Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books,

great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College

Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast.com.hillsdale.edu or wherever you find your audio.

Morning, glory and even grace, America.

I'm Hugh Hewitt on this Halloween day.

That music means it's time for the Hillsdale Dialogue, the last radio hour of the week. I am joined

at him most week by Dr. Larry Arne, president of Hillsdale College. We'll get to Hillsdale

at Halloween at the end of the program. Must be an interesting night on the campus. But Dr. Arne,

welcome. Good to talk to you after a few weeks. Since last we spoke, President Trump brought peace to the Middle

East, or at least a big ceasefire, and got 20 hostages out of the clutches of a moss. And I did not,

frankly, think that was possible. What do you make of Trump's performance here? Well, it's amazing.

Of course, one doesn't know how successful it's going to be. Odds are against it. But the energy that he brought to that, we had a really great guy here in town this week named Wes Mitchell. He's going to do some teaching for us. He gave a speech, and he's written a brilliant paper about the art of diplomacy. We make two mistakes about diplomacy. One is we think

military power is enough, and the other is we think it doesn't matter if you've got the military

power. What Trump does, it's kind of like the art of the deal. He's pretty good at going around

talking to people and figuring out what they want and what they need and what

their pressure points are. And he brought a bunch of people together to cooperate with this

that you wouldn't think he could do. Egypt, Qatar, you know, those are important places. Turkey.

And they've got some power and they're going to be involved. And he got Israel to agree.

And, of course, that's a, you know, life and death matter to them. Israel let a couple of thousand prisoners go.

They weren't being tortured and starved to death and raped the way the Hamas hostages were. But he let them go.

And some of them were under sentence of death

or life imprisonment for murder. So it's a very complicated thing, and who would have thought it

...