Azeem Azhar

So I'm not on the queue.

I'm here talking to you.

And here we go.

Sovereignty.

I urge you to go back and read Mark Carney's speech.

The Prime Minister of Canada gave speech yesterday.

He, in the words of Michael Caine in The Italian Job, he blew bloody doors off.

It's a fantastic speech about what sovereignty needs to look like if you're a middle power, about the kind of alliances you're going to have to build.

But critically, the point he makes is the rules-based order is over.

It's not a smooth transition.

It is a rupture and people need to live up to it.

But let's just say, I see Joeri van Gies saying he's a real leader.

Joeri, of course, the Belgian prime minister also did himself proud, speaking a little bit before Carney yesterday.

His words were, and please, I'm going to be paraphrasing, Europe has been a group of happy vassals and now runs a risk of being unwilling slaves.

It was incredibly powerful language, which adds, I think, to the momentousness of the moment right now.

Arthur Mensch of Mistral was also on that panel and Arthur made the observation that technological sovereignty is going to be really important, that the entirety of Europe is dependent essentially on US software.

I've talked to a lot of people, and I think people in the exponential view community, how we have thought about the world being spiky.

We put this risk in the first book, which came out five years ago.

And essentially, there is a widening belief that interdependency is now going to be weaponized extensively.

That even things, my view now, like the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud,