As his self-proclaimed 10-day window for dealing with Iran approaches its end, what are President Trump’s options? GoodFellows regulars Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster weigh the merits of a US military strike versus an interim diplomatic solution. They also probe the Epstein scandal’s impact on the British landscape and the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Trump administration’s use of emergency powers for tariff implementation. Later, in the “lightning round”: why US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was warmly received at the Munich Security Conference; the Pentagon’s desire to sever academic ties with Harvard University; Barack Obama’s suggesting that aliens exist; plus H.R.’s remembrance of film great Robert Duvall, aka Apocalypse Now’s Lt. Col. Bill “I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning” Kilgore.

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Unlike the romanticized tale the Chinese Communist Party tells of itself—long marches and a long game of outlasting and outwitting its foes—the early years of the CCP were ones of unrepentant violence and a rise to power made possible only with external help. Frank Dikötter, the Hoover Institution’s Milias Senior Fellow and author of the forthcoming book, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, joins GoodFellows regulars Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane and H.R. McMaster to discuss what shaped the CCP from the years 1921–1949, plus parallels between Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in terms of amassing power, purging rivals, and practicing economics and geopolitics. After that: the fellows debate the assertion by a New York Times columnist that Donald Trump has “lost the country,” as well as how much faith to put in economic indicators, plus songstress Billie Eilish’s belief that “no one is illegal on stolen land.”

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Donald Trump’s drop-in at the World Economic Forum and the ensuing kerfuffle between the American president and the attending globalist elites raises the question: Who is winning on the world stage, Trump or his foes—or do they have more in common than is commonly recognized? Tyler Cowen, an economist, blogger, and Free Press columnist, joins GoodFellows regulars Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster to discuss Trump’s third presidential visit to the Davos, Switzerland, lion’s den, plus the rise of “democratic socialism” and “affordability politics” embodied in the ethos of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. After that: the three fellows discuss lessons from Minneapolis in the aftermath of two protestors shot to death by federal immigration agents; the odds of American military strikes against Iran; the significance of China’s latest military purge; plus whether the show’s resident historians are comfortable with the (over)use of phrase “the right side of history.”

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