Azeem Azhar

We know about Ron Carney's speech.

We know about Donald Trump and his two-hour and some ramble speech.

Most people who sat through that did say they lost the thread of what the argument was or the point that was being made was.

But I think more interesting in conversations I've had with people from the international relations and geopolitics community and some business leaders who are running multinational organizations is the awakening of the complexity of this environment.

And that, in a sense, as someone challenged me yesterday after I had said there are only two countries who can really be sovereign in the world, which would be, of course, the United States and China, the pushback came.

The pushback was that, yeah, is that even true?

Of course, the U.S.

is dependent on lots of things China produces.

It's dependent on ASML, which is a European company for making the advanced machines that make the chips.

So we do still have this quite interrelated, interconnected world, despite a move towards McCandless policies.

But what's really different this year, because we've been talking about these things for a couple of years, and I co-led a working group looking at this two years back, is it feels more real.

It feels more real, more tangible.

Steps are being taken right now.

Other thing I've observed, of course, is that we tend to, especially coming out of the UK, as I am, think about this in terms of the transatlantic relationship.

But somebody pointed out to me, of course, that US trade is actually only a small portion of global trade.

And outside of the US, in fact, from the US, trade is growing.

But outside of the US, it is growing even more rapidly because many countries do need to continue to trade with each other.

So the picture is not quite as black and white as we otherwise would have seen.

The second theme that is playing its way out and becoming really consistent are questions about AI.

And let me just summarize where they are.