Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar of classical military history and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. He writes for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. The author of many books dealing mainly with military history, he is a visiting professor of history, teaching most recently a class on the nature of war.
Are you coming back next year?
Yes, I had a meeting today [Sept. 23] with your president and we both agreed that I would come back. We’re working out the units and the time frame. I don’t know if I can come back for a month but Hillsdale is going to work on a solution to somehow compress it – maybe teaching four days per week instead of three, or two units instead of three.
What has changed since the Arab Spring?
What’s changed is that a year ago it was felt that once the dictators left or were removed the opposition obviously couldn’t get worse. Now a lot of people believe that in Egypt Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood are no improvement over the dictator. The same is true in Syria. If Assad leaves we’re not convinced that al-Qaidists are going to be better if that’s who’s going to take over, and the same is certainly true in Libya, that we had hopes that the opposition would be better than Gaddafi. It’s authoritarian order versus murderous chaos, so far it doesn’t need to be true but that seems to be how it’s playing out. People are a lot less optimistic in and out of the Middle East.
Where does Russia fit in?
People thought that after the Cold War Russia’s internal problems meant it wouldn’t be a superpower anymore. Vladimir Putin created a mechanism of playing off Americas weakness and has crafted a new alliance of anti-American groups in the Middle East: Hezbollah, Syria, Iran. We’re kinda confused because the consensus is that Putin shouldn’t be powerful at all and yet somehow has more influence than we do. Partly it’s his nihilism, he basically has no idealism at all, and partly it’s that he doesn’t believe the United States is serious.
Where do you see that relationship going?
Putin doesn’t have the economic or military power to be a rival to the United States directly, but it can be an obstructor. Basically whatever we’re for he’s going to be against, and it’s going to be led by a very clever guy who’s going to try to find ways to stop us from winning.
How has Obama handled Syria?
I think he was confused. He didn’t have an objective and therefore didn’t know the proper means to achieve it. We don’t know if the objective is to remove Assad, or to damage Assad, or ignore Assad, or to punish him for weapons of mass destruction, or punish him for killing and having 99,000 people die in Syria, to destroy the WMDs, or to help insurgents a lot, or to help insurgents a little bit.
What’s the future for Hillsdale?
Where is the future? Hillsdale’s surviving Obama pretty well, but it has to be eternally vigilant, because there are forces in the United States that would like to make an example of it, so it has to be very careful. I think it’s also in a Catch-22 position—the more well-known it becomes and as it gains a national reputation the more people want to challenge it. So the more you have a Kirby Center or the more you have a Margaret Thatcher statue or the more you have Ted Cruz come, that gives you stature and it resonates but you also get a target on your back from those who disagree with you.