Dr. Victor Davis Hanson Talks Appeasement With Secure Freedom Radio

Listen hear for the stunning comparisons of the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Victor Davis Hanson between Obama, Iran, Hitler, … and the Panama Canal Treaty?

Click here for the audio version.

FG: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. There is quite simply no one who I think brings more intelligence to discussion of the war for the free world, certainly no one who brings the depth of knowledge of the struggle for freedom over millennia, just decades, than our first guest. He is Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. A noted classist, professor, author, and historian of great renown, and not least, a member of the [inaudible] who excels in pieces like the one he wrote recently at National Review Online. I’m anxious to talk to him about the way of all appeasement. Victor Davis Hanson, thank so much for joining us. It’s great to have a chance to talk with you.

VDH: Thank you for having me.

FG: You draw five important parallels between what we’re witnessing at the moment, with what the I call the ‘ObamaBomb’ deal and other acts of appeasement, that really I think are so stunning and so clear and so ominous, that I wanted to make sure we have a chance to visit with you quickly about them. Would you mind enumerating those for us?

VDH: Yes. I tried to emphasize aspects of appeasement we usually don’t think about. One of them of course, the appeaser, that is the people who give the concessions, usually think they’re going to be rewarded for their indemnity but usually they end up being despised as being weak. So in the case of the Iran deal, we already have seen the ayatollah’s mock the administration and double down on their rhetoric, the same way that Hitler did with Chamberlain. Earlier Stanley Baldwin said there’s something psychologically there, the Soviets probably like to deal with Reagan rather than the appeasing Carter and the same thing with the Iranians. So people forget that weakness gets you no respect with your enemy. The second thing is that it has a great effect on allies and third parties, rather the Czechs in 1938 or Poland in 1939. They usually bear the brunt of the appeaser. The appeaser tries to shield himself from the way of [inaudible] and it wasn’t connected to the continent. France was way to the west and this was in East Germany [inaudible], Czechoslovakia and Poland. And what we’re doing is basically telling the Arab moderates, so called moderate world, in Jordan, Egypt, and Gulf monarchies that ‘you’re gunna deal with this, the bomb’s in your range’. Or we’re telling Israel ‘your range’. Even some of the Southern European countries, ‘you’re in range’. But we have a [iunaudible] because of our distance and our military clout. So it’s going to be harder and you have also a larger effect on the tone of strategy in the world at large. So after really pressuring and mocking the Chinese and the Russians to sign on to this deal, which they fought from the very beginning, now it’s their [inaudible] to monitor them, affects even their own allies on other issues. Greece for example. They were negotiating change and they were being told by western powers but the European Union was pretty tough on them. Now what are they going to say? ‘Now you’re saying your giving more concession to the Iranians that are extensile in nature than you did on money with us?’.

FG: Yes and it’s a really critical point. The one thing that I wanted to address is your factual analysis, that appeasers always wrongly insist that the only alternative to their foolish concessions, is war.

VDH: Usually they think there’s no alternative. In fact, there was no urgency to cut this deal with Iran. Everything was going our way. Their economy was tanking, their oil was being stockpiled – couldn’t be sold, money was frozen, they couldn’t get their hands on arms, their terrorist images were short cashed, and it was getting worse. So we could have just smiled, waved to them and said ‘come back to us when you want to talk seriously’. But of course, we wanted a deadline. A deadline the Obama presidency wanted, to cut a deal for a so-called legacy. And of course, the other thing is we ignored the effect of a domestic political opinion. There were people who thought – General Holder in his diary said ‘Hitler might be gone by the end of ‘38’ because there was real anger and apprehension that Germany wasn’t ready for war – yet here was Hitler trying to provoke it and there were a million people in the streets of Iran in 2009, and this domestic opposition to the theocracy is gone now because the people in the street will say ‘well what did you do? Look what they did, got us prestige, money, the economy back and we got the bomb’. So it destroyed the internal opposition.

FG: And created a more dangerous Iran by far in the process. Despite all of this Victor, there is some concern among those of us who are opposed to this deal, that having engineered an arrangement in which this accord, which the president says is not a treaty, will be dealt with under legislative arrangements that make it exceedingly difficult to reject it. That this will go through and it will not be just be the Security Council, not just the Europeans, it will be we who will also allow this to go forward. One of the things I’d be interested in, is your thought to whether there was, in the instance of, you mentioned Ronald Reagan earlier, his handling of the Panama Canal Treaty and what flowed from ultimately its approval by the Senate at the hands of some key Republicans it should be said, that might be a model, a kind of jujitsu or lemonade-making out of this lemon, for Republicans who’re opposed to the bomb, Iran, and the foreign policy of this administration to boot.

VDH: Yeah and Reagan was the lone wolf in the wilderness and he used that issue to introduce a whole critique of the Carter Administration. He said ‘what do you get in the Panama situation? You end up giving up this strategic asset to a non-stable country’ which by the way, was pretty prescient when you look at what the Chinese are doing in Panama. That was a metaphor for the arms talks with the Soviets, for the Soviet’s behavior, for their whole perception of our weakness, from Afghanistan to Tehran to the Chinese. At the time he was right, so it’s the same thing that has repercussions that ripple well beyond just Iran and the United States and I don’t see as far as the so called treaty versus resolution, I don’t see how they can stop it because our assumption was that it was treaty so then you need two/thirds majority of the Senate and now, because it’s a resolution, you literally need an override of the entire Senate. So he’s [Obama] flipped a third of the Senate necessary and he’s going to override this veto. So it’s not a question of whether it be approved but when and unless there’s some new development – the Iranians can say something or do something very radical but I assume they will tell their people to shush and tell Hezbollah to calm it down a little bit, Hamas the same – and as soon it’s its ratified and approved, we’ll see what their plan is.

FG: We’ll be watching it closely as I know will you. Victor Davis Hanson is our guest hailing from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence. Let me just ask you one last question. The New York Times featured prominently, a story that there have been requests for criminal investigation by the Justice Department, by two inspector generals, including the Inspector General of the State Department, of Hillary Clinton and her handling of classified information and more generally her email insecurity. Can you give us a quick assessment, Victor, of how this might have come about and what it might portend?

VDH: We know the Obama Justice Department is entirely politicized so any hint of a prosecution is only political nature and that goes back to the 2008 acrimony between Obama and Clinton, and more importantly, they do want her voicing criticism of the last eight years in 2016. And she’s too centrist they think, she’s pretty left wing, but they’d rather have a leftist candidate even a left wing candidate that lost than one who will critique them but they all know what Hillary is going to do. She’s going to run hard left in the primaries, get criticized and move to the center and sort of ankle bite the Obama Administration when necessary for her own political reasons, and they don’t like that. They’re sending her a message ‘you better be careful’ and they did this to Senator Menendez on the Iran deal. Shooting a cannonball across the brow saying ‘you know what, you better be very careful’.

FG: Yeah it‘s the ‘Chicago way’. I think even just the fact they’ve identified that this is potentially criminal activity and there was classified material on her machine is going to be a problem.

VDH: Well in the Obama Administration, you have to ask what the political dividends are.

FG: You will be monitoring it closely; we look forward to your writings on it in National Review and elsewhere and hopefully, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, talking about it with you in the near future. Thank you for joining us, come back again soon.