Particularly interesting is his pointed observation that in the war between democratic Athens and monarchic Sparta, most Greeks hoped for a Spartan victory. They preferred a less overbearing option over the more overbearing, self-righteous Athenians, democracy or no. It's impossible to read this without relating it to current events. Prediction: Dr. Hanson will be coming out against the NATO proxy prosecution of the Ukraine war in the months ahead.
This is what Imprimis should be all about. I was disappointed in the codswallop by Bjorn Lomborg on climate change. It was not Imprimis quality material. Hansen on the other hand is.
I believe VDH already has. Check out some of his interviews and talks at the Hoover Institute. His thinking is similar to John Mearsheimer in regards to Russia-Ukraine. Odd bedfellows.
Interesting. There was indeed a distinctive greatness about Athens that even its tribute paying, vassal states begrudgingly admitted and ultimately were transformed. America has also become an imperial power, albeit without overt tribute. It too receives the begrudging admiration of its vassals. Those countries also realize that their inherent culture and customs are being challenged and transformed by the American presence. This has caused much bitterness, resentment and often violence.
Hanson is brilliant.
He is brilliant at analyzing the lessons of history.
He is brilliant at looking at the large picture.
But the large picture is made up of millions of individual people.
He needs to be paired with someone who looks at the individuals behind the large picture.
Put that person with Hanson on a cruise and sign me up.
If it wasn’t for British imperialism India would be part of China.
I agree with or will defer to everything Hanson says in this piece. (I actually don’t recall ever disagreeing with anything he has said).
The founder of economics, Adam Smith, opposed Mercantilism, and favored free trade. Ditto, the Unites States. Mercantilism advocated that European powers develop overseas colonies which would be sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured products. You might recognize a certain relationship between this policy, Mercantilism, and Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum (that Germany had to expand to the east to achieve self-sufficiency in food and oil). The race for colonies in Africa and Germany’s challenge to British naval supremacy were among the causes of WWI.
Hansen has spoken to yet other issues relevant to the challenges we face today. For example, the Munich Agreement dividing up Czechoslovakia, isolationism, and appeasement of Russia. It looks to me that he’s a peace through strength guy, a non-interventionist, opposes appeasement, and advocates of strong military alliances and international trade and investment.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/1/victor-davis-hanson-lessons-in-munic-agreement-for/
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/victor-davis-hanson-warns-of-isolationist-sentiment/
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LOL, not russia's war on Ukraine but "NATO proxy prosecution of the Ukraine war"
Yup, russian leveling of Ukrainian cities is an improvement. Idiocy
Progressives and Marxists of various stripes have revised western society’s political terms to hide new forms of an imperium - primarly housed in the administrative state but increasily born from within, and enforced from, instituttions outside the state and sometimes outside any state.
Incressingly states adopt mandates from non-state acting imperiums, like the UN, the OECD or even the WEF, as if the state and its own elected officials have no choice. How much so? Just ask governments who openly defy mandates from those suprnational imperiums and their propgandists in the media who portray those imperiums as righteous and governments who oppose them as “backward”.
If you want to see an example of corruption and hubris, take a look at Joe Biden. The Dictator seems to say: This is America. We can win any war(s) we want, anytime we want. AND. We’re losing patience with those who prolong the pandemic. Take the shot now.
I’ll step off my soap-box and offer better analysis from VDH:
This might remind us also of Britain, whose empire probably reached its peak sometime between 1850 and 1860. But if we read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, published in 1852, we see that at the heart of the empire in London, there were vast numbers of people who were in poor-houses at the same time the country was spending its resources far and wide on its great imperial civilizing mission.
This in turn might make us think of present day San Francisco, where people are injecting themselves with drugs, fornicating, urinating, and defecating on the streets, and downtown businesses are closing in large numbers; or Chicago, where the murder and crime rates are making life there unbearable for so many. Our major cities are going to rot at the same time we are pledged to giving $120 billion to Ukraine, already making its military budget the third largest in the world.
And the decay goes beyond the large cities. Think of those gruesome scenes in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train crash that enveloped the town in a toxic chemical cloud. East Palestine is full of working-class people whom few of our establishment political leaders were willing to go visit. The people of East Palestine form the demographic that died at twice the numbers of the general population in our overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet few in our leadership class—many of whom had made one or more recent trips around the world to Ukraine to visit the Ukrainian people and pose for photos with Mr. Zelensky—went to East Palestine. I don’t know if one can properly call the United States an imperialist power, but this phenomenon of neglected and hollowed-out cores coupled with widespread overseas investments and commitments tends to be characteristic of empires.