It's Tuesday, May 6, 2025, 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 and I'll be your moderator today.

Most enviable task because I now get to kick back and benefit from the collective wisdom of three of the brightest individuals I know.

We call them the good fellows. They are the historian Sir Neil Ferguson, John Cochran, a.k.a. the grumpy

and blog name, Ali, is actually a delightful gentleman. And former presidential national security advisor and our resident optimist, lieutenant general, HR McMaster.

In addition, there are many distinguished accomplishments.

Neil, John, and HR are all Hoover Senior Fellows.

Well, gentlemen, we're doing something different today, something we haven't done in a while.

It's a what we call a B.Y.O show, or more to the point, a BYOT show, as

in bring your own topic. We've got G-CSU to come ready and loaded with a matter for conversation.

John Cocker and I turn to you. This week is coincides with the 80th anniversary of VE Day in Europe,

Victory in Europe Day, and you have Europe on your mind.

Ah, yes. Well, part of that is I want to advertise. I have a book coming out with my co-authors,

Luis Garcano and Klaus Masuk, on how to reform the Euro.

Title?

Crisis cycle. And the theme is that the Euro is actually pretty well set up, but then a sequence of crises broke all the rules and now they need to get the rules going again.

So we won't, I won't give you a book breakdown. It's just a reason to be on my mind.

It's on my mind another reason too. Europe is having an economic reckoning as well as its foreign policy and military

reckoning, which I think HR will talk about, and how does it deal with trade, another reckoning.

But from the Mario Draghi report to many other voices, it is recognizing that it stopped growing in 2010.

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