Victor Davis Hanson
We saw on October 7 unprovoked mass slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, decapitation, and hostage-taking, and agreed that human nature has not changed much since the era of the Aztecs or Macedonians. But the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear, chemical, biological, and the use of artificial intelligence—have evolved far beyond the muscular strength of the old, resulting in the specter of instantaneous, and comprehensive mass death.
True, civilizational annihilation, as we saw in the past, is the rare exception not the rule of the victors’ terms to the defeated. Even the defeated and murderous Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were recalibrated into democracies rather than erased as peoples.
Yet currently there are five autocratic nuclear powers (counting Iran)—as numerous as those democratic (U.S., U.K., France, India, and Israel). And those threatening to use such nihilist weapons include almost all the dictatorial nuclear club.
Iran routinely threatens to obliterate Israel and for the first time in history hit the Israeli homeland with a huge swarm of 320 cruise and ballistic missiles and drones. (About half the ballistic missiles failed to launch or imploded en route).
Threats to launch nuclear weapons rather than lose Ukraine have come thick and fast from Russian generals, media blowhards, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and former president Dmitry Medvedev (e.g., “Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead only to one thing—a global war with Western countries with the use of our entire strategic [nuclear] arsenal against Kyiv, Berlin, London, and Washington. And against all other beautiful historic places that have long been included in the flight targets of our nuclear triad.”).
There is no need to list all the targets that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has threatened to nuke. Periodically, Pakistan talks of resorting to nuclear weapons to overcome India’s strategic and demographic advantages. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has produced an entire corpus of existential threats—to use the remedies of his grandfathers to deal with the Armenians, to rain down a storm of missiles on Athens, and to “come at any night unexpectedly” against Israel.
China threatened to nuke Japan if it were to help Taiwan and issued a snuff video of such an envisioned strike against Japan, with a warning, “When we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force, even if it only deploys one soldier, one plane, and one ship, we will not only return reciprocal fire but also start a full-scale war against Japan. We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously until Japan declares unconditional surrender for the second time.”
The reaction to such “hyperbole”? It is not much different from the naivete of the Thebans or Carthaginians.
So, we too dismiss such threats as mere braggadocio. And like prior vanquished states, we assume that we are still preeminent as of old. We preen still that we are so strong that no entity would dare attempt the inconceivable—even in the age of September 11, the gain-in-function Covid-19 virus, and the mass cheering throughout the Muslim Middle East on news that 1,139 innocent civilians were grotesquely butchered at a time of peace in the worst single-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
The postwar American imperium ended two decades ago, as massive borrowing and spending, costly quagmires abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increasingly ossified, bureaucratic, and woke military, an open border, millions of illegal aliens, and suicidal energy, race, and crime policies have combined to encourage our enemies to no longer fear the United States and friends and allies no longer to respect us.
America is on its own. There is no help on the way, any more than there was a Spartan army to the rescue of Thebes or a Genovese fleet to save Constantinople at the eleventh hour. Like the deluded of the past, America shrugs that it is borrowing $1 trillion every three months, with little worry that the interest on the soaring national debt alone exceeds the defense budget.
Our military is short 45,000 recruits—after 8,500 skilled officers and enlisted men, many with natural COVID-19 immunity, were drummed out, and witch hunts sought to root out nonexistent cabals of “white supremacists.”
The country is more divided at any time since 1861. The legal system has lost global respect, as it has degenerated into a Third-World extension of the state’s hounding of its enemies. Past prestigious institutions, brands, and labels have blown themselves up due to their incoherence, incompetence, and hubris—whether Disney, Anheuser Busch, Target, United, Boeing, Harvard, Columbia, or MIT.
No one knows where the limits, if any, will be on Artificial Intelligence—only that those who have designed Google, the old Twitter, and Facebook to warp elections and suppress the news are the same who have moved on to programming AI.
It is past time for America to practice fiscal sanity, to protect our skies from storms of enemy missiles, to repair the Pentagon and end its woke agendas, to secure our borders and restore the primacy of citizenship, to reunite the country and let the voters, not the lawyers, select a president.
There was a time when Macedon would not have dreamed of attacking a hallowed Thebes when Rome would not have dared to land a fleet near the harbor of Carthage, and when Constantinople fought its enemies a thousand miles away rather than from its walls. Decline is a choice, not a fate, and when it is perceived all sorts of Alexanders and Scipios arrive out of nowhere, the sort of men who can make an end of everything.
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