September 9, 2025 • 59 mins
For the past dozen years, Hoover’s online publication Strategika has examined contemporary conflicts and national security challenges by assembling academics of varied thought to re-examine past struggles. On the occasion of its 100th issue, historian Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover’s Martin and Ilie Anderson senior fellow and the man tasked with bringing the publication to life, discusses the institution’s growing commitment to the study of history (Hoover’s having a compliment of historians rivaling that of world-class universities) and how a Strategika-like approach explains complicated conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Also discussed: how Victor’s passion for military history stems from his male ancestors’ involvement in two world wars, his thoughts on how best to introduce young learners to classical opuses, plus the problem of university history departments discouraging intellectual diversity.
- Celebrate Strategika’s 100th issue titled, The Current Status of Military History, by exploring the full collection of essays here.
- For more episodes of Matters of Policy & Politics, subscribe here.
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>> Bill Whalen (00:00):
Foreign August 14, 2025 and welcome back to Matters of Policy and
Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast.
I'm Bill Whalen.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution.
If you're watching this onHoover's YouTube platform,
you probably notice we're doingthings a little differently today.
(00:22):
I'm not sitting in my officeat the Hoover Institution.
I am instead high aboveStanford University.
I'm on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower,looking down on Stanford, so to speak,
the Stanford University campus.
But I'm here today and
I have the high honor privilege ofbeing joined by Victor Davis Hanson.
For those of you who don't know whoVictor Hanson is, let me briefly explain.
Victor is the Martin and
Eli Anderson Senior Fellow hereat the Hoover Institution.
(00:43):
You've probably seen him ontelevision at some point.
Perhaps you listen tohis eponymous podcast,
which is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
What else about Victoria?
Author of numerous books,he is a prolific columnist.
I can't escape his presence, which I'mgoing to ask him about in a minute here.
What I call Victor Nation hereat the Hoover Institution.
Victor is the chair of Hoover's Workinggroup on the Role of Military History and
(01:04):
Contemporary Conflict.
He's a participant inHoover's Applied History Working Group and
the institution's Global Policy andStrategy Initiative.
He is also responsible for the creationof a publication called Strategika,
which recently just hit a milestone.
It's now published.
It had 100 issues published.
We're going to talk about as well.
Victor, it's great to see you.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (01:23):
Nice to be here.
Thank you.
>> Bill Whalen (01:24):
So I don't know if I told you this before, but wherever I travel,
I can't escape you.
Now, part of this is my own fault.
I listen to your podcast,
which is out I think three timesa week if I'm not mistaken.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (01:33):
Four. >> Bill Whalen
My God, you're busy.
But when I travel,
I have encounters with Victor DavisHanson's second hand encounters.
So this began a couple of Novembers ago.
I was flying back from Florida and
sitting next to me on the planewas a childhood hero of mine,
a baseball pitcher named Jim Palmer, WorldSeries champion Hall of Fame pitcher.
I went into complete fanboy mode with him.
(01:55):
It was ugly from his standpoint,I imagine.
But at some point he turnedthe conversation and said,
what do you do for a living?
Said, well, I work at a thinktank at Stanford University,
the hoover institution.
Pause.
1, 2, 3.
Do you know Victor Davis Hanson?
Last Saturday, Victor I was on a rideto the airport In South Carolina,
Don the driver.
Shout out to Don if you're watching.
Don asked me the obligatory,what do you do for a living?
(02:16):
Think tank, Hoover Institution,Stanford, 1, 2, 3.
Do you know Victor Davis Hanson?
So this is all secondhand stuff.
So what is it like foryou firsthand to be VDH and
probably get encountered in airports andhave groupies come up and talk to you?
Yes, but 1 out of every 10 is not so nice.
>> Bill Whalen (02:34):
Right. >> Victor Davis Hanson
we're in polarized times.
And, you know, I.
I was pretty much left alone untilmaybe three or four years ago.
I think has a lot to do with a podcast.
That genre has taken off in a waythat maybe even being on Fox.
But we do get people that show upat our house out in the country.
(02:55):
That's kind of ambiguous.
And I've been swatted by the sheriffs.
They had a call that there was an armedintruder, which was false, of course.
Yeah, I've had all my bankaccounts looted by hackers,
so there's a downside to that, too.
(03:16):
But most people, nine out of 10, are veryfriendly and, you know, very friendly.
Right.
Let's talk about strategic adventure,but let's back up for a second and
let's talk aboutthe Military History Working Group,
which you chaired from the beginning,and take us through how this began.
My understanding is that this goesback to about what, 2012, 2018.
(03:38):
The late John Racian, who wasa director of the Hoover Institution
before Condi became the director.
He brought you in the office andhe talked about this idea.
Was there a void in thiskind of history at the time?
Was nobody doing this, or was Johnthinking more course correction in terms
of offering a kind ofalternative approach to history?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (03:56):
Well, this was in the period before we had the luminaries
like Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson,Stephen Kotkin, Frank Decoder.
There was a few of us, but not very many.
And John casually said to me, we need.
He appointed me in 2002, butI didn't arrive till 3, 4.
(04:19):
And he said, you don't have a program andyou're writing a lot, but
this is called the Hoover Institutionon War, Revolution and Peace.
And we have nothing on war.
And I'd like you to start a program.
And I don't want opinionjournalism politicos,
and I don't want academics only.
(04:40):
I want you to get a broad cross section.
So we discussed it.
Generals, admirals,active retired military diplomats,
former government officials,Hoover fellows, as many as we could.
Right.From different fields, but
had an interest in history,public intellectuals.
And he said,I don't want them all to agree with you.
(05:03):
So I we had paleo cons,neocons, neo isolationists,
interventionists, liberal people.
And then he said,now we have to pay for it.
So you and I are going to go traveling.
So for a year we traveled,flew all over the country, partly for
(05:24):
official Hoover business, but partlywe were raising money for the Hoover,
the new program on military history andcontemporary conflict.
So that's how it started.
And then I said, well,we have these task forces,
but we don't have a lotof online magazines.
(05:45):
So that was before reallyonline had taken over.
So he said, okay, you go ahead and do it.
And then he said,you're going to need an assistant.
So He gave me an assistant and
David Berkey came on two years later.
>> Bill Whalen (06:02):
I think David Burkey is a research fellow.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (06:05):
He's a research fellow.
>> Bill Whalen (06:06):
He has a background in classics.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (06:08):
And he's.
Yeah, I have a prejudice forclassical philologist.
He has a PhD from Yale in Classics.
And then we brought Bruce Thornton,who has a PhD in classics from UCLA.
And now we have another research person.
Morgan hunter has a PhD inclassics from UC Berkeley.
(06:29):
And then Barry Strauss is a member.
He has a PhD in classics from Yale.
So it got kind of out of hand,the classics lobby.
But I was a good.
So it was very lively group.
And no sooner had John said this than hejust happened to come in the one time.
There was a real altercation.
I mean, a fiery exchange.
(06:51):
We had some people who werevery strong about the Iraq war.
We had some people that said it wasan ungodly disaster that morphed into,
well, you've never served the military andyou have.
And it was really kind of intellectual.
But John walked in right during that,and he called me in and
(07:12):
said, no, no, no,nothing goes leaves your room, but
you have to be a stronger force andmoderate it.
So we were civil, right?
And that was the only time in,since the life of it,
in the 13 years that Ihad encountered that.
It was just the time that he came in.
>> Bill Whalen (07:29):
And I think John had two very important mandates, Victor.
One was he wanted an assembly of opinions.
He didn't want me.
He didn't want four peopleall saying the same thing.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (07:37):
No, he did not.
>> Bill Whalen (07:37):
Oring it's repetitive.
And secondly, I think he told you,keep it simple.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (07:42):
He did.
He said, we don't want.
When you have the strategic,what are you going to do?
And I said, well,we'll have a historical backgrounder.
That meant if it's on the Ukraine war,somebody would do 2,000 words on
the history of Ukraine, andthat's borders and the diff and then some.
Someone.
Then he said, well,can't we get different views?
(08:03):
I said, yes.
So we'll have someone whothinks we're doing too much,
someone thinks we're doing too little.
And then he said, well,we have polls at Hoover.
We have all.
So I want a poll.
So we did the poll and we had research.
So we kept that model that he andI worked out every issue,
all until this current 100 issues.
And then he said something I'd forgotten.
(08:25):
He said, I don't want it this morbid.
And the problem with these task forces orthese sinners four is they start out and
they're all excited andthey have a journal and
then it's supposed to be out every monthand then it's every three months and
then three years later it's gone, right?
So he said, if you're going to do this,as long as you're at Hoover,
(08:46):
this is going to be sustained.
So I said, okay.
And it has.
>> Bill Whalen (08:51):
How'd you come up with the title?
How'd you come up with Strategika?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (08:54):
Well, that is a Greek word because obviously strategy
is the English derivative,but strategos in Greek
means a general with a krather than the Latinized C.
So then the neuter plural is general,like things.
(09:14):
It doesn't really meanan ancient Greek strategy, but
the things that generalsare worried about.
So we just use the neural plural,Strategika.
And I searched all over the Internetto see if anybody had ever used that
term as an English word with the K there.
And I hadn't found anybody.
So, and he liked it.
John did.
>> Bill Whalen (09:34):
How do you come up with topics, Victor, for each issue?
Is it Newtonian?
Does an apple land on your head?
Do you have some epiphany whenyou're working the farm where.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (09:41):
Well, what I do is David, who is the managing of her.
He calls me and says,now we gotta get the issue.
Victor, what do you want to do?
And then I ask him, can you.
I give him three or four ideas.
And I said, now I want you to search andsee if there's anything tangential.
We've done on that before becauseit's been a hundred issues.
(10:02):
So he comes back and
then the second criterion is toparticipate in the big session.
Everybody has to submit articleson three or four topics.
So we'll.
If we have visitors to just to come,you have to do that.
So we might have a corpus of 80.
So then I try to see how during the yearI can get a topic that also can draw on
(10:23):
Those to be add ons.
But usually I try to do two things.
One is, have we discussed this before?
And two,does it have contemporary relevance?
And we tried it.
I've looked back at them.
We don't really repeat unlessit's something like the Iran,
a nuclear bomb or that has changed soradically over the years.
(10:48):
But we do that and then we gothrough the names of everybody and
I say these people andthen David will tell me,
well, this person hasn't contributedenough or this is too much.
So then we whittled them down.
And then I do the poll, I do the researchquestions, and then he and I decide
(11:08):
of the backgrounder and the pro andcon, which person's gonna do which one.
And then he is in chargeof contacting them.
And sometimes I do, but he does it mostly.
And then he gets the illustrationsfrom the archives, posters and things.
And then his job as managing editoris to make sure that it's on time.
(11:32):
And then I'm working on the next issue,the topic, the people who should be on it.
And then we have a research fellow, BruceThornton, who edits them along with David.
So it's three of us produce it.
>> Bill Whalen (11:47):
Issue one of Strategika, Victor, came out on April 1st, 2013.
Do you happen to know the topic?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (11:53):
No.
>> Bill Whalen (11:54):
Bashar al Assad.
What do we do with a problemlike Bashar al Assad?
This is the beauty of history,because here we are now, 12 plus years.
Later.>> Victor Davis Hanson: And there's no.
Where's Mr. Osad right now?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (12:05):
Well, he's dead and
his son is somewhere practicing asan ophthalmologist in Russia, I'm told.
>> Bill Whalen (12:11):
Right. So times change.
It's very funny.
I do the Goodfellow show, which Eric, bythe way, long overdue for an appearance.
My friend, we always have had the fearof running out of things to talk about.
But I don't know, Victor, if we're inthe age of hyper history, if you will, but
maybe it's just a function largely ofDonald Trump and the sleepiness and
the previous president,but it seems like news and
history are just kind of like watercoming out of a fire hydrant.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (12:33):
It is.
When I started studying history,
it was the disagreements in historywere not as sharp as they are now.
They were all within certain parameters,
but there was not people who said,two big things have changed.
One is that you accepted evidence andyou could disagree about the evidence,
(12:57):
but you were trained as a historian, so
you knew you had the tools to decidewhether the evidence was valid or not.
Today everything is out the window.
You can bring in anything andthere's no rules.
Second thing is, andthis has kind of been good,
I think is if you in the early days ofthe Internet had a historical problem and
(13:18):
you googled people,it was mostly academics,
people that had PhDs in history orclassical language, something like that.
Today it's what they used to call, when Iwas growing up, Luce libre a free for all.
You know what I mean?
It was just anybody can get on andif they can explain a topic better or
they're more photogenic or they're betterlooking or more they, they'll get that.
(13:43):
And then the good side of that isyou get fresh blood from people
with different experiences.
The bad side of it is there'sno commonly agreed tools.
So if you're in classical history,for example,
before you can write your thesis,you've got to take 12 seminars.
(14:03):
You have to know French andGerman, a reading ability.
You have to be fluent in Latin and Greek.
But more importantly, you've had to be.
You've had to take courses in andbe examined in on your PhD.
So you have to know if you havea passage with Xenophon, is it more or
less reliable than Herodotusvis a vis Thucydides?
(14:25):
Where did Thucydides have as sources?
Can you trust them?
What about late authors like Plutarch,who.
And it was called this fancyGerman word quellenforschen.
Find the sources of the extant history.
And that gave everybody legitimacy andcompetency.
Today I'll see things written onthe Internet about ancient history that
(14:49):
are just absurd.
And the person has no idea thatthis particular source that he's
using is completely fabricated ornot to be trusted.
So that's the problem.
But the Internet, it's still a 51%proposal that finally you'll have,
people will say,wait a minute, this is wrong.
(15:09):
And then they'll pile on.
And so there is some kind of audit,but it's a much wider open experience.
>> Bill Whalen (15:15):
It's a busy time to talk about war.
There's obviously Russia and Ukraine.
There is the situation in the Middle East.
There's always the threat of somethingmaybe happening between China and Taiwan.
There are conflicts in Africathat don't get much attention, or
there's a potential for something tohappen in a place like Venezuela.
Let's look at a couple of theseconflicts to make sure and
put them in a strategic lens, if you will.
(15:36):
First of all, Russia and Ukraine.
So we're doing this podcasta day before the summit, or
whatever they're calling it now in Alaska,between Putin and Trump.
If he were to analyze the Russia-Ukrainesituation, Victor, and
did it through Strategika,where would you go?
Would you go back to 1979 and Afghanistan?
Would you go back to 1939 and Finland?
(15:57):
Or would you go back maybedeeper into tsarist history?
Because.
Because one thing we know about Putin,he sees himself where he wants to be,
he wants to be a czar.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (16:04):
Well, everything, there is a reason for everything.
Even if the reasons are evil orthey're wrong.
So what we do is.
So Russia has beenaggressive toward Ukraine.
Why is that?
And we go back to, let's say, ancienthistory, and you find out that Russia had
territorial interest and had absorbedparts of Ukraine which over their history,
(16:29):
off and on Crimea,I think since 1787, the Donbass.
How did the Donbass become Ukrainian?
That was a inter Sovietjurisdictional matter.
And then you find things, andthis is the discussion in Strategika,
as somebody will say, well, wait a minute,Western Ukraine was part of Poland.
(16:51):
And it was Roman Catholic andPolish-speaking and for a thousand years,
till 1939, when the Molotov-RibbentropPact, Russia invaded Poland from the east.
They annexed it, Stalin would notgive it back at Yalta or Potsdam.
And sothey ethnically cleansed everybody out and
(17:12):
it became a Soviet state,all of present day Ukraine.
And that territory was compensatedby ethnically cleansing 13 million
Germans out of Pomerania and East Prussia.
And that was New Poland.
And then that makes it.
The boundaries become more fluid andambiguous and
(17:32):
the historicity becomes more.
Doesn't mean you'll cometo a different outcome.
But we try to do that withall of these and we try to,
because strategic, it does meangeneralship in these discussions.
What was Putin thinking?
So somebody asked me the other day, are wegonna get a deal between Trump and Putin?
(17:53):
And I said, if you're Putin,this is obviously a big mistake.
You've lost a million dead,wounded, missing or captured.
You went in there saying youwere going to do certain things.
They were never going to be in NATO,Ukraine.
So you can say you got them out of NATO,but they never were going to be in it.
Nobody had the military wherewithal toexpel you out of the Donbas or the Crimea.
(18:18):
You had some legitimacy on your claims,so then the question was,
at what magical point westward,where will you have the DMZ?
So when you're thinking from Putin'spoint of view, at what point do I
have to go west so I don't get shotby the military or the oligarchs?
(18:38):
Because this was a disaster and
I've got to get something morethan I had before I started.
And then you start to see what he,what his motivations will be.
And at some magical point, he will grab itbecause he thinks he can take it back and
say that I enlarge Russiaon the Ukraine side.
It's in the Constitution,they're not allowed to give up territory.
(19:01):
So they're thinking,did we ever have the ability to
get back Crimea on our own or Donbas, no.
Do we have the ability to stopan overextended Russian army, yes.
Where is the mostrealistic defensible line?
And between those two lines, that'swhat it's going to be negotiated on.
>> Bill Whalen (19:22):
Issue 21 of Strategika, February 2015, What Makes Putin Run,
your author suggests the following.
One, tougher sanctions against Russia,two, lethal aid to Ukraine,
and three, a PR war against Russiahighlighting Russian kleptocracy.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (19:37):
Yeah. >> Bill Whalen
eerily predictive.
Yeah, we have very brilliant people in that group.
One of the things I thoughtwas very important.
I don't want to mention names,but John Racian said to me,
this person used to work at Hoover.
I had to let him go becausehe was too controversial.
I want him back.
(19:58):
This person.
You bring the names.
This guy's kind of crazy, butif you can handle him, go ahead.
Right.And so if you look at the original group
and the people that are in it, they allhad a reputation for being very brilliant,
somewhat individualistic,somewhat pariahs or mavericks.
(20:21):
And so we tried to bring in.
And then he said to me,you've been writing.
At that time,I think I'd written 20 books.
He said, what's your attitudeabout people who've attacked you?
And I said, I don't care.
I said, great, so bring in people.
So the first meeting,I looked around, I said,
that guy wrote an unfair review of me.
(20:41):
That guy shouted at me at a department.
That guy was in an elevator with me andwouldn't speak.
So they're all in there, and
that was kinda good becauseit was very lively then.
>> Bill Whalen (20:53):
Bunch of mad monks.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (20:54):
Yes, everybody.
And then people would come to me andsay, he's on the.
On the same menu asshe's on the same menu.
And they have both been very unfair.
They screamed at me at a conference,and I said, that's the rules.
If you want yes men in an academicconference, we can do that.
(21:14):
But this way everybody knows theycan say whatever they want, and
you can't repeat it outside the room.
And it's been very lively, andwe've had a lot of guests,
a lot of the donors come andlove it, but it's getting.
We have to make a decision because westarted with a 20-person twice a year.
We had 20 in one group and20 and then it got to be 40.
(21:36):
And so I think now we have 90 to100 people come by invitation and
it's a huge group.
And we've had people say this is great,it's getting publicity.
And we've had people say welost the one on one intimacy.
And back and forth.
So we're always trying to calibrate it.
>> Bill Whalen (21:54):
Yeah, let's use the strategic approach, Victor,
to unpacking the Middle East.
And I don't know if you could do this infour episodes or four issues or what,
it's complicated.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (22:03):
Yeah, we always start.
>> Bill Whalen (22:04):
How far back do you go?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (22:05):
Yeah, we say, you know, in military history, so
we always start with the history of it.
>> Bill Whalen (22:10):
Right. >> Victor Davis Hanson
that would be the 47 war,the 56 Suez Crisis War,
the 67 Six-Day War, 73 Yom Kippur War.
And why and how has Israel been able todefeat countries that have more assets,
population, amount, everything?
And you can disagree about, well,they had the US as a patron,
(22:35):
or they had the Arab world was,we start with this lack of symmetry.
And then we go to the, the historical.
What is the fight over?
Is it the fight over Israel'sexpanded beyond its 47 borders,
or is it to destroyIsrael river to the sea?
So we're trying to find motive, thehistorical arguments that each uses and
(23:02):
then why on the battlefield are somesides successful and some aren't?
And that's a matter of their spirit,their training,
their munitions, their weapons,their patrons, their generalship.
And so we tried to look at what we'retrying to do is do it systematically.
So I, I've been to all of thesemeetings except one where I was ill.
(23:26):
And as chairman, I don't thinkI've had anybody just go up and
say I hate this person orI don't like this and then spout off.
They would be cut atthe knees by everybody else.
So there is a group a sense that if youmake a statement, you have to back it up.
And then on anybody whopresents a paper that I ask,
(23:47):
I also choose who's going tobe speaking at the strategika.
And when you do that, they expect toughquestions and the questioners expect.
Them to answer without getting angry.
And I think that's very important todaythat, you know, you can say, well,
somebody's destroying democracy.
(24:08):
And you say you need tocalibrate things like that.
What do you mean exactly?
Give me an example.
So if somebody says the Palestiniansalways miss a chance for peace or
Israel's always taking territory at ourmeetings, people will say, hold it.
Tell me exactly what you mean.
Give me an example andshow me where the evidence is.
All right, that's what makesit pretty successful group.
(24:31):
Let's stick with the Middle east for a minute, Victor.
So after we do this podcast,
you're going to be speaking to the HooverInstitution's summer policy boot camp.
This is a gathering of collegekids who come here each year and
they spend a week at Hoover andthey listen to you and other fellows and
the idea is to whet theirappetite about public policy and
see if this is a coursethey want to take in life.
And it's really just a fantasticprogram when you get down to it.
(24:53):
I had dinner with a few of thesekids last night and as for
their impressions on talking to otherkids and one thing they said was, boy,
Israel has just really gotten thrownunder the bus with a lot of these kids.
In other words,they just hear from their professors,
Israel is an aggressor, Israel isoppressive, Israel engages in genocide.
It's a very one sided conversation.
(25:13):
This raises a question to me, Victor.
What about taking somethinglike strategika and
trying to apply it to schools,for example, AP History kids.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (25:24):
Yeah, well we,
that was another thing thatcame up at the founding.
So John said,how are you going to get the message out?
Right?So one thing we do is we have something
called History in the news andwe pick a person each week and
then they take a contemporary event,Ukraine, Pakistan,
(25:46):
India, and they try to locate itin history, not its history, but
if there is a dispute over an island orthere's a border dispute,
they try to show you how borderdisputes in history have been solved.
Then we have something called Classics ofMilitary History where we have about Now,
(26:07):
I think it's 78, but we,and we pay for all this.
So I have to raise the money sothat the donors,
I'll say to them,if you want to get great historians,
and I have to pay them above market rates,which is over a dollar worth.
So then I'll open it up and say,who wants to do a military classics?
And then they'll write a book review andthen that's catalog and
(26:30):
then we have essays in military history.
So just this week, for example,
Scooter Libby wanted to showhe's a member of the group,
that strategy has not been emphasizedenough in recent administrations.
He gave an example from the 1990s,when rather than reacting to a problem
(26:51):
on the horizon, they would anticipatewar game and give a strategic analysis.
So then when George H.W.
bush or Reagan came in, they'd say,okay, what's on the shelf?
How do I deal with this to be prepared?
So we have those periodic essays andwe're thinking about how to reach,
as everybody is, younger people.
(27:14):
I'm on the board of the Bradley foundationand we oversee Encounter books.
And the best selling bookright now is Land of Hope,
recent textbook on American history.
And they've got a new big project, theGolden Thread, for high school students,
AP students on Western Civ.
And I've been looking at how they dothat and the level of writing and
(27:38):
the project, andit's been very successful.
So we're thinking of projectsthat would introduce
military history to younger people.
>> Bill Whalen (27:49):
There's an audience out there, no question.
I was a way too serious young boy.
I remember being at summer camp and beingcompletely wrapped up in the Red Badge of
Courage, for example, which,by the way, leads me to something,
classics of military,something Hoover does.
You wanna explain what that is?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (28:03):
Those are works by famous generals.
Churchill's memoirs,Montgomery's War As I Knew it,
by George Patton,timeless philosophical treatises that have
something to do withstraddling Machiavelli.
Right.
He wrote a book on.
I mean, a treatise that, we don't reallythink much about military history.
(28:27):
Classical historians think about history.
It starts with Herodotus,
but it's not that it's synonymouswith military history.
It is military history.
So Thucydides follows the first historian,Herodotus, Persian War.
He writes about the Peloponnesian War.
Xenophon continues the warswith sparta down to 362.
(28:49):
So in the beginning, history wasmilitary history because the ancients
thought that this was the one eventthat was preeminent in people's lives,
that you risk life or death.
People do things onconditions of battle and
war they usually don't do in real life.
People work harder to produce goods andservices to fuel the machine of war.
(29:12):
All of these reasons.
And it's been, I think, because of Vietnamand the rise of university history.
95% in most polls ofhistory departments and
humanities in generaltend to be on the left.
The left tends to believe that humannature is malleable, changeable, and
(29:33):
can be perfected andtherefore war can be eliminated.
I think there's more peace studies,conflict resolution programs and
military history program.
There's changing that.
Military history is renewing its cachet,but
it's not like it was in the 1920s or30s or the 19th century.
>> Bill Whalen (29:51):
Children vary, Victor, in terms of their intellectual curiosity,
their maturity and so forth.
But what do you think is a good age tointroduce a child to military history and
what would you put in front of them?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (30:01):
I always think that it's good to start with primary
sources so that they understand.
So I've noticed that childrenlike things like Plutarch's lives
because live of Caesar, life of Pompey,life of Alexander the Great,
life of Pericles, andbecause they're very.
(30:21):
Plutarch is just engaging anda person 10 to 15 could actually read and
they're all easily.
And then they hear and see incidents orthey, they, you know, if you read
Pericles, he'll mention the PeloponnesianWar or he'll mention his ancestors and
Plutarch will mention the ancestorsthat fought at Marathon.
So they get that hook and then they can.
(30:44):
Can go on to secondary literature.
I.
I had.
The person I was named afterwas a Marine who was killed at.
In Okanawa, and my father flew on40 missions on a B29 over Tokyo.
So they would talk andthen I would go through and look at my f.
He didn't want me to look at it,but I'd sneak in and
(31:05):
look at his photo album of the squadron.
I'd look at the mission statements.
You know, you have 16 hours.
You're going to go work COB, you're goingto arrive at 1am you're going to drop 11,
you're going to encounter Zeke fighters,this kind of stuff.
And then I would read secondary stuff.
Certain books, though, captivated me.
(31:27):
I was a little older when I readJohn Keegan's the Face of Battle.
That made a big impression on me.
Quentin Reynolds had, I don't knowif you remember, but you might.
In the 60s, there was something calledthe landmark histories that were for
children, landmark books.
And Quentin Reynolds had onecalled the Battle of Britain.
(31:50):
And I read that andthen I got hooked on it.
And Walter Lord had a great book.
He was sort of a general,a general journalist called.
Called Incredible Victory at the Battleof Midway and things like that.
So I was always trying to read about it.
And I got interested becauseI would at Thanksgiving or
(32:14):
Christmas, we had my grandfatherwho had been gassed at
the Argonne forest World War I andone was disabled.
And then my aunt's husband waswounded in the Illusions campaign.
And then my father had,as I said, I was on a B29.
And then our cousin was withPatton in a tank in third Army.
(32:39):
And then there was Victor,who wasn't there.
They talked about who had been killed.
And then there was Belden, andhe had suffered dinghy finger fever and
he was disabled.
And maybe at 9 o', clock,after the turkey they'd had, you know,
they were all talking andthey would kind of say, well,
the Philippines weren't that important,or Patton was better.
And they would start kidding each otherand I would kinda sneak under and
(33:03):
listen to them.
So that World War.
And then my father would,you know, roust us out the longest.
In the 60s, I think it was 12,the longest day is we're going
to take you to the movies or12 o' clock high is on.
So we.I watched all the war movies with my
father and he dragged me toall of the Fresno theaters.
>> Bill Whalen (33:25):
I was lucky, Victor.
My father served in a peacetime Navy,which gave me a early love for
naval history.
Going to see ships.
But I grew up in Arlington, Virginia.
Wow.Right across the river from Washington.
I had two things.
One, he would take me toCivil War battlefields.
When I was nine years old, he.
Gave me a book on the Civil.
War that was about that thick.
It was like a bible, but it showed everybattle, not in, not gory detail, but
(33:46):
showed maps of the battles andwhere soldiers were and things like that.
My God, it was fascinating to read.
I just could not put that down.
But then secondly, he would take meacross the river into Washington and
we go to the Smithsonian andwe see history come alive.
Which leads to one of the controversiesdu jour with Donald Trump right now, and
that is the Trump administration wantingto re examine the presentation of history
(34:07):
at the Smithsonian Institution.
Victor, as you know, since youfollow Donald Trump very closely,
like all Trump controversies,it starts with this enormous explosion.
My God.Donald Trump wants to take down
the Smithsonian.
What's he doing?
When you actually exhale andlook at what he's doing,
he's asking a very honest question.
You go and you look andexhibit A, Smithsonian, but
there's a little placard inthe placard explains what's going on.
(34:29):
And over the years thesehave been twisted.
So that example, if you seean exhibit on why people fled Cuba,
it fled Cuba because of Fulgencio Batista,no mention of Castro, for example.
So it's a skewed view of history.
My question to you, Victor,is really, how did this happen?
How did we let historydrift in that direction?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (34:49):
You're right about Trump.
He believes he's waging a cultural,social, economic and
political counter revolution.
So he feels that he's,
he's at this point in time trying toreverse something that was politicized and
he thinks he's bringing it back tothe center and it's gone way over.
(35:09):
So you mentioned the Enola Gay or thedropping atomic bomb at the Smithsonian.
That was very controversial when they.
But it was all negative.
But it was just to kill Asian people orto warn the Soviets or it was Cold War,
but didn't get to the realheart of the matter.
And I've written a lot aboutthe heart of the matter,
(35:29):
whether it was saving an invasion orCurtis LeMay was not going to be able to
burn down all of Japan as he could havevery easily had they not dropped the bomb.
But in any case,I think part of the problem was, and
we mentioned this earlier,that the museum shows the government's,
(35:50):
whether it's aid programs like USAID,
basically people draw on academics andthese are people
with PhDs that are in researchuniversities for the most part.
>> Bill Whalen (36:05):
Right.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (36:06):
They're not people from where I taught at Cal State Fresno
that are teaching eight classes a year andwith a divide of very low income people.
So you're talking aboutthe faculties of Penn, Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Berkeley,Stanford, and they tend,
not because of what Victor says,but on data and they self identify.
(36:29):
90 to 95% consider themselves left.
More importantly, they have developedin the academy the philosophy
that the society at large wastraditionalist, conservative, reactionary.
So the church, the community,the small town attitude,
(36:52):
they were all indoctrinating people and
conservative values andtherefore they could react.
Whether that's true ornot, I'm not sure it was.
But they are.
If you talk to them, they'll say,well, well, we're 95% left wing,
but we have to be because you havethe corporation saying one thing, you have
(37:13):
the church saying one thing, you have thegovernment and we are voices in the will.
That's how this wounded Fawn.
It was worse than just they were partisan.
They felt that they werefreedom fighters or
they were victims of a oppressivesystem or they were truth tellers.
There was a messianic idea.
>> Bill Whalen (37:31):
When you get to it, the 95% problem, Victor,
that's just one of two things.
Either, number one,you have a different point of view.
You're not being admitted into the system.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (37:39):
Yeah.
>> Bill Whalen (37:40):
Or secondly, you're perhaps not bothering to want to get into
the system because you think myviews aren't going to be welcome.
Why do I wanna be?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (37:47):
Especially with tenure,
tenure was created to create intellectualdiversity by not punishing people.
But the people who inaugurated it,1910 to 1940,
didn't realize that you have to get tenureand to get tenure is a politicized.
And I'm speaking to someone inthe California state system,
(38:11):
was probably on 15 to 20hiring committees, and
I was on maybe 10 tenure promotion,retention committees in which
people would say openly, that guy,I don't want to get tenure.
He's too right wing or he's conservativeor I don't think he's up on LGBTQ issues.
(38:33):
And then you would say,would you please quantify that?
I want to know,what do you think of this book he wrote?
What do you think of theseteachers that didn't matter?
And that filters out to people sothey say things to themselves.
I'm going to suppress or not beexplicit about my political views or
my views of academia or how I do research.
But once I get tenure, I'm going to be in.
(38:56):
Once a person goes down that road andmakes compromises,
they'll do it after theyhave tenure just for other.
Other incentives.
Well, I wanna be a full professor.
Well, I want to getthe Scholar of the Year award.
Well, I wanna get a merit pay,and it never stops.
So it's.
That was what was I liked about John Racinwhen he told me about strategika.
(39:21):
Get people who disagree with each otherand get eccentrics I can remember.
I won't mention his name.
I bought one person andhe said, victor, come here.
That's a little too far.
This guy came in my office and screamedand yelled at me, and I had to let him go.
And now you're humiliating me.
And he started laughing.
But go ahead, bring him in.
(39:41):
Who turned out to be oneof our strongest people.
>> Bill Whalen (39:43):
In case you wonder why John had a considerable stash of wine
in his office at all times.
It's probably my mouth cycle.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (39:48):
Our M&Ms, yeah.
>> Bill Whalen (39:49):
We've talked about war victory.
We've talked about history.
Let's put the two together now,
a column you recently wrotecalled War against history.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (39:56):
It used to be that if you had a historical question.
Question Japanese internment, sayWorld War II, dropping the atomic bomb.
You could legitimately disagreeabout history, your interpretation.
But you did agree thatthere were certain facts.
>> Bill Whalen (40:13):
Right?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (40:13):
You could say the Roosevelt administration was for
the internment and the McClatchynewspapers were for the internment.
And Attorney General Warren,before he was governor, signed the order.
Modern, today's history said, who are youto say that that's a legitimate source?
So if you look at the 1619 project,right, that project said, well,
(40:37):
we're saying America started whenthe first African American slave landed.
And who is Gordon Wood to say otherwise?
So they challenged the basis of history.
And they did it on two levels.
They, they being the left said,the fact that you have a PhD or
you've written all these books oryou're well reviewed or you're,
(41:01):
you know, you won the Bancroft Prize,that doesn't matter.
That's just artificialstandards that were.
You created,people like you created to oppress us.
The other more fundamental was,well, everybody has their own facts.
So, you know, with that common,
your terrorist is somebodyelse's liberation fighter.
(41:24):
So the patriarchy,the white race, the males,
the heterosexuals,they've all created these artificial
standards of what qualifies as history orfacts.
And we're going to blow them all up andsay that anybody can say anything.
And that is filtered down.
(41:45):
So you have.
People on the Internet will say,well, Churchill's a terrorist.
Show me the evidence he's a terrorist.
Well, Hitler wanted to.
After he took over France, and Francehad fallen, he gave a peace offer and
he didn't want to do it.
And then he had a bombing campaign and
he ordered British bombersto bomb the Black Forest.
(42:09):
Terrorism.
And you say, well, wait a minute.
What did Hitler want from Britain?
They weren't going to give backany of the conquered territory.
And they had bombed Coventry andmore importantly, the Black Forest.
There was an arms depot in the BlackForest that they tried to bomb with a,
(42:31):
a very rudimentary incendiary.
So you get into the facts, butI see Candace Owens, for example,
playing a historian now saying that Ms.Macron is not a female.
>> Bill Whalen (42:46):
Careful, it's a family broadcast.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (42:48):
Yes.
And.
Well, how do you know she,she's not, she's not male.
Well, birth certificate.
Well, you could forge a birth certificate.
So it's always the evidencedoesn't matter.
And that's what's new.
And that was.
Came from the postmodernmovement of Derrida Lacan,
(43:08):
all of the French postmodernists Going and
they basically said thatevidence doesn't matter.
So critical legal theory, critical racetheory, critical historical theory.
The only reason that it's againstthe law to steal sneakers is because
a bunch of wealthy white privilegedpeople don't steal sneakers.
(43:33):
So then they made an arbitrary lawthat says it's against the law.
And you say, no hope,because you can't steal anything and
have the elements of a lawful society.
>> Bill Whalen (43:41):
Go back to Churchill for a second victor.
Fewer world figures have been morelionized in this century than Churchill.
Actors have won Oscars playing Churchill.
He's always heroic in terms of standingup during the Battle of Britain.
He's sympathetic in terms ofgoing through his struggles,
be it in the 1930s,trying to be the voice of the wilderness,
his own struggles with depression andsuccess and so forth.
(44:02):
He's always a sympathetic,compelling figure.
And yet here he is now being thrownunder the bus by would be historians.
Is it why?
Why did they do that?
Is it simple?
Just the shock factor that my guy.
How can you say thatabout Winston Churchill?
Are they just doing to get attention?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (44:16):
There's a number of undercurrents and neither the left nor
the right has the monopoly onthis crazy revisionist right.
So from the left they're saying,well, he was a colonialist.
So he talked about the fourfreedoms with Roosevelt and
(44:36):
he was going to have all ofthese post war free elections.
But did he give the Indiansfree election in India?
Did he give the people in Burma?
He was a colonialist,he was a 19th century colonist.
And you say, yes,he was a man of his times.
But when you see what he wrote aboutpeople who were colonial people,
(44:56):
he was very empirical and empathetic.
Then you have people on the right who say,well, why did we go to World War II?
Hitler, he had grievancesfrom World War I.
And after he, he took most of Europe,he was saying that he was going to.
It was kind of like the eu.
It was just going to be underGerman control rather than
(45:17):
the Anglo Saxon control.
And then you got the sinister partwho say, you know, it was the Jews.
The Jews were the ones who were doing it.
They were the ones that goteverybody in the war because Hitler
didn't like the Jews.
Big deal.
And you mentioned the Holocaust.
Well, how do you knowthe Holocaust took place?
That was just what you said.
(45:37):
It is.The Germans said it didn't take place.
And so you've got the right saying thatthere's some kind of conspiracy or
cabal that sucked us in.
The other reason is People look, andthis was the Pat Buchanan approach.
They look at the end of the war andthey say, well, you know, 1939,
Hitler went into Poland,so we were going to go in.
(46:00):
The British were, and by extension us andfree Eastern Europe from Nazism.
And what did we do?
We allied with these commies that killed20 million of their own people, and
we ended up ensuring that Eastern Europewas under Soviet control and
they were no different than Hitler.
And if you really didn't like Hitler,then you couldn't have liked Stalin.
(46:24):
And when Hitler invaded Russia,why did we give them Lend Lease?
Why don't we just letthem kill each other off?
And if you try to say,well, at that point, the,
the immediate threat to Britainwas Hitler, not Russia.
They were helping Hitler.
But it's, it's something.
And the other thing finally,is Churchill wrote so much.
(46:46):
He wrote on every topic.
He wrote on race, he wrote on colonialism,he wrote on Islam over 60 years.
So it's like having a tape recorderof anybody and you can go back and
find anything in isolation.
So I see this now about.
Churchill will say, well,if you go to the River War,
he said this about Islam when he was 26 orsomething.
(47:10):
And so.
But they don't look at the totality of it.
It's kind of like Lincolnwhen Lincoln would say, well,
I don't think bringing slaveshere was a great idea.
But you look at whatFrederick Douglass said about, for
all his flaws and imperfection,he was about the best you could get.
And he praised them after his death,but doesn't matter.
(47:30):
So we had this idea,if you're not perfect, you're not good.
And may we apply that to history?
>> Bill Whalen (47:36):
So I see two challenges here.
Victory.
One is the information age,just the control of information.
Information gets out of control.
Rumors like Mrs. Macron spread around.
Michelle Obama goes through this.
Other figures, he says,Jeffrey Epstein, for example.
It's just this conspiratorial, what yousee is not necessarily true mentality that
the Internet, I think, pushes along.
(47:56):
Second question, Victor,is what constitutes a.
A historian.So
we were talking off the airbefore we started this.
I have a very bad habit.
I stay up way too late at nightswatching YouTube videos on history.
A lot of World War IIvideos in particular.
It's addicted because there's justconstant video after constant video of
about 30 to 45 minutes.
They're well produced a lot by Brits,so the accent kind of draws you in.
(48:18):
But I find myself having to do one thing,Victor, when I see something,
I start to watch and I stop and I want togo on the Internet and look up the fellow
who produces it to see what his backgroundis, to see if he's a historian.
And that leads me to this question,Victor, what is a historian?
Do I have to have a PhD inhistory to be a historian?
Do I just have to be very learnedon a topic to be a historian?
(48:39):
Do I just have to have street smarts andknow how to produce and think and
write to be a historian?
How do you define a historian?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (48:45):
You're right, we there are great historians that do not
have PhDs and do not work in theuniversity and don't want a university.
But what happens like Cornelius Ryan, hewrote the Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far.
These were socalled popular histories, but
they were meticulously researchedin a journalistic fashion.
(49:07):
And what happens is over time,I don't think you can tell right away, but
over time and space, there's a differentcriteria that people can use.
Did professional historians thatwere academics that are nipped,
what were their attitudetoward the history?
So you can look at book reviews and youcan shield them out and say, well, he did
(49:27):
a hatchet job because he's left wing andhe's right wing or right vice versa.
But you can get a consensusthrough book review.
You can get a consensus, believe it ornot, through book sales.
That can help as well.
You can get a consensus on howthat book was used by others.
So I'll give you an examplewhen I see we're
(49:47):
looking at military historians right now.
So I can go to Google Scholar and
I can find out how many timesthis historian was cited.
And then I can use common sense and say,well, he was cited because he wrote this
popular book or he wrote more booksthan this great magnus opus of this one.
But you can use that.
(50:09):
And then you can look at up on the booksales, you can look at awards,
you can look at the book reviews andall that together.
You can get a consensus thatthis person is a good historian.
So it's possible.
So if I Take a historian, just tomention a Hoover Fellow, Andrew Roberts.
>> Bill Whalen (50:32):
Yes.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (50:33):
So I look at all these different things.
Well, he's an Oxford DPhil, sohe went through that process.
Not that that is essential, butthat's one thing to consider.
And he wrote this book on World War II,the storm of war, the history of
the English Speaking Peoples, andthe Churchill biography and the Napoleon.
So he was prolific.
(50:53):
And then I go to look at the books andthey are documented.
And even if they weren't documented,
cuz John Keegan never usedfootnotes very often.
But you can see whether he isintellectually honest and he is.
And then you can see,do people agree with you?
You can look at the book reviews andthen you can look at the book sales and
how many books are still in print,are there paperback?
(51:16):
And out of all that criteria, you,
you can come to the conclusionhe's a great historian.
>> Bill Whalen (51:21):
All right, final question for you, Victor.
So, Strategika 100 issues.
Congratulations.
What else are you thinking interms of projects for Hoover?
In terms of history?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (51:29):
I'm 71 and I, I would like to institutionalize
strategic in the military history.
So right now we're lookingat a military historian.
But it's sodifferent than when I first came here.
I was the only military historian,the only classicist.
(51:51):
Norman Inmark was a great historian.
He wrote on history.
We were very fortunate.
But when Condoleezza Rice came in,she put an emphasis.
So all of a sudden you've got StephenKotkin, the world's great biographer of
Stalin, you got Neil Fergusonwrites on everything.
You've got Andrew Roberts,you've got Frank Decoder on communist.
(52:13):
So you've got all these great historians.
And so I would like to, first of all.
And we have H.R. mcMaster, of course,who's written history and lived it.
And we have the history project,that's Kotkin and Neil's project.
So we're getting a nucleus.
So according to my small station,I would like to see, and
(52:34):
I think it's happening, but not due to me,but I have a small part in it,
that the Hoover history faculty,even though we're not assigned to teach,
is really, I think right now the besthistory faculty of any university
in the United States by the amount andthe quality of scholarship.
(52:54):
And I'd like to see us build on that sothat Hoover would have a name that
if you want to get a PhD in history orjust study, you can come to the Hoover.
You can look at the archives.
We have that and Eric Waken's doinga great job as the archivist,
especially getting collectionsof military history.
But you can talk to these people,you can meet them,
(53:16):
you can go to some of their seminars.
We tried to open it up to the public.
We're trying to get theseaccessible journals online.
And so right now I'm trying to thinkof someone I think that will take over
the project when I retire and expand itand do a better job than I have done and
then expand it like you mentionedthat we would try to have.
(53:41):
And I think Dr. Rice is doing that,especially in her tenure,
that we're reaching out andtrying to communicate the Hoover
message to younger people through videos,documentaries.
And so I think it would more organizedway of getting our strategic out.
(54:02):
And I've even thought of ita simplified form for high schools.
But every time I do that,I get emails from kids that read it.
So we're fulfilling part of that function.
I've been doing a lot of podcasts and
one of the things that we dois Saturday's History of War.
(54:22):
So I started for four years going fromMarathon all the way up to the Middle
east wars and now I'm doing bigconflicts of the 20th century.
I did that.
I'm going to start next time munitions andweapons cross time and
space revolution and arms,starting with the hoplite warfare,
(54:45):
going all the way into AI anddrones and things like that.
So we're always tryingto think about not just
increasing the quality of our research,but also disseminating it and
having the idea that if it camefrom the Hoover Institution,
it's a brand that you can trustin this chaotic world out here.
(55:07):
We're not going to have people fromthe Hoover Institution that get on and
say, well, I think Hoover's.
I mean, excuse me, I think thatChurchill's a terrorist without
we don't mind doing discussingwas Churchill illiberal or
should he have demandedunconditional surrender?
Why did he consider maybe the useof poison gas, things like that?
(55:32):
So I think widening andbroadening this history initiative that
has really taken place,I don't want to underestimate that
because I've been here 22 years plus andin the last five years,
history has expanded more than itever has in the cumulative years.
(55:53):
So it's really the big unknown storyabout the Hoover Institution that
it's on a mission to.
To bring in the world'stop historians here.
>> Bill Whalen (56:02):
Victor, I have greatly enjoyed this conversation,
I haven't talked to you for a while,so I've missed talking to you.
We need to talk about California atsome point, a lot's going on here.
You know, I have a shared passion aboutour beloved governor, among other things.
I'd love to go over to boot camp with youand talk to you in front of the kids there
and ask just how you budget your time,because all those kids are.
They're budgeting themselves throughGoogle and things like that.
(56:23):
I've always been fascinated aboutthis because you run a farm and
you're teaching at Hillsdale College andyou are finishing a book on Donald Trump.
You have another book out on Hoover,by the way, you're writing your columns,
you're doing your podcast, you're doingyour TV hits, and the hits go on.
And I know all this,
Victor, because I'm on the thirdfloor of the Hoover Main building.
And around the corner for me is yourassistant, the lovely Megan Ring.
(56:46):
And every day, Megan has oneof those voices that carries.
I can hear her trying to schedule you, andit's like watching somebody trying to cook
about 10 things ona stove at the same time.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (56:56):
Yeah, well, I'm very lucky.
I think we have Morgan Hunter,David Burke, and Megan Ring.
And I couldn't do it without them.
And then as I get older,I'm not a model for anybody.
My daughter called me other day andsaid, you've had this surgery.
You've had nine or 10 of them.
(57:17):
What is wrong with you?
You don't sleep.
You don't do this.
You don't see this.
And when I look back, you know, I did somereally crazy things when I was younger.
I traveled.
I think I had a rupturedappendix in Libya.
I had a torn ureter in Greece.
I've had malaria in Egypt.
And I look back at all the crazy thingsI did and I don't sleep that much.
(57:40):
I only sleep about four or five hours.
So I'm not a model.
But I was always curious.
I think part was growingup on a farm in isolation.
I had wonderful parents.
They had.Actually.
My mother's grandfather mortgagedher his little farm of 128
mortgage it to send his daughtersto Stanford in the 1930s and 40s,
(58:02):
and then to professional school,law school and graduate school.
Everybody thought they were freaksamong the farming community.
But from an early age,we didn't have any money.
But my mother would always andthey all came back to Selma.
They didn't.
But they'd always say, you have to read,read, read, read, read, read, read.
But you have to work, work, work, work.
(58:23):
And they'd say,you got to go out there and
I want you to pick 200 trays onthe grapes today, every day.
And you say, but I have to read.
I can't work.
No, no, you're going to work andthen you're going to read.
So it was a good balance.
I was very lucky.
>> Bill Whalen (58:37):
Well, Victor, thanks for all you do for the Hoover Institution.
And thank you for reminding us that it isformally the Hoover Institution on war,
revolution and peace.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (58:45):
Thank you, and I owe a lot to John Racing for that.
>> Bill Whalen (58:48):
Strategika.
You can find it online atthe Hoover Institution.
The URL is hoover.orgpublications Strategika.
Let me repeat that one more time.
Hoover.org publications Strategika.
Sign up for it.
And while you're doing that,sign up for Classics of Military,
which looks into great books devoted tomilitary history that I mentioned, and
(59:09):
Philosophy of War, which is a weeklycolumn that explains how studying the past
helps us understand the complexitiesof the present and the future.
And if that's not enough, sign up forthe Hoover Taylor Report,
which keeps you abreast ofeverything that Victor is up to.
And you know what?
You can read all thiswhile you're listening to
the Victor Davis Hanson podcast.
How's that for multitasking?
That's it for this episode onmatters of policy and politics.
Thanks for watching.
(59:29):
Hope to see you soon.
Till then, take care.
And again, thanks for joining us today.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (59:33):
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
Foreign August 14, 2025 and welcome back to Matters of Policy and
Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast.
I'm Bill Whalen.
I'm the Virginia Hobbs CarpenterDistinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism
here at the Hoover Institution.
If you're watching this onHoover's YouTube platform,
you probably notice we're doingthings a little differently today.
(00:22):
I'm not sitting in my officeat the Hoover Institution.
I am instead high aboveStanford University.
I'm on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower,looking down on Stanford, so to speak,
the Stanford University campus.
But I'm here today and
I have the high honor privilege ofbeing joined by Victor Davis Hanson.
For those of you who don't know whoVictor Hanson is, let me briefly explain.
Victor is the Martin and
Eli Anderson Senior Fellow hereat the Hoover Institution.
(00:43):
You've probably seen him ontelevision at some point.
Perhaps you listen tohis eponymous podcast,
which is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
What else about Victoria?
Author of numerous books,he is a prolific columnist.
I can't escape his presence, which I'mgoing to ask him about in a minute here.
What I call Victor Nation hereat the Hoover Institution.
Victor is the chair of Hoover's Workinggroup on the Role of Military History and
(01:04):
Contemporary Conflict.
He's a participant inHoover's Applied History Working Group and
the institution's Global Policy andStrategy Initiative.
He is also responsible for the creationof a publication called Strategika,
which recently just hit a milestone.
It's now published.
It had 100 issues published.
We're going to talk about as well.
Victor, it's great to see you.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (01:23):
Nice to be here.
Thank you.
>> Bill Whalen (01:24):
So I don't know if I told you this before, but wherever I travel,
I can't escape you.
Now, part of this is my own fault.
I listen to your podcast,
which is out I think three timesa week if I'm not mistaken.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (01:33):
Four. >> Bill Whalen
My God, you're busy.
But when I travel,
I have encounters with Victor DavisHanson's second hand encounters.
So this began a couple of Novembers ago.
I was flying back from Florida and
sitting next to me on the planewas a childhood hero of mine,
a baseball pitcher named Jim Palmer, WorldSeries champion Hall of Fame pitcher.
I went into complete fanboy mode with him.
(01:55):
It was ugly from his standpoint,I imagine.
But at some point he turnedthe conversation and said,
what do you do for a living?
Said, well, I work at a thinktank at Stanford University,
the hoover institution.
Pause.
1, 2, 3.
Do you know Victor Davis Hanson?
Last Saturday, Victor I was on a rideto the airport In South Carolina,
Don the driver.
Shout out to Don if you're watching.
Don asked me the obligatory,what do you do for a living?
(02:16):
Think tank, Hoover Institution,Stanford, 1, 2, 3.
Do you know Victor Davis Hanson?
So this is all secondhand stuff.
So what is it like foryou firsthand to be VDH and
probably get encountered in airports andhave groupies come up and talk to you?
Yes, but 1 out of every 10 is not so nice.
>> Bill Whalen (02:34):
Right. >> Victor Davis Hanson
we're in polarized times.
And, you know, I.
I was pretty much left alone untilmaybe three or four years ago.
I think has a lot to do with a podcast.
That genre has taken off in a waythat maybe even being on Fox.
But we do get people that show upat our house out in the country.
(02:55):
That's kind of ambiguous.
And I've been swatted by the sheriffs.
They had a call that there was an armedintruder, which was false, of course.
Yeah, I've had all my bankaccounts looted by hackers,
so there's a downside to that, too.
(03:16):
But most people, nine out of 10, are veryfriendly and, you know, very friendly.
Right.
Let's talk about strategic adventure,but let's back up for a second and
let's talk aboutthe Military History Working Group,
which you chaired from the beginning,and take us through how this began.
My understanding is that this goesback to about what, 2012, 2018.
(03:38):
The late John Racian, who wasa director of the Hoover Institution
before Condi became the director.
He brought you in the office andhe talked about this idea.
Was there a void in thiskind of history at the time?
Was nobody doing this, or was Johnthinking more course correction in terms
of offering a kind ofalternative approach to history?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (03:56):
Well, this was in the period before we had the luminaries
like Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson,Stephen Kotkin, Frank Decoder.
There was a few of us, but not very many.
And John casually said to me, we need.
He appointed me in 2002, butI didn't arrive till 3, 4.
(04:19):
And he said, you don't have a program andyou're writing a lot, but
this is called the Hoover Institutionon War, Revolution and Peace.
And we have nothing on war.
And I'd like you to start a program.
And I don't want opinionjournalism politicos,
and I don't want academics only.
(04:40):
I want you to get a broad cross section.
So we discussed it.
Generals, admirals,active retired military diplomats,
former government officials,Hoover fellows, as many as we could.
Right.From different fields, but
had an interest in history,public intellectuals.
And he said,I don't want them all to agree with you.
(05:03):
So I we had paleo cons,neocons, neo isolationists,
interventionists, liberal people.
And then he said,now we have to pay for it.
So you and I are going to go traveling.
So for a year we traveled,flew all over the country, partly for
(05:24):
official Hoover business, but partlywe were raising money for the Hoover,
the new program on military history andcontemporary conflict.
So that's how it started.
And then I said, well,we have these task forces,
but we don't have a lotof online magazines.
(05:45):
So that was before reallyonline had taken over.
So he said, okay, you go ahead and do it.
And then he said,you're going to need an assistant.
So He gave me an assistant and
David Berkey came on two years later.
>> Bill Whalen (06:02):
I think David Burkey is a research fellow.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (06:05):
He's a research fellow.
>> Bill Whalen (06:06):
He has a background in classics.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (06:08):
And he's.
Yeah, I have a prejudice forclassical philologist.
He has a PhD from Yale in Classics.
And then we brought Bruce Thornton,who has a PhD in classics from UCLA.
And now we have another research person.
Morgan hunter has a PhD inclassics from UC Berkeley.
(06:29):
And then Barry Strauss is a member.
He has a PhD in classics from Yale.
So it got kind of out of hand,the classics lobby.
But I was a good.
So it was very lively group.
And no sooner had John said this than hejust happened to come in the one time.
There was a real altercation.
I mean, a fiery exchange.
(06:51):
We had some people who werevery strong about the Iraq war.
We had some people that said it wasan ungodly disaster that morphed into,
well, you've never served the military andyou have.
And it was really kind of intellectual.
But John walked in right during that,and he called me in and
(07:12):
said, no, no, no,nothing goes leaves your room, but
you have to be a stronger force andmoderate it.
So we were civil, right?
And that was the only time in,since the life of it,
in the 13 years that Ihad encountered that.
It was just the time that he came in.
>> Bill Whalen (07:29):
And I think John had two very important mandates, Victor.
One was he wanted an assembly of opinions.
He didn't want me.
He didn't want four peopleall saying the same thing.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (07:37):
No, he did not.
>> Bill Whalen (07:37):
Oring it's repetitive.
And secondly, I think he told you,keep it simple.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (07:42):
He did.
He said, we don't want.
When you have the strategic,what are you going to do?
And I said, well,we'll have a historical backgrounder.
That meant if it's on the Ukraine war,somebody would do 2,000 words on
the history of Ukraine, andthat's borders and the diff and then some.
Someone.
Then he said, well,can't we get different views?
(08:03):
I said, yes.
So we'll have someone whothinks we're doing too much,
someone thinks we're doing too little.
And then he said, well,we have polls at Hoover.
We have all.
So I want a poll.
So we did the poll and we had research.
So we kept that model that he andI worked out every issue,
all until this current 100 issues.
And then he said something I'd forgotten.
(08:25):
He said, I don't want it this morbid.
And the problem with these task forces orthese sinners four is they start out and
they're all excited andthey have a journal and
then it's supposed to be out every monthand then it's every three months and
then three years later it's gone, right?
So he said, if you're going to do this,as long as you're at Hoover,
(08:46):
this is going to be sustained.
So I said, okay.
And it has.
>> Bill Whalen (08:51):
How'd you come up with the title?
How'd you come up with Strategika?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (08:54):
Well, that is a Greek word because obviously strategy
is the English derivative,but strategos in Greek
means a general with a krather than the Latinized C.
So then the neuter plural is general,like things.
(09:14):
It doesn't really meanan ancient Greek strategy, but
the things that generalsare worried about.
So we just use the neural plural,Strategika.
And I searched all over the Internetto see if anybody had ever used that
term as an English word with the K there.
And I hadn't found anybody.
So, and he liked it.
John did.
>> Bill Whalen (09:34):
How do you come up with topics, Victor, for each issue?
Is it Newtonian?
Does an apple land on your head?
Do you have some epiphany whenyou're working the farm where.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (09:41):
Well, what I do is David, who is the managing of her.
He calls me and says,now we gotta get the issue.
Victor, what do you want to do?
And then I ask him, can you.
I give him three or four ideas.
And I said, now I want you to search andsee if there's anything tangential.
We've done on that before becauseit's been a hundred issues.
(10:02):
So he comes back and
then the second criterion is toparticipate in the big session.
Everybody has to submit articleson three or four topics.
So we'll.
If we have visitors to just to come,you have to do that.
So we might have a corpus of 80.
So then I try to see how during the yearI can get a topic that also can draw on
(10:23):
Those to be add ons.
But usually I try to do two things.
One is, have we discussed this before?
And two,does it have contemporary relevance?
And we tried it.
I've looked back at them.
We don't really repeat unlessit's something like the Iran,
a nuclear bomb or that has changed soradically over the years.
(10:48):
But we do that and then we gothrough the names of everybody and
I say these people andthen David will tell me,
well, this person hasn't contributedenough or this is too much.
So then we whittled them down.
And then I do the poll, I do the researchquestions, and then he and I decide
(11:08):
of the backgrounder and the pro andcon, which person's gonna do which one.
And then he is in chargeof contacting them.
And sometimes I do, but he does it mostly.
And then he gets the illustrationsfrom the archives, posters and things.
And then his job as managing editoris to make sure that it's on time.
(11:32):
And then I'm working on the next issue,the topic, the people who should be on it.
And then we have a research fellow, BruceThornton, who edits them along with David.
So it's three of us produce it.
>> Bill Whalen (11:47):
Issue one of Strategika, Victor, came out on April 1st, 2013.
Do you happen to know the topic?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (11:53):
No.
>> Bill Whalen (11:54):
Bashar al Assad.
What do we do with a problemlike Bashar al Assad?
This is the beauty of history,because here we are now, 12 plus years.
Later.>> Victor Davis Hanson: And there's no.
Where's Mr. Osad right now?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (12:05):
Well, he's dead and
his son is somewhere practicing asan ophthalmologist in Russia, I'm told.
>> Bill Whalen (12:11):
Right. So times change.
It's very funny.
I do the Goodfellow show, which Eric, bythe way, long overdue for an appearance.
My friend, we always have had the fearof running out of things to talk about.
But I don't know, Victor, if we're inthe age of hyper history, if you will, but
maybe it's just a function largely ofDonald Trump and the sleepiness and
the previous president,but it seems like news and
history are just kind of like watercoming out of a fire hydrant.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (12:33):
It is.
When I started studying history,
it was the disagreements in historywere not as sharp as they are now.
They were all within certain parameters,
but there was not people who said,two big things have changed.
One is that you accepted evidence andyou could disagree about the evidence,
(12:57):
but you were trained as a historian, so
you knew you had the tools to decidewhether the evidence was valid or not.
Today everything is out the window.
You can bring in anything andthere's no rules.
Second thing is, andthis has kind of been good,
I think is if you in the early days ofthe Internet had a historical problem and
(13:18):
you googled people,it was mostly academics,
people that had PhDs in history orclassical language, something like that.
Today it's what they used to call, when Iwas growing up, Luce libre a free for all.
You know what I mean?
It was just anybody can get on andif they can explain a topic better or
they're more photogenic or they're betterlooking or more they, they'll get that.
(13:43):
And then the good side of that isyou get fresh blood from people
with different experiences.
The bad side of it is there'sno commonly agreed tools.
So if you're in classical history,for example,
before you can write your thesis,you've got to take 12 seminars.
(14:03):
You have to know French andGerman, a reading ability.
You have to be fluent in Latin and Greek.
But more importantly, you've had to be.
You've had to take courses in andbe examined in on your PhD.
So you have to know if you havea passage with Xenophon, is it more or
less reliable than Herodotusvis a vis Thucydides?
(14:25):
Where did Thucydides have as sources?
Can you trust them?
What about late authors like Plutarch,who.
And it was called this fancyGerman word quellenforschen.
Find the sources of the extant history.
And that gave everybody legitimacy andcompetency.
Today I'll see things written onthe Internet about ancient history that
(14:49):
are just absurd.
And the person has no idea thatthis particular source that he's
using is completely fabricated ornot to be trusted.
So that's the problem.
But the Internet, it's still a 51%proposal that finally you'll have,
people will say,wait a minute, this is wrong.
(15:09):
And then they'll pile on.
And so there is some kind of audit,but it's a much wider open experience.
>> Bill Whalen (15:15):
It's a busy time to talk about war.
There's obviously Russia and Ukraine.
There is the situation in the Middle East.
There's always the threat of somethingmaybe happening between China and Taiwan.
There are conflicts in Africathat don't get much attention, or
there's a potential for something tohappen in a place like Venezuela.
Let's look at a couple of theseconflicts to make sure and
put them in a strategic lens, if you will.
(15:36):
First of all, Russia and Ukraine.
So we're doing this podcasta day before the summit, or
whatever they're calling it now in Alaska,between Putin and Trump.
If he were to analyze the Russia-Ukrainesituation, Victor, and
did it through Strategika,where would you go?
Would you go back to 1979 and Afghanistan?
Would you go back to 1939 and Finland?
(15:57):
Or would you go back maybedeeper into tsarist history?
Because.
Because one thing we know about Putin,he sees himself where he wants to be,
he wants to be a czar.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (16:04):
Well, everything, there is a reason for everything.
Even if the reasons are evil orthey're wrong.
So what we do is.
So Russia has beenaggressive toward Ukraine.
Why is that?
And we go back to, let's say, ancienthistory, and you find out that Russia had
territorial interest and had absorbedparts of Ukraine which over their history,
(16:29):
off and on Crimea,I think since 1787, the Donbass.
How did the Donbass become Ukrainian?
That was a inter Sovietjurisdictional matter.
And then you find things, andthis is the discussion in Strategika,
as somebody will say, well, wait a minute,Western Ukraine was part of Poland.
(16:51):
And it was Roman Catholic andPolish-speaking and for a thousand years,
till 1939, when the Molotov-RibbentropPact, Russia invaded Poland from the east.
They annexed it, Stalin would notgive it back at Yalta or Potsdam.
And sothey ethnically cleansed everybody out and
(17:12):
it became a Soviet state,all of present day Ukraine.
And that territory was compensatedby ethnically cleansing 13 million
Germans out of Pomerania and East Prussia.
And that was New Poland.
And then that makes it.
The boundaries become more fluid andambiguous and
(17:32):
the historicity becomes more.
Doesn't mean you'll cometo a different outcome.
But we try to do that withall of these and we try to,
because strategic, it does meangeneralship in these discussions.
What was Putin thinking?
So somebody asked me the other day, are wegonna get a deal between Trump and Putin?
(17:53):
And I said, if you're Putin,this is obviously a big mistake.
You've lost a million dead,wounded, missing or captured.
You went in there saying youwere going to do certain things.
They were never going to be in NATO,Ukraine.
So you can say you got them out of NATO,but they never were going to be in it.
Nobody had the military wherewithal toexpel you out of the Donbas or the Crimea.
(18:18):
You had some legitimacy on your claims,so then the question was,
at what magical point westward,where will you have the DMZ?
So when you're thinking from Putin'spoint of view, at what point do I
have to go west so I don't get shotby the military or the oligarchs?
(18:38):
Because this was a disaster and
I've got to get something morethan I had before I started.
And then you start to see what he,what his motivations will be.
And at some magical point, he will grab itbecause he thinks he can take it back and
say that I enlarge Russiaon the Ukraine side.
It's in the Constitution,they're not allowed to give up territory.
(19:01):
So they're thinking,did we ever have the ability to
get back Crimea on our own or Donbas, no.
Do we have the ability to stopan overextended Russian army, yes.
Where is the mostrealistic defensible line?
And between those two lines, that'swhat it's going to be negotiated on.
>> Bill Whalen (19:22):
Issue 21 of Strategika, February 2015, What Makes Putin Run,
your author suggests the following.
One, tougher sanctions against Russia,two, lethal aid to Ukraine,
and three, a PR war against Russiahighlighting Russian kleptocracy.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (19:37):
Yeah. >> Bill Whalen
eerily predictive.
Yeah, we have very brilliant people in that group.
One of the things I thoughtwas very important.
I don't want to mention names,but John Racian said to me,
this person used to work at Hoover.
I had to let him go becausehe was too controversial.
I want him back.
(19:58):
This person.
You bring the names.
This guy's kind of crazy, butif you can handle him, go ahead.
Right.And so if you look at the original group
and the people that are in it, they allhad a reputation for being very brilliant,
somewhat individualistic,somewhat pariahs or mavericks.
(20:21):
And so we tried to bring in.
And then he said to me,you've been writing.
At that time,I think I'd written 20 books.
He said, what's your attitudeabout people who've attacked you?
And I said, I don't care.
I said, great, so bring in people.
So the first meeting,I looked around, I said,
that guy wrote an unfair review of me.
(20:41):
That guy shouted at me at a department.
That guy was in an elevator with me andwouldn't speak.
So they're all in there, and
that was kinda good becauseit was very lively then.
>> Bill Whalen (20:53):
Bunch of mad monks.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (20:54):
Yes, everybody.
And then people would come to me andsay, he's on the.
On the same menu asshe's on the same menu.
And they have both been very unfair.
They screamed at me at a conference,and I said, that's the rules.
If you want yes men in an academicconference, we can do that.
(21:14):
But this way everybody knows theycan say whatever they want, and
you can't repeat it outside the room.
And it's been very lively, andwe've had a lot of guests,
a lot of the donors come andlove it, but it's getting.
We have to make a decision because westarted with a 20-person twice a year.
We had 20 in one group and20 and then it got to be 40.
(21:36):
And so I think now we have 90 to100 people come by invitation and
it's a huge group.
And we've had people say this is great,it's getting publicity.
And we've had people say welost the one on one intimacy.
And back and forth.
So we're always trying to calibrate it.
>> Bill Whalen (21:54):
Yeah, let's use the strategic approach, Victor,
to unpacking the Middle East.
And I don't know if you could do this infour episodes or four issues or what,
it's complicated.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (22:03):
Yeah, we always start.
>> Bill Whalen (22:04):
How far back do you go?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (22:05):
Yeah, we say, you know, in military history, so
we always start with the history of it.
>> Bill Whalen (22:10):
Right. >> Victor Davis Hanson
that would be the 47 war,the 56 Suez Crisis War,
the 67 Six-Day War, 73 Yom Kippur War.
And why and how has Israel been able todefeat countries that have more assets,
population, amount, everything?
And you can disagree about, well,they had the US as a patron,
(22:35):
or they had the Arab world was,we start with this lack of symmetry.
And then we go to the, the historical.
What is the fight over?
Is it the fight over Israel'sexpanded beyond its 47 borders,
or is it to destroyIsrael river to the sea?
So we're trying to find motive, thehistorical arguments that each uses and
(23:02):
then why on the battlefield are somesides successful and some aren't?
And that's a matter of their spirit,their training,
their munitions, their weapons,their patrons, their generalship.
And so we tried to look at what we'retrying to do is do it systematically.
So I, I've been to all of thesemeetings except one where I was ill.
(23:26):
And as chairman, I don't thinkI've had anybody just go up and
say I hate this person orI don't like this and then spout off.
They would be cut atthe knees by everybody else.
So there is a group a sense that if youmake a statement, you have to back it up.
And then on anybody whopresents a paper that I ask,
(23:47):
I also choose who's going tobe speaking at the strategika.
And when you do that, they expect toughquestions and the questioners expect.
Them to answer without getting angry.
And I think that's very important todaythat, you know, you can say, well,
somebody's destroying democracy.
(24:08):
And you say you need tocalibrate things like that.
What do you mean exactly?
Give me an example.
So if somebody says the Palestiniansalways miss a chance for peace or
Israel's always taking territory at ourmeetings, people will say, hold it.
Tell me exactly what you mean.
Give me an example andshow me where the evidence is.
All right, that's what makesit pretty successful group.
(24:31):
Let's stick with the Middle east for a minute, Victor.
So after we do this podcast,
you're going to be speaking to the HooverInstitution's summer policy boot camp.
This is a gathering of collegekids who come here each year and
they spend a week at Hoover andthey listen to you and other fellows and
the idea is to whet theirappetite about public policy and
see if this is a coursethey want to take in life.
And it's really just a fantasticprogram when you get down to it.
(24:53):
I had dinner with a few of thesekids last night and as for
their impressions on talking to otherkids and one thing they said was, boy,
Israel has just really gotten thrownunder the bus with a lot of these kids.
In other words,they just hear from their professors,
Israel is an aggressor, Israel isoppressive, Israel engages in genocide.
It's a very one sided conversation.
(25:13):
This raises a question to me, Victor.
What about taking somethinglike strategika and
trying to apply it to schools,for example, AP History kids.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (25:24):
Yeah, well we,
that was another thing thatcame up at the founding.
So John said,how are you going to get the message out?
Right?So one thing we do is we have something
called History in the news andwe pick a person each week and
then they take a contemporary event,Ukraine, Pakistan,
(25:46):
India, and they try to locate itin history, not its history, but
if there is a dispute over an island orthere's a border dispute,
they try to show you how borderdisputes in history have been solved.
Then we have something called Classics ofMilitary History where we have about Now,
(26:07):
I think it's 78, but we,and we pay for all this.
So I have to raise the money sothat the donors,
I'll say to them,if you want to get great historians,
and I have to pay them above market rates,which is over a dollar worth.
So then I'll open it up and say,who wants to do a military classics?
And then they'll write a book review andthen that's catalog and
(26:30):
then we have essays in military history.
So just this week, for example,
Scooter Libby wanted to showhe's a member of the group,
that strategy has not been emphasizedenough in recent administrations.
He gave an example from the 1990s,when rather than reacting to a problem
(26:51):
on the horizon, they would anticipatewar game and give a strategic analysis.
So then when George H.W.
bush or Reagan came in, they'd say,okay, what's on the shelf?
How do I deal with this to be prepared?
So we have those periodic essays andwe're thinking about how to reach,
as everybody is, younger people.
(27:14):
I'm on the board of the Bradley foundationand we oversee Encounter books.
And the best selling bookright now is Land of Hope,
recent textbook on American history.
And they've got a new big project, theGolden Thread, for high school students,
AP students on Western Civ.
And I've been looking at how they dothat and the level of writing and
(27:38):
the project, andit's been very successful.
So we're thinking of projectsthat would introduce
military history to younger people.
>> Bill Whalen (27:49):
There's an audience out there, no question.
I was a way too serious young boy.
I remember being at summer camp and beingcompletely wrapped up in the Red Badge of
Courage, for example, which,by the way, leads me to something,
classics of military,something Hoover does.
You wanna explain what that is?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (28:03):
Those are works by famous generals.
Churchill's memoirs,Montgomery's War As I Knew it,
by George Patton,timeless philosophical treatises that have
something to do withstraddling Machiavelli.
Right.
He wrote a book on.
I mean, a treatise that, we don't reallythink much about military history.
(28:27):
Classical historians think about history.
It starts with Herodotus,
but it's not that it's synonymouswith military history.
It is military history.
So Thucydides follows the first historian,Herodotus, Persian War.
He writes about the Peloponnesian War.
Xenophon continues the warswith sparta down to 362.
(28:49):
So in the beginning, history wasmilitary history because the ancients
thought that this was the one eventthat was preeminent in people's lives,
that you risk life or death.
People do things onconditions of battle and
war they usually don't do in real life.
People work harder to produce goods andservices to fuel the machine of war.
(29:12):
All of these reasons.
And it's been, I think, because of Vietnamand the rise of university history.
95% in most polls ofhistory departments and
humanities in generaltend to be on the left.
The left tends to believe that humannature is malleable, changeable, and
(29:33):
can be perfected andtherefore war can be eliminated.
I think there's more peace studies,conflict resolution programs and
military history program.
There's changing that.
Military history is renewing its cachet,but
it's not like it was in the 1920s or30s or the 19th century.
>> Bill Whalen (29:51):
Children vary, Victor, in terms of their intellectual curiosity,
their maturity and so forth.
But what do you think is a good age tointroduce a child to military history and
what would you put in front of them?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (30:01):
I always think that it's good to start with primary
sources so that they understand.
So I've noticed that childrenlike things like Plutarch's lives
because live of Caesar, life of Pompey,life of Alexander the Great,
life of Pericles, andbecause they're very.
(30:21):
Plutarch is just engaging anda person 10 to 15 could actually read and
they're all easily.
And then they hear and see incidents orthey, they, you know, if you read
Pericles, he'll mention the PeloponnesianWar or he'll mention his ancestors and
Plutarch will mention the ancestorsthat fought at Marathon.
So they get that hook and then they can.
(30:44):
Can go on to secondary literature.
I.
I had.
The person I was named afterwas a Marine who was killed at.
In Okanawa, and my father flew on40 missions on a B29 over Tokyo.
So they would talk andthen I would go through and look at my f.
He didn't want me to look at it,but I'd sneak in and
(31:05):
look at his photo album of the squadron.
I'd look at the mission statements.
You know, you have 16 hours.
You're going to go work COB, you're goingto arrive at 1am you're going to drop 11,
you're going to encounter Zeke fighters,this kind of stuff.
And then I would read secondary stuff.
Certain books, though, captivated me.
(31:27):
I was a little older when I readJohn Keegan's the Face of Battle.
That made a big impression on me.
Quentin Reynolds had, I don't knowif you remember, but you might.
In the 60s, there was something calledthe landmark histories that were for
children, landmark books.
And Quentin Reynolds had onecalled the Battle of Britain.
(31:50):
And I read that andthen I got hooked on it.
And Walter Lord had a great book.
He was sort of a general,a general journalist called.
Called Incredible Victory at the Battleof Midway and things like that.
So I was always trying to read about it.
And I got interested becauseI would at Thanksgiving or
(32:14):
Christmas, we had my grandfatherwho had been gassed at
the Argonne forest World War I andone was disabled.
And then my aunt's husband waswounded in the Illusions campaign.
And then my father had,as I said, I was on a B29.
And then our cousin was withPatton in a tank in third Army.
(32:39):
And then there was Victor,who wasn't there.
They talked about who had been killed.
And then there was Belden, andhe had suffered dinghy finger fever and
he was disabled.
And maybe at 9 o', clock,after the turkey they'd had, you know,
they were all talking andthey would kind of say, well,
the Philippines weren't that important,or Patton was better.
And they would start kidding each otherand I would kinda sneak under and
(33:03):
listen to them.
So that World War.
And then my father would,you know, roust us out the longest.
In the 60s, I think it was 12,the longest day is we're going
to take you to the movies or12 o' clock high is on.
So we.I watched all the war movies with my
father and he dragged me toall of the Fresno theaters.
>> Bill Whalen (33:25):
I was lucky, Victor.
My father served in a peacetime Navy,which gave me a early love for
naval history.
Going to see ships.
But I grew up in Arlington, Virginia.
Wow.Right across the river from Washington.
I had two things.
One, he would take me toCivil War battlefields.
When I was nine years old, he.
Gave me a book on the Civil.
War that was about that thick.
It was like a bible, but it showed everybattle, not in, not gory detail, but
(33:46):
showed maps of the battles andwhere soldiers were and things like that.
My God, it was fascinating to read.
I just could not put that down.
But then secondly, he would take meacross the river into Washington and
we go to the Smithsonian andwe see history come alive.
Which leads to one of the controversiesdu jour with Donald Trump right now, and
that is the Trump administration wantingto re examine the presentation of history
(34:07):
at the Smithsonian Institution.
Victor, as you know, since youfollow Donald Trump very closely,
like all Trump controversies,it starts with this enormous explosion.
My God.Donald Trump wants to take down
the Smithsonian.
What's he doing?
When you actually exhale andlook at what he's doing,
he's asking a very honest question.
You go and you look andexhibit A, Smithsonian, but
there's a little placard inthe placard explains what's going on.
(34:29):
And over the years thesehave been twisted.
So that example, if you seean exhibit on why people fled Cuba,
it fled Cuba because of Fulgencio Batista,no mention of Castro, for example.
So it's a skewed view of history.
My question to you, Victor,is really, how did this happen?
How did we let historydrift in that direction?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (34:49):
You're right about Trump.
He believes he's waging a cultural,social, economic and
political counter revolution.
So he feels that he's,
he's at this point in time trying toreverse something that was politicized and
he thinks he's bringing it back tothe center and it's gone way over.
(35:09):
So you mentioned the Enola Gay or thedropping atomic bomb at the Smithsonian.
That was very controversial when they.
But it was all negative.
But it was just to kill Asian people orto warn the Soviets or it was Cold War,
but didn't get to the realheart of the matter.
And I've written a lot aboutthe heart of the matter,
(35:29):
whether it was saving an invasion orCurtis LeMay was not going to be able to
burn down all of Japan as he could havevery easily had they not dropped the bomb.
But in any case,I think part of the problem was, and
we mentioned this earlier,that the museum shows the government's,
(35:50):
whether it's aid programs like USAID,
basically people draw on academics andthese are people
with PhDs that are in researchuniversities for the most part.
>> Bill Whalen (36:05):
Right.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (36:06):
They're not people from where I taught at Cal State Fresno
that are teaching eight classes a year andwith a divide of very low income people.
So you're talking aboutthe faculties of Penn, Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Berkeley,Stanford, and they tend,
not because of what Victor says,but on data and they self identify.
(36:29):
90 to 95% consider themselves left.
More importantly, they have developedin the academy the philosophy
that the society at large wastraditionalist, conservative, reactionary.
So the church, the community,the small town attitude,
(36:52):
they were all indoctrinating people and
conservative values andtherefore they could react.
Whether that's true ornot, I'm not sure it was.
But they are.
If you talk to them, they'll say,well, well, we're 95% left wing,
but we have to be because you havethe corporation saying one thing, you have
(37:13):
the church saying one thing, you have thegovernment and we are voices in the will.
That's how this wounded Fawn.
It was worse than just they were partisan.
They felt that they werefreedom fighters or
they were victims of a oppressivesystem or they were truth tellers.
There was a messianic idea.
>> Bill Whalen (37:31):
When you get to it, the 95% problem, Victor,
that's just one of two things.
Either, number one,you have a different point of view.
You're not being admitted into the system.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (37:39):
Yeah.
>> Bill Whalen (37:40):
Or secondly, you're perhaps not bothering to want to get into
the system because you think myviews aren't going to be welcome.
Why do I wanna be?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (37:47):
Especially with tenure,
tenure was created to create intellectualdiversity by not punishing people.
But the people who inaugurated it,1910 to 1940,
didn't realize that you have to get tenureand to get tenure is a politicized.
And I'm speaking to someone inthe California state system,
(38:11):
was probably on 15 to 20hiring committees, and
I was on maybe 10 tenure promotion,retention committees in which
people would say openly, that guy,I don't want to get tenure.
He's too right wing or he's conservativeor I don't think he's up on LGBTQ issues.
(38:33):
And then you would say,would you please quantify that?
I want to know,what do you think of this book he wrote?
What do you think of theseteachers that didn't matter?
And that filters out to people sothey say things to themselves.
I'm going to suppress or not beexplicit about my political views or
my views of academia or how I do research.
But once I get tenure, I'm going to be in.
(38:56):
Once a person goes down that road andmakes compromises,
they'll do it after theyhave tenure just for other.
Other incentives.
Well, I wanna be a full professor.
Well, I want to getthe Scholar of the Year award.
Well, I wanna get a merit pay,and it never stops.
So it's.
That was what was I liked about John Racinwhen he told me about strategika.
(39:21):
Get people who disagree with each otherand get eccentrics I can remember.
I won't mention his name.
I bought one person andhe said, victor, come here.
That's a little too far.
This guy came in my office and screamedand yelled at me, and I had to let him go.
And now you're humiliating me.
And he started laughing.
But go ahead, bring him in.
(39:41):
Who turned out to be oneof our strongest people.
>> Bill Whalen (39:43):
In case you wonder why John had a considerable stash of wine
in his office at all times.
It's probably my mouth cycle.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (39:48):
Our M&Ms, yeah.
>> Bill Whalen (39:49):
We've talked about war victory.
We've talked about history.
Let's put the two together now,
a column you recently wrotecalled War against history.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (39:56):
It used to be that if you had a historical question.
Question Japanese internment, sayWorld War II, dropping the atomic bomb.
You could legitimately disagreeabout history, your interpretation.
But you did agree thatthere were certain facts.
>> Bill Whalen (40:13):
Right?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (40:13):
You could say the Roosevelt administration was for
the internment and the McClatchynewspapers were for the internment.
And Attorney General Warren,before he was governor, signed the order.
Modern, today's history said, who are youto say that that's a legitimate source?
So if you look at the 1619 project,right, that project said, well,
(40:37):
we're saying America started whenthe first African American slave landed.
And who is Gordon Wood to say otherwise?
So they challenged the basis of history.
And they did it on two levels.
They, they being the left said,the fact that you have a PhD or
you've written all these books oryou're well reviewed or you're,
(41:01):
you know, you won the Bancroft Prize,that doesn't matter.
That's just artificialstandards that were.
You created,people like you created to oppress us.
The other more fundamental was,well, everybody has their own facts.
So, you know, with that common,
your terrorist is somebodyelse's liberation fighter.
(41:24):
So the patriarchy,the white race, the males,
the heterosexuals,they've all created these artificial
standards of what qualifies as history orfacts.
And we're going to blow them all up andsay that anybody can say anything.
And that is filtered down.
(41:45):
So you have.
People on the Internet will say,well, Churchill's a terrorist.
Show me the evidence he's a terrorist.
Well, Hitler wanted to.
After he took over France, and Francehad fallen, he gave a peace offer and
he didn't want to do it.
And then he had a bombing campaign and
he ordered British bombersto bomb the Black Forest.
(42:09):
Terrorism.
And you say, well, wait a minute.
What did Hitler want from Britain?
They weren't going to give backany of the conquered territory.
And they had bombed Coventry andmore importantly, the Black Forest.
There was an arms depot in the BlackForest that they tried to bomb with a,
(42:31):
a very rudimentary incendiary.
So you get into the facts, butI see Candace Owens, for example,
playing a historian now saying that Ms.Macron is not a female.
>> Bill Whalen (42:46):
Careful, it's a family broadcast.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (42:48):
Yes.
And.
Well, how do you know she,she's not, she's not male.
Well, birth certificate.
Well, you could forge a birth certificate.
So it's always the evidencedoesn't matter.
And that's what's new.
And that was.
Came from the postmodernmovement of Derrida Lacan,
(43:08):
all of the French postmodernists Going and
they basically said thatevidence doesn't matter.
So critical legal theory, critical racetheory, critical historical theory.
The only reason that it's againstthe law to steal sneakers is because
a bunch of wealthy white privilegedpeople don't steal sneakers.
(43:33):
So then they made an arbitrary lawthat says it's against the law.
And you say, no hope,because you can't steal anything and
have the elements of a lawful society.
>> Bill Whalen (43:41):
Go back to Churchill for a second victor.
Fewer world figures have been morelionized in this century than Churchill.
Actors have won Oscars playing Churchill.
He's always heroic in terms of standingup during the Battle of Britain.
He's sympathetic in terms ofgoing through his struggles,
be it in the 1930s,trying to be the voice of the wilderness,
his own struggles with depression andsuccess and so forth.
(44:02):
He's always a sympathetic,compelling figure.
And yet here he is now being thrownunder the bus by would be historians.
Is it why?
Why did they do that?
Is it simple?
Just the shock factor that my guy.
How can you say thatabout Winston Churchill?
Are they just doing to get attention?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (44:16):
There's a number of undercurrents and neither the left nor
the right has the monopoly onthis crazy revisionist right.
So from the left they're saying,well, he was a colonialist.
So he talked about the fourfreedoms with Roosevelt and
(44:36):
he was going to have all ofthese post war free elections.
But did he give the Indiansfree election in India?
Did he give the people in Burma?
He was a colonialist,he was a 19th century colonist.
And you say, yes,he was a man of his times.
But when you see what he wrote aboutpeople who were colonial people,
(44:56):
he was very empirical and empathetic.
Then you have people on the right who say,well, why did we go to World War II?
Hitler, he had grievancesfrom World War I.
And after he, he took most of Europe,he was saying that he was going to.
It was kind of like the eu.
It was just going to be underGerman control rather than
(45:17):
the Anglo Saxon control.
And then you got the sinister partwho say, you know, it was the Jews.
The Jews were the ones who were doing it.
They were the ones that goteverybody in the war because Hitler
didn't like the Jews.
Big deal.
And you mentioned the Holocaust.
Well, how do you knowthe Holocaust took place?
That was just what you said.
(45:37):
It is.The Germans said it didn't take place.
And so you've got the right saying thatthere's some kind of conspiracy or
cabal that sucked us in.
The other reason is People look, andthis was the Pat Buchanan approach.
They look at the end of the war andthey say, well, you know, 1939,
Hitler went into Poland,so we were going to go in.
(46:00):
The British were, and by extension us andfree Eastern Europe from Nazism.
And what did we do?
We allied with these commies that killed20 million of their own people, and
we ended up ensuring that Eastern Europewas under Soviet control and
they were no different than Hitler.
And if you really didn't like Hitler,then you couldn't have liked Stalin.
(46:24):
And when Hitler invaded Russia,why did we give them Lend Lease?
Why don't we just letthem kill each other off?
And if you try to say,well, at that point, the,
the immediate threat to Britainwas Hitler, not Russia.
They were helping Hitler.
But it's, it's something.
And the other thing finally,is Churchill wrote so much.
(46:46):
He wrote on every topic.
He wrote on race, he wrote on colonialism,he wrote on Islam over 60 years.
So it's like having a tape recorderof anybody and you can go back and
find anything in isolation.
So I see this now about.
Churchill will say, well,if you go to the River War,
he said this about Islam when he was 26 orsomething.
(47:10):
And so.
But they don't look at the totality of it.
It's kind of like Lincolnwhen Lincoln would say, well,
I don't think bringing slaveshere was a great idea.
But you look at whatFrederick Douglass said about, for
all his flaws and imperfection,he was about the best you could get.
And he praised them after his death,but doesn't matter.
(47:30):
So we had this idea,if you're not perfect, you're not good.
And may we apply that to history?
>> Bill Whalen (47:36):
So I see two challenges here.
Victory.
One is the information age,just the control of information.
Information gets out of control.
Rumors like Mrs. Macron spread around.
Michelle Obama goes through this.
Other figures, he says,Jeffrey Epstein, for example.
It's just this conspiratorial, what yousee is not necessarily true mentality that
the Internet, I think, pushes along.
(47:56):
Second question, Victor,is what constitutes a.
A historian.So
we were talking off the airbefore we started this.
I have a very bad habit.
I stay up way too late at nightswatching YouTube videos on history.
A lot of World War IIvideos in particular.
It's addicted because there's justconstant video after constant video of
about 30 to 45 minutes.
They're well produced a lot by Brits,so the accent kind of draws you in.
(48:18):
But I find myself having to do one thing,Victor, when I see something,
I start to watch and I stop and I want togo on the Internet and look up the fellow
who produces it to see what his backgroundis, to see if he's a historian.
And that leads me to this question,Victor, what is a historian?
Do I have to have a PhD inhistory to be a historian?
Do I just have to be very learnedon a topic to be a historian?
(48:39):
Do I just have to have street smarts andknow how to produce and think and
write to be a historian?
How do you define a historian?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (48:45):
You're right, we there are great historians that do not
have PhDs and do not work in theuniversity and don't want a university.
But what happens like Cornelius Ryan, hewrote the Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far.
These were socalled popular histories, but
they were meticulously researchedin a journalistic fashion.
(49:07):
And what happens is over time,I don't think you can tell right away, but
over time and space, there's a differentcriteria that people can use.
Did professional historians thatwere academics that are nipped,
what were their attitudetoward the history?
So you can look at book reviews and youcan shield them out and say, well, he did
(49:27):
a hatchet job because he's left wing andhe's right wing or right vice versa.
But you can get a consensusthrough book review.
You can get a consensus, believe it ornot, through book sales.
That can help as well.
You can get a consensus on howthat book was used by others.
So I'll give you an examplewhen I see we're
(49:47):
looking at military historians right now.
So I can go to Google Scholar and
I can find out how many timesthis historian was cited.
And then I can use common sense and say,well, he was cited because he wrote this
popular book or he wrote more booksthan this great magnus opus of this one.
But you can use that.
(50:09):
And then you can look at up on the booksales, you can look at awards,
you can look at the book reviews andall that together.
You can get a consensus thatthis person is a good historian.
So it's possible.
So if I Take a historian, just tomention a Hoover Fellow, Andrew Roberts.
>> Bill Whalen (50:32):
Yes.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (50:33):
So I look at all these different things.
Well, he's an Oxford DPhil, sohe went through that process.
Not that that is essential, butthat's one thing to consider.
And he wrote this book on World War II,the storm of war, the history of
the English Speaking Peoples, andthe Churchill biography and the Napoleon.
So he was prolific.
(50:53):
And then I go to look at the books andthey are documented.
And even if they weren't documented,
cuz John Keegan never usedfootnotes very often.
But you can see whether he isintellectually honest and he is.
And then you can see,do people agree with you?
You can look at the book reviews andthen you can look at the book sales and
how many books are still in print,are there paperback?
(51:16):
And out of all that criteria, you,
you can come to the conclusionhe's a great historian.
>> Bill Whalen (51:21):
All right, final question for you, Victor.
So, Strategika 100 issues.
Congratulations.
What else are you thinking interms of projects for Hoover?
In terms of history?
>> Victor Davis Hanson (51:29):
I'm 71 and I, I would like to institutionalize
strategic in the military history.
So right now we're lookingat a military historian.
But it's sodifferent than when I first came here.
I was the only military historian,the only classicist.
(51:51):
Norman Inmark was a great historian.
He wrote on history.
We were very fortunate.
But when Condoleezza Rice came in,she put an emphasis.
So all of a sudden you've got StephenKotkin, the world's great biographer of
Stalin, you got Neil Fergusonwrites on everything.
You've got Andrew Roberts,you've got Frank Decoder on communist.
(52:13):
So you've got all these great historians.
And so I would like to, first of all.
And we have H.R. mcMaster, of course,who's written history and lived it.
And we have the history project,that's Kotkin and Neil's project.
So we're getting a nucleus.
So according to my small station,I would like to see, and
(52:34):
I think it's happening, but not due to me,but I have a small part in it,
that the Hoover history faculty,even though we're not assigned to teach,
is really, I think right now the besthistory faculty of any university
in the United States by the amount andthe quality of scholarship.
(52:54):
And I'd like to see us build on that sothat Hoover would have a name that
if you want to get a PhD in history orjust study, you can come to the Hoover.
You can look at the archives.
We have that and Eric Waken's doinga great job as the archivist,
especially getting collectionsof military history.
But you can talk to these people,you can meet them,
(53:16):
you can go to some of their seminars.
We tried to open it up to the public.
We're trying to get theseaccessible journals online.
And so right now I'm trying to thinkof someone I think that will take over
the project when I retire and expand itand do a better job than I have done and
then expand it like you mentionedthat we would try to have.
(53:41):
And I think Dr. Rice is doing that,especially in her tenure,
that we're reaching out andtrying to communicate the Hoover
message to younger people through videos,documentaries.
And so I think it would more organizedway of getting our strategic out.
(54:02):
And I've even thought of ita simplified form for high schools.
But every time I do that,I get emails from kids that read it.
So we're fulfilling part of that function.
I've been doing a lot of podcasts and
one of the things that we dois Saturday's History of War.
(54:22):
So I started for four years going fromMarathon all the way up to the Middle
east wars and now I'm doing bigconflicts of the 20th century.
I did that.
I'm going to start next time munitions andweapons cross time and
space revolution and arms,starting with the hoplite warfare,
(54:45):
going all the way into AI anddrones and things like that.
So we're always tryingto think about not just
increasing the quality of our research,but also disseminating it and
having the idea that if it camefrom the Hoover Institution,
it's a brand that you can trustin this chaotic world out here.
(55:07):
We're not going to have people fromthe Hoover Institution that get on and
say, well, I think Hoover's.
I mean, excuse me, I think thatChurchill's a terrorist without
we don't mind doing discussingwas Churchill illiberal or
should he have demandedunconditional surrender?
Why did he consider maybe the useof poison gas, things like that?
(55:32):
So I think widening andbroadening this history initiative that
has really taken place,I don't want to underestimate that
because I've been here 22 years plus andin the last five years,
history has expanded more than itever has in the cumulative years.
(55:53):
So it's really the big unknown storyabout the Hoover Institution that
it's on a mission to.
To bring in the world'stop historians here.
>> Bill Whalen (56:02):
Victor, I have greatly enjoyed this conversation,
I haven't talked to you for a while,so I've missed talking to you.
We need to talk about California atsome point, a lot's going on here.
You know, I have a shared passion aboutour beloved governor, among other things.
I'd love to go over to boot camp with youand talk to you in front of the kids there
and ask just how you budget your time,because all those kids are.
They're budgeting themselves throughGoogle and things like that.
(56:23):
I've always been fascinated aboutthis because you run a farm and
you're teaching at Hillsdale College andyou are finishing a book on Donald Trump.
You have another book out on Hoover,by the way, you're writing your columns,
you're doing your podcast, you're doingyour TV hits, and the hits go on.
And I know all this,
Victor, because I'm on the thirdfloor of the Hoover Main building.
And around the corner for me is yourassistant, the lovely Megan Ring.
(56:46):
And every day, Megan has oneof those voices that carries.
I can hear her trying to schedule you, andit's like watching somebody trying to cook
about 10 things ona stove at the same time.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (56:56):
Yeah, well, I'm very lucky.
I think we have Morgan Hunter,David Burke, and Megan Ring.
And I couldn't do it without them.
And then as I get older,I'm not a model for anybody.
My daughter called me other day andsaid, you've had this surgery.
You've had nine or 10 of them.
(57:17):
What is wrong with you?
You don't sleep.
You don't do this.
You don't see this.
And when I look back, you know, I did somereally crazy things when I was younger.
I traveled.
I think I had a rupturedappendix in Libya.
I had a torn ureter in Greece.
I've had malaria in Egypt.
And I look back at all the crazy thingsI did and I don't sleep that much.
(57:40):
I only sleep about four or five hours.
So I'm not a model.
But I was always curious.
I think part was growingup on a farm in isolation.
I had wonderful parents.
They had.Actually.
My mother's grandfather mortgagedher his little farm of 128
mortgage it to send his daughtersto Stanford in the 1930s and 40s,
(58:02):
and then to professional school,law school and graduate school.
Everybody thought they were freaksamong the farming community.
But from an early age,we didn't have any money.
But my mother would always andthey all came back to Selma.
They didn't.
But they'd always say, you have to read,read, read, read, read, read, read.
But you have to work, work, work, work.
(58:23):
And they'd say,you got to go out there and
I want you to pick 200 trays onthe grapes today, every day.
And you say, but I have to read.
I can't work.
No, no, you're going to work andthen you're going to read.
So it was a good balance.
I was very lucky.
>> Bill Whalen (58:37):
Well, Victor, thanks for all you do for the Hoover Institution.
And thank you for reminding us that it isformally the Hoover Institution on war,
revolution and peace.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (58:45):
Thank you, and I owe a lot to John Racing for that.
>> Bill Whalen (58:48):
Strategika.
You can find it online atthe Hoover Institution.
The URL is hoover.orgpublications Strategika.
Let me repeat that one more time.
Hoover.org publications Strategika.
Sign up for it.
And while you're doing that,sign up for Classics of Military,
which looks into great books devoted tomilitary history that I mentioned, and
(59:09):
Philosophy of War, which is a weeklycolumn that explains how studying the past
helps us understand the complexitiesof the present and the future.
And if that's not enough, sign up forthe Hoover Taylor Report,
which keeps you abreast ofeverything that Victor is up to.
And you know what?
You can read all thiswhile you're listening to
the Victor Davis Hanson podcast.
How's that for multitasking?
That's it for this episode onmatters of policy and politics.
Thanks for watching.
(59:29):
Hope to see you soon.
Till then, take care.
And again, thanks for joining us today.
>> Victor Davis Hanson (59:33):
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
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