddam do not go into Kuwait and means absolutely nothing especially when the people who so many people in the United Nations they vote only when they're in the United patience they surely don't vote back at home they have no consensual 'ti in their own societies or Free Press so this idea that we're gonna rejoin I mean we just heard that Iran is on the United Nations Commission on the status of women this is a country that stones women who just said that the tsunamis and all these natural disasters are called caused by women revealing themselves so we have bad actors in the United Nations and because the United Nations assumes that they're all rational they're going to vote and assumes that one vote from Iran is equal to a vote for France it's not and I have no qualms about saying that when Zimbabwe or Venezuela vote that vote is not the same as a consensual Society and the UN has no mechanism for enforcing it and it's a nice debating society but it has not the only two wars I think it even participated in in a positive way where East Timor and Korea and that one Korea was because of the the boycott of the Chinese so I don't see any purpose other than to talk and I wish the best thing we could do with the United Nations is stay in it and get the headquarters out of New York City and put it where it needs to be in Zimbabwe or you know Colombia or somewhere and then all these diplomats would be away from the 5-star restaurants and CBS ABC and they wouldn't get the attention they could just go debate but this idea that they're gonna stop wars historically inaccurate yes welcome back thank you I read recently where the Ottomans thrived by encouraging multiple cultures within their empire and then by pitting them against each other and thus preventing anyone from becoming very strong is there any truth to that well that's the famous divide and conquer aspect of the Romans worth they went into Gaul or they went into Numidia they always found one tribal leader to fight a Vercingetorix or to fight or Mithridates or to fight a jagira and they played both sides all the British were experts at that in India with a very very small force they were able to control India by having one Prince fight another and the problem with all of that is in our post enlightened age we consider that cynical real politique unfair whatever even though it has a utility that's proven through time so especially we're not very good imperialist because we've never really had an empire we haven't taken buddy's land since 1898 in the Philippines so I don't think the United States is going to go into Afghanistan the way the British would have or the Romans would have and said you know what let's get the Pashtuns versus the Tajik sand get them all plate off and so there's a balance of power and where the broker because it's much more American to go in and say you know what we've got to make sure that they brush their teeth three times a day and they use an electric toothbrush or they're gonna have an unacceptable level of cavities well in this country I'm a little worried that's a whole different subject but we have a pattern that this is the only multiracial multi-ethnic country that this size that has worked and it's because it's not multicultural and at a common constitutional system and a diverse racial makeup in one language and everywhere where a multicultural system has been employed whether it's in the Balkans or Rwanda or in the old austrian-hungarian empire and never works because each side then makes claims on on the public body and that can't be sustained or can't be granted and so if we get to a situation where we're gonna have an Asian American a so-called white America and a Hispanic America a black America and each are making claims that their grievances Trump the others and there's no common language there's no Lincoln does not exist for everybody Hispanic says I can't think Shakespeare is part of my heritage because he was white or some of us who happen to be white say you know what I don't like Martin Luther King because he when you get to that point it won't work we know it won't work so any time I hear somebody saying he wants a multicultural society I think this is a prescription for suicide yep yeah I've got a question for you I agree with you in terms of the Falklands it was a war that really didn't need to be locked it was a disaster shall we say but what I'm wondering what is your opinion as a classical military historian in terms of the Iraq war did we really need to go in there in light of all the information that's come out in the last few years as to the cook do for me you mean looking back at Iraq yeah do you think it was worth it was it worth it in terms of the methods they used for deciding to go in which is very faulty in the waters I think there were mistakes made and the biggest one that I had although the traditional missed so-called mistakes I think can be reinterpreted and there's good arguments on both sides disbanding the Iraqi army and turning a bunch of eighteen year olds loose with nothing to do was a mistake but on the other hand that army is now pretty much free of Bathurst that in the long run that might have been wise the idea that you're gonna go in there and have a light footprint and try to get out as quickly as possible the Casey Abizaid idea versus the Petraeus counterinsurgency I think you can see that in retrospect there's a lot to recommend the Petraeus support the big mistake I think that's absolutely on question is that on October 11th 10th and 11th 2002 the US Senate and the House of Representatives voted in bipartisan fashion both motions carried the House and the Senate in the Senate a majority of Democratic senators wonderful speeches by John Kerry Hillary Clinton that we needed to go in to take out Saddam because writ 1 2 3 23 of them he tried to kill George Bush he practiced genocide against the Marsh Arabs he's violated the UN Accords he has harboring Abu Nidal and Abu all these terrorists he had attacked four of his neighbors they were all there were only one maybe two or about WMD with this administration the Bush administration decided to privilege that one and then it put all its eggs in one basket had it said we're going to go in there because this is a homicidal genocidal main who's destroyed everything he touches and he's unstable when he's combined with petroleum he proud they probably would have had a coalition it would have lasted even if they didn't find WMD but once you you privilege WMD it disappeared and then when you try to make the argument I mean there was some utility Libya under Colonel Qaddafi had an enormous WD MD program he gave it up Pakistan's dr. Khan was running in a nuclear warehouse he gave it up Syrian Syrians were killing people in Lebanon they were dominate they got out there were all these positive things try making that argument in 2005 you couldn't do it the American people because they had been told that WMD WMD wmb no WMD it was not worth it now was it worth it that is going to be for historians to on the one side 4,000 tragic deaths of young people versus a constitutional society in the heart of the ancient CLE fate that may or may not endure if it endures it's going to be a positive force in the region and it will ironically check Iran in a way that we can't check around every day there is free broadcasting of Shia participating in consensual government going into Iran it's one of the reasons Iran is being destabilized but will that endure we don't know if it falls apart no the war wasn't worth it if that government succeeds it was worth it our CIA estimates it Israel has between 175 and 200 nuclear weapons so how do you think Iran is going to destroy Israel well Iran's premise why would they want 1 to 10 weapons when as you say Israel has over 175 and the ability an Israeli missile is much more likely to find the target than an Iranian missile just like an Israeli software program is more likely to work than an indigenous Iranian program but why would I ran then won't even want them since the counter response will be overwhelming and again we get back to this idea of nuclear poker the Iranians better than we do know that it's not nuclear weapons per se that mattered of us lose sleep that Israel or France or Britain have nuclear weapons we're terrified that Pakistan North Korea do they understand that and they have already prepped the field so to speak by acting lunatic and telling everybody that they want to see a missing Imam and they want to go to paradise and they don't really care and go back and read about the Iran Iraqi war how we sent our young people is human mind bridges over minefield we don't care you want to live we want to die and have paradise they do all of that and the net result is that they want to create a situation in which ten nuclear weapons creates a greater threat greater deterrent threat because all ten are more likely to be used in more scenarios than in the case of Israel so what Israel I think is trying to do is to warn them that it's on intolerable and you start to hear a lot of Israelis say sixty five years after the Holocaust we're not going to sit here while Europeans smile and make these empty gestures why the half of the Jewish population in the world can be wiped out by this lunatic regime they're not now tolerate that and so what they're trying to tell the Iranians in advance is this is what's gonna have they're trying to deter them in advance a problem that we have in the United States is that for one reason or another in the last eight years countries that were bellicose hostile to the United States versus countries that were friendly between 2001 and 2008 we've switched it's almost it's like this administration is saying hey you know Castro hey Chavez hey Assad hey Putin hey Medina John I kind of understand why you didn't like the Bush administration hey Colombia why did you like the Bush administration hey Israel why were you friendly to us hey Britain why were you friendly to us and so we flipped and our allies are being treated as enemies are ignored and our enemies are being courted and that's very dangerous because Iran and and Venezuela and Syria almost think if I try something there's going to be a certain degree of sympathy for me I'm not saying that's explicit but it's a very dent dangerous situation because we need to reestablish that if you a democratic constitutional state and you're invested in the Western idea of Commerce and globalization and constitutional government then you get a little bit more attention than if you're a destructive autocratic dictatorial country like Venezuela or Syria or Iran unfortunately that message has not gone out and our enemies understand that and they're looking around it's it's 1979 all over again we used to hear those soaring platitudes about we won't sell weapons we don't want to be connected with the Argentine dictatorship as a student I used to love hearing that at Stanford then all of a sudden we found out that all of the world's bad players thought you know what it's time for the Chinese to invade Vietnam it's tide time for the Afghans to be invaded by the Russians it's time to take hostages it's time to go into Central America fear the Soviet surrogates and the world blew up so to speak why because they thought the United States either could not or would not react when you get to the situation that you have to be perfect to be good then it's very very dangerous time for a blockade I've heard let Israel take care of it let them bomb Iran and there's a bunch more I'm sure yes which would you think is the best method as far as let's say the West or particularly us I know what you mean is which do you think would be the least bad yes because there's no there's no good ones and I don't think you want Israel to do it I'm worried about that for a variety of reasons they don't have the sufficient air force to do it or they could do it but they're going to take a lot of losses given the sophisticated imported missile defense that the Iranians have there's going to be people in Europe and people in the United States who are going to say good is Israel bells the cat for us and now we turn around and damn Israel as a provocative pre-emptive power we win both ways I don't want Israel I don't think any of us want Israel to fall under that situation if you will just let the situation go on as it is we're going to end up ten years from now with a nuclear Saudi Arabia a nuclear a a nuclear Syria so what has to be done what we need to do we have about a window of 15 months at most we need to be encouraging dissidents to take it to the next step and if they get out on the street next time we need Barack Obama the man of the people the charismatic leader who he promised whom he his supporter said can appeal to people across racial national post-national post-racial magnetic leader of Mandela who happens to be an American he can get out there on the barricade so to speak and galvanize those people and say this is a Dark Age Neanderthal theocratic evil regime that is killing homosexuals it's killing women it's killing minorities it's anti-semitic it's it's just a bad regime and you Iran has a great history it goes back to antiquity and you're always been a sophisticated lightin people and now it's time to reclaim your heritage and he's got to say that all the time and then we have to have a fifteen to sixteen month window in which he does that at the end of that when they're just about ready to go nuclear then we're gonna have to act and I would imagine that if you're going to take out the facilities you might as well take out the Republican Guard barracks the Air Force the whole bit because I think if you just take out the nuclear weapons the people are gonna say wow they took away our nationalist Persian bomb even though they didn't like the regime you take out the Republican Guard and the people who are killing the people they're gonna say well I don't like anybody attacking around but at least they got rid of the people who brought us such misery it's a bad bad situation and Bush administration didn't have any answers and I think the Obama administration is a little bit more culpable but because they think they have answers and they've told us they have answers and they have fewer answers but we're dealing with this is what happens when you are a postmodern president in you're dealing with a pre-modern dictator it's not good thank you very much I enjoyed it [Music] [Applause] [Music] Victor Davis Hanson is a Hoover institutions senior fellow and contributor to National Review magazine find out more at Victor Hansen comm today on book TVs in depth noted feminist author and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum

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Keywords: victor davis hanson, us, history, war, book, politics, Trump, Maga, Senate, Democrats, Republican, Conservative, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Latin, Conflict, Terrorism, Cold War, World War, Solider, Military, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Politics, Congress, MAGA, Liberals, Progressive, Immigration, Immigrants, Racism, Fascism, Sexism, Identity, Political Theory, Obama, Cheney, Bush, Reagan, Nixon, Carter, President, Churchill, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy

Id: ZXEUBmi_om8

Length: 67min 12sec (4032 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018