Victor Davis Hanson on “The End of Everything”

Plus, Yossi Klein Halevi on antisemitism as the symbolization of The Jew

“How civilizations disappear” is the subject of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.”

Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. His new book offers four detailed and sobering case studies of how prospering, successful civilizations—the Greek city-state of Thebes, Carthage in what is now Tunisia, Byzantine Constantinople, and Aztec Tenochtitlan—were conquered and essentially obliterated.

The looming shadow that lends the book its urgency is the risk that it could happen again now—either a Russian defeat of Ukraine, or a Chinese defeat of Taiwan, or an Iranian defeat of Israel. Davis even speculates about a Turkish attack on Greece or on Armenia.

Hanson identifies some patterns among the defeated civilizations. They “counted on help that rarely appeared.” They were “too confident in their fortifications.” They “struggled with factionalism and disunity.” They underestimated the capabilities and ruthlessness of their enemies and overestimated their own strengths. They put too much faith in last-ditch diplomacy.

Does it sound a little too familiar for comfort?

If there’s an optimistic thread here, it’s that the defeats in the cases he outlines might have been avoided with different choices and less complacency. That makes the stories relevant, and practically useful as a warning—including here in America.

The laws of human nature, he writes, apply “even to the United States, which often believes it is exempt from the misfortunes of other nations, past and present.”

The “delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered: ‘It cannot happen here.’”