Victor Davis Hanson on What Trump Thinks of Zelensky and Predicting Geopolitics

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today on Upstream, we're releasing a conversation I had earlier this week with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, and fellow at the Hoover Institution. We discuss the future of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, how the American left will adapt, how Trump talks about class, and more. Please enjoy.

Professor, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining.

Thank you for having me.

So you're a historian, but I want to ask a little bit about the future today or how history will be— how certain people will be remembered. Let's say that we're having this conversation in 2030 and we're reflecting on the Trump presidency or the Trump legacy. How do you think Trump And his presidency, second presidency might be remembered?

Well, we have some guide because we're almost 5 years out. That would be 5 years from now. We're 5 years out from his first term. And I think most people think it was chaotic for 2 reasons. One, he had no experience before and he had no constituency as far as appointments. And there were people both in his party and his opposition That were in his government that tried to, they weren't on the same agenda, put it that way. And then he was subject to, you know, 5, uh, 2 impeachments and Robert Mueller for 20 months. But given all that, he was, I think the other, on the other side, people look at it for all the chaos, he did pretty well as far as foreign policy. There were no wars. Putin stayed within his borders for the first time in the last 4 administrations. He killed Soleimani, got rid of Baghdad, he got rid of ISIS, attacked the Wagner Group. It was pretty tough on Putin and China. So I would imagine that his second term, I think everybody that he has nominated as an agency or cabinet head is unlike— there are no Rex Tillersons or Jim Mattis or John Boltons. Everybody Is either on the team or more on the team than Trump is. They're force multipliers of his agenda. And the same is true of Congress. While he has a much smaller margin in the House, the Never Trump Liz Chaney's, Mitt Romney's, they're all gone. So he has a much more unified party. And the party itself has made much greater inroads by winning the popular vote and the Electoral College and, you know, winning 45% of Hispanics and 25% of Black males. So I think they'll think it's chaos, as we've already seen, but I think it'll be seen as successful. A lot will depend on whether they maintain the Congress in the midterms and also who's going to be— can you have a MAGA agenda without Trump? And I think that was the idea behind J.D. Vance, that he would be a MAGA person unlike Pence was or somebody like that.

And, and if you had to predict, do you think Vance is, is likely to, to win in 2028?

I think he's likely, unless something happens, to be nominated. Um, he's always underestimated because people think if you have a white male president, you don't nominate a white male president from a state that you're already going to win anyway. That was the conventional wisdom. But what they misjudge about him is that he's very rare because he grew up very poor in Appalachia and he understands the underclass. And then he was in the military in a combat zone, and then he was among the nation's elite at Yale Law School, and he did marry somebody from India. So he's got all these different experiences. He was a very successful writer, and that showed up. You could— people who were critical of Trump for nominating him, they, they dropped that criticism within days after he started those 30 or 40 media appearances, because he seemed to just Devour all of these so-called expert journalists, CBS, NBC, MSNBC. He just, he was a better articulator of the MAGA agenda than anyone else. So I think he has a really good chance. He'd be a very difficult candidate. He destroyed Tim Walz in the vice president's debate. So I just, I think he's probably about the best the Republicans have.

And Let's say it's 2030 and we're reflecting on what happened to Europe over the preceding 5 years. How do you think certain things are going to play out there? Do you think a similar vibe shift is going to happen, or is someone like AfD likely to win in Germany, or parties similar to that?

Yeah, I think what's happening to Europe is the old post-war order that gave them open borders, their extreme version of the Green New Deal, High energy prices, deindustrialization, no defense to speak of. Not all the NATO members even met their 2.0% GDP investments. That there's going to be a conservative wave, not maybe AfD completely in Germany, but it's going to move to the right. And the elites are more anti-American. Than the populist conservative people that J.D. Vance was talking over the heads of the elites to those people, and I think they're going to be closer in a weird way. I think they're going to start to rearm. I don't. I think the United they're going to start to treat the United States very different. We're in an Orwellian situation that's not sustainable when Mr. Mertz and Mr. Schultz, the present chancellor and the incoming, start to lecture us. About what's sustainable when the United States has 50,000 soldiers 85 years after World War II. We have 40 bases in Germany. We have subsidized their defense. They don't spend, as I said, what they promised. They're running a, depending on how we calibrate it, somewhere between $80 and $90 billion trade surplus with the United States. And that's, they claim it's because of Superior productivity, but when you, when you factor in labor and power, they have 4 times the power cost that we do. You can see that it's mostly because of their 5 to 6% tariffs that they slap on everything that we send in. And then we only charge them 1 to 2%, maybe 3% on some car models. And they feel that that's normal. And so when you go and tell them that's not normal anymore. We're $36 trillion in debt, and you're going to have to shoulder more of your own defense. You're going to have to have zero tariffs or 1%. We'll have the same. They go crazy and they start yelling and screaming at us. So, and then they start telling us what they're— we have to do in Ukraine. You have to do this and do this. It would be as if, you know, we, we tell NATO, we want you to send 10,000 people to help us patrol the Mexican and Canadian borders. I mean, he had a point when Trump said there's a big ocean between us and they've got this perennial Russian problem right on their borders. And they were the ones that we warned them. Trump warned them not to be reliant on Nord Stream 2 natural gas, and they didn't believe us. They got really angry at that. We've warned them again and again about the Green Deal, the Paris Climate. Every time we say anything to them, they They object, and then they do other things. I mean, the International Criminal Court says these rulings that they're going to arrest our ally Israel's head of state, and then we find out that Brussels or Spain or Poland might arrest him if he goes there. So it's—I don't think they understand what the relationship is anymore. I think they don't quite understand Trump. They feel that they are much more important than they are. And, um, it's— Germany's had flat GDP for 2 years now. No GDP growth. 16% of the population's not born in Germany.

Wow. How do you think Ukraine and Russia is going to resolve?

Well, there's one big issue. Uh, there's the only issue that I can see, and I don't understand Some of my colleagues at the Hoover Institution who are trying to undermine the proposed outlines, but and a lot of people on the left. The only issue that I see is where is the DMZ going to be? Because it was never the argument of the Obama administration when he invaded the Donbas and Crimea, or the Trump administration who inherited that, or the Biden administration prior to February. 2022 that we were going to give them the military wherewithal to take back Crimea and Donbas. Everybody said— nobody said that. That only came up after the, the, the latest invasion. But there's no way in the world that Ukraine has the ability to take back those 2 areas, and there's no way in the world the United States and Europe are going to give them the necessary wherewithal to do that. So I think what we're looking at is that Putin is going to say to the people when they ask him why did he get a million Russians killed and wounded in a stupid invasion, he's going to say, I reified or I institutionalized disputed territories that we occupied in Crimea and I kept them out of NATO. And we're going to say, well, okay, they're out of NATO, but Ukraine is the best armed and experienced army now in all of NATO. Except for the United States. And it stopped kind of like Finland in 1940. It stopped the Russians from absorbing the country. So then the only, the only issue that I see is where will the DMZ be? Will it be as we want it to be prior to February 24th where he started? And he's going to say, I want it 60 or 70 miles where I am now. And wherever that is, they might split the difference. They'll have to have a DMZ. And then Trump is faulted for talking about precious metals and things and having concessions. But the more you think about it, if he has a sizable US investment and other countries invest in the same rare earth minerals and they are there very close to the DMZ where the minerals are, it's going to be very hard for Putin to invade again when we have all these international corporations there. That's what Trump is trying to do. He's trying to welcome all this investment. So he tells Putin, if you invade again and you kill an American, and he said that before to Putin about the Wagner Group, then we're going to be, you know, we're going to have conflict. So I think that's good. And then we've also learned that a much higher percentage of European aid was loans than we thought. We gave them almost all of ours in cash and they gave a high percentage of theirs in loans. So they're not going to be criticizing Trump's deal because they're going to want something out of it to get paid back.

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And do you agree with the view that the war could have been avoided if NATO had been taken off the table? Or do you think that Putin is trying to restore sort of, you know, the greatness of the USSR territory?

I think both. I think his attitude is Putin's. He went in 2008 into Ossetia and Georgia when George Bush was tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he felt that Bush wouldn't. And Bush had said to him, I looked in his eyes and I saw a kindred soul and all that. He went in in 2014 when Obama, uh, tried to reset with Russia. They went to, to Geneva. They had the reset button. He didn't do anything to, uh, Putin. And, um, more importantly, he had that hot mic and so Korea, where Obama said, I'll be flexible on missile defense if you gimme space, 'cause of my last election. They, and they both kept their end. We dismantled the end of the deal that he, we dismantled the missiles. So, and he went under Biden because, you know, Biden was after the Afghanistan debacle, we had no deterrence. And he said, he said things like, I'll react if it's a major invasion, but maybe not if it's a minor one, that kind of stuff. So he's always opportunistic. And when, so he's gonna go in anywhere that he thinks he can, if in a cost to benefit analysis. So that brings the question, why did he go into Ukraine, uh, a 3rd time? He went in once in 2014 and took those. He went into Kyiv and then he went into back to the Donbas again. And the answer is he thought that he could, he could get away with it. Did he have a reason to get in it? It depends on what you think we were going— when we said they would not be in NATO, George H.W. Bush said that. And then after that, the Clinton team came in. It was very clear that Victoria Nuland and John McCain and other people like that did not like the elected government in 2014, who was very pro-Russian, corrupt, and they thought very unpopular. And they pushed him out. I think that's— I know the left will get crazy when they hear that, but we were doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. For example, in 2016, the ambassador to the United States from this new government in Ukraine was writing op-eds about why you should have had to elect Hillary Clinton. And Ukraine's had this problem aside from the Bidens and the The Bidens and Hunter and Burisma to interfere in our— I understand they're desperate, but in 2016, some of the sources that were helping Christopher Steele were allegedly Ukrainian, not so much Russian, but Ukrainian. We had Alexander Vindman, who was a dual citizen, bragging that he had been offered the Ministry of Defense twice from Ukraine, and he was really the architect of the first impeachment. By leaking a classified document to the— then we, and then Joe Biden flew on a C-17. He flew Zelensky right at the heart of the campaign in September to Pennsylvania, the key swing state. And then he was accompanied by Democratic politicians to a munitions factory where they basically said, these people all have jobs because of Biden's aid to us. And that was another interference. That's probably why Trump is so angry at Zelensky. And Ukraine in general. But I guess that's a long explanation that had somebody after the Cold War continued the Reagan-Bush idea that the Warsaw Pact becoming NATO gave us a pretty good deterrent against Russia. And then the fact that the Soviet Union broke up into federated states like Ukraine and Belarus, and they were under the sphere of Russia, but they were semi-autonomous. That was their business, I guess, was what I'm saying. And we decided for a variety of idealistic and selfish reasons that Ukraine was going to be a Western NATO EU country. And that meant that the borders of the West would be 500 miles closer. And that was, and he warned us he was going to do something. If I guess my conclusion is, if you're going to do that, then you better deter him. But it's the worst thing in the world to be provocative. We had people in the Obama administration, the ambassador, other people to Moscow that were meeting with dissidents. They were talking about Putin had to go. They were saying he was a monster. That's fine. It was probably true. But if you're going to be very provocative, then you've got to deter him. And yet they cut the defense budget and they were weak. So talking loudly with a twig is the worst thing in the world.

Right. But at the same time, you also think that Putin does have expansionary, um, sort of goals separate from this.

Yes. Irredentist. If he had his way, he would take the Baltic states. He would turn everything into what Belarus is, a useful frontline republic that's indistinguishable in terms of its economy and foreign policy from Russia. And yes, he would do that. And I think that we get shocked at that, but he thinks he has a sphere of influence. But in 1962, you know, we said even though the Caribbean is their autonomous states, we had a long history with Cuba before Castro. We had a protectorate in Puerto Rico. And so what Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba pointed at us, we said that you can't do that. They're too close to the United States border, even though the Castro government was an autonomous communist ally of the Soviet Union. So when Putin said to us, you're not going to take this former relationship we had with Ukraine and put a bunch of Western stuff here and put it in NATO. He was kind of making the same argument we made about Khrushchev in Cuba. And the left, or even people, conservatives, well, that's not valid because we were good and Khrushchev was bad and we're good and Putin was bad. But that's not the issue. That's how they were just thinking how they look at it. Yeah.

Was the war good for us in the US in that it weakened Russia Yeah.

Yeah, it did. And that becomes a very interesting topic because we always thought the left who had been lecturing us about Iraq and the, the carnage that we were trying to build a democracy with, I think it was kind of naive in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the left was very quickly, as soon as it turned bad, saying that this was horrific. We were killing people, collateral damage. said the same thing about Israel. And then all of a sudden it became, we're going to bleed Russia to the last Ukrainian. And nobody on the left— I never heard Schumer or Pelosi or the Squad— nobody ever said this is a human tragedy, that we probably have a million and a half Ukrainians and Russian kids that have been killed, maimed, wounded, missing, captured. No one's even discussed it. The other thing that was weird about it is The left had all of these idiosyncratic ideas. They said that the Netanyahu government had to have a war cabinet and bipartisan. So as soon as October 7th had happened, they brought in the opposition, all of the opposition, Bennett and Gantz and all these people. Then we never said that to Zelensky. He subsequently outlawed political parties opposed to him. He outlawed the oppositional press. Suspended elements of habeas corpus, delayed elections. We still haven't had an election that was scheduled coming up. Then we, we would say to Israel, no collateral damage at all. You're, you're, we never said that to Zelensky. We always said, Israel, you've got to have a ceasefire. You have to have a ceasefire. And we never said to Zelensky, why don't you just have a ceasefire? There's, there's, and yet there was far more death and destruction. in Ukraine. So we had a very separate set of principles, and that was unsustainable. I think that's why when the war started, there was a majority of conservative dash Republicans, maybe 65 or 75%, that supported in the old Republican deterrent fashion. And now it's down to about 25. And I think the nation at large is 50-50.

Yeah. Let's say it's 2030 and we're reflecting on, did China take Taiwan and did we let it happen? Or, you know, what happens there? And then I also want to ask you about what is sort of the state of Israel in 2030.

Yeah, I think very quickly China's looking at this and I'm not sure that if we have a peace deal, I don't think they're going to be encouraged that it was an easy thing for Putin to go in there and he got, he didn't get what he wanted. He wanted all of Ukraine. Ukraine, and I think he looks at this administration now. Whatever Trump is, he deters China in a much more. There wouldn't have been an Afghanistan debacle under Trump. I can guarantee you the first day that balloon started to traverse the United States, he would have shot it down, and he would have just. He wouldn't have allowed the hacking. So China knows that, and they think he's predict. Unpredictable. The other thing about it is our allies in the Pacific that are worried about Chinese aggression are far more muscular than our allies in Europe that worry. In other words, Japan is massively rearming right now. South Korea is spending more. Taiwan is rearming. Australia is rearming. And although they're terrified of China, they all want us to. They want to enlist if we're going to lead them, and they're under our nuclear umbrella. So they're different type of allies is what I'm saying. And the other final thing is it's a lot harder to go across 90 miles of water and take an island than it is just go across your border. And we're starting under the— I think we're going to see a new type of armament where we're going to get away from, you know, it's great to have $12, $14 billion carriers, but you can't put them anywhere near the Chinese. Sure. But when you have maybe 20,000 or 30,000 drones, maritime drones, air drones, you could really do a lot of damage to the Chinese fleet. And that's what I think we're aiming at.

Got it. So, so, uh, you think it's in the U.S.'s interest to get and get involved if something were to happen there?

I think with our allies it is. Yeah. I have to protect Taiwan. And I don't know whether I think China sees it as long as we say that we're not going to try to Create an independent Taiwan in the complete sense of the word. I think China will be very reluctant. They they have so much investment from Taiwanese money in China, and it's yeah, I just don't see it. And if Taiwan, I think Taiwan realizes that if they don't rearm, we're not going to do anything. I mean, that they have to say that they're willing to die on the beaches of of Taiwan if we're going to go over there. And now they say they are, but well, it'll all depend on how well they're armed and how well the South Koreans are armed. And the Japanese are doing a very good job. They're arming like crazy. And the Australians are trying to.

How about Israel? Is that the alliance between Israel and Saudi going to hold, or are we just going to have a perpetual, you know, status quo?

Yeah, that's kind of an Orwellian situation, as it always has been, because all of Israel's Potential Abraham Accords allies would like to be allied to Israel, and they don't—they don't like the Palestinian problem that they feel. You know, Palestine 1991, the Kuwaitis found out they had a third of a million Palestinians. They all were cheering on Saddam, and as soon as the war was over, they ethnically cleansed them and sent them back to. But because they're illegitimate countries that have no elected leaders, they're terrified of the Palestinian question among their own. Minorities, Shia and all that. So it's going to be very hard for Israel to have a lasting peace with any of those so-called moderates. And then the other issue is they really do want Israel and/or the United States to deal with Iran, but they do not want them publicly to be bellicose because they feel the first thing Iran is going to do, they still have enough missiles probably after their, even after their losses, To do a lot of damage to the oil areas, so their attitude has always been: If you're going to Israel, if you're going to do something with Iran, you've got to take out all of it. You got to take out their military equipment, their nuclear. But if you're not going to do that, we're not going to. We're going to try to triangulate, and that's their that's their position. The other problem Israel has: It hasn't been able, like most Western countries, to translate. tactical victories to strategic resolution. And that's just hard to know why. It's partly the, the age when nuclear powers, you're always worried about a nuclear power as we see in Ukraine. You can't really win the war. Part of it's Western piety and bottle piety. We're too above war. We don't really believe in killing people or final surrender. We don't declare war on people. fertility rates. Israel's a little bit immune to that, but Western countries, when you have 1.5 children, it's harder to— traditionally in military history, you look at the fertility rate and then that sort of allows you to be more bellicose. I think that's even true of China. That's a restraint on them with their one-child policy. But there's what I'm getting at in a postmodern, leisured, affluent society, and Israel is like that, Not to the same decadent degree we are, but it's very hard for the population to deal with a non-state entity or a third world type of entity because, and you can see it with the asymmetrical hostage exchange. Everybody in Israel understands they're letting out all of these killers at 20, 50 to 1 for hostages. They understand it's not good for the national security of Israel, but they're a humane society that say they have to do it. And the same thing about collateral damage. They text people, we're going to hit this apartment building. And Hamas, Hezbollah, they don't do any of that. And, but yet it's very hard for Israel to use a level of violence that classical strategy would say would be necessary to eliminate, uh, Hamas. So if they had gone into the final corridor, And just did what they did to the rest of Gaza, they probably wouldn't be in a much better position. And they were doing all they could in there before their truce with Hezbollah to, and they did a great job, but they haven't gotten rid of Hezbollah. And so they have been very successful in deterring people, but the problem with Israel is that they have no margin of error as a Western country. Any little lapse in which they experiment with pacifism or utopianism is absolutely fatal to them.

One last question, I'll let you, then I'll let you go. What is the future of the, of the left? Let's say it's, we're 2030 and we're reflecting. Have the Democrats moderated, uh, pivoted, or what do you think about that?

Yeah, they, they know what they have to do. It's sort of like an addict that's on a fix and they know it's killing them, but they don't have, they're too addicted to it. Or they feel they've got a cancer, but they don't want to take the chemotherapy because it's too bitter. So they know what they have to do. If you go back and the answer for the Democrats is just to go back to 1996 and read the Bill Clinton reelection DNC charter at the convention. I think it was written by Doug Schoen and Mark Penn. And it just said, we're for closed borders, legal only immigration. We're tough on crime. We want, they balanced the budget under Clinton. Something that Bush, neither Bush had ever done. So they know they have to do that, but they've been kidnapped or hijacked by this hard left group. And the problem they're having is on every issue, they're about a 20% on the border, open borders, 20%, uh, 3 genders trend, 20%, crime and the Soros, um, district attorney ideology, 20%. Afghanistan, pull out 20%. And Trump has 80%, 70%. We've seen that in the polls. Same thing within on the economy. So they're going to keep losing even. And somebody would say, well, Victor, why aren't they getting blasted? Because they, they shouldn't be losing because they control until recently all the Silicon Valley money. They outraised Republicans now 2 or 3 to 1. They control ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, uh, Chicago Tribune, Post, Washington Post, New York Times. Until recently, all of social media, the universities, the corporate boardroom, they had all of the institutional power. And yet, because they have these boutique issues that no one really wants, they're bleeding. Um, and, and what also is hurting them is that Trump, to the, to the anger of the old never-Trump Republican aristocracy, he's substituting class for race. So he's going and telling everybody, if you're a Black truck driver, you're a, a white carpenter, if you're a Hispanic baker, you all have more in common with each other and your real enemies are your bicoastal elites of all colors. So he's telling to the Black male, OPA doesn't represent you any more than a professor of English at Stanford represents a farmer out in the San Joaquin Valley. And so that's been very successful. No one in their right mind ever thought that Trump would get 26% of Black males or 45% of the Hispanic vote. When you look at the returns, he made marginal gains over the— it was very hard to get any more white males than he did. He was over, I think, almost 60% of them over that. And he did well with women and youth, but not greatly from 2016 and '20. But where he really made inroads were that extra million and a half votes that came largely from Hispanics and Black males. And that was because they, they felt that the elite Obama wing, they didn't want to be talked down to and told you've got to support the New Green Deal or transgenderism or woke. And there was no support for it. So this is a really revolutionary paradigm shift. The Republican Party has become the party of the middle class and the Democratic Party has become the party of the elite professional wealthy classes on the coast and the subsidized poor.

I want to be mindful of your time, but just related to the Silicon Valley point, you know, we have a largely Silicon Valley audience and it's, um, you know, as you know, Silicon Valley has become more politically pluralistic recently. And so I'm excited for even more of Silicon Valley to be exposed to your ideas, and we'll put in links in the show notes to a lot of your other work that people can check out. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you.

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