: .
VDH has been studying war and history for fifty years. When he speaks, it's worth listening carefully.
His thesis: Donald Trump lit a fuse, and things are blowing up everywhere. Everyone is panicking, calling him a disruptor, a bull in a china shop. But step back and look at the full picture and you start to see something different.
IRAN. Seven presidents in a row said they would prevent Iran from going nuclear. Seven presidents did nothing. The theocracy spent 47 years building proxy armies, funding terrorism, and accumulating the leverage to eventually hold the entire Middle East and then Europe, and then us at nuclear gunpoint. Trump bombed the nuclear facilities once. Iran kept rebuilding. Kept expanding its Russian and North Korean ballistic missile force. Kept proving that no deal, no negotiation, and no diplomatic framework was going to solve the problem. So Trump went back this time with the objective of either removing the theocracy entirely or rendering it permanently inert. That's where we are right now.
VENEZUELA. Maduro is gone. A communist drug lord who propped up Cuba, spread Chavismo across Latin America, and shipped dangerous opiates into the United States removed. The new government has been told: put the oil on the world market, reform the economy, get the Chinese out, and you'll have a bright future. They're terrified of the United States. That's not a bug. That's the point.
. Democratic revolutions in Central America. Argentina. Chile. Panama told to stop triangulating with China or lose the canal. They chose wisely. Result: China and Russia are being pushed out of the Western Hemisphere. Cuba is watching Venezuela and Iran and doing the math. No more Maduro oil. No more Russian subsidies. An economy too incompetent to survive on its own. Trump is 90 miles away and they know it.
EUROPE and UKRAINE . VDH makes a point the media consistently buries: Trump is the one who got rid of the Wagner Group. Trump gave offensive weapons to Ukraine. Trump warned about Nord Stream. Trump got out of the arms treaty. Not Biden. Not Obama. Trump. Now he's trying to thread an impossible needle weaken Putin enough that he stops expanding into Europe, while also preventing him from being so cornered that he becomes permanently dependent on China. That's not appeasement. That's grand strategy.
The political risk TRUMP took. VDH makes a point almost nobody is making: Trump did not have to do this. The midterms are eight months away. The economy was recovering. Energy prices were low and he was bragging about them. A purely political animal does not right before midterms go into two of the world's largest oil producers and accept short-term energy disruption for long-term strategic gain. Europe was begging him not to. His own base was nervous. He did it anyway because he believed it was necessary. That's not politics. That's leadership.
HANSON's Conclusion : If the United States ends 2026 having dismantled the Iranian theocracy, transformed Latin America, pushed China and Russia out of the Western Hemisphere, and resolved the Ukraine war on terms that don't reward aggression that achievement would make Reagan's defeat of the Soviet Union look modest by comparison.
#Devolution #Expand Your Thinking #Eye of The Storm #TheGreatAwakening
