Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk about our two cold wars, the one that we won against Russia and the one that we’re de facto in against China. They’re very different. And I would argue that the 45-year Cold War with Russia was much easier to win, despite their 7,000 nukes, than it will be with China for a variety of reasons that we should all be aware of.
No. 1, Russia was Russia, kind of a pariah state. It was isolated from the so-called free world. Europe was Europe, and Asia and the United States had guardrails against it. There were no students de facto from Russia in the United States. None. Statistically, almost none. There was no conduit for espionage or the expropriation of American scientific and engineering knowledge out of our Ph.D. programs, MBA programs, you name it. There was very little espionage by students. There were very few Russian nationals in the United States. We just didn’t let them in. There was no American investor class in Russia.
Remember how controversial Armand Hammer was? He was the head of Occidental Petroleum. He had the pencil monopoly in Russia. His parents had been living in Russia. They had been pro-communist, at least his father, as I recall. And then they’d gone back to the United States. He’d grown up part of his youth in Russia. He spoke fluent Russian. And he was our de facto business liaison with the communist government. Every time there was a JFK or Nixon or Johnson administration, and they wanted a back channel, they called up Armand Hammer.
I don’t know quite what his sympathies were, but he was about the only one, and he was a pariah. People were angry at him.
Take the example with China today. It’s much different. And funny, there was a sense that Russia had very bad propaganda. People thought that Russians were crude. They thought they were cruel, that nobody liked them in the Third World when they came in.
Even today in Hollywood, have you noticed that almost every villain in every movie is a Russian? He has that kind of guttural Russian accent. He’s got a shaved head. He has a tattoo when he takes off his shirt. He’s covered with tattoos. There’s the three-bar Orthodox cross. It’s a very cruel caricature, but we don’t do that with China.
And remember that we thought we were going to be blown up by Russia. They had 7,000 nuclear weapons. They had the mother of all bombs. I think it was a 50- or 100-megaton bomb they dropped. It was all over our childhood in school. That propaganda wasn’t propaganda. Actually, it was the truth. I can remember having to do drills.
So, we were clear who the enemy was and what they were capable of. China is very different. They were an ally of ours in World War II. But unlike Russia, that we did not include in the Marshall Plan, and we stopped Lend-Lease right after, we had a much more empathetic view.
China was deindustrialized. It didn’t really have a chance. It hadn’t made a deal with Hitler as the Russians did. It had been preyed upon by Japan. And so, there had been American missionaries, not colonialists or imperialists. We never had an imperial project in China. But it was sort of a goodwill. It wasn’t even lost during the Korean War.
We had this good feeling about China, and there are 300,000 students. People in the administration, I don’t know why, are thinking of having 600,000. If you have 1% engaged in active espionage, that would mean you would have 3,000 students who are actively trying to glean information in labs, in research projects, in joint endeavors with American academics, sending that home. Almost every student who leaves the United States and goes home to China is interrogated by the intelligence arms of the People’s Liberation Army.
It’s nothing—the Russians had no such clout. There were almost no, as I said, no Russians here. Three to 5 million people are foreign-born from China. I think 3 million of them who are in the United States are not U.S. citizens. They’re residents. That would be unheard of in the Cold War with Russia.
I don’t know how much investment there is, but it seems like every American capitalist has made a fortune in China. People have suggested it might be trillions of dollars over the last 40 years. I’m not saying they have dual loyalties, but there’s an insidious idea that China’s not really an enemy because of the massive amount of money that has been invested there.
And that means, put the Chinese students, the Chinese residents, the foreign investment, and our history of empathy with China—it’s very, very hard to tell people that China is an existential enemy in the way that Russia was.
And we all know that they played the DEI, woke propaganda card. Especially, we saw that with COVID. It wasn’t just that we were supposed to believe that crazy idea that a sick pangolin or a bat 100 miles away gave the world COVID when the Wuhan lab was right there, a level 4 lab with American expertise, instrumentation, and some money provided by whom? Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, and others, Francis Collins, perhaps.
And so, what I’m getting at is, every time that we tried to criticize the corruption of the World Health Organization or China, they came back and said, here you go again. You’re racist. You’re racist. This is the Yellow Peril all over again. This is the Rape of Nanking, your style. It was almost as if they had studied the DEI mosaic in the United States, and they had tapped into it in a way that the Russians couldn’t.
They were lily-white, guttural-speaking enemies on the Hollywood big screen. And the result of that is, as we speak today, can you imagine if there were Russian bio labs? One was about 10 miles from here. I used to work there in high school at the packing house. It was used later by this operative of the Chinese Communist Party. There was one in Las Vegas. There may be more.
Can you imagine if the Russians bought farmland next to U.S. high-security military bases? We would have never allowed that to happen. We would have never funded a Russian lab.
So, there are so many different ways that China has infiltrated the cultural, social, economic, political life, the military life of the United States, that they are much more insidious, much more powerful. And of course, they have 1.4 billion people. The Soviet Union at its height, I think, had 240 million. So, they are a much more formidable enemy, and they’re much more adept at knowing where we are strong and especially where we are weak.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
