2026: The Weaponization of Economic Interdependence

P5 Transcript
Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Please get seated. We should start. So we have a very strong panel to discuss the present state of affairs, the weaponization of the economy.

We just heard from Professor Markus Jaeger, who gave us, really, the lay of the land. And now we are going to discuss the various players and how they deal with that situation. And I will start with the only panelist who is not in the room, Arancha Gonzalez, who was the Foreign Minister of Spain but also has been involved, a big part of a career in trade.

I worked with Pascal Lamy, with the Minister. He's really a great expert on trade issues and a committed supporter of the European Union. And now the Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs.

Arancha, I think that when we look at Europe, we see the European Union, more specifically. We see an organization that wants to find its autonomy, to free itself from dependence on the United States, including on American financial systems. We also see an organization, a continent that has a huge market, that has a significant clout.

But we're not sure whether the European Union can use that clout to really avoid being swayed by the United States and by China. It is an anti-coercion instrument. There are a number of things.

But there's still a question mark on how the European Union is going to deal with various pressures. So you have the answer.

Arancha Gonzalez:
Thank you very much, Jean-Marie. And apologies for not being with you. I would rather be with you and discuss this very important question, which at the end of the day is what power and what vulnerabilities is Europe ready to live with?

That's in reality the question that you're asking us. And the answer that Europe is giving, and is, of course, a work in progress, is first to reduce strategic vulnerabilities, two, add optionalities, and three, keep the interconnection. In other words, it's not a policy for decoupling or for retrenchment.

And it's not across the board. So it's strategic vulnerabilities, it's adding optionality, and it is keeping the interconnection. This is the three main ingredients through which Europe is looking at building more strategic autonomy.

And the two words matter equally. It's autonomy, it's not full independence. As I said, it's not full decoupling.

We are very clear in Europe that decoupling is simply not possible. It's not the level of, you know, it's not a level, with a level of costs that we are ready to live with. So it's autonomy, it's not independence, and it's strategic.

And, of course, it all depends on what you call strategic. But let me give you a few ideas of where Europe is working on, because the strategic vulnerabilities are in a few sectors where the EU is working to build more capacity to define for itself what it wants its future to be. The first one, obviously, is deepening the internal market.

We all have seen the proposals that the Commission has put on the table and that both the Parliament and the Council of Member States of the EU, so like the two chambers that require agreement in Europe, have come up with to deepen the internal market. Deepening the internal market is essential to reduce vulnerabilities and dependencies, excessive dependencies on foreign markets, gives the European Union the ability to absorb more erratic trade policies of some of its partners. Second area, no surprise there too, is defence, where there is clearly a reliance by Europe, not just the European Union, on the NATO alliance, but also with the weakening of the deterrence capacity of NATO, a clear understanding on the European side that Europe has to build more of a deterrence capacity on its own.

It's spending more, it's spending better, and it's spending together. It's also a little bit more than spending, it's also defining collectively the threats and having a clearer military doctrine for what this deterrence would mean. And all of this is work in progress.

Three is on the financial side, obviously there is a big dependence by the EU on the US, on the US dollar for international trade transactions, on the US infrastructure and jurisdiction, payment systems, clearinghouses, rating agencies, asset managers. And in all of this, there are steps that Europe is taking, including with the digital euro, and more recently with proposals by the big six member states on capital markets union that go in this direction of greater strategic autonomy. I would also maybe to leave it here and to give a space for the conversation later, mention the other sector where the EU is also working to integrate more the European market, and this is in the energy sector.

And events in the last four years, five years, whether it was Russia's invasion of Ukraine and more recently the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are important elements to convince Europeans to go full steam ahead in not only in boosting sources of energy that build greater resilience in Europe, reducing the impact of fossil fuel energies in the European market, but also connecting better the national infrastructures and investing in the grid, given the ambitions that Europe has for electrification. So all of this is work in progress.

Now, obviously, and let me end here, more European optionality would mean, longer term, less power over the EU for its partners and in particular the US. If the EU builds a greater capacity on the defence sector, it means that the EU would be buying more from the EU and less from the US. It would mean diversifying away from the energy partners, including the US, and it would mean, at one point, less US leverage over the EU.

So, I mean, this is not something that the EU has been advancing, but it's something that the EU sees very clearly as the necessity to navigate a much more conflictual world, including a much more conflictual relationship with its traditional ally, that is the US. Back to you, Jean-Marie.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much, Arancha. So, there are a number of arrows in the European quiver, but they need to be sharpened. That's what you are saying, in a way.

Now, I would like to turn to Zoe, who works at the Council on Foreign Relations and who has been watching China very carefully and closely. And when one looks at China, of course, it's now an economic giant. Its economy, and that's a big difference with the time of the Cold War, its economy is a very successful economy and it's deeply integrated with the world economy.

But it seems to continue to be driven by exports. I mean, the Chinese consumers, they don't spend what the rest of the world would want them to spend. And so, that leads to an economy, an export-driven economy.

And the question really, when one talks about weaponization, is whether that creates for China a capacity to weaponize, or on the contrary, it creates also a dependence. So, how does that new politicization of economic relations, how do you think it plays in China and how is it going to play in the future?

Zoe Zongyuan Liu:
First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be here and thank you all for sharing your day here with us at Columbia. Yes, I'm working at the Council on Foreign Relations, but I'm also part of the Columbia Institute of Global Politics. So, I also teach a class here, so I'm very much a member of the Columbia community.

Now, putting that aside, to directly answer your question, I'd say what China is seeking is not necessarily autarky. What China is seeking is also not trying to replace the United States, whether it is U.S. dollar, replacing U.S. dollar with renminbi or anything like that, but what China is trying to do. The bottom line, based upon my research, is that China is trying to avoid using a term that might be overly used these days, a suicidist trap.

China is trying to avoid the suicidist trap, but at the same time, obtain a de facto veto against U.S. unilateral action power, which includes sanctions, export controls, and things like that. So, it might sound like it seems that China is trying to have it cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you are trying to integrate into the global market, trying to make the rest of the world so dependent on you, and at the same time, you are trying to build self-sufficiency.

How is that going to work? So, I'd say what China is trying to do is very similar to what the European Union is trying to do in terms of seeking strategic optionality, but seeking strategic optionality comes at significant cost, which basically means there is a domestic political decision in terms of what kind of trade-off that China is willing to take. Now, on the one hand, economically, you are absolutely right.

The Chinese economy remains to be very much export-dependent. Up until now, about 20% of the Chinese economy still comes from export. Now, if we are talking about right now at this moment, if you only look at where does China export, Chinese export to the United States used to be number one most important export market, but right now, Chinese direct export to the United States is less than 10% of Chinese total export.

Now, this gives some people in the Trump administration to say, well, tariffs actually worked because we significantly reduced our dependence on China, but that is overly simplified because where does the Chinese export eventually end up in? Still, a lot of those end up in the United States, but the export ended up coming through a longer route. Especially through Southeast Asia.

So if you look at the numbers, there is a direct linkage between the rise of Chinese export to countries like Vietnam in particular and Vietnam's export surge to the United States. Obviously, small economy like Vietnam cannot simply absorb that big amount of Chinese export. So this is just one example to say not just decoupling is not happening, but it takes a different format.

Goods, including manufactured goods and energy, which Richard, I'm sure, is going to talk more about. A lot of this stuff is fungible, meaning what China is trying to do is trying to build optionalities to see where its goods can go. And if tariff means made in China becomes too expensive, too inconvenient to be directly exported, that gives the Chinese companies as well as the government incentive to encourage companies to shift manufacturing capacity overseas.

So I track Chinese overseas industrial parks. And it's interesting that Chinese investment in overseas industrial parks also closely follow where Chinese investment in overseas ports and overseas exports, airports as well. So from that point of view, I just say what China is trying to do is not really seeking autarky, is not trying to replace the United States as the global leader.

But instead, what China is trying to do is trying to make an increasingly fragmented global system work in its favor. Now, how does China do it? China is trying to build alternatives through a currency system.

Now, we just heard that the European Union is trying to develop its own alternative capital market, trying to build its alternative euro-based payment system, and so on and so forth. But China has been doing that for a long period of time. It's just that the motivation has changed, especially since 2018.

Now, before 2018, when you take a step back around 2009, when Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan first talked about the need for renminbi internationalization, the rationale was totally with regard to, well, the rest of the world is too risky. Every time when the United States made a big mistake, the rest of the world become collateral damage. Hence, the rest of the world need to have a more diversified currency system is to reduce your risk exposure to the US-based system.

Fast forward, what happened in 2018 was after President Trump's first visit to China, he came back in 2017, started the first trade war. And in 2018, that was the first time of a global tech campaign against Huawei and ZTE. That sort of strategically changed the mindset inside China.

The idea was that the weaponization of interdependencies become a choke point to China's technological advancement. And China deeply believed that it has the right to develop, to grow. And that is a legitimate right for any country.

In that context, the mindset changed from I want renminbi internationalization to be improving the international user experience of doing trade with China. I wanted to reduce the currency risk. I wanted to reduce transaction costs.

From there on, the motivation started to change into hedging against US unilateral power. That includes sanctions, that include export controls. So as a result, in between 2018 and 2024, what ended up happening is that you not only see an acceleration of the broader use of renminbi in international trade and cross-border settlement, but also the acceleration of China's domestic buildup of export control regime.

Before 2020, China didn't really have a domestic export control law. All the trade, China's foreign trade law governs one thing, weapon proliferation. Now, 2020, China launched its export control law.

And that, in a way, it's a mirror image of what the United States has been doing, but it's improvised. Then, when Trump came in for the second time, it gives China the opportunity to test how far it can go as the bare-earth material export control goes. And it also gives China the opportunity to refine its tools with regard to whom it can use it.

Not just Japan, but it also provides China with a series of domestic legitimate laws and regulations and administrative procedures to impose higher costs for foreigners, foreign governments, who try to coerce China. So I'll just close by saying that a lot of what China is trying to do is very similar to what the European Union is trying to do. It's really about how to make interdependencies safer for China without changing, fundamentally, overthrow the existing international system.

Fundamentally, China spent the past 30 years to learn how to play the role. It learned so well that it learned how to exploit it to China's benefit. It even built an alternative around it.

So it wouldn't make any sense for China to completely overthrow the existing system. So the bottom line is very similar to what the European Union is trying to do, seeking strategic optionality, but it adds huge cost. And that's sort of the domestic politics, domestic trade-offs that China has decided that it is willing to take in order to win a longer-term strategic competition with the United States.

Back to you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much. I mean, from what you say, and we're not going to get into that discussion immediately, but I want to go back to it. I mean, you insist on, in a way, how both China and the European Union have, in a way, some shared interests.

But when one looks at China from the European Union perspective, China, I mean, even ignoring the issue of support of China to Russia, but looking at trade and economic issues, there's not a sense that the two economic blocs can really play a joint, have a joint effort, which would be good for the rest of the world, too. I mean, the whole issue of the Global South looms there. So I want to come back to that issue with you and Arancha later in the discussion.

But, because I think this question of the relationship between China and the European Union is a really interesting, interesting one. But before doing that, I want to give the floor to the other panelists. And Richard Nephew, is also teaching at Columbia.

He's a great expert on sanctions, and I would say a practitioner of sanctions, because you have worked for various administrations. And so you've been advising on sanctions. So you have a perspective on one of the tools of weaponization of interdependency that very few people have.

And so as you reflect on that tool of statecraft, and you look at its effectiveness, do you see, what are your conclusions? And do you see there should be some guardrails? Because now it seems that sanctions becomes a kind of all-purpose instrument.

Richard Nephew:
Yeah, well, first of all, just to extend my thanks as well for letting me come and join you today. Very interesting conversation thus far. And as I was walking over here this morning, I was thinking a little bit about questions around legitimacy, which I think are also infused in all this.

Because sanctions are most effective when they are seen as legitimate, right? And I think for most people in the room, that probably then echoes with if it's consistent with UN mandates, if it's something that's covered by UN Security Council resolutions, those sorts of things. But it strikes me that that definition of legitimacy actually lacks something, right?

Part of the reason why is that a lot of UN Security Council sanctions regimes come about simply because the big five decide that we're going to have one. And frankly, the rest of the countries in the world can go hang, right? Because it's the P5 that are able to exercise vetoes and decide whether or not we're going to do these sorts of things.

Is that really a definition of legitimacy? You know, sometimes we can define legitimacy as being linked to whether or not there is a global common good that's being advanced. And I think you could certainly make the case that's one of our most effective international sanctions regimes over the course of the last 30 years is associated with the Iran nuclear file.

Benefited from the fact that we had nuclear obligations that the Iranians were manifestly not implementing under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that required certain steps to be taken. But there are a lot of people who thought that even the Iran sanctions regime, and certainly as it was being implemented, including beyond the specific requirements of the UN by the EU, in addition to the United States, Japan, Korea, a number of other different countries, was excessive and was going beyond what was necessarily required. Is that a legitimate sanctions regime in that regard?

I think this all comes back to the fundamental concepts around sanctions, which are that they are tools that are still being used in the absence of other options if you don't think that diplomacy is going to work and if you'd prefer not to go to military force. And I think what undergirds all of that is a recognition that we are still in a conflictual international environment. We may wish that we weren't, but we are trying to find ways to get past that and try and find ways to communicate with one another to reduce those likelihoods of conflict and then to address conflicts as they come up.

And because we're humans and we don't always have the best way of communicating intentionality to one another, providing confidence to one another, coercion automatically comes back into the fore. So then the question to my mind isn't whether or not sanctions regimes are on their face legitimate. It's whether or not the causes that they are being used for are something that most of the rest of us can understand and support and appreciate, or whether or not they're seen as capricious, whether or not they're seen as just being an individual country trying to take advantage for itself.

And candidly, I think that's part of the reason why now the reaction is coming from the EU, the reaction is coming from China and coming from other states is that the United States is still in a position of significant economic privilege at this point, mostly because of a lot of the buildings down that way, but not exclusively so, is in a position to exert itself as it wishes and to force a lot of people to do what they may not otherwise. But if we go back 10 years or so ago, it was exactly that position that was seen as important in order to address some of these global harms, whether we're talking about Syria and what Assad was doing to his people, we're talking about Iran, whether we're talking about Libya, frankly, we're talking about other kind of global harms like human trafficking, whether we're talking about forced labor, whether we're talking about human rights violations. And the number of times I have been asked why I'm not enforcing a sanctions regime that would get all the corrupt actors and all the human rights violators is indicative of the fact that there is still a sense that sanctions have got significant utility. And that's where I come back to the ultimate questions of effectiveness.

I think sanctions are most effective when you're able to present a clear story that most people understand why they're being imposed and what it will take for them to go. When they're aimed at something that most people around the world can appreciate as being something that is worth those kinds of risks and worth those kinds of costs. And when there is agility that is put in place as sanctions are being enforced, both to think about how to be very effective and what tools aren't effective and to be able to pull those back.

And that requires a lot of analysis, a lot of diplomacy, a lot of communication. But ultimately, what it requires is a very clear understanding of what you're trying to do and whether or not sanctions are going to be a contributor to that. Because if not, frankly, then it's just a lot of symbolic action that doesn't have a lot of value.

So ultimately, I think sanctions effectiveness is linked to those key factors of whether or not you can get across the reasons why you're doing things and then the reasons why you'd be prepared to stop doing those things as time goes on.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
It's the legitimacy of the former legitimacy of a resolution of the Security Council. And there is a deeper political legitimacy of a sort of global consensus. Now, I return to Alex Cooley, who was the director of one of the most prestigious institutes at Columbia, the Harriman Institute, who's been a specialist of Russia and Eastern countries but who recently has done fascinating work on the question of corruption.

And I thought that in this panel where we're talking about interdependencies and economic connections, we see that national and international corruption are becoming a really important feature of the economic and political scene. And so I'd be grateful if you could share a bit of what you've found.

Alexander Cooley:
Yeah, thank you, Jean-Marie. And let me just echo my own gratitude for being here today and being part of this group of very distinguished, knowledgeable experts. Yeah, my own kind of research evolution is a little curious.

I did direct the Harriman Institute for the Study of Russia-Eurasia. I have a specialty in post-Soviet Central Asian politics. And so I would say I've taken a lot of my topics, which include transnational influence networks, transnational corruption networks, and applied them sort of from East increasingly to West.

And now I'm writing and studying a lot on some of the evolution of U.S. foreign policy and some of the ways in which sort of personal interests inform it at the moment. And I would just sort of lay out for our conversation and really Q&A kind of three recent, I would say, U.S. foreign policy national security orientations to corruption and how three administrations have gone about thinking about the corruption issue as it informs greater sort of foreign policy initiatives. So I'll talk about Trump 1.

I'll talk about Biden. I'll talk about Trump 2, right? So Trump 1, the corruption issue at the time, was really incorporated into this kind of orienting document and perspective about great power competition, right?

That we were coming out of the era of the war on terror and the national security strategy under Trump 1. I mean, he didn't understand it or write it, right? But it was certainly at the beginning of his administration sort of emphasized that it was strategic competition with China and Russia that would now be the focus of the U.S. and that the U.S. welcomed this. It didn't necessarily need multilateral institutions to engage in this competition. And in this framework, it singled out, especially Chinese strategic corruption as being corrosive, right? As leading to all sorts of bad things, especially in third regions like debt traps, right?

Like buying off local elites and so forth. And this was even a fundamental part of the first Trump administration's Africa strategy, right? Written by John Bolton.

Singling out, again, strategic corruption. We also had the passing of some landmark legislation, CAATSA, right? Sort of imposed sanctions across a number of sort of countries, Russia and North Korea.

Iran was part of that too. But also the Uyghur Human Rights Act, right? That used sanctions against Chinese officials in Xinjiang that had been associated with some human rights violations there and the issue of the re-education camps in Xinjiang.

So we see this kind of use of the tool, right, in Trump I, which for many seemed to be sort of at odds with some of Trump's private dealings at the time. But what I would emphasize at the time, Trump's private dealings in Trump I were really focused on side deals involving his real estate and licensing business, right? And the scale of these was actually quite small, right?

A few million here, a few million there. Richard's like, well, maybe. But everything's relative, right?

But it was in this sort of domain. And so you had this interesting kind of disconnect. Sort of Trump himself had no issues sort of extending his business dealings into that sort of professional realm.

But the infrastructure of U.S. foreign policy was engaging with sort of corruption and anti-corruption tools. Okay, let's go to Biden. Biden, we see, I would say, the institutionalization of a lot of this, right?

So I think the most significant aspects of the 2021 national security decision to include anti-corruption as part of U.S. national security strategy, right, recognizing this, this is like a fundamental issue, again, sort of singling out some of the strategic corruption that we talked about. And then really Russia's invasion of Ukraine, right, sort of crystallizes this. And this is where the, you know, some of the crowd I hang out with on the anti-corruption front was really happy with Richard, right?

And sort of what they did, right? With the kind of anti-corruption advocacy fuses with the national security advocacy, right? We sanction Russia, we sanction the oligarchs, we confiscate their yachts in a very sort of high profile way.

We don't think about how they're going to be maintained, but we confiscate their yachts and create a real kind of momentum to get at the heart of some of the agents, right? Some of the sort of industries, right? That service sort of like grand corruption.

So we pass a corporate transparency act. We try and eradicate the use of sort of shell companies and anonymous companies. So again, there's a kind of real momentum on this, but it is the fusing of national security strategy, right?

And anti-corruption, right? And it happens very quickly, right? Post-Russia.

So let's then move on to sort of Trump 2. And Trump 2 is marked by, I would say, a turn against liberalism, anti-liberalism, right? In foreign policy.

It's domestically, but it also is projected in a foreign policy. And I think I don't have time to get into the Trump foreign policy coalition, but I think many assume that Trump 2 would be, again, a kind of hyper-realist. When they heard Trump's into transactional foreign policy, they'd say, okay, so he has no time for sort of norms or the UN or kind of like concerns about alliances or things like that.

But what we actually see are some significant departures from Trump 1. One is the deinstitutionalization of foreign policy, right? Taking out the national, the sort of an integrated interagency process, expertise from the State Department, right, these sort of various inputs that came to determine the national interest.

And instead, we have personal envoys now, right, who are handling the portfolios, the conflict portfolios in big parts of the Middle East, Gaza, Iran, Ukraine. And that include Trump's personal friend and his son-in-law, right? And so from this, right, from this deinstitutionalization, we start seeing sort of personal ties, personal connections increasingly in the form, the forms, if not orientation, of sort of foreign policy deals.

Let me just give you a couple of sort of examples here. One is, and this is sort of an article I wrote with Dan Nexon in the March Foreign Affairs piece. One is what we call the transactional bundle, right?

So the first place Trump goes is to the Gulf, right, in terms of an overseas trip, signs three different grand agreements, right, with the UAE, with Qatar, and with sort of Saudi Arabia. And each of these is a mix of commercial deals, government and government deals, but then also sort of private deals, many of them financed by these sovereign wealth funds in this area, right, which includes sort of investments in crypto, licensing deals, and so forth. And we can go through sort of the investigative reporting on this, but it's laid out there.

A second area is an interest in post-conflict resolution, and especially taking the investment funds associated, right, with a post-conflict setting and thinking about how those, again, could be steered to sort of personal and political kinds of allies. And then we have sort of a third area of using the extraterritorial tools of things like the, you know, sanctions, FCPA, you know, the ways in which the U.S. government can, you know, sanction or indict sort of foreign companies, right, and using those as levers and bargaining chips in overall transactions. So possibly sort of cutting a sweetheart deal with Halbank, for instance, sort of non-enforcement there.

But there are others too. So I think transaction, right, means like all sorts of transactions. And what makes it very hard analytically to discern is what is personal, what is institutional, what is national.

They're all bundled together, right? We don't know. And because a lot of these chief negotiators have not signed or been, you know, subject to sort of normal sort of conflicts of interest kind of procedures and scrutiny and disclosures, we really don't know the sort of the full extent of how much sort of personal business informs national business.

I'll conclude with this last thought. None of this is unique to American foreign, no, to foreign policymaking. It's actually quite common in many parts of the world.

Foreign policy is sometimes a family operation. It is a political clientelist operation. There are no differences, right, between domestic and foreign policy.

And it's not unusual to have the president's two sons involved in a mining deal, right, with another sort of country. I think it's quite surprising and stunning for some people that this is happening in the U.S. foreign policy context, right? But again, this is also a language, I would say, to return to my own kind of area, many of the countries I study are perfectly sort of fluent in this and comfortable with this kind of transactionalism, right?

We talk a lot about transatlantic rifts and the European relationship and the NATO relationship, right? But there are other countries in which this is a mode which is functioning okay so far. I would say it has weaknesses in other ways, but certainly some of the countries I study appreciate that it's about business.

It's about doing what you can to sort of conclude those deals. And it's about sort of really dialing back on the kinds of norm issues human rights, governance, democracy that used to consume the agenda in previous administrations.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you for this sobering analysis. Now, I want to turn to Marcus Jaeger. So you explained to us this morning the economic framework and we have had illustrations in the panel, but as I listened to the various panelists, this is really one of the points that I would want you to amplify.

One of the points you briefly made this morning, because of course, one can see that it's better to inflict sanctions or to weaponize trade than to bomb countries. It doesn't kill people in the same way. Although, I mean, the sanctions, the Iraq sanctions at the time, the oil for food issue, and that did have some lethal consequences on the people of Iraq.

But nevertheless, there is a sense that economic weaponization of trade or going further, sanctions do not have the same lethal consequences. They are much better than military conflict. But do you see the risk that this way of now waging aggressive economic statecraft can lead eventually to conflict?

Markus Jaeger
So I think the short answer is probably no, in part because the costs you incur by actually engaging in physical military violence is much greater. I also think that generally, the broader question is, can it lead to conflict? The conflicts that we see, often they are preceded by economic weaponization, but that is often...

So to the extent that we have examples in history where this triggered armed conflict, it seems to me that the underlying cause was quite different. So think of Japan in 1941, for example, right? The story is, yes, sure, US sanctions triggered Japan's expansion, or at least Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, but the underlying cause, of course, of the conflict was much more structural in nature, was Japan's expansion and the war in China.

So generally, I think using economic tools is a lower cost, but they're also less effective. And the notion that they trigger military conflict, I think the chance of this is pretty low, but of course it doesn't mean, let's say, in a very extreme scenario where, say, China gets sealed off of foreign trade, now you probably have to use US Navy to do this, right? In that case, of course, you would expect a Chinese response to this, but using various other tools of financial economic statecraft, I think that's far less likely.

Another reason, of course, is that typically these measures are taken by more powerful states targeting less powerful states, so it's highly unlikely that the country that's targeted will retaliate using physical violence of the country or the coalition of countries that imposes those measures. Of course, that's not to say, and I'm not thinking of this in terms of economic coercion, per se, it's not to say that in some instances in the past, at least, the US and other countries have taken action when they felt the economic interests are at stake. You think of Iran in the 1950s or Guatemala in the 1950s, so even though I'm not sure how strategic banana production was to the US, it was probably quite other reasons that led the US to intervene.

There wasn't a military intervention, of course, in a traditional sense, but that can happen. But I would say in general terms, there's often an underlying strategic conflict that's already there, and then you see economic measures being taken often as a first attempt to coerce the other party. And if that doesn't work, then sometimes it leads to conflict.

But in that case, I wouldn't think of it as a causal relationship in a narrower sense. It's an intermediate step you take before you end up in an armed conflict. And again, the main reason is that the costs of retaliating against these measures tends to be very, very high and much higher than simply enduring those economic coercive measures and costs.

Now, looking forward, I think it's a little different. I mean, I don't think any of us probably think of the U.S. and European Union engaging in some sort of military situation. In the U.S.-China case, I think it's still highly unlikely, but I could see there is a greater case to be made, particularly once sanctions are so extreme, and I think that's highly unlikely, they're so extreme that they really jeopardize China's strategic position. But then the question is, how would this play out? So the short answer, historically, I think, it's quite unlikely. And the example I mentioned in my remarks today, even if you go back to the Peloponnesian War, historians disagree on this, but it wasn't the embargo in Megara that caused the Peloponnesian War.

It was the underlying strategic situation between Sparta and the Athenians that ultimately was the cause of the war. The Megarian Decree perhaps contributed or triggered it, but they weren't the ultimate cause. So in broad terms, I would say it's not really a causal factor in triggering broad-arm conflict.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
If I wanted to push back, I think I would say that indeed the notion that that would lead to an interstate conflict is not, as you said for Japan in the interwar period, we are not there yet, and there are also more strategic fundamental issues. But what I would say is that this systematic weaponization of trade, this erosion of the mechanism that were strengthened with the WTO, the erosion of norms against corruption that Alex discussed, or the non-implementation even of national norms like the Foreign Practice Act in the United States, all that in a way creates a different context for conflict. It's a fundamental destruction of the norms that are, you can say, fragile dikes of sand against war, but that nevertheless moderate the positions of nations.

And if that seems to be going by the window, I think we live in a harsher world, so it doesn't lead directly to conflict, but it does create a context in which conflict becomes less unlikely. So we have heard from all the panelists, and first I would want to ask the panelists if any of what they have heard from their fellow panelists triggers a reaction, and I would want to start with Aruncha and Zoe on this issue of China and Europe, because when one looks at the overall picture of the world, this is a really big issue.

Arancha Gonzalez:
So let me say that I very much agree with our colleague on sanctions, and before we get into EU-China, with the previous speaker's comment on the legitimacy of sanctions, and I was thinking of, in particular, the sanctions that have been announced today under Section 301 of the US, imposing, yet again, tariffs in the order of between 10 and 12 percent for countries' violation of forced labor. In the list, Japan, UK, and the EU, which is quite, let's say that it's quite surprising, let me say, and it's even more surprising coming from a country that practices forced prison labor. So what I see is an instrument being used in an illegitimate manner, but not only that, is weakening the legitimacy of fighting against forced labor, which is a scourge, and for which there are international conventions and international mechanisms and international frameworks.

So I very much wanted to put this on the table because I think it was Richard who spoke of the legitimacy of sanctions, and I very much think he was right about that. On China, EU, Jean-Marie, seen from Europe, Europe needs to develop its own strategy vis-à-vis China, and for now it has a convention that it did a few years ago saying that China is a partner, a competitor, and a rival, but I think the time has come to dust off a little bit this convention and build a bit of a strategy vis-à-vis China, and in my view it should start with Europe recognizing that its intention is not to suppress China's development.

I think we have to be very open and clear about that, but I think in this strategy we will have two difficult items to deal with, no surprise, that have to be owned by the EU and that have to be discussed with China. The first one has to do with Ukraine and the relationship between China and Russia in as far as it helps Russia continue to aggress Ukraine, which for Europe is an existential issue. And the second one, again, is the issue of the structural imbalances that has to do with the manner in which China manages its own economy.

This is for China to do, but obviously the structural imbalances in China are the adjustment factor, is an external adjustment factor, is international markets, is international trade, and I think there needs to be a candid discussion on that. I don't think we should make the argument that China is blanket, you know, artificially uncompetitive. I don't think it is.

I think China has improved enormously its competitiveness, but I think there are structural imbalances and unfair competition conditions that need to be discussed and debated. And the reason why we need to do that is because for Europe, the preferred option is to remain with open markets. And we've heard this from Zoe, it's a bit different from the US that reduces exposure to China.

The preference for the EU would be to maintain openness, but this openness has to be rooted and grounded in political license to keep markets open, and it will be tough if these structural imbalances that China has, and the US has in a different way too, end up being adjusted externally through external markets. So I think it would be good for Europe, again, to build its own strategic outlook vis-à-vis China. And, you know, I've tried to summarize Jean-Marie there, where I think it's going to be tougher, but I think it's better to be clear, open, and consistent than just pretend there is no problem and then raise the finger constantly.

Back to you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
If I can ask you another question, considering your considerable experience in economic relations, we haven't discussed enough the impact of this weaponization of trade on the global South. And what do you think can be done so that this, the battle between China and the United States does not negatively impact the global South?

Arancha Gonzalez:
Yeah, I mean, you're totally right that in this rivalry between the U.S. and China, there are, you know, there is a big impact on the rest of the world. So whether you're in the North, in the South, in the East and in the West, in this plurality of countries that are other than the U.S. and China, this is a concern. And I think the answer would be, I mean, this concern is about structural imbalance.

These are not any different in many countries in the South than they are in the EU. So I think the best way would be to build, to treat this in a cooperative manner, build the spaces for countries teaming up. Let me note, Jean-Marie, that there hasn't been much of an appetite in this vast rest of the world to engage into hiking tariffs or massively weaponizing trade instruments.

So by and large, what we've seen is a desire of countries to keep some semblance of respecting the rules of international trade. Again, not always the case, but by and large, it's been a desire to keep markets open and license to keep markets open. So partnering, cooperating, building coalitions is a lot of what we are seeing happen as a manner, as a means to buffer against this weaponization of the rivalry between the US and China and the spillovers from the rest of the world.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
If you look at this issue, I mean, do you think that's what Arancha said, that in the rest of the world, there's been some sense of keeping these things as they are? Do you think that's going to continue? That's the economic interest of all those countries?

What's your assessment of the impact of what's going on on the global South?

Markus Jaeger
I think I agree. I mean, first of all, these countries don't really have the power to play the same game. They tend to be smaller or even if they're not that small like Brazil, they have no interest in hiking tariffs because as we discussed earlier on, this is economically suboptimal.

And so generally, and the other thing, what they don't want, they don't want to end up in between these fronts to the extent that there's tightening of rules and restrictions because they don't want to have to choose because as of now, they're facing two very large economies or three, including the EU. And for them, it's simply not a great idea to rely on one or the other. Now, that might change to the extent that, and I might have a question for Zoe later on, to the extent that China and the US both start putting restrictions and conditions on trade becomes much harder for them.

But from their perspective, they get access to markets. They get access to capital, private capital, also like public capital from China. And so I think they have no interest in engaging this.

And in part, they don't have the ability to play that game because they're generally not powerful enough beyond perhaps certain mining areas. But trade-wise, they're simply not strong enough. So I think what applies to them also applies for many middle powers, depending on how we define this.

They continue to have an interest in engaging international trade in as open a manner as possible to the extent that this is still an option for them in the context of US-Chinese strategic competition.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
When we heard Richard talking about when in the development of the sanctions policy in the US, talking about the debt trap that China was creating with some countries. And so again, looking at the question of the impact of what's going on between the major world powers and the Global South. And China wants to develop its influence and soft power throughout the world.

How do you see that? And do you think that there is an evolution there? How do you assess China economic policies vis-à-vis the Global South?

Zoe Zongyuan Liu:
Right, Jean-Marie, I think that's really the core question right now, especially when the kind of narrative about the East is rising, the West is declining, that kind of narrative seemingly have gained a lot of attraction, not just in China, but a lot of countries, especially among members of the Global South. Before I go in there, I wanted to just very quickly touch upon the issue of a debt trap. People like me working on international economic and international development issues, a lot of us have spent many, many hours trying to look into the data and the numbers and looking specifically into the contract details.

What we find, actually, not just me, but also folks at William & Mary, at Johns Hopkins, at Harvard, a lot of us eventually independently reached out to the conclusion that there is no such thing as China actively designed a grand strategy of debt trap, trapping foreign countries in the sense that we know you cannot pay, and yet we wanted to do this. We just never find that kind of evidence. What we do find, however, is that China has never actively engaged in international development issues.

And that speaks to the fact that there is literally zero expertise, zero country risk assessment, zero understanding of environmental impact assessment, zero impact understanding. Well, you know, in foreign countries, regime can change. Military coup can happen.

You know, you cannot just pay off higher-level officials and assume that road can be built. Basically, whatever works in China does not always work out overseas. And you ended up often seeing Chinese independent contractors.

They know how to game the system of getting loans from Chinese banks. You ended up having to cook the books and then eventually work out the spreadsheet. They ended up obtaining lending from the Chinese banks.

Then they ended up getting themselves in a very difficult condition. So what we end up finding is actually a debt trap trapping a lot of Chinese companies overseas. So that's sort of the finding that we have.

We do understand, although. I think it's Secretary Michael Pompeo was the first time with a higher-level U.S. official. So when he talked about the China debt trap, that sort of gained attraction in the media and so on and so forth.

But I just wanted to put that on the record. You know, like from our empirical research, we haven't really found any active evidence suggesting that there is this grand strategy. And this also applies to the earlier point that you were talking about in terms of China's imbalance.

I do think this imbalance matters tremendously going forward for China gaining influence and gaining leadership internationally. Right now, we do see China has tremendous capacity. But you do not really convert capacity into credibility or character of leadership.

And this is what China actually lacks. You know, China has tremendous industrial capacity. It's about 30% of global industrial output.

It's bigger than Germany, U.S., Japan, Korea, France, Italy all combined. It's bigger than all the combination of those. Of course, if you layer on top of Russia's President Putin's war against Ukraine, and China seemingly China tries to say that it's not providing any material support to Russia.

But viewing from Europeans' point of view, China is not just an economic challenger or economic threat, but also is a security threat. So you combine those, this becomes a very challenging point for Chinese officials to work with the European Union in terms of post-conflict construction and so on and so forth. And there is no easy way out, especially when you realize that China is not going to change its industrial policy, its position.

It's not going to change its commitment to climb up the value chain. It's not going to change its commitment to pursue technology self-sufficiency. Now the caveat here is that although China doesn't have an active grand strategy to use overcapacity to flood the international market to a desperate foreign industrial base, the reality is whatever happens in China from top down, you put out the industrial output target, you ended up having local government, the companies, the domestic banking system, the venture capital system, everybody else is trying to actively engage in achieving the target. You ended up having overcapacity.

So it doesn't matter whether China has or does not have this kind of grand strategy or not. The fact that China becomes not very sympathetic to the global ramifications, that becomes a tremendous baggage for China going forward to convert its massive industrial capacity into global leadership or for that matter, leadership character. So I'd say going forward, if we are having these conversations five years down the road, do I see China gaining international influence?

For sure. But does that mean China is going to gain international leadership? I'd say no.

And here, I'd reference your previous book, Alex, although your work on The Great Game was in the context of Central Asia. But a lot of us tend to think that when we talk about a great power competition is China wants this, and China is going to get it. Russia wants this, Russia is going to get this.

We ended up not really understanding or ignore the agencies of all these other countries. And I just say a lot of countries have actually learned how to exploit a great power competition. So I'll just stop there.

So read that book.

Richard Nephew:
Thank you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Richard, any thoughts on what you heard?

Richard Nephew:
Yeah, actually, I wanted to respond to what you said, Jean-Marie, at the end. We were talking a little bit about the risk of norms eroding around trade and the risks that would come from conflict as a result of all that. I guess I would come at this with a slightly heretical point of view, which is I'm not actually all that convinced that trade prevents conflict.

And I think there's been some really interesting work. I believe, I'm really bad at names, Maria Grinberg, I think, at MIT wrote a book recently on trading with the enemy, which goes through a lot of historical examples and actually proves that time and time again, there is a lot of uninterrupted trade, you know, even amongst, you know, fierce adversaries, whether we're talking about the Napoleonic Wars or even the First World War and similar. And that goes back to kind of a fundamental point I would have, which is I wonder whether or not over the last 30, 40 years, we bought our own logic using a couple of salient examples like the EU, that if we trade with one another, we won't fight with one another.

Well, no, I think the answer is that the European countries simply didn't want to fight with one another because the Second World War was pretty awful. And there were a lot of good reasons why people wouldn't want to fight with one another again. And the real answer is as long as there are no other reasons to fight, trade will probably be a, will have some degree of depressing instinct on whether or not people want to go and have conflict or not, not necessarily something that blocks it.

I think that's important as we think about weaponization of economic instruments because it goes back to my fundamental point, which is if there are good reasons to undertake some of these actions, I think a lot of people would say, well, actually, in the absence of another policy solution, these sorts of things make sense. Now, what that does suggest is you're again coming back to the same point of legitimacy or come back to the same point of effectiveness, but you're also coming back to whether or not you are seen as being a state that is attempting to exert itself for its own benefits as opposed to better, you know, common good benefits or those interests that others can join in. And I think this is part of the reason why when we look at the impacts of trade, if we think about things like Russia and Europe, for instance, we see that there was a logic that had been built in that if we trade with the Russians, therefore, they won't invade Eastern European countries was completely and totally spoiled.

It's part of the reason why I think there's a harder time now to reflect on, well, therefore, what should we do about this? And this is part of the reason why Aracha's, you know, description of all the strategic autonomy pieces that are being undertaken by the EU. Even I, as a former American official, I think make a ton of sense, in part because this is about people having a lot more rational approach to thinking about what are the benefits of trade?

What are the risks of weaponization of trade? What are the benefits of integration? What are the risks that come along with that?

And to put all that stuff more in context and to my mind is I think back to the broader topic of this discussion. I think what really this argues for states to do is to have a much more realistic appreciation of how effective sanctions tools can be, how effective economic weapons tools can be, but also what are the actual limitations that are imposed by having trade and economic ties? Because they're really not as hard and not as fast as you might think.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you. Well, Alex, before we open to questions, any, any thought on how we restore some norms against corruption or...

Alexander Cooley:
I, I actually think and I am in, in, you know, in great sympathy with anti-corruption activists, the general, you know, norm, even the expansion of the norm to include, you know, service professionals, right? Whether it's, you know, in the area of, you know, lawyers or shell company providers or real estate brokers or so forth. I think the, the danger that we've seen is by integrating anti-corruption work into foreign policy, right?

And, and I understand the impetus behind it. We've also, you know, created this potential for its use, manipulation, trade-off and frankly, just like bad faith abuse, right? And so, I think what made the US system particularly effective if sort of quirky and yes, it was sort of founded on kind of, you know, US hegemony and this extraterritoriality was actually at some point the separation between, right?

Anti-corruption activities and law enforcement, even extraterritorially, right? In foreign policy. I'll give you a quick example.

Actually, a Columbia example. In 2003, a gentleman by the name of James Giffen was indicted for violations of the FCPA. Giffen was an advisor to President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, right?

And he was accused of facilitating corrupt oil payments with all the majors, all the deals that Kazakhstan concluded in the 1990s. A famous case, the movie Syriana was modeled on him. I say there's a Columbia connection because he taught politics of US-Soviet trade at Columbia for 10 years.

You can find his oral history where he very openly talks about these deals that he's made. Now, the reason I mention this, Jean-Marie, is that the George W. Bush administration, right?

Certainly not associated with sort of promoting global liberalism. Time and time again, right? Nazarbayev would put pressure on Cheney, on Bush to say, when are you going to make this Kazakhgate case go away?

And the response would be, you know, Mr. President, we are committed to having good relationships with Kazakhstan, but this is a separate issue. This is a matter for the Department of Justice, right? We don't have any say in this, right?

And so the case itself was a very curious case because it was paused for seven years. Giffen's defense was, yeah, I did it, but I was also working on behalf of sort of US official interests in doing it. The judge believed him, gave him a very sort of small fine, and he got off.

But I think the sort of lesson here is sometimes, I think, it makes sort of political sense to compartmentalize these, right, and to sort of pursue specific tracks so that the norm itself, right, is being, you know, robustly and, you know, if not enforced, certainly you still have investigations, you have the sort of, you know, the broader kind of sort of legal context without it then being sort of traded off in this, what's become now foreign policy bundle.

[Speaker 11]
Okay. Yeah.

Vivica Münkner?:
Thank you. Thank you so much. For your very insightful presentations.

I have a question to Richard and also to Markus. To Richard, I mean, looking at the Iranian-US deal conversations at the moment, one of the key asks from the Iranian side seemed to be that they are keen to have the Iranian assets been unfreezed and the sanctions being lifted. How likely is it in your view that the US will compromise on that, this issue?

And to Marcos, you mentioned before, I want to come back to your presentation before, that the US is very eager to achieve national energy dominance, which means that, and my question is actually, how does that impact their relationship to the Gulf countries? We've talked about the South, we've talked about Europe, but the Gulf states being a major region for oil and energy, how will that impact their relationship and also the power relations in the Middle East? Because in my mind I can actually see the Gulf states leaning more towards Russia or even China.

There's more to it, but the trade issue I think is also an important one and I would be keen to better understand your view.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Great question. Let's collect a couple more questions.

Surprise Malehase:
Thank you very much. Let me direct my question to Richard and Alex. In the context of this whole exercise, because it seems to me there's no strategy in terms of whether these tariffs that are being imposed, they're imposed politically or economically, so I'm trying to get a sense in terms of the strategy.

If perhaps you were to advise a low-income country within the global south that have been relying on the US aid over the years, even in terms of their developmental strategy, would you say that perhaps it was good to shake a global system so that they are able to start to develop their own strategy, just like what the EU is trying to do?

Rustem Maikabayev:
Thank you. My name is Rustem. I'm from the mission of Kazakhstan.

My question is not from Kazakhstan. So my question is to Mr. Richard and to all the panelists. So looking at places such as Iran and Russia, which has adopted its economy and managed to expand their defence production despite the sanctions imposed on them, should sanctions still be viewed as an effective instrument of coercive diplomacy?

If so, what explains the gap between its intended and actual results? Thank you.

Richard Nephew:
Should we go? Okay. Yeah.

So I'll just respond to a couple points. I mean, one of the issues that comes up when you think about sanctions effectiveness is I think that we think of sanctions tools as needing to address all the bad things that are associated with something. And we don't think about them as being intrinsically limited.

And this is where I would come back both to the Russia and Iran example. In Iran, our objective was to be able to put pressure on the Iranians so we could change policy and behavior on things like the nuclear program. I would argue that it was entirely successful and led to the nuclear deal in 2015.

That then was reversed by the Trump administration. It does not invalidate the fact that there was effectiveness there in part because the Trump administration upped what its demands were of the Iranians. If you are trying to get more than what the other country is prepared to pay through sanctions, sanctions aren't going to work.

If you were trying to take over a country but you were only prepared to deploy 100 ground troops to a small corner, are you going to win? No. People would say that is intrinsically absurd.

You are trying to use something that is not sufficient. I would argue that our objective with the original Russia sanctions was to impose significant costs on the Russians to make them rethink their strategy with respect to Ukraine. My complaint is that we have not supported Ukraine on the military side.

It is not taking advantage of that time and space. I think that is ultimately the reason why you have not been nearly as effective as you might have been in those cases. On your question, just remind me of the angle.

I forget. I think the Trump administration has demonstrated one thing that I suppose is laudable. They don't actually care about most issues associated with Iran, and they don't particularly care about sanctions.

I think the Trump administration would drop the sanctions with respect to Iran if he got a sufficient nuclear deal because he doesn't care about human rights issues or regional issues. He at least says he doesn't care about the Strait of Hormuz, which I think is probably wrong. But I actually think he is far more prepared to give at sanctions and he is politically prepared to be able to deal with complaints from Congress than his predecessors would be prepared to do.

But the problem in this case is that the Iranians are not prepared to give him as much as he wants on the nuclear issue. And if he could get enough on the nuclear issue to be able to justify removal sanctions, I think he would do it in a heartbeat. I have talked a lot.

Alexander Cooley:
Just on the question of how should countries who are used to getting this development assistance formulate strategies. Certainly I think hedging and to find out what the currency that is going to be valued is and offer that. I think you are right in the sense that one of the problems with transactionalism is if every deal is bilateral, you don't have an overall sense not only where you are going but how these areas are going to interact with one another.

We were talking about how surprised the administration was that Ukraine did all these security deals with partners. Trump was caught off guard. He didn't like it.

Part of this is not seeing how the ripple effects of one transactional deal feeds on another. I think there is a short-term that is baked in and can be overridden at any point. One thing I would like to say about sanctions specifically on the Russia front is obviously the scale of the economy is very different.

I think analytically we underestimated just what the meaning and practice of post-Soviet institutions was. There is a Eurasian economic union. There are customs procedures.

There are informal practices. You have seen all of these employed in sophisticated systems of re-export that are at the frontier of legal and illegal from the sanctioning countries point of view. You have seen the creation of these network effects across the Eurasian landmass and these different types of tools that have a broader long-term utility in thinking about how do you mitigate the impact of sanctions.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
The dominance in the oil business and what were the implications?

Markus Jaeger
It has been declared U.S. policy for a number of years now to reduce U.S. presence in the Middle East, leave local regional affairs to regional powers to create a balance of power there. In that sense, I think the whole Iran situation is contrary to what the national security strategy laid out. Clearly, combined this with energy dominance, it is clear what the U.S. is trying to do is make itself less vulnerable to energy supply issues globally. At the same time, autonomy is different from dominance. Dominance means the U.S. wants to be a dominant player. If you are able to kick China out of Venezuela and get Venezuela online and align with you, you are sitting on a lot of energy.

To that extent, the Middle East will become less strategically important. By reducing the importance of fossil fuels or having alternatives to the Middle East, the region should become less important, which is why the Iran situation is surprising. I think there were members in Congress who were quite astonished that the U.S. finds itself in a shooting war with Iran. That has to be in the larger context of the U.S. trying to reposition itself. In essence, you focus your strategic assets more on Asia and you want to be a crisis fighter in the Middle East. By being more dominant and less dependent on the Middle East, this is something you're pursuing.

There's a big difference between being a net energy exporter and still feeling the impact of global market movements. On the one hand, yes, U.S. companies benefit from the U.S. economy. In practice, however, all prices impact the U.S. economy. You want to be a net energy exporter in a situation where there could be supply constraints. I think that fits in the broader strategy of the U.S. trying to produce its presence in the Middle East, in the Gulf, and longer term, what will these countries do? Not just energy, but also technology.

In my mind, you will see increased competition between the U.S. and China. They're well positioned to play the role of a swing state.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you. answers? Do we have time for any final thoughts?

Zoe? Arancha?

Zoe Zongyuan Liu:
Sure. I'll just pick up on the Middle East part. I think this is another area where we tend to underestimate the agency of those countries, in particular with regard to renewables and their own strategic vision, whether it's 2030, 2035, or their own initiatives trying to have their own take on the use of not just pricing commodities, but also their potential of joining the digital based system, such as the Enbridge system.

From that point of on the one hand, right now, it has been since the 70s, because of Saudi's pricing of oil using dollar. Fast forward, when there is one commodity oil traded globally, you have this petrodollar system. Those countries receive dollar and invest in U.S. assets, including buying weapons, so you end up having this closed cycle. From one global commodity, you're going to have decentralized commodities, not just oil, but also natural gas, lithium, copper, and all sorts of things like that. And what China is trying to do is increase the pricing power. This is going to mean combining potential increase in international commodity pricing with China's capacity to process these commodities and export them.

You end up having potentially more fragmented areas, China becomes more embedded. That doesn't mean China is going to be immune to sanctions, but it means China is going to be very hard to pressure and very hard for the United States to ignore. And the Middle East is very much part of that.

Arancha Gonzalez:
I just wanted to thank you. I don't have much to add. I agree with a lot of what has been said.

Unfortunately, I'll have to disconnect now. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much. Thank you to the panel for a really rich discussion on a very complex topic.