Welcome to the Libertarian. I'm Charles C.W. Cook, and I'm here with the Libertarian himself, Richard Epstein. Richard, welcome to your own show.

Thanks. I love being welcome to my own show.

This is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. All right, Richard, I'm going to ask you about the war in Iran,

and I'm going to start with a declaration that you can agree with, disagree with, throw things around in response to, I think we're losing and that we shouldn't have gone in. Am I wrong?

God knows. I think the question is two parts are interdependent.

I think at present, it looks to me as if we are losing.

I don't think that answers the first question because the question is if we had optimal

policies by Mr. Trump after he decided to go in, would we be in this particular type of

situation?

I think a lot of that depends upon how you think about warfare.

One of the things that I just watched, I don't know if you saw it, was a great show called Masters in the Air, which talked about the 100th Battalion of the Eighth Army Air Force,

which in B-17 Super Fortress, the four-engine

planes were bombing all sorts of places in German and so forth, with a level of casualties,

which would be unacceptable today and so forth.

And just what was the question about how you thought about wars?

And what they thought about it was in two terms.

First, there was only one end to the war

that they regarded as even worth talking about,

and that was unconditional surrender by the enemy.

There was no effort whatsoever

to bring back a compromise

where Germany would be allowed to remain

...