Hi everyone and welcome.

My name is Glenn Dyson and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercurice and George Beebe, a former

CIA director of Russia Analysis and now the director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft, which by the way has excellent publications and at least my go to source for great analysis.

Beavis also the author of the Russia Trap from 2019, how our shadow war with Russia could spiral into nuclear catastrophe.

So again, something we all ought to be reading. Welcome. It's good to see you both again.

Thank you very much. So our topic today is an article written by you, George Beebe, for the irresponsible statecraft. And it's about how we can end the war in Ukraine.

What would be the conditions around the peace negotiations? How could the U.S. have some

negotiate from strength? So a lot of these issues. And I thought perhaps

we could start off by you outlining your key argument, perhaps. Well, sure. What I was

trying to do in the article was to point out that the approach that the Biden administration has taken to this war,

even prior to the actual invasion in February of 2022, has been counterproductive. First, it increased

the likelihood of the invasion happening. But once it occurred, it actually made it

less likely that we could resolve this conflict at the negotiating table. And I tried to point out,

what were the flawed assumptions behind the Biden administration's approach and what Trump

needs to do in order to maximize the likelihood that we can find

a compromise settlement, one that the Russians buy into, the Ukrainians buy into, and Europe

supports. Now, the other key player in this, which I did not get into in the article, but which

is probably the most difficult part of all of this, is Washington. Trump has got to convince

Washington's foreign policy establishment to get on board, And that may be even more difficult than convincing

the Russians, Ukrainians, and our allies in Europe to buy into some sort of compromise. And

there's a lot of challenge that I think awaits from as he undertakes this effort, which I think is absolutely necessary. I think there has got to be a settlement of this war. The alternatives to that are much worse than the compromises that are going to be necessary to end this war at the negotiating table. So Trump is absolutely right in trying to seek an end to this war.

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