American Thought Leaders - Victor Davis Hanson: How Trump Is Upending the Status Quo, From Beijing to Gaza to Kyiv

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

In this episode, we sit down again with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of two dozen books, including most recently “The End of Everything.”In this interview, we dive into the multifaceted dimensions of what he describes as Trump’s “counterrevolution” in the foreign policy space, from Canada to China to the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.What might the end of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza look like?Should Trump have accepted a plane from Qatar’s royal family? Was it a good idea to lift U.S. sanctions on Syria’s new leader? Is there any truth to rumors of friction between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?Is it possible that Trump actually, in some sense, wanted Mark Carney to win and become Prime Minister of Canada?And how can the United States ensure the Chinese leadership upholds their commitments in a trade agreement, given their track record of not following through?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

This is all so political. The Wall Street Journal was probably the worst offender. As soon as the tariffs were announced on Liberation Day and the market tanked, they ran story, as you remember, recession, Trump's ruined his 100 days, administration in chaos. When you looked at the actual data that was released in March and April, corporate profits up, energy costs down, GDP going to be recalibrated and good, inflation pretty moderate, job growth 100,000 more than we thought. So all the indicators were exactly opposite of what Wall Street was saying. So what was all that hysteria

about? It was all about that 7% that was paranoid about their mega profits. Joining me today is Victor Davis Hansen, a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of two dozen books, including most recently, The End of Everything. In this interview, we dive into the dimensions of what he describes as Trump's counterrevolution in the foreign policy space from Canada to China, to the Middle East, to Ukraine and Russia. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me. Victor, kind of hot off the presses, Kash Patel had an interview with Maria Bartiromo yesterday on Sunday as we're filming right now. And he talked about a range of things, a range of really significant things, including moving out of the main FBI building here in Washington, DC. But since we're going to be focusing on foreign policy today, I wanted to ask you about this also seemingly explosive information where he said that most of the terror suspects are actually coming through the northern border and also this sort of increased in movement and organized crime since the southern border has been sealed, whether it's the Chinese Communist Party, Iran, Mexican cartels. What's your take on that?

Well, I think he's reflecting the reality that the northern border, which is the longest border in the world between two sovereign nations, is naturally much more porous. There's not a river like the Rio Grande. There's not the Gulf that stops the border at about 2,000 miles in the case of Mexico. It's actually much easier to come into Canada than it is to Mexico and it's less patrolled and whether we like it or not, it seems like the Mexican government, because we have much more leverage on it, is much more responsive than the Canadian government especially under Trudeau. We'll see what Mr. Carney does. But there's been this tension with Canada and maybe part of that tension is expressed

in a less serious effort on their part to address this new surge of people that have ill intent toward the United States saying the southern border, which was the traditional entry into the United States, is now closed and the northern border is still open. It makes me wonder about one of the things I've heard from numerous people, it was almost like the U.S. president had an interest in having Mark Carney elected because he kept talking about the 51st state and so forth, sort of catalyzing Canadian nationalism and almost sort of fueling the idea that the conservative leader was something like Trump, which Canadians wouldn't like.

conservative leader was something like Trump, which Canadians wouldn't like. I think that's kind of a constant in foreign policy. I remember the Soviets were always more attuned to a conservative president, even though that was more diametrically opposed to their own ideology. The idea that they were more candid or they were more clear about their opposition, you knew what you were dealing with. And I think Trump probably feels that with Poliev that he would probably have to be careful what he said, he'd have to be careful because he was a kindred conservative, but with somebody who obviously was antithetical to Trump, it is what it is. And he, at that point point in the campaign represented more the Canadian views.

What I get in the real examples, so if you're going to tell Canada it's time you spent 2% as you promised in 2014 of GDP on defense and you haven't done it for 11 years, you're only spending 1.37. If you tell a fellow conservative that, it's embarrassing to him. If you tell a liberal or a man on the left that, then you have real pressure on him. I think that's the idea.

And the same thing goes for the trade surplus. You don't wanna embarrass a fellow conservative and say, look, we're running $63 billion deficit with you guys. You have some tariffs that are asymmetrical. We want to have some correction of that. But when you do it to someone who's antithetical, you can be more honest, blunt. I think that's what Trump is thinking. Let's talk about the tariff regime in general. What do you make of this whole tariff implementation? What is Trump trying to do with that?

Well, I think he's 90% correct in what he's doing. Where he errors is he feels that because he has a whole agenda, Doge is not going to cut the amount of money that is necessary to make up for these tax breaks on tips, for these, you know, tax breaks on tips, tax breaks on social security, tax breaks on first responders, maybe tax breaks that he's going to be in red ink. And so he feels that the revenue from the tariffs, which is about 2% of the $5 trillion of federal revenue, and even if he were to get, as he says, a trillion dollars over a decade, you're still talking about only a hundred billion dollars out of five trillion revenue. So that's

a mistake to talk about these tariffs as a way to raise money. The better way to talk about it is that we are running a one point, what, deficit we have for 50 years and in some cases that is allowing our enemies to get a lot of foreign exchange like China and they are investing it not in their people, healthcare, housing, etc. but in rapidly building this huge Navy, huge Army and new Air Force. So he's right about that, and they cheat. The other problem is that he's trying to tell our allies that the post-war order is now ossified, and the post-war order was because we emerged from World War II, the dominant

power with the least amount of damage in a world that needed industrial goods. For basically 80 years, we were willing to be asymmetrical with what became the EU, with Asia, Japan, South Korea. And the problem is that these deficits were tied to offshoring, outsourcing, and a diminished assembly and factory sector. I hesitated only because I work at the Hoover Institution. I'm lectured every day by our blue chip economists that trade deficits don't matter. And I think they do, especially when they have forced multipliers of a trillion dollar,

excuse me, two trillion dollar budget deficit and 37 trillion dollar national debt, it's all connected. So what Trump is trying to say is, we've got to get Doge to slash government. We've got to get a trade balance. We've got to address the debt because without any fiscal reform we're going to be weak abroad. And it's all part of a larger package of financial reform. And then we get to the question of fairness, symmetry, and it's tied in, as you pointed out, with military readiness. And so Canada's very angry, and as you know as a Canadian at us but they don't and you can make the argument that the 51st state mem is Donald Trump trolling them in the way he talked about annexing Greenland or taking back the Panama

Canal. That's part of his art of a deal style. It's not serious, I think. But Canada won't address these existential issues. So for them to get to 2% it's about 40 billion dollars. And they're not going to do it, not for five more years. And so what they're basically telling the rest of the NATO alliance and the United States is we want to be members of NATO, but because we have two oceans like the United States, we're really not in any existential threat from China or Russia. And we're right under the nuclear umbrella of the United States, and it's going to build a missile defense system in Alaska that will be covering us as well. Toronto is closer to U.S. cities than most U.S. cities are to each other. So we're just going to kind of carry along with that and we have all sorts of statutes because we're next to

this big colossus that we don't want to be dominated. So we have things about news suppression, acquisitions of media, we don't want to be just you know an ancillary to the culture the United States. And we have these domestic products that we have to protect the eggs, poultry, and we went around to 63 billion. And then the next thing is the Canadians tell us, and I'm not trying to be too harsh on your countrymen, but they say, well, we give you all this oil.

95% of our oil that we produce goes to you and that's true and we even give a discount but when you look at the oil it's very heavy it's very sulfur-laden it's very far from your east and west ports to get it out and so it's right across the border to us and so the Americans are saying well yeah but we've got this big energy market and we're right next to you guys so you don't need a lot of big pipeline, very long pipelines or truck. How would you get it out anyway? And more importantly, we have all these refineries that, because we have some of the same stuff

that specialize in heavy oil. If you were to try to truck it out or transport it out to your two ports and then send it on the world market, you wouldn't be as as successful this is a great deal for you and so all of these were all of these issues were predicated on the idea of past administrations this is Canada this is our friend this is our ally we don't just like Britain or Australia we just don't talk about these things. Trump comes in and says That was then this is now we're 37 trillion in debt We're sliding as a world power in the estimation of our enemies

China's on the right. We've got it. We've got to do make some corrections and those corrections are very painful for everybody involved Yeah, and there's also this other dimension. I mean, as someone, I've lived in Vancouver for a number of years at one point in my life, and you can't imagine it as a Canadian, as a narco-trafficking hub for North America, which Sam Cooper has demonstrated extensively, it has become. Yeah, and you think of Canada as sort of a signature Anglo-North American country. You don't get the idea that it has greater open borders than we do as far as immigration. And the liberal governments have really enshrined in Canadian politics that for us to grow, we're going to have to open our doors and bring in immigrants from all over the world

because now we are a multiracial, multicultural society. But the problem with that is that we know that there is no successful multiracial democracy that is multicultural. India has terrible problems with a caste system and all sorts of tribalism. So does Brazil, these big democracies that are multiracial. The United States and Canada have been successful, in the case of Canada it probably was more successful in the sense that it had a kind of a uniform population until recently. We were more multiracial, but we had a single culture. And if you bring in millions of people, as Canada is trying to do, and you don't inculcate

them and you follow our pattern of not acculturating, not assimilating, not integrating, then it's a disaster of tribalism and sectarianism. That's what everybody's worried about in Canada because we have the same problems here, but we're trying to address it. In your case, your guys are doubling down on it. That seems to be what's happening in Europe as well. I think the Americans are saying, we kind of exported ideas, at least the Trump administration is saying, of multiculturalism, of woke, of transgenderism,

of borderless utopias. And you guys lapped it all up because we were culturally influential. And it was disastrous. And we're going to rectify that now here at home. I think the world is saying, well this is weird. Under Obama and Biden, you know, we kind of, Clinton, we kind of thought this was good so we followed your lead. And now suddenly you're saying close

your borders and make fair rather than free trade and have one culture and get rid of woke and DI. So it's kind of a shock for a lot of foreign countries and a lot of anti-Americanism about it. Do you think that the world will also follow suit in adopting the change in culture, given the frankly significant social stripe you see in numerous European countries, for example, because of exactly the type of immigration you described? Well, Europe is very critical of our system. No other country has ever successfully emulated this two-party system with these elections where the people vote in a party and there is no parliamentary coalitions and there's no we have no

conception that a person can be a prime minister or president without being voted for in other words that if the the party caucus doesn't like him they get rid of him it was a shock enough that we did that with a nominee with Harris and Biden, but Essentially the people did vote they have a very good all of these other countries that are democratic have a different system and the problem with their system is when they confront on Orthodox changes that the people want

unorthodox changes that the people want, they have mechanisms to stop it which we don't have here because we have the midterm elections and we have the four year elections and it's just a free-for-all. Anybody can you know anybody anybody that wins can take power and to the Europeans and to a lesser extent former Commonwealth countries of the British Empire they have the same system and so when they have the same system. And so when they see the alternative for Deutschland or conservative parties in the Netherlands or France, they just go paranoid and they become very anti-democratic in their efforts to suppress them. Because the ruling powers think, you know, these people, the people, they don't trust the people like we do.

They think these people are uneducated, they're unwashed, they don't know what they're doing, we're technocrats, we're aristocrats, and we've got to stop them. And then they end up hurting themselves by acting very anti-democratically. Victor, before I jump back to the whole tariff regime, something I've been thinking about recently, someone drew my attention to the idea that the spoils system, i.e. if you win, you get to select a whole bunch of people and put them into the bureaucracy to run things, the people that were your political allies specifically. Someone pointed out to me that this is actually by design, and this actually provides a kind of check on growing corruption or something like that. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, because a kind of check on growing corruption or something like that.

That was a fast—I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, because that kind of speaks directly to the issue you just described, I think. Well, our system has kind of been abused recently when you think of Anthony Fauci and James Comey and Lois Lerner, but the system actually is accommodating. So when you have a new party come in, then they can change the cabinet level appointees. They can change the head of the FBI. They can get the chairman of the Joint Chief. And that's important.

Otherwise, you get something like the chaos of the first year of the Trump administration where he brings these people in and they don't agree with him. I'm talking about Rex Tillerton or Jim Mattis or John Bolton or anonymous or people in the high levels of political appointments that try to sabotage a government. But then at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, they are protected by civil service and they're supposed to, as long as they're apolitical. And that system has worked pretty well in a way that allows a government to come in

and do things because the people are all on the same page. And I can tell you that when Obama came in, he fired everybody on boards that were political pointies. I know Susan Rice got very angry and went in kind of a racist rant against Pete Hecsef because he fired her from the Defense Policy Board. He called her, she called him a cis white male mediocrity. But she was appointed after Biden fired the previous Trump appointees.

And she was a late appointee that was a political, and that's just our system. And it works pretty well because it gets everybody on the same page. And then if there's abuses or excesses, the voters can throw them out. Victor, I want to jump back to the whole tariff set. So do you agree with me? Like for me, when I looked at those initial tariff tables, and kind of the first foray, if you will, in Trump's art of the deal using tariffs, China was really the focus. Does it continue to be that way given this 90-day reprieve that they're now trying to extend, I might add? Yes, China was the focus, but he understood there were problems in focusing on

China because while the Europeans run a similar trillion dollar deficit with China, they make it up in part by having a 300 billion dollar surplus with us. And so the Europeans were very opportunistic. For example, when China initially said we're going to cancel all 737 purchases, well, Europe was delighted because they were going to sell them airbuses. So the Europeans are the last people to engage with Trump. He's going to get a deal with India. He's going to get a deal with the UK, as he did. He'll get a deal with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. He'll get

a deal with China. But the last people he will get a deal with are the EU because they're opportunistic. They are more, they're as anti-Trump as the American left. They take their cue from the American left. If they are told by the American left, cutting a deal with Trump helps them politically, then they will do the opposite, as long as they can. And the way that Trump is dealing with them and saying, we're going to have more favorable tariff arrangements with countries that settle now rather than later.

So he's trying to create a psychological condition where kind of like musical chairs, when the music comes off you want a chair otherwise you're too late. But I think it'll be harder actually to get a deal with the Europeans than it will be the Chinese. And the problem with the Chinese is that not just that the Americans are hooked on cheap stuff coming from China and it was very weird to hear the Democrats say there won't be enough Walmart stuff for people because they're very critical of consumerism in general and they were very critical, of course, at least at one time of no tariff Chinese dumping that took away American fabrication

and assembly. But there's other issues involved. And they are patent and copyright violations, monetary manipulation, dumping product, technological theft. 300,000 students in the United States, maybe one or two, three or four thousand actively engaged in espionage. Stanford Review just had a big story where I work that students are actively engaged in Chinese espionage. So how you address all of that at a time when China is becoming military, closer to be,

it's not yet achieved it, but it's going to aim to achieve military parity with the United States within five to ten years. And it's Velikos, and it depends on us more. We found that out when they kind of caved, but it's a very tricky thing to do. The other thing about it very quickly is this is all so political. The Wall Street Journal was probably the worst offender. As soon as the tariffs were announced on Liberation Day and the market tanked, they ran stories, you remember, in the news and the op-eds. Recession, Trump's ruined his

100 days, administration in chaos, administration in free fall, tourism down. And then when you looked at the actual data that was released in March and April, corporate profits up, energy costs down, GDP going to be recalibrated and good, inflation pretty moderate, 2.3 I think in April job growth a hundred thousand more than we thought so all the indicators were exactly opposite of what Wall Street was saying and then when you looked at what Wall Street had been telling us whether it was Jason Furman under the Obama administration or Warren Buffett they were saying the chief peril is debt. Debt, debt, debt.

Trade deficits, budget deficits, national debt. And here was the first president that was talking about that. And then they would say, well, there's also uncertainty in the markets because of the Middle East and the oil and the war and Ukraine. And then this was the first president was trying to get a ceasefire in Ukraine. So all the evidence belied the animus.

And then you said to yourself, well, why are they doing this? Well, they were doing it because they can't stand him for one reason, but the other is 7% of Americans own 93% of the market capitalization, not the number of stocks, but the value. And 50% have 1% of market capitalization, not the number of stocks, but the value. And 50% have 1% of market capitalization. So what you basically saw was a small group of very, very elite people in the Acela corridor furious because in August, when the market hit 44,000, they were giddy.

And now it had gone down to 40, where it was pretty much much of the last few months before the big surge. It was actually where it got. It got down to where it was in August or September. And the market, I think, hit 44 in May. So they were basically telling the American people, once the market reaches its crescendo, we lock it in there and that's ours forever. And anything that goes on is a loss.

They never look at the other way that it was mostly 40,000, which they were giddy about and when it went up, that was an unusual spike. And so now they're mute because where are we? We're right back where we were right before Trump assumed office. And so what was all that hysteria about? It was all about that 7% that was paranoid about their mega profits. And when I live in Southwest Fresno County,

I think the per capita income's about 17,000. When I go to the store or I go get gas and I talk to people. I can tell you I've talked to 400 strangers the last year. Not one has ever mentioned the stock market. Not one. They don't own one. I owed a stock.

And if they have some in their retirement plan, they have no idea how much it is. But it's not much. And I can tell you what they talked about was the price of California gas, the price of California electricity, how terrible the infrastructure was, and the hyperinflation that has not ceased, I mean that we're stuck with from the Joe Biden prices. And so a lot of this is class differences, and I think that's why this is so unusual to see a Republican president whose emphases seem to be on the middle class that was a Democratic constituency. Well, and this is fascinating too, because President Trump loves to talk about how well

the stock market is doing. He clearly has a focus on that as well. Yeah, and he's right about it. I mean, even if you don't own stock, everybody wants a strong stock market. But this insane paranoia that for one month, they lost their heads and said that because we don't get to have 44,000, then the whole country's falling apart and we're going to be in a recession.

It was ridiculous because there was no indicators, there was A, no indicators that they usually count on. And then second, all of the issues that they had been warning long term and they were furious about, he was trying to address. That was exactly what Doge was trying to do. That was what people in the Republican House were fighting about. How do we cut the debt? How do we cut the budget deficit? And they can say all they want now about trade deficits not mattering.

But 20 years ago Warren Buffett basically said, we're running huge trade deficits and at that time there were 60 or 80 billion a year with China and all the result is that they are accumulating foreign exchange and they're going to use that foreign exchange to import sophisticated technology for military purposes or they're going to buy key real estate all around the world with foreign exchange. That's exactly what they did in the Belton Road. And then all of these people then, what it was Warren Buffett saying now, oh, trade deficits don't matter. Jason Furman said, you know, there's a certain percentage where you cannot have a trade deficit larger than a

percent of GDP. I think it was 3% or something. And when it got over that, he was very angry or something. And when it got over that, he was very angry and chastised, I think, the Biden administration. And now when it dipped below it, he said it didn't matter. So there's a deep, I think to understand American politics, there is a deep paranoia, loathing, visceral hatred of Donald Trump in the media, in academia, in the bureaucracy, in the foundations among the elite, and it clouds their empiricism. They cannot be disinterested. And that's just the way it is. And the Wall Street Journal falls into that category. Victor, with respect to this, you said it's going to be easier to make a deal with communist China than it is to

with the Europeans. I'm not aware of examples where China honors their side of any deal. Maybe there are some small examples that I'm unaware of. But let's say they make a deal. There's this 90-day reprieve because of initial conversations. There's been this criticism of the president that he's very transactional. We can talk about that. But can you be even transactional with the CCP? No, you can't. And they're like the Iranians. Everything they say is untrue. And they have no intention of honoring it.

I think what he's trying to do is draw attention to the fact that when he went head to head with the Chinese, despite their suppression of the news, they were under more stress than we were. And I think that's true. China experts have said there were people in the streets, there were idling factories, and that we could endure that.

So I think what he's saying is, I'm going to put them on notice, but I can do this again. And for a period, they're going to find that it's in their self-interest to emulate or feign or at least follow 50% of what they do or they're going to get slapped again and that is going to give us a window and we have to seize the moment and in that window I'm going to tour the world and get $10 trillion of foreign investment and we're going to make our own pharmaceuticals, we're going to make a lot of, we're not going to outsource technology, we're going to do the AI, the biotech, genetic.

We're going to do it all here. And we're going to have all this foreign capital coming here. And by the time, it's going to give us a window where we don't just collapse and be completely dependent on China as we were. And I think that's the idea. I don't know if it's going to work. People have said, oh, you don't have enough skilled workers or your welfare programs are too lucrative.

People won't come out and work. You're going to be short labor. These people are lying. In the Middle East, they will not really put the money there. They're just saying this. But I think that was the idea, at least, that he's getting a... It is a record amount of foreign investment and the idea is that we're going to produce stuff that we get from

the Chinese that's valuable. And I think he doesn't really care about dolls or consumer, cheap consumer commodities that they make very cheaply, but he's talking about military parts, AI, very sophisticated technology, chips and things that he wants to be built here, and he wants no more reliance on China. I think the COVID thing really shocked a lot of Americans. We couldn't even make protective equipment and China would wink and nod and say, we're trying to send it to you, or we're trying to say, sorry, we're a little late. That kind of attitude. Victor, this is incredibly confusing to me, because I agree with you. It was unbelievably shocking. The CCP actually threatened to withhold

some of those products, but that didn't translate into America actually going all out to repatriate supply chains, especially on critical pharmaceutical precursors or PPE or whatever? That just didn't happen, which is kind of shocking. No, it didn't happen because there were so many people left and right that were so heavily invested in China and fabrication and for that to happen you would have to make them either reclocate here or relocate to Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam. What Trump did is basically he he called in during the campaign and then during the hundred days all the people who shouldn't like him for cultural social reasons And that was Andreessen been Horowitz

David Sacks Larry Ellison was favorable to him Zuckerberg Elon Musk he won over right after the first assassination Jeff Bezos and he got he brought all, I'm kind of generalizing, but Andreessenberg basically said this. And he got them all in and he said, you guys are being regulated to the death in Europe, they don't like you, they're trying to suppress your products to promote their own domestic less efficient, less competitive products.

The Chinese, you may think you're doing a lot over there, but all they're doing is having you invest. They copy everything you do. They copy your business plan. And when they have squeezed you dry, they kick you out. So I'm making you a deal kind of like the war production board of World War II when Roosevelt called in his antithesis William Knutson head of GM, Henry Kaiser head of Kaiser Steel, Henry Ford and he

said look the new deal is over with we need to produce stuff and I'm going to give you willow run to build B-24s I'm going to give you the Alameda shipyards I want a Liberty ship every week I'm going to Mr. willow run to build B-24s. I'm going to give you the Alameda shipyards. I want a Liberty ship every week I'm going to mr. Newts and you just do what you got to do and I will protect you But you've got to out produce the world and so what Trump is trying to tell these guys is I'm not going to do I'm not going to regulate you. I'm not going to go after you. I know you don't like me But if you bring your stuff back here and you invest here and you hire here, you're going to get the most favorable climate possible from us, the government, under one condition that you be American first.

Promote us, us, us. And I will protect you from the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, anybody." And they were shocked at that message because they had been told by Joe Biden in the case of Andreessen, he said, you know, they basically said these companies are going to be an AI and these aren't. And this is what you can do. And we expect a big contribution. And I think Trump just thought, these guys are smart. They don't like me, but I can use them and they can use me and we can promote America. And I think, I don't know if it's going to work, but that's his plan. How important is rebuilding U.S. manufacturing to this whole picture?

Well, when we say manufacturing, the critics usually say the idea you're going to lure all these Americans, many of the labor participation rate is 62% of able-bodied people. And that's because of our generous safety net, kind of a new culture that you work at home and these people are not going to go into the factory floor and stand up there and build a phone all day like the Chinese do. So it's a crazy idea. But I don't think that's what he's talking about.

I think he's talking about bringing in $10 trillion of foreign investment, making very, very sophisticated, automated robotic factories, and then getting a trained workforce. And you can see his emphasis as he's warring on the four-year colleges. But when you look at what he's also not warring on, he's promoting technical schools, community college, two-year training. So I think his idea is that we're going to get some well-trained Americans.

And it's going to be very, it's not going to be labor intensive. It's going to be very sophisticated. And maybe we can make things that really matter. it's not going to be labor intensive, it's going to be very sophisticated, and maybe we can make things that really matter. And as far as the other things that require huge workforces and repetitive labor, we'll let other people do that, like the Chinese. And that's why I think China is very, very upset, because it understands that what it

really makes money on are industrial goods, technology that it's appropriated from Europe and the United States and ships back to us are medical, pharmaceutical, India and China, things like that. That's what he's aiming at. He's trying to tell we're not going to have avionics coming from China. We're not going to have computer chips coming from Taiwan. We're not going to rely on India for Augmentin or Doxacil. We're just not going to do that anymore. And so we'll see how that works. With this respect to this criticism that the president is purely transactional in his foreign policy, it's very interesting to me that Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State and now also the National Security Advisor, at least for the time being.

I can think of a few people, I count them on my hand, who were in the US Congress of the Chinese Communist Party threat and as supportive of, for example, Chinese dissidents of a variety of sorts. So it's very interesting that he has this now dual top position. It seems to me that there's something more happening here than pure transaction. I'm curious what your thoughts are. There is. I think he's trying to elaborate on the criticism that Trump got for his mercantilism in the Gulf. He's trying to say in his interviews that he's trying to say that we're realists, but we're not and we are idealists and the two are not antithetical. And what is reacting to is he feels in the last, in the George W. Bush administration

in the eight years of the Obama administration, in the four years of the Biden administration, we put human rights and idealism in a Wilsonian sense and we didn't understand local customs traditions and we tried to imprint that sometimes muscularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, sometimes by promoting, as we saw with USAID, transgenderism, gay marry, all of these cultural menus and traditional places like Pakistan or the Gulf. And it didn't work. And all it did was open those countries to mercantile arguments from China and illiberal regimes. So this new nexus of North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China capitalized on the anger of our

own cultural imperialism. And at the same time, our interventionism to nation-build was an utter failure. So we got this Orwellian situation in Afghanistan where the world was watching this huge military that had built a $300 million retrofitted bag from a billion dollar embassy, and it was fleeing from a bunch of terrorists, and it was leaving behind 50 billion in munitions,

but it had a pride flag on the embassy. There were George Floyd Murrells around Kabul. They had an $80 million gender studies program. And so what he was saying is that that is a form of cultural imperialism. Not that there's not universal ideas that transcend culture about freedom and human rights. He's not questioning that, Rubio, but he's saying that if you go into a country that you don't really understand and you start dictating to it and you think that it has to mirror image us, there is a good chance that that country will choose our enemies and it will be worse off for that country and us. And one of the Locus Classicus examples would be Joe Biden. So when he came into office and we had

Mr. Khashoggi, who was dismembered by the Saudi secret services in a foreign embassy, and you know he was a virulent critic of the Saudi royal family. So everybody was furious and they should have been furious. But then Joe Biden was asked and he was very derogatory. He said, these people, I'm not gonna go there. They're tyrannical. They're not friends of the United States. And he had some good points.

I mean, 9-11 and their role in it and stuff. But the net result was twofold. They started looking and cutting deals with Russia and China as did Iran and I think that was inevitable. But Russia and China and North Korea and Iran had this nexus and they were starting to deal with illicit oil sales to India, to Turkey and everything. So what he was saying is, Rubio would say of that, I think, what was the end result of that?

But to drive people that had been pro-American and had benefited by slow osmosis to liberalize their societies. And I think even the worst critic of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Iran or the Emirates will say they are more liberal societies now than they were 40 years ago. And that's largely due to Western investment and Western influence. And then he was saying the second half of it, and you're hypocritical too. So you blast the Saudis and say that they're primeval as Biden did, and you're not going to visit. And then you come up to the midterms and they've cut back on oil production. And suddenly gas is $4 a gallon.

And people are angry and you're draining the petroleum reserve at a million barrels a day to save your party in the midterm. So then you go over there on all fours and you beg the Saudi royal family to pump oil right before the midterm and not to be so close to China. And they said, SIA wouldn't want to be you. And yet they insulted him. And so it didn't work either way. And so I think what they're saying is we take the world as it is, and we're

trying to get 51% of the deal that we're not going to try. We're not going to be the good isn't going to be the enemy of being perfect. We don't have to be perfect to be good. We're just trying to make sure that these countries that don't agree with our cultural and social values and our humanitarianism, they don't end up in the other orbit of the dark countries, kind of like the Cold War. So we've supported a lot of dictatorships. We said Spain and Portugal and Greece are dictatorships, but they're better than a

communist dictatorship. And they will better than a communist dictatorship. And they will evolve and a communist dictatorship will never evolve. So I think that's our idea. If Saudi Arabia is run by the Chinese, they'll never evolve. But if it has good relations with us and it's profitable, maybe by osmosis it will. And that's what got people so angry. This week I think Rich Lowry and Elliott Abrams and others have been critical. I think in terms of communication and the narrative the the administration when they wrote that speech for Trump rather than blasting the previous administrations while you're overseas which they are very sensitive about.

They say don't do that, but that's what they did. When you blast, you know, nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was a subtext. They might have added a line or two that they meant well, they meant well, but the results are the opposite of what they achieved because Afghanistan may have been a better situation under a king or even in transition than under the Taliban or something like that. They could have thrown a bone or they could have said, doesn't mean we're not interested

in human rights. The final thing in this is very quickly, Trump is staging a counterrevolution and it's two pronged. One of them is to have a foreign policy that's closer to Israel, stops the Iran bomb, controls China, etc., etc. Jawbone's Europe to be more accommodating to different views. But the other and the more controversial counterrevolution is they say to themselves where is the source of power that gave us the open borders and this lunacy of 12 million illegal

aliens including 500,000 criminals where is the policy that allowed fentanyl to come in? Where is the policy that allowed our alliances to be asymmetrical? Where did all these come from? Where's boys, biological males, and female sports? Where did this DEI come? Where did ESG come?

And they came up with an answer. And they said it's endemic and institutional. And part of it is the high levels of the government with USA, these NGOs, part of it is these foundations that are not really disinterested, the Tides Foundation, the Soros Foundation. Part of it is these academics, these big blue chip universities

that bring in Chinese students, overcharge them, bring in people from the Middle East, both countries illiberal without our interest at heart. They gouge us on grants. They charge 40 to 50 percent overhead. They defy Supreme Court rules. They practice endemic racism and admissions, retentions, graduation ceremonies, you name it. The student loan program allowed them to gouge the public and raise tuition above the annual rate of inflation.

So they looked at all of it, the media, and they decided in this counterrevolution, we are not just going to do with the symptoms, close the border, try to find it. We're going to do the root cause. So we're going to tell the universities, no more federal money until you stop the anti-Semitism, you stop the surcharges, you stop the reverse racism, you stop the getting money from China

and Qatar and not reporting it, all of that. Then they looked at the foundations, and this is really happening this week. They're saying that foundations over $5 billion are going to start paying taxes on their interest income because you're just funding one side. And then they're saying to the media, we're going to get rid of NPR and PBS because they're propaganda organs. And then they're looking at USAID,

and they're saying these are NGOs. They're not USAID. They're just basically sinecures for left-wing rotating politicians. So they're trying to deal with the root causes and that's what worries the Democrats and the left because they've never seen an administration that would dare do that, that would dare question the source of their power. The Trump administration is saying on every single issue that we ran on it was 55, 45,

70, 30. There was no popular support for the Harris or Biden agenda, but those agendas were actualized because of these institutions. And they would say 51 intelligence authorities on the last debate right before the 2020 lied to the people and said that the laptop was, or collusion or the Mar-Lago Raid are trying to get him off the ballot in 25 states or 93 indictments with these left-wing that's what they're after blue chip law firms that Perkins Coe that was deep knee-deep in the Russian collusion hoax they're trying I don't

know if they're gonna get away with it or not, but it's an ambitious 360-degree effort to find out why an agenda that is so unpopular with the people was institutionalized the last four years. Victor, you mentioned this foreign money in the universities. You specifically mentioned Qatari money. Qatar, of course, is kind of in a sanctuary for Hamas, for example. Explain to me how it makes sense for this jet to replace Air Force One. It might seem confusing to people given what you just described. It's a very complex story. And I don't think it's quite what everybody thinks. So they have the latest model of 747. Two of

them, they have them and they decked them out as if they were the Titanic. They were beautiful out as if they were the Titanic, you know, they were beautiful inside but they're They were built in 2013 So they're 12 years old and they're very costly to run because they don't make them anymore and They're very expensive to run because they're not the fuel are not fuel efficient like a 777 or 787 or even a 757.

So they put them on sale in 2020 for $400 million. And guess what? Nobody wanted to buy them. Nobody wanted to buy them. So they gave one to Turkey. They had two. Turkey took it free. And then they, according, and I can't confirm this, but Senator Mullen from Oklahoma has been adamant

that these discussions about the airplane started with the Biden administration. And the argument was that when Donald Trump left office, he gouged Boeing and said, we are using the main Air Force One in the backup and they are decrepit. They're 40 years old. They come from the regular almost and they're not up to snuff and we want two late model, the last late model 747s and we are not going to pay what you." And so he cut a deal and they were so angry that they maybe slowed down.

And so for those four years, they didn't do anything. During the Biden administration, he didn't press them. So now there's no, these two decrepit old, old 30 to 40 year 747s needed, would have been replaced by two updated ones. But those are going to take maybe three to five more years. So the idea was Gutter wanted to unload one of these, which had no market value. I mean, at the price they wanted, nobody wanted to buy it.

So they come to Trump and say, we'll give it to the Air Force, and you can use it if these two old planes are not up to snuff any longer until you get the two new ones and then you can give it to your foundation. Everybody got angry and Trump said, well, it's kind of like the Reagan deal after he left office, the Air Force one that had been used by him and George H.W. Bush, they gave it to the right, you know, it was inoperable and still there at the raven. But people said no, no, it'll be running and that was the key difference.

It'll be running so you're gonna use it for your own personal use. Well, he has a 757 at his disposal and so we're to believe that when he leaves in four years the Air Force is going to give it to his foundation. And he is going to fly around the United States with this huge airplane that has a refueling cap. It'll be upgraded with another billion dollars or half a billion so it can refuel. It'll have rockets. It'll have armor.

It'll have all the sophisticated things he doesn't need as a private citizen. It'll need three or four pilots. It will have to have hard to get parts. It will be twice as expensive to run as his inefficient big 757. And we're to believe that that's going to really help him and he's going to ride all over the world. I don't think so. So I think he went there and he was wanting to get a lot of investment with gutter and they wanted to get rid of this plane and they couldn't sell it.

And they looked around and they had talked to Biden and they thought, well Biden talked to us about it and considered it. So we'll just give it to you. And then Trump thought, as he said, you know, Sam Snead, if you got somebody said, you don't have to make the putt, you just get another. He just thought, I'm not going to insult them. And we have to find a way out where it's a gift to the Air Force. And so where he erred is he should have said, this plane is a beautiful plane,

but we're going to have to consider it because we're going to have to spend a lot of money to make it like the antiquated 747s that we have now. It has to have a lot of modifications. The Air Force will do that and I don't know whether it will be ready by the time the two come on, the new ones do in the last year of its presidency. But we'll do it as a backup. And when it's over, I think it'll be a good thing for the Trump Foundation Library to put it out in the entryway or on the lawn somewhere or put a hanger over it. And it's so big and luxurious, it'll be a nice tourist.

And he could have done that easily. And I think that's what he's going to do. But don't think I think once people started to criticize him he doubled down Hmm, and he basically said I'm not going to insult my host right when and what were the Qataris doing? They were doing exactly what they did when they built a billion dollar base people forget that they look right across They're terrified of the Iranians and they're terrified of the Saudis and the Emirates and all the, and they're right in between and they play both sides. So they thought, we don't trust the Iranians, but we can make money and be safe if we cut a deal with Iran to be their megaphone and Hamas won't attack us if we let them stay here. But then the Saudis and everybody hate us for that because these groups are trying to

overthrow them. So we're going to build a billion-dollar base. And I've seen it before. I went to Iraq twice and we stopped once on the way. It's huge. And then they spent, I think, 10 years ago, another billion. So this whole argument is kind of ridiculous because we, the government, under several administrations,

took a $2 billion gift from Gutter to put our base there when it should have been somewhere else. And it protects Gutter from our friends and our enemies, both of whom really hate it. But they're not going to touch it, because it's the biggest base in the Middle East and it's the most sophisticated. It's the nicest. And they built it at their own expense and then gifted it to us.

And so I don't know. And then the other irony about the whole thing is reports say that since 1980, Gutter and Communist China have contributed somewhere between 50 and 60 billion to universities and not just universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, et cetera. And these universities lapped it up like milk. I mean, they just loved it. And then they were fined in part by the previous Trump administration for not reporting it.

I know Stanford took millions of dollars and did not report it, and they were fined in the first administration, Trump administration. So you have the critics of this whole deal, mostly academics and people who have been on the trough from gutter for years. So I think it was a matter of messaging, but it was much more complex than the media said. But it was much more complex than the media said. Absolutely fascinating. The other dimension here is the prospect of Syria actually joining the Abraham Accords. Is that something that you see? I mean, I wasn't expecting that one. What do you think? Well, I think what happened is that that area had been so anti-American and The Alawites were this kind of weird Quasi-Shia religion that was not representative of 80% of the population and it had done such damage

in the area as a as the transit point for Iran to disperse a lot of its subsidies and munitions to Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas, et cetera, that when it fell in that vacuum, there was a lot of people that took up the vacuum and they were not always hostile to the United States. So the Kurds came in and created an enclave. Then the Turks, to stop them, came in and created a border enclave. And then the Israelis came in and said to protect the Druze, we're going to carve out a little border section. And then the Saudis and the Sunni money states said, we're going to put up this former guy that we've rehabilitated who was in ISIS and stuff,

and he's gonna turn this into a pro-Sunni for the first time that represents the majority of the population. And then all of these groups came to, I think, the Trump administration, as did the Gulf states, and they said, yeah, this guy's a terrorist, but he's letting Turkey have a lot of influence, and we don't have cross borders, and the Kurds are willing to cooperate now. They've said that they're going to have kind of a peace treaty if they get an area, an

adjoining area. And the Israelis kind of like, this is much better than Assad for the Israelis because they can protect the Druze and they have a buffer and there's no Iranian influence. So just recognize him and then it'll be better and we'll handle it. So I think, I don't know if it's going to work, but I get the impression that it's not going to be a place where Russian pilots fly over and Israeli pilots are bombing and there's terrorists that are anti-Western. There may be terrorists but they may be directed in other directions, I don't know. But all of these interests felt that it was superior to the Assad regime and most of the interests were pro-American and they came to the Trump administration and said, you got to talk to this guy. He's transactional and we'll help. We'll help. We'll pay the tab and give him money to rebuild the country.

And he's promised to protect all these different ethnic groups and all the border countries that are pro-American want a deal. And that's what Trump did. So do you think that's realistic? So do you think that's realistic? I don't know. I don't know enough about him. I don't know to what degree he's... I think what's strange about it, I think he was born in Saudi Arabia. And I think he's more prone to the pressures from the Sunnis. But I'm not sure that his purpose is to overthrow as many in the Bin Laden fashion or the ISIS fashion that he used to be to overthrow corrupt but pro-American Gulf monarchies or the Jordanians or the Egyptians. I don't think he thinks monarchies or the Jordanians or the Egyptians. I don't think he's, I don't think he thinks that. I think he thinks he wants to evolve into one of

those type of governments which would be autocratic but pro-western and the neighborhood seems to feel more comfortable with him than the Assad's. That's all. Is it 51% better? And Russia's out of the picture and Iran is out of the picture. That's the main subtext. Everybody's looking at this and said there's no Iranians now. This guy hates Iranians and they've killed a lot of Iranian and there's no Hezbollah and there's no Russians. They're all losers. And what's going to replace those three entities are more than less favorable to us. That's right. That's Lee Smith's argument that this is a much better arrangement simply because Iran is no longer a player, is actively being kept out of there.

Yes. And I think the Israelis said, you know, the Druze are always in danger. We have a lot of Druze and the Assad government was not protective of them. So we're going to protect them now and that means we're going to go into Syria space and there's no Russians to worry about. And I think the Kurds said there's a lot of Kurds there and now we're going to protect them. And The Turks said we're going to basically de facto push our influence beyond the border. This guy who's weak, I think they're going to have problems if he gets control and he actually forms a government and it actually has public support, then he's going to have to reclaim these borders from all these areas that are de facto lost to him.

Victor, what do you make of—well, let me caveat this. This has been by far the most pro-Israel administration in memory. I think you might agree with that. Also, there's a reported schism, right? Netanyahu, Trump at the moment. What do you make of that? It's hard to know. I don't know why he didn't stop with Israel. He's the most pro-Netanyahu because he's very different than Biden or Obama. First of all, there's nobody trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government. Biden was actually doing it. So was Obama. He's given them a blank check.

He's not going to suspend 2000. He just said, whatever you need to do, vis-a-vis, the Houthis, Hamas, just do it and we will supply you the weapons. That's new. There's no more pro-Hakobi. Hakobi is the ambassador. He's very close to Trump. So they've got that. And then they are saying to him, where you get the tension is in two sections.

The Israelis say, we have emasculated for a year or two Hamas, Hezbollah, we're both working on the Houthis, and we have demonstrated you can go into Iran with impunity and destroy their air defenses. We have a brief window. It's now the time to take out all of these nuclear facilities. They'll lie about it, they'll lie about it, they'll lie about it, but you cannot deal with these people. And the Trump administration is saying to them, we agree, but this is contrary to the

MAGA covenant. The MAGA covenant we ran on said no optional Middle East wars, no foreign entanglements, and it's always better to jawbone than to go to war. That's the MAGA. That's the JD Vance Tucker Carlson group. So what Trump is trying to thread to war. That's the JD Vans Tucker Carlson group. So what Trump is trying to thread the needle, so he's saying to Israel, let's just get six or seven months of negotiations. And the Israelis are saying it's a waste of time. They'll not honor it and they'll never

give up this thing. And he said, well then if they won't give up, we'll negotiate to the point where they have to shut up or put up. And if you're right, and just yesterday they said they're never going to get, then we have a case to be made to our MAGA base. We can say, do you want a nuclear weapon with these people? They're going to threaten Europe, they're going to threaten Israel, they'll eventually threaten us, and they're close with the Russians and Chinese, and they're vulnerable now. And we tried to have they're vulnerable now and we tried to have peace with them and we tried to have negotiations with them and

they shut the door. So I think that's what the Trump administration is saying that we have to go through the motions. You may be right and the Israelis say it's a waste of time and I think sometime in the late summer or fall they're going to conclude that you can't deal with theians, but they made the effort and that was good public relations and either we or the Israelis or both are going to take them out. I think that's what will happen. And that's going to be very controversial because Trump is, as we said, a transactional diplomat and he does not want disruption in the Middle East.

He does not want the price of oil to go high. He does not want increased terrorism. The Iranians have tried to kill him in the past. We have an open border as we discussed with Canada. And he thinks, you know what, I can deal with these people. I killed Soleimani. Everybody knew that he was a terrorist. He was responsible for thousands of American deaths during the Iraq War. And Obama didn't do anything. Even George W. Bush was afraid to get rid of him. I got rid of him. And then

the Iranians wanted to retaliate and save face. And I said to them, if you touch one American in Iraq, when you retaliate, we're going to take out. And he said he gave them a list, you know, here's your harbors, here's your military. So then the Iranians said, well, we'll notify you in advance. Just keep everybody in your base. And that's what happened. And there's critics of Trump said, well, some Americans had some shell shock, but basically we knew the missiles were coming. We stayed in the base. And then Iran lied and told their people that they sent a barrage into Iraq to make the

Yankee imperialists pay for what they did. And that's how Trump is transactional. And there was no war, but the main point was he got rid of Soleimani without having a war. I think that's how he operates But I don't think that that is a solution. He did it with North Korea as well and then Biden kind of let up on them, but I just think in the case if you are on record as Rubio and even Vance and Trump are that they cannot enrich to 90% and they keep enriching, then there's no other solution.

And it's a very tricky operation. I think the administration is also not convinced that they don't have bombs and they are at other facilities that have either just recently been discovered or that there's other ones that haven't been discovered. They keep talking about all of the places that we know about but given what we know the theocracy there's probably a lot of places where they've been rich and they may have two or three bombs and that is also something they're very worried about that they could send it in to Israel and everybody says well Iron Dome will knock them down. Well, the other day that Houthi sent one in

and it hit almost at the airport in Tel Aviv. And if that had been an Iranian missile, now they sent, I think, 500 total missiles on those two separate attacks. And everybody said they knocked down 95% of them, but there were about seven or eight missiles that got through. And if one had been nuclear, it would have been catastrophic. There's a lot of reasons to be very careful,

is what I'm saying. Victor, this has been a fantastic conversation. I want to finish up with two things. One is just a quick comment. How valuable is Israel to the U.S. in its position in the Middle East? That's one. And then I want to just talk a little bit about the Maga Covenant in Ukraine, Russia. Very quickly, it's very valuable. It's very valuable for a variety of reasons. It is the most technologically sophisticated country in the world per capita. And so we have a wonderful partnership with military technology with them, with intelligence with them.

And it is everything that you would want in an ally in this sense. It is democratic, it is pro-American, it is sophisticated, and it's surrounded by 500 million people who at various times have all been enemies of the United States and we have a tenuous relation with the Arab-Muslim world. The left-wing argument that it is a colonial power that puts us at odds. This is also the Pentagon, I think, attitude, at least the former Pentagon, I think is false. The Jewish people have been there longer than anybody. And when you talk about the one issue that people criticize the American relationship, it's the Palestinians. We don't talk about the 1 million Jews that

were ethnically cleansed after the 48, 56, and 67 wars from Baghdad, from Cairo, from Amman, etc. We don't talk about probably somewhere around 150 to 250 thousand Cypriots that were ethnically cleansed in 1973. Thousands were killed by the Turks. They are unlawfully occupying the northern part of Cyprus and Nicosia. No one talks about that. They're not recognized by any country in the world. I've never heard anybody talk at Columbia about the illegal, nobody talks about the 13 million Germans that at the same time the Palestinian question arose, they walked back from areas, not just from Poland but from places in Palmyrania and East Prussia.

Two million died. I don't know that anybody in their right mind would say a German today should jiggle the keys and say my house in Danzig was lost and it was German for a thousand years and it's not called Gdansk and I want to go back. That's what Palestinians do. I don't think there's anybody who cares about the, sad, the 500,000 Volga Germans that were ethnically cleansed by Stalin. So why is this one particular issue, as important as it is, so exceptional?

And all of the human rights people don't give a blank blank about any of these other groups. I think some of it's anti-Semitism, some of it's the oil producing power of the Middle East. Some of it is the fear of Islam and radical Islamic terrorism. So that is the issue that people use. That's the only issue that I know

that people use to question the relationship that we have with Israel. But Israel has been our closest ally. And the final thing is the criticism of Israel is different today and it's much more serious than it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago it was from the Paleo-right. The Pat Buchanan people, they would say,

they're going to get us in a war, or these people are too aggressive, the old anti-Semitism, some of them. Today, it's much more insidious because it comes from the left. It just doesn't just come from the left. It comes from the Middle East students and the European universities in here, and it comes, to be honest, from our DEI. We have a long history of Al Sharpton saying, dim Jews, I'd come over and I got my yarmulke on. We had Jesse Jackson way long ago talking about a heime town. We had Farrakhan talking about gutter religion. We had the Black Lives Matter right after

October 7th showing posters with hang gliders glorifying the murder. So we have constituencies that hate Israel and do not like Jews that are protected because they feel they're DEI victims. So you can't criticize the Middle Eastern students. You can't criticize Black Lives Matter or some of the minority communities. So that's dangerous. Then very quickly, your question about Ukraine,

and you wanted to know… Well, the question is this. I think part of the Maghac covenant, if I'm reading the way you mean this term correctly, was that If I'm reading the way you mean this term correctly, was that Trump needs to stop the Russia-Ukraine conflict? What's funny about this is in the last four administrations, Putin left his borders as we all know. He went into Georgia and Ossetia under George Bush when he was bleeding in Iraq and Lameduck. He went in in 2014 to Crimea and the Dome. I think that had a lot to do with the 2012 hot mic where Obama basically said to Medevid to tell Vladimir that if he's flexible, if he'll be flexible and not cause trouble,

flexible. If he'll be flexible and not cause trouble, then I'll be flexible on missile. We dismantled, as you know, missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland. And then he was flexible during Obama's, as he said, flexible during my last election. As soon as Obama was elected, a year and a half later, he went in. Then he went in Biden. And why did he go in Biden? I think it was Afghanistan, the humiliation, and then Biden said stupid things like, if it's a minor invasion, I might not react the same way. He put a hold on offensive weapons as soon as he came in. So the point I'm making is Putin always looks to recapture the Soviet Union's borders if he senses weakness in the West. But he

didn't with Trump because he felt that what Trump had done, you know, getting rid of Soleimani or Baghdadi or destroying his Wagner group, he was unpredictable and dangerous. And so the other thing that was interesting about Trump, I don't know of another president, correct me if I'm wrong, that talked of Ukraine and humanitarian terms. I never heard Joe Biden one time said, this is awful, this is the worst battle since Stalingrad. There is now a million and a half dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians, and for what? I never heard Obama say that. I never heard Susan Rice said that. I never heard John Bolton

say that. The only person I ever heard was Trump. He said, this isn't waste. Maybe it was because he's a builder or maybe he thinks war is not profit. I don't know what it is, but he was the only one talking about this, Stalingrad, Verdun in human terms. And I think he really believed it, that he doesn't understand why right on the doorstep of Europe this is going on when there's no military solution. We hear one day that the Russian army is being depleted, that they can't get recruits, that they're losing two soldiers to every one Ukrainian. The next day we're told that Ukraine has lost 12 million

people from refugees have left the country. The average age of a Ukrainian soldiers in his 30s, they can't hold back this huge juggernaut of 140 million people, 30 times the territory, 10 times it. You hear both narratives but they have one thing in common, nobody is going to get their agenda reified. So Trump comes along with a transactional, he really wants to stop the killing and in his matrix, it's not to give Ukraine more weapons because they'll never be able to beat this colossus. And he thinks naively at first, maybe more realistic, that he had a relationship with Putin that was Illustrated by the fact that Putin never went in during his administration.

So, He started out by pressuring Ukraine. I'll talk to Putin. We'll get a deal. That didn't happen. And now I think he thinks We're gonna have a North Korean DMZ, South Korean like DMZ, just stop everything where it is and we'll negotiate the border after the ceasefire and we're going to have a rare earth concession barrier where we have a lot of investment to pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine and for people to have profit and will probably end up arming Ukraine to the teeth. It will tell Putin it won't be in NATO.

You invaded, maybe you can go back and tell the Russian people you lost a million Russians because you wanted to ensure that or maybe you can say that well they would have taken Crimea and Donbass and now they agree that they're Russian forever or you got 40 miles or 50 miles beyond the border. You can say all that and we can tell Ukraine, you were heroic, you saved your country, you lost 10% of it, 15%, but you're kind of like Finland in 1940. You stopped the Soviet, the Finns stopped them for four months and then they gave 10% of their country and they ended up autonomous but neutral. And you can maybe join the EU but you're not going to join NATO. I think

that's everybody knows that's the deal. And now it's just to what degree does Putin feel that he can go. The only thing that's stopping the deal right now is that Putin knows he started the war, he conducted it savagely and incompetently, and he's got to go back in an autocracy and tell people in the apparatus that they've lost a million people, they've destroyed their military basically for a decade, they've lost any shred of legitimacy abroad. They're broke and it was all worth it. And here's what I got. And that's so what he's trying to do right now is get more so he can go back and say this is what I got and we're saying no more. And Ukraine is living with that now. Ukraine is basically

saying stop it right now. We're the heroes. We lost something and fortify this DMZ, fortify us, and they won't do it again. And that's not a good solution, but it all depends on Putin. Victor, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. It seems to me like you're kind of extending this counter-revolution idea. I've heard you mention a number of times. This is really a counter-revolution in foreign policy, isn't it? Yeah, it's in everything. It's trying to address the progressive project domestically, financially, economically, culturally, socially, diplomatically, and militarily. And look at Pete Hexseth saying, you know, we're not going to have DEI. And we were short 45,000 recruits.

We were told that that was inevitable because of gangs and poor physical condition of our youth. Then suddenly, it just disappeared. 45,000 people joined. And we know that the 45,000 people joined the military. We know two things about them. They were mostly white males, and ordinarily from rural areas, they felt. And then we know that they felt

they had been unfairly ostracized under the DEI programs, the vaccination program, all of that. And we know one other thing, that statistically they die at double their numbers in the demographic at Afghanistan and Iraq. About 72% of the fatalities, and they make up about 33% or 34% of the population, white males. So they were very integral to combat units,

and they were not joined. And we know another thing, that the 45,000 person shortfall was in large part white males. And when you have Mark Milley or Lloyd Austin or the head of naval operations said they're going to go after white rage, white supremacy, white privilege as they did in congressional testimony and they don't produce any proof of that, then people feel that it's an inhospitable workplace and they act it accordingly. So we're seeing a revolution in the military, we're seeing it everywhere.

And it's like all counter revolutions, it's got a counter counter revolution. But there's no margin of error just to finish. And that means that every step the Trump team takes, they have to have good messaging and they have to explicate it. If they're gonna deal with mercantilism and there's a logic to it, then they have to say, this was the whole story about the plane. And we have an ethics czar and nobody in the family is going to profit

from foreign policy. We saw what the Bidens did. So they've got to be very careful because they've got a thousand eyes watching them and hoping they fail. The entire establishment in America wants them to fail. It's clear about that now. Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Okay, thank you. Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hansen and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.