Transcript
Victor Davis Hanson (0:01)
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Friday news roundup. And this week we've got lots of news in Ukraine and in Europe and Russia and China with rights to minerals in Bolivia. So we'll get to those stories first when we come back from these messages. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He has a website, Victor Hansen.com it is called the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. You can find all of Victor's writings that are for free with American Greatness and other journals. And then you can also get the ultra material by subscribing at 6:50amonth or 65 a year. And we would love to have you. So, Victor, the first thing I wanted to ask you just sort of an update on what's going on as far as the peace deal in Ukraine and then also the mineral rights that Zelensky has agreed to, apparently to the chagrin, I think, of his own people. But I was wondering, any updates on that?
Sammy Wink (1:26)
Well, Donald Trump was considered a neo imperialist because he said that a larger percentage of the money we gave and it's in dispute. He says 300 billion, some people say 250, some say 200. Zelensky for some reason said he only got 100 or billion or less. So there's a discrepancy. And then the question is how much of that money were loans and how much were outright cash. And Trump has made the allegation that the Europeans had a higher percentage of loans and they weren't candid about it. That was the implication than we did. So he wants to recoup some money by having rare earth minerals. I don't quite understand the logic because there's going to be a lot of rare earth minerals in the American west, places like Wyoming, Montana, the Tehachapi Desert in California. We have a lot of them. If we and under Trump, they will be allowed to be exploited. But the point is twofold. It's not just to get the money back that we gave Zelensky, it is to get to make a deterrent because he's basically saying that if you bring Western and particularly American investment in and they build infrastructure and they pay you, they have a concession, they'll pay you some money for it and they'll pay you not as much money as you'd like because you owe them Money for a while, but then that is a deterrent because it's very close to where Vladimir Putin invaded in the Donbass. It's not western Ukraine, it's eastern Ukraine. So the point is if you got hundreds of American business people there and Putin decides after he swallows his prey this time he's going to digest it in five years, do it again, it's going to be a little hard because they're a de facto tripwire. And that was the point, not just to make money. He does seem though that if you look at the 6 to 7 trillion dollar budget we have and we're running over a trillion dollars deficit and we need to get that down because we have $36 trillion in aggregate debt. That and he doesn't want to raise taxes because he feels he won't grow the economy. So he has a tripart, I guess a tri part strategy. And that's starting to obsess him as it should because we're, it's unsustainable. The number one is to cut. Elon Musk said there were $2 trillion. I don't think there'll be $2 trillion in cuts. We'll be lucky to get a trillion dollars. But that's a lot, a trillion dollars. And it sends a message we won't be growing government for a while. And then he wants to have tax cuts and deregulation and foreign investment. And that he thinks will get GDP up to 3, 3%, low unemployment, low inflation. So you'll get more revenue. And we did get more revenue under his first term, but we didn't stop spending. And then third, he's coming up with all of these methods of making money tariffs, this gold card where instead of a green card you pay $5 million and there are people who apparently there's a couple hundred who have that kind of money want to come to the United States. And so he is suggesting that if you have 200,000 and they pay 5 million, you can see you're getting up to a trillion dollars. And that would be revenue right away. A lot of people object and say, well, we're only letting wealthy people in. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if that comes at the expense of other green card holders or not. But it's a far cry from bringing in 12 million people under Biden and almost all of them whom need to be on federal assistance. And the idea that instead of bringing in people on federal assistance or state assistance or local assistance, you're bringing in people who have capital that creates taxes and Jobs and everything. So it's a, that's what it's all about. And we know what the outlines of the Ukraine. We've talked about it before. It's just now down to how far will Vladimir Putin go Back to the February 24th embarkation points. In other words, he's going to have the Dome bath, he's going to have the Crimea. Everybody knew that. John Bolton said, why would you say he's going to have it? Or why would you say he can't be a NATO? Those are negotiating points. It's like me, as I said, it's like me with a bunch of cards and I say, I have a full house and you look at my face and you say he's bluffing. So if we tried to say we're going to put Ukraine in NATO or we're going to give them the weapons and manpower to take back Crimea, they know we're not going to do that.
