Victor Davis Hanson: JD Vance's Iran deal, midterms, & the right wing realignment

I'm delighted to be joined today by the classicist and scholar Victor Davis-Hanson, who is a formidable commentator on American politics and much more. And we are going to be talking about the Iran deal and the Trump presidency, in particular its foreign policy, because today Vice President J.D. Vance is on his way back from the Swiss Alps, where he has concluded the opening phase of the talks to begin the so-called technical negotiations between America and Iran and various mediators, with a view to achieving some sort of lasting peace deal. J.D. Vance was optimistic about what had been achieved in these opening talks over the weekend. The Qatari officials who've been mediating were optimistic too, as were the Pakistani officials. But I think it's fair to say, Victor, the reaction in the press, on the right and on the left to a certain extent, has been very, very sceptical. And there's a strong temptation among many commentators, it seems, to regard this whole affair, the whole Iran war, as a humiliation for America. I think I'm right in saying you wouldn't agree with that. No, I do have an idiosyncratic view of it. And that is, I'm not sure that the administration ever believed that Iran would sit down and soberly and judiciously negotiate something that could ever be honored. I think what they were doing was twofold. They wanted to go and inform the American people that they were willing to negotiate, and this was not going to be a forever war. Forty days of bombing was not seventy-eight days in Serbia or seven months in Libya. The second was, they are paranoid about the midterms. And in two, both negatively and optimistically, 38 out of the last 41 midterms, the president loses, his party loses. We all know that. So history is against him. But they have been given hope because of a number of things. The red state redistricting is going to beat the blue state in this ridiculous war of changing the nature of the congressional districts. And that may end up with a four or five seat advantage for Republicans. The racial gerrymandering Supreme Court, we don't know to what degree it will be in time, but people have argued that maybe three or four seats will flip. The Democrats are not taking advantage of the disarray among the right, whether it's Plattner or Calarico or some of El-Sayed. These candidates are not in the mainstream, and they're very polarizing, and they're 30-70 on the issues. And then they look, and this is getting to the heart of it, I don't want to be too verbose, but the American people support this idea of getting a deal and getting out 55%. And where I am in California, which has the highest gas prices in the United States, it was 650 a gallon. Yesterday, I filled up at 490. And I can tell you that all the people on this farm who have been working are delighted. That's all they care about. It's kind of one issue for them. So what all that means is, I think what the administration was trying to do is turn the concept of time flip back against the Iranians and say, you think you're going to drag this out? We have a mechanism where we can do well in the midterms if we drag this out and don't have to get into full-scale war. And we can get the price of oil down, open the strait, get gas reasonable. We have other things in our favor on the midterms. So don't count on me being impeached and tied up by the Congress's subpoena for two years. So I think that's part of it. The other reason why they think time is on their side, and I haven't talked to them, so I'm just trying to speculate. The strait itself will be quasi irrelevant in two years. There's massive efforts already going underway for pipeline expansion or construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Arabian Sea that will bypass the Gulf and kind of flip that Iran may be more vulnerable than it is now because it can be blockaded, whereas the Gulf states will have access to export without even getting near the strait. So they're confident that in the long term, that is a good thing. And then I think most people quietly accept the idea that there's going to have to be a kinetic restart. There's going to have to be something because they cannot be trusted. And if you look at what Clinton did and Obama, they really started with dual-use targeting very early. Bill Clinton and NATO weren't doing anything for 40 days against Milosevic in 1999, and then all of a sudden they made that wild leap and started hitting all the bridges on the Danube to immense criticism. That didn't even do it. Then they went in and dropped graphite bombs all over Belgrade and shut down the grid. Almost every day they shut it down. They apologized for hospitals they hit. And Barack Obama said he was not going to hit dual-use in seven months. He hit ports, he hit derricks, he hit TV stations. Not to effect, but what I'm getting at is they have told the Iranians, I think, that while they have defeated them militarily, they haven't defeated them strategically, but they can. And they can do it very quickly if they're willing to take that risk. In other words, if they break the deal and they try to shut down the strait, they can put Tehran in darkness in 24 hours. They can stop all of the transportation systems. They can stop almost anything they want to force them to concede, and they can open the strait militarily. And they can do that in the short time that they feel will not affect gas prices or the midterms. So I think Iran has got the long impression. They feel they've got away with murder. They were defeated by any classical definition, but strategically their survival they defined as victory. But I think the future is not very good for them because even aside from what I just said, when the people come out of their apartments and the internet is back in some form, they're looking at about, from what we understand here in the United States, about a half trillion dollars, 50-year investment in military, industrial, nuclear investment. And if that government, such as it is, starts immediately supplying Arab terrorists, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, or tries to start rebuilding their nuclear facilities while the people are in three-mile gas lines and there's not enough food, I think you're going to have even more internal turmoil, especially because they don't really know who's in control. So I think Iran's problems are starting, they're not ending by these negotiations. Well, I mean, there have been a lot of people in the last few days that have been trying to insinuate, particularly on the democratic side, to be trying to insinuate that this deal, such as it is, it's still just an initial memorandum of understanding, but it's shaping up to be less stringent on Iran than even Barack Obama's JCPOA. That, you would say, is a grave misreading. Before we go on, a word from our sponsors, Monetary Metals. What if your gold could actually earn more gold without you ever selling it? That's the idea behind Monetary Metals, a company changing the way investors think about gold ownership. For decades, owning gold meant paying storage fees and hoping the price went up. But Monetary Metals lets you put your gold to productive use through their gold leasing marketplace, earning up to 4% yield on gold paid in actual gold ounces, not dollars, more gold. So you maintain exposure to gold's long-term purchasing power while increasing the amount of metal you own over time. In a world dealing with inflation, debt expansion, and financial instability, that's a very different approach to wealth preservation. Thousands of investors are no longer relying solely on gold price appreciation. They've become Monetary Metals clients to accumulate more ounces of gold. Learn how to earn yield on gold paid in gold at monetary-metals.com forward slash americano. Yeah, but it's very different though, Freddie. When Obama was negotiating in 2015, you could argue that Iran was at its ascendance. It was starting to get massive shipments of Chinese and Russian arms. It was the terror of the Middle East. When you talk to people in the Middle East and said, well, you can go into Iraq, you can go into Afghanistan, you can go, but do not touch the Iranian. They are crazy. They've killed over a thousand Americans with shape charges. You just don't involve them. And then Obama, to be frank, and I think that's documented in various memoirs, had an idea that was completely not just dangerous, but so idiosyncratic that it didn't make sense. He really believed that an axis in Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza, Yemen was going to empower, almost as if he was a community organizer. The Valerie Jarrett, Ben Rhodes, Obama notion of let's build up the traditional enemies, because maybe they're not enemies. The people that we really shouldn't trust as much are the Gulf monarchies and Israel. And if we can create a tension between the two, kind of a play one off, balance the power, then we can come in and adjudicate. When the people in the Green Revolution were out in the street at a million strong, Obama didn't say a word for 10 days, almost as if he was on the side of the Iranian regime. And we know they gave $1.7 billion. But the main difference is, if you look at Iran then, when Obama made that deal, and you look at Iran now with a supreme leader dead, his son somewhere, 80 key figures dead, no air force, no air defenses, essentially no Navy. We don't know how many missiles are left, but probably 10%. That could be a large number, but it's still 10%. They were in a very different position. And as far as the nuclear enrichment, it's pretty much under pickaxe mountain or the other four door, wherever they are, it's sealed for now. And that wasn't the case then. So they're in a much weaker position and we are in a much stronger position than we were in 2015. If you said to Obama in 2015 or Ben Rhodes or Valerie Jarrett or any of them, they're breaking the agreement. They're lying to us, which they were. You need to have an airstrike. They wouldn't have done it. They would have said, they have Chinese air defenses or it's too dangerous. They've got 200 combat aircraft, but we can't do it. If you said that today, they could do it in 10 minutes. It's a very vastly different landscape. So you're suggesting that after the midterms, the Trump administration may well feel emboldened to strike again militarily if necessary against Iran. I do. I think they will try to keep a lid on things by doing what we saw two weeks ago, tit for tat. So if tomorrow they send six missiles into Kuwait and they may well do that, then they will probably hit a bridge or do something, but it will be disproportionate, but it will be a one day off and they will try to keep a lid on it. Keep the straight open, keep gas prices, keep negotiating. And then once the midterms are over, for either way, if he loses or wins, then if he loses, then he's going to be, the whole Trump family will be subpoenaed. We'll have impeachment hearings for two years and he will rule like Obama did. Obama, when he lost the Senate and the House, he said, I have, as you remember, a phone and a pen and I'm going to rule by executive order. And that's what he'll do. And Obama, remember, he bombed the last day in office in Libya and that seven month circus really led to nothing other than death and destruction. We really never knew whom we were bombing. I think we do in this case. So I think there's a way to resolve the matter. The only problem that I have with the administration is twofold. They keep confusing military defeat with strategic victory. And that's not always the same. They have done so much damage. It's a natural thing to say, what can they do? Well, they look at survival as victory against this huge superpower and many in Europe do too. And they haven't explained the difference and why we don't have strategic victory yet, because it's a self-limiting process. If they wanted to have, they can instill a level of damage as they did with Milosevic and get some victory out of it without getting on the ground. The other thing that looms very large is people keep saying they have a whole agenda on the right and the left. Well, we have to make sure they don't give any money to any of the Arab terrorists. That's fine. We have to make sure that all their missiles are surrendered. That's fine. We have to make sure they have no drone factory. That's fine. But what you're talking about is regime change to ensure that. And we were collectively 30 years, 20 in Afghanistan, 10 in Iraq, 7,000 American dead, 53,000 wounded, $2 trillion. And we achieved regime change for a while. And we did micromanage the Afghan economy and military and society. And we did micromanage and affected all of those things we wanted, and they were not lasting. They had some effect, positive maybe in Iraq, but nothing at all. In fact, it was a complete humiliation in Afghanistan in 2022. So they don't want, we're not a colonial power and Iran is not a protectorate. And when people keep talking about, well, we're going to do all these things to them, they're either going to have to put ground troops or they're going to have to take out the regime. And there's no public support for any of that. But you can by air power achieve the two primary objectives that they don't, that they don't have nuclear weapons and that they have the Strait of Hormuzo. You can do that by inflicting enough damage on their fleet, on their missiles, and on their leadership and on their grid and everything. And I think they'll do that after the midterm. Do you think then that the midterms were always the flaw in the project that was Operation Epic Fury? Because it seemed to me like Trump made a bet that perhaps the regime would collapse. He certainly talked about four weeks, four to six weeks, I think he was saying in the early days of Operation Epic Fury. Well, I think if your point is that with his recitation that he took out Soleimani that nobody thought he would do, and it was a clean operation. And then he allowed them to have a performance art volley of a few missiles to save face. He took out Baghdadi in a day. He bombed ISIS into oblivion. He got rid of the Wagner group, killed 200 Russians. Second term, he jawboned Panama to getting the Chinese out of the exit. The Maduro thing went like clockwork. If you're suggesting all of that gave him the impression that this huge country in the Middle East could be handled the same way, I think I would tend to agree with you, that there was a sense of optimism that they were in the driver's seat. And then I think that was unfortunate because when they said a week or two or three, they raised expectations so high if they had have said from the beginning, Iran is one and a half times larger than Texas. It's got a fanatic government. It's a very sophisticated society. It's got 93 million people. It is the terror of the entire region. And we're going to be very careful, but somebody has to bell this cat. Seven presidents said that they could not enrich uranium and they're closer than ever. So we're going to do it and we're going to hope that we can do it with air power, but hang on. If they had have done that, but I think they were so optimistic given the thing, what you were implying and given the record of these one-off clean campaigns, which were quite extraordinary. And I think it still can be, if history looks back five years from now and said, there is no Iranian nuclear program and the straight is open, but it's kind of irrelevant now as far as oil export is because there's other avenues to export it out of the Gulf. And the United States lost 13 soldiers in doing this, or maybe a few more tragically, if they do it. And it was about a hundred billion dollars that will be. And you set the stage for some type of internal dissension or regime change, which I know when the Berlin wall fell, some of those Warsaw pact nations were not freed for months. And the Soviet union took two years. It's kind of an aftershock and we've put a great shock to that system, but we don't know what the people are going to do when they come out and they see the actual damage. And we don't know what the damage is because this is the first time since Serbia, we don't have any ground troops and we don't have any embedded reporters and we can't depend on the Iranian media. And it could be a lot worse and people will discover it's a lot worse and they will be very angry to have to rebuild. We think they're humiliating us. I think the people of Iran, when they come out, will think that their regime has been utterly destroyed, humiliated and weak and impotent. And that was their signature that they were strong and could embarrass people, but they don't even have an air force anymore. And the Chinese, they were bragging for, I went back and looked, I didn't realize how many Western reporters said you can't get into Iranian airspace because they have sophisticated Chinese state-of-the-art defenses. The Israelis went through them and shredded them in one day. So it's, I think there's been somewhat a distortion of the coverage and that always happens with a controversial figure like Donald Trump. Well, I mean, after about five to six months after the June strikes, the summer strikes on the nuclear facilities, there was a popular uprising against the government. And there is a theory that with a little bit of time now, with a lot of its infrastructure knocked out, perhaps a lot of its ability to suppress dissent limited, that Iran could have another popular uprising if given a bit of time now. Yes, I think so. I think part of the problem we have is with Turkey. I think there was a discussion to help arm the Kurds or at least use the Kurds to transmit arms to the people. And Turkey, which is, it's a NATO member, but it's our only Islamic NATO member. And Mr. Erdogan is a very fickle character. And he reportedly said, you're not going to arm the Kurds or you're not going to use them to convey arms. I think that was a mistake. I think we could have armed the Kurds at least to protect themselves on border towns. And they could have smuggled some weapons in, or at least given the appearance they were to worry the regime. But in any case, and then the Gulf states, remember, they have 600 combat aircraft. They have more aircraft than Germany, the UK and France together. And we're told that many of their aircraft are piloted by veteran European and American pilots. That's the rumor. But they haven't really played a muscular role. They bragged that they were doing covert operations, but the Israelis have 300 combat aircraft that were constantly in action. We have about 1000 in that region, we can go up to 2000 probably. So you can imagine that if everybody got on board, you could do even more damage very quickly. So I've never seen a conflict with such asymmetries and resources as this one. It's not like Iraq or Afghanistan. And you can do a lot of damage to Iran. And the other thing very quickly is, what was the self-restraint? Yes, it was the midterms, it was public opinion, it was fear. But it was also this idea that the revolt you mentioned, or the quasi-revolt, struck them as that it was going to snowball. So the last thing they wanted to do was hit the type of targets that we did in Serbia, or against Saddam, or in Afghanistan, because the people would resent it, or they'd rally to their government. But most importantly, when they took over, they would be completely destitute. So we haven't even hit cargo. People have said, why didn't you take out the ports or the derricks, not the fuel lines or the storage, but just so you can't unload oil. You could do that in a day without one guy stepping foot on the ground, and they didn't do that. So my complaint is mostly the communication, because it's not a simple matter, and it's a very difficult thing. And if we had had this discussion five years ago, and I said, the United States is going to go in and bomb Iran, and with the Israelis, I think you would have probably said, Victor, that's an absurd notion. Iran is a very volatile, powerful country, and it's the source of mischief, and there will be repercussions all over the region. But the world is changing, and nobody talks about the geostrategic. I don't think anybody thought that Hamas would be non-existent. The Houthis are pretty quiet. Hezbollah is troublesome, but they've suffered a lot of damage. China has lost cheap, sanctioned oil, both from Iran and Venezuela. I think it's very worried about drone warfare, the idea of sending a fleet across the South China Sea, when the United States now is going to build 330,000 drones, they say, within 12 months. Ukraine is building a million a year, and we look at what's happened to Russia. That whole scenario has radically changed. Now China needs 11 million barrels a day of oil, and they're importing 30% of their food. They used to be self-sufficient. Their fertility rate is 1.0. This idea in America, well, you've empowered Russia and China. I don't think that... Russia's lost over a million, probably a million and a half casualties, maybe 800 fatalities, and there's no way out for them without being humiliated. Well, another geostrategic element that has changed a lot in the last five to 10 years is America's working alliance with various Gulf state countries. I mean, Saudi Arabia has long been an ally, but I think there's probably a more practical alliance in the region now. The UAE, Qatar... I mean, arguably, one of the things that's annoying a lot of Israel supporters in America at the moment is that America, the Trump administration, seems to be listening to the UAE and Qatar and perhaps Saudi as much as it does Israel in terms of resolving this conflict. I think that's a legitimate concern. We had J.D. Vance, and I know him and I like him, but I thought it was very naive to say that we are dealing with moderate elements of the Iranian government and we can see a normalization of Iran without regime change. I just don't think that's possible. And I think that was shot down the next day when they were talking about jihad and etc., etc. The other thing I don't think we appreciate is, well, Israel is proximate and small and we're distant and large, so they have obviously different concerns. And we wouldn't have been able last June to fly B-2s from the United States and for 30 minutes drop bombs and get home without any interference if Israel hadn't have taken a great risk and taken out all the air defenses for us. And they have been... Most of the regime's leaders were not taken out by us, they were taken out by the Israelis. Only they have that intelligence. And so while we have differences, I wish that people would say that 80% of our strategic goals are parallel or the same, and more importantly, we have to give some credence to the fact that that's the only consensual government in the entire 500 million person Middle East, and we don't seem to... We seem to be forgetting that. The idea that they led us into this war has been very common now on the right, and it's got a lot of anti-Semitic overtones here in the United States that somebody who's sneaky is running all of this stuff. I don't quite understand that because they keep saying, people in the administration keep saying, some of them, neocon, neocon, neocon, but all the so-called Jewish neocons that I know that were supporting the Iraq war, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, David Frum, Elliot Cohen, they are all adamantly pro-Biden people. They're now pro-democratic, they're pro-left, they've been really critical of this war. Bill Kristol endorsed Mondani for New York mayorship. I don't really know any Jewish neocons anymore that are on the right that are for this war. There's none that I know of, and yet they keep saying this bogeyman, and they really don't exist, and so I don't know quite what the strategy is. I was a little worried maybe you saw Marco Rubio, he was kind of stone-faced when this was going on and the photo op, and that kind of worries me a little bit, but I do think they feel they can finesse it through the midterms where they might have a 40-60 shot of 50-50 of saving the house, and then they will unload if the regime is still in power, and by mean finesse, very carefully replying to their transgressions over the next four months without crashing the price of, and without escalating the price of gasoline or dooming themselves in the midterm. That's the plan as I detect it. I wanted to ask you about J.D. Vance's role in this, and also Marco Rubio, because a lot of people who support the war or supported the operation are calling it, Mark Thiessen is the person I'm thinking of, called it Vance the Vance deal. There appears to be a push to tie the deal to Vance on that side, but also Vance himself seems very keen to bet his political future, whether he had any choice in the matter I don't know, on making this deal work, and even Donald Trump has joked I think that if this doesn't work I'll just blame it on J.D., which I think that does seem likely to happen. His political fortunes will rise or fall with the outcome of this deal, would they not? Yeah, it will. I think it'll depend, and I think he's been put in an unfair position, but I do think the position that he was put in did not necessarily require that explicit attack on Israel that we heard. I mean when he said they can't kill themselves, or when they talk about blowing up buildings, they don't quite realize that Hezbollah's got fiber optic kind of retrograde drones that are immune for the time being from being jammed, and they're killing one or two Israeli soldiers almost every day, and they're still northern Israel's uninhabited, and how do you fight that other than going to the source of where they are made or stored, which are usually in basements and individual buildings deliberately dispersed in Shia neighborhoods, or even non-Shia, and when you look at the actual damage when he said they're blowing up whole buildings, they're actually not. I looked at about 10 of them, they're hitting top floor, bottom floor, but they're not collapsing anymore the entire building, but then they need to tell the Israelis either for the price of peace, you're just going to have to keep you know a hundred thousand people out of the border, and you're going to have to take some hits, or I don't know what else they can tell them, because there's no other solution other than a disproportional response to what Hezbollah is doing. I don't think anybody in America believes that Trump said and tomorrow there's going to be no violence, and the first person who starts the violence we're going to deal with, nobody believes that will be Israel. Most of these things are they're disproportionate by design, but they're reactive, and I don't think that came across in J.D.'s condemnation of Israel. I don't know why the Lebanese coal area was in the memorandum of understanding, other than Iran insisted on having this one surviving patron that they can exercise influence on the United States. They feel that they only have Hezbollah and Israel left, those are the only two cards. Presumably the Iranians are betting that they can use the Lebanon issue to drive a wedge between Israel and the US. Yes, I think that's the whole purpose, and it's so blatant, but it's also been very effective, because what Tucker Carlson said the other day that he had, he was very complimentary of J.D., and he for the first time since his rupture with Trump, he said something to the effect that Trump is now coming around, meaning he's thinking, I suppose, by delegating J.D., and it just seems there would have been a way to negotiate with the Iranians without criticizing Israel as the instigator or the problem or the person that would disrupt the negotiations. And there was a way of suggesting that we're going to deal with them, but we're going to be realistic rather than to say we want to remake the whole Middle East and these people, there's moderates within this regime. There are moderates, no doubt, but they will probably be killed if they made a deal, as long as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard isn't there, or the theocrats. You can't deal with that country when 70% of the people who hold the power are fanatical. And then looking at Rubio, I'd say both Vance and Rubio trod quite carefully around the war in different ways as it was going on. Now, Vance is obviously very involved in the peace process. Rubio seems to be removing himself from it pretty much as much as he can as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Yes, I think they looked at the polls, and the polls from their preliminary in-house polling were accurate, that as soon as you said a deal and there was not going to be a war and the street would be open, the latest poll I saw was 55%. And as long as that was true, and as long as gas, I think yesterday it was $73 a barrel had gone up down from 95. Nobody predicted that except Trump. As long as that is true, I think they're going to pursue that, and that they're going to have J.D. as the lead person. But when, I don't think it's if, it's when they flagmentarily start to break any concession they gave, whether before or after the midterms, I think you'll see Rubio play a more prominent role. I don't think he wants to be involved as much as, I'm speculating, but I really don't think he wants to be involved in a discourse that suggests that Israel is part of the problem and that we can work with this group that we're talking to in Iran for a regional peace that will last. I don't think he believes that, but I'm just speculating. But I think what Trump is doing is, to be frank, seems like he has two rival schools, and he's backing off and letting them each ply their goods and see who wins in a weird, you know, in a reductionist fashion. Well, one thing that might emerge from this is that if the Iran issue is even fixed in a short-term sense, and you know, for the next few years, Iran is less of a more urgent headache for kind of American geostrategists, the Trump administration can then start looking to what it's doing in other parts of the world, and you've already mentioned China. I think it's fair to say the Trump administration has put a lot of pressure on China as a geostrategic rival in the last two years, particularly in Latin America, Central and South America, where this weekend we saw another success for a right-wing candidate, a new Colombian president, and there does seem to be a sort of strange realignment happening to the right in American politics, as America has removed a lot of Chinese left-wing influence in that part of the world. Yeah, and I think you will see there's a chance in Peru there might be a right-wing government emerging, and maybe, who knows what will happen in Cuba, but that government is weakened and on the ropes, and the Panama Canal is under different auspices, and there is a Monroe document again. The other thing is that when you look at the US, I mean, Pete Hexeth is a controversial figure, but if you just sort of suspend your attention, everybody's attention, to what they say about him, and look at what he's actually done, he came into office short 45,000 troops, and everybody said it had nothing to do with DEI, but of course it did, so we have all of our branches of government have a surplus. We have more Marines, Air Force, Navy, Army than we actually, we exceeded our recruitment goal, but more importantly, we're going to go up to five percent of GDP, but when you look how we're going to spend it, I don't think Northrop, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, all of the standby huge conglomerates that basically say we've got a 75 million or 150 million dollar fighter, here it is, and then cost overruns, and we have these, you know, these priceless fighters that we can't afford to lose when the whole method of fighting has been changing, so now we have small startups in Silicon Valley, often run by left-wing people, Anduril is a good example, and they're making drones and hypersonic missiles very cheaply, and the whole emphasis has changed from a few very expensive sophisticated weapons to a lot, it's kind of like the war production board in World War II, we helped win World War II, not because we had the best, necessarily the best weapon, you could argue that Russian tank was better than the Sherman, perhaps, but we made, you know, we made 50,000 tanks, and we made, we produced 95 percent of the aviation, we had a larger GDP than all of the belligerents on both sides put together by the end of the war, and I think we're getting back to that idea that we have to produce a lot more weapons, and they have to be practical, and pragmatic, and good enough, but they don't have to be so sophisticated that if you lose one, it's very dangerous to the budget of the United States, and that you can see the media, we've lost some F-16s, and Apaches, and the headlines are $40,000 Apache, or $75 million F-15, so we're in a good direction there, in larger senses, I think a lot of people have missed what's going on in the United States, we've had massive deregulation that's kicking in, tax cuts, the deficit is the biggest worry, of course, but for all the failures of DOJ, they have trimmed the federal workforce by about 350,000 employees, the border is absolutely secure, I live not too far, you know, six hours from it, I can tell you it's just made a whole difference in my life, when I go to emergency room, I don't have 150 people in the emergency room, when I've had this illness, if I go there, it's orderly now, the way it used to be, and our fertility rates back up to 1.7, we're the largest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization, we're up to 14 million barrels, they say 15 to 16 million barrels, and I think that if we had this conversation five years ago about AI, space exploration, satellites, robotics, bioengineering, crypto, we would be very pessimistic about the United States and the West versus China, now I think in all of those fields, we've either achieved parity, or we're ahead of them, and there's a new sense that people who were on the left, very wealthy people like Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, just to take a few examples, they don't really want to be political anymore, because I think under the Biden administration, they felt that there was a command economy, and they were going to pick winner, and the message that they're getting is, I don't care about your ideology, I don't care what you do, all I want you to do is make United States preeminent, you go to it, and we'll back you, and that's how he flipped Elon Musk, and they flipped almost all of those people, Mark Andreessen, Ben Hor, there's a whole David Sachs, and they've really turned that talent in a way we did in World War II with William Knudsen, and Henry Ford, and Henry Kaiser, we just let them loose, and so I think in terms of rare earth minerals, we're really accelerating, there's big mines opening up in the Northwest, in Nevada, big lithium mine in California, of all places, they're pressuring to drill off offshore oil in California, we have the fifth largest oil and gas of all the states, and we use almost none of it, it's still there underground or under the sea, so there's things going on in the United States that I don't think people are appreciating, but they're quite dramatic. I mean, you talk to people inside the administration more than I do, but there was a sense that I picked up among people involved in it, or involved in the celebrations of America 250, this semi-quintessennial, I always say it wrong, that this birthday, this American birthday, would be a moment where a kind of anti-declinist message, anti-declinist vision of America, a more upbeat, positive view of America could be promoted and reinforced, and as you say, the declinists are slightly on the back foot in many areas, because an innovative market economy still exists in America, and that is crucial in defense and tech, and the future. And even our universities, your Times educational supplement that rates top universities, top 10, I think they were Cambridge and Oxford, but other than those, the other eight were all American, and I looked at the top 50, I think 40 of them were American, and they're not because of our English departments, trust me, or our classics departments, they're because of STEM, you know, science, technology, engineering, and math, that have been untouched by, for large part, some, but not all, mostly untouched, and our professional schools like MBA programs, medical school, so we have, and I think these reforms in education, whether it's stopping the grant gouging, or racial preferencing that's going to end, and looking at the endowments, looking at the student loan, they're all going to be, they're all going to be very valuable to the universities, even though they're fighting them, kicking and screaming, and I think even the tensions between Europe have been somewhat misread, partly because of our fault, we tend to lecture, but if you look at what they're actually, in the American press, and what people on the conservative side, they're not critical of Europeans, in the sense that they feel that we inherited our institutions from Europe, and that we went through this derangement syndrome earlier than you did with DEI, and maybe we exported it to you, but then we took remedies to stop it, and we think that it got carried away in Europe, and by that I mean the Germans have ruined their competitiveness, maybe the UK with the green agenda, that when you had natural fossil fuels, your borders were open, you had a little bit more problem than we, because not all of our immigrants were Muslims, in fact a small number were, we had a lot of people who were Christian and Catholic, which were easier to assimilate, but when we, and your fertility is about 1.3, I think, but the point I'm making is, there's a sense that in the United States, and I think it should have been communicated better, is please don't make the mistakes we did. We made the mistakes, and now the recovery is very difficult, very controversial, the left is very dangerous. You people, we thought you were more sober than we were, so we want you to succeed, and we want conservative governments to restore your preeminence. I think that's, that'll be very healthy, I think, for the relationship between Europe, you have 450 million people in the EU, and then there's Britain, and I would, I think most Americans on the conservative side want to see a partner with Europe that says to us, you know, sort of, we need to do this in this place of the world, how can, you know, like the Falklands or something, you know, this is out of hand, can you guys help us, or we want to go to, whether it's right or not, I don't, I'm not getting into the specifics, but when France and UK basically said to us, we need to do something about Gaddafi, I wasn't for that, but the idea is we stepped up, and then the same thing about Milosevic, we stepped up, and that type of cooperation is only possible when Europe is strong and sometimes takes the initiative. Well, I think that's a very good point. I would also add that, I think, with regards to Britain, our sort of habitual self-hatred, we sometimes encouraged Americans to criticise us so that we could feel bad about ourselves, and then we would get resentful that you had criticised. But, lastly, Victor, I want to ask about, go back to those midterms and to Trump's legacy. If the Republican Party lose the House, as you suggest, there'll be impeachments, there'll be a lot of restrictions on Trump's ability to act. They needn't necessarily restrict him entirely, but how devastating do you think it will be for his legacy, for the ending of his presidency, if he doesn't hold the House in the midterms? It depends on what type of candidates the Democrats, I don't think it's going to happen, but if a guy like Plattner or Tallarico were to win their Senate seats in Maine and Texas, or Al Saeed in Michigan, these are democratic socialists, but that's a euphemism. They're socialist communists, to tell you the truth, or they've got positions that are so absurd, or they have particular personal stories. I mean, when you have Al Saeed saying, you have to be very careful about celebrating the death of the Supreme Leader because my constituents might take offense at that. And then we have 20 different excuses from Plattner, why he has a Totenkopf, 3rd Panzer Division, SS Totenkopf, Verbonne at the death camps, and Tallarico's, everything he said doesn't make sense about his own personal history or story. If these people win, then I think it makes a big difference because they will, we know now that the Democratic Party is ossified and calcified and the people like Nancy Pelosi, but now Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, they all will gravitate where they think the future and the power is, even though it's not there. They don't look at McGovern's radicalization of the party that led it to over the cliff and second biggest landslide, I think, and Nixon's victory in 72. They don't think that's going to happen at all, but I think it might. But the point I'm making is, if you get a very radical Democratic win, then they will impeach him twice. Nobody had ever done that before. They will impeach him three times just to eat up time. And they will bring in Don Jr., Eric, they'll bring in the whole people, and they're going to ask him, here was your net worth when the president came into office, and here's your net worth now, you explain it. And that's going to be, even if they haven't done anything wrong, I don't think they necessarily have, but there's a lot of people who have become pretty well off, and that's going to cost them a fortune in legal bills to explain that. It's going to be a circus. So that will hurt him. But in some sense, because of the closeness in the House today, and he has about eight or nine apostates in the House, and now he has four or five apostates in the Senate, he's doing pretty well, and even though the judges are mostly cherry-picked to stop him, the lower district justice, he's doing pretty well. Most of the things he's done have been by executive order. They haven't been, I wish they were by legislation, but that is impossible. And all the people that everybody said that were going to stop him, that they were Tucker Carlson, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Thomas Massey, or Megyn Kelly defected, they haven't had that effect that everybody thought they were. Thomas Massey was the heartthrob of the libertarian right, and now he's just disintegrated. Marjorie Taylor Greene is kind of a tabloid figure now. Candace Owens is still trying to convince us that Mrs. McCrone has a phallus. And Tucker is now having Graham Plattner, and he still believes that Russia is on the side of morality in Ukraine. So Trump is, he's been a beneficiary of what I'm saying, is he has a unique ability to drive his opponents in and out of the party crazy, and then they react to him in such a way that's counterproductive. Even the lawfare, I have this book Counterrevolution coming out, and I could not believe the polls, they're almost identical to the indictments that he had, 91 indictments. Every time he got indicted, he got either a mugshot or he went to a small store in New York, he said, I'm in New York, they want to put me in jail, I might as well come up here and talk to you people. Anytime they called him garbage, he got in a garbage truck. Anytime, he had a masterful way of bringing out the worst in people that were his opponents. It was almost as if he was saying, go in the ring with me and get dirty and wrestle me, but I've already been in the ring, you haven't, and what you say about me in crude terms doesn't affect me, my supporters, because they know I'm crude, and I express crudity, but your supporters have pretensions that you're sober and judicious and you play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, so when you be like me, that hurts you more than it does me, and that seems to be true. That's one of the secrets of his success. Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it's always a great honour and a pleasure to have you on this podcast. Thank you very much indeed for coming on.