Anyone Catch VD Last Night?

I’m referring, of course, to Victor Davis Hanson’s two hour appearance on C-Span’s Book TV Sunday evening. After reading his essays in National Review for some time, I was paying close attention to the corners of his mouth for rivulets of foam. All in vain, since Hanson the interviewee exudes as much cool and rationality as Hanson the essayist drips callousness and bile. Well, the interviewee’s thoughts on war ran the gamut from callous (casual references to the crimes of Uncle Joe Stalin) to bilious (“‘neoconservative’=Jew”), but they all sounded so … so … so thoughtful.

He did make one brief but valuable point about the philosophical distinction between neoconservatives and the foreign policy “realists” who came before. Among the latter are many heavies from the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I administrations–think of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, and other realpolitik wonks who sometimes criticize Boy Bush. These guys are hardly foreign policy icons in my eyes, but they have their merits. As Joseph Stromberg once put it,

Realists contend that, in a manner analogous to the laws of physics, states in the state-system must behave in certain predictable ways. Reckoning with a mob of geographical and other structural factors, they say that a rising state which seems bent on becoming a hegemonic or dominant state tends to call into being an opposing coalition of the threatened, who will seek to thwart that aspiration by diplomatic means and, finally, war, if it comes to that. This isn’t the worst way to look at things, and in a rough and ready way such insights can be useful.

Contrast this with what Hanson (rightly) called his “idealism”: disdain for “narrow” conceptions of American interests, ie, self-defense; gunboat therapy for the nondemocratic/fundamentalist world; a kinder, gentler white man’s burden whose costs can never be questioned.

As a quadrennial supporter of hopeless presidential candidates, I often hear the lesser-of-two-evils argument. I’ll go along with it this year, on one condition: the Democrats put George H.W. Bush on the ballot.

One thought on “Anyone Catch VD Last Night?”

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