Hi everyone and welcome. I'm joined today by the excellent Alexander Mercuris and by always high demand,

Jeffrey Sachs. And yeah, I really wanted to speak to the both of you today about the possibility

of peace, especially now as Trump's moving into the White House. perhaps people are too optimistic or pessimistic about

their prospect.

Again, I find it all, to be honest, sometimes confusing when I hear him speak.

For example, Trump just posted an interesting video on social media, a video of you, Professor

Sachs, where you are criticizing, I guess, efforts to portray always world conflicts as some sort of

a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. And your focus in the clip is Israel and the wars

from Iraq, Syria, the genocide in Palestine. And well, if Israel has its way, also Iran. So

you point out that these wars don't really have anything to do with democracy and you even came down pretty hard on Netanyahu.

So much deserved.

Yeah, much deserved. And this is possibly it. Also why I was surprised that Trump would post this video, given that he tends to portray himself as Israel's best friend.

However, I would argue one can also put the Ukraine in the same category.

The war, of course, was starting in 2014 with the effort of pulling Ukraine into NATO's orbit.

It's something Ukrainians at that time overwhelmingly did not want,

and again, pulling them into

NATO's orbit and avoidably destroyed its democracy, also main basic human rights. Yet, the political

media leads tend to still portray this as democracy versus authoritarianism. So, anyways, I thought

it was interesting that Trump is now listening to you. It gives me reason to be optimistic.

But I thought we can start by you may be outlining some of your main ideas there.

And also what you read into Trump's interest in your arguments.

Well, first of all, let's just say he posted some remarks that I made at Cambridge Student Union.

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