It's Tuesday, April 26, 2022, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast,

examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow.

We'll be your moderator

today. I'd like to introduce you to the stars of our show. Three of my colleagues we jokingly

refer to as Hoover's Goodfellows. That would be the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John

Cochran, geostrategist, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, they are Hoover Institution Senior

Fellows all. Gentlemen, it's good to see you after a week off, and I thought we'd do something a little

different this week.

This is going to be what we call a B-Y-O-T show, as in bringing your own topic.

John Cochran, why don't you begin?

Well, it's such a pleasure.

One of the pleasures I get out of this show is the chance to nail my two working, my hard traveling colleagues to the floor for 15 minutes and ask them hard questions about things I don't understand. So that's what I'm going to do. And I have a two-part question, which is a little bit both HR and Neil. So first, this week was supposed to be the grand tank battle in eastern Ukraine,

replaying the Battle of Kursk or something of the sort. And since I know I happen to know somebody

who was a tank commander and could tell us something about how these things work. In particular,

it doesn't seem to be happening. I'd be curious how you would be handling it if you

were Ukrainian. I'm interested that they seem to be digging immense trenches and fortifications.

Is this a big, magical line? I would have thought they would have played for maneuver,

space, let the Russians move in a little bit, stretch their supply lines, and then close in.

But given what they got, you know, what would you be doing?

And related, the other week's news, and this is for both of you, the larger, from the small to the

large, the geostrategic question, the U.S. is now at war with Russia. We have announced war aims that

...