Azeem Azhar

I suspect the OPEC cartel is a good example where the dependency on oil was used as a manifest as a tool.

But in the past five or six years, that weaponization has become increasingly manifest and it's becoming perhaps part of the geopolitical landscape.

So I'm just curious about whether you see that as a phase change as well, or is it a rerun of the tape that you so eloquently described of the 20s and 30s?

But do you think that what we see in this specifically between the US and China today has a grand plan to it?

Or is it a bit incoherent?

I mean, I look at things like 100% tariffs, but carve outs for Nvidia's H20 chips, you know, with the Chinese response to their domestic industry saying you've got to use domestic chips.

It doesn't look that look like

Either side is fully proactive and escalating in a consistent way.

And it certainly looks from the US side, but there's a little bit of shooting from the hip.

Right.

So maybe you don't you don't stop trade with China, but maybe it is that any kind of systems change is

necessarily messy, feels incoherent at the tactical level, because what you need to do is generate momentum, generate force in order to change the system.

The White House, the administration has been reasonably clear about the gestalt that they want, which is sort of make America great again, have fewer dependencies, have a greater, more transactional control over

relationships with other nations rather than alliances that are writ on paper.

So perhaps, you know, tactically that will always need to have that sense of frivolity and friction rather than, you know, people in suits walking down a checklist.

I wonder whether what's really going on here is system building, that we tend to talk about

the components or the minerals.

We tend to talk about the bandwidth of the memory in the chips or whether the battery can come out or whether a particular rare earth is allowed.

But perhaps it's as much about creating these

innovation and technology systems that are not dependent at a fundamental and strategic level on your great rival, right?