Super Bowl, Shmooper Bowl with Victor Davis Hanson

>> Pres. Biden: When I was briefed on the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down, on Wednesday as soon as possible. They decided that the best time to do that was if it got over water, outside within 12 mile limit.

>> Bill: It's Monday, February 6, 2023, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow. I'll be your moderator today, which means I get to introduce the stars of our show. Three of my colleagues we jokingly refer to as the Goodfellows. That would include the historian Niall Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, and the geostrategist lieutenant general HR McMaster.

They are Hoover Institution senior fellows all, rounding out our conversation. Today, we have a goodfellow's favorite returning to the show, backed by popular demand, Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is a Martin Ely Anderson senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. He is a historian and classicist. He is a proletic authorization columnist.

On top of all of that, he runs a family farm in the San Joaquin Valley. I think his next book should probably be on time management, because I'm not sure how he manages to do all this, but somehow he makes it all work very well. Victor, welcome back to the show.

 

>> Victor: Thank you guys for having me.

>> Bill: Okay, so I think you can all guess where we're gonna start today. I have a lot of questions for you wise gentlemen with regard to the balloon, such as, what is China's intention here? Such as, what is the proper response by the United States?

Did we do the right thing shooting it down? What's the next step? What, if any, reprisals, whether it be on the part of Beijing? What next for diplomacy? Niall, does Tony Blinken need to get on a plane to go to Beijing right away or not? HR, what about the Pentagon of the White House communicating the question whether or not the military has been watching this for years and not always letting the White House know.

Victor, what's your big takeaway here?

>> Victor: Well, that was a little disturbed because almost all of the explanations that we got from the administration either had to be updated or were misleading. We were told first that it was not really a surveillance satellite of any importance. And then, it leaked out that perhaps a slow moving balloon had some advantages at least, then we were told that they didn't want to shoot it down because of fragments.

But of course, it entered the Aleutians, where there's one person per square mile, and there was coastal areas where there was nobody, and then five people per square mile in Montana. And so we went through this entire process for a week. And then I think, finally, the pressure of the media, popular anger, the opposition party and the state of the union coming up.

I don't think he wanted to give the state of the union when the reply or the rebuttal will be, will you let this thing go over the country? And the only mystery of it is, I mean, there's some talk that it was, the Chinese lost control. But it doesn't really matter what they say.

It's just the idea that the United States allowed this device, to go over its key locations strategically at least, militarily. And it sends a message to Australia and South Korea and Japan and Taiwan, Philippines, whether inadvertent or not. That, I think the Chinese will say to them, this is your patron, this is the guy that you're under the nuclear umbrella, some of you, this is the guy that's gonna protect you.

And then the other final thing is, we know what would happen if you, I mean, we send, there's a game where we all send satellites. But if we send a balloon at 45 to 60,000ft across the length of China, we know what they would do. We know what they'd say, because they did it in 2001 with a plane that was in international space, an EP three, that crashed after being rammed by a Chinese pilot.

And, we know what the opposition, I think HR knows as a member of the Trump administration. If in say, 2018, a Russian balloon went across the length of the United States and you guys didn't do anything, they would say that Trump is a Russian puppet or asset or something.

So, the asymmetry of it is Clarine.

>> John: There's always two interpretations to an event like this. One is devious plans or perhaps very smart plans, and the other is gross incompetence. The devious plan option is, there is an advantage to countries allowing each other to have some, to be looking at each other's stuff.

There was, the Eisenhower administration proposed, why don't we allow overflights of US and Russia so we'll both not get scared about missile gaps that aren't there. So, what is it that we are doing to China that we kinda the game was, we secretly allow them to have our balloons here and we do something else there, then that got perturbed.

Okay, I'm trying my best. And this.

>> Victor: You need to try harder, John.

>> Victor: I think Gary Powers was shot down on U two, and Eisenhower denied spying, etcetera, and that caused an international.

>> John: No, no, the open skies agreement did not go through. Still, there's is an idea that says, we allow you to do some stuff.

You allow us to. Maybe that's what happened at Bella park. But then, to HR, how is it possible that the US, if it's incompetence, that we do not have the ability to detect a balloon? I know the balloon itself doesn't reflect radar, but come on, all you need is people with binoculars to see it.

And how do we not have the capacity to shoot down a balloon, to collect a balloon intact, in midair? All we've got is it. Which f was it? I forgot an f something or other, that can go within 20,000ft of it and shoot an incredibly expensive missile that then blows up, and then destroys the balloon.

I mean, in world War II, there was stuff you could drag out of a c 47 to grab people of our mountain top, the capacity. How do we not have detection, and capacity to grab this thing out of the air?

>> H.R.: We do have detection. So, I think it was detected.

I think it really goes back to what Victor said. I think they just didn't release it until, the information that this balloon was over, over North America.

>> John: Why didn't they do it? If they detected, why didn't they do anything about it?

>> H.R.: I think because the Pentagon is like the most risk averse, organization or government sometimes.

I mean, I think that's part of it, and, I mean, of course we have the capacity to shoot it down. I think when something's at 60,000ft, it's kinda tough to deploy a net, I think, to catch it down, to bring it down.

>> John: No, we don't have a net to catch.

 

>> H.R.: In a less spectacular fashion.

>> John: But if it mattered, we would have that net. It's not technologically that hard to grab a balloon or to shoot it down effectively.

>> H.R.: Well, one of my favorite quotations from General Ernest Harmon from World War II was he said, if it takes a toothpick, use a baseball bat.

And I guess that's what we did.

>> John: Well, we waited till it traversed the whole US transmitting back whatever its information was to China on the way, so that it just does not make any sense.

>> H.R.: No, and I don't know what we did. I don't know if we did anything from an electronic warfare perspective either, while it was transiting.

I mean, maybe we did interrupt signals communication from it. I hope so.

>> Victor: Joe Biden today blamed the Pentagon. He basically said he had ordered this earlier and he got a recommendation, I suppose it was, from the Joint Chiefs, ubiquitous Mark Milley, not to shoot it down. And then finally, when he was pressed, he said, I'll take care of it.

But their lady Jean Pierre said today or yesterday that he was following the advice of his military advisor. And then she kinda hinted that until Joe put his foot down. This is outrageous, State of the Union coming up I suppose. So that, I don't know why the Austin and Millie, if they were the people who were advising him, would not have ordered immediate destruction of it.

 

>> Niall: Well, here's another scenario, Victor, and that is that the administration was very keen to improve relations with China. That was the reason that Secretary of State Binken was going to go to Beijing. And this threatened to spoil. That initiative in the direction of Detente. I think that's the most plausible explanation that I can come up with.

They really were wishing it wasn't happening, and unfortunately for them, the Montana local press has people with binoculars, and they blew the story. I think that Millie, and presumably Blinken, too, were praying the thing would keep going and the skies would be sufficiently overcast that nobody would notice and Secretary Blinken could go on his way.

I think that's the most plausible explanation.

>> Victor: And that asked the question. It was sort of like Anchorage, Alaska then, that even though maybe if you believe the Chinese, they lost control, they must have known that you wouldn't. If they wanted a summit with Blinken, they wouldn't have released, in the general direction of the United States, a balloon that could go in its territory.

So they were trying to humiliate us in the way they did at Anchorage in March of 2017.

>> John: No, no, here, I think the lesson of history, like the Cuban missile crisis, is never underestimated incompetence. It's entirely plausible that the part of China that's sending balloons up isn't communicating with the part of China that's running diplomacy.

And that somebody is headed to a labor farm in the middle of Tibet as a result of this snap. It's not clear that this is.

>> Bill: We know that is actually, the head of the Chinese meteorological weather service has already been canned, so let's assume he's headed off to tobacco.

 

>> John: Well, that's it.

>> John: And what about the Canadians? When the Canadians just went over their territory for a long time

>> Victor: Well, we don't, with all due respect, Trudeau explains that. One word explains the Canadians, but it doesn't really matter what we can go in all these hypotheticals, at some point, they let off a balloon in our direction.

If we're gonna spy them, we have certain protocols, we don't send balloons right over their territory. They knew it, and we let it go on too long, and that sent a message. I know some of our allies say, well, you might have overreacted, but privately they know that that's worrisome, that this administration did not react right away.

 

>> H.R.: I'm glad we shot it down, though. So, finally, I mean, I was worried about, you guys know, I predicted. I said, okay, we're going to shoot this thing down eventually. But it fits into a broader pattern of Chinese violation of many nations sovereign territory, right? All the overflights that we've seen directed toward Japan and South Korea, of course, they're building islands in the South China Sea in what would be the largest land grab in history if they succeed.

They've been bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier. So it's a larger disturbing pattern. And I think you mentioned already, Victor, the Hainan island incident with a p three was forced to land that was an overzealous PlA air force pilot doing what he thought his superiors wanted him to do.

So I think this jingoistic rhetoric that you hear out of the party, it's having an effect on its own armed forces and its own other departments and agencies, even maybe apparently the meteorological institution.

>> Victor: But that's having an effect on us, too. I mean, if you compare this administration on Ukraine and China, I agree with most of you that Putin is saber rattling, but he's giving a more overt nuclear threat warning to us than China is.

And yet this administration, as you say, is so risk averse that they are not reacting to an affront to their home airspace, sovereignty from a nuclear powered China. I guess because they don't want to get into brinksmanship or something, but they're perfectly willing to discount I as just rhetoric a nuclear threat from Russia on a proxy war 5000 miles away.

Where they seem more concerned about the nuclear threat than they are to their own homeland, I don't understand that.

>> Niall: But this leads us to the observation that we're in a Cold War, and this is what Cold Wars are like. This is why we can think immediately of the Gary Parris case in 1960, which led to the failure of a summit.

I think if you're in Cold War, there is this inherent tension between the need to try to get close to the other side to avoid World War III and the fact that its a Cold War. And they're not exactly going to stop spying on us any more than were gonna stop spying on them.

So I think this just confirms the Cold War hypothesis. But there's a more interesting question, Victor, that I have for you, and that relates the Ukraine war to the attempt to improve relations with China. I think it is dawning on people in Washington, that the net beneficiary, the number one net beneficiary of the war in Ukraine is in fact China.

Because although we thought cleverly we were bleeding Russia dry with Ukrainian manpower and Western weapons, in practice we're running down our own stocks of weapons. And what's China's position? It gets russian oil at very steeply discounted prices, and it can sell all kinds of things to Russia. Chinese exports to Russia are way up, as long as it stays on the right side of our sanctions line.

And I think what they've realized is that this isn't working out quite as planned, and they need to rethink their overall geopolitical strategy. And one way of doing that is to try to improve relations with China. We can't know what's going on in Beijing, that's a completely closed black box.

But I think we can tell a little bit better what's going on in Washington. And what I see is a realization that the grand strategy of the Biden administration has got us into a pretty hard to stop war, albeit one that we're fighting by proxy. But it's created a real vulnerability in the rest of the world, not only in East Asia, but also in the Middle east.

And I think the administration's legitimately worried that one more crisis in one of those places is gonna make the situation very difficult indeed.

>> Victor: I think we don't understand that we have a rendezvous with a geostrategic situation that's not necessarily favorable. And that is, as you say, we've got 1.4 billion person China and 144 million Russia now in the de facto alliance.

And they're drawing into the orbit, not entirely, but by inference, of oil and weaponry. Turkey and India, I never thought India would be so blatant about buying Russian oil or Turkey so blatant about supplying both sides or merging toward Russia. And then, now Iran doesn't just have a North Korean patron, it's got a Chinese and Russian patron, and the same as North Korea.

It's got a Russian and North Korean Russian again, and now North Korean. And they're building some type of loose alliance that has a lot of resources. And I don't know how you'd avoid it, but it's something that at some point, we've got to talk about. And I know that I'm for pushing Putin completely out of Ukraine if possible, and if not possible, at least back to the 2014 borders.

But we are incrementally getting ourselves into a strategic situation that's not favorable to us, and we don't have a strategic resolution in mind, or we're not discussing one. And all I wrote something today is, I just hope that the most zealous, and it's not, I'm not referring to people here, but I mean, some of the people on the left who this has been almost a religious cause, they understand that.

I hope when this is over, they'll be prominent in voting to restore the Pentagon stocks of artillery shells and javelins. And they'll be very pro defense and they'll be as adamant about the protection of Taiwan as they are Ukraine. But I don't know if that's going to be true.

Something strange that we haven't discussed or nobody's discussed about the Left's fixation on Ukraine beyond just support, where it's almost a crusade. And I think it has something to do with the idea that Russian disinformation didn't work, Russian collusion didn't work. And they fixated on the idea, aha, we can finally prove to all you people Putin is evil, but we all knew that.

When I ride a bike around Palo Alto and I see these signs, Ukraine on people's lawns or these flags on their Teslas, I've never seen that before. They have really adopted this into something that's almost quasi-religious.

>> H.R.: Well, Victor, I think it has a lot to do with, when Stephen Kotkin was on with us, I mean, I think his equation is right.

I mean, I think support for Ukraine derives from Russian atrocities, right, plus Ukrainian valor. I think there's good reason for it, Victor. And-

>> Victor: How about, though, I mean, we have a million people that have been persecuted, the Uyghurs. I think as far as Taiwan, nobody believes that Russia is gonna take all of Ukraine, but a lot of people believe that China will take all of Taiwan.

So, I don't understand why there's, I'm not against the zeal, HR. I'm just wondering why there's not commiserate zeal to worry about losing all of Taiwan and a million people in camps right now that are treated terribly, that antedate. And I don't understand for further why in 2014, this country snored when Obama basically explained in a hot mic in Seoul, South Korea his quid pro quo about flexibility for Putin vis a vis space, i.e., for Obama to dismantle missile defense.

And he went into Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and there really wasn't any reaction by our administration, by the very people right now that are giving sermons to everybody about they have to be hyper-zealous. It's like a surreal, you wanna say, okay, I'm all for it, but a lot of us wrote columns in 2014 that that was the time to stop him.

And you didn't do anything. In fact, you had a quid pro quo with him-

>> John: I think-

>> Victor: As from that hot mic.

>> John: I wanna defend people in Palo Alto with Ukrainian flags cuz I happen to be one of them, although I'm not a recent liberal and I don't have all the other flags that are common in Palo Alto on my front lawn.

A possibility is they came to their senses, and occasionally, reality bites. There's a couple of ways in which the sort of liberal consensus is coming to its senses. Europe is starting to realize that its energy policies were insane. A lot of people in Europe are realizing their defense policies were insane, and they were good liberals.

They're coming to their sense. I wanna add-

>> Victor: I would be a little bit cynical if I could interject. I think the real reason was in 2014, they did not want to lodge any criticism against his holiness Barack Obama.

>> John: Yeah-

>> Victor: And now that situation is different.

And of course, when the administration, whatever the people say about Trump, that is a hiatus between two bookends, 2014 and 2022, vis a vis Ukraine. And nobody mentions that at all.

>> John: Well, there's been a lot of lines in the sand that we gave up on in 2014 is a shameful one.

But I also wanna say the reason I think that people have changed their mind is it's not just about the level of atrocities. It's not just recognition of the tremendous valor of the Ukrainians. But I think they've woken up to this fundamental question, what world do you wanna live in?

Do you wanna live in a world where we're back to armed invasions, grabbing territory in parts of Europe in your own backyard? And really, that the reason Ukraine matters, and it matters to us, is that we don't want to live in a world where we have our invasions going on.

That's why it has to be pushed back-

>> Victor: We've lived in a world like that since 1945, if we remember. No, I mean, think about it. We didn't do anything for years in Yugoslavia. More importantly, we just sat there while the Hungarians were wiped out. In 68, we sat there while the Czechs, cuz we said we don't dare get into a land war with the Soviet Union because it has 7,000 nukes.

Now we've said we dare to get into a war with Russia even though they have 7,000 nukes.

>> John: I think Gulf War 1 was a good example of the right precedent and the opposite instinct, no, this shall not stand. We go back to it. But I think that's the reason.

Uyghurs, well, I think there's a whole lot of atrocities going on in the world. The North Koreans are suffering horribly. The Somalis are suffering horribly. That's inside a country's border. That's not an armed takeover of another country. So I'm not justifying any of it, I just do think it's not just as craven as you paint it.

Now, that will come to the test. You're exactly right, are we gonna take that same feeling seriously about Taiwan? Are we going to spend the money and have the means and the will to take that seriously about Taiwan? I don't know, but at least the coming of their senses about Ukraine, I think, is a little less awful that you paint it.

 

>> Niall: I offer the insight that the western liberal public, especially in the English-speaking world, has spent about 200 years, if not longer, falling for other people's nationalism. And it's very inconsistent. You never quite know who's going to pull on our heartstrings. Garibaldi was good at it. Actually, the Greeks were good at it.

Nobody-

>> Victor: Very good.

>> Niall: Noticed that better than you, Victor. But we have this tendency to fall in love with other people's national struggles. Sometimes we really offer meaningful support, and other times we do just put the flags in the yard. I think this is part of a quite well-established pattern that goes back to the early 19th century.

But I think there is a more interesting and important question to address here, and that is a good one for you, Victor. You've written one of the great books on World War II. World War II has this strange way of starting. It starts with sort of overtures of what look like small, discrete conflicts, and it's only gradually that they roll up together to be a world war.

I've been feeling very queasy about the world situation for the better part of a year. I realized back in January of last year that Putin was going to invade. And I keep asking myself, what's next up? Because if you get a crisis simultaneously in, let's say, Iran, suppose there's a fighting over Iran's nuclear program, it's conceivable in the next 12 or 24 months and the Chinese make a move against Taiwan, then suddenly you've got three simultaneous conflicts.

As a scholar of world War II, Victor, do you sense that we might be on the edge of something much scarier than Cold War II, namely World War III?

>> Victor: Yeah, I've been worried about, and I wrote something about that. Somewhere between June 22nd of 1941 and December 7th, the word great war disappeared from the western vocabulary suddenly for the first time called World War I.

And you're right, up until 41 in June 22nd, there was the Polish War, there was the Fall of France. There wasn't World War II and common currency. Then everybody put it all together and said, my God, this was all connected, especially after Pearl Harbor. And I think right now there's a lot of juggling under the radar of our enemies, and they're trying to game this and see at what point they see an opening.

Opening our advantage. I was in Israel in June, and I talked to a lot of people in the government, and they were very worried. They have historical problems with Ukraine, as you know, from World War II, but they were worried that they had certain protocols with the Russians.

And HR knows them better than anybody, about their ability to stop Hezbollah by going into Russia controlled airspace in Syria. Even the gesture that they were in league with the west, overtly supporting Ukraine, would change that dynamic quite quickly. And then they were also worried that they had felt that Putin was not whole hog behind the Russian enrichment, I mean, the Iranian enrichment.

And now he might not just be behind Iranian enrichment, but hypersonic missile delivery systems that could go into Israel. And so, I think that's true of all these things. China, as you mentioned, North Korea, and I'm not saying you can prevent it, but the quicker this thing is over, the better for everybody.

And if Russia keeps saying, and they're mobilizing 300,000 more people that they consider this, I think the other day, Putin said there's never, I don't know if he's telling the truth, I can cite examples that make him a liar. But he said, there's never been a large conventional war against a nuclear power that he lost on the border, that they were willing to lose.

And we're not gonna lose this war. But if you take him at his word, the only way Ukraine can get every Russian out, as they've defined victory back to the 2013 border, and we talked about this last time, is a level of material support. And death count could be up to, 200,000 plus have died, it could be up to 400,000.

It could be $500 billion they need. And if we're gonna do this, we should right now have a war production board, and we should be producing shells and javelins and missiles like we've never produced them. It's gonna take five years to replenish the javelin arsenal, but we're not doing any of that.

 

>> H.R.: Victor, but it'll take long. I mean, we went through six years of production-

>> Victor: But we're sleeping through this, though, I'm sure.

>> H.R.: Very low rates.

>> Victor: Don't you feel like we're kind of sleeping through all these-

>> H.R.: Well, I think that there's been some movement in the right direction, but not enough, right?

It's been inadequate. So, the National Defense Authorization Act does have money specifically set aside for expanding the industrial base. And there needs to be not only an increase in the defense budget to make up for the backlog of ammunition, but also a huge bout wave of deferred modernization since the Obama administration really.

And then finally, what is required is multi year budgeting to give the defense industry more predictability. Because right now they cant open up additional production lines and know that that demand is gonna be sustained over multiple years. So there are a number of reforms that are absolutely necessary, not only, as you mentioned, Victor, to make up for what's been expended already and provided to the Ukrainians.

But to prepare for future contingencies, maybe involving China. But of course, what we need is we need a strong defense to deter war.

>> Victor: I got an email the other day from an Israeli and said, those 300,000 shells you're taking out of Israel were kind of for us too.

And I don't know what he meant by that, but we're draining stocks all over the world, it seems to me from the news reports. And we're not talking about how we're gonna replace them if they go into Taiwan, the Chinese. And what I'm getting at is, if you juxtapose a lot of people on the left, their rhetoric and their zeal for getting every Russian out of Ukraine, and their pronouncements that I've heard, I won't mention names.

We know some of them, that Ukraine is on the cusp of victory any minute. I mean, they're gonna win. And you juxtapose that with their lack of advocacy for massive war production mobilization and a very radical change in our deterrence to meet this ambitious agenda that they're advancing.

It's striking, because they're kind of sleepwalking. Well, it's just gonna be sort of like bombing Milosevic and it'll be over and we won't, it's not, this is going to be the largest conventional war we've seen since Vietnam, and maybe Korea. And nobody's talking about getting ready for it.

 

>> John: There's two things I don't get here, and HR maybe you can help me. Five years to start up a production line, to do artillery shows, I mean, December 7th, 1941, let's count five years from that. Yeah, we'll get some tanks to you five years from now. Henry Kaiser-

 

>> H.R.: I agree, John, I agree with you. I mean, remember, I'm on the side of being an American, not an American't, right? We could do, we could do, we could do this.

>> John: Henry Kaiser said, sure, he signed a contract to make liberty ships, and 90 days later he had made a port, made the production facility, and sailed the first ship.

None of this five years for one round of ammunition.

>> Victor: I think I have the answer for that, John. When I was 15, my grandfather said, we're gonna irrigate every morning. And I said, do I have to get up at 7:00 AM? And he said, I've been up since 04:00 AM, that generation.

So that generation is very different than our generation.

>> John: This is about getting the permits and the contract, it's not about, I still believe Americans can get up at 4 in the morning if they want.

>> Victor: Well, I guess what I'm saying is, if for each person that says we're gonna win at no cost, then why don't they have an ancillary plan to do it?

And that plan would have to be a rabid, almost total war, I mean, to defeat this guy.

>> H.R.: Here's something, just a quick point here. I know we're lamenting the shortages that we have and we need to make up for, but we are gonna make up for them.

I just saw commercial contracts for production for our artillery shells for the first time rather than doing it exclusively through US arsenals. So, I mean, some adjustments are being made right now, but you know who's got a much tougher problem? Hey, Russia does. And you know who else does?

China does, because China depends on a lot of Russian weapon systems. So does India. I mean, I'll tell you, I think the Russian military industry is dead ,and all their clients are now probably wishing they had diversified their weapon stocks. So I think it's obviously important for us to be self-critical and understand the difficulty situation we're in, but I think the Russians are in a much worse shape.

 

>> John: Don't we need to win this year? If this turns into a multi, multi year slog, that's a pretty bad situation. And I don't understand how even giving them 14 tanks, I sort of remember my World War II histories, Kursk wasn't fought with 14 tanks. Russia is actually starting their winter offensive, they seem to be moving forwards.

I don't see the plan to how this is over this year.

>> H.R.: Well, this goes to, I think Victor was making this point, weren't you, Victor, about, I mean, incrementalism, right? I mean, enough with the incrementalism. Hey, we'll give you this weapon, but not that weapon, we'll give you 31 tanks.

 

>> Victor: But if you're not gonna be incremental, you have to change your mentality. And the people who are the strongest supporters of this, Biden keeps bragging about all the things he's done, and we forget that he said, well, I wouldn't object if it was a minor incursion. Or he offered a ride to Zelenskyy to get out of town the first week.

But forget all that, they keep bragging about aviator Joe, and we're gonna get really tough, but if he If he really believed it, he'd give a talk, or Millie would say, this is what I advise, we've got to do this and we've got to galvanize, and he'd say, you know what, we're short on recruitment.

Here's what I'm going to do to make sure that, and be public about it, I'm sure he's doing it privately, but it's a very weird Orwellian situation. I gave a talk in Newport about some military affairs, and I had four people say, I'm not sending my kid, by the way, the same old stuff.

My grandfather fought in Vietnam, my dad fought in Gulf War, I'm not sending my kid to that Pentagon, no way. And what the subtext was is that Millie and the Pentagon have offended an entire working class constituency as I said, and got kind of in trouble with you guys last time, has died at twice the numbers of their population.

And that's just one element of this, that's the manpower element, but you've got to get those people to come back into the military, you've got to get ramp up military production, you've got to get some leaders in there that don't let a balloon go across the United States.

So they send a lesson that Putin was watching that, and then there was a report, HR last two weeks ago that Putin is talking with the Taliban because of the 60,000 vehicles, including jeeps, trucks, humvees. And I saw a figure of 500,000 automatic weapons and machine guns, 500,000.

At the same time that report came out, there was a report that the Russians were complaining that they had first generation AK 47s that didn't work and bolt action World War Two rifle, and they were not getting their wounded out of the battle zones because they didn't have transport.

The next article said, from American officials, we just don't, and a Pentagon, we just don't think the Taliban would dare do that. They just wouldn't want to sell that stuff to Russia and break up this new relationship we have, and I thought to myself, are these people crazy?

You're trying to tell me that Putin could not use 60,000 vehicles and 500,000 automatic weapons for his depleted stocks, and that a Russian wouldn't know how to drive an American jeep or use an M four? This is crazy, and the Taliban, who's done all sorts of things to us, wouldn't be willing to make a couple of billion dollars selling this stuff off.

But we're in a state I'm trying to get to the point, I'm trying to convey the idea we're in a state of collective denial. I think Neil was right about that, about the geostrategic consequences and the wherewithal to complete this ambitious agenda.

>> Niall: I think where we agree, Victor, is that the kind of enthusiasm for Ukraine that swept liberal America, replacing Black Lives Matter signs with Ukrainian flags, has had a certain strategic naivety, might one put it that way?

 

>> Victor: Much better.

>> Niall: Nobody actually has the faintest idea how to stop this war, including the people in Washington whose job it is, the problem is that both sides think that time is on their side, they both can't be right. But it means that neither Zelensky nor Putin is remotely open to the idea of negotiations, even although we've clearly suggested that to both sides.

So we've got this open ended commitment now, we keep having to increase the firepower that we make available to the Ukrainians because we really can't have them lose now, we've backed them, and that means they can't lose. So that much has already been established, but what it takes to win is not clear.

And Putin's nuclear threats clearly do intimidate President Biden, who worries a good deal that he could inadvertently start World War III. So we have a very familiar pattern, which brings to mind Lyndon Johnson's plight, where you escalate in a rather far off war without wanting to escalate too much, because, of course, there are all kinds of potential downsides to doing so.

You mind the domestic politics, but you end up in the worst of all possible strategic outcomes, I think that the decision to escalate in Vietnam is probably the worst strategic decision the United States has made in its history. But what's amazing to me is the ways in which this could have similar disastrous consequences, and it's very hard to get anybody to talk about that.

Let me put another question to you, Victor, it seems to me that we used the term axis too casually in the wake of 911, and there never really was an axis of evil of the sort that was famously referenced by George W Bush in a speech I think David Frum wrote.

But there is now a real axis, China, Russia and Iran are working closely together, maybe with North Korean involvement, too. This is a proper axis, and it's increasingly acting in concert, the axis of course, in World War Two, didn't act in perfect concert, if it had, heaven knows, the outcome might have been different.

But I wonder how far the term axis is now appropriate and how far we should be thinking, not narrowly, of what's happening in Bakhmut, what's happening today in Ukraine, but broadly, what's happening globally? Let me ask you a question, did you read Robert Kagan's challenging the US is a historic mistake?

I thought that piece was really wrong, I think right now, challenging the US is a huge historic opportunity, and the axis of Russia, China and Iran is planning to do just that.

>> Victor: Yeah, I think what, I agree with you when I read that essay, I think that he looks at all of our assets and he thinks we can do almost anything, but the fact that we have these assets and we can't do anything, that we can do anything, that we can do nothing, in a sense, makes it, it earns us a greater contempt.

When you mention these spin offs, I think before Ukraine, to give one example, and Erdogan would not say, as he did two weeks ago, the Athenians are gonna wake up the residents of Athens one night and they're gonna have one of our missiles come into Athens. And then he said something like, the Dodecanese islands have always been Turkish, they haven't.

And he's still bothering people in the Aegean about natural gas, and he's much more likely to do something than he was, say, in 2020. And the same is true, I think, of Iran, and the same, I think, is true of North Korea, and their view is that we are now tied down psychologically and materially in Ukraine.

And we're in a period of left wing governance that is pacifistic, that won't fund the necessary wherewithal to conduct that war and to maintain deterrence in these peripheral theaters, and they're going to take advantage of it. But they're waiting for the best opportune moment, and that's why it's very dangerous for something that's symbolic, like this balloon.

Anything that gives the wrong impression that we're weak because we're not weak, but anything that gives impression to these players in these diverse landscapes, it could be catastrophic, especially for our allies.

>> Bill: Let me put a question to the group here, so axis of evil popped up in a George W Bush State of the Union speech.

The president speaks on Tuesday night to the nation, to the world, it's a speech he's been working on for days, if not weeks, it's his game, his rules here. Granted, these speeches are a spectacle, I'm a recovering speech runner, so I enjoy them, but that tells you what warp priorities I have.

We've been talking about these world problems, and here is the president's chance to say something cleanly to the country and to the world. Victor, what should he say?

>> Victor: What can he say?

>> Bill: What should he say? What will he say? What should he say?

>> John: Two different questions.

 

>> Bill: No, I think you know what he will say, what should he say?

>> Victor: What he should say is that we're living in an increasingly dangerous world, and with great reluctance, we have to face that our ends and our means are incompatible as of now. And we have to ramp up the defense budget and produce enough deterrence so that we can live in a safer world.

He's going to have, he only gets animated if you think about it when he's talking about his enemies or the ultra maga or these, and then his eyes get beady and he gets angry. But he's got to talk about some sort of unity in the country, because, and it would be a wonderful opportunity, because on every issue, literally every issue, he's pulling below 40%.

And personally, he's only at 43 I think today and in poll yesterday, both DeSantis and Trump beat him. So he should be calling for national unity, not go after the opposition and talk about these foreign threats, divert attention politically from his disaster at home. But more importantly, to get the country ready for some, we're going to be in a.

I think I'll defer to our economist expert here, but I think we're gonna be in recessionary or stagflationary times in summer to a greater degree than we are now. And we're gonna be seeing a very, very robust Iran and a robust China and a robust North Korea, and Putin getting his second wind.

And people who are supporting this war are not willing to go all the way. This alliance between deterrent hawks and the left wing doves is gonna start to unwind very quickly. Because when you start to mention the defense budget, what's necessary to win in Ukraine, they're not gonna go for that.

 

>> John: I want to take up Neil's line of questioning, is it a terrible thing to attack the United States or not? Or to challenge the United States? And you're the great historian of World War II. We sort of like 1938 is here, a president with a not very successful economy behind him.

But an isolationist country that is seeing horrible things happening in Spain and Manchuria and God knows where, but. Or abyssinian and not very happy about it, but still very isolationist. And then comes the Pearl harbor moment. And we've seen sort of a teeny inkling of a Pearl harbor moment among the left with Ukraine that changed their minds a lot also with the Europeans.

So I wonder, would the invasion of Taiwan be a Pearl harbor? That's the great question, not will we prepare. America will never prepare ahead of time, get it all ready and be ready to go. But will we rally and will this become the Pearl harbor moment that brings us all together?

That's the question for us about whether we'll prevail, not whether we can get it all together now and deter it. That's a question for my World War II historian.

>> Victor: Do you really believe that the left feels that China opposes the existential threat, which it does, as much as Russia?

Because that's the key to it. The real enemy and the great danger we're facing is China, which the left has a soft spot for, and the lesser power. And the ossified country they are obsessed with for a variety of reasons that go back to collusion and disinformation.

>> John: Taiwan's not Hawaii, the national thing.

 

>> Victor: I do not think they would rally on Taiwan's behalf on Ukraine, even though it's been a much longer concern of the United States and it's got quasi ally status with us. But I just don't think they're going, there's a lot of reasons why, and part of it is effective, it's the same thing about the Wuhan lab.

You can't get anybody on the left to admit today that that thing was birthed in a lab that was controlled by the PLA. Not that they did it deliberately, but it was there, they don't believe that today. And so they have a soft spot.

>> Bill: I'd like to get Neil's and HR's thoughts on what the president should say about China, because it seems to me he has a balancing act.

He has to talk tough, given the events of last week and this weekend, but he also has to talk in an optimistic tone, HR, about diplomacy. So how does he balance the two?

>> H.R.: Yeah, I think he just talks about the competition with the Chinese Communist Party and makes it clear that this form of aggression, of a balloon, fits into a much broader context of economic aggression, sustained industrial espionage.

What Victor talked about at the beginning, the behavior of the party against its own people. He should speak in favor of the chinese people and against the Chinese Communist Party. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity, I think he also has a huge opportunity, as Victor has alluded to, that, hey, we have to get serious, right?

We have to strengthen our defense because really hard power is what deters aggression, right? I think if there's a big lesson from Ukraine. It's that sanctions and relentless diplomacy don't prevent wars, really hard power prevents wars. And I hope he'll take the opportunity to ask young Americans to join our armed forces and make clear, our military is not woke, our military is not extremist.

Our military are young men and women who are determined to protect their country, and they are prepared to fight for each other, to sacrifice for each other. And I think people on the left and right ought to try to magnify that message. And if there's an issue, I think the issue is with the civilian leadership within the administration that has been foisting a political agenda on the military, a resistant military.

But I hope he does make a call to serve and then talks to the country frankly about the importance of the competition with the Chinese Communist Party.

>> Niall: Well, what he should say, as opposed to what he will say, is we clearly are going to have to increase our defense expenditure.

And focus much more carefully on our ability to supply our military in events of further conflicts in the world. And that means that we must take steps to rein in expenditure in other areas because we are on an unsustainable fiscal path. And he should cite John Cochrane and his wonderful book, noting the inflationary pressures that have arisen from these.

 

>> John: Hold up the book.

>> Niall: Yes, thats what he should say. He should say that were in danger within a matter of years of having more money going on servicing the federal debt than on defense, national security. He should say that, but that's not what he's going to say, because this is a state of the union that is the prelude to his seeking re-election.

And therefore, what he is going to do is say a whole bunch of things directed at his progressive base. So there'll be climate, there'll be Rara, Ukraine, there'll be nasty things said about Republicans and pro Trump fascist elements, all that stuff will be trotted out. But then there will also be the things that are directed at swing voters, the things that he's actually taken from Donald Trump.

America first, a kind of national economic strategy which is just code for protectionism. That's what he, I think, will say. And in that sense, it's a really depressing prospect, because I Really worry about where we're heading, let me tell you what I worry about. I don't really worry about World War III, I don't think this administration is going to get us into world War III.

Rather, I think they're going to get us into a position of such overextension that we have to fold when the Chinese make a move on Taiwan. And that is my nightmare, that we end up in a situation, perhaps it's under President Harris rather than President Biden several years hence.

But when the chips are down and the move is made and the United States then discovers that it doesn't have the wherewithal to take back Taiwan. Or to prevent a successful Chinese blockade or invasion, we will be in Suez crisis mode. And that's the thing that I find most troubling about our present national trajectory.

 

>> Bill: John, there's one other thing he could do, he could hold up a trillion dollar coin, and say, I have solved our debt problems.

>> John: Well, before we get into the debt joke, I just wanna emphasize what Neil just said. The danger actually is folding, we're not gonna lose, they're not gonna invade the US.

But it's almost inevitable that in Taiwan, in Ukraine, when we get tired of it, and God knows in the Middle East that we don't have that energy to go back. The balloon is a joke, and let's remember, this is a joke, it's a snafu, it reveals incompetence, not a well executed plan of delusion.

 

>> Niall: You know what it reminds me of, John? When Matthias Roost, a teenager from Hamburg, landed his plane in Red Square and exposed that the Soviet Union had no air defenses. And it was an absolutely revealing moment of how completely decayed that system was.

>> Victor: You know what it reminds me of, John?

When April Gillespie, controversial, whether that was, she told Saddam Hussein, right on the eve of the first Cold War, that I think it was in August, that the United States had no strategic interest in inner Arab boundary disputes. Or when Dean Acheson, even more controversial, cuz the left denies this ever happened.

But when he said that he made a map of US allies under the nuclear umbrella and he conveniently left out Korea, and of course, that was noted elsewhere. So these little tiny gestures are important because they are windows into the soul of a nation. And that balloon, people look at that in a way that we don't,

 

>> John: I think it's windows into bureaucratic incompetence, but not for us.

>> Victor: For us it is. Yes, no, our bureaucratic and their bureaucratic incompetence. No, but I mean, we view that-

>> John: You asked me a question. There's supposed to be a hotline mechanism, and that's also not working, so there's a lot of little stuff that's not working.

Now, let me give you some good news, defense is cheap. We're spending, what, like 2 or 3% of GDP? What percent of GDP is cheap, we have thrown this kind of money down rat holes like nobody's business. The Chips Aact, the subsidies for green cards, so long as they're made by unions in the United States, we are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down rat holes.

You do not need to throw grandma's Social Security off the train in order to have a serious defense budget. Defense is much, much cheaper than you think compared to the size of a modern welfare state, so that's, that's the good news.

>> Victor: You're trying to convince us of that or me of that?

 

>> John: Yeah.

>> Victor: Well, I mean-

>> John: Somebody said there's a serious financial problem here, and I'm just noting that it should-

>> Victor: Secretary Blinken explained the other day why he wasn't going to China. I was driving and I said, it will be within 20 seconds that he will mention climate change.

And of course, 20 seconds later he said, and this is not going to interfere with our strong partnerships with the Chinese government on matters of mutual concern, like our investments in climate change and etc. And it was almost an apology that he was canceling this trip, it was pathetic.

And it reminded me of the anchorage, March 2021 with the first major thing the Chinese basically said, screw you guys, we don't like you, and they just said, you don't like us.

>> John: Look, at least he's facing reality that if you care about climate change, buying Tesla's to drive down to your private jet, Palo Alto is nothing.

It's all about China, burning coal to build nuclear, burn to do electricity, that's it, that's climate change.

>> Bill: And John, if you care about debt, the trillion dollar coin.

>> John: Okay, sorry.

>> Bill: And whose face goes on that coin, by the way?

>> John: So the trillion dollar coin is a silly idea.

So what it's about really, is that we have a debt limit, which is, I think, a useful device. It's our only remaining budget control system, when you sit down and say, how much are we spending overall? The remaining budget stuff doesn't work, that's heretical, everyone thinks you should get rid of it, but I'll offer that one.

The debt is very badly measured, so the trillion dollar coin is in the measurement of debt, coins issued by the treasury don't count, so, we can do that. There's a cleverer way, the treasurer, it only counts the principal value of debt, not the interest. So if you issued interest only debt with no principle, that would work too.

But the spirit of the thing is you're not allowed to get around it, we're supposed to be doing something about that, not getting around it, that's why I think none of these ideas will go anywhere. Yes, the formula for measuring the debt could be exploited, but I don't think that's gonna happen.

 

>> Bill: Neil?

>> John: Also, this is not about a serious default of the US, this is about a technical question of the debt limit.

>> Niall: Yeah, it's a silly idea, but unfortunately, debate about the federal debt has been silly for about 20 years.

>> John: Right.

>> Niall: And it's really hard to get people to talk seriously about the unsustainable nature of US fiscal policy because the mismatch between expenditures and revenue has been structural for years.

And the projections that the Congressional Budget Office produces become more and more eye popping with the debt to GDP ratio. And thats public debt, debt in the hands of the public heading towards 200%. And so what frustrates me is that we get these silly Twitter discussions of trillion dollar coins instead of a serious discussion about where this leads.

And where it leads is that once you get positive real interest rates, then the cost of this huge stock of debt is suddenly a meaningful item in your budget. And when that is a big item in your budget, other things start to get squeezed. And the political economy of the US Congress means that national security is easier to squeeze than entitlements.

And that's why I worry about where we're heading, because it seems to me that we're heading into a position, rather like Britain, between the wars. Where our commitments around the world are no longer affordable and our industrial base is no longer equal to the task of large scale defense of those overseas interests.

So forgive me if I sound somewhat despondent, but it doesn't feel like we're tall on a good path. That's why the state of the union will be a kind of charade. It'll be a charade in which a whole bunch of empty rhetoric will be deployed to try to distract from this fundamental growing structural vulnerability that the United States has at home and abroad.

 

>> John: Let me just add two things, yeah, Washington has not gotten the message that throwing money at things is no longer gonna happen. Second, even the CPO projections are, nothing bad happens. If, when China invades Taiwan, there's gonna be the mother of all financial crises, and we're gonna need Stimulus, bailout and military stuff.

Uncle Sam goes and says we want 10 trillion more debt, that's on top of the CPO projections. And finally, there is no reason for the US to be borrowing money right now. Government debt is a great and wonderful invention. You borrow money to fight wars, to fight horrible recessions, to fight temporary things, and then you pay it back.

Our economy is booming, there's no reason whatsoever in economics that we should be running trillion dollar deficits at this point.

>> Victor: Yeah, I think it's booming, but I think we have, and correct me if I'm wrong, we're up to about 64% of labor non participation rates, that's COVID or stuff.

And then I was looking at the real estate market the other day, a lot of loans that are not competitive, but they're still out there, 7% 30 year loans. And if you look at the days that houses are on the market now, what's happening is people will not lower this price.

Cuz they've got this inflation acculturated idea that their house is always gonna be, it's worth this imaginary number. And so it's gone from about here in the San Joaquin Valley, about 11 days, up to 90 days and growing. They can't sell these homes at 7% interest rates and they do not wanna lower the price and they need the money.

So there's a rock and a hard place and at some point people are gonna say, you know what, I got a job out of state or my daughter's getting married. Or I got, I need the money and they're gonna start, this thing is gonna, I think, erode very quickly.

 

>> John: That's a short term thing. Debt repayment is a long term growth.

>> Victor: Yeah, well, we have 450-

>> John: And the answer is-

>> Victor: $450 billion it's gonna cost to service the debt by the end of the year, this year. So, I know we have a strong economy, but I think there's a lot of reasons to believe it's not gonna be so strong by the end of the year, and that's not what we're talking about.

 

>> John: We have a weak economy that is doing the best it can-

>> Victor: Yes, that's a better way to report it.

>> John: And more demand is not gonna help. More government spending, more stimulus. What you need now is 20, 30 years of really strong supply side growth and that's the only way you're gonna get out of your fiscal problems.

 

>> Bill: So I'm worried about Neil coming out of that speech on Tuesday in something of a funk, so I know exactly what will lift his mood. And that is Sunday afternoon, evening, depending on where you are in the US, the Super Bowl HR question, where are you gonna be on Sunday?

You're gonna be in Arizona or some undisclosed location?

>> H.R.: I'll be at an undisclosed location. I will not be able to go to Arizona, but GO BIRDS, GO BIRDS, as we say in Philadelphia.

>> Bill: Victor, it's something of a running joke on the show. We constantly gang up on Neil and his dislike of American football, would you like to pile on or order.

 

>> Victor: I used to be a fanatic fan, but I don't watch it anymore. I don't know why I don't keep it.

>> Niall: Cuz it's boring.

>> Victor: Maybe the last five years I haven't.

>> Niall: Cuz it's the most boring

>> Victor: It's too much celebrity. It's not that old days of Jim Taylor and Jim Brown and all those guys.

Bart star, it's just celebrity, celebrity, celebrity. And the halftime show has become sort of a Petronian Satiricon event.

>> Bill: You're not a big Rihanna fan, I take it.

>> Victor: Yeah, it's something right out of Petronius. I like to do it because I'm feeling a lot better and I like to ride again.

So that's the best time to ride a bike is during the Super bowl. There's no, the streets are empty and you can ride, never see a place.

>> Bill: So, John, what are you gonna do on Sunday when the rest of society comes to a halt?

>> John: Well, normally our tradition is we go out to dinner cuz it's really easy to get a restaurant reservation.

 

>> Victor: You too.

>> John: Unfortunately, I'm gonna be in Frankfurt, so my dinner is gonna be schnitzel somewhere in Frankfurt.

>> Bill: Okay, Neil, what's the Mo in the Ferguson household? Do you turn off the TVs and just tell the boys nothing is going on? You just keep them away from that or?

 

>> Niall: Well, we are a dedicated sporting family, but our attentions are entirely on real sports, rugby, football, and association football, sometimes known here as soccer. And it's an exciting time of year. The Six nations just began. Scotland won a famous victory over England on Saturday, I'm still sort of walking on air after that.

And Arsenal of five points clear at the top of the Premier League. Super Bowl, I mean, Schmooper Bowl.

>> Bill: Folks, Neil is on Twitter, by the way, in case you'd like to offer your comments on that.

>> John: What was all that?

>> Niall: Real sports, try them, America, try them.

HR knows I'm right, rugby's the better game. You saw the world.

>> H.R.: Rugby is the better game.

>> Niall: You know what good sport is like, and Victor's right, the Super Bowl is the most Roman of spectacles. The decadence, it's just almost unbearable. I find the halftime show obscene, I can't bear to watch it.

And as for the sporting events itself, the tragedy of this mutant form of rugby is that it gets steadily worse with every passing year. This is what Victor's observed. It's got worse, the commercial breaks get longer, the plays get more predictable, it's just a fail. And you guys have to shut it down.

 

>> H.R.: I bet you don't even like nachos, do you? You don't like nachos either, do you?

>> Niall: No, I don't like nachos.

>> John: Get them on American beer.

>> Niall: It's not about eating. The big American mistake is to think that you should sit and stuff your face. What you should do at a sporting event is sing your heart out and hurl obscenities at the other side's fans.

It's cathartic, not some kind of feast, you're going there for catharsis. And this is what Americans miss about sport. That's why you're all unhappy and depressed and on meds. Because in Saturday you just eat freaking nachos instead of shouting abuse at the Tottenham fans, which makes me and my sons feel so much better.

 

>> Bill: Neil, your morphe into Ricky Gervais the more you talk.

>> Niall: I think it's kind of transatlantic syndrome.

>> Bill: Very good. Well, gentlemen, very good conversation today. Victor, great to have you back.

>> Victor: Thank you guys for having me, I appreciate it.

>> H.R.: Hey, Victor, great to be with you.

 

>> Bill: And HR, good luck on Sunday, HR.

>> H.R.: All right, go eagles.

>> Victor: Okay.

>> H.R.: Go birds.

>> Bill: So that's a wrap for this episode of GoodFellows. On behalf of my colleagues, Neil Ferguson, John Cochran, HR McMaster, our guest today, Victor Davis Hansen, we hope you enjoyed our talk.

We'll be back soon with a new episode, till then, take care. As always, thanks for watching so long.

>> Narrator: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch battlegrounds, also available at hoover.org.