Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

President Obama has just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.

Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement the now-familiar stereotype of Obama’s desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bows to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America’s historically exceptional world role as are they....

The reason why our deficit is more than $1 trillion is not just that we have multimillion-dollar jet fighters or tens of thousands of Marines. Defense outlays currently represent only about 20 percent of federal budget expenditures and are below 5 percent of our gross national product. Those percentages are roughly average costs for recent years — despite an ongoing deployment in Afghanistan. In contrast, over the last three years we have borrowed a record near– $5 trillion for vast unfunded entitlements — from a spiraling Social Security and Medicare to an expansion of the food-stamp program to include one-seventh of America. Yet many Americans would probably prefer a new frigate manned by highly trained youth to discourage our enemies, rather than another Solyndra-like investment or a near– $1 trillion stimulus aimed at creating jobs in “shovel-ready” projects....

Burton Folsom, Jr. is professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal? (Simon & Schuster, 2008). His new book, co-authored with Anita Folsom, is FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Anita Folsom works at Hillsdale College and is co-author of FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America (Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Who should build and fix the nation's roads? The Democrats clearly believe road building and repair is best done by the federal government. President Obama, in fact, made infrastructure improvements a major part of his $787 billion stimulus package. And in the New Hampshire debate on Saturday night, the Republicans sadly seemed to look to Washington as well.

When asked during the debate about the federal government's role in improving the nation's roads, Newt Gingrich seemed resigned to a strong federal role. So did Mitt Romney, although he also seemed open to state efforts. According to Romney, "There are certain things government can do to grow the economy. Rebuilding infrastructure that is aging is one of them." He went on to describe bridges and highways that needed repair.

These Republicans are right in pointing to a strong infrastructure as being essential to economic growth. But "Let Washington do it" should not be our battle cry. If we look first to the Constitution, and second to competency, we will discover that we should ask Washington to hit the road, not build it....

...[T]he Constitution leaves road building as a state and local function. In 1817, when Congress passed a bill allowing the federal government to build roads and canals in various states, President James Madison vetoed it. "I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution," Madison said....

(CNN) -- The New Hampshire primary will tell us a good deal more than the Iowa caucuses did about where the Republican candidates stand and how they might do in the general election against President Barack Obama.

While the unpredictable nature of the Iowa caucuses offered Rick Santorum an opportunity to shine, Tuesday's vote will tell us where the party is really headed, in what has been a Wild West of a presidential selection process, one with more ups and downs than the Colorado Rockies.

The New Hampshire primary, established in 1916, has a long and treasured history in American politics. It has often been the site where new voices have been able to upset the status quo and take on establishment figures.

In 1952, the military hero Dwight Eisenhower successfully challenged "Mr. Republican" Robert Taft, the senator from Ohio, who was thought to be one of the strongest figures in the party. That same year, Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver shook up the Democratic Party by winning a stunning victory against President Harry Truman, fueling his decision not to run for re-election.

In 1968, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy's strong second-place showing similarly upset President Lyndon Johnson, forcing him to think twice about how strong his support was within the Democratic Party. The results, Sen. Ted Kennedy recalled, demonstrated that "overnight, Johnson had become beatable." A few weeks later Johnson told the nation that he would not run for re-election....

IN the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent — has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.

From the moment the United States government forced Cuba to lease the Guantánamo Bay naval base to us, in June 1901, the American presence there has been more than a thorn in Cuba’s side. It has served to remind the world of America’s long history of interventionist militarism. Few gestures would have as salutary an effect on the stultifying impasse in American-Cuban relations as handing over this coveted piece of land.

The circumstances by which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo are as troubling as its past decade of activity there. In April 1898, American forces intervened in Cuba’s three-year-old struggle for independence when it was all but won, thus transforming the Cuban War of Independence into what Americans are still wont to call the Spanish-American War. American officials then excluded the Cuban Army from the armistice and denied Cuba a seat at the Paris peace conference. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” the Cuban general Máximo Gómez remarked in January 1899, after the peace treaty was signed, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former rulers’ power.”...



Gil Troy, professor of history at McGill University, is the editor, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel, of “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2008,” fourth edition.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it "by far the best speech Tuesday night." Santorum's address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called "freedom." A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family's one-time economic privation. It wasn't off the cuff. "As you know," he said, "I do not speak from notes, but there's a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I'm going to read them as I wrote them." And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: "because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them." He came because—why else?—he loved freedom....

"He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them."...

To put it plainly: miners like Rick Santorum's grandfather were enslaved to their companies, tied by feudal bonds to the company towns where they lived and worked. First off, quite simply, because they had no money to go elsewhere (remember, they didn't get paid in money, but in coupons only redeemable at the "single local general store"; and how can you move if you don't have cash-money?). And secondly, yet more sinisterly, corrupt accounting systems typically kept families perpetually in debt—making moving to another place of one's choosing, the basic act of a free human being, a jailing offense. There was no "freedom." No market economy. This was debt slavery....

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Throughout the last three years, President Obama has been nitpicked in the press for a variety of public gestures that in and of themselves seemed to have little lasting effect: having Mexico join Eric Holder’s Justice Department to sue to strike down a U.S. state’s immigration law; bowing to Saudi and Japanese royals; apologizing for, or at least contextualizing, past American acts while overseas; giving interviews in which he criticized his predecessor; offering mythopoetic speeches that offered pleasant but outright fiction to his hosts; branding his entire new foreign policy as “outreach” and “reset” as he sought to soothe Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, or Muslim Brotherhood leaders; sending subtle messages that an old ally like Britain, the Czech Republic, or Israel is now just one of many, while reaching out to old enemies like Iran, sending an ambassador to Syria, and trying to appease Putin. All that by now is old hat and relegated to the talk-show litanies. And if the showboating-Nobel-laureate policy has not made the world any safer or more secure since 2009 — so akin to the Carter reset years between ’77 and ’78 — it so far has not seemed to make things all that much worse. So far, that is.

But what appears to be a gesture in isolation often become a tessera in a larger mosaic, and after three years the picture is starting to emerge of a somewhat different United States. Whether the emerging image is a fair representation or not does not really matter because, after all, it is an image perceived by others that President Obama is ambiguous about America’s past and its future, that he seems to agree that others might justifiably have long-standing grievances against the United States, that his inherited friends are as problematic as his inherited enemies, that foreign animosity toward the United States during the Bush administration had a logical basis, that America’s wrong wars are better ended than won, that he reluctantly must expand the Bush antiterrorism protocols he once derided as so toxic, and that just as he derides the 1 percent at home as suspect, so too perhaps abroad he is equally suspicious of the small number of wealthy and prosperous nations who derive riches from the other 99 percent.

The result of all this, as in the fashion of 1979–80, is that many nations — Iran, North Korea, China, Pakistan, Russia — might conclude that there is now a good full year left for readjustment to the global security scene in ways that will not earn much reaction from the U.S...

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2011 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

The formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq on Dec. 15 enhanced neighboring Iran as a major, unpredictable factor in the U.S. presidential election of 2012.

First a look back: Iran's mullahs already has had one opportunity to affect American politics, in 1980. Their seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days haunted President Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign and – thanks to such developments as yellow ribbons, a "Rose Garden" strategy, a failed rescue operation, and ABC's America Held Hostage program – contributed to his defeat. Ayatollah Khomeini rebuffed Carter's hopes for an "October surprise" release of the hostages and twisted the knife one final time by freeing them exactly as Ronald Reagan took the presidential oath.

Today, Iran has two potential roles in Obama's reelection campaign, as disrupter in Iraq or as target of U.S. attacks. Let's look at each of them:

Who lost Iraq? Although George W. Bush's administration signed the status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government, stipulating that "All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011," Obama's decision against keeping a residual force in Iraq made the troop withdrawal his choice and his burden. This puts him at risk: should things go badly in Iraq in 2012, he, not Bush, would take the blame. Iran's supreme guide, Ali Khamene'i, in other words, can make Obama's life miserable.

Khamene'i has many options: He can exert more control over those many Iraqi leaders who are Shiite Islamists with a pro-Iranian outlook, some of whom even lived in exile in Iran. For example, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki fits this mold. The Iranians can also influence Iraqi politics via the country's intelligence services, which they have already substantially penetrated. Or, they can move Iranian troops at will into Iraq, those tens of thousands of U.S. troops now gone from Iraq's eastern border, and engage in mischief of their choosing. Finally, they can support proxies like Muqtada al-Sadr or dispatch terrorist agents.

In 1980, the Iranians manipulated the American political process with hostages; in 2012, Iraq is their plaything. Should Iran's rulers decide to make trouble before Nov. 6, the Republican candidate will blame Obama for "losing Iraq." Given Obama's long opposition to the war, that will sting.

(Alternatively, the Iranians can shift gears and make good on their threat to close the Straits of Hormuz to imperil the 17 percent of world oil that goes through that waterway, thereby creating global economic instability.)

Mullahs chose to harm a weakened Democrat in 1980 and could do so again; or, they could decide that Obama is more to their liking and desist. The key point is, the troop withdrawal hands them extra options. Obama may well rue not having kept them there until after the elections, which would have allowed him plausibly to claim, "I did my best."

Bomb Iranian nukes? Almost two years ago, when Obama still held a threadbare popular plurality among Americans of +3 percent, I suggested that a U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities "would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene" to his benefit. With one action, he could both protect the United States from a dangerous enemy and redraw the election contest. "It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon."

As Obama's popularity has sunk to -4.4 percent and the elections loom less than a year away, his incentive to bomb Iran has substantially increased, a point publicly discussed by a colorful range of figures, both American (Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, Ron Paul, Elliott Abrams, George Friedman, David Broder, Donald Trump) and not (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro). Health care, employment, and the debt offer the president little solace, the Left is disappointed, and the independent vote is up for grabs. Current skirmishes over sanctions and drones could be mere distraction; an attack on Iranian facilities would presumably take place in the first half of 2012, not too self-evidently close to the U.S. elections.

In conclusion: Khamene'i and Obama can both make trouble for the other. If they do, Iran and Iraq would play outsized roles in the presidential contest, continuing in their unique thirty-year role as the tar babies of American politics.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Two terrible September days sum up the first decade of the new American millennium.

The first, of course, was Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden’s suicide terrorists that morning hit the Pentagon, knocked down the World Trade Center, killed 3,000 Americans, and left in their wake 16 acres of ash in Manhattan and $1 trillion in economic losses. Two invasions, into Afghanistan and Iraq, followed — along with a more nebulous third "war on terror" against Islamic radicalism generally.

America was soon torn apart over both the causes and the proper reaction to the attacks. The Left often cited America’s foreign interventions and Middle East policies as provocations. And it soon bitterly opposed the war in Iraq, and even more adamantly decried the antiterrorism protocols that followed 9/11.

The Right countered that only unwarranted hatred of the U.S. prompted the carnage. The best way, then, to prevent more Islamic terrorism was to go on the offensive abroad against regimes that sponsored terrorism, whether the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. New security protocols and laws at home were likewise needed to prevent another major terrorist onslaught.

But a decade later, the unforeseen had happened...