One Of Our Best Thinkers

Victor Davis Hansen looks at the world. Here are some of his pithiest observations:

In truth, only a militarily strong, traditional, and capitalist United States can keep its critics, here and abroad, safe and well off enough to allow them their rage over knowing that the utopian world they prefer won’t work.

Here at home, if we keep paying out petrobribes to unsavory nations, piling up debt to China and Japan, run serial deficits, lose Iraq, and accept stalemate in Afghanistan, surge to 20 million or so illegal immigrants, and suffer another 9/11 attack, then expect the world to become a far more dangerous place, as a poorer, more isolationist America retreats inside an ever thinner, more fragile shell.

In contrast, stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, stop the nuclearization of Iran, cut radically back on imported oil, close the southern border, and end the financial hemorrhaging, and the United States will do just fine, to the great benefit of the world at large.

But for now hold on, as the Russians get angrier, the jihadists more desperate, Mr. Ahmadinejad closer to Armaggedon, the Chinese more eager to match new power with now old money, Europe more terrified — and the United States ever more baffled by it all.