The Western Way of War

In this episode of Roots, Rights & Reason, Lee Smith welcomes historian Victor Davis Hanson for a clear and grounded look at what defines the “Western way of war” and how it is shaping modern conflict. Hanson explains that, at its core, this approach relies on overwhelming technological superiority, precision targeting, and strategic infrastructure disruption; seeking decisive outcomes without prolonged ground engagements. Drawing on current tensions in the Middle East, he contrasts this doctrine with insurgent-style warfare, arguing that restraint from entering drawn-out, on-the-ground conflicts is not weakness, but strategic discipline. 

The conversation expands into a broader geopolitical lens, exploring how economic pressure, supply chain disruption, and coalition dynamics function as extensions of military force. Hanson outlines how blockades and targeted strikes can weaken regimes not only militarily but internally, accelerating political fracture and forcing high-stakes decisions from leadership. With historical parallels ranging from World War II to the Cold War, this episode offers a clear-eyed assessment of how modern power is exercised, and what victory may look like in an era where dominance is measured as much by strategic patience and leverage as by force.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

From the brave roots of our family. The unstoppable force of American integrity. To the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome, and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing how Western civilization came to rule the world. Through the Western way of war. Our guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, the well-known commentator, classicist, and historian of ancient and modern warfare, argues that the Western way of war is a distinctive tradition that developed in ancient Greece. It continued through European and American history. According to Hanson, this way of war emphasizes decisive head-on battle aimed at quickly destroying the enemy's ability to resist, rather than engaging in prolonged or indirect conflict. Hanson traces the tradition back to Greek hoplite warfare, where citizen soldiers fought in disciplined formations, seeking a single, decisive class. This preference for direct engagement carried forward later into Western history. From Roman legions to modern militaries, Western forces have emphasized discipline, organization, technological superiority, and the concentration of force to achieve quick, decisive victories. Warfare is also closely tied to the state, supported by strong economies and bureaucracies, and aimed at eliminating the enemy's capacity to wage war. In contrast, many non-Western approaches, both historically and today, emphasize indirect, asymmetric, and prolonged forms of conflict. For instance, the famous 5th century BC military strategist Lao Zhu teaches in the Art of War that the best victory is achieved through deception, strategy, and avoiding direct confrontation when possible. A modern example of this indirect approach can be seen in the Islamic Republic of Iran's use of proxy warfare. Rather than engaging in large-scale conventional battles, Iran funds and trains terror groups across the Middle East, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, to advance Iran's strategic goals. This strategy allows Iran to project power and wage conflict while avoiding direct responsibility and reducing the risk of full-scale retaliation. It reflects a broader pattern of asymmetric warfare, where weaker states or actors avoid decisive battles and instead rely on attrition, psychological pressure, and decentralized violence. Today, we're seeing these two styles of warfare tested on the field of battle in the Persian Gulf. Victor Davis Hanton, our guest today, is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs the working group on the role of military history in contemporary conflict. He is also author of numerous books, including The Second World Wars, How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and The Case for Trump. His forthcoming book is The Counter-Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement. Victor, thank you so much for being here with us today. We're speaking about the Western way of war, and you have written about this and you described exactly what the Western way of war is and what it means. Is that what we're seeing right now in the Persian Gulf?

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yeah, I think so. I think it's uh a deliberate attempt not to go into the streets of Fallujah or Halman province and fight a non-Western pro-Jihadist type of, you know, house-to-house and counterinsurgency, terrorism, all that. It's to use fire, overwhelming firepower and technology and superb uh infrastructure, carriers, carrier groups, helicopters, drones. And um it's so it's it's fighting for it's fighting in a way that we did maybe in the first Gulf War, where we used our advantages and we didn't go in and try to occupy um Iraq. Maybe we should have. But that's it, once we do that and get into the Middle East, and as Israel knows, when it goes into Gaza or it goes into Lebanon, that's a very different operation for them than it is to target particular uh infrastructure or command and control and use firepower to eliminate it without getting on the ground. And of course they know that. So their I their Europa dope strategy is that uh while they have concerns or a timeline, that is, they don't want to lose their entire industrial, nuclear, military uh complex, uh Trump has the midterms, he's got an anti-war right, he's got some stirrings or murmurs from the paleo-right, uh anti-war right, paleo right, and he's got the left, of course, who feel that this is a way to take back the Congress in in November. And he's got Republican lawmakers that are in purple districts that are putting pressures on him. But if right now we're we're not really the problem we have, I think a lot is that communication. No one has said we're really not in a kinetic war right now. So the we're pay we're spending a lot of money, but no one is in in you know harm's way in a combat situation. Basically, we are strangling the Iranian government by denying their uh exports of oil and their imports of vital materials, and they're losing, according to these various experts, 400 million uh a day in input. And just a question, who's going to blink first? Donald Trump, because of the political pressures he's getting from his party and his opposition, or the Iranians who are afraid that either the the whole system will collapse or the the ninety-three million people who hate their their governance will come out again.

SPEAKER_02 6:34

So what's fascinating Well, I was gonna say it's fascinating you remind us of what happened. That was actually what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq when the United States decided to play, um, decided to play by the insurgent way of war. Even as people are saying you have to send in ground troops to take the Straits of Armuz, uh Korg Island, and you're saying um which makes absolute sense. If you do it, you are giving the the advantage back to them.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. I don't think we have to I mean if you want to harm Korg Island, there are port facilities, cranes, uh dockworks that we can hit without hitting the oil. Uh and so that if there were were to be a change of government, they would have the infrastructure there, but it would not allow this regime to export anything out because they couldn't unload it, they couldn't do any of that. And I think we could do that without hitting the actual pipeline structure and the oil, if that's what we're concerned about. The other thing is that Iran is facing not just short-term pressures because of the blockade and the damage to their infrastructure, but it's also there's sort of geostrategic things going on. They w they're not immediate, but when the Emirates leaves OPEC and it says that we have our own concerns, we were attacked by Iran, we want to fix our infrastructure. Oil is$100 plus a barrel, and we are operating under 20 or 30 percent restraint that we can't pump fully. Well, the other 22 members are gonna say, well, if they're gonna do it, then we might as well and the net result would be I think you would see oil prices markedly collapse because all of those, not all of them, but the majority of them are not pumping to full capacity. And if the the cartel broke up, each one would be freelancing. And then long term, the United States is probably going to up, I think it can up at another million barrels in two or three months. Venezuela is coming back on, and Russia, for evil or good, will probably be pumping a lot. So long term it's not good for Iran. And this the Emirates and Oman are working on pipelines to double their capacity in the Gulf of Oman. Well, you don't have to go in the straits. Saudi, Saudis are talking about increasing their pipeline uh production ability in the Red Sea. So you you could see long term that Iran would be, this regime, if it's in power, would be severely hampered because of what it what it birthed. And then, of course, China, Russia's out of the Middle East. Everybody says they're they're a winner. They're bogged down in Ukraine, they're out of the Middle East. China and Russia are out of the Western Hemisphere after the Maduro and Panama. So there's a lot of things going on that no one talks about, but they tend to be all in the interest of the United States.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

I like how you give us the big picture because, again, a lot of people are just looking at, well, I mean, a big problem that the president has is uh when we talk about the support for the war, I mean, it was a given that the Democrats can't support it because the Democrats made protecting Iran, especially its nuclear weapons program, a core Democratic Party interest after Barack Obama's Iran deal. So it's really great that you give this full picture here. To what extent are uh blockades and this kind of economic warfare? How does this fit into the uh arsenal of the Western way of war?

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Well the thing about it is all of Iran's technology is borrowed or adapted from either Europe or the United States or westernized Asian countries. So when you blockade the oil, everybody's talking about that, but the blockade works two ways. So unless they can get a sufficient amount on their rail line to through two different countries, into China or into uh Kazakhstan or Russia through the Caspian Sea, they're they're not going to be able to import uh at the volume they need to restore their pharmaceutical industry, their steel industry, and people in their home, when their TV breaks down, when uh their oven doesn't work, all of those components have to be imported. And so it's starting to it'll it'll start very quickly that they will not have the wherewithal in in the military sense, even to start to service these things. Right now, the only card that they have, and why that I think Trump is tentative is the blockade is starting to strangle them. At some key point a week from now, two weeks, three weeks, Iran has to make a decision. They have to say to the United States, you better stop this, or and what will that or be? It will probably be we're going to send a lot more missiles that we have hidden than you think, and we're gonna send them as they have been. 5,000 of them were sent at the six Gulf Council states. I think there was only 800 at Israel. So you can see that's their target, to force those countries to cease production of oil, strangle the West with oil lost, and then pressure the United States to concede to their demands. But I think Trump, being Trump, he will say to them, as he already has, I imagine, if you send missiles, here's a target list. And that target list will be something like what Bill Clinton did in Serbia in 1999, when finally he just said, uh, I may be a Democrat and a liberal, but I'm taking out every bridge on the Danube and I'm taking out your grid. And he he he cut off power in Belgrade I'd I'd say every other day for hours, sometimes for a day or two. They couldn't fix it fast enough. So for all the talk about Donald Trump as a war criminal, it was Obama who bombed seven months in Libya, port facilities, TV stations, communications, cargo ships, uh, without congressional approval. And Bill Clinton did the same thing for 72 days in Serbia. So Trump has, I guess what I'm trying to say, he has options, both political. He can always say, I'm just gonna do follow the Obama and Clinton model and start hitting dual-use infrastructure. And you can tell the Iranians, here's a list of 400 bridges that you're and here's a list of 500 power plants, and here they're all gonna go if you start letting out missiles.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

You make a very good point when you're talking about, yeah, it's not the the the blockade, it's not just about uh uh energy. It's also basically their supply lines, civilian and military supply lines. It's really interesting. What what do you think the I'm I'm I'm asking you to be uh to to predict as well, but how is this shaping up? What what do you see as the end game? Not uh not a time limit to it, but what happens? I mean, uh the president has said he wants them to give up their remaining uh heavily enriched uranium, which I guess there's nearly half a ton of it. I hear other people saying, yeah, it's not just the 60 percent. We need to get the other uranium from them, 20 percent, so there's a lot. And then also he wants to make sure that they have no ability ever, uh at least under this regime, to build to build a nuclear weapon. So what's the end game now?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Aaron Ross Powell Well, I think because it he's got six months um for the midterm, so I would give him a month of the strangulation. And it's kind of what Lincoln did in the Civil War to the South or the Anacona strategy. Everybody said it wouldn't work, and it really did work. But it took it took a while to get going. Well, it's got going now. They're not getting anything out despite what Senator Murphy or people say. So I guess what I'm saying is in the next month, if they are losing five hundred million dollars in economic input production output, I should say, and they're not getting any um strategic materials in there, at least not in the quantity that they need to survive, then uh there's going to be uh uh increasing friction between these four warring groups for power in that country. We don't know right now to what degree the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the theocrats that are still under whoever whatever whatever or whoever he or whatever he is, common A, we don't know what their role is, we don't know what the elected officials are role is, and we don't know what the regular military, but all of them are worried that one of the other cliques or cohorts will call them weak or appeasing. So they're all mouthing this hardliner stuff. But I think it's all for internal consumption. By the same token, they're all worried also that if the thing starts to te totter and it starts to slip away, they don't want to be the group that is responsible for have killing for killed 30 or 40,000 Iranians. So they're all worried also that they're gonna be have a collective noose around their head in some kind of you know Nuremberg trial if the people take over. And they're also worried that if the hostilities start again, they've come out of the woodwork a little bit, and they're all gonna be targeted by the Israelis. So the result is I think that chaos among those warring groups is gonna increase. And at some point, some person, if the blockade continues, is one of is gonna want to cut a deal and say, okay, we renounce the use of nuclear weapons. We'll let you or the international committee come in and investigate or take away what you need. You can look at our missile inventory. We're not going to I don't know if they're able right now to give Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis any money. I doubt it. But they're gonna have to cut off that. And we'll see. It could be a Venezuela-like solution where you get a strong guy, secular guy from the Army who says, I'm a dissident army officer, I'll follow that. Or it could be a transitional government. But I don't think that's uh just so somebody is willing to meet our demands and we we have to find a way where they're going to meet our demands. Right now it's kind of absurd what they're saying. It would be as if we've on September 2nd, when we sent the huge Pacific Fleet and the U.S. Missouri into Tokyo Bay, and they were completely obliterated, all their military, but they had 7,000 kamikaze left, I guess. And they said they had they said they had a million and a half people under arms on the mainland. But it would be as if the Japanese delegation said, We're not gonna surrender, we reject your. And what are you gonna do about it? Well, the we would have kept bombing. So they're at they're at the same equivalent state. They have no military wherewithal, so to speak, and they're they're gonna be starving very soon. But that regime is not ten it's not tenable, it's not sustainable to keep saying we're not gonna listen to you, we're gonna attack you. If they attack them, they're in one hour, they're gonna lose everything. And they've already lost, some estimates are almost a half a trillion dollars of military hardware, uh, industrial capacity, nuclear installations, and now all that was, you know, that was acquired over 50 years almost, 47 years of investment. So even if we just decide, well, we've got most of our objectives, I wouldn't agree with this, but if we just now left, I think we should at least stay a month and tighten it up, then they're gonna have to spend. I don't know where they're gonna get the money. We could still keep the blockade going with one carrier group, and I don't know where they're gonna get the money to fix everything, and then especially tell their people, well, we need 50 million, 50 million a month to give to Hezbollah and 50 million to Hamas and the Houthis, and then we want to build another underground cavern for 10 billion. It would be very difficult. So, you know, when they took the wall down, the people did, crashed it, and everybody said the Soviet Union would fall. It took the Soviet Union two years. And in Eastern Europe countries, some of them fell in a week or two, but some of them took three or four or six months. So uh once you lit light the fuse, it doesn't mean everything blows up all at once.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

It is interesting because I guess a lot of it comes down to the nature of regimes. I mean, you talked about the you know the the the imperial Japanese regime, uh, and they said, okay, you know, we're finished. And the the Iranians, uh the Iranians have not. So and and the Soviets, right? Weren't the estimates of the Soviets, oh well, no, the economy must be doing well because the Soviet people aren't up in arms yet. And as it turns out, they just had the ability to absorb an awful lot of pain, and then it was too much and it was over.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

And so did the Japanese and so did the Germans. And everybody said, you know, Japan will never surrender. They didn't even surrender because of just the atomic bomb. They surrendered because of the incendiary campaign that wiped out 10 cities, and that Curtis O'Mey was at now at Okinawa, and he was he was building a fleet of 10,000 bombers, most many of them transferred from the European theater. He had B-24s, B-17s, B-29s, and he could do two missions a day from Okinawa. So they knew that. So any regime, whatever the rhetoric or whatever the ideology is, it has to function in a real world, physical world. And this regime is is, I don't know. We're well, I think I expect to see a lot of internal bickering, fighting, even killing before they before they're Oh yes, so do I.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

I can't imagine these guys don't start shooting at each other. Uh pretty soon.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Or freelancers. I I think what you'll see is kind of like a Bonnie Sodder, a goat's body who thought that, you know, after Khomeini n got rid of the Shah, they all thought they were gonna have a socialist utopia. So all these Iranians went out in the street that had got rid of the Shah, and they said, Well, we want Bonnie Soder, and we're gonna have a so European and they were all liquidated, 20,000 of them. Then they got Khomeini. So I think you're gonna see one or the other clique start to take care of business if it before we get a unified regime. And we have I think there's uh I don't know what the CIA is doing as far as arming people, but they must be arming either ethnic groups or having some way to arm militias or something.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

We we had some news, right, when that when the president said, Yeah, I'm very upset, someone we sent arms and someone uh derailed those arms. I think I I believe but uh I believe he was probably referring to Kurdish some Kurdish group, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Aaron Powell Yes. Yeah, I wa I think he was. But um it's a very unstable situation. And the irony is that the the Gulf states wanted the war and they egged us on, but then you know, they have 600 combat aircraft, they didn't use any of them, but they became the target. And then I never thought in my lifetime the UAE would be asking Israel to send technicians over to man, you know, yeah, for the Patriot batteries. So I think you're gonna see in the aftermath that the money that goes to fund Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, if at least to the degree it comes from the Gulf, is not gonna be there.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

Right. Qatar has Qatar has a different perspective now. Yeah. Victor, where where do you I mean again, I the war is not over, but where we are right now, how would you rank or how do you judge Donald Trump as a as a war president? You spoke about Lincoln before in the Anaconda strategy. So where do you see Trump as a wartime president right now?

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Well, if you look at the first term, he said he was going to bomb ISIS into SHIT, and he did. And they had occupied half the country. He did that for six or seven months. And then he you everybody told us you can't touch Solomony. He he killed so many people of our own in Iraq and Afghanistan with a sheikh. And don't get don't get Iran rival. They're just a different breed of people. They're just two and he killed him. And Baghdadi, he got rid of. And everybody said, you don't want, don't mess around with the Wagner group. You'll get in a nuclear war with Russia. And they attacked, and he wiped 200 of them out. And then the second term, don't go into Iran. He went in 27 hours and bombed it. Nothing. I think it was pretty successful, but not getting already the enriched uranium. And then he Maduro, I don't know how he pulled that off, but he he had a coup and extradited Maduro and didn't have any combat losses. And now he's kind of got his boot on the neck of these Maduro residuals that'll have to do what we say, or there'll be a revolution in the country. I think they're very gradually uh encouraging the opposition to come out of the woodwork slowly and carefully. And then um so in all of that context, we've lost it's tragic, we've lost 13 people, but Joe Biden lost 13 in that humiliating uh 50 yeah, 50 billion we left in hardware. So it I think it's been pretty good uh that he's been able to do all of this without he's been able to do all this without ground troops. And he hasn't taken um even when the left says, well, you spent twenty-five or thirty billion dollars. I mean, here in California we're looking at two hundred and fifty billion in welfare fraud. So it it's been pretty amazing. It just the um I think as the war goes on, it's gonna be interesting to see and that he's got the Europeans on one side, he's got, as I said earlier, the left on one side. He I don't think the Tucker right is is that influential anymore, but they're there. Then he's got senators and house members that are traipsing to the Mar-Lago and saying, you know, I'm gonna be defeated at the polls unless you can get out of there. And then he's got the economic gurus who are saying, you know, we had all the deregulation tax cuts, foreign investment, oil was down as cheapest. We were right on the edge of a boom. We got to get this going again. And he's in the middle of it all. And then he's got some people like Rubio who are saying, steady, you have a chance for historic reworking of the entire Middle East. It's not just Iran. You get rid of Iran, this regime, and all of a sudden subsidies for all the terrorists dry up. People the Israelis make peace with their enemies in the Gulf, and there's no China or Russia, and you're controlling the destiny of this whole so uh it it it's just a question of how much how much a gamble the way everything boils down to how much a gamble does Donald Trump want to take. Because he could get 70% of a victory right now by and then say we're going to keep blockading, and then suddenly in a week say, you know, I'm gonna leave a carrier group. We have a carrier there all the time anyway, and they're gonna try to blockade, and then they're gonna do they're gonna enforce the blockade. If Europeans want to help them, that's fine. Israelis can help too if they want with air power, and I'm gonna go home. And he'd probably have sixty to seventy percent of a victory. But if he wants to stay a month or two months, I think after two months it'll be very tricky, but uh he could get a he could get a landmark victory. It just how much risk does he want to incur?

SPEAKER_02 27:21

Aaron Powell Historically, I mean we we heard that from some of the finance guys when Jamie Dimon, for instance, is saying, well, yeah, you know, no one likes higher oil prices, but this is a chance to, you know, to uh perhaps create long-term stability in a very important region, and and and that will change things. So that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Aaron Powell That's what seven presidents, seven past presidents all said the same thing. They can't have a nuclear weapon. Right. That regime has to be controlled. A lot of the problems we're having, the enrichment up to 60 percent probably started under Biden once he released all of the uh ended all the sanctions and released embargoes on imported products, and they were getting$100 billion,$200 billion in revenue. So that that was the ascendance, and they reached their peak on October 7th, because everybody knows, whatever their denials, they were the architects and the banker for October 7th. And that at that point, everybody said, Oh my God, they have gone into Israel, they've killed 1,200 civilians, the Houthis have shut down the Red Sea. Hezbollah hasn't even entered the fray yet with all their rockets. Uh Hamas has got hostages in tunnels. The Europeans are what is good there's no way we can defeat this monstrous Iran. They've got all these missiles. They were saying, you know, Hezbollah has 200,000 rockets and we have 10,000 missiles. And that's all history now, it all vanished. And that was because of Trump and the Israeli Air Force and Netanyahu.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

Victor, bef Victor, this is great. Your your broad and historical perspective of what's happening here. Before I let you go, I just want to, you know, our our our audience, I mean, audiences around America love you. Your I mean, your your contributions to help us understand the world, how to understand history, our present, stuff like that. And so, you know, of course, a lot of people have have have are concerned to hear about the your different uh you know, your different uh medical issues. And we just wanted to check in and and and ask and see how you're doing. You look fantastic, you sound great. I know that. You know, but with there's so much love for you all over. I know our audience just wants to hear, you know, just wants to hear how you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Well, I I'm kind of in a holding pattern. Uh on the last day of tw 2025, I had a mass in my lung, and and all year long um people I had scans and the regular checkups and scans, and people had insisted that it was benign, it was pneumonia or valley fever or something, but it was actually the damage from a cancerous tumor that was inside this collapse. And um, I had that out at the end of the year, and it was a four-hour, it's a large, it was the size of a baseball, the mass, and everything was going well, and then an I guess you'd call it an aneurysm, the artery uh opened up, and I lost immediately three liters of blood. Um, they had to take me immediately out of the ICU back in, open me up, and I had five uh blood transfusions, one platelet, and the as a result of that eight hours for the last three months, um I I'm healing from the lung operation, but the anemia and the damage to the heart when it tried to compensate, you know, with the loss of blood volume and to keep it was beating too high for too long. That I had some heart damage that I think uh I'm on the end of uh three three and a half months that we'll go over, but it's been kind of I've been kind of weak and fatigued and dizzy and because of uh the the massive blood loss and I had five different I'm a universal recipient of rare AB uh negative, so I had five different types of blood, and I think I got some allergic reactions. So that I think is I'm getting better. I have good and bad days still, but it's only been three and a half months. But the cancer was a very rare uh mutation type, and so unfortunately, it couldn't be treated with immunotherapy or chemotherapy. So after they removed it, uh they when they typed typed the um the cancerous tumor, it was called the Crass Stux G12R, which means nothing works on it. So now it's just a question, will it come back? And it does have a tendency to come back in about f at my stage, about 40% of the time. And so what they do is they give you a DNA test and um with targeted for your mutations, it's state of the art. They've only been doing it for a couple of years. And then if they find one blood cell of cancer circulating your system, they know that it's gonna land somewhere. In my case, I think it it's likely to land in the lung, pancreas, or brain. And where it lands matters how they can treat it. So if it it's in the lung again, I suppose they can either go back and cut it or radiate it. But um uh so far they haven't the the good news is when they took this mass out, the surgeon was very gifted. And he was the one that went back in and said that's not just a m mile leak, that's an artery, and and he was able to to to not let me bleed out. I almost bled out. He and so he's he kind of saved my life. And uh so anyway, he he got a lot of the he got all the lymph nodes that he got were all negative, and he did a lot of I guess you'd call it standard, they they scrape when they take out the lobe, they they scrape around it and they take all the vessels that were cut and tied off and they examine all of that, and they call that a clean surgery. And I had a clean surgery, but because of the size, there's disagreement whether you should type the whole mass, which includes dead tissue and the tumor, or just the tumor, and that makes a big difference on your prognosis. And so if you're one group of people said, Well, there must be cancer in that mass, so it's a whole thing, then it's stage four. If if it's just a contained G1, they call it, and it was a G1, where it had a diameter you could see. But uh it's a it's a very rare thing, so that was part of the problem with diagnosing it. They they hadn't seen that type very often. But I'm I'm I'm trying to work and get my mind off everything, and I have good and bad days. If I try to walk too much um or do too much, I usually get uh what they call episodic tachycardia, where your heart it's not AFib anymore, but it just it just says to you, slow down your lung you don't have the lung capacity to do that. And when you don't have the lung capacity to do that, I have to beat the heart faster to get the oxygen to your brain. So just stay. If you don't stop, I'm gonna keep doing this and then you're gonna faint. So I have to stop. It's been kind of strange and funny. I'll we have a farm, and I'll be telling my wife, I think I feel pretty good today. I have a steady heart rate. I want to walk, I'm gonna walk four or five miles today. I'm gonna go out in the orchard, you know, and then all of a sudden, bam, without I felt great, and then it's my I I I get dizzy and I have to sit down. I have to call my wife to come and get me.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Well, that's the thing people know about you. I mean, you know, you're a farmer. I mean, you stand for you represent uh most Americans, not just uh the great uh intellectual um vitality, but also your your health as a as a as a vital as a vital American from you know from the place, the soil from which we draw our strength, or as Devin Nunes would say, from the soil that furnishes the breadbasket of the solar system. But yeah, it's to you as a really healthy, you know.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

I hope so. Uh it's very frustrating to live on a farm and you know, even though we've my siblings, we had 180 acres here, but we have only I only have 40 now. But it's a very active place. I rent it out, but you know, you see people come in, you know, hey Victor, we got a problem here. Uh or the renter will say, I'm gonna spray today, what are you gonna do? Tell me, can I use the pump? Stuff like that. Or then I have I have a two-acre yard, so I I want to go out and prune, but if I start pruning or doing anything, I start to teeter. So it's and I the good news is it's all that the cardiologist says it's temporary. That he did an echocardiogram, EKG, and he said your heart is sound, it just it was it's you don't have when we take out that much of a lung and you've had that much blood loss, um I guess they call it deuce autone autonomia, that you your autonomic system, your vagus, everything is out of whack. And until it gets back in whack, everything is hypersensitive. So I I was on a view the other day, uh uh a podcast we were taping, and I got kind of animated. And um somebody said, You look a little dizzy in I I never had an Apple watch in my entire life. I didn't even I never checked my heart rate in my entire life, and I wear one now, and all of a sudden I said no. When I came in here, I checked it was my normal 58, and I looked down, it was 109, you know. And that doesn't seem that high when you jog or anything, you know. I was jogging you tried to jog at 115, but uh something about losing that much blood and my age and the volume and the anemia, it all kind of and the lung capacity. So that's all. Uh I'm very optimistic that I'm gonna get in fact I I I just took a blood biopsy and I should get the res uh last week and I get the results today or tomorrow. And I'm hoping that it's negative, that there's no cancer in the blood. And then I have a brain and uh uh pancreas uh lung to CT next week at Stanford.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

You have a lot of people praying for you because again, so many so I mean so many Yeah, just so many Americans just love you. Everything that you've everything that you've written, the stuff that you say, the stuff that you explain to us so we understand things more clearly. And of course, your you know, your extremely generous demeanor and your wit, you're you know, well, you're you're you're la you're you're you're tr you're you're cherished.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

I really I really have a lot of nice letters. I really made a difference. And as somebody, a nurse said to me uh in my when I was in the hospital, she goes, I don't understand, you're 72 and you've lost, you had six transfusions, and you're still reading a book right now. Yeah. Why and she goes, This is pretty amazing. I said, Well, I feel like a truck ran over me. She said, Well, you're not in the ICU, and that's a big difference. So I was I was very lucky, I think. Condolisa Rice, our director, was very she was monitoring, you know, she was the one that suggested I go to Stanford, and she did a lot, she did a lot, she was really monitoring my situation.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

She was also she generously alerted Americans who were following how you were doing. So, yeah, she was.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

Yeah, I that was a big help.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Well, well, no, I I I thank you so much for thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you. Thanks for being with us on Roots, Rights, and Reason, and and thanks to all of you for watching. And we talked about talked about the Western way of war, and uh we got a chance to speak to one of America's uh greatest writers, historians, and someone who understands this, someone who defined the issue, the Western way of war. And uh again, Victor, you are so loved, and we hope you will come back on soon. Uh you have a book coming out in September on on Donald Trump, and we hope you'll come on to discuss it then, if not before. I will. In the meantime, in the meantime, God bless you, and thanks so much for uh we're we're Victor. We're I'm I'm really honored because I I you know again, I know you're busy recovering, and other people want to speak to you. Thanks so much for speaking with us today.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

See you soon.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Okay, thank you.