The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: They Said Nazis Would Dominate, Then the Soviets. Now China

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

We’ve heard this story before. From Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to Japan and the European Union, Americans have repeatedly been told another world power was about to overtake the U.S. America is still leading the world in energy, agriculture, military strength, higher education, and innovation, and today’s fears about a rising China are part of a much older pattern of American decline narratives, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”  👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com 👉Protect women’s sports from biological reality denial at JoinADF.com/HANSON or Text HANSON to 83848 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. As an advocate of truth, you know that women shouldn't have to share locker rooms with men. Women shouldn't have to compete against male athletes. And they shouldn't be punished for speaking the truth. But across America, that's exactly what's happening. Men are being allowed to compete in women's sports, robbing girls of scholarship. medals, titles, and safety.

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This is our moment to push back. Stand with Alliance defending freedom. today. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. The recent Chinese-American summit, as I've spoken elsewhere, has raised anxieties that there is a tension between a establishment in the United States and a rising power of China. And a lot of people who I would call declines say, well, China's going to replace us. A lot of people on Wall Street are afraid of that. A lot of people in the military, a lot of people on the left, a few people on the right, but we're not looking at it empirically. So there's two things to be cognizant of. Number one, there's about eight or nine ingredients that allow a society to flourish, to advance,

to expand, that are critical to this argument. And they cross time and space. They're ancient. One is fuel. The United States is the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. right now. Another one is food. The value of our agricultural products is at an all-time high. We're completely self-sufficient in food, and we're in terms of the value of the exports, the biggest exporter of food. So food and fuel. How about education? The Times Educational Supplement that studied the top 50 universities in the world, if you look at the United States, 90% of them are here in the United States, especially on the so-called STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, Caltech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

are at the top in the world. So in higher education, we're there. Fertility, we're not 2.0 anymore, but we're much better than Europe at 1.3, and much, much better than China at 1.0, which is a shrinking and shrinking and aging society. We're not. not at 1.7. It's about as good as you can get in the Western Hemisphere. In terms of military, we're going to spend the largest money we ever have in real dollars and largest in many years is a percentage of our budget. We invented the aircraft carrier. We've got 11 carrier groups. We have the most sophisticated weapons in the world. As far as space goes, we have a NASA program, and then we have Space X. And Space X on its own is support.

period, almost all space programs elsewhere in the world. So by any fundamental evaluation, the United States is not in decline. So why do people say that? Usually they say it because they're unhappy with the other party. So most of this is now coming from the left. If you'd watched MSNBC, which I'm forced to do sometimes to get a different view. In CNN, they're all saying that the summit was a disaster. She had all the cards, Trump was played.

That's not true. I just explain why it isn't. But Western declineism is kind of intrinsic in general to Western societies that are paranoid about decline, and particularly in the United States. And let me just finish by giving you a few examples. During the Great Depression started in 1929 with the stock market collapse and continued all the way to 1940. 1938, our employment was 25% in some point. Most of it crossed the United States. People said, look at Europe. There is a new paradigm. Fascist Italy, fascist Germany. They have wonderful infrastructure programs. Hitler is building auto balance. Mussolini is building rail tracks. They didn't suffer the depression like we did. They have a new formula. They're re-arming. By 1939 and 40, Charles Lindberg said, we couldn't win a war against Germany. The Luftwaffe is invincible compared to our decrepit forces. In fact, at the outset of 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, our army was smaller than Portugal's,

19th than the world. So everybody said, our system doesn't work. We had a depression, now we're unprepared. And four years later, we destroyed all of our enemies. And the U.S. economy was larger than all of the economies of the belligerents in the war put together. And the U.S. Navy was the largest Navy in history and it was larger than the Russian Navy, what was left of the German, Japanese, Italian navies, and the British Navy. All together, the U.S. Navy, one Navy. So that was just a passing, I don't know, paranoia, but it was typical. The next thing happened after World War II, our ally, the Soviet Union, suddenly switched sides. It became an enemy after, even after we supplied 25 to 30% of its Lynn lease effort to win the war.

30% of its, I should say, total amount of fuel, radios, ponchos, food, planes, everything. And yet they started the Cold War. And then people got very scared because they said this totalitarian command economy is very, very efficient. It's better than ours. Look what's happened. They're ahead of us in the space race. they ignited a 100 megatom bomb, the biggest in history. They have about, there was something called the missile gap.

They have twice the missiles that we do pointed us. That's what John Kennedy got elected on, the missile gap. It didn't really exist, but that's what he was able to convince people about. So the Soviet Union, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev, we will bury you. And what happened? It imploded two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then we found out that it was completely overrated. It was a rotten system. The CIA estimates of its military power, its economic vitality were all wrong.

It was a pathological society, and it broke apart. Hold your breath. That didn't stop the decline us. Then they said by 1980s and the 90s, right after the Soviet, they said, well, we have a new problem. Our capitalist, free market, democratic society is not as efficient as what's going on in Japan. We're going to call that Japan Inc. What we need to do is merge our businesses with the government and make them into one fusion and one policy. Look what Japan has done. They've got more money than we do. Their cars, Honda, Toyota, Lexus, they're all better than our cars. GM is through.

is through. American Motors is through. They're all going broke. Our system doesn't work. Look what Japan did. Their richest people came over. They bought Rockefeller Center. They bought Columbia Pictures. They bought Pebble Beach Golf Course. What an insult. They're taking over all the United States. And then what happened? An aging, shrinking Japanese population, backed by unwise government and corporate policies went into a period. of about 15 years of destructive deflation. Deflation. And today, it's a strong economic power.

We're friends with it, but no one in the right mind thinks Japan, Inc. is going to replace the United States. And we're very happy that it's prosperous, but it doesn't pose any rivalry to the United States. And go back in the 1990s and 80s, you'll see paranoid pictures from Hollywood films about how we should be suspicious of the Japanese because they're everywhere.

That faded. That wasn't the end of it. At the millennium, we took a deep breath, we said, well, okay, the Nazis and the Japanese militarists didn't replace us as we feared. We won the war. And the Soviets didn't bury us, as everybody said they would. In Japan, ink, didn't buy us out, but there's a new paradigm, and it's superior to our constitutional federal system. And it's called the European Union. Yes, the European Union, they have 450 million people. All united now is a continental nation state. And we started out at 90 cents to a euro, and now it cost $1.6 by 2005. We're importing all this fuel. We're bogged down in Iraq. We're bogged down in Afghanistan. The Europeans are getting stronger. But there were people who had warned us that this doesn't work.

You can't have 30 or so nations. with separate languages, separate traditions, separate religions, all saying they're going to be united. Eastern Europe had just been freed from communist oppression. It was very different than Western Europe. There had been intense rivalries between England and France and Germany historically. Now, the EU did a lot of good things in the sense that it prevented war and it tried to acculturate a continent, but it wasn't a nation.

Henry Kissinger famously said, when I've got a problem, and I want to talk to Europe, who do I call? To whom do I call? Who's the president of Europe? He has no power. There's no power. Every time the EU made an edict, they had very little, they had no defense. And so what happened?

They began to become utopian. And they adopted a series of measures. And what were they? Green energy, get rid of nuclear gas and oil, open borders, illegal immigration, enjoy the good life, don't have children, don't get married, and who needs defense when you have the United States? And today, the EU with 450 million people has the economy about 65% the size of ours. And no one thinks the EU is going to take over. In fact, we're worried that Europe is in rapid decline. I say all this because you should remember that what we are saying now

about China, which is in crisis, economically, culturally, politically, militarily, compared to us, is not new. It's an old, old phenomenon in Western civilization of pessimism and declineism, and particularly here in the United States. China is not the new rival it's going to replace us. It is the new version of Germany and Italy and Japan and the Soviet Union and Japan, Inc., and the EU. the pseudo threats that we've all seen before. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the DailySuit. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal.

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