Alex Turnbull

I think anyone with the capacity to produce fossil who has access to open ocean doesn't have to transit any geopolitical hot zones.

And so that would be Argentina, Brazil,

probably Venezuela at some point, and also a lot of West African countries which have offshore oil developments right now.

So I think that's where people will go to diversify, to have uncomplicated supply lines where they don't have to worry about drones and other such things.

Well, they're not actually, certainly the price has gone up without a doubt.

The problem is that their oil-loading ports are increasingly and frequently on fire because they are getting hit by Ukraine all across Russia, even in the Baltic.

There have been numerous hits on Primorsk, Osloge, and so on.

So they are struggling to really benefit in volume terms, and they're also struggling with their internal domestic refining system due to all these hits by Ukraine, which are just ongoing.

And this is the central fact of all this, is that the tools of warfare of change, that changes a lot.

So I think we need to consider that as sort of a paradigm shift, which has a lot of downstream impacts and geopolitics and needs to be contemplated very deeply.

There's a great book by a historian called Carol Quigley, which is about how weapon systems drive history.

It was published in the 70s, actually, posthumously.

And I think looking at what these platforms do, it's a little bit like the emergence of the rifleman and the sort of citizen army in the sense that you can have

the citizen drone pilot.

And within that range of those drones, you can have a very functional kind of territorial army, which doesn't lean as hard on the centralization and force projection that

allowed the US to project military power so effectively for so long.

So provided you have the industrial capacity to produce these platforms, you as a mid-sized power get a much bigger vote in geopolitics going forward.

So I think this is a challenge to the US, certainly in the Middle East right now, but I think it's also going to be a challenge to China if they

were to get expansionist elsewhere, much as it has been extremely challenging for Russia and Ukraine.

So I think this is kind of, to a certain extent, it's a deep flattening of the field.