S7E3: Escape from the World-Island: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

Hello and welcome once again to Season 7 of Talking Strategy. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. In this season, my friend, Professor Bezris Husa and I will be talking to experts about some of the most important strategic issues affecting global security today: the history and implications of great power competition, deterrence in a multipolar world, and the future of the international order. We are delighted that this podcast is once again made possible thanks to our long-term partnership with Corn Furry. As a leading global consulting firm specialising in strategy and in unlocking performance across defence and commercial sectors, their passion for enhancing organisational and individual potential makes them ideal partners. Now, the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Corn Furry, RUSI or indeed any other institution. Now, the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of In this episode, we'll be exploring the impact of geography on how states and increasingly non-states act. In his 2013 book, The Revenge of Geography, Robert Kaplan argues that those who espouse globalization as the motive force in international relations miss the importance of physical factors in shaping what is happening. Increasingly today, we're seeing the resurgence of thinking about politics and economics that includes reference to geography, either as a constraint or an opportunity. To discuss the return of geopolitics and geoeconomics, we're joined by Professor Scott Smithson from Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Scott is Professor of the Practice of Grand Strategy and Director of the Grand Strategy Program at Denison. He served for 21 years in the United States Army, including as a strategist at U.S. Central and Southern Commands, the U.S. Joint Staffs, and in the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense. He is the Founder and Chief Officer of Geopolitics Incorporated. His publications include Solving America's Gray Zone Puzzle in Parameters 2016 and The Compound Security Dilemma, Threats at the Nexus of War and Peace, Parameters in 2026, both of which done with Isaiah Wilson III. Scott, it's great to see you again. Welcome. Thank you so much for the kind introduction, Paul. It's great to be here and thank you for the interest. I would like to start by asking very, very provocatively, strategy and politics obviously are influenced by geography, technology, economics, people, and all that. Isn't the importance of geography so blatantly obvious that it is a no-brainer even to talk about it? This is a great question. And I think it's very, very interesting in the fact that ever since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the word geopolitics has entered everything from what the think tank community does, what we see in the media, to the way in which scholars and policy practitioners try to characterize the nature of the international system and international competition. What I find very, very interesting is even though we use the phrase geopolitics, there is a missing dimension of the true geographical component of that and how does it have an impact on things. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, there has been this sense that geography can be overcome by certain technical capabilities that we think about multilateral frameworks. History always matters, and geography gets a vote. And so the way in which we understand the nature of how not just states, but as Paul said, non-state actors behave is highly contingent in this field. There's a great scholar, Jeff Sloan at University of Reading, who talks a lot about geopolitics really being a synthetic field of geopolitics, strategic studies, and history. We have a tendency, I think, to drive towards niche and simplicity and academic isolation. But geopolitics is inherently integrated and multidisciplinary and requires a lot of different views. And so I think that a lot of times the geopolitical dimension of things are assumed, but not always really calculated. There's this false sense that technology can always save us, or that the challenges of the past can be overcome by certain things. And I think whenever any of our listeners look at something about geopolitics, they have to ask themselves, do I see a geographic dimension of the analysis or the scholarship that I'm looking at? Or is it someone just talking about international affairs and calling it geopolitics? Because this is a phrase that gets editors excited and happy, and it grabs headlines. And may I turn what you've just said around and say, when people are talking about geopolitics, do they always take into account the extent to which geography also changes, or is mitigated by technology and the natural change of the world with rivers silting up and coastlines eroding and harbours silting up, which have actually had an enormous impact in the past on war and peace. For example, the fact that French harbours on the Atlantic coast were suddenly all silted up and too small for ships when you came to the Renaissance and early modern times. And it was only then that a new big harbour, Le Havre, was built because there wasn't anything else. Anything else had become unusable at that stage. And I think that's a very important point. So are we taking enough account of the changes of geography in geopolitical thinking? I think perhaps that we do on a broad macro sense. But as you also said, perhaps at the micro level, not as much. One area where I think that you're starting to see a shift in the sensibility of these things is the focus on the high north. And the question of with the melting of ice in the Arctic, is this changing the way that states kind of think and operate? Much has been made about the very, very early shipments of liquefied natural gas from Russia to China. But I think your question is a good one. I think what geopolitical analysis has to understand is what are those things that hold constant over time? And what are those things that vary? So how do we think about geopolitics, not necessarily in a direct kind of fatalistic sense, but in a probabilistic sense? What is the magnitude and direction in which these things could go, but always relying, on the fact that you have human agency, you have the environmental factors that you just discussed, that tend to influence and channel the way that states, non-state actors, private, corporate decision-making can go and can be influenced? Scott, can I take you back then to where this idea of geopolitics comes from, and how it shaped thinking, particularly in the context of the Cold War? I'm thinking now, of course, of Mackinder, Kealan, Speakman, and others, and of course, how it plays into Keenan's long telegram. One of the things that I think is foundational is to understand the broader context in which authors were writing. If we start, for example, with Sir Halford Mackinder, he's the founder of the London School of Economics. He basically created the Department of Geography at Oxford. He was the high commissioner of what was called Southern Russia, what we now know as Ukraine, following the Red October Revolution, was a member of parliament, did a tremendous amount of reading and writing. He was influential in building professional military education after the Boer War and before World War I, and so someone who really tried to think about big-picture ideas and big-picture things. He's probably most well-known for this idea of what he called the Heartland Thesis. The main intellectual foundation of Mackinder's contribution is this brilliant essay at the Royal Geographic Society in 1904 called The Geographical Pivot of History. What Mackinder's really trying to do in this piece is to lay out a geographic causation of the trajectory of human history. How does geography explain these broad patterns of history playing out largely on the greater Eurasian landmass? Mackinder's doing this for two reasons. By the time that he's writing in the early 1900s, he makes the argument that all the open spaces of the world of colonization and exploration are basically filled in, and that the world's competitive environment is no longer just a closed system in Western Europe, but the chessboard is the world. And he's writing and speaking to people trying to change their attention to think less about only Europe, but Europe, as he says, historically subordinate to broader patterns of geographically infused causation across what we now know as Central Asia, Russia. The second thing that Mackinder is talking about, and doesn't get enough credit for, I believe, and this ties back to Beatrice's early point, he's not just speaking about geography on its own, but geography as it relates to the introduction of new technologies. And so for Mackinder, the thing that he was really taken about is with the rise of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the Russian Empire, that now big, historically landlocked countries that maybe had limitations because they could not have access to the world's oceans, and could not necessarily compete with the major capitalist, democratic-oriented trading maritime empires of the time, now they could potentially be challenged by the advent of this new technology, the capability to parlay resources into actual military power and military might. And so within the greater Eurasian landmass, he identifies what he calls this pivot area, what he calls a great register or reserve of power. And if one power or a series of powers could aggregate dominant control over this pivot heartland area, they could threaten the maritime supremacy of the great empires at that time. the time, and he's speaking obviously about the British Empire and the challenge of the Royal Navy. So his ideas really start to set as a foundation of how changes in technology can change geography from an inhibitor to an enabler. And he's saying this at a time in which the British Empire is starting to see challenges, right? The rise of Wilhelmine Germany, coming at the end of the Long Boer War, making sense of a rising United States of America. Of course, Mackinder's not the first to use the term geopolitics, is he? In fact, it goes back to the 9th century, or rather to 900, when Emperor Leo first coined the term strategy and talked about the effects of the climate and also of geography and also of politics and all sorts of other things on strategy. So Scott, where does Kjelland fit into this? Rudolf Kjelland was a Swedish political scientist who was the first to really coin the term geopolitics, geopolitique. Kjelland talked about the state in a way that it was a living organism whose survival depended upon expansion, resources, and space. Kjelland was concerned about the continued growth in the power of Tsarist Russia and had hoped that Scandinavia could be a check on that growth. It wasn't happening, so instead started to focus more and more on potentially the power of a rising Germany. Kjelland was a student of Friedrich Ratzel, so someone who came up with the concept of this idea of Lebensraum. And then you start to get this co-optation of the language of geopolitics or how that was corrupted by Karl Haushofer and others. But really the early 20th century is where we start to see the writings of geopolitics start to have traction. And interestingly, the same time that Mackinder is writing, others are writing about other things from a sea power perspective. Could I take you then to the maritime component of. Because Mackinder talks about the heartland, the world islands, but then there's this opposing idea of the rimland, which is what sits around it. Could you unpack that for us a little bit, please? Yes, absolutely. So if we think of Mackinder as one of the intellectual foundations about how we think about power in the greater Eurasian landmass, those ideas are adjusted slightly by the works of Nicholas Speakman. So Speakman was Dutch. He immigrated to the United States during World War II, became a professor at Yale, unfortunately died of cancer in 1943. But Speakman was focused on not only the importance of the geography of Mackinder's heartland, but what he called the rimland. So you could think about this broader crescent that goes from Western Europe all the way across the Middle East, top of the Indian Ocean Basin, all the way up to Asia Pacific. For Speakman, it was this area that was the most consequential, not necessarily the heartland itself. He's writing while World War II is still ongoing. And he's very concerned about the potential isolationist tendencies of the United States whenever the war is over. So a lot of his writing in books like The Geography of the Peace, his audience, he's communicating less so to purely policy people, but more the Americans saying, look, when this war is over, there are parts of the world that will remain consequential going forward. He really makes this, projection, if you will, about what parts of the world will remain important. He makes the argument that the contestation of control of the rimland really drove major conflict. The examples that he talks about were Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and obviously Nazi Germany. We have these major global conflagrations when a rimland power seeks to achieve that greater balance of power and challenge the maritime-oriented powers of the time. I think another thing that's interesting about Speakman, Paul, is even though he talks about this rimland, he also talks about other parts of the world that maybe don't get as much attention in other classical geopolitics, the importance of the Western Hemisphere for the United States and its security, and that the United States can only do things globally if it has positive relations with its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, most approximately the greater Caribbean and Canada. He's less concerned about European long-term influence in Latin America. He gives us this idea of what he calls the equidistant zone. So from the heartland of the United States to Europe, but also in the Southern Cone, in cautions that the United States should not turn its back on the Western Hemisphere. I only raise this because right now we're seeing a significant change in the way in which the United States, at least the current administration, is defining its relationship in Latin America in the Caribbean. And so I think that there are some positive things that Speakman still has to teach us, both within the rimland context, but also in some other parts of the world. You spoke there about the tension between the heartland and the rimland. And one characterization, which you may regard as quite crude, is people would often say that the U.S. is still a rimland power, and China is a heartland power, as traditionally may have been the case, the Mongol Empire and things of that sort. Is that still an accurate characterization with the island chain idea, the Belt and Road Initiative and others? Is China moving beyond a heartland culture and therefore the classic framing may no longer be relevant? So this is a great question. Speakman himself talked about China as having the potential to be the great, what he calls, the Asiatic rimland power. So in a Speakman estimation, again, he's writing at the time of the 1940s, China itself is divided between the nationalists and the communist forces who are both fighting imperial Japan and had been since the 1930s. But he sees the great potential of China, potentially India as well. And Speakman makes the argument that the United States needs to leverage islands. He doesn't use the phrase first island chain, which you could kind of think of as an imaginary line that from Japan to Taiwan, to the Philippines, and then to the South China Sea, as that being an area where the United States needs to be ready to challenge a potential expansionist China. It's interesting that that very territory is the main area of emphasis in the United States' current national defense strategy that talks about needing to deter conflict against territorial expansion against U.S. allies who are in that region. I think what you see, though, with the Belt and Road Initiative is not so much that China is trying to become one or the other, but a hybrid approach. There was a previous Indo-PACOM commander that was asked, what was China's grand strategy and who was most influential? Mackinder, Mahan, and Corbett. And he said all of the above. So China's militarization and its fleet expansion of the PLA Navy is an embrace of Mahanian ideas. But this reliance on maritime-based trade and China's manufacturing an export-based economy, that's a Corbettian sense of things. Yet at the same time, deepening relations with Russia, trying to have more sway in Central Asia, China, and the U.S. military, the United States, this is consistent with the Mackinder view. Interestingly enough, if you look at six of the major corridors, so think about ports, rail networks, shipping, six of the major corridors in the Belt and Road Initiative, four of those six are in Mackinder's pivot area. So within China, there's a book that gets published called The Science of Military Strategy. And a significant amount of the writing in there is all about these very geopolitical terms. So it's interesting that the part of the Belt and Road Initiative that is inherently focused on the land is a way to offset China's vulnerabilities at sea, what many Chinese scholars and academics and strategists would call the "Malacca Dilemma." So a great amount of China's not only export to market, but reliance on energy from the Middle East comes through the Strait of Malacca into China. That same vulnerability also exists for Taiwan, for South Korea, for Japan, for the Philippines and others. So it makes that area highly strategic. China does have a significant amount of infrastructure to move goods across Central Asia, but there's no substitute for moving freight at sea. And the amount of shipments of goods and services that come across the Belt, which is the land component of Belt and Road, is a rounding error compared to what is shipped at sea. Scott, you spoke there about choke points. The Malacca Strait. And we're seeing lots of choke points, the Strait of Hormuz and others. Could you talk to us about how do choke points play their part in this thinking about geopolitics, geoeconomics, and how the economic angle is being used against us? One of the things that immediately jumped to my mind in this question was a gentleman by the name of Sir Jackie Fisher. One of the things that Fisher talked about when he discussed the importance of sea power as related to trade is this idea of what he called the "Five Keys." Basically making the argument that domination and influence of things in the maritime domain does not need to be omnipresent. That there are just five areas. At his time, he said Singapore, Strait of Malacca, the Cape of Good Hope, the Suez Canal, Gibraltar, and Dover as the real consequential areas. And that's where the Royal Navy needed to focus, both as an enabler of trade, but also in a protective capacity. And so while some of those straits may not have the importance that they did in the past, as you mentioned, Malacca today, Strait of Hormuz, Bab el Mendeb, even with Panama, these areas seem to be great concentrations of not only maritime, but also undersea fiber optic cables. And the proximity allows weaker actors, asymmetric benefits to disrupt trade. One of the things that was basically, I don't want to say taken for granted, but was assumed the free flow of shipping in both national and international waters was just a thing that allowed globalization. Major corporations did not have to incorporate a tremendous amount of concern about geopolitical risk when it came to shipping outside of maybe piracy here and there and some other things. But now geography is back with a vengeance and we're seeing that play out. Another great historical example for us would be in World War I, the Gallipoli campaign, you know, obviously the Royal Navy and Empire forces had tremendous material advantage. But that material advantage was offset by that geographic proximity. The U.S. Navy is finding this right now in the challenge against Iran. And we may be seeing this more and more in the Bab al-Mandeb. When we touch on the Bab al-Mandeb, we're seeing non-state actors playing an increasing role, in part through occupation of some geography, but equally when you spoke about businesses and their role now in geopolitics, geoeconomics. Can you say something about that? Maybe some of the commercial actors who are wielding huge power. When I think about it from a business perspective, it's less one of where corporations are finding emerging markets and more how the democratization of technology is allowing non-state actors to have influence in the ways that they wouldn't even at 10 or 15 years ago. So the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, unmanned systems. I remember, my time at U.S. Central Command, we started to see ISIS using Amazon to buy quadcopters, have them shipped to Turkey, bringing them over the border into Iraq and affixing grenades to the bottom of these quadcopters and trying to attack the Peshmerga. And this was only 10 years ago. Now you look at where the shifts of technology are, with very, very little money, both state actors as well as non-state actors that are state supported, and I think this is an important distinction, have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components. And I think that's a very, important distinction, have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, and have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, and have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, and have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, and have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components, and have the ability to build off-the-shelf missile components. be on the winning side of that cost curve and find ways to impose huge costs on maritime traffic and now even in the air domain. So all this to say that the tyranny of distance in some ways is being overcome by some technologies. That's amplified when you're dealing with those straits, those keys of Sir Jackie Fisher, where everyone has to go through that funneling. And if you're in international shipping, you want to minimize the time that it takes to get from point A to point B. Speed is of the essence. Yet what we're seeing with these disruptions is with minimal investment that can all impose not just economic costs, but then put political costs on world leaders, Donald Trump being a great example of right now. Scott, if I can take you back, you spoke about Speakman. How do Speakman's ideas then get translated into policy that directs how we construct the Cold War? When we discussed Speakman, we talked about Speakman's emphasis, of the importance of what he called the rimlands, not necessarily the heartland on the greater Eurasian landmass, and how it's the rimlands that are most consequential. That's where industry, that's where trade, and it's that interstitial place from land power to sea power that connects everything. And that's why he believed in it so much. Usually when we talk about containment and containment strategy, we're talking about an American former diplomat at the time named George Kennan in the Long Telegram. And much like how Mackinder goes deep into history before he gets to his causal argument, Kennan does the exact same thing. But when he gets to his policy prescription, his idea of containment is not necessarily that the Soviet Union or global communism has to be checked everywhere. Instead, he said it's really important to focus on a series of strong points, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine River Valley, Japan, and a handful of very small other areas. And that that containment in and of itself will be a good enough strategy to allow the internal weaknesses of the Soviet Union eventually get to the point where the whole system implodes on itself. And if you plot some of those areas that Kennan talks about, and you look at some of the areas that Speakman emphasizes in his rimland writing, there's a pretty strong correlation. It's not exactly clear that Kennan was directly influencing the Soviet Union. But it is interesting, Paul, that when you look at the broader security architecture that the United States builds at the end of World War II and into the Cold War, it would make sense to Speakman. The United States is not a rimland power. It's what Mackinder would call an island or an insular power. But its architecture was all focused on a series of security mechanisms really across that rimland. And if we look at where the Cold War flashpoints were, they're in these rimland areas. As a quick aside, I'm an admirer of a geopolitical atlas that the French War College, Ecole de Guerre, generates each year. And in a previous version, they tried to create a map of America's grand strategy historically, really embraced a Speakman-esque rimland way of containing China and Russia going forward. So without a doubt, these ideas between a Speakman's rimland and what we saw eventually with aspects of containment, there tends to be resonance with both of these areas. You've shown very beautifully, Scott, how the Speakman ideas, but also before that, the Mackinder ideas would have translated themselves into such strategic prescriptions. Could I talk about how German thinking about geopolitics was actually contaminated by such political dimensions? And this is sitting here in Hamburg. I'm very aware of the fact that the word geopolitics is rather problematic, because in National Socialism, people preaching about geopolitics actually signed up to a Nazi agenda of expansionism. Could you talk about that? As we mentioned earlier, these ideas of geopolitics were co-opted by the Nazis to rationalize German expansionism. And I had talked briefly about Karl Haushofer earlier. Haushofer taught geography at the University of Munich. One of his former students was Rudolf Hess. So we're talking about someone who was well-placed within the Nazi regime. And as you just mentioned, Beatrice, geopolitics didn't necessarily cause Nazi expansionism, but it hijacked it, and it rationalized what it was doing going forward. Because of that, the concept of geopolitics became so tainted, both in higher education in the United Kingdom, definitely in parts of Europe, but also in the United States. It was that phrase which would not be named. And it wasn't until Henry Kissinger, in his time in the United States government in the 19th century, came up with this idea again. But as you rightly put out, we have to be very, very careful about how concepts trying to be descriptive in talking out potential causality can be inverted in such a way to justify military expansionism. We're seeing at the moment with changes in the climate, the opening up of the northern route for China to get its goods over the top. Does that make a significant difference to our understanding of geopolitics, do you think? I don't know if it is a challenge, but I think what it does is it forces people to engage the changing context and think through the implications beyond just the preliminary effects of climate change and where we may be seeing more shipping. China has repeatedly tried to call themselves a near Arctic power. But I think there's the broader question of how are we seeing changes in military posture from Russia in the Arctic? How is that forcing NATO to change the way that it thinks about things? And so again, I don't think that the opening up of the northern route for China to get its goods over the top of the northern route fundamentally challenges the way that we think about geopolitics. It just adds another dimension, right? It's something that has to be accounted for going forward. It's something that I think is slowly gaining traction in some circles in ways that maybe it would not have five or 10 years ago. But of course, Speakman, when he's writing about Rimland, is containing towards the south, whereas now we're suggesting that there's an expansion route to the north. Exactly. I think that's a great point. And I think that's a great point. The Cold War would know when I talk about the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap. Well, this matters again. And I think that we in the West are scrambling in some ways to catch back up to the capabilities needed to address security challenges. So many European powers in the United States as well, after the Cold War, got rid of a lot of undersea capabilities. That created a vulnerability that now is being exploited by Russia and others. And so we're trying to adapt. But there's a geographic parameter that kind of drives that action that we see. Kaplan, as I mentioned in his book, The Revenge of Geography, seems to try to position understanding geopolitics almost in opposition to the globalization element. To what extent do you think that the two are indeed oppositional, or in fact, is globalization creating some of the geopolitical challenges we're having through choke points and others? It's a great point. A lot of the geographical parameters of the things that we've discussed are important, and many of these characteristics remain enduring. But what we see now with the advent of things in the digital domain, there's now new choke points. Some of them are physical, some of them are virtual, some of them are based on supply chains, but some of them are also based on policy choices. Our listeners who know a lot about critical minerals and rare earths realize that those vulnerabilities that the West has right now is less of geography, but way in which the economic system matured and shifted. Where the value chain of things like copper were over time. And so it's bred a lot of these dependencies and vulnerabilities that can be weaponized. And we see this play out right now. Great power competition from the United States and China. Right. China has the ability to weaponize vulnerabilities in global supply and value chains. With this tariff regime, Donald Trump is weaponizing access to the American market. So there are two fundamentally different ways of thinking about. Access to things, resources, markets, industries, capital, but in many ways that's consistent with some of the ideas that we see in a lot of classical geopolitics. McKinder wouldn't have been able to think about the vulnerability of fiber optic cables or the importance of the AI race, but even with AI, it has a geographic component to it. It's not just how well the models can think, but the data centers that power that, the resources required. All of that. That has a logistical and physical tail, which creates vulnerabilities and those can be plotted on a map. And those are things that we can see in existing processes. Very early on, you mentioned something you said you called consequential powers. Could you just expand what you meant by that and how it might differ from a great power? So usually when we talk about great powers, there tends to be a tendency to talk about China, the United States and Russia in modern times. But there are other countries who, while they may not have the GDP, the size of militaries, the geographic expanse of those three countries that I just listed, there are other countries that matter. They have the ability to influence the magnitude and direction of international affairs. And so I think of Canada, I think of France, I think of the United Kingdom, I think about Indonesia, I think about Australia, I think about Japan. I believe that in a lot of current geopolitical analysis, we ignore current geopolitical analysis. We ignore countries like that at our own peril. When combined, the combined economies of the European Union is the third largest in the world. Japan's economy, even with all their challenges, is massive right now. And there's many other parts of the world that we could talk about. And so when I talk about consequential powers, I'm thinking of those that are maybe just below that threshold of China, Russia and the United States. Ones whose policy choices across diplomacy, information, military affairs and economics are highly consequential for the future magnitude and direction of the 21st century. We talked about containment earlier. The United States would not have been in a position to enable the West to resist and deter the Soviet Union had it not been for its constellation of allies and partners. The previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe Dunford, talked about the United States' true strategic center of gravity was its network of allies and partners. And that that was the thing that really enabled the United States to do what it did in the Cold War and the post-Cold War space. So when we get into a dialogue of this is Europe's problems, this country should spend more on defense. We'll help out these Indo-Pacific countries, but only if they do this. Things become transactional and less transformational. And so we ignore allies and partners at our own peril. Thank you, Scott. Your point there about consequential powers that are consequential perhaps as a composite nature of their position, economics, geography and their relationship with, in this case, the United States, I think really highlights for me the point that geography matters, but not on its own. It matters when it's interwoven with thinking about economics, with technology and how that interplay happens. And it's also important that geography isn't fixed and therefore our ability to think through the implications of changes here. Scott, it's been a pleasure to see you again and as ever to learn from you. So thank you very much for joining us today. Paul and Beatrice, thank you both so very much for giving me this opportunity. Thank you for joining us for this RUCI podcast brought to you in partnership with Korn Ferry. If you would like to catch up on any of our earlier episodes, please visit your usual streaming platform or try our web page at RUCI.org. And to hear about future episodes, you can follow RUCI on social media. As we have just heard, ideas can often get hijacked and become less descriptive and more justification for sometimes ill-intentioned action. And as the frameworks and mental models we construct to explain the world become problematic for whatever reason, it becomes tempting to reach for yet new buzzwords and concepts. To make it look as though we're on top of things. In our next episode, we will be talking to Dr. Chiara Libicella from King's College London about the dangers in latching onto strategic fashions. Those whose ideas are seductive but are often both vague and exclusionary. We hope that you can join us then. Thank you.