¿Será 2023 el año de los cambios en el poder mundial? con Judah Grunstein

TATIANA SERAFIN: Hello. I 'm Tatiana Serafin, co-host of The Doorstep podcast here at Carnegie Council. I will be joined in a moment by my fellow co-host, Nick Gvosdev, and also our special guest, returning for the third year in a row, Judah Grunstein, editor-in-chief of World Politics Review, to help us understand where the world is in January 2023, what to expect over the next 12 months, and what happened to us last year.

Today, January 11, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. It is #WearBlueDay. I am wearing blue for this important issue. We will be talking more about it in future Doorsteps as an important issue in the world.

I also want to mention that next week, looking at America in the world today, we will be joined by Christopher McKnight Nichols on January 19 at 11 am ET to talk about Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations, our first Book Talk of 2023. Please go to carnegiecouncil.org to sign up. We look forward to your thoughts and your ideas this year. We are starting a whole new year. Please find us on Twitter—for as long as Twitter lasts—email us at carnegiecouncil.org and look for our previous podcasts. We want to hear what your issues are for 2023 as we go forward.

Let's join our guest and co-host right now.

Judah, it is so great to welcome you for year three of our "What in the world is going on in the world?" review. Thank you so much for joining us.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Thank you so much for having me. I have to say, Nick, three years, three different backgrounds. The first one was in the den, the second one in the kitchen, and now what looks like the living room.

NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: This is partly The Doorstep being on the road, at least one-half of it because we are going to be meeting to discuss with some students at Gettysburg College, seniors who are part of the Solarium program, to be looking at challenges to national security, and they want to get a sense of the doorstep issues that they should be looking at.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Right on.

TATIANA SERAFIN: That is a perfect intro into what should we be looking at this year. I went back and looked at 2021 and 2022. I had to do it. I had to see if our predictions held together, and I have to say we were pretty prescient. In 2021, which we called a "groundhog" year, we spent a lot of time thinking about how the pandemic was going to shape us. We are now in 2023, and I just gave my daughter a booster yesterday, so we still have the pandemic around. Certainly in China's case it is still a huge part of their doorstep issues and ours, because that affects our trade, so we will talk about that.

What I thought was interesting from 2021 too is that you mentioned that your concern in the world was a "splinternet." I want to start out talking about tech issues because I think tech dominated all of our geopolitical concerns last year. I would like to start out looking at tech and the splinternet that you talked about and how we go forward when we are looking at how the internet and social media have changed how war is conducted, how the United Kingdom and Europe are going about regulating Facebook, and how TikTok is now being banned in the United States and what is going to happen there. That is not so much of a splinternet, but you did mention also the regulation aspect of social media and what is going to happen. With social media pervading everything we do, I would like to talk about the world in 2023 and how it is being shaped with social media.

Judah, how do you see it over on your end because there is so much going on where you are? Three prime ministers in one year, ambulance strike—

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: And the lettuce.

TATIANA SERAFIN: What do you think the role of social media will be in 2023 because I think this is a big meta issue that is going to tie and bind all of the issues this year?

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Tech and social media were in my thoughts for this year. I thought, I think I said that for 2021, and I don't want to repeat myself this year. There are a few different things going on right now, and I think they have to do with social media and with splinter tech if not necessarily splinternet in a couple of senses.

In 2021 what I had my eye on was this question that you mentioned of tech and social media regulation because there was beginning to be an upsurge of public awareness of not just the impacts but also the lack of accountability of the tech giants, and that has only gathered momentum since Elon Musk purchased Twitter. This will come up later as another theme with the question of the return of the "super-empowered individual" that was talked about a lot in the 2000s.

I don't think that is going anywhere. If anything, that will be even more the case, but my thinking now in terms of tech and social media is that it will become as much a cultural movement or phenomenon as a political or regulatory phenomenon. The parallel I would draw is to the late 1960s, early 1970s, the "back to the land" movement, when there were the beginnings of an awareness of the environmental damage, the cultural damage, and the social damage that advanced industrial economies did to all of those things.

I think what we might start to see is a real shift by people in terms of how they live their lives, not in the same way that the back-to-the-land movement necessarily ended industrialization, but certainly 30 to 40 years later there are a lot of vestiges of it, whether it is the environmental movement, the Green movement, the move to decarbonize the economy, and other things like veganism and vegetarianism, which even in the past 20 to 30 years have accelerated enormously.

We might see things like people choosing not to use social media, people choosing not to use the Internet, and people choosing to use typewriters. Snail mail might make a comeback in the same way that vinyl LPs have and a lot of analog technologies. We might find that some of our friends might be harder to reach than they have been over the past decade or so, and these leaps and bounds in terms of connectivity and ease of communication might start reversing, again not on a mass scale, but we might see little pockets like that emerging where people start calling into question: "Do I need my cellphone turned on all day long, or maybe I can leave it off and just check it every five or six hours? Do I need 12 different messaging apps, or can I get by with just one?" I think we are going to see a little bit of that in the next year taking shape as part of other social movements.

Unless we want to stop there, in terms of the splinternet I think we are going to see a lot of movement and turbulence with regard to not necessarily splinternet, although it might come to that, but splinter tech and splinter apps, so TikTok might be less accessible in various jurisdictions and other things like that. Also, we see with the U.S. export controls on China in terms of high-tech equipment, there is going to probably be a bifurcation in terms of tech innovation and availability, which I cannot imagine won't have consequences in terms of a two-tier or two-speed tech ecosystem in the globalized ecosystem that we had gotten used to. In terms of tech that's where my thinking is. It is more zeitgeist than any particular data or science, but that's where I see things.

NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: To take your discussion of the splinternet and then perhaps broadening it—the trends that you have been observing now for the last several years, as you said we are not going to stop, but things may get reshaped—and just thinking about globalization in general you did a great essay for us—I am wearing my Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs hat here—in Orbis on globalization, but we are seeing a fracturing, decoupling, and recoupling in different ways, whether it is Europe in particular with this radical decoupling from Russia that three years ago everyone said was impossible—Europe was interdependent with Russia in energy and other things—and this decoupling is happening, the attempts to shift supply chains to not have them run through China, and in turn Russia, Iran, and other countries looking to find ways to bypass or route around the dollar and the United States as the linchpin of the global economy.

Does this notion of the splinternet also tie into larger trends that you are seeing, so that instead of speaking about a single world we may speak of several world systems, whether in economics, science, communications, or tech that will then have to learn how to collaborate or connect with each other?

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Referring back to the article that you were kind enough to invite me to write, a lot of times when you talk about decoupling or de-globalization people say: "Well, that's not happening. If you look at the trade data, if you look at the supply chain data, even if trade makes up a smaller amount of growth in the global economy than it used to, it is still robust and still interdependent, and this talk of de-globalization and decoupling is just that; it's talk."

The point that I tried to make with that article is that that is a very narrow definition of what we thought about globalization 15 to 20 years ago, which was this excitement about the world becoming accessible across jurisdictions and across boundaries. Technology and communications technology was a big part of that. Trade was obviously a big part of that, but travel was as well, the kind of cross-pollination of various national cinemas and film industries, music, and things like that.

I don't think the next generation is going to be growing up with the same mental map of the world that the generation that grew up in the past 20 years did. It might have been utopian to expect boundaries to disappear, but they had a smaller impact certainly on people in the developed world, in the Global North, in terms of their day-to-day life. Obviously that cannot be said for people in the Global South, who still face a lot of restrictions, visa inequalities, and things like that in terms of travel. Certainly for global elites and for the more cosmopolitan classes—and this contributed to the backlash against it—the world was a very different place 15 years ago than it is today. The idea of what was possible in terms of where one could seek business opportunities and trade opportunities was a lot broader and wider and more frictionless or less friction-ful.

I don't think there is any question that things have changed dramatically, not only because of the war in Ukraine—predating that—and that kind of movement is only going to be driven and fueled by what seems like a broad acceptance of what even six years ago was almost anathema or mindboggling, this mercantilist approach to trade where national borders are important even if supply chains are still international.

What you said, Nick, about the war in Ukraine, was that it changed what people think is possible in terms of decoupling, that the imaginary around which the kind of diversified supply chains are cooked in, I don't think anyone believes that anymore. I just saw an amazing graphic the other day. It was a time-lapse graphic of Germany's imports of Russian gas. It is mind-boggling, because it turns on its head the discussion of what thought possible even in February of 2022. Germany essentially imports zero Russian gas right now.

Once that becomes possible you start looking for other opportunities or places where it can be applied, and I think the delay in applying it becomes shorter and shorter each time. It is not so hammering when all you see is nails so much as when you realize that a hammer works you start looking for other nails. I think policymakers have already started that. Then the danger becomes where do you stop.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the tensions that that has created with Europe and the European Union are a great case in point. If it is good to promote U.S. businesses over Chinese businesses and start turning toward embracing industrial policy, European businesses might be the collateral damage. They are not going to be happy about that, and where does it go from there? That temptation has been made a lot more compelling and stronger by the events of the past year, and that I think is the real danger.

TATIANA SERAFIN: One of the other things that you mentioned in the past ties into this conversation of protectionism and trade barriers is that in 2022 there was a very negative view of China that had grown, and recently you talked about this groupthink especially in Washington, DC that is anti-China and that maybe that hammering of China is not a good thing.

I want to talk about that because I think it is a new way of talking about China that many people are not discussing, that maybe it's not all bad, and we need more reflection on our relationship, on the opportunities, and that it is not all a negative game.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: I have been thinking a lot about this. I am not the only one and I am not the first. I mentioned recently that people like Ali Wyne and Jessica Chen Weiss have been at some risk in terms of the marketplace for ideas in Washington, DC and have been iconoclastic on this march to a "China hawk" position and trying to say, "Wait, slow down."

Both of them have been doing it in their own ways. Ali has written for us in the past, and what he said basically is that even if we want to compete with China, that is not how we should define U.S. foreign policy. U.S. foreign policy should not be reactive to China. It should not only be a competition with China or trying to counter China's advances. It should be based on America's strengths—what can we do and what can we offer that people want? There is very clearly a great demand left for U.S. leadership, especially U.S. trade deals that I think the Biden administration has ruled out somewhat shortsightedly.

What I am trying to say is going even a step further, and I need to preface it with the caveat that, yes, China is problematic, the Chinese Communist Party is an authoritarian dictatorship, the repression in Xinjiang and across the country is horrific, the move during Xi Jinping's leadership toward a more repressive, more closed-off China, and a more ideologically driven China is clearly a disappointment and a reversal of what people were hoping for and maybe somewhat expecting.

That is all very clear, and I think that the United States and Europe do need to respond to that by taking stronger measures, by protecting themselves when it comes to strategic supply chains and things like that and diversifying, but in the recognition that things were going in a direction that were belying the policy agenda in Washington or countercurrent to the policy agenda and that something needed to change there has been a rush to say everything about the past 20 years has been a mistake committed by U.S. and European governments and also that everything that has gone wrong in the past 20 years has been a result of China.

I think that is dangerous, first of all in terms of the decline in America's relative power. The United States contributed a lot to that with a 20-year war in Afghanistan and a 10- to 15-year war in Iraq, a squandering of goodwill, a squandering of that kind of unipolar dominance that the United States had, the global financial crisis, the sort of "casino economy" that was favored, and the enforcement of the Washington Consensus and neoliberalism on developing countries that had their own ideas for how to address inequalities and poverty, most notably in South America and Latin America. I think blaming everything on China is a mistake.

Also saying that everything about bringing China into the global economy and China's rise has been a mistake is also very dangerous. First of all, regardless of geopolitics hundreds of millions of Chinese brought out of poverty is a good. That is a good for China, it's a good for humanity, and it's a good for the world.

Beyond that the impact that China has had in the developing world in terms of infrastructure investment, development, trade, and demand for commodities—it has been imbalanced and at times might have been predatory, but the benefits that it has accrued to South American, African, and Southeast Asian countries in terms of poverty reduction, economic development, and infrastructure cannot be denied, and they happened a time when the United States and Europe increasingly turned their backs on development aid and on ways that the developing world could be helped beyond simply the Washington Consensus, structural adjustments, and things of that nature. There is that as well. The idea of a world where the United States and Europe dominate and have as much wealth and power inequality as they did beginning in 2000 is fundamentally unjust, and I don't think that should be anyone's goal. We can get into this more.

There are real opportunities right now. There was a time for a reset of how we approach and address China. This idea of containing China and trying to make countries choose between the United States and China or the West and China is a real mistake, is shortsighted, and does not play to our strengths. Between that and things like industrial policy, the IRA, and some of the measures that Europe has taken—the carbon border tax and things like that—go against everything that the United States and Europe have been trying to create in terms of a liberal global order where there is a more integrated economy and things like that. I think there is going to be more and more of a disjuncture between U.S. values and the U.S. value proposition.

We can talk about it more in terms of what I see as a rebalancing and reconfiguration taking shape between the Global North and the Global South. I think that creates opportunities for the United States and the West, but not if they play it as they have in the past year or more, competing with China in ways that then divide the West, competing with China in ways that then force other countries to make binary choices that they don't want to make, and demonizing China in ways that don't resonate. If you talk to populations, governments, and publics in Africa, for instance, there is a much more nuanced view of China's role in Africa than is portrayed and perceived in Washington.

That is what I mean when I say that we need a much more balanced and nuanced discussion of China to recognize and call out where there are problems but not to go so overboard that we blind ourselves to where there are opportunities and also where we dismiss very clear gains. Without China's rise over the past 20 years the world would be monumentally worse off, including Western populations, but especially in the developing world and elsewhere.

NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: This calls to a point that the world is going through this shift, that we have new centers of economic gravity developing, and again calling not for a reactive approach on the part of the United States and Europe but an active approach. We had on The Doorstep two years back Ambassador Charles Ray talking about the importance of thinking about Africa not as a set of problems to be solved but as a set of opportunities, whether it means the green energy transition, which is going to rely on minerals and commodities from Africa, but also Africa as the "demographic workshop," where you have a labor force that can shift some of these supply chains and make them more compact. I think this does speak to a change in thinking and gets back to your point about the mental match changing about how we in the West and particularly in the United States are viewing the world.

TATIANA SERAFIN: Since we are on Africa, you tweeted: "The only thing worse than the United States ignoring you is the United States paying very close attention." This is related to Africa. Can you explain that? I just love that tweet and want to talk about that.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: I started out by saying that my thoughts and prayers are with Africa and Africans because the "Africa is the future" trope has become widely recognized as a reality in Washington, DC. It was tongue in cheek. The United States has a lot to offer.

I don't want to generalize too much and be too critical or harsh, but the U.S. foreign policy establishment, both within government and in the Washington, DC ecosystem does see the world through a U.S.-centric prism in ways that reduce the world to U.S. interests. Similar to what I just said about strategic competition with China in Africa, when the United States starts paying too close attention—again that whole hammer-and-nails thing; we start looking for nails everywhere, and Africa is such a diverse continent with so many different economies and different regions, and different political cultures that any attempt to generalize is bound for failure.

The good thing is that the Biden Administration has one of the top Africa analysts as the Africa point person on the National Security Council, Judd Devermont, and one of the things he worked on when he was still with the Center for Strategic and International Studies was city-to-city partnerships with Africa, so I don't want to be overly critical.

Again, when you project outward 50 years from now in terms of demographics everyone knows Europe, Asia, and the United States—a little less because of immigration but we'll see how that goes—are going to be aging societies where there are going to be smaller and smaller active workforces trying to support larger and larger retired workforces of elders who are living longer and longer with healthcare becoming better and better but more and more expensive. It is not a great recipe for sustainable economic development in the West at a time when the world is becoming more competitive.

What do we have? We have Europe doing everything it can to shut down immigration from Africa and we have the United States doing the same for South America, Latin America, and Africans who are trying to come through the Americas to the United States, which is a relatively new phenomenon.

There are two things going on. One is that there is going to be a real re-thinking of that a generation from now and a real competition for immigrants, but not just from Africa. In the meantime African countries are going to start leveraging that and other things to their advantage. We saw a start of that in the Loss and Damage Fund for Vulnerable Countries that came out of the Conference of the Parties (COP) 27 climate change conference in Egypt, where there was a very clear balance of power that tilted against the United States and Europe in ways that made it untenable to hold out against those payments. They were framed as something other than reparations in order to avoid any legal responsibility, but the door has been opened to that kind of wealth transfer.

I think we are going to see more of that. We have an article lined up for today on a similar movement for reparations for slavery and colonization by Mohammed Elnaiem that argues that that kind of global fund to transfer wealth, even if not as reparations, is where we will see that movement go in the future with probably more practical results.

Africa stands to benefit from all of that. It stands to be the worst victim of climate change, but if there is a meaningful transfer of wealth and technology for loss and damage but also for mitigation and adaptation it stands to benefit from that and other transfers of wealth and other shifts in the global economy.

Africa has a strong hand to play to mitigate against the typical U.S. approach in engaging with Africa that might otherwise be, like I said, cause for concern in that post on Twitter. It remains to be seen whether it will play it, but Africa and the developing world in general have a very strong hand to play.

TATIANA SERAFIN: Nick, I want to mention that one of your concerns over the last two years has been the Biden-Harris administration operating at the margins, that they cannot push their agenda through. There was a big national strategy review, they took down the whole world, "We're going to do 20 million different things," but what is possible after—wow!—15 votes to get a speaker of the House? What is going to be possible in these next two years where I think we are going to start to see—god, is it time for another U.S. presidential election?

We have talked a lot over the last few moments with Judah about the potential and everything we have to do. Can we actually do it?

NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: I agree with what Judah has been saying here and with another one of our Doorstep guests and friends, Ali Wyne, that the United States seems to be locked into a reactive mode. Proactive measures require the ability to legislate, to set up programs—gasp!—appropriate funds, and create programs, and if you have deadlock and a Congress that cannot pass budgets but does Continuing Resolutions and has not coalesced around a positive vision of what the United States should be doing in the world, I don't know that we can move forward.

Judah, does this leave the initiative in the hands of China, India, or the European Union? It becomes an open question. As you said, people want the United States involved, they want the United States engaged, but is U.S. domestic politics going to be the rock on which these aspirations are going to founder? I don't have a clear answer on that. Judah, from your perspective as the editor of World Politics Review and also being able to observe this from the outside, what are you hearing and seeing?

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: With regard to U.S. domestic politics, it has been pretty astonishing how successful the first couple of years of Biden's presidency have been in terms of pretty monumental legislation that has come out of those first two years. In fairness, Biden came into office similar to Obama, with a lot of clean-up and a lot of repair work to do to crucial relationships, especially in Europe but also Asia and things like that, and also U.S. democracy in the aftermath of the Capitol riot.

There were some limitations in terms of how ambitious his global agenda could be in terms of foreign policy, but I think a lot of the constraints have been self-imposed by the so-called "foreign policy for the middle class," this allergy to trade deals and liberalized trade, which is what Southeast Asia, countries in the Americas, and Africa as well would value and have increasingly come to see as gauges of U.S. seriousness in terms of engagement. So there has been that as a constraint.

There has also been a real hesitation to undo some of the leverage points that the Trump administration accumulated, whether it is with China but also with Iran, for better and worse in that case. I think politically it would not have been a good look for Biden to immediately re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal, at all costs or to immediately unilaterally remove U.S. trade tariffs on China. Was he ambitious or energetic enough in trying to get some of that stuff moved more quickly? I don't think so.

With China he was also getting some advice from people who are very sound in terms of Asia policy and China policy but probably a little more hawkish than I would have been in terms of that, so I think there has been some self-imposed modesty or limited ambition by the Biden administration in terms of action.

The dichotomy—as you said, Nick, and also you, Tatiana—is when you look at the declarative policy in terms of the strategy documents and everything, it is everything everywhere. There are no trade-offs at all. There are no means-to-ends measurements, configuration, or calibration. The United States has to be all things in all places, and that obviously does not work and cannot work.

With regard to the interaction between U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy the advantage Biden has is that the U.S. president does have a wider range on foreign policy than in domestic policy. The disadvantage that you mentioned, Nick, is that he needs money to do a lot of things, and without Congress functioning in a way that is realistic in terms of funding some of these programs I don't think necessarily that he will have a lot of leeway to do so.

One last thing I would say is that where there is a real consensus for the most part it is on maintaining military support for Ukraine, on replenishing U.S. stocks of munitions and rearming the U.S. military, and refocusing the U.S. military on big conventional wars after the counterinsurgency decades. There are also more calls in Europe. We see Germany committing more to defense funding. Japan just committed more to funding their defense. I think that is important, but again there is a limited amount of resources.

Tatiana, you mentioned how the pandemic is still with us. I would say that the pandemic is with us but in a different way. I think we are in the "long COVID" stage of the pandemic, where all of the things that were talked about in March 2020—"build back better," the debt that is owed to the younger generation that suffered and sacrificed so much in that year, how to make things more sustainable, how to make sure the Global South doesn't suffer the way it did—where is that in all of this, and in a period of inflation and what have you?

That bigger chunk that defense spending is going to take or seems likely to take out of domestic spending is going to be contested. There are going to be a lot of social movements and social agitation for putting that money to use elsewhere in ways that could make that problematic. That too is something that will have an impact on U.S. foreign policy. The budget is going to be increasingly contested and not just by dysfunction in Washington but by social movements in the United States that are demanding more of that.

TATIANA SERAFIN: That leaves a lot of questions about where the United States is going to be in the world and what is going to happen in 2023. I want to ask you: What one or two stories are you looking at this year that you think might not have been covered enough in 2022?

Let me share mine. I think India. I think it is all about India. We haven't talked enough about India. The next few years are going to be all about India.

I look from the ground up. Here in America we have this phenomenon called the American Girl doll—I don't know if you have heard about it, Judah.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Not yet, no.

TATIANA SERAFIN: The newest American Girl doll is an Indian American doll. I do think that tells us something from the ground up that there is more of this appetite to learn more about India and to study. Also from the top down India's influence in the world needs to be looked at closer. That is my big story for 2023. What about you?

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: We have definitely talked about a few of the themes that I am looking at. I am focusing less on particular countries and more on bigger trends I guess. We talked a lot about various things like what I expect to be a shift in the power balance between the Global North and the Global South. What I am keeping my eye out for is that the narrative we have seen over the past couple of years of democracy versus autocracy is going to shift dramatically. We are in a period right now where we are seeing a real exhaustion of all the proposed models for governance. Democracy has shown some wear and tear in the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, El Salvador, and even in India, but autocracy hasn't been doing too well either, whether in Iran, China more recently, or Russia. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more creative solutions being offered on a bird's-eye level similar to what I mentioned about reparations and loss and damage, ways of repairing and restoring some equity to the global relationships, but also from the ground up in terms of social movements.

The pandemic demonstrated that there is still a role for the state in terms of interventions and that when the state wants to do something it can. That comes on the heels of a lot of questioning of the neoliberal Washington consensus and things like that. I don't think necessarily state capitalism in the Chinese model or Russian model necessarily works any better. Some of the backlashes in terms of nationalism or illiberal democracy in Eastern Europe have not worked out that well, either.

I think we are in a period where the field has been leveled in terms of competition for governance models in a way that creates more opportunities for new ideas to move from the margins to becoming more respectable and part of the more conventional mainstream discussion. I don't necessarily know what those are, but I feel like we might be surprised in the next year or two or three by where things come from and how our discussions don't resemble what they did a year ago and how we are discussing things very seriously that a year or two ago would have been considered fringe or crank for better and worse.

Decoupling with China was a fringe argument four or five years ago. Now it is gaining some momentum, but I think we will see more from the ground up ways of making democracy more responsive or making the global economy and national economies more just and more equitable. Whether or not it will have an impact, whether or not it will gain traction, I don't know, but I do think we are going to see things like that bubbling up that in ways that again, even if they don't overturn everything that we have come to take for granted, will add things that can have a meaningful impact. That is what I am keeping an eye out for, maybe due to wishful thinking and optimism, but I do think there is some power to that.

TATIANA SERAFIN: We would love to have you back in 2024 to see what happened over the past year and if that came true.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: I will be taking notes over the next 12 months so that I can discuss it with you.

TATIANA SERAFIN: Thank you so much for joining us, Judah.

JUDAH GRUNSTEIN: Thanks for having me. It has been a great pleasure as always.