Free Republic

America has repeatedly been declared a dying empire, yet every rival—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China—has ultimately fallen short of US power and resilience. One American view of China—now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd—is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American...

Given that we spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq and maybe more in Afghanistan, and Joe Biden left $50 billion in equipment in the latter, the idea that you would spend less than $30 billion and have a chance to overthrow the worst government in the world—one that’s caused most of the problems we’ve had in the Middle East—is a bargain, if it works, and I think it will, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

Demographic change, DEI ideology, anti-Israel radicalism, and political cowardice have mainstreamed hostility toward Jews. Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel. After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances. Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of...

Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional working-class, patriotic roots and embraced a radical Jacobin ideology built on division, coercion, and political extremism. For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative. By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and...

The Iran war didn’t just break Tehran—it shattered old alliances, exposed Europe’s weakness, checked China and Russia, and accelerated an American-led geopolitical realignment. No one ever quite knows the nature of the aftermath of any war in the Middle East. The current effort to disarm and neuter the Iranian theocracy is no exception. But contrary to European and American left-wing consensus, the ripples of the Iran war are already remaking the postwar world as we knew it—and in ways that are all bad. For more than half a century, OPEC has terrorized the industrial world with threats of oil shortages...

For decades, Iran survived by staying just below the threshold of direct confrontation. It relied on shadow oil shipments, asymmetric attacks, and strategic disruption. That formula worked against sanctions. It is now colliding with something it was never built to handle: a sustained, enforced blockade.And markets are only beginning to understand what that means.How a Shipping War Turned Into Economic ContainmentThe escalation did not begin with the blockade. It began with Iran attempting to weaponize uncertainty.Early in the conflict, Tehran targeted commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, effectively freezing traffic through one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints....

We’re approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran war, and we’re still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war’s not going well. It’s completely nonempirical. It’s antithetical to the evidence. Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about $500 million in input per day. It’s running out of storage space in a week or two for its daily output of oil, at which point they either have to stop pumping or they’re going to have—if they don’t stop pumping—their wells will collapse. They either have to stop pumping, or they have to...

Trump’s assassination attempts underscore how rhetoric that casts political opponents as existential threats can move from language to violence. Same Old, Same Old: Target Trump.At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt—this time in full view of the Washington press corps. The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump. After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall—and that he might see possible violence outside it. Indeed, protesters ringed...

Iran’s decades-long bluff—built on terror proxies, nuclear brinkmanship, and Western appeasement—collapsed the moment it faced direct force and a changed geopolitical landscape. How does the supposedly most fearsome regime in the violent Middle East now find itself on the verge of an utter economic and military collapse? Iran’s half-century-long deadly terrorist reputation peaked with the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel that it helped fund and coordinate. Iran’s terrorist ambitions of running the Middle East had accelerated after witnessing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s distancing itself from Israel. Biden’s humiliation by a series of Chinese slights and the...

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny. Pseudo-HeroesIt is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality. In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made...

“It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.” —VDH Wednesday the US / Iran ceasefire expires. It has been an interesting two weeks. The US used it to negotiate an end to hostilities, resupply our ships in the Arabian Sea, do maintenance on our ships and warplanes, dismantle Iran’s banking conduits, and blockade Hormuz to shut down the regime’s remaining income flow. The Iranians used it to jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo. They...

<p>Here are Victor Davis Hanson's own words from the discussion, cleaned up and formatted for clarity (removing timestamps, interviewer prompts, and host commentary):On Iran's regime and internal humiliation:“As I said in this article, it’s one thing to tell the population, ‘Well, you don’t like us, but we restored the Iranian credibility. Everybody’s afraid of us. We’re the terror master.’ And now the people are saying, ‘No, you’re not the terror masters of the Middle East. You’re a paper tiger. You’re buffoons. They’ve wiped you out. We’re going down the toilet with you.</p>

America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war. The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum. The Strait of HormuzPrior...

Summary of Video Transcript Victor Davis Hanson suggested letting NATO "die on the vine" by putting into it exactly the amount of effort that Canada does, while making bilateral deals with European countries that support the U.S., in this video for "The Daily Signal." "Even though they have a $22 trillion GDP, apparently they don’t want to invest that in their own defense," he said. "And they don’t want us to use it when we need it." "What’s the future? Do we get out of NATO? I don’t think we do. I think we just let it die on the...

The Left and some on the Right went crazy over a recent Trump tweet. He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” His wording may have been sloppy, but Trump obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and wouldn’t come back once power plants and transportation systems crucial to the regime’s survival were cut off. Why do we know that? Because, unlike...

Democrats can rebrand candidates, but they cannot hide a long record of condescension toward the very working-class voters they now need to win back. After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong. While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found. Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40–50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout. Democrats realize that their...

--SNIP-- Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism. They are more reliant on oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz. All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state. But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some ****** the US effort as either illegal or unnecessary. The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting the US...

NATO endures on American backing while many allies demand U.S. action abroad but withhold it when asked, exposing a widening gap between rhetoric and responsibility. NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership. But they often do just that. Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security. They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in...

Military victories are decided on the battlefield—but in modern America, they are too often lost in the politics that follow. The rare quick and total victory over an enemy at little cost often ensures unquestioned political support in modern consensual societies. In most cases, however, especially in the Western world, ongoing military success or failure is adjudicated through the lens of politics—in a way sometimes at odds with the reality of the battlefield. Politicians answer to the people. The best do not drift with the prevailing winds. On the other hand, all must face elections, secure legislative support, and ultimately...

The canonized legacy of Cesar Chavez is collapsing under revelations that recast a sainted activist as a deeply flawed—and possibly predatory—man the Left can no longer easily defend. Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument....