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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because

we know you can't get enough Americano in your life. I am delighted to be joined by Professor

John Meersheimer, who is a professor at the University

of Chicago, and a leading expert on international relations, as well of someone who's caused

quite a bit of controversy, or stirred up quite a bit of anger anyway, with his recent speeches

about Gaza and Ukraine. John, I'm delighted that you are our first guest.

Thank you for coming on.

I want to start by asking you to give your response to Emmanuel Macron,

because there's a video that's been going around,

and a lot of people are saying how clever and eloquent Macron is,

because he has spelled out why he thinks the West should

support France, in his case, but the West generally should support Ukraine in hitting

Russian targets, targets within Russia in response.

And he does make quite an eloquent case, which is that since Russia is aggressively

attacking Ukraine from within its borders, and we are giving Ukraine weapons to defend itself,

Ukraine should be able to strike back at Russian targets, as long as they are military targets.

What's your response to

...