A warning from history

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, September 19th. This is WORLD Radio, and we thank you for listening.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. In the current WORLD Magazine for September, I wrote a column lamenting that American politics doesn’t seem to turn on foreign-policy issues.

AUDIO: [Montage of Walz, AOC, Harris, and Trump]

To be fair, this is no recent development. What is, is how dangerous the world has become, even more so—arguably—than when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had nuclear weapons trained on one another.

Still today the Arms Control Association says there are close to 10-thousand nuclear warheads at the ready: Russia has them, as does the U.S. and UK, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea. Iran—depending upon whom you believe—is getting close. Let’s not forget bioweapons and cyberweapons and military applications of artificial intelligence.

HANSON: There’s a certain therapeutic mind that doesn’t understand that peace is not the natural order of things. It’s chaos, war, and danger. Peace is a parenthesis.

That’s Victor Davis Hanson. He’s a military historian at Stanford. He’s also a classicist. He wrote a book called The End of Everything and he and I talked this summer after I read his book in preparation for that magazine column. It was quite the beach read.

Not really.

The End of Everything traced the utter destruction of four ancient civilizations—the Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, and Aztecs. There’s a reason you don’t hear about them anymore. They were wiped out. But before they were, they thought they were powerful. They thought they had allies that had their backs. Internally, they had deep divisions. They were self-deceived and they misunderstood their enemies.

HANSON: They’re not thugs. They’re systematic, deliberate, scientific minds, and they’ve come to a conclusion and a cost-benefit analysis, it’s time for these civilizations to disappear and stop this rivalry or this problem.

These are lessons Hanson says are much needed. As he looks at the world today, Hanson’s concerned about two big themes: first, weapons of mass destruction in so many hands and so many rogues, including NATO member Turkey—what Hanson calls the anti-NATO NATO member. Second, dangerous new axes of evil.

The late Henry Kissinger once said U.S. security rested on the idea that Russia was no closer to China than it was to America and China was no closer to Russia than it was to America. But now, the U.S. is on the outside and Russia and China are in the same camp: the one with the largest population and second largest economy in the world and the other with the largest number of nuclear weapons and largest territory. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson:

HANSON: There’s a perception, whether it’s legitimate or not, that we either can’t or won’t react—and that means that our friends basically say, ‘it’s too dangerous to be a friend of yours when we have this rising axis that we don’t particularly like, but we’d rather cut a deal with them and survive, than be loyal and join you and die.’ And so we’re starting to see that and we’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to rearm and we’ve got to restore deterrence and we have to have a coherent, bipartisan foreign policy.

There’s a yawning gap between what we need and what we have. Military recruiting, for one thing. Hanson the military historian says there’s a particular demographic from which we’ve drawn our warrior class. We’re talking rural and suburban white men. Hanson says their fathers fought in the Gulf War, in Afghanistan; their grandfathers fought in Vietnam; their great grandfathers in World War II. Three-quarters of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan came from this group, roughly 35 percent of the overall population. These are your warriors, Hanson says, and the current military brass has tagged them as possibly dangerous extremists.

HANSON: You’ve so demonized this group that when you look at the actual data of who is not joining the military, it turns out that this is the specific group that accounts for 90 percent of the 50-thousand that are not joining. So it’s not just that 50-thousand are not joining, it’s 50-thousand that if you get in a war over Taiwan or you get in a war—who knows?—with Iran or you get in a war with the cartels, these are the type of people who will step up and say, ‘I want to fight.’ And yet we have alienated them for a generation.

This is not lost on America’s enemies. They notice. They also notice a college campus culture rooting for Hamas in the Israeli war in Gaza. It makes our enemies think they have an opportunity to exploit. Hanson doesn’t believe America would right now lose what he calls an existential war, but he’s worried we’re not strong enough to deter one by projecting confidence and strength: financial, cultural, social, economic, not just military.

Hanson says look at the 36 trillion dollar debt with interest costs exceeding the military budget. Look at the border and the unknown millions who’ve been pouring over it.

HANSON: When you get to a situation when a civilization’s perceived medicine is seen as worse than the disease, that was a famous formulation of the historian Livy about Rome, who said we can’t live with our sins and we can’t live with our medicine. The medicine is deemed worse than the disease. I think that applies to things like social security, the budget, the border and we know what we have to do, but we’re paralyzed. And I think our enemies say, ‘this is not the United States of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Belleau Wood and Gettysburg. It just isn’t. That’s what they think.

Whether America’s enemies are right or wrong is almost beside the point. The point is the deterrence is fraying.

Is there a happy ending? Well, of course, there is, we read the same book. But maybe the best news of all the bad news is that the end is not yet here. Special thanks to historian and author Victor Davis Hanson.

HANSON: Well, thank you.

I’m Nick Eicher.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.