Lee Harris

Exactly.

So this has been standard in insurance policies for planes and ships and commodities like oil since World War II.

It's been around for decades.

And it says that policies are canceled if war breaks out between any of these five powers, the U.S., China, Russia, the U.K., and France.

And that's long been thought of as common sense.

I mean, if war breaks out between any two of those countries, the thought has been all bets are off.

But they're kind of eyeing the fact that at the moment there are more and more skirmishes or examples of low-grade conflict between some of these powers or their proxies.

And they want to make sure that that doesn't immediately or necessarily result in these policies being canceled.

So they're considering adding a clause that would set out scenarios under which this exclusion wouldn't be automatically triggered.

And they're looking specifically at things like cyber warfare, drone technology, and even undersea sabotage with submarines.

A Chinese drone or a spy balloon flying into U.S.

airspace wouldn't automatically mean that policies were canceled.

The same thing would be true for a submarine that was nosing around undersea cables in UK waters.

Those both seem like plausible scenarios that could occur without necessarily indicating that there's a full-fledged war going on.

Exactly.

Yes, that's true.

And you're entirely right.

I mean, it's not every day you see insurers raising their hands to offer more coverage.

A couple of caveats are, number one, they're not sure that they're going to go ahead with this.

So this is just something that's being discussed, but they're trying to avoid, frankly, a reputational risk for the industry.