Saagar Enjeti

Hong Kong and places like this.

And the shadow fleet depends really on a network of brokers and intermediaries that

that can incorporate companies in those jurisdictions.

And the question then is, can the sanctions policymakers in the United States and in Europe track down those companies quickly enough to put them on the sanctions blacklist before these people create new companies?

And it's a real cat and mouse game.

And we've seen right in the global fight against tax evasion,

that no matter how well-intentioned you are, it is very difficult to keep tracking these offshore entities quickly enough.

It's possible, but we are going to need a big investment in state capacity to do that.

And more broadly to your question, Crystal, about the limits of US leverage, I think one of the things that the Russia sanctions have really shown is that Asia is the absolutely pivotal economic player in the world economy when it comes to making sanctions effective and particularly making them hermetic.

And one of the things that was sorely underestimated in the run-up to the war in Ukraine is that Western policymakers believed that if they launched very big sanctions, those would be sufficient, and they didn't really need to incorporate large Asian economies.

And what the last three, four years have shown is that if only China and India continue to buy Russian oil, that is actually enough to keep the Russian economy afloat and even doing reasonably well.

The sanctions are definitely imposing costs on Russia, but they can...

uh, survive, uh, for the time being, and they're not under any immediate, very strong pressure.

And, um, that's really key.

So I think that the Russia Ukraine war is the first geopolitical crisis where we see that Western economic power alone is not enough to make sanctions decisive.

Uh, you really need to have Asian countries on board and even all the major Asian economies.

And that's exactly what you see in this crisis too.

It really, I think, is going to be a question of how Iran and the Asian economies negotiate, because those links are the most important.

And that's, I think, where we're going to see the most important developments about what might stabilize out of this Hormuz control weapon.

Thanks very much for the invitation.