Transcript
Narrator/Announcer (0:04)
Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio.
Hugh Hewitt (0:28)
Morning Glory and Evening Grace in America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. This Halloween day, that music means it's time for the Hillsdale Dialogue, the last radio hour of the week. I am joined as him Most week by Dr. Larry Arn, President of Hillsdale College. We'll get to Hillsdale at Halloween at the end of the program. Must be an interesting night on the campus, but Dr. Arne, welcome. Good to talk to you after a few weeks since last we spoke. President Trump brought peace to the Middle east, or at least a big ceasefire, and got 20 hostages out of the clutches of Hamas. And I did not, frankly, think that was possible. What do you make of Trump's performance here?
Dr. Larry Arnn (1:06)
Well, it's amazing. Of course, one doesn't know how successful it's going to be. Odds are against it. But the energy that he brought to that. We had a really great guy here in town this week named Wes Mitchell. He's going to do some teaching for us. He gave a speech and he's written a brilliant paper about the art of diplomacy. We make two mistakes about diplomacy. One is we think military power is enough, and the other is we think it doesn't matter if you've got the military power. What Trump does, it's kind of like the art of the deal. He's pretty good at going around, talking to people and figuring out what they want and what they need and what their pressure points are. And he brought a bunch of people together to cooperate with this that you wouldn't think he could do. Egypt, Qatar, you know, those are important places. Turkey, Turkey. And they've got some power and they're going to be involved. And he got Israel to agree. And, of course, that's a, you know, life and death matter to them. Israel let a couple of thousand prisoners go. They weren't being tortured and starved to death and raped the way the Hamas hostages were, but he let them go. And some of them were under sentence of death or life imprisonment for murder. So it's a very complicated thing. And who would have thought it could have happened?
Hugh Hewitt (2:26)
I didn't. I had given up, actually, on seeing those 20 people again. I'm the pessimist in the crowd. But I got to ask you about Dan Senor. He runs a great podcast, the Call Me Back podcast. Dan was the Coalition Provisional Authority spokesperson for a number of years. He's a big guy in New York. He's written a couple of books on Israel. And his Call Me Back podcast is probably the most popular podcast among American juries of the center. Right. And widely read listened to in Israel. Dan made a comment last week when he's talking to Dava Yal, who is basically the Dan Bals of Israel, that Netanyahu had embraced the madman theory of foreign affairs when he hit Qatar with the attempt to kill the Hamas leaders. And that shook everyone up so badly that Trump was able to come in in the aftermath of that and say, I can deal with, with Bibi, but you have to help me out by you dealing with Hamas and let's get everyone to the table. And then Dan went on to say madman theory goes back to Machiavelli. That was news to me. I know it's associated with Richard Nixon in Vietnam, but. But is that your understanding of where madman theory comes from? Unpredictability equals power.
