Victor Davis Hanson -- The New Old World Order

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson uh be sure to follow us by the way on twitter at twitter.com unc knowledge twitter.com unc knowledge send comments suggestions uh let us know the guests you'd like to see a classicist and military historian victor davis hansen is a fellow at the hoover institution at stanford he's the author of countless and they are countless i tried to do a count victory countless essays and columns and of books that include warfare and agriculture in classical greek greece the western way of war infantry battle in classical greece a war like no other how the athenians and spartans fought the peloponnesian war carnage and culture landmark battles in the rise to western power and that names about a third of your opus i think our topic today an essay that dr hansen published on national review online this autumn entitled the new old world order quote i'm quoting you victor the post-cold war new world order is rapidly breaking apart nations are returning to the ancient passions rivalries and differences of past centuries close quote very briefly why is this happening well it's happening because all of these artificial constructs like the european union or the united nations or even things like nato they have a small shelf life and they're not as strong emotions as tribal affinities ethnic affinities religious affinities and so the world is returning the way it's always been all right segment one take europe victor davis hanson quote take europe the decades-old vision of a united europe is dissolving divides between germany and greece for example remain too wide to be bridged by fumbling bureaucrats in brussels close quote the european union they just celebrated their 50th anniversary a couple of years ago to enormous um self-acclaim at least so what's going on well there'll always be a european union that just won't do anything it'll be sort of like the masonic lodge today in small town america it's going to be there but nobody's going to really belong or do much to it so when i read the greek newspapers today or i read the german newspapers it reminds me of 1939 you got all the stereotypes that you've always had there's sunny people down south in places like italy and spain and greece and there's ladies and serious yes they're yelling they wave their hands they don't know how to do accounting they take siestas and then there's all these rigid nordic and germanic peoples that are working from six to six to pay for them that hasn't changed it goes back to antiquities so the european union tried to by fiat or convention say that they wouldn't exist anymore those differences but the difference between greece and germany is much more than mississippi and minnesota well so you just said that the european union will just sort of continue to exist all those bureaucrats in strasbourg and brussels will remain in place but become irrelevant yes i think it'll be just kind of a dead weight on european society will the euro the currency at some point the germans will not want to subsidize everybody and they'll go back they'll go back to their mark and they'll go back to the drachma and devalue it when i lived in greece what greece is doing now happened all the time and all they would do is devalue the currency inflate the economy and then sort of laugh and sleep their way back to prosperity and they can't do that now with the euro but they will be able to when it breaks apart i think it will gradually it'll be an insidious process it won't be a it'll be with a whimper rather than a bank you're familiar with mark stein's argument in america alone that muslim immigration and high muslim birth rates are transforming europe into eurasia recent events in europe june 9 dutch elections gert wilder's party for freedom wins 24 seats becoming the third biggest party in parliament september 14th the french senate approves a ban on wearing the burqa a ban that had already passed the french assembly by 335 to one september 19th the swedes hold elections and a party called sweden democrats wins 20 seats in the 349-member parliament i'll quote the ap quote the far-right party we're talking about sweden democrats demands sharp cuts in immigration and has called islam the greatest foreign threat since world war ii close quote so the drift to eurabia is being arrested europe there's a european that there's a reassertion of europe proper they have two problems and it's it it transcends demography because in theory it wouldn't matter how many muslims came if they became good europeans that's not happening for two reasons the european left is multicultural and that is they don't believe in themselves they can't argue that europe is better than the alternative they have no concept of the history or appreciation of the renaissance renaissance enlightenment they don't see themselves exceptional so then why should people who come see them as exceptional so they're not integrating people in the way the united states is doing a much better job at least until recently and then the other problem is europe's always been for all of its socialism a class-bound society it doesn't intermarry it doesn't integrate as well as the united states we're a plutocratic society you can get status by making money no matter what you look like where your parents were born or where you go to school in europe you're always located in time and space by where you were born the sound of your voice who your parents were and that makes it very hard for immigrants to get social economic cultural acceptance and you put that left and right wing impediment and then you end up with something like rotterdam or the suburbs around paris i'm very pessimistic about that in rotterdam or suburbs around paris you have an extremely dense muslim-only population where there's a at least a tendency towards sharia they're simply it's simply a kind of um muslim world implanted in europe and it's full of self-contradictions where they want to escape the autocracy the middle east and the poverty they come to the west and they are given freedom but then they resent the fact that they're unequal they want instant parity because that's what they've told the eu does and then the eu says well we give them all this money we give them all these entitlements as long as they don't come into our neighborhoods why are they angry so the problem is insoluble it's unsoluble all right um europe and the united states cnn online on september 28th quote a potential plot against europe was one factor contributing to the uptick this month in missile strikes by unmanned drones against terrorist targets in pakistan according to a u.s official the u.s official is quoted as saying we would be remiss not to try to take action to thwart what might be underway in europe close quote it's a long way a long time since europe lay prostrate in the ruins of the prostate prostrate by reaching the age at which that difference matters uh in after the second world war this is now a rich society why isn't the defense of europe the business of europe two reasons one is that it's true it's a generic generic truth for any society that the more affluent and leisure they become the less they're willing to make sacrifices you add that to the demographic paradigm paradox where you only have one child who's a precious child so that european parents are saying we need more money for for all these social entitlements especially as we age we only have one child we don't want to lose them in some god-awful place like afghanistan that creates a utopian pacifism but why should we americans continue to insulate them from reality well we've been taking nothing but the back of their hand since the war on radical islam began we do because 1917 and 1918 and the failure of the versailles accords and then the disasters from when we got in 41 to 45 and we said we decided somewhere around 1946 that these people will kill each other and they will draw us in unless we create the united nations or nato or they create the eu and that was the premise but the pro what we never in our wireless imaginations thought is that the more that we would subsidize their defense the more like angry petulant teenagers they would resent their parents for that subsidy and that's what's happened segment two asia victor davis hanson quote one of two rather bleak asian futures seems likely either an ascendant china will dictate the foreign policies of japan south korea and taiwan or lots of new freelancing powers will appear to deter china since it cannot count on an insolvent u.s for protection close quote so which of those two do you consider more likely well they're not antithetical as as we just saw with the uh the the problem with the japanese and the chinese over fishing boat and what we're seeing is that china wants recognition influence and power commiserate with its economic success so it's basically letting it be known to places like taiwan japan the philippines south korea that this is our area of influence and they're looking to us and saying is that true or not because you're way over there and we have to deal with all of this chinese money and we're saying we don't know we have budget deficits uh and so what's happening is i think that within the next 20 years japan will probably very seriously take a look at going nuclear south korea may have to go nuclear and if they don't go nuclear they're going to become under the influence of china's bullying and i think that's the problem we're having right now um why shouldn't the future of asia lie in asian hands this is a this is a variation of the question i just asked about europe what is the american interest why shouldn't we after getting drawn into the second world war and having had to police all of the pacific since the attack on pearl harbor why shouldn't we say thank goodness japan you're a rich society taiwan you're very handle the problems yourselves work it history doesn't start at a and then end at z it's cyclical so we look at asia before we got involved and we saw what japan's co-prosperity sphere was like and then we saw again in the 50s what the mao and stalin had envisioned for places as diverse as korea or vietnam and we said you know what that's not going to happen we're going to let these countries just fight decide their own futures and they're going to be consensual and they're going to be capitalists and the result you can't criticize the result i mean we created things like everything from south korean kias to japanese hondas by the by allowing those people in asia to be free and have their own destiny in their own hands and that's what we're trying to do we're not trying to interfere we're just trying to say if countries want to be uh self-determinate and free the united states is going to promote that and we're going to do that because that's our values and every time we didn't do that we get drawn in because as our president says we're a pacific pacific country uh as recently as the clinton administration when china engaged in military maneuvers on the strait of taiwan opposite taiwan we sent an aircraft carrier group through yes this used to be called the strait of formosa the strait it still does on my map in the kitchen would we do that today i don't think so i think that obama believes or president obama believes that problems in the world are a result of misunderstanding miscommunication mixed signals and because he's so eloquent and charismatic non-traditional appeals to what the way most of the people in the world think and look he thinks at least in his own words he says that then by his singular diplomacy he can iron out these differences he doesn't see that most problems in asia and in the world in general both predated and transcended george bush and his way of thinking bush did it he was a twangy texan christian he didn't have my heritage and landscape that i bring to the problem and therefore things got worse and now i'm here and they're going to get better that therapeutic approach didn't quite work you talked about the result of free markets in asia can't argue with that you said new york times columnist thomas friedman this is writing in september quote one party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks but when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people as china is today it can also have great advantages it is not an accident that china is committed to overtaking us in electric cars solar power energy efficiency batteries nuclear power and wind power close quote what do you make of this what's called the beijing consensus this emerging view that maybe they actually are better suited to the future than our form of government if you gave me 10 minutes and the internet i could give you quote almost a verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about mussolini and the 20s and what right-wing people like charles lindbergh said about germany same thing they make the trains run on time they make the trains and their efficiency but china has a rendezvous with uh radical pollution problems cleanup demographic problems it's shrinking population water stein says they'll grow old before they grow rich yeah one child with male ch imbalance between the sexes they somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear pakistan a nuclear north korea a nuclear russia soon to be a nuclear iran and maybe in the future in nuclear uh taiwan and japan all on their borders so they've got problems that they have rendezvous with all of them and i don't get this fascination because you fly into the shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that kennedy doesn't then suddenly they're the the avatars of the future what thomas friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle and go across rural china and then compare that with biking across nebraska and see which society is more resilient and stable segment three south of the border victor davis hanson quote mexico devolves daily into a more corrupt and violent place than iraq or pakistan the fossilized leadership in mexico city shows no interest in reforming counting on the more than 20 billion in remittances remittances that return to the country each year but americans are tired of picking up the tab to subsidize nearly 15 million poor illegal aliens close quote mexico bad and getting worse you want to stick with that assertion oh yeah i think so okay let me give you a counter argument about the mexican government yeah far from proving passive for four years the president of mexico felipe calderon has been struggling to recapture control of the country from the drug organizations 28 000 mexicans killed in this two thousand of them stayed in federal police so i put it to you victor that you ought to support calderon's effort to regain control of his country at least as stoutly as you supported george w bush's effort to but that's a different emergency that's a different question because draw the distinctions because we're in the 11th hour in mexico this is a tactical decision the mexican government in an existential war's existence says at the 11th hour we've got to finally turn on these drug leaders and corruption but what they don't make the connection is that if you didn't have drug cartels you'd have to invent them in mexico because when you have a statist economy and a non-transparent economy and a class-bound racist culture you're going to get racist meaning the spanish descent especially yes indigenous indigenous peoples and when you have all of those problems that have not been addressed and papered over then you're going to get something like the drug cartel and you're going to have to fight it but the real question is is president caldwell is he going to bring in transparency is he going to open up the society foreign investment is he going to readjust the tax code is he going to allow people to have uh buy and sell land freely and have changed so you're so you're being so impatient because they're along the this is but along the texas border they were doing pretty well and in monterey which is the second biggest city in mexico in the last decade business has become more normal in monterey it's a wealthy you can do business in monterey almost as easily as in miami there are spots where they're improving in mexico no peter there's two there's two okay there's a highway in the indigenous part of mexico and the center and mexican government says if you live in chiapas if you live in oaxaca i suggest you go north go north and for the first time in your life we will champion your civil rights when you get arrested in the tulare county jail and by the way send us 25 billion dollars a year so that we don't have to pay for social programs for your families but on the other side on the western coast suddenly we're going to discover things like property rights investment because we're going to build and advertise resort communities in baka for wealthy white people to have a second and third home so you ask yourself if mexico can do that in baja why can't they do anything in oaxaca and the answer is that we're getting back into a statist state-run economy a corrupt elite a racist elite and a united states that all they have to say is the mexican war the treaty of guadalupe hilda anything any one of those buzzwords and people are supposed to forget all of their complaints against the mexican government so they march i just want to push you a little bit on the trajectory you really think calderon is worse than um lopez portillo in the 80s i think he's better i think that but that's not the question the question is is he going to address the underlying problem that makes mexico mexico i think for his political no he doesn't he can't he's not in a position to do that so he's going to survive perhaps by taking on people who would i mean it's he has no choice he either fights back or he doesn't exist but the question is is he going to be able to convince the elite to make the sort of changes that would turn it into a country like chile or the united states and the answer is no counter-argument on immigration since 2005 the inflow of illegal aliens from mexico has dropped by two-thirds part of that is because we have a weaker economy up here the magnet is less powerful but part of it is surely increased american resources at the border including the incomplete border fence incomplete but a couple hundred miles in place so my word to you is victor relax the worst of the immigration problem is already over americans will calm down as they see that we're reasserting control at the border and then over a period of time these x million who are here illegally can be digested dealt with assimilated that's the counter argument what do you make of it well i wrote an article called mexicofornia do we want mexifornia in 2002 and the book came out in 2003 and that's exactly what i said i said we have to have increased border support scrutiny we have to find employers if we have an economic downturn it will not be so attractive we have to push assimilation we have to build a fence a lot of us wrote that and the result of all of that pressuring it's working is we're starting to work but the pro the central problem is that there's a two-pronged dilemma the right wants to close the border and assimilate people and that we should and we should deport people who just got here we should deport people who are on entitlements and not working we should support people who have a criminal record but there's still going to be seven or eight million people here who are following the rules and working and came under under the assumption it was open borders so we're going to have to work with them earn citizenship make them we have a lot of leverage for the first time we can say to somebody yeah you can listen to spanish television you can do all that bilingual interpreters and all that but you're going to have to learn english you're going to have to take a test about american citizenship we can do that but we can work with them and on the other hand the left we know once we when you're talking about things are getting better they are but we're still talking about 500 to 700 000 attempted crossings per year and we know the left wants to remake the political constituencies of the american southwest for political purposes and we know that there's a small elite of the chicano community in journalism politics and the university who wants to have a permanent underclass that they can attribute that that a failure to achieve parity on the basis of racism and therefore them themselves are the spokesman and they do pretty well and that's where the left is on that issue so we're going to have to close the border and work with the people that are here that are law abiding and working i think everybody understands that victor you're a fifth generation california yes all right question about california our state of california the hispanic proportion of the population has risen from about 16 percent in 1970 to about 37 percent today in the decade from 1990 to 2000 two million more people left california than entered from other states the census of 2010 will surely show an even larger number so what you've got here basically is largely white middle-class californians moving out in large numbers so this is a crude question but i don't know how else to phrase it has california passed the tipping point it's hard to know because i don't know what hispanic or mexican means anymore i've got a brother who's married to a mexican woman i've got another brother who's got two uh stepchildren that are half mexican american i've got a friend whose grandson is half a one-quarter mexican one-quarter asian that's all good news right it's getting better absolutely they're americans everybody you name thinks of himself what i'm thinking is happening in california is we have an elite that trills trills their r's and at their name joe lopez they call themselves jose lopez and then they find career opportunities in the media in the universities but while that professional hispanic exactly but while that's going on and the muscular classes people are intermarrying and they're starting to interact and assimilate even though they were told the melting pot is passe the salad bowl and it's not true so that is very positive and the tragedy is if we would just stop the border close the border and wait a decade and a half and let it mix up and then allow mexico to have 50 000 legal immigrants per year privilege them a little bit more than other countries we could solve this problem in 20 years segment 4 the new evil empire victor davis hanson quote oil rich russia deprived of its communist era empire seems to find lost imperial prestige and influence by being for everything the united states is against selling nuclear material to iran providing weapons to hugo chavez's venezuela bullying neighbors over energy supplies close quote what are the russians thinking they're thinking wow we've got a president and we've got an administration that for a brief window of opportunity really wants to reach out and really does believe that the deterioration in russian american relations was because of george bush and not because of things like cutting off gas to eastern europe or pressuring the balkans or pressuring europe or pressuring the former soviet republics any of that and this is a time really to reach out praise this administration to the skies and then take them to the cleaners and the result is that they're helping iran get a bomb they're helping arm our enemies and uh they like but they like the status quo here's the piece that doesn't the piece of the puzzle it's a big piece of the puzzle it doesn't make sense to me russian mortality rate extremely high birth rate extremely low their economy almost zero it's purely extractive industries that is to say they have any the only wealth they have is because they happen to sit on top of land that contains oil minerals natural gas which they can sell to genuinely productive economies this is not a good long-term picture the muslims i'm not talking about the kazakhstan and this stand and the other side but within russia proper itself exactly you've got a large muslim population and the birth rate is so much greater in the muslim population in russia than that of the russians proper that by 2050 russia will be more than 50 muslim so if you're vladimir putin and you are trying to preserve some kind of mother russia this is an argument that leaders and actors they ought to be doing business with us they ought to be they ought to be begging us for alliances peter and peter peter that's like saying that on june 22 1941 the world war ii was essentially over from the atlantic ocean all the way to the russian border from the arctic circle to the sahara desert it was all a german reich and why in the world would adolf hitler invade russia when russia was giving them more natural resources to do things like bomb britain than they ever got when they actually occupied the country for four years so it was absolute lunacy to act against his own self-interest but he did and why because he had some crackpot notion of uh uber mention and the ukraine and the slavs and this is the same thing with putin he's thinks he's angry about the cold war he's angry at the loss of empire he's angry angry that we stopped him we helped kill russians in afghanistan he's angry angry angry and you could sit down you can say vladimir what you did in chechnya is the future you guys are i mean wow you've got problems with radical islam and you've got all the things you've delineated it's not in your interest to be estranged from the united states your natural ally and uh it's not it's an emotional thing and he likes the idea that we get tangled up in iraq we get tangled up in afghanistan we get tangled up in places with israel in the middle east we get tangled up with the iranian bomb and and this is all good that we and by the way the more that we get tangled up and if there's going to be any preemptive strike in iran or a right the price of oil goes up chaos makes run uh russian profits as far as oil going so what what you are asserting here victor is even though we're talking about russia in the 21st century you're asserting something that comes from your understanding of uh of the classics this is greek tragedy this is this is the perversity of human nature choosing the bone-headed course of action if i could why do i mean if i could even though it wasn't a direct quote from the historian thucydides he doesn't say that states attack other states because they want their uh pot um you know their soil to make pots or they want uh olive oil or something they do it for honor fear and self-interest they act on emotional responses so asking me why russia would act against her self-interest is the same thing of saying why in the world would argentina in the middle of a depression with a dictator invade the falklands against the british navy people do stupid things for emotional reasons that i think have a lot to do with their fears and their sense of honor one more question about russia let me quote ellen berman of the american foreign policy council he's writing in the washington times quote the bulk of russia's strategic resources are concentrated in a country's inhospitable far east siberia and east this is a territory that a dying russia low birth rates will find increasingly difficult to harness let alone to populate in the years ahead china doesn't have that problem again can't putin see this his problem is with his problems with china dwarf any problems he has with us why isn't he i it should be i agree absolutely i think if you could sit down you could convince him and then he would still smile at you and say you're absolutely right but he has certain reasons for being angry at the united states or at least seeing us have problems and the more problems we have as i said the more chaos we have the less uh the less smug and secure we are as the winner of the cold war the more that the world is tense that the energy prices stay high but he's got a rendezvous with the chinese as long as uh along with many other things like demographic and health issues of the population segment five iran daniel gordus writing in the october issue of commentary notes two events this past august one iran fired up its first nuclear reactor two the obama administration let it be known through a leak to the new york times that iran was still at least a year away from a nuclear weapon and that the administration had convinced israel that there was no imminent threat let me quote daniel gordus the united states was determined not to view the working iranian reactor as a crisis requiring immediate and determined attention the news accelerated the sense inside the jewish state that action against iran would be unavoidable and that israelis would not be delivered from taking action themselves close quote has daniel gorgeous got that right yeah i think so i mean with obama we've seen the rhineland we've seen the anschluss we've seen the suit line now all that's left is the invasion of poland so we know what ahmadineji he came to the united this is after one relocation after another yeah after we reached out obama sent him a video we had a real genuine chance of some revolutionary democratic activity uh last spring and obama voted present on that and did not encourage people because he thought that his own unique profile would be so necessary to deal with a problem like ahmadinejad when we just wouldn't want a bunch of democratic people out in the streets it'd be too simple and he wouldn't be needed but nevertheless we miss that opportunity i don't know if it would have been uh determinant or not but it was an opportunity and now we're going down this road and we know where it ends and each time that obama said he shook his finger and he said you better do this by the g20 you better do this by the u.n meeting you better do this by the first of the year and he's given about four deadlines and they don't matter and now we get insulted at the u.n and i think it's pretty clear that mr ahmadinejad is going to smile and say he has no interest in nuclear weapons and then one day sometime in the next 18 months he's going to tell us he's got the bomb and then that's it i have a question here from a ricochet member trace erden who asks an interesting question you were just talking about this this moment of opportunity and he writes did president obama gain anything by appealing to ordinary muslims using the bully pulpit to celebrating ramadan and the white house accomplish anything i don't think it did i mean if you came from mars and you said are muslims still trying to kill americans yes mr mutalab is mr hassan was yes they are in times square as you and i are speaking right now headlines in all the newspapers that muslim sleeper agents are all over europe trying to kill europeans and americans as we look at afghanistan if we look at the situation in the middle east if you look at the pew polls of public opinion i don't see any difference the only difference that i see is that whereas we might have been disliked uh under george bush there was some fear that george bush was unpredictable and maybe a little scary or dangerous now there's a sense that we're disliked and that we are very predictable and not at all scary um the sunni arabs and this includes a lot of rich countries saudi arabia the gulf states are suspicious of nervous about wary of the shia in iran the ambassador to the united states of the united arab emirates a man called yusuf al otaiba i'm sure i mispronouncing it but that's the best i can do speaking in august quote i'm quoting an arab ambassador we cannot live with a nuclear iran i am willing to absorb what takes place close quote so you have the sunni threatened by iran directly you have israel threatened by iran directly let them sort out the costs the benefits how it is to be done but let them do it we don't need to get involved i think that reflects the majority opinion in the united states right now along with that well there's not a lot i mean first of all because they're not going to do any they're not capable of doing anything and the problem is who's going to spell this can't pull off you don't think so no but i i share your frustration because you know that the moment we do something that same speaker as well as saudis egyptians will then attack us publicly for uh harming fellow muslims and then privately sending us a telegram of congratulations with the premise that we are sophisticated americans we're adults we have to accept that they have to deal with the street but yeah and we're tired of that we've done it for too long and so the answer that's a it's a terrible situation with only bad and worst choices because basically it's this is the dilemma that we're faced with only we can ensure that they don't get a bomb and yet if we do ensure that they don't get a bomb there's going to be terrorism there's going to be chaos there's going to be oil and it's going to affect us more than anybody and everybody knows that victor here's a big here's the big question in some ways it's been lurking beneath everything we've said seven years of fighting in iraq and the newspaper this morning is maliki is clinging to power their maneuver they still don't have a functioning government seven years of fighting in afghanistan polls show that americans want to get out and we still don't have a clear route to victory bob woodward's latest book shows the administration in total disarray the president trying to divide the difference china's rising india is rising our ship brazil is rising our share of world gross domestic product has been shrinking since the second world war so aren't we just in about the same position that britain was in in the middle of the last century it's over we're not going to be number one country able to dominate the globe keep pox americana was wonderful while it lasted but we have to cede our position at least in part to others with good grace or ill grace we have to do but that's only one half of the equation when you mention britain when it seeded its positions and in the mediterranean or in africa or it gave up its empire which it should have done probably but the reason why that's where it had to though because it made a terrible mistake and that in the 19 late 40s and 50s it nationalized its steel its automobile its power it's became a social redistributed state and that was why we got out of the depression and they didn't really i mean we got out of the depression because we spent all this money in world war ii but then when the tab came due in 1946 and all of a sudden the world was flattened and we were the only capitalist free market society that for the next 10 years could supply goods and services and pay off her debt britain couldn't because it's i mean in germany if you looked at liverpool and frankfurt and 19 i mean liverpool and dresden or hamburg in 1945 it would have been one picture if you looked them in 1960 it would have been quite another be like hiroshima and detroit the same contrast victor last question to ensure then so you see a sense of possibility here you don't see things inevitably closing in this is not greek tragedy this is not an inevitable closing in on the united states that once was to ensure that the 21st century is as much an american century as the 20th what do we need to do decline is a choice it always is by every society when rome fell apart in the fifth century it its enemies were just a fraction of what they were during the punic war 600 years earlier what we need to do is to ensure that we're a merecratic state and that people advance or fail according to their skill their hard work their ambition and their knowledge and skill expertise and we have to have a transparent lawful society we have to have a dynamic economy and if we decide that we are no longer an econom in a quality of opportunity society but we're going to be an equality result and you look at where that leads to whether it's venezuela cuba the eu greece or the pernicious forms in the former eastern europe it leads nowhere to surf so that's the real question the united states has got everything it needs it's got a large population it's the only truly multi-racial successful state in the world it's got a wonderful constitution we inherited infrastructure and expertise and traditions from our forefathers however if we think that we're going to be we're not going to be good unless we're perfect and we're going to socially engineer pre-determined results about human nature and we're going to do this with a technocratic class like plato's overseers or guardians and we're going to have an all-powerful monolithic state that's going to direct our lives and destroy american initiative then yeah we're going to end up like england about 1950. it's inevitable victor davis-hansen thank you very much thank you i'm peter robinson for uncommon knowledge in the hoover institution thanks for joining us you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 714,776

Rating: 4.7687435 out of 5

Keywords: HooverInstitutionUK, Cold war, world order, chaos, new world order, cooperation, power, Asia, Mexico, Russia, Putin

Id: go8uMp-gUsY

Length: 37min 51sec (2271 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2010