WASHINGTON DC - Victor Davis Hanson comes on like the bracing sting of the first splash of lotion on a shaving nick. During his long career as a classicist Hanson has pointed out the cultural dimension of warfare, and has brought his classical perspective massively to bear on the current scene in his frequent commentaries for National Review Online, many of them collected into a new book, An Autumn of War.

Hanson, currently serving as visiting professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, came to Washington on Monday to offer his reflections on where we stand a year after September 11. Everyone is doing so this week, but from Hanson you will hear none of the treacly sentimentality of most of the TV talking heads we are fated to suffer.

To say that Hanson is politically incorrect is on par with saying Bill Clinton likes girls. He has no use for the cultural relativists who say that Islamic radicalism is born of poverty or Western maltreatment, or for the therapeutic liberals who think yet another mediation process or conflict resolution group can end terrorism. This war, like most wars, will end in the usual way: with victory or defeat by one side. Hanson bluntly calls Saudi Arabia an enemy, and notes that war is an innate human trait that progress is never likely to change.

Hanson is piercing with his blunt discourse about human carnage, yet the sum of his teaching is edifying. Western nations typically whip non-western nations in war because of inherent cultural traits such as discipline and superior technology. The worst wars are when modern western nations fight each other--not when we fight non-western cultures. That is why a fight with Iraq is not much to be feared.

More provocative is Hanson’s perspective of the widening split between the U.S. and Europe, leading him to speculate that a U.S. war against Iraq might lead to the breakup of NATO. Might this be such a bad thing? After all, NATO was formed primarily to defend Europe against Soviet communism, which no longer exists. Maybe not, but Hanson notes that Europe, despite its wealth, is not able to defend itself or its interests in a serious way. Europe, Hanson said, is like the Hobbits in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, living in an idyllic, self-contained little world and relying on someone else, the United States, to protect them. Europe couldn’t get it together to end genocide in its own back yard in 1999 without the lead of the U.S. If, Hanson mused, the Vatican had been destroyed last September 11, Europe would have had neither the means nor the will to fight back as the U.S. has. Why all this fear of “unilateralism” then; we’re going to have to do all the real fighting ourselves anyway, no matter how much “support” we get from our European “allies.”

Claremont’s Charles Kesler added an observation that aptly summarizes where we are. The national slogan after 9/11, generated by the heroes of Flight 93, is “Let’s roll.” This contrasts nicely with the national slogan of the Clinton years, which was “Let’s move on.” Whether we maintain the active voice attitude of the present or the passive voice attitude of the past will determine whether this war ends in victory or defeat.

Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of The Age of Reagan--The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. He can be reached via email at shayward@pacificresearch.org.