Future Challenges and Closing Thoughts

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Street Easy is an assumed name of Zillow Inc, which has licenses in all fifty states Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for our podcast, Victor Davis Hansen, his own words. I'm going solo today. Jack and Sammy are not with me as we usually do these solos with authors . And I'm very proud to have a close friend of mine and somebody I know that you all know, Bing West , he's written twelve books on military history and memoirs about his experiences in three wars , combat veteran and the Marines of Vietnam , and then he's been embedded for a long period of time in Afghanist an, Iraq. I don't know how he does it . I don't want to reveal his age, but when he told me he was in Afghanistan going with the troops and got cholera, I think he got cholera . And I mean that',s it was quite amazing. So he's been in combat. He's been he's had a senior appointment at the Pentagon . He's the father of Owen West, who, I think you may know , who is also an official at the Pentagon and also a combat veteran in Iraq . I think many of you knew some of his books have been bestsellers , the strongest tribe about Iraq and then the Siege of Fallusia, those were great books. All of them have been very good, but those stand out in particular. And so Bing, I'm so happy that you're with us. And you've got a brand new book coming out july seventh, is that right? Yes . Yes. And it's called Cat five. That cat is an abbreviation for category five as if it were on the edge of a disaster or some imminent threat . And it's the twenty thirty three war . And the gist of it, and we're going to have been explained is that we have gone through three wars in Vietnam , Iraq and Afghanistan in which the people on the ground fought heroically , and we, I think you could make the statement we almost suffered no tactical defeats, but we ended up strategically defeated for a variety of reasons which Bing is going to explain . And that's the background of the book, but then he also that reality he says he's very worried and I think we're all worried because we're facing two existential threats and we don't have a record of strategic resolution. And this is kind of a warning to all of us that when you're thirty one trillion dollars in debt and you've got a very extensive social welfare entitlements and there's very little money that's not committed somewhere in the budget to Social Security or Medicare or entitlements, and the defense budget has been in real dollars cut . And then you couple that with a rising ascendant China. And that's a category five problem to be nearly insolvent and China rising who's well aware of this financial precariousness and he's picked this year twenty thirty three is when we run out of time if we don't change. I know that I didn't give your book justice being, but comment on what you were trying to do and did so well and what the book is about. Well, thank you, Victor . I sat down to try to explain how we had lost three wars , where I had been with the troops and they were winning the battles , and then I would go to the White House and talk to people at the top and it was as if we lived in two different worlds . And then I got reflecting on what Toynbee said that no great civilization is murdered . They commit suicide because they lose their dynamism and turn in wood and just live off their wealth . And then I reflected more on where we're going with our debt ignoring China . And then I was beginning to read philosophers, and I was struck more than anyone else by Isaiah Berlin . Yes. When Isaiah spent long time he said when you are dealing with a particular ly critical decision that someone has made or you have to make , keep driving down until you come to the single driving idea that underlies all the others . And that then became the spine of the book. If you look at what we did in Vietnam , we did not fight with all our might . In fact , President Johnson said he didn't believe he could win the war he had started . Then you have President Bush going into Iraq and he says we owe them freedom . But when he asked people for a vote on Iraq . He did not make that the rationale that he was going in for . Then we're in Afghanistan to get al Qaeda who had hit us on nine hundred eleven But again, President Bush changed the mission from just destroying Al Qaeda to making a nation . And then you look at President Trump uing the tradition , going in almost on a whim against Iran without thinking it through . And I asked myself how can so many people at the top do this ? And I was fortunate . I've been to the White House many times . I've had long conversations with President Reagan. I've known six presidents . And I kept thinking, why ? And I realized what Isaiah Berlin said, when you drive down to the central idea , the central concept that has been with us since we won World War II and how that changed everything. And then the dynamism the idea of what's called the Jupiter complex that we gradually, like many civilizations , began to think it was just in our DNA that we had this power . Zeus, for the Greeks, as you well know, and Jupiter for the Romans , they were the k ing god among all the other gods, and they could lose thunderbolts anytime they wanted without any responsibility because they believed no one had their power . And when you look at what Princeton President Johnson , going to war on the one hand and then starting a huge war on poverty on the other hand, as though we could just do anything . And that was true of President Bush thinking, my goodness , we can resurrect or cause democracies in the middle of the Middle East and we can do it in a very short period of time . And you look at President Truman. President Truman genuinely belie that he could negotiate with the North Vietnam with the North Koreans and the Chinese and we saw where that glass . And then you look at President Trump today, believing he really can negotiate with the Iranians . And when everyone pushed him the other day and said, You know, sir, you can't trust them. Look at their history. He said, Well, if I have to, I can always go bomb them again . That is the essence of our Jupiter complex victor , that we believe we are all powerful , and that is what I think has led us to a huge mistake . Since nineteen fifty , we have increased the war on poverty or as we call it entitlements where we give something to somebody to the extent that today two hundred million Americans receive more money from taxes from the government than they put in. two hundred million . That's the major that's a vast vast constituency and the Congress keeps adding to it . So you get to this complex where everyone thinks you can continue to do anything and there'll be no consequences . And that's where I caught Cat five the category five that is inevitable. It's going to hit. The next president cannot avoid it . The next president by twenty thirty one to twenty thirty three , our debt as a nation , which means the amount of money that we owe because every year we're borrowing two trillion dollars more than we bring'reing in revenues will hit twenty five percent of all our taxes will have to go to service the debt we already have and we'll still be asking people to give us more money . That's like you own you're earning one hundred fifty thousand a year . You have to spend fifty thousand of it on debt you have every year and you go to somebody and say, but you gotta give me another fifty thousand every year on top of that . There is no known case in history where a corporation or a nation hit twenty five percent debt service before the average person buying the debt or another nation buying the debt, the bond says, Oh, I'm not going to do that anymore. Not for four percent . You have to give me a risk premium because I don't trust you anymore . And once the risk premium goes above let's say six percent, which it will by twenty thirty three . Then your inflation goes higher than that. It goes to seven percent . Then the amount of money you're pouring out takes the money from the free market from the corpor ations and you get into a death spiral where you're printing money, no one trusts you anymore, and you go the way Argentina went . And we're going there. I mean, the scary thing , and at the same time, China's sitting there , we have cut our military to the point where we have less money going to the military now in real terms than we had in nineteen thirty eight . That has to scare anyone in terms of supposing supposing Z wakes up, Chairman Z says, Well, before I die, I'm going to do something about Taiwan because he's promised he's going to do it. And he moves his vessels out and says, I'm blockading them just the way and Iran blockaded each other in the Homu Strait as soon as you reach terms with me, I'll stop doing this, but in the meantime, all the trade in the Pacific stops . Do we think the president when he faces a huge debt is going to take that on as well . And so that's what I lay out, Victor. We are going into a category five hurricane because we think we have so much power like Zeus or J likeupiter that nothing will happen. But we're going to get slapped right across the field. Yeah . Unfortunately, I think you're right. I wish you were wrong. History has a way of dealing with indebted nations like the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century or Rome , the Western Empire in the fifth century AD . And it's usually three things and I think you've outlined them in the book . One is you mentioned, you can inflate your currency so it's almost worthless and pay your debtors off and ruin your economy that way . Germany did that after World War I two you can appropriate private capital. And I've been when I looked at your book, I was just for a thought experiment. I went into liberal law journals and whatnot , and there are people on the left who say we need to go into four hundred and one K's and take private money and give them credit for social security . And that's happened in the past that you take away take away private capital. The third and the most dangerous and we see that in Latin America in the nineteen sixties is you just renounce debt and there have been people on the left who say , well actually China only owns about twenty five percent of our debt. Most of our debt is U. S. Treasury bills owned by wealthy Americans. And what if we just told wealthy Americans , you have more money than all of us on welfare anyway. So what if we just said to you, the government's not going to pay you back on half of the debt? And that way we could get out of it. And of course , all those remedies then ruin the as you pointed out, the credibility of the debtor us . And it ruins the government. But there's these iron laws throughout history that will deal with our case if we're not careful. You see any optimism? I went back and reading in nineteen ninety six , the debt was just a fraction I mean, it wasn't very much. It was about five billion . But Ginrich went to Clinton and said, We're going to shut down the government. And Clinton said, Okay , I will freeze expenditures and you raise taxes a little bit. And from ninety seven, ninety eight ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine, two thousand, they balanced the budget and they actually started paying off. And then Bush came in and gave that massive tax cut and we went back. You see that it because we all churchill, you know, was said and think about the United States it always does the right thing last . You see that it'll get so bad given that we're spending I guess it's three billion a day in interest and the interest is more than a defense budget. Do you see anybody who can do something in the eleventh hour to ward this rendezvous with catastrophe off ? I wish I could say yes, but the idea that you have a Gingridge and a Clinton isn't with us now and within two years we're going to be voting for the next president , President Trump has said he's not going to touch Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid . Because whatever all the other problems he has, he couldn't. I mean, the Congress would never go with him . I think that our country is so divided now , Victor, that you can't get that across the aisle . Instead, you have the radicals on the progressive side picking up st eam . So the idea of going to them and saying, We have to cut everybody back by twenty percent . They would erupt rather than agree . So I see the crisis actually occurring before anything happens. And I can't predict what comes out the other side except and I bring it out in the book because I go into the military of course . Can you imagine if you're China and you see that we are in the almost death throes with our Congress at each other's throats about what do we do now that we have huge interest we have to pay, we can't pay it . And now you say, well, I'm going to take some moves to establish my domination over the Pacific . Then the president has to say, holy smokes , I have a Congress that is each other's throats . I have a debt that's out of control, and now I'm supposed to send out my fleet to stand up for Taiwan. That's the problem I see us coming . Now I will say I'm much more optimistic on the Pentagon side . The Pentagon is doing something, Victor that I never thought I'd see. And Secretary of Defense Hakes , unfortunately, gets zero credit because every soon disliked the mainstream press , but he has allowed his deputy Steven Feinberg and a group around him that that encanter includes my son Owen . And they have gone to private enterprise and they said the heck with the old models . Yes . We want to have within two years three hundred and fifty thousand AI drones at a cost of much less than five thousand dollars apiece versus fifty thousand dollars apiece today . And they have driven a competition that is now succeeding and doing that by going to all the startups and say bring us what you have . And we will have a huge competition, which they're now running . And it's succeeding because they have unleashed the dynamism and the initiative in our commercial sector and applied it to the defense sector. So they are making headway . If we end up within a few years of having hundreds of thousands of drones on unmanned vessels , we don't have to put our carriers in harm's way , the carriers can be hanging back and we could say to China, don't even think of doing that because we're going to meet you with all of these autonomous warfare vehicles and drones and there's nothing you can do about it. We'll fire a thousand drones at each of your ships without risking one American life . So if the Pentagon continues the way it's going, even on a shoestring budget , it can make drastic changes. The challenge is going to be that the major defense corporations obviously see a hu ge threat to their profits and they can't compete because they have this huge hierarchy. So they're going to Congress and they give enormous amounts of money to Congress in terms of political contributions . So we won't know until this year is finished whether Congress is going to authorize the money for this new way of doing business . And so far it's I'd say at least a fifty fifty coin flip . Well, I should tell everybody we're talking with Bing West. He has a new book category . It's abbreviated CA fiveT, the twenty thirty three War. That's a war against debt, but also the confrontation that will be inevitable if we don't solve it with China . And we'll be right back from some sponsors . And we're now back and we're back with Bing West. I think you must feel pretty good though, Bing, because Bing is a member of our military history working group at Hoover Institution at Stanford . And I think for the last five, four years when we've had you write for our journal Strategica , and I'm going to summarize maybe eight or nine articles you've written , you've kind of suggested not kind of but explicitly that we don't have to have a hundred million dollar jets all the time. We need to disperse and go back to the World War II quantity to complement quality, that we need more affordable weapons . And although you haven't been strident about it, implicit in your argument is that Raytheon and Gener al Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed , they're all good companies, but there's something wrong with these eight or nine monolithic big companies that essentially they have a monopoly on contracts and when they have cost overruns we pay the price and we're not making enough ships, we're not making enough planes or drones. We're not making enough of things. And the way we won World War two , we produced a B twenty four an hour at Will Run. We produced five thousand B twenty nine s permal. It came within two years . We made fifty five thousand shirts. We just outpuced everybody and we still have that ability and you've been calling for a lot of the things that's going on right now, I think. You were arguing that some of these startups like And re andw these other compan ies , they're decentralized and they're not part of the revolving door network. And I think that's optimistic. The other thing I want to say very quickly , what do you looked at our problems, but the more you talk to some China experts, they will tell you China's fertility rate is one point zero. Ours is one point seven three . And although they can afford to lose a lot of population with one point four billion population, they are aging much faster than we are , and they're shrinking more faster than we are . We're the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of civilization now. fourteen million barrels of oil and we're supplying Europe with natural gas. We're exporting more, I think than Saudi Arabia is . And China has to import eleven , eleven million barrels every single day. And they were relying on sanctions cheap Venezuelan and Iran o il, I think for six million of it. That's lost for now . They also were bragging to us ten years ago. They were the world's greatest food producer . But as they became affluent with a four hundred million person middle class, their taste increased. Now they're importing thirty percent of their food seventy about seventy five to eighty five percent of their fuel and they've got this aging population and we were looking at the Chinese air defenses that were supplied to Iran, the Israelis and the US went through them in about forty eight hours. Does that give you some hope that maybe given that autocratic system , that it's inflexible and it won't react to these existential challenges that it faces in the same way that we will. I'm trying to be an optimist. Well, I think there's a very good reason for being optimistic . When President Reagan basically said we have free market system with democracy for everybody against the Soviet Union. He predicted the Soviet Union was going to fall, and it did. It did. It will be it will be one or the other . It will not be the two of us standing by the year twenty forty five as equals . That will not be the case . By twenty forty, China, which is hiding a huge amount of debt , is going to have an explosion among its governors of the provinces who genuinely believe that Z and the Beijing group are misleading them tremendously in terms of how they're trying to centralize everything . But the year when that crunches several years after we hit our crunch point of twenty thirty three . In other words, oh that is fine if we can do something about our own debt. But if our debt crashes before that happens, then Z is in a better position than we are. Yes. And let me do a thought experiment with you . Exactly . Because I see in essence this idea of the Jupiter complex, we can do everything is also masking the huge dissonance and fight for the soul of our culture that is going on in the United States and has been going on for quite some time . What is called culture wars is really a question of who are you as a country? Let me give you the exact example coming back that is very striking . At in nineteen forty five , we had a monopoly on atomic bombs . We had the longest range bombers . We then went on to build ICBMs , all of which was a purpose of deterring by showing that we were stronger the Soviet Union and anyone else in the will . And no one ever suggested at that time, well no, let's not build any of our nuclear weapons, or let's not have B fifty two s and let's not have ICBM's because that will be destabilizing. So let's just try to get along Look what we're doing today . Well, what I'm about to tell you is going to cause you to think for a moment, where are we ? We have a person by Elon Musk . He has proposed to the government the permission to put into space one million AI satellites . Think of that, one million . He has these starships that are astonishing. They're as tall as the Washington monument. People don't don't grasp . He can put two hundred thousand pounds of of items, satellites into one of them , each of them weighing ten to fifteen pounds . He can put today if he wants ten thousand to twenty thousand satellites into space . And the average cost of the satellite is less than twenty five thousand dollars with all its equipment . So if we want it , there isere's the space here's the thought experiment . As a country, do we want to be the most powerful nation in the world ? No terminal. And the answer is if it is yes, well then, all you do is that you go back to Musk and you say, look, we'd like to take because you're a patriot , we'd like to be using your Starship missiles that you launch in order to put payload, and we'd like you to design these satellites so that they surveill the entire world . And we'd like you to have satellites that attack that come out of orbit at seven thousand miles an hour and hit anything we want anywhere in the world and it'll cost us twenty five thousand dollars for each of them . So for less cost our F thirty five is less cost than our next carrier , we can totally control space and from space we can control any target in the world and we can have twenty thousand to one hundred thousand military satellites up there . Let's do it . I can assure you, there's the thought experiment. Put that before the Congress and do you think it would get through or do you think they'd vote it down because it would be destabilizing ? And I think it would divide the Congress. I'd love to see us do it , but I think the antagonism now that has built up in so many different ways, they'd vote against it. I'm a little encouraged though that Mark M reeson, who now works in the administration , the multibillionaire Silicon Valley guy who had worked with Ben Horowitz , he went to Trump and he said, The problem with the Biden administration, they take us in a room and they said, You're going to do this and you can't do this or we'll go after you with antitrust. And you're going to do AI . And Trump came in to them and said , Essentially , I don't care what you do . We're not going to go after you, but you got to be hyper patriotic and you got to make us number one in the world. So he kind of flipped Elon, Andreisen , Horowitz, maybe Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos . In other words, it's kind of like the War Production Board where they let Henry Kaiser and William Newtson and Henry Ford . And I think these guys that everybody thought were left wing actually had the same worries you do Visa V debt, China and they're starting to think of really creative ways about weaponry , robotics , AI , crypto, bioengineering. And when you talk to, you know, we work Stanford's next to Silicon Valley. So when I talk to some of these people , they are for the first time optimistic that they've gained ground on China and China starting to lag , especially in things like AI because we've turned these guys loose and said, you know what? We don't really care if you're gonna work a trillion dollars as long as that trillion dollars is working for us, the United States. And we're going to protect you guys in Europe from censorship when the, EU goes after you, we're going but if we do that, then you've got to do sort of the things that you say. You've got to use your talent and capital in a collective nationalistic patriotic . You think that's possible? I think we're moving in that direction that you've outlined. I couldn't agree with you more overall, and that is it is clear for instance, the fight now about the fight now is about AI before we ever space . And you can see the battle lines aligning and that is the fight's now with anthropic Claude is a terrific AI model. But here you got this nutcase in charge of inatropic that's sort of saying, well, I'm never going to use it to help the United States in a military manner. What? That's your country you're talking about. I know. There's a big, big fight about that going on , but you notice again that the progressive side of the Democratic Party is in favor of controlling and stifling . It's insanity . It is. They're all these new technologies they want to control . Exactly. So I come back to is the chance because of our dynamic spirit and our engine ering and ingenuity in the capital system such that we can remain dominant militarily . The answer is yes, if you will and you go to space , but you're going to have two big fights with almost half the country. It's going to be a fight about whether you're going to allow AI to continue the way it's going and whether you're going to help them to have the electric power they need or whether you're going to stifle it that way . And then after you do that, whether you're going to take the next step and say now we're going to transition into space and we're going to claim space . And that's why I get back to we're so divided as a country today versus the way we were, Victor when we fought World War two , that holy smokes, I don't have I don't know which way the Congress would go . Yeah . We're talking to Bing West. We're going to take a short break and be right back. He has a new book Cat five, the twenty thirty three War . I have one final question when we get back . And we're back with Bing West . Bing , I think everybody agrees will agree with this really great book of yours and they'll say outline three wars we fought on the ground magnificently in the spirit for the most part of World War two . And then we suffer tactical victory but strategic defeat . And then you Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, you mentioned North Korea . And so my question, I think the readers will say, okay, so you have an existential threat , say right after World War two , the communist Chinese revolution breaks all their agreements. They're in the north and they invade the south. Or we think that the same thing has happen ing in Vietnam, or we have the Taliban, whatever or Iraq . And they're all different types of threats. Some were existential, some not so much, but when we get a perceived threat that is genuine like Iran getting the bomb . You're not advocating isolationism, are you advocating hit them hard with the type of warfare that's our brand overw,helming firepower, intense firepower, no limits, and then get out and damage them and almost say well periodically we're going to have to do this and knock you back . And we're not going to put troops in the streets of Fallujah or Ramadi and fight your type of war or we don't do it all together . What you had very effective critiques of all these scenarios that have really hurt us, but let's say what would be the ideal solution in your estimation for something like happened in Vietnam? Or how could we have remedied that? Was it we needed more unambiguous use of force, but not in a way that would bog us down for years and nation What would just outline for the audience what you would what's the best way to do it ? Well, I think it depends on well snimple . And I put this out in the book after showing what we didn't do in three wars . The first thing a president has to do is call in his advisers and say, let's start with what is the objective after the war . That's it . And then from that work your way back to all right, you military, what do you need to get there? And then ask the question, okay , how long is that going to take ? And if it takes more than my presidency , you better gosh Danwell have such a compelling rationale that you have gone and you have the public with you and the Congress with you because they know there's no turning back . And so it's what Oliv Holmes said after fighting in the Civil War as a Supreme Court justice, he said, If you go to war , you have to believe with all your might that what you are doing is right and you are going to persevere . The dilemma you have is that time after time no president is willing to take that last step first and just say all right, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to write down what our objective is when this is all over . Then I'm going to turn to my political advisors and military advisors and say , Do I have the time and the resources to get to this objective? And if I don't, I have to change that objective until it syncs with the resources I have and the time I have. Let me give you an example. don't mean to pick on him, but President Trump. Yeah. He impulsively attacked Iran because obviously the Israelis persuaded them we have a great opportunity to assassinate to kill the top thirty leaders . Well at, that particular point , the way I structured my book, I'd say now at that particular point , the president sits down, calls in his advisors, military and political and said, all right, what's my objective in killing those leaders ? Because killing leaders, there are other leaders that don't even replace them. So is my objective to change the regime ? And if the because it's not the nuclear weapon that we fear . Israel has nuclear weapons, many people nuclear weapons. It's the regime that has the nuclear weapon . So I won't get diverted into going after warehouses . I always say, alright, if do I have a chance to remove that regime? And the only way you can do that is by saying to the people of Iran, I'm going to give you ten million weapons. I'm going to air drop them all in. I'm going to give you all the communications so you can use our supporting systems. I'm going to turn to the Kurds. I'm going to say kill anyone you want who's in that Tehran military group and get your own part of it and I'm going to cause total chaos to cause that to happen . And if then everyone says, holy, smoke, sir, we just intended to kill a few people. We didn't intend a real war . Then I would say, wait, guys, then let's not get into something here that we haven't figured out how we get out of. And so I've seen it time and time again in the wars , that when I asked the people at the top and I spent a lot of time with them , what's your objective? It was always elusive. Me to the example from Iraq . At the time of Fallujah, I'm talking with George Casey and his deputy . And George was in charge of the war at the time, the Four Star . And I said, Well, what's your model for how this ends? And they said, Korea. I said, Korea. I said, We've been in South Korea for seventy years . The last time they had a gunfight in the White House in South Korea was in the early eighties . It took it too seventy years to bring real democracy to Korea . So you're saying we're going to be here for another seventy years . Well, to their credit, they were a little bit , but then they kind of acknowledged that's not up to us. But the point was that no one had had a conversation with President Bush and said, Hey, sir, you're undertaking seventy years of being in this country . So I would always say, Victor , start with what your final objective is , write it down, write it down and then have your people say, can I can I not achieve that and work your way that way instead of starting from well let's go hit them and see what happens . Yeah I think I agree with you. I think what they felt was if they said the magic two words regime change , everybody would think of Afghanistan, Iraq, it didn't work . So they what they are counting on, I've coedck some up of them is something like the shock of the Berlin Wall fell and then it took either one month to almost a year for the Warsaw Pact to crumble in two years for the Soviet Union. So they felt if you humiliate the regime , you take away its military industrial nuclear complex by air and you set them back . Basically we don't know part of the problem is we have no embedded reporters because we have no ground. We don't know what's going on, but there are estimates that the Israelis have made that they've actually may have done three hundred billion to a half a trillion dollars in damage , which is fifty years of investment. So then during this pause , the people say we're flat broke. We lost four hundred million dollars a day to sanctions, frozen assets , lack of import export . We've got all this infrastructure, and this crazy Trump has not even done what Clinton didn't do. Clinton did what Clinton did do in Serbia after seventy eight days. He was going nowhere for sixty days. And somebody said , Drop all the pretens ions and you got to knock out every bridge on the Danube and you got to hit the grid. And he did , and Milosevic caved . And so I think they were telling Trump Go negotiate and tell them that you've got a whole target list and this time it's you've already done the air defense of the Air Force. This time you're going to take out all their bridges, their highway overpasses, their generation, the moment and you're going to do it disproportionately. They cheat . And then you're going to have to explain to the people that you're going to need a trillion dollars to rebuild the country and you're going to try to tell them that why you spend money on a new nuclear program or more money for Hezbollah, and that's going to cause some type of delayed reaction because we don't know what the people are thinking right now, but we're going to learn very soon because there's going to be a lot of reporters go into that country once they restore the internet, and I think they'll have to. And we'll find out the extent of damage and what the people and then I think you're absolutely right . If they're cheating and we have to hit them, then we should supply weapons to the because I think the resistance is still there and it's going to increase once they see how the regime is trying to fix all the damage that they ca used themselves . Because you know, I talked to one Iranian person who wrote me an email and he said , this is what they gave us fifty years we were told the great Satan and we have all these missiles and we have drones and we have tanks and we have all this nuclear centrifuge and it's all a lot of us up in smoke . They did all of that and we were humiliated and they did it without losing thirteen people . And now we have to rebuild it all and they're going to do it again anytime they want. Maybe we should get rid of the regime. That was what he was suggesting is going on the minds of Iranians. I don't know the veracity, but I don't think it's the verdict's out yet on Iran is what I'm trying to say. If we do the right thing, if he hits disproportionate ly the moment they cheat on the straits or the enrichment, he hits them disproportionately. I don't like the word they use proportional. It's got to be disproportional. And then let's hope that somebody will, if the first sign of resistance , we arm them. And then I think it can work . But if you don't hit them disproportionately and you just let them do, then and you don't help the resistance . You don't have to have ground troops to do that. You said AirDrop, you're right about that . So I don't I think the verdict is still out and I'm glad that we haven't One thing about Trump is he's very wary of escalation and in the fashion that we have escalated in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, when you look at Solimani and Baghdadi and the Wagner Group in Venezuela and the last June bombing he has had some kind of limits on it . And you know, this is Mike Jeff Diff Kill Baghdadi , bomb ISIS, don't get on the ground , don't stop until they're gone . Get rid of Soleimani, if they want to have four performance. I disagreed with that , but he said they want to have a few performance art missiles, they'll call us up and say, Here they're coming, all that stuff. But he always wanted to have a limiting factor. And I think now the limiting factor is open the strait and hope that we learn from this. And he's telling the Saudis, he's telling the UAE, he's telling his you better get those pipelines out to the Red Sea, out to the Mediterranean, out to the Persian Gulf as quickly as you can , because these SOBs are going to do it again . And I'll hit them and I'll hit them, but my job isn't to keep hitting them for the rest of your life. You're going to have to step up . And I think that is the strategy as I see it and you talk to people. They don't articulate that . The unfortunate thing is today JD was saying one thing . Trump said another , and the person that a lot of people trust the most maybe is Rubio and he was stone cut silent. And that's a problem. I noticed today that Rubio had a stone face, a stone face indicating this is crazy. Yeah. I mean, I think it was a mistake for the president to say , well, they can have ballistic missiles because other people are ballistic missiles. He smokes. And then to say, starting today , Iran can export all the oil it wants. All sanctions are off provided in the future they do something, but he this is a huge gamble that he is taking and he could lose it Yeah, yeah, it all depends on when he when he said I'm going to hit them really hard. I'm going to hit them like they never been hit, then we're the everybody's taking that seriously. If they start if tomorrow being they send sex missiles into Kuwa it , I think Trump should take out ten major bridges immediately and say I'm going to do this every day for one missile you lose ten bridges. For two missiles you lose your grid and see how long that lasts . And but I don't know if he's willing to do that. I don't know if politically. He's got a lot of people coming to him and say I'm in a purple district and I'm running five points behind and you carried that district this house district by ten points and I am scared and you can't do anything. You got to get gas down or they got senators saying get the price of gas down arm cook ed. And if I'm cooked, you're going to be impeached the House will impeach you and the Senate won't convict you . They won't have sixty votes, but they're going to subpoena you and your family and the whole Maga thing is going to be over with and if we lose this house. And I don't I don't want to get to adjudicate the veracity of that, but I know that that's what they're telling him . And that and he's got a lot of people in the administration that says you've got you're not going to run a protectorate over Iran . You just don't have the capability. So hit them hard , but we've got to get out of this somehow and the way we can get out of it is no nuclear weapons straight open and hit them hard. And if they use a missile against our allies hit them hard, but do not and hit the targets that really hurt them. Don't go after an individual launcher. Go after twenty bridges that the launcher needs to navigate or something like that . But I know that he's under enormous pressure, not from the left. We assume that but from the right, from his own people in Congress. Well in my book, I indicate that I write just one chapter on Trump and then I go on because he is transitory. I would argue he's probably already gone to a very large extent The issues that I try to bring up are debt and the challenge from China and not having taken the steps yet that we have to take, those issues are going to be there for the next president and the And the real crunch point is not going to come under Trump. No one is going to challenge him. The debt is not going to peak under Trump. And China is not going to move under Trump. Both of those things are going to happen on I agree with you entirely . I think that you're absolutely right . We're out of time, but I want to urge everybody to order Bing's book is it knocks the publisher ? Yes , yeah. Where can they get category five, the twenty thirty three War? Where's on Amazon? Where everybody goes Amazon. Yeah. Amazon to look, let's face it, Amazon controls publishing . Yes, it does. They just don't want to take the actual move because it would antagonize too many people. But everybody goes to Amazon. Amazon. Just so say, Bing West, boom, you're gonna get my books. And then Cat five, the hurricane, there you are. It's not complicated . Well, they're a lot more honest in their rankings than the New York Times. They use a formula for the best seller that nobody knows what it is. It's bookstores or ideology or something, but it's not book sales like Amazon . But okay, and I'm not going to get into it at the end of this, but you know, they have their own algorithms. Amazon does, but yeah , and they don't tell us what it is. Correct. I bumped into a huge problem with them last time because my prior book the last Platoon sold out in the course of one afternoon and they hadn't anticipated that. So I was at the back of the queue that went for two months. So it took two more months before they resupplied. So there are impediments to dealing with I had the same problem with a dying citizen . It was number four on Amazon and there were no books for . And then they have a little sign on available. They put on available . And there's nothing worse than an unavailable because then the buyer says, well, heck, I'm gonna buy something else. Exactly , exactly. Not that Amazon's perfect, but my sold I was on the New York Times bestseller for the end of everything , which sold half of what the case for Trump did , and that was never on it . So yeah, that's what I mean. The whole thing is grateful. I'd be grateful if everybody just bought five estates. Go out and buy Bing , Bing West , cat that's for categ ory five and the twenty thirty three War. Thank you very much, Bing, and I hope to see you very soon at Stanford. Thank you, Vector. Thank you very much. Thank you . Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at Victorhansen. com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.