It's Tuesday, November 25th, 2025, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast,

examining matters of history and current events, economics, and geopolitics. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a distinguished policy fellow here at the Hoover Institution broadcasts examining matters of history and current events, economics, and geopolitics.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a distinguished policy fellow here at the Hoover Institution. I'll be your

moderator today, joined by our full fleet or full complement of good fellows as we jokingly refer to them.

And I am referring, of course, to the historian, Sir Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran,

and former presidential national security advisor,

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. Good to see you guys. So, fellows, today, we're going to

answer viewer mails. We've been badgering our listeners for weeks now to send in questions,

and I want to thank everybody who bothered to do so. It's a reminder of the scope of this show.

We receive questions from no

less than six continents and numerous countries. Smart questions, I would add. And if your

question to not get answered this round, I apologize simply too many to get to in this limited

amount of time. So gentlemen, let's get to it. And our first question comes from Edward

in Brighantine, New Jersey.

He writes, is the proposed Trump-Puton agreement on Ukraine's fate more like Chamberlain Hitler deciding on Czechoslovakia's 1938 or Stalin Hitler on Poland in 1939?

I would note that is we record this on Tuesday morning here. Right now, the 27 point, I believe, has been slimmed down to 19 points.

Ukraine reportedly has agreed to core terms of this deal. Neil, what do you make of it?

It's not like either of those things for the very obvious reason that in 1938, a part of Czechoslovakia was handed over without a fight,

and then the rest of it was swallowed up without a fight. And in 1939, Poland was partitioned very

rapidly indeed by Nazi Germany and Stalin-Soviet Union, whereas what is happening here is that a compromise

peace is being negotiated after nearly four years of conflict in which Ukraine has inflicted

huge losses on the Russian army and prevented the Russian army from achieving a subjective,

...