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- [00:01]
A
I'm Scott.
- [00:02]
B
I'm Bill and we're the Trade Guys.
- [00:07]
C
You're listening to the Trade Guys, a podcast produced by CSIS where we talk about trade in terms that everyone can understand. I'm Phil Luck and I'm here with Scott Miller and Bill Reinsch, the CSIS Trade Guys. Thanks for listening to the Trade Guys. Today we'll be talking about US China negotiations, lumber lobbying and secondary tariffs on Russia. All that and more on the Trade Guys. Hello and welcome to Trade Guys. I'm Philip Luck, CSIS Economics Program Director and Shoal Chair in International Business. Today I'm sitting in with the Trade Guys and we're diving into three US China trade talks in Madrid and the clash over Nvidia. US Lumber industry lobbying for tariffs and finally, potential sanctions on Russia and transatlantic coordination. But before we start, Scott, I wanted to get an update on your upcoming Trade Guys course here at csis.
- [01:09]
A
Thanks, Bill. Yes, this is one more shameless plug, probably the last one before the course happens. But Bill and I have for several years run a course in the spring called Crash Course and Trade Policy with the Trade Guys. It's a seminar style course limited to 20 participants. Bill and I are the two content providers. You'll basically spend a day and a half or a little more with us talking about politics and policy as it's existed in the US when it comes to international trade, people get a lot of benefit out of the course. There's of course lots of trade courses around Washington. We offer a small class size and a very efficient use of your time. If this sounds interesting to you, you can either check the show notes if you're a subscriber or you can go to CSIS.org and click on Executive Education. You'll find the registration materials. The course is offered at CSIS headquarters in Washington D.C. october 8th and 9th and registration is open. What we find is we bump along at a very low level, everyone gets frightened and then somehow it's mysteriously it's instantly oversubscribed. So take a look at it. If it's for you, we'd love to meet with you and engage with you in those two days. So October 8th and 9th at CSIS headquarters. Trade Policy with the Trade Guys, the Crash Course.
- [02:24]
C
Very excited about that and you'll have plenty to talk about as always. So let's start with our first topic. Start in Madrid where the US and Chinese officials have been having trade talks, talking about TikTok tariff and other issues. But Nvidia became a bit of a topic Du Jour as Chinese regulators accused Nvidia of violating antitrust commitments that they'd made back in 2020 after acquiring a Chinese firm. They've also blocked, at least reportedly, Nvidia from being bought by some large tech giants, including Alibaba. This comes a few weeks after the president conditionally allowed Nvidia to sell certain chips, including the H20, to China, which the Washington was going to skim off the top of. So they'll have to find that revenue from somewhere else. Bill, Love, to start with you, what do you make of this? Is this a vote of confidence in indigenous technology? How should we be thinking about this?
- [03:15]
B
Well, my head is spinning. Is this a chess game? And it's much too complicated for me. I haven't been able to figure it out. Maybe Scott has some thoughts about it. Trump has gone back and forth on the question of controlling chips. The chip in question, the H20, which was designed specifically for Chinese use and specifically to be consistent with our controls left over from the Biden administration, was first banned and then permitted, and apparently permitted. I think this relates to Trump's effort to get a meeting with Xi Jinping. I think that it was permitted as a gesture to try to persuade the Chinese to respond with a gesture of their own. Ironically, of course, the Chinese response was essentially, well, now that you're giving us those chips, we don't want them. They're not good enough. Basically, what's not clear to me anyway is why the Chinese did that one, is it could just be another move in the chess game, one where they're trying to leverage the American side for more. It could also be because they are well down the path anyway of trying to develop their own chips and their own technology. I mean, this is not a new thing. We've discussed this before. This goes back at least 10 to 12 years in terms of what the Chinese goal has been. The Biden administration's controls, we think here at csis, accelerated that process by creating a lot of difficulties for the Chinese by cutting them off of chips. At that point, they were expecting, so they sped up their process to develop indigenous technology. I think you could have a debate amongst technical experts about the extent to which they're succeeding at that. I think the most likely evaluation is that they figured out ways to actually put slightly lower level chips together to get them to work as one. So it's a little bit more cumbersome, but it does the job. That may be what's motivating them here. Just they're trying to, you know, wean their Users, which include the big companies that you cited on off of American chips and push them to buy the Chinese product. They know that this is an industry where scale is very important and if you can't scale up, you're going to be at the margin forever. So one of the ways you solve that problem is you tell everybody to buy our chips. Parenthetically, I think in a few years we're going to see the same problem with aircraft. Once the Chinese have a certifiable airplane, they're going to tell all their domestic airlines you have to buy it, and that will create scale in that industry. So not a new tactic. They must, however, be operating on the assumption that what they're telling their companies to buy is equivalent at least or better to the American product, which is kind of a message for us, I think, to figure out if that's true or not. But then again, all of that could be wrong. And this could just be part of a chess match in which we made a gesture, probably of good faith gesture, and the Chinese have come back and said, well, now that you made it not good enough, we don't want it. And it's, it's a fair point that the chips that we are permitting them to buy are not the highest end that we make. The chip in question, the H20, was specifically designed to be compliant with the Biden controls, so it is less capable than other chips. So I can see why the Chinese would say, well, this is not really what we wanted. So there it sits. And there's no new news today. We're recording this a few hours after the Xi Jinping Donald Trump phone call, where it appears the only material thing that came out of it was an agreement to have a meeting, which is not insignificant. We're in the margins of the APEC summit, which is going to be, I think, October 28th and 29th in Korea. It's not clear whether the meeting will be in Korea or whether some other location, but the timing seems to be set. Both parties confirmed that Trump also said that he had approved the TikTok deal. The Chinese account of the conversation didn't say that, and it was a lot more ambiguous. So I think on TikTok, we're going to have to wait and see what really happened. And no mention of chips. And it doesn't sound like they made progress on any of the trade issues, but in fairness, they kicked the can on that until November anyway. So I wasn't expecting a lot of progress. Scott, can you figure out what's really going on?
- [07:20]
A
Well, it's tough because first of all there's an antitrust action in the background and antitrust is not unfamiliar to technology companies. In fact, there's a lot of sort of the criteria for a claim of antitrust, whether it's abuse of dominant position or whatever the claim might be, happens in concentrated industries. And the tech sector is full of concentrated industries because innovation drives to relatively few companies who produce a device or produce a system. So it's not surprising to see antitrust actions proceed. I will say that the U.S. antitrust actions are very different than Chinese, mostly because of sort of the domestic characteristics of Chinese courts. Basically, as I understand it, Chinese antitrust law is basically an import of German antitrust law. I hope they translated it well. But it's, it is administered by a group of judges who are basically party officials. So that's why people want to stay out of antitrust lawsuits in China. But once again, it's not unfamiliar to anyone in that space. I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was a very small company. In fact, at one time in the 80s they would have qualified for SBA loans. They had one product, Ms. dOS. They had one customer, IBM. They had fewer than a hundred employees at one location, Boca Raton, Florida. And Microsoft actually one time at a very small, maybe two person Washington office. But they got tangled up in US antitrust law in the mid-90s and suddenly there was a big Microsoft presence in Washington. No surprise. So things change fast in that industry. Nvidia is by no means a newcomer in this. They've been making graphics computing equipment for a long time. That's a space that is very sort of cutting Edge. It's a 30 year old company, it's got 36,000 employees worldwide. So it's a company that has the experience in these situations to kind of know how to manage both the legal side and the, and the export control side. So I think they'll be fine. And from that standpoint, I think the bill's initial point, it's hard to sort signal from noise there, but I think they're a sophisticated company, they'll get through it.
- [09:26]
B
Now we were trying to figure out what the Chinese were talking about when they said that Nvidia was engaged in anti competitive actions which they didn't explain. It appears that one of the conditions for the acquisition that is in question here was that Nvidia continued to supply China with chips and that the US controls have made that impossible at the high end. So the Chinese are arguing, I think that Nvidia is not adhering to one of the conditions of the acquisition that the Chinese have previously signed off on. Of course, that doesn't exactly track with their directive to their own companies not to buy the chips. So. Good explanation, Scott, but I'm still confused.
- [10:02]
C
Yeah. Nor does it seem to line up time wise. Why? Because, you know, there's been blocks on these chips for quite some time. So there hasn't been an enormous amount of detail from the Chinese system and I'm not sure we're going to get that much. But yeah, I'd say I'm a little dubious of the paper description here. One additional question I have on this, which is, so, I mean, regardless of sort of, you know, how we think about this or the motives of both the US unilateral offer and the PRC's decision to revoke these chips or ask firms not to buy them based on the way Bill sort of described the objectives here, how do we think this affects the US strategy? Because I mean, the US strategy you could think of as either we wanted to continue to have them hooked on or relying on our technology, or you could say we were looking for Nvidia to have more revenue for R and D. Or you could say this was an attempt to sort of de. Escalate, calm tensions or secure a meeting. I guess if the objective was to secure a meeting, it's possible they achieved by those other criteria. How would you sort of think about where the US strategy sits now?
- [11:03]
A
Well, these are sort of middle of the road chips. They're not leading edge. And the important issues for both strategy and export control are leading edge equipment. And so I don't think it really matters all that much in the context of at least the security side of the equation. A lot of these chips get oversupplied for many reasons. You may recall the DRAM chip chip disputes. They came in the form of dumping cases with Korea. There are occasions where silicon chip markets have one too many entrants. They become instantly unprofitable for everybody. Okay. It's a miserable situation. It's really easy to get over capacity and to drive yourself out of business. So it's unclear that this is not just one of those situations where we have now excess production in sort of middle of the road, useful, but not cutting its chips.
- [11:52]
B
It's a really good question. I think in a way though, it gets back to the. You referred to it as one of the things Secretary Ludnick said we wanted, we want them to be addicted to our chips. And in a way he's kind of Missing the point because it seems pretty clear that the Chinese are determined that that not happen. That's sort of the whole point. They don't want to be dependent on us. Just as coincidentally, we don't want it to be dependent on them for a lot of things. And the two sides are kind of pulling off hard on anything that might be considered relevant to security. So if that's our goal, it's not going to succeed. I think the more likely US goal is not to get the Chinese addicted but to get everybody else buying into the US tech stack basically and to make it a global standard in preference to the Chinese alternative that may be an attainable goal. We were talking about this earlier today and as I think Phil made the point that the question there is not going to be conception but deployment and he might want to say something about that. It's clear that that might make a lot of sense as a goal. It's not entirely clear we can accomplish it. But the idea that we're going to try to get China to continue to be dependent on our chips as they used to be I think is impossible to achieve and it's really a waste of our time to try to do that.
- [13:04]
C
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. This is one of those situations where kind of reminds me of the Russia situation where yes, we can sort of put actions on that sort of restrict their access to our goods but. But in some sense from their perspective that's kind of the objective. They kind of want to be less reliant on our goods. Now of course there's a short term economic cost which you know, unless their chips are just as good as the H20 they'll be paying it. But in their long term objective this might be entirely in line with their objectives. Okay, well let's move to a slightly simpler supply chain, that of lumber. So lobbying and lumber. Earlier this week the US Lumber Coalition sent a letter to the Commerce Department and USTR to demanding substantial Section 232 relief. And just for reminder to those 232 are national security tariffs. So we're presumably there's a national security concern for imports of lumber claiming basically the existing tools that we have to sort of counteract unfair trade practices, anti dumping, countervailing duties, especially on Canadian goods, is simply not fit for purpose. You guys will know better than me. But you know, this is a dispute, I believe that's been going on sort of for decades. So maybe. Scott, let's start with you. I mean, what is your reaction to this request for protection well, I'm not.
- [14:15]
A
Sure anything from the 80s is ancient except maybe me, but remember the 80s very well. But 1982 was the beginnings of the US Canada dispute over subsidies in softwood lumber. There have been a variety of softwood lumber cases and basically what it comes down to conceptually is the way that Canada's land ownership operates and therefore timber ownership versus the United States. And therefore there's a different method for offering and of subsidies. So it's been an area of controversy for now over 40 years. It has been never really settled. But occasionally they suspend the fight for a while. And so that's essentially the history. So all this goes way back to the 80s. There was an agreement as recently as 2006. The softwood lumber agreement was intended to run for about seven to nine years. There was at least one extension of it, but that agreement expired in 2015. Now on any dumping or countervailing duty case, and this is because it's a subsidy case, would be a countervailing duty case tend to lend themselves to what are called suspension agreements. And suspension agreements are where both sides agree to a price level that is adequate from their standpoint and therefore there's no further need for collection or investigation of the subsidies themselves. Now suspension agreements walk like and quack like a price fixing arrangement because they are. So you get suspension agreements only when both the foreign and the domestic industry agree to higher prices for the all about consumers. So that's the bad news. If this were two private domestic enterprises that would be an illegal action. But in fact it's a normal part of anti subsidies law. So that said, this has gone in and out of the subsidy fight for a long time. I don't think there's a fundamental way to address it other than maybe acquisition. There's a possible investment strategy which if Canadian firms were to buy enough American operations to change the politics but they're not in the business to do that. Nobody's in the business to settle political arguments. So but in the case that's the background on the story. The US industry has had a long standing complaint and they can make their own arguments but they're looking for additional help. And 232 looks like a nail everyone would like to drive with their particular hammer. So we'll have to wait and see what the administration does in its investigation.
- [16:41]
B
To get wonky for a second. Scott's right. I happen to know a little bit about this. Despite in a career long effort to avoid it this intune a fish I always tried to stay out of. I Had a good excuse on tuna fish because when I was working for Senator Heinz, the Heinz company owned either starkist or the other one, whichever one it was, so he could recuse himself, which meant I didn't have to think about it. But lumber was different. The Canadians have been accused of two things. They've been accused of dumping, which means they're selling below cost, but they've also been accused of subsidies. And that's been the more, I think, more sensitive allegation. And it has to do with stumpage fees. A lot of the timber is cut on government owned land in Canada. And the issue is what does the government charge the company to come in and cut the trees down? That's called the stumpage fee because the companies don't own the land. So the companies have to pay a fee to the government, which does. The allegation from the American side has been that the Canadians deliberately set the fee essentially below the market value of trees. I get basically. And that basically is essentially a subsidy. It allows the Canadian lumber companies to harvest the timber more cheaply than they would be in a private market situation. That's gone to the WTO. We more or less lost. We didn't lose 100%, but we lost a lot of it for a long time. It's gotten oded. We settled it with a suspension agreement, which is a price fishing agreement. Right now we're having the same argument about Mexican tomatoes. It's the same thing. The American side was not happy with the agreement and they let it expire. It was time limited and they haven't been able to agree on a new one. There's also revealed lately not a quirk but a feature of our anti dumping and subsidy law, which is that every year the Department of Commerce goes back and takes another look at the case and reevaluates whether the subsidy is still the same as what it was the previous year and whether or not they're still dumping. That means that every year there's an opportunity to adjust the tariffs. If there's less subsidy, they'll get lower. Because in the case of that law, it's. It's not punitive, it's compensatory. And so the tariff, the duty is calibrated to be equivalent to the amount of subsidy and the amount of dumping. What's happened in the last year or so is as the department has reviewed these cases, they've been increasing the duties. They've been finding that higher subsidies and more dumping. So the pressure on the Canadian industry is growing. I think the Duties now are up. They vary between dumping and subsidies, but I think they're up in the 20s and 30%. And as Scott noted, there's a 232 investigation going on that will produce probably more duties on top of those, which will be prohibitive in all probability. I think two interesting elements is this is the rare investigation for Trump that's gone on longer than people expected. They have been rolling these things out more or less in the order in which they were announced. And this is one of the oldest ones. It goes back to March, as I recall, and still no answer, which means something's going on that we don't know. One thing that is going on is in a bit of a surprise. Last month, Trump added the furniture to the investigation, which essentially requires the government to conclude that chairs, tables and desks are a national security threat, which I don't think passes the laugh test, but I'm not a judge, so it doesn't, no matter what I think. But he threw that into the lumber investigation and has also said that this will be done, I believe, by October 11th. I don't know that that will happen, but, you know, we'll see and we'll see what he ends up doing. We've been trying to figure out the extent to which it matters and are coming up with not entirely useful data on the subject. My question had been there's a lot of lumber that goes into houses. We have a housing shortage, and are we just doing something here that's going to make houses more expensive? Because I think the Canadian lumber, they have about a 21% market share right now in the United States. And if you put essentially prohibitive tariffs on, which is what we seem to be moving towards, what happens to that 21% share? Can the US fill in with the domestic industry? I think they would say yes, but I'm not sure that everybody else would say yes. And second, even if the answer is yes, there'll be a time lag. There always is. And so then what happens to housing prices? The domestic lumber industry says that the price of lumber in a house is only 1 to 2% of the cost of the house. I'm skeptical of that. There's other data that suggests that it might be closer to 20%. I think the answer is probably somewhere in between. It usually is. But even if it's 10 or 15, if you're talking about houses that are already out of reach for a lot of Americans, will we making that situation where worse for people at the lower end?
- [21:19]
A
Well, Bill, if I Could ask, given the rising dumping duties that are being applied. Seems like a suspension agreement's not a totally terrible idea. The parties might find it of interest to enter into yet another suspension agreement.
- [21:33]
B
Good point. There's always a lot of principal rhetoric that floats around on this. You know, they're subsidizing and that's just an evil thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, in the end, it all boils down to money. And the agreement was probably suspended because the American side thought that the prices were too low and that they weren't getting enough market share that they wanted. They wanted to lower the share of imports, and this was a way to accomplish that objective. These agreements are. I've been involved in the Mexican tomato one in the past. These agreements are never about what's good for consumers. They're always about how can we work out a way to make more money for the producers. And usually there's a deal out there, you know, because the producers on both sides in Canada, the United States have a common interest, which is profit. And you'd think they'd be able to arrive at a number that satisfies them both. But that's been elusive in the lumber case.
- [22:23]
C
Bill, just a one follow up on that. So, I mean, wonder if you could say a few more words on. So, I mean, to your point, this is a 232 investigation, so. Which now has expanded to furniture. We've now added this to a long list of tariffs on all sorts of goods. But this one, to your point, really does seem to strain credulity and the national security implications. Why do you think this is the path that the US Industry has gone, just because this is a popular tool for the president, or why are we using this method?
- [22:50]
B
Well, the cynical answer, not that I would ever be a cynic about these, the cynical answer is that this is North Carolina politics. Scott may know more about this than I do, since he lives there. North Carolina has been the center of the furniture industry in the United states for probably 100 years or more. And they've really been decimated over the years by imports, not just Canadian, but by others. Vietnam is a big importer of the finished product. And actually, it's an interesting case about manufacturing because we have been in the business in some areas of exporting the raw material, that is trees that have been felled, and we export them to other countries where they're made into furniture. When I was working for Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia, one of the oddest trips I took and Also one of the scariest, because we were in one of these single engine planes with just, you know, room for four people. We flew to Preston County, West Virginia, which is the county, if you don't know West Virginia. It's the county that is bumps up against western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. It's in the corner there and they got a lot of trees there and that's about it. They don't have much else, including people. But we went up there for a grand opening of a company that historically had done what I just said, they cut trees and sent them to Japan for making into other stuff. And what Rockefeller had been involved in, because he had a long standing relationship with the Japanese, was to try to recapture some of the value added for West Virginia. And he didn't capture all of the value added. But what the plant was doing was not. They were actually taking the trees that had been cut down in Preston county and cutting them and trimming them in the timber and then they were shipping to Japan. So they weren't in the furniture business, but they were at least capturing more of the value than just being an extractive cow and shipping the material overseas. I think partly it really is politics. North Carolina is a swing state and furniture is. They've been decimated, but it's still an issue there. Frankly, I can't think of an explanation. Scott, can you?
- [24:50]
A
Well, there's an open seat Senate race. There are many of those this cycle, but there is one here. North Carolina furniture is an industry near and dear to the hearts of Tar Heels. So I don't have any insight beyond that. And it doesn't seem to me to be a, a defensible part of a 232 investigation. But we'll find out what the documents say when they're released.
- [25:13]
B
It does raise an interesting question, which is whether somebody's going to sue him on this. There haven't been any 232 lawsuits against the Trump cases. And the statute's not very forthcoming in terms of defining national security. Kind of leaves it up with the President. And, you know, the early ones were, and the medium ones were, you know, pharmaceuticals, aircraft, semiconductors, steel, aluminum. You can make an argument for those. Furniture is kind of far afield, I think. Frankly, I think automobiles are kind of far afield too. But it'll be interesting to see if anybody sues over that one. And then if you can find a judge that will be willing to second guess the President on his definition of national security would surprise me if they can find one.
- [25:55]
C
But we'll See, I would agree with your skepticism there. All right, well, now for something completely different. Let's talk about Russia. The president signaled recently that he's ready to go, quote unquote, for major sanctions on Moscow, but only if other NATO allies also take tough action. This includes cutting off of purchases of Russian oil, which importantly, certain member states of the eu, including Slovakia and Hungary, continue to get piped. Lng, as does Turkey, buys an enormous amount of Russian oil. Turkey is a NATO member, obviously not in the eu but of course, under the president's call to arms for NATO, they of course would have to do so as well. The president, President Trump has also floated 100% tariff or I guess secondary tariff on both China and India, punishing them for buying Russian crude. And China, he's indicated that he would like the Europeans to go along with that as well. Scott, maybe we can start with you. This idea of secondary tariffs is pretty new to this administration. Are tariffs a good tool for this type of situation?
- [26:57]
A
Well, we'll probably find out. I don't think so. Now, first of all, let me say I do understand the administration's frustration because we're fairly clearly funding both sides of a conflict. All right? We're sending arms and material and loans to Ukraine, okay? And NATO forces are involved, at least at the strategic level and a lot of operational levels as well, although not with ground troops. And at the same time, we have NATO members purchasing vast amounts of Russia's primary export, you know, so we probably ought to not be on both sides of the deal here. So the frustration is obvious and understandable. The issue that I would take is first, it's clear that we've reached diminishing returns on the sanctions already applied, especially financial sanctions. I mean, whatever else can be piled on in the financial restrictions court doesn't seem to me to have much of an effect. I mean, Russia has found a way to live with whatever they've got or whatever we're trying to do to interfere with financial transactions. And I think there's always massive difficulty in sanctioning any good that has basically an inelastic short term demand curve. There is no elasticity for oil. And that's true of all hydrocarbons. I mean, every hydrocarbon molecule produced for fuel ever has been consumed for fuel. I mean, there's always a market for it. But the sanctions have relatively. They mess things up, they make it hard to buy insurance, things like that. They create a black market and that probably reduces the net revenue of Russian crude versus without those sanctions. But it's A very difficult thing to stop. So I think we're going to find out before too long what the ultimate diminishing returns are. But it seems to me they've set in.
- [28:38]
C
Yeah. Bill, any thoughts here? I mean, has this been effective?
- [28:42]
B
Not a lot. I think Scott was very complete about it. I think it's an illustration of what we all know about this kind of thing, which is for every move there's a counter move, and if you try to cut something off, then people will find a way around that. This would deal with the, I think, the public ways around it, particularly the Chinese and the Indian just going ahead and buying. Although I have to say, you know, we set up Secretary Yellen when she was in the Treasury Department, you know, set up a price cap mechanism in which we agreed to permit the sale of the oil, and it was oil more than gas in that case, as long as it was a price that was lower than the cap that was set. And the cap was supposed to be set at a level that made sure that the Russians didn't make very much money off the transaction. That seems to have been forgotten in all this, and I simply don't know. There seems to have been a good bit of evasion of it. The Russians have created kind of a ghost fleet, for lack of a better term, of unregistered vessels that transport this stuff and sometimes don't they basically offload it into another vessel in the ocean in international waters, and then so it's very hard to trace. So more sanctions are not going to solve that problem. The Russians are going to continue to do that. And if you really want to get to stop, at least on the oil side, I think it's going to entail a much more aggressive and international enforcement effort. Gas is a little bit different because you can get the Europeans and the Turks also, which get it by pipeline, you know, to basically shut down the imports. That would be, I think, more significant.
- [30:07]
C
Yeah, totally agree. And thanks for bringing up the shadow fleet as well. I totally agree with you that, I mean, there's a large sanctioning action against vessels the very end of the Biden administration. I think it was changed January 10th, but we have not had any sort of actions against vessels since then, at least by the Americans. I'm pretty sure the Europeans and the Brits have still. So this is another point, you know, because we haven't seen those other actions. It's also to me, fair that some of our allies would sort of question our commitment to actually imposing these actions. I was actually with a government official from a European country last night. And we were kind of talking about this idea that the president is asking its partners to sort of like jump with them on these 100% tariffs on India and China. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of commitment that if they jumped, the president would also jump. So, you know, I think there's also issues here where this is a place where our lack of credibility in other trade negotiations, other space also creates issues here where we don't necessarily have the credibility we'd need to sort of get the coordination that we may want. Any other thoughts or anything else we should be doing in this space? I should also note that today this, as Bill mentioned earlier, we're recording this on Friday and the Russians seem to have violated Estonian airspace. So things are heating up there as well.
- [31:18]
B
Yeah, that's a really worrisome development. I mean, I think the evaluation has been we're sort of testing NATO resolve and testing the European countries resolves. But now there's a sort of growing list of countries where this is happening. I mean, we'll see what the next Russian move is going to be. NATO seems to be scrambling jets to follow them, but there haven't been yet any of what has occasionally happened in the past with US And China, which is sort of air incidents where collisions or near collisions. And I hope we don't see that in this case.
- [31:44]
C
Excellent. Well, thank you guys so much for letting me sit in and chat with you all. It's been a lot of fun. Covered a lot of waterfront here and talk to you guys again soon.
- [31:52]
A
Take care.
- [31:59]
C
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