Who Is Victor Davis Hanson?

My VIP for this week is Victor Davis Hanson who is recovering from major cancer surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his lung. Recovery has taken a little longer because there were complications, including emergency surgery for an arterial bleed. The word is that he is recovering well as well as grateful for all the support that he has received during his recovery.

In his article published at The Daily Signal, Hanson discusses “Trump’s ‘Wars of Reckoning’ Send a Message to Iran, China, and Beyond.” 

Hanson is a historian, and he sees current events through the lens of history. He has watched how Trump runs a war and says that there is “a general pattern” for “a Trump way of war.”

·        [Geostrategic]

One thing that’s central to all of his action is they’re geostrategic. Pressuring the Panamanians to divorce themselves from China. Making sure the Venezuelan oil does not go to Russia or China by changing the government and kidnapping, capturing, Nicolas Maduro.

Things like that suggest that the current Iranian operation has targeted China, but it’s a major supplier of Chinese oil. China’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, supplier of consumer goods, material goods to Iran. It supplies weaponry to Iran, and Iran has become a client more of China now than Russia. And it may be lost to China as Venezuela was, and maybe Panama was.

·        [Settling Old Scores]

You’re starting to see a pattern. These are wars of reckoning. People say, “Well, why are we attacking Iran?” and Trump’s way of reasoning, he’s settling up old scores. Panama was getting away with murder through a previous administration, maybe including his own, by stationing or allowing the Chinese to have strategic locations on the Panama Canal.

It was time to say, “No more.” Maduro was getting away with literally murder. Sending drugs, working with the cartels into the United States, sending hardened criminals into the United States as well, illegal aliens. And it was time to say, “You’re not going to cause a Castroite Latin American Communist Revolution. We’re going to stop it.”

And it was past time in Trump’s way of thinking. All of these wars are in that way. Same thing with Iran. They have killed more Americans, as we all have been told, than any other terrorist clique or operation. Going back even before the Iran-Iraq war, before our incursions in the Gulf War.

At the very beginning that government was birthed on the idea of taking American hostages and then subsequently blowing up our embassy, blowing up Marine barracks, involvement in Khobar Towers, using proxies like Hezbollah to hijack planes, assassinate Americans.

It was time, in other words, to even up the score. These take place during negotiations.

·        [Negotiation]

Notice that Trump was negotiating with Iranians during the summer hit on their nuclear facilities. He was negotiating with them in this current war. He was negotiating with the Venezuelans, and that is his characteristic.

He’s saying to these different entities, “I want a peaceful solution.” And even if he didn’t want a peaceful solution, the idea that he is negotiating lessens the criticism that they are preemptive, or preventative, optional wars. In other words, he can say, “Well, I wanted to make peace, but the negotiations broke down.” 

[Top-Down Attacks]

Notice their top-down attacks. They go after Qasem Soleimani in the first term, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or they go after Maduro or they go after Ali Khamenei. The idea is, everybody in the world should be on notice…. Of course, there’s no nation-building….

·      [No cultural imperialism]

There’s no cultural imperialism. No desire to say we were going to make democracies all over the Middle East. We’re not going to do that, and therefore, we’re not going to have boots on the ground … unless emergencies.

·         [Weird Exit Strategy]

There’s a weird exist strategy too that Donald Trump has in all of these. He determines when the war starts and when it ends….

·         [No UN Involvement]

An eighth aspect of the Trump way of war: There’s no effort to go to the United Nations. No United Nations, no International Criminal Court, no EU consultation. … nobody talked about NATO….

·         [Showcases U.S. Arms]

Nine, there are show cases for U.S. arms…. Everybody’s talking about the greatest, biggest, strongest warship in the history of civilization, the Gerald R. Ford….

·         [America First]

And finally, there’s no, I don’t know how to put it, but he’s not hiding U.S. self-interest. Of course, he talks about it’ll be much better for the greater Middle East, but we wouldn’t have gone to war if it hadn’t been for U.S. interest.

And what is U.S. interest? We’re sick and tired of the Iranians attacking our allies, but more importantly, as the biggest killer of Americans. We don’t want them to hijack planes anymore. We don’t want them to stage assassination attempts in New York or in Washington against either dissidents or foreign entities like the Saudi ambassador.

We don’t like them to capture hostages and torture them. We don’t like them sending lethal arms to kill Americans as they did during the Iraq war. We don’t want them to kidnap people in foreign countries or in Iran and hold them as hostages. We’re just sick of it. And it’s in our interest, in Trump’s way of war, to end it….

… War doesn’t change because human nature is immutable….

But how do you do it? What are the tactics? What is the strategy? What is the weaponry? Have change, and no one has changed them more than Donald Trump.