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May 24, 2025 - Epoch Times
01:21:49
Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s ‘Counterrevolution’ and the Future of Ukraine, Iran, and US-China Trade
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This is all so political.
The Wall Street Journal was probably the worst offender.
As soon as the tariffs were announced on Libertation Day and the market tanked, they ran stories.
You remember, recession, Trump's ruined his 100 days, administration in chaos.
When you looked at the actual data that was released in March and April, corporate profits up, energy costs down, GDP going to be recalibrated and good.
Inflation, pretty moderate.
Job growth, 100,000 more than we thought.
So all the indicators were exactly opposite of what Wall Street was saying.
So what was all that hysteria about?
It was all about that 7%.
Joining me today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of two dozen books, including most recently, The End of Everything.
In this interview, we dive into the dimensions of what he describes as Trump's counter-revolution in the foreign policy space, from Canada to China to the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
Victor, kind of hot off the presses, Kash Patel had an interview with Maria Bartiromo yesterday on Sunday as we're filming right now.
And he talked about a range of things, a range of really significant things, including moving out of the main FBI building here in Washington, D.C. But since we're going to be focusing on foreign policy today, I wanted to ask you about this.
Also seemingly explosive information where he said that most of the terror suspects are actually coming through the northern border and also, you know, this sort of increased in movement in organized crime since the southern border has been sealed, whether it's the Chinese Communist Party, Iran, Mexican cartels.
What's your take on that?
Well, I think he's reflecting the reality that...
There's not a river like the Rio Grande.
There's not the Gulf that stops the border at about 2,000 miles, in the case of Mexico.
It's actually much easier to come into Canada than it is to Mexico, and it's less patrolled, and whether we like it or not, It seems like the Mexican government, because we have much more leverage on it, is much more responsive than the Canadian government, especially under Trudeau.
We'll see what Mr. Carney does.
But there's been this tension with Canada, and maybe part of that tension is expressed in a less serious effort on their part to address this new surge of people's...
You know, it makes me wonder about One of the things I've heard from numerous people, it was almost like the US president had an interest in having Mark Carney elected because he kept talking about the 51st state and so forth,
sort of catalyzing Canadian nationalism and almost sort of fueling the idea that the Conservative leader was something like Trump, which Canadians wouldn't like.
I think that's kind of a constant in foreign policy.
I remember the Soviets were always more attuned to a conservative president, even though that was more diametrically opposed to their own ideology.
and the idea that they were more candid or they were more clear about their opposition, you knew what you were dealing with.
And I think Trump probably feels that Trump He'd have to be careful because he was a kindred conservative.
But with somebody who obviously was antithetical to Trump, it is what it is.
And he, at that point in the campaign, represented more of the Canadian views.
And what I get in the real examples, so if you're going to tell Canada – You're only spending 1.37.
If you tell a fellow conservative that, it's embarrassing to him.
If you tell a liberal or a man of the left that, then you have real pressure on him.
I think that's the idea.
And the same thing goes for the trade surplus.
You don't want to embarrass a fellow conservative and say, We're running a $63 billion deficit with you guys.
You have some tariffs that are asymmetrical.
We want to have some correction of that.
But when you do it to someone who's antithetical, you can be more honest, blunt.
I think that's what Trump is thinking.
Well, let's talk about the tariff regime in general.
What do you make of this whole tariff implementation?
What is Trump trying to do with that?
Well, I think he's 90% correct in what he's doing.
He feels that because he has a whole agenda, and Doge is not going to cut the amount of money that is necessary to make up for these tax breaks on tips, tax breaks on Social Security, tax breaks on first responders, maybe tax breaks that he's going to be in red ink.
And so he feels that the revenue...
And even if he were to get, as he says, $1 trillion over a decade, you're still talking about only $100 billion out of $5 trillion revenue.
So that's a mistake to talk about these tariffs as a way to raise money.
The better way to talk about it is that we are running a 1.5%.
And in some cases that is allowing our enemies to get a lot of foreign exchange like China, and they are investing it not in their people, healthcare, housing, etc., but in rapidly building this huge Navy, huge Army and huge Air Force.
So he's right about that, and they cheat.
The other problem is that he's trying to tell our allies that the post-war order is now ossified.
And the post-war order was because we emerged from World War II, the dominant power with the least amount of damage and a world that needed industrial goods.
For basically 80 years, we were willing to be asymmetrical with what became the EU, with Asia, Japan, South Korea.
The problem is that these deficits were tied to offshoring, outsourcing, and a diminished assembly and factories.
I hesitated only because I work at the Hoover Institution.
I'm lectured every day by our blue-chip economists that trade deficits don't matter.
And I think they do.
Because they're, especially when they have forced multipliers of a trillion dollar, excuse me, two trillion dollar budget deficit and 37 trillion dollar national debt.
It's all connected.
So what Trump is trying to say is, we've got to get doge slash government.
We've got to get a trade balance.
We've got to address the debt because without any fiscal reform, we're going to be weak abroad.
And it's all part of a larger package of financial reform.
And then we get to the question of fairness, symmetry, and it's tied in, as you pointed out, with military readiness.
And so Canada is very angry, and as you know, is a Canadian at us, but they don't.
And you can make the argument that the 51st state mem is dominant.
That's part of his Art of the Deal style.
It's not serious, I think.
But Canada won't address these existential issues.
So for them to get to 2%, it's about $40 billion.
And they're not going to do it, not for five more years.
And so what they're basically telling the rest of the NATO alliance and the United States is, we want to be members of NATO, but because we have two oceans like the United States, we're really not in any existential threat from China or Russia.
And we're right under the nuclear umbrella of the United States.
And it's going to build a missile defense system in Alaska that will be covering us as well.
Toronto is closer to U.S. cities than most U.S. cities are to each other.
So we're just going to kind of carry along with that.
And we have all sorts of statutes because we're next to this big colossus that we don't want to be dominated.
So we have things about news suppression, acquisitions of media.
We don't want to be just an ancillary in culture to the United States.
And we have these domestic products that we have to protect, the eggs, poultry.
And we went around to $63 billion.
The next thing is the Canadians tell us, and I'm not trying to be too harsh on your countrymen, but they say, well, we give you all this oil.
95% of our oil that we produce goes to you.
And that's true.
And we even give a discount.
But when you look at the oil, it's very heavy.
It's very sulfur-laden.
It's very far from your east and west ports to get it out.
And so it's right across from the border to us.
And so the Americans are saying, well, yeah, but...
How would you get it out anyway?
And more importantly, we have all these refineries because we have some of the same stuff that specialize in heavy oil.
If you were to try to truck it out or transport it out to your two ports and then send it on the world market, you wouldn't be as successful.
This is a great deal for you.
All of these issues were predicated on the idea of past administrations.
This is Canada.
This is our friend.
This is our ally.
Just like Britain or Australia, we just don't talk about these things.
Trump comes in and says, that was then, this is now.
We're $37 trillion in debt.
We're sliding as a world power in the estimation of our enemies.
China's on the right.
We've got to make some corrections, and those corrections are very painful for everybody involved.
Yeah, and there's also this other dimension.
I mean, as someone, I've lived in Vancouver for a number of years at one point in my life, and you can't imagine it as a Canadian as a narco-trafficking hub for North America, which Sam Cooper has demonstrated extensively it has become.
Yeah, and you think of Canada as sort of a signature Anglo-North American country.
You don't get the idea that it has greater open borders than we do as far as immigration, and that the liberal governments have really enshrined in Canadian politics that for us to grow, we're going to have to open our doors and bring in immigrants from all over the world, because now we are a multiracial, multicultural society.
But the problem with that is...
India has terrible problems with the caste system and all sorts of tribalism.
So does Brazil, these big democracies that are multiracial.
The United States and Canada have been successful.
In the case of Canada, it probably was more successful in the sense it had a...
We were more multiracial, but we had a single culture.
And if you bring in millions of people, as Canada is trying to do, and you don't inculcate them, and you follow our pattern of not acculturating, not assimilating, not integrating, then it's a disaster of tribalism and sectarianism.
That's what everybody's worried about in Canada.
Because we have the same problems here, but we're trying to address it.
But in your case, your guys are doubling down on it.
And that seems to be what's happening in Europe as well.
And I think the Americans are saying, we kind of exported ideas, at least the Trump administration is saying, of multiculturalism, of woke, of transgenderism, of borderless utopias.
And you guys lapped it all up because we were culturally influential.
And it was disastrous.
And we're going to rectify that now here at home.
I think the world is saying, well, this is weird.
Under Obama and Biden, you know, Clinton, we kind of thought this was good, so we followed your lead.
And now suddenly you're saying close your borders and make fair rather than free trade and have one culture and get rid of woke and DEI.
And so it's kind of a shock.
And I think for a lot of foreign countries and a lot of anti-Americans.
Do you think that the world will also follow suit in adopting the change in culture?
Frankly, significant social stripe you see in numerous European countries, for example, because of exactly the type of immigration you described.
Well, Europe is very critical of our system and no other country has ever successfully emulated this two-party system with these elections where the people vote in a party and there is no parliamentary coalitions.
And we have no conception that In other words, that if the party caucus doesn't like him, they get rid of him.
It was a shock enough that we did that with a nominee with Harris and Biden, but essentially the people did vote.
All of these other countries that are democratic have a different system, and the problem with their system is when they confront unorthodox changes that the people want.
They have mechanisms to stop it, which we don't have here, because we have the midterm elections, and we have the four-year elections, and it's just a free-for-all.
Anybody that wins can take power.
And to the Europeans, and to a lesser extent, former Commonwealth countries of the British Empire, they have the same system.
And so when they see the alternative for Deutschland or conservative parties in the Netherlands or France, They just go paranoid and they become very anti-democratic in their efforts to suppress them because the ruling powers think, you know, these people, the people, they don't trust the people like we do.
They think these people are uneducated, they're unwashed, they don't know what they're doing, we're technocrats, we're aristocrats, and we've got to stop them.
And then they end up hurting themselves by acting very anti-democratically.
You know, Victor, before I jump back to the whole tariff regime, something I've been thinking about recently, someone drew my attention to the idea that the spoils system, right, i.e., if you win, you get to select a whole bunch of people and put them into the bureaucracy to run things.
The people that were your political allies specifically, right?
Someone pointed out to me that this is actually by design, and this actually provides a kind of check on growing corruption or something like that.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, because that kind of speaks directly to the issue you just described, I think.
Well, our system is kind of...
It's been abused recently when you think of Anthony Fauci and James Comey and Lois Lerner, but the system actually...
Otherwise, you get something like the chaos of the first year of the Trump administration, where he brings these people in, and they don't agree with him.
I'm talking about Rex Tillerson or Jim Mattis or John Bolton or Anonymous or people in the high levels of political appointments that try to sabotage a government.
But then at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, they are protected by civil service as long as they're apolitical.
And that system has worked pretty well in a way that...
And I can tell you that when Obama came in, he fired everybody on boards that were political appointees.
I know Susan Rice got very angry and went in kind of a racist rant against Pete Hexeth because he fired her from the Defense Policy Board.
She called him a "cis white male mediocrity." But she was appointed after Biden fired the previous Trump appointees.
And she was a late appointee that was political.
And that's just our system.
And it works pretty well because it gets everybody on the same page.
And then if there's abuses or excesses, the voters can throw them out.
Victor, I wanna jump back to the whole tear step.
Do you agree with me?
For me, when I looked at those initial tariff tables and kind of the first foray, if you will, in Trump's art of the deal using tariffs, that China was really the focus?
And does it continue to be that way, given this 90-day reprieve that they're now trying to extend, I might add?
Yes, China was the focus, but he understood there were problems in focusing on China because While the Europeans run a similar trillion-dollar deficit with China, they make it up in part by having a $300 billion surplus with us.
And so the Europeans were very opportunistic.
For example, when China initially said we're going to cancel all 737 purchases, well, Europe was delighted because they were going to sell them Airbuses.
So the Europeans are the last people to engage with Trump.
He's going to get a deal with India.
He's going to get a deal with the UK, as he did.
He'll get a deal with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan.
He'll get a deal with China.
But the last people he will get a deal with are the EU, because they're opportunistic.
They're as anti-Trump as the American left.
They take their cue from the American left.
If they are told by the American left, cutting a deal with Trump helps them politically, then they will do the opposite.
As long as they can.
And the way that Trump is dealing with them is saying, we're going to have more favorable tariff arrangements with countries that settle now rather than later.
So he's trying to create a psychological condition where, kind of like musical chairs, when the music comes off, you want a chair, otherwise you're too late.
But I think it'll be harder, actually, to get a deal with the Europeans than it will be the Chinese.
And the problem with the Chinese is that not just that the Americans are hooked on cheap stuff coming from China.
It was very weird to hear the Democrats say there won't be enough Walmart stuff for people because they're very critical of consumerism in general, and they were very critical, of course.
At least at one time, of no tariff Chinese dumping that took away American fabrication and assembly.
But there's other issues involved, and they are patent and copyright violations, monetary manipulation, dumping product, technological theft, 300,000 students in the United States.
Maybe one or two, three or four thousand actively engaged in espionage.
Stanford Review just had a big story where I work, that students are actively engaged in Chinese espionage.
So how you address all of that at a time when China is becoming closer to being military And it's velicos, and it depends on us more.
We found that out when they kind of caved.
But it's a very tricky thing to do.
The other thing about it, very quickly, is this is all so political.
The Wall Street Journal was probably the worst offender.
As soon as the tariffs were announced on Libertation Day and the market tanked, they ran stories, you remember, in the news and the op-eds.
Recession, Trump's ruined his 100 days.
Administration in chaos, administration in free fall, tourism down.
And then when you looked at the actual data that was released in March and April, corporate profits up, energy costs down, GDP going to be recalibrated good, inflation pretty moderate.
2.3, I think, in April.
Job growth, 100,000 more than we thought.
So all the indicators were exactly opposite of what Wall Street was saying.
And then when you looked at what Wall Street had been telling us, whether it was Jason Furman under the Obama administration or Warren Buffett, they were saying the chief peril is debt.
Debt, debt, debt.
Trade deficits, budget deficits, national debt.
And here was the first president that was talking about that.
And then they would say, well, you know, there's also uncertainty in the markets because of the Middle East and the oil and the war and Ukraine.
And then this was the first president was trying to get a ceasefire in Ukraine.
So all the evidence belied the animus.
And then you said to yourself, well, why are they doing this?
Well, they were doing it because they can't stand him for one reason, but Not the number of stocks, but the value.
And 50% have 1% of market capitalization.
So what you basically saw was a small group of very, very elite people in the Acela corridor, furious because in August, when the market hit 44,000, they were giddy, and now it had gone down to 40. Where it was pretty much much of the last few months before the big surge.
It got down to where it was in August or September, and the market, I think, hit 44 in May.
So they were basically telling the American people, once the market reaches its crescendo, we lock it in there, and that's ours forever.
And anything that goes on is a loss.
They never look at the other way, that it was mostly 40,000, which they were giddy about.
And when it went up, that was an unusual spike.
And so now they're mute because where are we?
We're right back where we were right before Trump assumed office.
So what was all that hysteria about?
It was all about that 7% that was paranoid about their mega profits.
And when I live in Seattle, When I go to the store or I go get gas and I talk to people, I can tell you I've talked to 400 strangers the last year.
Not one has ever mentioned the stock market.
Not one.
They don't own one iota of stock, and if they have some in their retirement plan, they have no idea how much it is, but it's not much.
And I can tell you what they talked about was the price of California gas, the price of California electricity, how terrible the infrastructure was, and the hyperinflation that has not ceased, I mean, that we're stuck with from the Joe Biden prices.
So a lot of this is class differences, and I think that's why this is so unusual to see a Republican president.
Whose emphases seem to be on the middle class that was a democratic constituency.
Well, and this is fascinating, too, because President Trump loves to talk about how well the stock market is doing.
He does.
He clearly has a focus on that as well.
Yeah, and he's right about it.
I mean, even if you don't own stock, everybody wants a strong stock market.
Insane paranoia that for one month they just went, they lost their heads and said that because we don't get to have 44,000, then the whole country's falling apart and we're going to be in a recession.
It was ridiculous because there was no indicators.
There was A, no indicators that they usually count on.
And then second, all of the issues that they had been warning long term and they were furious about.
He was trying to address.
That was exactly what Doge was trying to do.
That was what people in the Republican House were fighting about.
How do we cut the debt?
How do we cut the budget deficit?
And they can say all they want now about trade deficits not mattering.
But 20 years ago, Warren Buffett basically said, We're running huge trade deficits, and at that time they were $60 or $80 billion a year with China, and all the result is that they are accumulating foreign exchange, and they're going to use that foreign exchange to import sophisticated technology for military purposes, or they're going to buy key real estate all around the world with foreign exchange.
That's exactly what they did in the Belt and Road.
And then all of these people then, what was Warren Buffett saying now?
Oh, trade deficits don't matter.
Jason Furman said, you know, there's a certain percentage where you cannot have a trade deficit larger than a percent of GDP.
I think it was three percent or something.
And when it got over that, he was very angry and chastised, I think, the Biden administration.
And now when it dipped below it, he said it didn't matter.
So there's a deep, I think, to understand American politics.
There is a deep paranoia, loathing, visceral hatred of Donald Trump in the media, in academia, in the bureaucracy, in the foundations among the elite, and it clouds their empiricism.
They cannot be disinterested.
That's just the way it is.
And the Wall Street Journal falls into that category.
Victor, with respect to this, you said it's going to be easier to make a deal with communist China than it is to with the Europeans.
I'm not aware of examples where China honors their side of Maybe there are some small examples that I'm unaware of.
But let's say they make a deal.
There's this 90-day reprieve because of initial conversations.
There's been this criticism of the president that he's very transactional.
We can talk about that.
But can you be even transactional with the CCP?
No, you can't.
You can't, and they're like the Iranians.
Everything they say is untrue, and they have no intention of honoring it.
I think what he's trying to do is draw attention to the fact that when he went head-to-head with the Chinese, despite their suppression of the news, they were under more stress than we were.
And I think that's true.
China experts have said there were people in the streets, there were idling factories.
And that we could endure that.
So I think what he's saying is, I'm going to put them on notice that I can do this again.
And for a period, they're going to find that it's in their self-interest to emulate or feign or at least follow 50% of what they do or they're going to get slapped again.
And that is going to give us a window.
And we have to seize the moment.
And in that window, I'm going to tour the world and get $10 trillion of foreign investment.
And we're going to make our own pharmaceuticals.
We're not going to outsource technology.
We're going to do the AI, the biotech, genetic.
We're going to do it all here.
And we're going to have all this foreign capital coming here.
And by the time, it's going to give us a window where we don't just collapse and be completely dependent on China as we were.
And I think that's the idea.
I don't know if it's going to work.
People have said, Oh, you don't have enough skilled workers or your welfare programs are too lucrative.
People won't come out and work.
You're going to be short labor.
These people are lying in the Middle East.
They will not really put the money there.
They're just saying this.
But I think that was the idea, at least, that he's getting a use.
And the idea is that we're going to produce stuff that we get from the Chinese that's valuable.
And I think he doesn't really care about dolls or cheap consumer commodities that they make very cheaply.
But he's talking about military parts, AI, very sophisticated technology, chips and things that he wants to be built here.
And he wants no more reliance on China.
And I think the COVID thing really shocked a lot of Americans, you know, when we couldn't even make protective equipment and China would kind of wink and nod and say, we're trying to send it to you or we're trying to say, sorry, we're a little late, that kind of attitude.
It was unbelievably shocking.
The CCP actually threatened to withhold some of those products, right?
But that didn't translate into America actually going all out to repatriate supply chains, especially on critical pharmaceutical precursors or PPE or whatever.
I mean, that just didn't happen, which is kind of shocking.
No, and it didn't happen because there were so many people left and right that were so heavily invested in China.
Fabrication.
And for that to happen, you would have to make them either relocate here or relocate to Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam.
What Trump did is basically he called in during the campaign and then during the 100 days all the people who shouldn't like him for cultural, social reasons.
And that was Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, David Sachs.
Larry Ellison was favorable to him.
Zuckerberg.
Elon Musk, he won over right after the first assassination.
Jeff Bezos.
I'm kind of generalizing.
But Andreessen basically said this.
And he got them all in and he said, you guys are being regulated to the death in Europe.
They don't like you.
They're trying to suppress your products to...
The Chinese, you may think you're doing a lot over there, but all they're doing is having you invest.
They copy everything you do.
They copy your business plan.
And when they have squeezed you dry, they kick you out.
So I'm making you a deal.
Kind of like the war production board of World War II when Roosevelt called in his antithesis.
William Knudsen, head of GM, Henry Kaiser, head of Kaiser Steel, Henry Ford.
And he said, look, the New Deal is over with.
We need to produce stuff.
And I'm going to give you Willow Run to build B-24s.
I'm going to give you the Alameda shipyards.
I want a Liberty ship every week.
Mr. Knudsen, you just do what you've got to do.
And I will protect you, but you've got to outproduce the world.
And so what Trump is trying to tell these guys is, I'm not going to regulate you.
I'm not going to go after you.
I know you don't like me.
But if you bring your stuff back here and you invest here and you hire here, you're going to get the most favorable climate possible from us, the government, under one condition, that you be American first.
Promote us, us, us.
And I will protect you from the Europeans, the Chinese, the Jap, anybody.
And they were shocked at that message because they had been told by Joe Biden in the case of Andreessen, he said, you know, they basically said these companies are going to be an AI and these aren't.
And this is what you can do and we expect a big contribution.
And I think Trump just thought, these guys are smart, they don't like me, but I can use them and they can use me and we can promote America.
And I think, I don't know if it's going to work, but that's his plan.
How important is rebuilding U.S. manufacturing to this whole picture?
Well, when we say manufacturing, the critics usually say, the idea you're going to lure all these Americans, labor participation rate is 62% of able-bodied people.
And that's because of our generous safety net.
Kind of a new culture that you work at home.
And these people are not going to go into the factory floor and stand up there and build a phone all day like the Chinese do.
So it's a crazy idea.
But I don't think that's what he's talking about.
I think he's talking about bringing in $10 trillion of foreign investment, making very, very sophisticated, automated robotic factories, and then getting a trained workforce.
And you can see his emphasis as he's warring on the four-year colleges, but when you look at what he's also not warring on, he's promoting technical schools, community college, two-year training.
So I think his idea is that we're going to get some well-trained Americans, and it's not going to be labor-intensive.
It's going to be very sophisticated, and maybe we can make things that really matter.
And as far as the other things, That require huge workforces and repetitive labor will let other people do that, like the Chinese.
And that's why I think China is very, very upset, because it understands that what it really makes money on are industrial goods, technology that it's appropriated from Europe and the United States and ships back to us, or medical, pharmaceutical, India and China, things like that.
That's what he's aiming at.
He's trying to tell...
We're not going to have computer chips coming from Taiwan.
We're not going to rely on India for Augmentin or Doxacillin.
We're just not going to do that anymore.
And so we'll see how that works.
Well, so with respect to this criticism that The President is purely transactional in his foreign policy.
It's very interesting to me that Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State and now also the National Security Advisor, at least for the time being.
I can think of few people, I can probably count them on my hand, who were in the U.S. Congress of the Chinese Communist Party threat and as supportive of, for example, Chinese dissidents of a variety of sorts.
So it's very interesting that he has this now dual top position.
It seems to me that there's something more happening here than pure transaction.
I'm curious what your thoughts are.
There is.
And he tried to, I think he tried to elaborate, or he's trying to elaborate on the criticism that Trump got for his mercantilism in the Gulf.
And he's trying to say in his interviews, he's trying to say that we're realist, and we are idealist, and the two are not antithetical.
And what he's reacting to is, he feels in the last In the George W. Bush administration, in the eight years of the Obama administration, in the four years of the Biden administration, we put human rights and idealism in a Wilsonian sense, and we didn't understand local customs traditions, and we tried to imprint that, sometimes muscularly in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sometimes by promoting, as we saw with USAID, transgenderism, Gay Mary, all of these cultural menus in places like Pakistan or the Gulf.
And it didn't work.
And all it did was open those countries to mercantile arguments from China and illiberal regimes.
So this new nexus of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China capitalized on The anger of our own cultural imperialism.
And at the same time, our interventionism to nation-build was an utter failure.
So we got this Orwellian situation in Afghanistan where the world was watching this huge military that had built a $300 million retrofitted Bagram, a billion-dollar embassy.
And it was fleeing from a bunch of terrorists, and it was leaving behind 50 billion in munitions, but it had a pride flag on the embassy.
There were George Floyd murals around Kabul.
They had an $80 million gender studies program.
And so what he was saying is that that is a form of cultural imperialism.
Not that there's not universal ideas that transcend culture about freedom and human rights.
He's not questioning that, Rubio, but he's saying...
And one of the locus classicus examples would be Joe Biden.
So when he came into office and we had...
So everybody was furious, and they should have been furious.
But then Joe Biden was asked, and he was very derogatory.
He said, these people, I'm not going to go there.
They're tyrannical.
They're not friends of the United States.
And he had some good points.
I mean, 9-11 and they're rolling it and stuff.
But the net result was twofold.
They started looking and cutting deals with Russia and China, as did Iran.
And I think that was inevitable.
But Russia and China and North Korea and Iran had this nexus, and they were starting to deal with illicit oil sales to India.
To Turkey and everything.
So what he was saying is, Rubio would say of that, I think, what was the end result of that?
But to drive people that had been pro-American and had benefited by slow osmosis to liberalize their societies.
And I think even the worst critic of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Iran or the Emirates will say they are more liberal societies now than they were 40 years ago.
And that's largely due to Western investment and Western influence.
And then he was saying the second half of it, and you're hypocritical too.
So you blast the Saudis and say that they're primeval, as Biden did, and you're not going to visit.
And then you come up to the midterms, and they've cut back on oil production.
And suddenly gas is $4 a gallon.
And people are angry, and you're draining the petroleum reserve at a million barrels a day to save your party in the midterm.
So then you go over there on all fours, and you beg the Saudi royal family to pump oil right before the midterm and not to be so close to China.
And they said, Sia wouldn't want to be you, and yet they insulted him.
And so it didn't work either way.
And so I think what they're saying is we take the world as it is and we're trying to We don't have to be perfect to be good.
We're just trying to make sure that these countries that don't agree with our cultural and social values and our humanitarianism, they don't end up in the other orbit of the dark countries.
Kind of like the Cold War.
So we've supported a lot of dictatorships.
We said Spain and Portugal and Greece are dictatorships, but they're better than a communist dictatorship.
And they will evolve, and a communist dictatorship will never evolve.
So I think that's our idea.
If Saudi Arabia is run by the Chinese, they'll never evolve.
But if it has good relations with us and it's profitable, maybe by osmosis it will.
And that's what got people so angry.
This week, I think Rich Lowry and Elliott Abrams and others have been critical.
I think in terms of communication and the narrative, the administration, when they wrote that speech for Trump, rather than blasting the previous administrations while you're overseas, which they are very sensitive about, They say don't do that, but that's what they did.
When you blast, you know, you go...
They might have added a line or two.
They meant well.
They meant well, but the results are the opposite of what they achieved because Afghanistan may have been a better situation under a king or even in transition than under the Taliban or something like that.
They could have thrown a bone, or they could have said, it doesn't mean we're not interested in human rights.
The final thing in this is, very quickly, Trump is staging a counter-revolution, and it's two-pronged.
One of them is to have a foreign policy that's closer to Israel, stops the Iran bomb, controls China, etc.
accepted.
Jawbones Europe to be more accommodating to different views.
But the other and the more controversial counter-revolution is they say to themselves, where is the source of power that gave us the open borders and this lunacy of 12 million illegal aliens, including 500,000 criminals?
Where is the policy that allowed fentanyl to come in?
Where is the policy that allowed our alliances to be asymmetrical?
Where did all these come from?
Where's boys?
Biological males and female sports.
Where did this DEI come?
Where did ESG come?
And they came up with an answer.
And they said it's endemic and institutional.
And part of it is the high levels of the government with USA, these NGOs.
Part of it is these foundations that are not really disinterested.
the Tides Foundation, the Soros Foundation.
Part of it is these academics, these big...
They gouge us on grants.
They charge 40 to 50 percent overhead.
They defy Supreme Court rules.
They practice endemic racism in admissions, retentions, graduation ceremonies.
You name it.
The student loan program allowed them to gouge the public and raise tuition above the annual rate of inflation.
So they looked at all of it, the media, and they decided in this counter-revolution, we are not just going to do with the symptoms, close the border, try to find it.
So we're going to tell the universities, no more federal money until you stop the anti-Semitism, you stop the surcharges, you stop the reverse racism, you stop the getting money from China and Qatar, not reporting it, all of that.
then they looked at the foundations and this is really happening this week they're saying that foundations over five billion dollars are going to start paying taxes on their And then they're saying to the media, we're going to get rid of NPR and PBS because they're propaganda organs.
And then they're looking at USAID, and they're saying these are NGOs, they're not USAID, they're just basically sinecures for left-wing rotating politicians.
So they're trying to deal with the root causes, and that's what worries the Democrats and the left, because they've never seen an administration that would dare do that.
That would dare question the source of their power.
The Trump administration is saying on every single issue that we ran on, it was 55, 45, 70, 30. There was no popular support for the Harris or Biden agenda.
But those agendas were actualized because of these institutions.
And they would say 51 intelligence authorities on the last debate, right before the 2020, lied to the people and said that the laptop was, or Russian collusion, or the Mar-a-Lago raid, or trying to get him off the ballot in 25 states, or 93 indictments with these left-wing.
That's what they're after.
Blue-chip law firms, Perkins Coey, that was knee-deep in the Russian collusion hoax.
I don't know if they're going to get away with it or not.
But it's an ambitious 360-degree effort to find out why an agenda that is so unpopular with the people was institutionalized the last four years.
Victor, you mentioned this foreign money in the universities.
You specifically mentioned Qatari money.
Qatar, of course, has been a sanctuary for Hamas, for example.
Explain to me how it makes sense for this jet to replace Air Force One.
It might seem confusing to people, given what you just described.
It's a very complex story, and I don't think it's quite what everybody thinks.
So they have the latest model of 747.
Two of them, they have them.
And they decked them out as if they were the Titanic.
You know, they were beautiful inside.
But they were built in 2013.
So they're 12 years old, and they're very costly to run because they don't make them anymore.
And they're very expensive to run because they're not fuel efficient like a 777 or 787 or even a 757.
So they put them on sale in 2020 for $400 million.
And guess what?
Nobody wanted to buy them.
Nobody wanted to buy them.
So they gave one to Turkey.
They had two.
Turkey took it free.
And then they, according, and I can't confirm this, but...
And the argument was that when Donald Trump left office, he gouged Boeing and said, we are using the main Air Force One in the backup, and they are decrepit.
They're 40 years old.
They come from the Reagan era almost.
And they're not up to snuff and we want And so he cut a deal, and they were so angry that they maybe slowed down.
And so for those four years, they didn't do anything.
During the Biden administration, he didn't press them.
So now there's no, these two decrepit, old, old 30 to 40 year 747s needed, would have been replaced by two updated ones.
But those are going to take maybe three to five more years.
So the idea was Gutter wanted to unload one of these, which had no market value.
I mean, at the price they wanted, nobody wanted to buy it.
So they come to Trump and say, well, give it to the Air Force, and you can use it if these two old planes are not up to snuff any longer until you get the two new ones, and then you can give it to your foundation.
And everybody got angry.
And Trump said, well, it's kind of like the Reagan deal after he left office.
The Air Force One that had been used by him and George H.W. Bush, they gave it to the Roy, you know, it was inoperable.
It's still there at the Raven.
But people said, no, no, it'll be running.
And that was the key difference.
It'll be running.
So you're going to use it for your own personal use.
Well, he has a 757.
at his disposal and so we're to believe that when he leaves in four years the Air Force is going to give it to his foundation and he is going to fly around the United States with this huge airplane that has a Refueling, it'll be upgraded with another billion dollars or half a billion, so it can refuel.
It'll have rockets.
It'll have armor.
It'll have all the sophisticated things he doesn't need as a private citizen.
It'll need three or four pilots.
It will have to have hard-to-get parts.
It will be twice as expensive to run as his inefficient big 757.
And we're to believe that that's going to really help him and he's going to ride all over the world.
I don't think so.
I think he went there and he wanted to get a lot of investment with gutter.
And they wanted to get rid of this plane and they couldn't sell it.
And they looked around and they had talked to Biden and they thought, well, Biden talked to us about it and considered it.
So we'll just give it to you.
And then Trump thought, as he said, you know, Sam Snead, if you've got somebody said, you don't have to make the putt, you'll just get another.
He just thought, I'm not going to insult them.
And we have to find a way out where it's a gift to the Air Force.
And so where he erred is he should have said, this plane is a beautiful plane, but we're going to have to consider it because we're going to have to spend a lot of money to make it like the antiquated 747s that we have now.
It has to have a lot of modifications.
The Air Force will do that.
And I don't know whether it will be ready by the time the two...
The new ones do in the last year of his presidency.
But we'll do it as a backup.
And when it's over, I think it'll be a good thing for the Trump Foundation Library to put it out in the entryway or on the lawn somewhere or put a hanger over it.
And it's so big and luxurious, it'll be a nice tourist.
And he could have done that easily.
And I think that's what he's going to do.
But I think once people started to criticize him, he doubled down.
And he basically said, I'm not going to insult my host.
And what were the Qataris doing?
They were doing exactly what they did when they built a billion-dollar base.
People forget that.
They're terrified of the Iranians, and they're terrified of the Saudis and the Emirates, and they're right in between.
and they played both sides.
So they thought, But then the Saudis and everybody hate us for that because these groups are trying to overthrow them.
So we're going to build a billion dollar base.
And I've seen it before.
I went to Iraq twice and we stopped once on the way.
And it's huge.
And then they spent, I think 10 years ago, another billion.
So this whole argument is kind of ridiculous because we, the government, under several administrations, took a $2 billion gift from Qatar to put our base there when it should have been somewhere else, and it protects Qatar from our friends and our enemies, both of whom really hate it.
But they're not going to touch it because it's the biggest base in the Middle East and it's the most sophisticated.
It's the nicest.
And they built it at their own expense and then gifted it to us.
And so I don't know.
And then the other irony about the whole thing is reports say that since 1980, Qatar and Communist China have contributed somewhere between $50 and $60 billion to universities.
And not just universities.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.
And these universities lapped it up like milk.
I mean they just loved it and then they were fined in part by the previous Trump administration for not reporting it.
I know Stanford took millions of dollars and did not report it and they were fined in the first administration, Trump administration.
So you have the critics of this whole deal, mostly academics and people who have been on the trough from gutter for years.
So I think it was a matter of messaging.
But it was much more complex than the media said.
Absolutely fascinating.
You know, the other dimension here is, you know, the prospect of Syria actually joining the Abraham Accords.
Is that something that you see?
I mean, I wasn't expecting that one.
What do you think?
Well, I think what happened is that that area had been so anti-American, and the Alawites were this kind of weird quasi-Shia religion that was not represented by 80% of the population,
and it had done such damage in the area as the transit point for Iran to disperse a lot of its subsidies and munitions to Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas, etc., that when it fell in that vacuum, there was a lot of people that...
So the Kurds came in and created an enclave.
And the Turks, to stop them, came in and created a border enclave.
And then the Israelis came in and said, to protect the Druves, we're going to carve out a little border section.
And then the Saudis said, And the Sunni money states said, we're going to put up this former guy that we've rehabilitated who was in ISIS and stuff.
And he's going to turn this into a pro-Sunni for the first time that represents the majority of the population.
And then all of these groups came to, I think, the Trump administration, as did the Gulf states.
And they said, yeah, this guy's a terrorist, but...
And the Kurds are willing to cooperate now.
They've said they're going to have kind of a peace treaty if they get an area, an adjoining area.
And the Israelis kind of like, this is much better than Assad for the Israelis because they can protect the Druze, and they have a buffer, and there's no Iranian influence.
So just recognize him.
It'll be better and we'll handle it.
So I think, I don't know if it's going to work, but I get the impression that it's not going to be a place where Russian pilots fly over and Israeli pilots are bombing and there's terrorists that are anti-Western.
There may be terrorists, but they may be directed in other directions.
I don't know.
But all of these interests felt that it was superior to the Assad regime.
And most of the interests were pro-American, and they came to the Trump administration and said, you've got to talk to this guy.
He's transactional.
And we'll pay the tab and give him money to rebuild the country.
And he's promised to protect all these different ethnic groups and all the border countries that are pro-American want a deal.
And that's what Trump did.
So do you think that's realistic?
I don't know.
I don't know enough about him.
I don't know to what degree he's...
I think what's strange about it, I think he was born in Saudi Arabia.
And I think he's more prone to the pressures from the Sunnis, but I don't, I'm not sure that his purpose is to overthrow as many in the bin Laden fashion or the ISIS fashion that he used to be, to overthrow, I don't think he thinks that.
I think he thinks he wants to evolve into one of those type of governments, which would be autocratic but pro-Western.
And the neighborhood seems to feel more comfortable with him than the Assads.
That's all.
Is it 51%?
And Russia's out of the picture.
And Iran is out.
That's the main subtext.
Everybody's looking at this and said, there's no Iranians now.
This guy hates Iranians.
And they've killed a lot of Iranian.
And there's no Hezbollah.
And there's no Russians.
They're all losers.
And what's going to replace those three entities are more than less favorable to us.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, that's Lee Smith's argument, that this is a much better arrangement simply because Iran is no longer a player, is actively being kept out of there.
Yes, and I think the Israelis said, you know, the Druze are always in danger.
We have a lot of Druze, and the Assad government was not protective of them.
So we're going to protect them now, and that means we're going to go into Syrian space.
And there's no Russians to worry about.
And I think the Kurds said there's a lot of Kurds there, and now we're going to protect them.
And the Turks said we're going to basically de facto push our influence beyond the border.
And this guy who's weak, I think they're going to have problems if he gets control and he actually forms a government and it actually has public support.
Then he's going to have to reclaim these borders from all these areas that have been de facto lost to him.
Victor, what do you make of, well, let me caveat this.
This has been by far the most pro-Israel administration in memory.
I think you might agree with that.
Also, well, there's a reported schism, right, Netanyahu, Trump at the moment.
What do you make of that?
It's hard to know.
I don't know why he didn't stop.
With Israel, and he's the most pro-Netanyahu because he's very different than Biden and Obama.
First of all, there's nobody trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government.
Biden was actually doing it.
So was Obama.
He's given them a blank check.
He's not going to suspend 2,000.
He just said, whatever you need to do, vis-a-vis the Houthis, Hamas, just do it, and we will supply you the weapons.
That's new.
There's no more pro He's very close to Trump.
So they've got that.
And then they are saying to him, where you get the tension is in two sections.
The Israelis say, we have emasculated for a year or two Hamas, Hezbollah.
We're both working on the Houthis.
And we have demonstrated you can go into Iran with impunity and destroy their air defenses.
We have a brief window.
It's now the time to take out all of these nuclear facilities.
They'll lie about it.
But you cannot deal with these people.
And the Trump administration is saying to them, we agree, but this is contrary to the MAGA.
The MAGA covenant we ran on said no optional Middle East wars, no foreign entanglements, and it's always better to jawbone than to go to war.
That's the MAGA.
That's the J.D. Vance Tucker Carlson group.
So what Trump is trying to thread the needle.
So he's saying to Israel, let's just get six or seven months of negotiation.
And the Israeli is saying it's a waste of time.
They'll not honor it.
And they'll never give up this thing.
And he said, well, then if they won't give up, we'll negotiate to the point where they have to shut up or put up.
And if you're right, and just yesterday they said they're never going to get it, then we have a case to be made to our MAGA base.
We can say, do you want a nuclear weapon with these people?
They're going to threaten Europe.
They're going to threaten Israel.
They'll eventually threaten us.
And they're close with the Russians and Chinese.
And they're vulnerable now.
And we tried to have peace with them.
And we tried to have negotiations with them, and they shut the door.
So I think that's what the Trump administration is saying, that we have to go through the motions.
You may be right.
And the Israelis say it's a waste of time.
And I think sometime in the late summer or fall, they're going to conclude that you can't deal with the Iranians.
But they made the effort, and that was good public relations.
And either we or the Israelis or both are going to take them out.
I think that's what will happen.
And that's going to be very controversial because Trump is, as we said, a transitional, transactional diplomat.
And he does not want disruption in the Middle East.
He does not want the price of oil to go high.
He does not want increased terrorism.
The Iranians have tried to kill him in the past.
We have an open border, as we discussed with Canada.
And he thinks, you know what?
I can deal with these people.
I killed Soleimani.
Everybody knew that he was a terrorist.
He was responsible for thousands of American deaths during the Iraq War.
And Obama didn't do anything.
Even George W. Bush was afraid to get rid of him.
I got rid of him.
And then the Iranians wanted to retaliate and save face.
And I said to them, if you touch one American in Iraq when you retaliate, We're going to take out.
And he said he gave them a list.
You know, here's your harbors, here's your military.
So then the Iranians said, well, we'll notify you in advance.
Just keep everybody in your base.
And that's what happened.
And there's critics of Trump said, well, some Americans had some shell shock, but basically We stayed in the base.
And then Iran lied and told their people that they sent a barrage into Iraq to make the Yankee imperialists pay for what they did.
And that's how Trump is transactional.
And there was no war, but the main point was he got rid of Soleimani without having a war.
I think that's how he operates.
But I don't think that that is a solution.
You did that with North Korea as well, and then Biden kind of But I just think if you are on record as Rubio and even Vance and Trump are, that they cannot enrich to 90% and they keep enriching, then there's no other solution.
And it's a very tricky operation.
I think the administration is also not convinced that they don't have bombs.
And they are at other facilities that have either just recently been discovered or there's other ones that haven't been discovered.
They keep talking about all of the places that we know about, but given what we know of the theocracy, there's probably a lot of places where they've been rich, and they may have two or three bombs.
And that is also something they're very worried about.
That they could send it in to Israel.
And everybody says, well, Iron Dome will knock them down.
Well, the other day that Houthis sent one in and it hit almost at the airport in Tel Aviv.
And if that had been an Iranian missile, they sent, I think, 500 total missiles in those two separate attacks.
And everybody said they knocked down 95% of them, but there were about seven or eight missiles that got through.
And if one had been nuclear, it would have been catastrophic.
So there's a lot of reasons to be very careful, is what I'm saying.
You know, Victor, this has been a fantastic conversation.
I want to finish up with two things.
One is just a quick comment.
You know, how valuable is Israel to the U.S. in its position in the Middle East?
That's one.
And then I want to just talk a little bit about the MAGA covenant in Ukraine, Russia.
Very quickly, it's very valuable.
It's very valuable for a variety of reasons.
It is the most technologically sophisticated country in the world per capita.
And so we have a wonderful partnership with military technology with them, with intelligence with them.
And it is everything that you would want in an ally in this sense.
It is democratic, it is pro-American, it is sophisticated, and it's surrounded by 500 million people.
Who, at various times, have all been enemies of the United States, and we have a tenuous relation with the Arab Muslim world.
The left-wing argument that it is a colonial power that puts us at odds, that's also the Pentagon, I think, attitude, at least the former Pentagon, I think is false.
The Jewish people have been there longer than anybody.
And when you talk about the one issue that...
It's the Palestinians.
We don't talk about the one million Jews that were ethnically cleansed after the '48, '56, and '67 wars from Baghdad, from Cairo, from Amman, etc.
We don't talk about probably somewhere around 150,000 to 250,000 Cypriots that were ethnically cleansed in 1973.
Thousands were killed by the Turks.
They are unlawfully occupying the northern part of Cyprus and Nicosia.
No one talks about that.
not recognized by any country in the world.
I've never heard anybody talk at Columbia about the illegal They walk back from areas, not just from Poland, but from places in Pomerania and East Prussia.
Two million died.
I don't know that anybody in their right mind would say a German today should jiggle the keys and say my house in Danzig was lost and it was German for a thousand years and it's not called Gdansk and I want to go back.
That's what Palestinians do.
I don't think there's anybody who cares about the, it's sad, the 500,000 Volga Germans that were ethnically cleansed by Stalin.
Why is this one particular issue, as important as it is, so exceptional?
And all of the human rights people don't give a blank-blank about any of these other groups.
think some of its anti-semitism some of it's the oil producing power of the Middle East some of it is the fear of Islam and is radical Islamic terrorism so that is the the issue that that people use But Israel has been our closest ally.
And the final thing is, the criticism of Israel is different today, and it's much more serious than it was 50 years ago.
50 years ago, it was from the Paleo-right.
And the Pat Buchanan people, they would say, Oh, they're going to get us in a war, or these people are too aggressive, the old anti-Semitism, some of them.
Today, it's much more insidious because it comes from the left.
It just doesn't just come from the left.
It comes from the Middle East students in European universities and here, and it comes, to be honest, from our DEI.
We have a long history of Al Sharpton saying, "Dim Jews, I'd come over and I got my Yarmark on." We had Jesse Jackson way long ago talking about Jaime Town.
We had Farrakhan talking about gutter religion.
We had the Black Lives Matter right after October 7th showing posters with hang gliders glorifying the murder.
So we have constituencies that hate Israel and do not like Jews that are protected.
Because they feel they're DEI victims.
So you can't criticize the Middle Eastern students.
You can't criticize Black Lives Matter or some of the minority communities.
So that's dangerous.
Then very quickly, your question about Ukraine.
And you wanted to know...
Well, the question is this.
You know, I think part of the...
You know, what's funny about this is, in the last four administrations, Putin left his borders, as we all know.
He went into Georgia and Osatia under George Bush when he was bleeding in Iraq and lame duck.
He went in in 2014 to Crimea in the dome.
I think that had a lot to do with the 2012 Hot Mike where Obama basically said to Medved to tell Vladimir that if he's flexible, if he'll be flexible and not cause trouble, then I'll be flexible on missiles.
We dismantled.
As you know, missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland.
And then he was flexible during Obama's, as he said, flexible during my last election.
As soon as Obama was elected, a year and a half later, he went in.
Then he went in Biden.
And why did he go in Biden?
I think it was Afghanistan, the humiliation, and then Biden said stupid things like, if it's a minor invasion, I might not react the same way.
He put a hold on offensive weapons as soon as he came in.
So the point I'm making is Putin always...
But he didn't with Trump because he felt that what Trump had done, you know, getting rid of Soleimani or Baghdadi or destroying his Wagner group, he was unpredictable and dangerous.
And so the other thing that was interesting about Trump I don't know of another president, correct me if I'm wrong, that talked of Ukraine in humanitarian terms.
I never heard Joe Biden one time say, this is awful.
This is the worst battle since Stalingrad.
There is now a million and a half dead, wounded, missing Ukrainians and Russians.
And for what?
I never heard Obama say that.
I never heard Susan Rice say that.
I never heard John Bolton say that.
The only person I ever heard was Trump.
Maybe it was because he's a builder, or maybe he thinks war is not profitable.
I don't know what it is, but he was the only one talking about this Stalingrad Verdun in human terms.
And I think he really believed it, that he doesn't understand why right on the doorstep of Europe this is going on when there's no military solution.
We hear one day that the Russian army is being depleted, that...
The next day we're told that Ukraine has lost 12 million people from refugees that have left the country.
The average age of Ukrainian soldiers in his 30s, they can't hold back this huge juggernaut of 140 million people, 30 times the territory, 10 times the Nobody is going to get their agenda reified.
So Trump comes along with a transactional.
He really wants to stop the killing.
And in his matrix, it's not to give Ukraine more weapons because they'll never be able to beat this colossus.
And he thinks, naively at first, maybe more realistic, that he had a relationship with Putin that was illustrated by the fact that Putin never went in during his administration.
He started out by pressuring Ukraine.
I'll talk to Putin.
We'll get a deal.
That didn't happen.
And now I think he thinks we're going to have a North Korean DMZ, South Korean-like DMZ, just stop everything where it is, and we'll negotiate the border after the ceasefire, and we're going to have a rare earth concession barrier where we have a lot of investment.
To pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine and for people that have profit.
And we'll probably end up arming Ukraine to the teeth.
We'll tell Putin it won't be in NATO.
You invaded, maybe you can go back and tell the Russian people you lost a million Russians because You can say all that.
We can tell Ukraine, you were heroic.
You saved your country.
You lost 10% of it, 15%.
But you're kind of like Finland in 1940.
You stopped the Soviet, the Finns stopped them for four months, and then they gave 10% of their country, and they ended up autonomously.
And you can maybe join the EU, but you're not going to join NATO.
And I think everybody knows that's the deal.
And now it's just, to what degree does Putin feel that he can go?
The only thing that's stopping the deal right now is that Putin knows he started the war, he conducted it savagely and incompetently, and he's got to go back in an autocracy and tell people in the apparat.
That they've lost a million people.
They've destroyed their military basically for a decade.
They've lost any shred of legitimacy abroad.
They're broke.
And it was all worth it.
And here's what I got.
And so what he's trying to do right now is get more so he can go back and say, this is what I got.
And we're saying no more.
And Ukraine is living with that now.
Ukraine is basically saying, stop it right now.
We're the heroes.
We lost something.
And fortify this DMZ, fortify us, and they won't do it again.
And that's not a good solution, but it all depends on Putin.
Victor, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me.
It seems to me like you're This is really a counter-revolution in foreign policy, isn't it?
Yeah, it's in everything.
It's trying to address the progressive project domestically, financially, economically, culturally, socially, diplomatically, and militarily.
and look at Pete Hexeth saying, you know, we're not going to have DEI and we were short 45,000 recruits.
We were told that that was inevitable because of gangs and poor physical condition of our youth.
Then suddenly it just disappeared.
45,000 people joined.
And we know that the 45,000 people joined the military.
We know two things about them.
They were mostly white males inordinately from rural areas, they felt.
And then we know that they felt they had been.
Unfairly ostracized under the DEI programs, the vaccination program, all of that.
And we know one other thing, that statistically they die at double their numbers in the demographic at Afghanistan and Iraq.
About 72% of the fatalities, and they make up about 33% or 34% of the population, white males.
So they were very integral to combat units and they were not joined.
And we know another thing that the 45,000 And when you have Mark Milley or Lloyd Austin or the head of naval operations said they're going to go after white rage, white supremacy, white privilege, as they did in congressional testimony, and they don't produce any proof of that, then people feel that it's an inhospitable workplace and they acted accordingly.
So we're seeing a revolution in the military.
We're seeing it.
Everywhere.
And it's like all counter-revolutions, it's got a counter-counter-revolution.
But there's no margin of error just to finish.
And that means that every step the Trump team takes, they have to have good messaging and they have to explicate it.
If they're going to deal with mercantilism and there's a logic to it, then they have to say, this is the whole story about the plane.
And we have an ethics czar and nobody in the family is going to profit from a foreign policy.
We saw what the Bidens did.
So they've got to be very careful because they've got a thousand eyes watching them and hoping they fail.
The entire establishment in America wants them to fail.
It's clear about that now.
Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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