Victor Davis Hanson

Why Iran despises the Trump administration

The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less capable of funding terrorist operations in the Middle East and beyond, proxy wars in the Persian Gulf, and the opportune harassment of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

June 19, 2019

Why are the Western middle classes so angry?

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of Southern and Eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives?

June 12, 2019

Greece finds new footing as a player on the world stage

After Greece temporarily hosted a pair of U.S. military drones, Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos said last fall that, "It's very important for Greece that the United States deploy military assets in Greece on a more permanent base."

June 5, 2019

Trump becomes the Democrats’ great white whale

One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.

May 29, 2019

Federal rats are fleeing the sinking collusion ship

The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

May 22, 2019

The fall of Rome must remind today’s profligates what keeps civilization alive

The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the "Judge of Elegance," was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region into a once-traditional Roman society.

May 15, 2019

Progressives face a bleak post-Mueller landscape

Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr's indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

May 8, 2019

Russia succeeded in sowing chaos thanks to Hillary Clinton’s use of sources to warp election

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller's massive report. She concluded of the report's assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump's words and actions that "any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted."

May 1, 2019

How Mueller’s investigation was driven by pious hypocrites

Special counsel Robert Mueller's two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.

April 24, 2019

If America doesn’t address growing crises on a number of fronts, history will

Economist Herbert Stein's old adage — "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop" — still holds.

April 17, 2019

California becomes America’s cannibal state

For more than six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

April 10, 2019

Faced with the collapse of Russian ‘collusion,’ Democrats turn on their own

The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos.

April 3, 2019

Trashing the Electoral College is about seizing power, not principles

Progressive candidates and new Democratic representatives have offered lots of radical new proposals lately about voting and voters.

March 27, 2019

Can Trump win in 2020?

In 2016, Donald Trump overwhelmed 16 qualified Republican primary rivals and became the first major-party presidential nominee without prior political or military experience. Against even greater odds, Mr. Trump defeated in the general election a far better funded and politically connected Hillary Clinton.

March 20, 2019

Destroying history is no way to feel good about the present

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.

March 13, 2019

The continued resilience of Quiet America

Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation.

March 6, 2019

California’s rendezvous with reality

Californians brag that their state is the world's fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

February 27, 2019

How radical changes in vocabulary can be admissions that reality is unwelcome

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy "wetlands." Fetid "dumps" are often rebranded as green "landfills."

February 20, 2019

The mythologies of ‘Joe being Joe’ Biden

Some polls put 76-year-old Joe Biden as the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential election. There is certainly some logic to that reckoning.

February 13, 2019

New venom is often spread by left-wing groups that claim victim status for themselves

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers' first loyalty would be to "Rome," not the United States.

February 6, 2019