6:00 Victor Davis Hanson: ….. And so they really inflamed Israel justifiably in a way that we have never seen before, and they’ve woken up, and the reaction is going to be exactly like in the Yom Kippur war, except to the n-th degree. And I don’t think that Hamas understands that this is the first time in our lives, John, that there is no restraint to speak of. I know that Joe Biden will go there and he will say do this and do that and do that, but he is not gonna stop this righteous retribution on Hamas and then Hezbollah is talking, talking, talking and Iran is talking, talking, talking and beating their chest and tomorrow is supposed to be a day of reckoning, but they don't understand that they’re widely despised in the Western Europe, is sick of them and Europe is clamping down on their own unassimilated immigrant Muslim population and we are getting very angry at ours. You have a problem as well in Australia and I think there is no patience anymore.
The second thing is that Joe Biden is not leading events, he has been driven by events.
They have 100000 rockets in Lebanon. If they get full of themselves and they send, I don’t know, 5000, 4000 at the US fleet, perhaps one might hit it, a lot might hit it. But they don’t understand that there is no patience with them any more, there is no restraint on the United States . Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, China has one, two concerns. One, everything that hurts the United States they are up for, but #2 they don’t want 40 percent of their oil disrupted and they don’t want a big war in the Middle East, not right now with the economic difficulties and what that means is that the clients of Iran are not going to be eager to get into a war with the United States or the West in general, and so Iran has no client, it has no backup. And I don’t know if they know that. They keep thinking that because of the weakness of this administration that it’s systemic and will continue forever, but I do not think that Joe Biden will be able to stop the righteous anger if they do something stupid and they may well do something stupid because we’ve lost deterrence.
John Anderson: That is very Interesting that you are seeing, as you say, perhaps we are being dragged to it rather than leading events, but nonetheless, as the Russians discovered, and now the Middle East is observing, the rest of the world is observing, when it comes to foreign affairs, when it really comes down to it, America is still resolute enough to stand up, it has the willpower That seems to be one of the great messages out of this?
VDH: I think so. There is a weird calculus going on because there are people in the Democratic party, not their crazy lunatic squad base, but are very strong supporters of Israel, and they are shocked by this nihilist blood curdling support for Hamas’s barbary and savagery, and they want Israel to retaliate. That is not coming from the Conservative or the Right, that’s coming from the mainstream Democratic party. They are telling Joe Biden you’ve got to let Israel go, and do what they need to do, and that’s very new. When you have a Democratic president. I don’t think that people abroad fully comprehend -you have no restraint. Typically a Republican or a conservative Administration wants to have deterrence and then the Left almost in Pavlovian fashion says this is imperialistic, neo-colonialist, provocative. Trump killed Solemaini, he got blasted for it, Trump bombed Isis, he got blasted for it. But when the Democratic people are in, there is no restraint because no Republican would say please don’t hit Iran or please don’t hit Hamas. You have members of their own party who were outraged what happened to Israel and what Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are saying about that but what they are going to do in addition to that.
I don’t see when I look at the landscape here or abroad, I don’t see any restraining voice that is going to say you better not do that or else, or you cannot do that because that would be amoral or it’s against UN rules of war. There is nothing of that. I don’t hear any of that.