TRANSCRIPT: Israel, Hezbollah and Iran – A Year After October 7: Victor Davis Hanson

He was deemed fit enough to finish out the next seven months of his presidency. But he’s, I’ll be candid, he’s failing at a geometric rate. So he slurs his word, he loses his train of thought.

And then that problem is compounded because his vice president is running as the replacement. The 14 million people voted in our primaries for Joe Biden, and suddenly within a 48-hour period, that primary vote was nullified. And the current Democratic nominee, our vice president, has never entered much less won a primary.

We’ve never had anything like that in our history, where a candidate has just been, I guess you would say, forcibly abdicated. And then another person was picked in like a 19th century process in the back room and never entered a primary, and the primary voters had no say whatsoever.

And then that person, Kamala Harris, because Joe Biden is polling about 41 percent and about 56 percent negatively, she is running as a hope and change, a new way forward candidate. And that’s, to answer your question specifically, that’s even more confusing for Americans as well as people abroad, because she does not want to run on what his economic, social, military foreign policy agenda has been for over three and a half years.

But she, in other words, she says she is going to make radical changes to the left. So that begs the question, why didn’t you do it as vice president or influence the president? But more importantly, why don’t you do it now? Because once you’ve announced your agenda and the president seems to be not fully engaged, you would have a wonderful chance to implement these very radical, we’ve never seen a candidate, I guess, since Richard Nixon tried it and failed, wage and price control, the wealth tax, an increase in the federal income tax up to 40 percent in addition to what the states could charge, increased inheritance taxes.

These are all she’s on the end. We don’t know to the degree to which her metamorphosis is a 90 day phenomenon because she is kind of in the last 90 days changed all of her positions on the border, on mandatory buying of guns from private citizens to crime, to everything.

So we’re bewildered because the candidate who is the vice president, we don’t know to what degree she agrees with Joe Biden, what degree she is sincere that when she renounced most of her prior hard left positions, is that a gimmick to get elected? And of course, we’ve never had at the same time since Grover Cleveland, a president who’s trying to run for a third term.

JOHN ANDERSON: So we’ll figure that out in a moment, but before we do, except for I mean, excuse me, except for Franklin Roosevelt, but I mean, with an interrupted third term.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, well, yes.

The Vice Presidential Debate

JOHN ANDERSON: And before we come back to that, can I just pause for a moment? We’ve just seen the Vance Walz vice presidential debate. Normally, that wouldn’t make much difference. But in a very tightly contested election like this, did that throw any real light on what the two offerings in terms of future administrations might look like to the American people, do you think?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think it does take greater import than usual for a variety of reasons, one of which is he was unfairly demonized as an ultra right wing, unsympathetic character who could not appeal to women and independents. And anybody who’s known him a little bit, and I have talked to him and met him a number of times, will find out that that’s contrary to how he comes across. He comes across in person just as he did in the debate. He’s soft spoken. He has the facts at his command. He’s not — he’s magnanimous.

So he was trying to show the American people two things, that he wasn’t going to go to the jugular vein. He could have, because Walz had a lot of openings, but he was going to be polite and professional and try to show the country that Mr. Walz, to the degree that he was coherent, had positions that were antithetical to most of the majority. And from what we know from the polls, people agreed.

As to your second part of the question, Donald Trump lost the Electoral College by an aggregate of somewhere between 45 and 60,000 votes last time. He won in 2016, despite losing a popular vote. And most people believe that this election is closer than 2016 and 2020. So any little indication, like a vice presidential debate, can make a difference. If it just made a difference in 100,000 votes and those votes were strategically located in Pennsylvania or Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, it could make a big difference.

October Surprises and Government Influence

We also have these, what we call in America, the October surprises. Those are usually things that the incumbent does to sway or influence the electorate in a favorable way and to the disadvantage of their opponents. And we’ve seen the Federal Reserve chairman lower interest rates just 40 days out. That’s almost never heard of before, as if the economy will suffer or bleed if interest rates are half a point higher. So he cut that right during the final stretch.

Then we had Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor, try to get around a Supreme Court ruling that kind of neutered his second half of his indictment about January 6th. And we’ve had this anti-Trump judge, Chutkan, who released the indictment prior to the formal trial. And so, again, it was the and we know that Mr. Smith has had in the past contact with the Biden White House.

We know that the Georgia prosecutor, Fani Willis‘ head lawyer, Nathan Wade, went to the White House twice to coordinate the Georgia rip. We know that Alvin Bragg in New York hired the third person in the Biden White House. So that is unusual. That comes on top of other things that have been happening.

There’s a lot of us that are a little concerned that Joe Biden intervened and essentially told Israel about the retaliation should not be disproportionate. And, of course, disproportionality is what wins war and reestablishes deterrence. So there’s a feeling in this country that he either does not want Israel to retaliate in a way that would restore its deterrence after suffering 182 attacks on Tuesday on its homeland and not hit the nuclear installations or especially not hit the oil installations.

And we are draining and we’re down now to about 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices before the election. We did that during the midterms of 2022. So there’s a sense that Biden can massage the power of the federal government as happens sometimes in our elections, but in a close election might make the difference.

Who’s Making the Decisions?

JOHN ANDERSON: Can I ask on that, is it Biden making those decisions or the machinery around him, the people in the machinery around?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Oh, I think it’s the people around him. He’s. It’s very controversial, his advisers object, but most people who look at the data see that he’s taken the most days off of any president, he has a lid on his work day at about three o’clock, three days a week, he’s in the White House less than half a week, he doesn’t travel very much and he’s declining at a rate.

Now, what fills or who fills that vacuum is subject to speculation, but most people believe that his wife is the official Edith Wilson-like conduit to members of the prior Obama administration. So the Obamas play a prominent role in the Obama team now has absorbed the Harris campaign apparatus.

So you get the impression that Kamala Harris is working with Barack Obama. And between the two, they are — they have a veto power, a selection power of all the appointments, judicial appointments, major initiatives. And that would explain why this administration has not given unequivocal support to Israel. For example, that that seems to bother a lot of people.

And I think that comes from the Obama era that explains this very strange attitude they have about Iran. They wanted to get it back into the Iran deal. They gave them one hundred billion dollars in relief from sanctions. They paid six billion dollars for hostages or at least they freed that money up from South Korea. They took off the terrorist designation of the Houthis. They restored money that’s fungible to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, et cetera, et cetera. And that has all the hallmarks, to use a famous phrase, of the Obama foreign policy.

Kamala Harris and California Policies

JOHN ANDERSON: Well, back for a moment to who is the real vice president, plainly she is from California, your home state, mainly she backs a lot of the policy approaches that have seen California become what it is, what Joel Kopkin calls an almost feudal state with a very wealthy at the top, middle class stripped out, manufacturing forced out because of the green tape, so forth, and emerging jobs, 80 percent of them low paid. She was cheering the Black Lives Matters destruction and what have you. I would have thought of ways in which she could have been defined. And in politics, the great thing when you particularly face a new opponent is to frame them before they can frame themselves. But it seems to me that Donald Trump has not been very effective at framing her.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, it’s been very hard because since she announced her candidacy or she was announced as a candidate, Donald Trump has met with interviewers, press conferences, town halls, not counting the rallies, about 75 times. She’s given five interviews, no press conferences whatsoever. And they have been with a local Philadelphia sympathetic reporter who it was a disaster. And then she gave one with Dana Bash, but she insisted that Walz be with her. And some of the questions were framed with multiple choice answers in advance.

Then she gave one with the Association of Black Journalists that didn’t go down well, very short. Then she gave one with Oprah where Oprah was sort of coaching her. That did not go down well. Then she gave one with two NBA former players that did not go down well.

So my point is that she will not talk for more than 10 or 20 minutes and only with a sympathetic interviewer. And if she does a debate or if a Trump person does a debate, whether she’s in it or not, the moderators now have discredited the genre entirely. We saw that with the Trump debate where they intervened and they promised they would not do that again.

And then, of course, CBS, the two moderators on Tuesday night, started fact-checking singularly and solely advanced and incorrectly. And they were wrong about the fact-check, but they were not supposed to do that. So it’s been very hard for the Trump advance team to bring her out, because if you want to debate her, she will only debate on network news and network news has been disastrous for Donald Trump.

The first time he did it, it was a set up stress test for Joe Biden. He was pretty much on the way to a landslide victory, and then they goaded him into saying, come on, CNN, before either candidate has been nominated and before the conventions have been held. We’ve never done that. And yet he did. And he watched Biden melt before his eyes. And that was the signal to the powers that be to remove him.

And then when Harris came back, she goaded him into a debate in which Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis intervened again and again. They picked the questions that were tailored toward Kamala Harris. They asked for follow-ups and explicit stick to the question types of corrections to Trump. They fact-checked him. And then they did the same thing with Vance.

So it’s hard for him to get into a fair, disinterested debate or venue with her. And then if she does not meet that, she does not hold press conferences and she will only be interviewed for a brief time. And I think now in the last 30 days or so, she will not do any interviews because they have been disastrous. I will say, though, that if you look carefully at the polls of last 72 hours in the swing states, she is hemorrhaging.

Kamala Harris’s Campaign Strategy

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And that is a result of the aggregate effect, as you pointed out, in part the Harris-Vance debate, but also the aggregate effect of all of these interviews that were staged transparently, so and she didn’t she just went into a wash rent spin cycle where she talked when no matter what the question posed, she says, I’m middle class and I grew up and I believe in empathy and I believe in a can-do economy. And the answers have no bearing or no relationship to the question asked.

And so that is for there’s been some extraneous things that these October surprises raise a lot of skepticism, especially the Jack Smith indictments, especially the lowering of the Fed rate suddenly.

Then they were very late and tardy, almost five days before either one of them took an interest in Hurricane Helene. We were told by the media that it was not of a serious nature. We were told for three or four days, only 30 or 40 people. It looks now that it could have been much worse than Katrina. It’s wiped out whole areas. The impression is that this is sort of an East Palestine, Ohio, Appalachian phenomenon where lower middle class working people have been decimated and devastated by natural disaster, of which this administration, as in the East Palestine, has not been tromped or empathetic.

And Joe Biden was kind of callous when he was asked about that at the White House. Why haven’t you been there? Why haven’t you been engaged? I have. I have. I was on the phone for two hours. That was counterproductive.

And then she wanted to do a photo op. So she staged a photo op as if she was on the phone directing things from Air Force Two. But unfortunately for her, when people looked at the photo, the pages were blank that she was working on and her earplugs were not connected to her phone. The wires were not connected. It was complete photo op.

So all of these things are starting to and the Israeli, the Middle East, remember that people remember that Jake Sullivan boasted eight days before October 7th of last year that the Middle East portfolio was the calmest it had been in 20 years. And they inherited a very calm area.

So I think people are looking at at these things in Ohio and I mean, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And it’s going to be very close. But right now, Harris and Walt seem more concerned about the election than does Trump-Vance.

You make a good point that he hasn’t been able to pin her down and say this is what she was her entire life. These are the issues that she embraced. These temporary issues, to the degree that they’re sincere, would still hurt the country. And if she is a change candidate, she had three and a half years to show us that which she didn’t. This is a counterfeit candidacy, something like that.

But it’s very hard in this country to to break through the Silicon Valley, social media, print media, institutional bias that we have. And but we’ll see. It’s I think the internal polls, if you look at the two candidates, you can see that there’s a sense of eagerness, anxiety on the part of her candidates. And that suggests that people have remarked that her internal polls show that she’s got big problems in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And the way our system works, if Trump were to win the states he won in 2016, that would be Nevada. And he came very close in 2020. But if he were to win Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, then he would not need to win Michigan and Wisconsin, just Pennsylvania or any of the three. So it’s going to be a very close race.

I think the betting has now changed. The last two days, the private betting sites are about 50-50. And it seems that the left wing media is much more angry, much angrier, much more anxious than they were two weeks ago.

Voter Concerns and Campaign Focus

JOHN ANDERSON: You touched on the issue of Americans not feeling the real, the matters that are important to them are not being properly addressed. And I think I read correctly that one reasonably reputable looking survey indicated that abortion, in fact, was not in the top 10 concerns of America, the economy, the border, immigration, geopolitical circumstances globally would all rate more highly. And yet that seems to be the one consistent area, notwithstanding that it’s a deeply divisive issue, that you can rely on her to campaign, even to the extent that I think Walsh said it would be unreasonable to have your right to an abortion being determined on a geographical basis. But that’s the whole point of American federalism. Different states have different approaches and people move accordingly, as I understand.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: If you look at the top 10, the top 10 issues in the debate, the questions were deliberately tailored to ones that they felt that she pulled either. She pulls on one area, abortion, higher than Trump. But on the other ones, she’s not completely underwater. And those were health care, child care, climate change.

But if you look at the importance, they’re ranked there in the bottom. They’re not even the top 10. Most of those issues, except for abortion, I think 3% consider global warming or climate change. So those questions were deliberately addressed to Vance because they felt that they were more conducive to a sort of a therapeutic redistributionist agenda of the Democrats.

But the issues that people pull the most, the border, crime, foreign policy, and especially the economy, that’s where she doesn’t pull very well at all.

On abortion, it’s very interesting because of the field of 10 Republican candidates. There were only three. I think Haley was one of them, maybe Christie, and he dropped out. Donald Trump was on the left side of the ledger by embracing federalism, as you say, that the states could decide. And if somebody was in, wanted an abortion in a red state that happened to pass an ordinance, they could go to across the border.

And more importantly, if you look at the polling carefully, there’s a wide consensus that abortion should, I guess you would say, as Bill Clinton did, it should be legal, but rare. And by that, I mean no one in the mainstream. There’s a portion, 25 percent of the electorate, but they were very conservative, wants to force a woman to have an abortion who’s been raped or a victim of incest.

But on the other hand, people have objected again and again to what we would call late term abortion in the final six weeks or when the baby is viable outside of the womb. And that was one of the contentions that Vance made, and he tried to show that Walz had signed a bill for late term abortions if the baby survives the abortion attempt. And he vetoed a bill that would protect the sanctity of that baby’s life.

In other words, and we know that’s happened. It’s not common, but seven or eight thousand abortions are at very late terms, almost during a normal birth. So that hasn’t gotten out. But that is just as unpopular as the extreme right wanting women who have been raped to have babies without an abortion.

But Vance tried to point that out and Trump tried to point that out and with not a lot of effect. But it’s very hard in this country if the Democratic Party is much more intolerant of dissidents. So it’s very hard. There’s not a never Harris movement like a never Trump movement.

And once they get the party line, so to speak, it’s very hard. So they say Donald Trump was involved with Project 2025 and that’s going to make a national registry of all pregnancies so he can go after. That’s not true. It’s not going to do that. Donald Trump was not involved in 2025, but it’s a 900 page document. I read it very carefully. 700 pages of it are mainstream. There are some things that I disagree with, but he wasn’t involved.

But yet that’s the the the talking point, along with he’s going to kill women. And but again, why are they doing that? Why was there an open border? Why, why, why?

And the answer is they don’t have confidence in their agenda. They don’t feel that the left wing hard left appeals to 51 percent of America. So in their way of thinking, and this is true of the Senate races as well as the presidency, they do not run on the way that they vote. So John Tester in Montana is in a close race. He will not defend the votes that he that he cast in the Senate.

And Kamala Harris will not say to the American people for 20 years as a city attorney of San Francisco, as a county attorney of the county, as the attorney general and as a U.S. senator. I have embraced the right of the federal government to force people to give back to the government certain weapons. I have said again and again, there shall be no deportations under any circumstances. I have said that we will pay for trans trans surgeries and full health care for illegal aliens. I have said crossing the border illegally is not a criminal offense. I have said the wall has no utility whatsoever. I have said that we have to bring back catch and release. I have said that we should not increase the defense budget. I have said that the people that rioted in May, June, July, August of 2020, it would not stop. It should not stop. It’s a movement. It should go on. And I have helped raise bail for violent offenders who looted and committed arson.

But that’s what she’s not running. She’s not running on any of those statements. She’s saying that I’m for border security and I’m for an equal economy. And I stand with Israel. And then people say, well, you just said that you wanted to cut off, you supported cutting off 2,000 pound bombs to them. I stand with Israel. And so it’s a stealth candidacy. We’ll see if it works.

American Values and the Democratic Party

JOHN ANDERSON: Can I ask you, perhaps a slightly impertinent question, as a profound believer in my democracy here in Australia, I know that it was achieved at great cost. Sometimes there were dark moments, but it’s given us extraordinary freedom and prosperity. The American experience, the American experiment, if I can put it that way, has been something that Americans have been so proud of and that whatever else one might say about the idea of nagging and making America great again, it implies that America’s foundational police values, history, are worth celebrating, worth building. I’d have to say I have the impression that the left wing of the Democrats and I agree with the vice president, she looks like a left wing of the Democrats to me. Actually, I’m skeptical about America’s past and its values, its beliefs, what it is. Isn’t there something to be said for just teasing people out? Are you really a believer in our country?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, well, they’re not shy about it. I know, but.

They’re truly Jacobin French revolutionaries, they try to change the founding date to 1619 because they think that slavery is the signature of the American experiment. They tear down statues, they rename buildings. But when you look at the institutions, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said they want to pack the court. Franklin Roosevelt tried that in 1937, and that was a blemish on his record.

It was considered so bizarre and so dangerous that no one would ever allow the president to come in and allow just because he didn’t have a majority of kindred spirits to start packing and appointing judges for that. They want to bring in two states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. And the old formula going back to the Civil War and the acrimonious free slave debate was always if you brought two states and they came in and in antithesis, so Hawaii was liberal, Alaska was conservative. That was the last time we did.

But no one ever thought you would just bring in two states or make one out of the District of Columbia just to get four senators. They want to get rid of the filibuster. It’s been there for 160 years. They want to get rid of the electoral college. It’s in the Constitution. So these are certified revolutionaries.

And I don’t know how your audience in Australia views it. But here in America, we look at things that have never happened before. We’ve never had a president impeached twice. We’ve never had a president tried as a private citizen in the Senate. We’ve never had a president where 16 states tried to remove the nominee of the major party off the ballot. We’ve never had a president or a major party nominee be the subject of five criminal and civil indictments that everybody acknowledges if he had not run for president or he’d been a man of the left, they would have not been filed.

We’ve never had a president. We’ve never had a nominee for president who was the victim of two failed assassination attempts. So all of these things are completely new to us. We’ve never seen anything like it.

And they juxtapose with what I just mentioned about the party, the Democratic Party’s overt, unapologetic idea that the Constitution, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment are flawed and have to be modified. Electoral College, the fill of all of these institutions that go back to our very founding have to be changed because they do not give them the 51 percent instant law majorities that they think they deserve. And so we’re in a fight in America for the notion of a constitutional republic against people who are Jacobins. They believe in a permanent revolutionary fervor.

Trump’s Opposition and the Establishment

JOHN ANDERSON: In the revised edition of the case for Trump, you write, never has a president been so opposed by the establishment of his own party, so hated by his political opposition, so undermined by the 5,000 Washington elite, so sabotaged by the administrative state and so feared by the billionaire class. What are these elites so afraid of? Is Trump, is it really legitimate to claim that he’s a genuine threat to them? Can you?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I think part of it is there was a little bit with Ross Perot, but when you have a candidate who has no political loyalties or ties or IOUs and comes in as elected, they were successful the first time because he had no constituency in the republic. All the people that you draw on, if you’re George Bush or George H.W. Bush or any Republican, were not willing to work with him. The Democrats opposed him and they thought he was satanic.

Trump’s Approach to Government

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Then he was out of office. Now, when he comes back in, they feel that he has no loyalties to the administrative state. So if you say to Donald Trump, here’s the argument why the Department of Education is malicious, it’s indoctrinating our kids, it will not implement civic education, and you say we need to eliminate it and go back to the period when we didn’t have, he would say, fine, let’s do it. If you say to Donald Trump, the Department of Energy is not needed, we never had it before, all we need to do is allow people within the system to pump gas and oil, then we could be not only more, we could be completely self-sufficient, which we are almost now, but we could help Europe out in their ordeal with having their natural gas system. He would say, do it.

And so that’s what scares them, that he doesn’t call up somebody and say, you know, we served in the Senate or, you know, you gave this or that. He has no pedigree, no history. And the other problem with him, they see, is that he has no filter.

So he says things that are often, they have no problem if they’re honest, they’re just crude and cruel, they feel, because they don’t, I’ll give you an example of how they define cruelty. If Donald Trump flies in to the Carolinas and said, this is a disgrace, these people are starving, they’re not getting food and water, they don’t have any, we’ve got to get Elon in here to give them Starlink, they don’t have any, the government is a moron. That is crude and cruel. But what they’re doing is not crude and cruel, because they are credentialed and they speak of particular bureaucracies and of their lacks. That’s just the way it is.

And so, you know, he says things that, he looks at Ukraine. Most Americans want to help the Ukrainians defend their territory from an unprovoked aggression. But Donald Trump comes in and says, there’s been a million people dead or wounded and it’s deadlocked, it’s like World War I and we spent $170 billion and there’s got to be a way to stop the bloodletting, let’s not fight this war to the last Ukrainian. Maybe I can cut a deal with Putin.

Well, nobody talks like that in diplomatic circles. They would say this is a very complex situation and we have to act sober and judiciously and we’re going to use all diplomatic efforts. But he just said stuff like that.

And I think most people privately think, well, he’s right, that Trump and Biden and Obama never thought they could get back the Donbass in Crimea after Putin stole them. And, you know, they don’t think really you should put Ukraine in NATO and there probably needs to be a demilitarized zone and then maybe push Putin back to where he was in February 2022. And that’s probably what’s going to happen. And maybe that way we won’t lose another million dead or wounded, missing.

And that’s where everybody is. But you don’t say that is what I’m trying to get at, like he does. And you don’t say it in a way that he does.

Trump’s Impact on the Republican Party

JOHN ANDERSON: In some ways, I think it would be fair to say, you described him as a Jacksonian figure. And he’s not a classic conservative. And yet it appears that many American conservatives were prepared to endorse him because they were not satisfied with where the Republican Party was going in 2015 and 16. And I guess that poses the question as to the extent to which the Republican Party had become, if you like, you know, subservient to elitism and pragmatism and needed to be blown apart. I know you talk about things a lot, but it’s just worth recapping.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, you can know Trump by his enemies. So Liz Cheney, as we’re speaking, is down in Texas campaigning against him and against Ted Cruz. Dick Cheney, who was called a Nazi by the left, has made commercials against Trump. It’s rumored that George W. Bush will not vote for him. All of the major conservative pundits, a Bill Kristol, a David Frum, a George Will, have said that he’s worse than any left winger. They’ve renounced the whole career of conservative positions just because the messenger of them now is Donald Trump. The message is the same in many ways.

So there’s a hatred. And your question is, why does that arise? I think part of the reason is he’s transformed the stereotype of the Republicans of the well-to-do who were only interested in deregulation, capital gains, privatizing Social Security into a broad based workers, nationalist, patriotic, middle class that substitutes class solidarity for race.

So what the Never Trumpers, political and pundit, don’t understand is when they smear him as a racist xenophobe, he’s going to get a larger percentage of the black vote, the Hispanic vote than any John McCain or Mitt Romney or Bush’s. And he’s going to do that because he’s trying to say to the black truck driver, the Mexican-American carpenter, the white coal miner, you all have more in common with each other than you do with somebody on MSNBC or some professor or some Al Sharpton spokesman. And that’s very scary to all these people, to make a national middle class party.

And it gets a lot of Republicans very angry because, you know, they want to, you know, he doesn’t want to cut Social Security. I guess he would prefer an increase in taxes rather than cut Social Security for people, or he thinks he’s going to cut the abuse out.

People said that if Donald Trump gets a hold of the Republican Party, I can remember chapter and verse in 2016, and he goes through with this lunatic idea of building a wall and saying that no more illegal immigration. We’re going to be short workers. A chamber of commerce came out against him and we will lose the Hispanic vote for a generation. And Donald Trump said, that’s crazy.

These people, unlike you, are on ground zero when gang members come in, cartel members come in, crime comes in. They will want me to do this. He said he is a lunatic. And what happened?

He not only did not lose any more than they did, he actually gained sizable constituencies in non-white communities just because they had the same concerns that he did and the white working class did. But, you know, when you start talking like that, that kind of makes irrelevant or silly. All of these Washington Beltway experts and pundits. So this new tribalism is very neat.

Political Divisions in America

JOHN ANDERSON: It seems that America has gone beyond mere ideological differences between citizens. It really entered the phase of each side considering the other to be a literal existential threat. And yet, is that where real middle American, when you live in a rural area, do you see that playing out in your community or are Americans still able to talk to Americans who disagree with you?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Oh, you can see I live in a rural area because I have a lot of dogs in the area barking, but no one takes that seriously when they say, I mean, the rhetoric has been singular and unprecedented.

We had Mr. Floof, who is the Obama carryover campaign architect for Harris, say that Donald Trump a few years ago should be destroyed. Mr. Goldman said that he should be eliminated. We just had the Department of Commerce secretary said that he should be extinguished. Hillary Clinton said that he was evil. They all have used this eliminationist rhetoric. Even after Joe Biden said that we have to put a bullseye on Donald Trump.

And he said he had that sort of Phantom of the Opera eerie speech where he said that ultra-MAGA is semi-fascist. So they have used every hyperbole you can think of, even though we know that the Secret Service on two occasions has exhibited to the country they cannot protect him for a variety of reasons. And we know that when you lower the bar, the reductio ad Hitlerum, that it’s OK to say that the president, former president and possible future president is Hitler. Well, then you know that that calculus will be to every nut in the United States.

If I shoot Donald Trump and he’s Hitler, half the country will be happy and I can do it because two amateurs almost did it and I can do better than they can. So we’re creating a very dangerous situation.

There was a poll taken about the Democratic Party members and they asked, would you be unhappy if Donald Trump was shot? And 25% said no and 25% said they were unsure. We had a New York Times columnist, James McWhorter, very well respected. And he said it just would have been better if Donald Trump had been shot and he hadn’t missed. That’s mainstream right now.

And they really do believe that he represents not just a speed bump, but a complete obstacle to this progressive project. And they feel that if he were to be elected, there would be sizable changes in their vision of America. It would return to what a lot of the majority of people think it should be. In other words, we would be voting on Election Day with a license as they do in Europe, an ID. There would be no illegal immigration. We could stop it as he did the last two months. We would have certain friends that we would be there under any circumstances and we would have certain enemies. We’d be Jacksonian, no better friend, no worse enemy. All of that they feel is not nuanced or it’s not global.

I don’t know, but I can’t convey enough the level of hatred they have for him, the left.

The Legal Challenges Facing Trump

JOHN ANDERSON: And given the massive warfare that you touched on that’s been launched against him, whether you make the point that it wouldn’t have been against a private citizen if he’d been a private citizen. I have a little sympathy for him, I must say, saying that maybe the U.S. Department of Justice needs a shake up and he’s placed a very deep shake up. I just hesitate a little and wonder whether there might be a risk of politicizing it in another way. Well, I shouldn’t imply that it’s politicized now, but politicizing it in a way that would not be in the best interest of the country.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, there’s a couple of issues. I’ll give you one example. There’s a handbook for the Department of Justice that it publishes and it says explicitly that no federal attorney and Jack Smith, remember, was not authorized by Congress because the special counsel statute has expired. He was appointed by Merrick Garland. So he’s a federal prosecutor. But the statute, the handbook protocol says no federal prosecutor operating with the compliance with the Department of Justice shall indict a major political figure 90 days before an election.

And that’s exactly what Jack Smith did, which begs the question, and this comes up in conservative circles all the time. How do you stop this? How do you stop Letitia James saying that you overvalued your real estate holdings and then you got a loan that you paid back with interest and made the Deutsche Bank so happy they wanted to lend you again? And that’s a crime and you owe us two hundred and forty five million dollars or E. Jean Carroll. I could go into that one or Fani Willis.

I talked to a politician not long ago. I said, have you ever called up in a close election? The registrar said, we all do it. We all call up and say there’s got to be something wrong. I won. Come on. Are you going to have a recount? What are you going to do? That’s not a felony. And we saw what Joe Biden’s private papers, 30 years, he stored them in four unsecured locations. And the special prosecutor said that he was culpable. But his age and dementia would make it hard to convict him.

So what I’m getting at is this has been so egregious, the conservative side and Trump in particular say, how do you stop it? You have two choices. At some times in a schizophrenic fashion, he says success, I’ll bring back great GDP growth, we’ll get back to one point two inflation, we will have low unemployment, we’ll have deterrence and the people will be so happy that I won’t have to play tit for tat.

And other times, he said. It’s so unprecedented that maybe they need a taste of their own medicine, maybe I need to go in, as Obama did, and fire all the political appointees in the Department of Justice, just like Obama did, almost all of them, and maybe just maybe Republican local prosecutors should just take a big look at what certain people do in the left side of the ledger and start filing indictments the way that and maybe just maybe some state registrars or attorney generals would want to take a Democratic candidate off the ballot who was the presidential nominee that year.

And maybe just maybe when we become the majority in the Senate, we should say we want to get rid of the Senate filibuster and steamroll things through. And maybe just maybe if they want to pack the court and then maybe if Donald Trump was elected, he will get six new appointees. And you can see where that would go, it would be tit for tat and we would be down to a third world status.

And so what I’m getting at, John, is the left plays a chicken of a sort and goes so extreme on the presumption that no one would do and retaliate in like kind. They have to have an adult in the room and they can be the bomb thrower. And after the Republicans have lost seven out of the last eight popular votes and they haven’t won 51 percent of the vote since George H.W. Bush in 1988 turned loose Lee Atwater, who was a bomb thrower. He destroyed Michael Dukakis 17 point lead. But their attitude is they will never do that again.

They’ll never defame and smear and slander like we do. And we raise so much more money than they do with Silicon Valley and global corporate entities that we can do whatever we want. There’s no deterrence. And that’s what they’re doing. And there’s a big debate in the Republican conservative circles to retaliate in like kind or take the high road and lose nobly and not win ugly.

Election Integrity and Voting Changes

JOHN ANDERSON: Can they win fair and square, by which I mean given the claims of interference, of corruption that often follow elections in America, particularly the last one, January 6th and so forth, and if this is a tight election, it will matter that the process can be seen as one of integrity. Is that likely to be the case?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I would like to think so. The problem, you see, John, is that in 2020, we entered a great experiment, something that the left had been calling for, but it was so absurd for years that no one took it seriously, and by that I mean they were clamoring for early voting that has already taken place.

So, it’s sort of like calling a baseball game in the sixth inning rather than letting somebody come back in the ninth inning. So, we have early voting in most states, and we don’t use the word absentee ballot, which in my day, if I was ill or I was out of town, I had to give an excuse. I wrote the registrar and I was mailed an absentee ballot. When I voted, I always had to show an ID. They crossed my name off.

So, under the guise of COVID in March, April, May of 2020, teams of Democratic lawyers went to Michigan, went to Pennsylvania, went to Georgia, etc., and they cherry-picked particular states, and they said it’s not fair to the dispossessed and the underclass to have to deal with COVID and show up at the polls. So, we want to say that if you mail in a ballot, it doesn’t have to be there on the night of the election, 10 days in some states, or some people, you know, they’re confused. They don’t speak English. They only have their first name. So, if they don’t have the complete name, that shouldn’t count, or they don’t have the right address.

And of course, the registrars can’t, you know, they can’t be accurate every time. So, if you get a ballot, they mail it to you, and it doesn’t match the ballot, maybe that’s okay. And maybe if you apply for a driver’s license, you apply for unemployment, you apply for disability, you apply for a building permit, whatever contact you have in a state agency, they will mail you a registration packet, and which will come to a ballot. So, you can register in six different areas and slightly different names, same address.

So, my point is that when they did all of this, suddenly election day in these states was only 30% of the electorate participated. 70% had either voted early or through mail ballot, which was highly irregular. But then when you looked at the rejection rate by states, it was no longer the four to six percent of ballots that were rejected. It dropped precipitously to 0.3, 0.2, 0.4. So, with double the ballots swarming these registrars, and then they were not authenticating them at the same rate they had done in the past, people got very skeptical.

And then they started, they had these new terms they spun on the American people, ballot harvesting, which somebody knocks on your door and says, here’s a registration packet, you can register the same day, fill it out, and here’s your ballot. As soon as you do, I’ll be right back with a ballot. Or ballot curing, where a candidate says, I’m behind by 2,000 votes, what are the ballots that are rejected? Oh, this person, I’ll call him up and I’ll bring him back to the polls and he’ll change his ballot. All of that was new.

And so that created deep levels of skepticism, especially when the ballots came in very, very late. And then people were watching television and Trump had this big lead. And this was primarily a democratic phenomenon. About 65 to 70% of the mail-in ballots were democratic.

So Georgia, Arizona, on those evenings, Trump was 80,000, 90,000 ballots ahead and people went to bed and they woke up and he was behind. And they couldn’t fathom it, and they got angry about it. And it wasn’t explained. And conspiracies filled that void, you know, about the voting machines were rigged. It was all done in March, April, May with the changing. And those changes are still in effect.

So not to be too windy, but to answer your question in particulars, I’m very worried about it because some states have required a license, very few. But the only thing that gives the Republicans and the conservatives some ray of hope is this time around, unlike 2020, they are mailing in ballots and they are telling voters, do what the Democrats do. Mail in the ballot now, early vote now. And when you look at swing states like Pennsylvania, there’s actually been more mailed in ballots from the Republican side than the Democratic side. And when you look at overall registration, uh, in most of the swing states, the number of Republicans is much greater and the number of Democrats is much smaller than the 2020 election in relative terms.

Predictions for the November Election

JOHN ANDERSON: Can I ask you what you think will happen? What do you think will happen in November?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What will happen in November? I think it’s a good chance Donald Trump will lose the popular vote because of the role of California and New York, Illinois, states like that. And there’s a 55% chance he’ll win the electoral college.

Pretty sure. I think there’s been a change in the last, as I said earlier, 72 hours. I think you pointed out the debate. Usually it doesn’t matter. This debate did matter in a close race. There’s a cumulative effect of poor interviews. There’s great anger and uncertainty about the economy that was borne out with this longshoreman’s temporary strike. There’s worry about the Middle East. There’s, uh, worry about the reaction of this government to natural disasters. And they seem to pick and choose which types of catastrophes they respond to. And they’re always using things for political.

So I think there’s, and then the final, those are just my impressions. But when I look at the actual data, it does seem that Donald Trump will get a much higher youth vote, black vote, Latino vote than he did in 2020. And when you look at the history of the polls, 2016, especially 2020, when he lost and you calibrate those to where the polls are now, he would have, he could be within two and a half points and probably be even in the popular vote. He’s about 2.2 in the popular vote behind, which says to me, it’s about equal.

But in the key states, the latest polls, the last 48 hours, he looks like he’s ahead in Nevada, one point. He’s ahead in Arizona, two or three points, Georgia, three or four points. North Carolina will be uncertain because of the disaster, but a point or two. He’s dead even in Pennsylvania. So those are polls that usually under-report Trump’s support.

If you’re a cynic, you would say, yes, Victor, but he’s going to have to do better than that because there’s going to be irregularities in the balloting because most of the balloting will be controlled in blue cities, even in red states, in which the registrars and the workforce that counts the ballots are overwhelmingly for Biden. I’m not convinced of that, but that’s the counterargument.

The Middle East and Israel’s Situation

JOHN ANDERSON: Wow. To move to something that you just touched on, the Middle East, the world looks extraordinarily dangerous at the moment. But there’s one, I have to say, this very, very plucky democracy. Everyone tends to forget that. A very successful democracy, one with no oil, surrounded by countries with any amount of oil, any amount of ease, wealth, but which are nowhere near as well-off and nowhere near as good a society to live in, which all seem to hate it. So Israel’s now facing existential insecurity, and the Razi stands behind this. And I’m just wondering, I’d be interested in your perspective, and I think those listening would be, you know, people are not familiar enough with the regime and the terror networks in the Middle East. Iran seems to be to be. I don’t think we fully understand just what a terrible regime it is.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah. Well, the Iranian strategy was that under the Obama-Biden, they came up with what they called creative tension. And that meant that they were going to empower Iran through the Iran deal, they were going to lift the oil sanctions, and they were going to stop the terrorist designation of the Houthis, they were going to increase money to the Palestinians, even Hamas, etc., etc. And then empowered Iran would be played off against Israel and the Gulf Arab Sunni monarchies. And then the United States would adjudicate that tension, being slightly in favor of revolutionary underclass regimes.

And I think Obama thought that just as he sided with the community organizing activity in the United States, so he saw the Shia and the Persians as the underdogs in the Middle East. Okay, Trump came in and blew all that up. And everybody said they were going to be a war. He said the Houthis are terrorists, and they’re not going to get any money in the financial system. And we’re not going to give a dime to Hamas or the PA because it’s fungible, and they use that money for weaponry and tunneling. And we’re not going to go back in that crazy Iran deal, and we’re going to sanction them. And we’re going to cut off and $100 billion he cut off.

And then he said, you know what, no daylight, anytime there’s daylight between Israel and the United States, somebody comes in and says, we can destroy the Jewish state. So Golan Heights remain Israelis in perpetuity, move the embassy, did all of that. Biden came in, and Anthony Blinken just before, as I said earlier, just before October 7th said it was the calmest period in 20 years. So whatever Trump did, it worked. And then they repealed, and I mean literally every single statute.

They gave $6 billion for hostages. They gave them $100 billion oil revenues. They said the Houthis were not terrorists. Hamas needs money, and we got in the present situation.

In other words, anytime Israel’s enemies feel that Israel is constrained or to the extent it is not, it will only reply proportionally to aggression. It’s in big trouble, and there will be a war. Anytime the United States says, we are going to protect the only democracy in the Middle East, and we have a special relation for the Jewish state, as does the Jewish state with its historic homeland from biblical era, and we’re not going to tell Israel what it must do or can’t do. It’s going to protect itself. We’re going to help them with the wherewithal, because it’s in the Western interest. And so anytime that happens, Israel is safe.

Now, right now, it’s in a terrible position because the world is told that you cannot deal with Hezbollah. They have 150,000 rockets. You cannot kill an idea with Hamas. The Houthis are too far away, and the Saudis committed war crimes against them, and we sided with them at one point. Iran will have the bomb, and you’ll have to fly over Jordan and Saudi, and it’s just too hard to do. And by the way, we want you to be proportional, even after October 7.

And Israel, it’s entirely dependent on technology and resupply from the United States. I don’t mean entirely in the sense that it gets all of it, but to wage a full-stage reprisal, it’ll run out of munitions unless we supply them. So suddenly, we are trying to leverage them with this insane idea of proportionality. And I think Israel’s at the point where it’s decided after October 7, and they’ve lost 100,000 people, maybe 60 now have been displaced. They can’t live along the border. Hezbollah has sent 8,000 rockets to Houthis and Hamas and Iran, another 12,000.

They feel they’re not going to have a second Holocaust, and they’re going to reply disproportionately. And they’ve pretty much destroyed Hamas, and they don’t really care whether, you know, that people on the American campuses say this was genocidal. It’s not, and they’re confident that they waged war in a way that Hamas never would.

And then they said, we don’t care if you say they have 150,000 rockets or not. We’re going to take out the entire hierarchy of Hezbollah, the most feared terrorist organization in the world. And we’re going to do it systematically, and we’re going to create a defensive shield where they can’t hurt us. And then when we do that, if the Houthis want to send a missile into Tehran, we’re going to destroy their entire port facilities, hundreds of millions of dollars. See how they like that.

And now they’re telling Iran, you know, we did this once before. You sent in 320 projectiles, our allies and I stopped most of all of them, and then we were only allowed to hit three. That apparently didn’t create deterrence. Now you sent 182 hypersonic ballistic missiles, and they did very little. That should tell you that you’re impotent and believe us, that’s what they’re telling the world. We’re going to reply disproportionately.

And so what I’m trying to get at is the world has been terrified of the radical Islamic braggadocio, that they love death and Westerners love life and you can’t defeat them. It’s an ideology and Israel is surrounded. You got to cut bait. They have the UN, they have the EU.

And Israel says, we’re at the point now where it’s existential. If we go down this route anymore, we won’t survive. Hezbollah was planning another October 7th. These people are medieval, what they did, beheading, mass rape, dismemberment, torture, hostage taking, and they would want to do it to all of us.

So now they’re completely liberated, unfettered, and we’ll see what happens. But they’re going to try to restore deterrence by being disproportionate. And I think if they were wise, they would focus on the Iranian nuclear facilities. And I think after a week of sustained bombing, they could probably neuter them. And then I think Iran would get the message.

And this administration is very fearful that they’re going to target the oil installations, because as we know from the midterms and even this general election, they have been draining the strategic patrolling reserve. It’s less than 50% to lower the price of gas. So Americans feel that they’re no longer suffering from inflation.

And I think the Biden administration is putting a lot of pressure on Israel not to retaliate disproportionately. That’s the term they use. But I don’t think it’s going to have any effect on them. The weird thing about all this, John, is if you look at polls, 65 to 70% of the American people, even in our nadir, support Israel and its right to defend itself as it sees best. 65 to 70%. That’s despite the huge influx of Middle Eastern people, the campus foreign students, all of that, all the propaganda, all the anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli media. And yet the American people still support Israel overwhelmingly.

JOHN ANDERSON: Do you think there would be a view in that, that that on the part of the American people recognises that in fact, the Israelis are doing us a service if I can degrade the Iranians?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, I think there’s members of the American government, even in the Biden administration, that say themselves in periods of momentary reflection, but the majority of Americans certainly would agree that if you look at, except for Al Qaeda, which terrorist organisations killed the most Americans? Hezbollah. They killed 241 Marines. They tortured CIA officers. They sent shaped charges into Iraq and blew up Americans.

And now all of a sudden, they’re afraid to answer their cell phone. They’re afraid to turn on their television set. All of a sudden they brag and brag about their 150,000 rockets. No one is safe. They can be 60 feet down in a reinforced concrete bunker and the Israelis can hit them. Part of this is the admiration for Israeli ingenuity and audacity. Nobody thought they could ever pull what they’ve done off.

Nobody had ever heard in a James Bond novel, anything like The Pagers or The Walkie Talkies, four or five years in its genesis. Nobody believed that you could blow up Nasrallah 60 feet below in a single block attack. Nobody thought you could get rid of this hierarchy in Damascus and Tehran. Nobody believed that you could knock them down.

Israel’s Military Capabilities and Global Perception

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I mean, to be candid, if somebody sent 180 hypersonic ballistic missiles into San Francisco, we could not knock them down. I don’t think London could do it. I don’t think Paris could do it. They can do it.

So there’s a lot of new admiration for their competence. And I think there’s a sense, even in Europe, especially in places like South Korea and Japan, that deep down inside, they feel the Israelis are doing the world a favor by neutering Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and they want them to go ahead and deal with Iran. Because as you know, a lot of Europe is in range of Iranian missiles. And if they should go nuclear, the first thing they would start to do is threaten European countries for concession with the implied threat that they could reach them with their rockets.

But Israel is showing the world not to be, I guess what I’m trying to say, John, is Israel is conducting a tutorial for Western nations and peoples and saying, do not be afraid. You don’t have to fear these people. You are strong. You are technologically superior. You are more moral. Don’t feel guilty. Reply and create deterrence. Stop these people. They’re anti-civilizational. They’re medieval. And we’re going to show you how to do it. And please help us. If you don’t help us, we’ll still do it for your and our benefit. And that’s a pretty powerful message.

JOHN ANDERSON: Do you think Israel has effectively rewritten the situation in the Middle East to the point where we’ll now talk about pre-October 7 and post-October 7?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I didn’t hear the last part, John.

JOHN ANDERSON: Well, we now talk about the Middle East in terms of pre-October 7, 2023 and post-October 7, 2023. Has it been such a profound shift, do you think, given the success?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I do. I think so. First of all, never in the history of the Jewish state has so many civilians been killed. In fact, more Jews were killed on October 7 than any day since the Holocaust, any single day since the Holocaust. And then it was the manner in which they were butchered and the sheer hatred. We’ve never seen, I mean, we hear about these things in Rwanda and things, but nobody thought in Israel people would, babies would be incinerated or limbs would be locked off or women would be mass-raped or hostages would be taken into subterranean labyrinths and murdered. It was a level of atrocity that was shocking.

And then the reaction of the left and the university crowds in Europe, the United States was equally shocking. And I think, in a way, Israel redefined itself. And it just, it came to its senses and said, there’s not going to be any more 20,000 laborers coming in and working at extra high wages. And we’re not going to worry about that anymore. And we’re not going to reach out because these people have an existential hatred and our success is not going to be a model for them to emulate. It’s going to be an object of envy and hatred. And they hate us and they’ll always hate us.

And the only way that we can survive and maybe convince them not to hate us is to be so strong and unpredictable that they would not want to attack us. And that’s a big change. When you look at polls in Israel and see the Israeli left, I mean, Netanyahu has been criticized, but it’s mostly from people who think he should have been tougher. There’s not really a peace movement in Israel anymore, other than maybe concessions to get hostages back. But the Israeli left has been discredited and Netanyahu is on the rebound as we look at his polls. And yet the criticism against Netanyahu is coming from the right, that he’s not being retaliatory enough.

So yeah, it’s marked a change. I think it’s made a big change in the United States among the American Jewish community in general. I think they feel that the left wing really does despise Israel and is anti-Semitic. And more importantly, their allies in the diversity, equity, inclusion movement have been at the forefront of anti-Semitism on these campuses. And when you look at the professors, there’s been an intersectionality in the hatred of Israel, that the gender studies, the gay studies, the black studies, the Hispanic studies, all of these people tend to be very anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic. That’s the perception, I think, growing in the Jewish community.

I think it’ll be reflected at the polls. Instead of 80-20 or 70-30, it’s going to be 60-40 or 50-50. And I can imagine, well, I’m surprised we’ll be as far as that, frankly. We’ll see.

The Two-State Solution and Future Prospects

JOHN ANDERSON: Just as we consider all the things that we’ve talked about, our government continues to say, rather than call for de-escalation, Andrew, the other thing they keep doing is calling for a two-state solution. I just cannot see how realistic the idea of a two-state solution is. I know that support for Hamas and its actions last year, it has dropped a bit, but it’s still very high. Most people in that area still believe that that ruthless attack on every civilizational value you could think of, of October the 7th, was warranted. I don’t see a prospect of a two-state solution, nor do I see any other at the moment, other than a very strong Israel imposing some very tough conditions.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I think most people looked at the news of October 7th and they discovered very quickly that over 500, maybe 1,000 Gazan civilians volunteered to go in and opportunistically rape and kill as civilians, not as part of a terrorist organization. And then everybody was on the street supporting Hamas in the days after and spitting and hitting hostages. So they got the feeling correctly so that the vast majority of people in Gaza and the West Bank would like to destroy Israel.

And that’s exactly the sentiment that I saw on the Stanford campus every day, walking to my office from the river to the sea. Every day they were chanting. So there’s not going to be a two-state solution. What there’s going to be is some sort of wall. I think you’ll see a demilitarized zone between Gaza and southern Israel. And there will be a kind of a border wall, but there will be a demilitarized area. And there will be some type of international aid or maybe Gulf aid that will try to rebuild Gaza. But Israel is not going to allow that to be a state right next to it.

And I think they’re going to make it very clear that for every time there’s a terrorist incursion from the West Bank or Gaza, there’s going to be a retaliatory response that’s unbearable for the Palestinians. And we’ll see what happens. It depends a lot on the American administration. Because if you had a conservative Republican administration, they might have the rhetoric, but they would not believe that Gazans can be trusted to have another one election, one time type of phenomenon.

And I think they would do other things that would really change the situation. I think a Republican, from what I understand, if you’re one of the 200,000 students from the Middle East, and you commit a crime in the United States, they would deport you, yank your student visa. And they would not be influenced by the Michigan Electoral College vote. And it would be very, I’m not saying that they would give Israel a blank check. They’re just not going to be sympathetic to a two-state solution. And everybody says, well, what’s the alternative? Well, the alternative is protecting Israel from the West Bank and Gaza and hoping that both those areas evolve. But they do, as they evolve, they understand that if they are going to repeat October 7, it’s going to repeat what happened to them after October 7, again and again and again.

People in Lebanon are getting very angry at Hezbollah. The Lebanese minister said Israel should not attack us because we have not recovered from 2006. He said that at the beginning. And again, there’s no sympathy. These devastating pictures of Israeli attacks on apartment buildings in Beirut. But when you start to look at them carefully, in most cases, the initial bomb is followed by sequential explosions from rocketry and other munitions that are going up. And so the question is, why in the world would you allow people to store these munitions in your apartment? And if you do so, would you blame Israel that they’re being used to attack the Jewish state?

Of course not. Israel has been very clever, smart, astute in the way they’ve responded to these existential threats. And they haven’t invaded Lebanon in force. I don’t think that would be wise. They’re the only country in the world. Ukrainians don’t call up people in the Donbass and Crimea on their cell phones and say we’re going to hit, reply to Russian aggression with an attack that might incur civilian casualties. It’s only Israel that we put these conditions upon. And I think they’ve done admirably well.

Israel’s Future and Global Conflict

JOHN ANDERSON: Finally, can I ask you this? You, as a great student of war down through the ages, will have thought Israel becoming safer or more dangerous in the current circumstances as Israel displays extraordinary capability, I suppose you’d say. Are they easing or increasing the chances of global conflict at the moment, in your view?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Oh, I think if you look at what prompted October 7th, to the degree it wasn’t entirely the fault of the United States, but I think we share the majority of the blame for easing up on Iran and the Houthis and giving money to them. But there was also some culpability in Israel, not with the people, but there was a… I had been there the last two years, summers, and there was an unrealistic appraisal that they’d reached sort of even Hamas they could deal with. And people would say to you, you know, Victor, we have 20,000 people working here, and we pay higher than anywhere else they can work. And when they get injured, we take them to the most sophisticated healthcare, and we have a university program.

And you would politely say, but maybe your magnanimity is going to incur envy or be seen as weakness to be exploited rather than to be reciprocated. And they were, I think they were so successful, all of their existential problems had been, they felt solved. They had these huge sophisticated desalinization plants, and they were giving some to the West Bank water. They had gone into this consortium with Greece and Cyprus about natural gas extraction. They found huge deposits of natural gas. Their Silicon Valley equivalent was earning multi-billion dollars in foreign exchange.

And to go to a city like Haifa and compare it to San Francisco, San Francisco’s downtown is dead. It’s dangerous to walk after eight o’clock. Homeless people, discreetment. You go to Israel, people, young children were out at 11 at night. The restaurants were packed. The stores were full. There was no homeless. So they felt they had kind of solved their problem, and they had been so successful that even the Palestinians would give them their due and probably fall suit and think, you know what, we can be the Hong Kong and Gaza. But that was so unrealistic on their part.

And I think they have been shocked to their senses, and they’re not going to go back there again. And so what I’m trying to say is what was very dangerous was the attitude they had before. Not now. Not now. They are trying to reestablish deterrence, partly because the United States has lost it in Afghanistan and China. But they’re trying to say, if you attack Israel, the disproportional response will be of such a magnitude, you will regret it. And you will always regret it. And I think they showed that in Gaza. And yet they’re not trying to rub their noses in it.

Israel’s Approach to Deterrence

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They’re not trying to say, we hate you, you’re horrible people. They’re just trying to say, we don’t want this. We do not want this. But if you attack us, the disproportionate response will make you unable to continue.

And we’re going to do the same thing with Lebanon. We’re going to do the same thing with the Houthis. And the center of all of the problems, John, as you know, if Iran had a consensual Republican Democratic government, we wouldn’t be talking today about this. If you went back, it didn’t even have to have that. If it had a government analogous to Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, you wouldn’t have this problem. You have a revolutionary fascist regime, theocratic in Iran, that’s causing all of this problem. So ultimately, they’re just tentacles on an octopus. And the head of the octopus is Tehran.

And Israel knows that. And that’s why it’s very important that the United States, once Iran puts its head in the noose to mix metaphors, they should really pull the rope and say, you know what? You attack us with 182 ballistic missiles, all designed to kill thousands of Israelis all at night. And we’re going to reply in a way that you will regret you ever did that.

And I think they can do it. But if we restrain them, and they go back to three missiles are going to go to Iran after 320 went to us, then you’re going to get this again and again and again. If Israel, months ago, after suffering 320 projectiles in its airspace, had it not listened to the United States, and had it not just sent three missiles to take out their anti-aircraft, but let’s say they had taken out Karg Island, I don’t think they would be suffering 182 today. I think the Iranians would have been so angry, they would have said, oh my god, they took out our oil revenue. They have the ability to take out, and that would have stopped. Or they would have lost the public support, such as it is.

So disproportionality, whether we like it or not, historically is what makes wars stop, for good or evil. And the proportionality is a way what the Romans called a bellum interruptum, which is the second, third Punic War, first battle of Mantinea, second battle of Mantinea, World War I, World War II.

Had the allies been disproportionate in World War I, and not gone in with the armistice, and not had the Versailles Treaty, and just defeated Germans the way they did in World War II, occupied the country, divided up zones of occupation, and then changed the government and sat there with a base for the next 30 or 40 years, like they did after World War II, there would have been peace. I think everybody has a long impression, you know, and I get back to the Versailles Treaty, because it’s so historically important. The problem with the Versailles Treaty was it was so humiliating and weak at the same time. But what you want to be is magnanimous and tough.

So we were very magnanimous to the Germans after World War II. We tried to rebuild the country with the Marshall Plan. We forgave them for so many things. We included them in NATO, but we were very tough at the same time. And that’s the way you stop violence and war. You’d be magnanimous in victory.

JOHN ANDERSON: Yeah. In Japan as well.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Same with Japan. You know, as a member of an allied country, all of the atrocities that were suffered by Australians from Japan, as was Britain and the United States, we were incredibly tough and destroyed that country. And then we went right back in, the Allies did, and we built it and created a good government. And they learned two lessons that it’s a good thing to be a Westerner. And if you cross a Westerner and you try to attack them again, bad things happen.

And I think that’s the lesson that Iran has to learn, that all good things can come if they want to be a westernized country with a humane government. It doesn’t even have to be humane, John. It just has to be non-Belikovs. And I don’t think necessarily Egypt is a humane government or Jordan or any of them are, but they don’t attack Israel with rockets at night. And they don’t do it, not because they’ve evolved so much as in the past when they did it, it didn’t turn out well for them. And they understood that after three Mideast wars. But let’s hope that Israel is allowed to restore deterrence for its homeland. If it does, I think Iran will, it won’t be immediate, but they will gradually see that they cannot, they won’t do that again.

JOHN ANDERSON: Doesn’t that mean, though, that you have to take out the nuclear development program?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I don’t understand that. I don’t understand.

JOHN ANDERSON: Yeah, I agree. I don’t understand.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Joe Biden has made a lot of mistakes in his nearly four years of governance, but the worst I think he’s ever did when he said the other day that he had, he almost said that was off-limits. I mean, the elimination of that nuclear program would have done so much for the world at large, but especially the Western world. It would have freed Europe from worry. It would have freed America. It would have freed all of the Western democracies from this bullying terrorist government armed with nuclear weapons. It would have sent a message to other illiberal regimes, don’t go nuclear because you’ll lose it.

And all we had to do was, we didn’t have to participate. We didn’t have to say anything. We could have remained silent. And then Israel would have probably, I hope it still does, take it out. It would be a very dangerous project. It would probably take a week of bombing, and it would probably either have to go over Arab hostile territory or secure those routes over the ocean, but they can do it. But to deliberately and publicly remonstrate with them when they’re doing the world and civilization a favor was just uncalled for. It’s a terrible thing the president said. I hope he’s ignored by Israel. I say that as a patriotic American, but we’ll see.

JOHN ANDERSON: Thank you very much for your insights. I really appreciate them. I know they’ll be widely sought.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I hope so. Good to talk to you again, John.

JOHN ANDERSON: Thanks, Victor.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you.

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