60th Munich Security Conference, African Union’s Conflict-Laden Agenda, Bellicose North Korea, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, the sixtieth Munich Security Conference meets at a perilous geopolitical moment, the African Union summit confronts many conflict challenges and North Korea celebrates the birthday of the late leader Kim Jong Il. It's February 15th, 2024 and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, it feels like we need to start in Europe, which is a place we tend to drift to quite a lot lately. Sixtieth Munich Security Conference begins tomorrow and it lasts through Sunday. This is a leading forum for debating international security policy. It's a favorite of this podcast. It's especially important point of contact for the transatlantic alliance and there's been quite a bit of roiling amid that alliance in the past week or so in light of the recent comments by presidential candidate and former President Trump, so is the NATO issue going to dominate the zeitgeist of Munich?

ROBBINS:
I love it when you do the German thing. Can you say the name of the hotel they're meeting in?

MCMAHON:
In the Bayerischer Hof.

ROBBINS:
I know.

MCMAHON:
It's a great hotel too, by the way.

ROBBINS:
So this is the annual sort of the Davos for national security nerds. Although I suspect the food and the wine are nowhere near as good. More than four hundred participants. There are going to be top politicians, defense and intelligence leaders, heads of think tanks, journalists, and of course arms manufacturers. We're going to be there. Some of the Marques names, Olaf Scholz, Kamala Harris is going to be there, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is supposed to go.

MCMAHON:
But no, Lindsey Graham, I hear.

ROBBINS:
Lindsey Graham, who used to be a total devotee of the security conference apparently is going to the border instead, after visiting with President Trump, he's shifted his priorities no longer an internationalist. And King Abdullah is going to be...Ursula von der Leyen is going to be there and of course, this should be a drinking game Bob, everybody's betting that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is going to be there as well. They're going to also be inviting people from the Global South; Guatemala's newly elected president is going to be there. That's going to be part of their focus. 

But as you said, the person probably most in everyone's mind is not going to be there and that's going to be former president and GOP front runner Donald Trump because last week as we discussed how Russia's invasion of Ukraine and anxiety about a possible Trump 2.0 was affecting national security thinking and somewhat defense spending in Europe and anxiety levels rose even higher over the weekend when Mr. Trump on the campaign trail told the story that he loves to tell about supposed conversation with the leader of an unnamed large NATO country in which he claimed he told this leader, "You got to pay and if you don't, I'm going to tell Russia to do whatever the hell they want with them." As you can imagine, that has led to a major freak out. 

So the main focus of this conference is once again going to be how reliable is the U.S. as an ally and with that, this question about what's going to happen with Ukraine, particularly because the Congress does not seem able to get it together. Now the good news is the Senate did finally approve the funding four months after President Biden asked for it, but the prospects in the house are quite grim. 

So is Trump coming back? Even if Trump doesn't come back, is the U.S. a reliable partner able to support this fight against Ukraine? Will the NATO alliance hold together? Those going to be a big part of the discussion around the table there. Zelensky undoubtedly, I assume he's going to come, he's going to make a very strong pitch there and the Americans who are there are going to have to make a very strong pitch that we're doing our best to continue to hold the alliance together and to keep the support for Ukraine flowing.

MCMAHON:
So the former president gets to be in the conversation at the big event and it's also focused attention on this issue of countries meeting their commitment of 2 percent of GDP towards defense spending. There seems to be a tick up in that if there's a bigger tick up, then the former president gets to say he had influence on that. So it's kind of win-win for former President Trump at a conference where the report is titled, "Lose-Lose?," alternate universes.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, I mean President Trump of course always represents this as if this is greens fees at a golf course. This has never been a question of made our dues. It's this commitment to spend 2 percent of your GDP and every American president has despaired over European defense spending and the lose-lose is this report that was written in the run up to the conference and it talks about an anticipation of the conference is concerned that we're looking at an increasingly transactional zero-sum world and that too was a hallmark of Trump 1.0, this notion that trade was all about, "If I win, you have to lose." And that is a pretty fundamental concern and I think that will be a focus of the conference as well. 

One of the interesting news developments that I think is going to perhaps focus the brain and perhaps draw the alliance together and perhaps maybe even have an impact on Washington is this news that came out on Wednesday much to the consternation of the White House from the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee, that the Russians are moving ahead in a space-based nuclear weapon that could destroy both military and civilian communications and surveillance satellites.

We go back and forth with this question, are we an isolationist country? Are we not an isolationist country? Is the alliance going to hold together, not hold together in the face of a very increasingly assertive and frightening Russia? I think that's going to be another focus as well. This is a pretty scary world out there and countries are caught between is it every country for itself or are we stronger? This sounds maybe like...it sounds like a Ford ad, "Stronger together," but I think that's going to be a big part of the discussion at the conference there. How threatening are the Russians and can we make it any way other than together? 

The report also includes some really interesting polling, which was getting some buzz this week. This is called the Munich Security Index, and last year showed pretty much every country that was polled said that it was all about Russia all the time and their big fear and this time around Russia had fallen down on the list of people's concern and countries are worried about migration caused by war and by climate change and also worried by the threat of radical Islam. And I think a lot of that has to do with the polling was done immediately after the Hamas attacks in Israel, but taking the edge off their concern about Russia did not spell well for Ukraine. Certainly there's been a decline of concern in the United States among the Republican party, but when you hear about things like the Russians pushing ahead with this potentially really frightening nuclear program and you see what's going on on the ground on Ukraine, we're sort of caught between once again this discussion in this country and on the ground in Munich will see what is the focus and how much is the alliance going to hold together.

MCMAHON:
Those are all really good points Carla, and I think it's also going to be interesting to see the dialogue that opens up with these Global South countries that you mentioned that are invited to this because as some of them have been saying and might even say even with the news of this space threat, a little bit of metaphorical eye-rolling about, "Oh, here goes the West again, worrying about their problems while spending enormous amounts of money in an area where it's not necessary. There's bigger things going on and the system that they've created is faulty and needs to be reimagined." We're going to be publishing on our affiliated website with the Council of Councils, a roundup of experts from around the world and it's pegged to the two-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And the experts from the global south are pretty much uniformly saying, let's move towards a ceasefire and some of them saying, let's look at a reappraisal, the security apparatus there, maybe we need to consider Russia's interests vis-a-vis a NATO expansion and so forth. 

It's all to say that it's an interesting set of views that might be on display at Munich, which is, as I said, pretty much hardcore transatlantic and concerns about Russia, but there's this other voice in the room that might modulate that theme.

ROBBINS:
Well, we talked about this that a lot of countries, including the United States and in the transatlantic alliance were utterly puzzled why the Global South, of course is such a generic term, but why some countries, including countries like South Africa, were not outraged by the Russians invading Ukraine. These are countries that are not overwhelmingly powerful and often threatened by their own neighbors. Why did they not see one of the fundamental international norms, the norms on which the United Nations is founded, is that you don't take land by force and why were they not outraged by what the Russians did? And that this clearly was a warning to we quote, "The defenders of the rules based in international order," that this had to be a wake up call for us. And that seemed to sort of slip away from the conversation and the attempt to say, "Well, the Black Sea grain deal was going to be a threat to world food prices." Was this going to be the wake up call? And none of this was the wake up call. 

And this Munich Security Report also warns that quote, "From the perspective of the sheer of humanity living in poverty or suffering from protracted conflicts, calls to defend the abstract rules-based order and shoulder, the costs that come with it seem tone deaf." Now this report is not saying give up on the rules-based order, but we do have to take very seriously people's sense that we are only defending that order because it's great for us. We have to explain to people why it's good for them as well. So that may well be a focus of the conversation in Munich. I certainly hope it's the focus as well because these things do reinforce each other. It's not just all about big power politics. The rest of world needs to understand why rules matter.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And that's going to be the fact of these people getting in the same spaces together throughout the sprawling Bayerischer Hof will be important to be able to continue to carry on this discussion to be open to listening, but also to making those points that you said, Carla. I think it's a reason why Munich is and remains important and why it's been going on for sixty years now.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, let's continue our conversation about summits with the African Union Summit, which also starts on Saturday and the African Union leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for their thirty-seventh summit and they have a lot to talk about as well. There's trouble in the Sahel, tensions are rising between Somalia and Ethiopia over a maritime deal with the breakaway region of Somaliland. We've talked before, there's huge displacement and suffering in Sedan's civil war, and those numbers just are horrifying. There's instability in the DRC and threats of war with Rwanda. There's an enormous amount there that they have to handle. Does the AU have any plans or ideas to address these multiple crises?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, you've really teed it up and a lot of those you mentioned, Carla came from an excellent scene setter from the International Crisis Group where I'll just quote from it because it gives a backdrop to what you're saying. As part of its intro to the summit, it's saying, "Insurgencies bedevil countries from Mali to Mozambique while state collapse looms in Sudan. There's the possibility of a major interstate war and tensions in the Horn and Great Lakes regions are particularly alarming." So that's a big chunk of Sub-Saharan Africa and it's going to be filling up the summit agenda for sure, but we should note that the number one thing that the Crisis Group listed on there among all these concerns is how to deal better with democratic backsliding.

So the meeting's happening after a period in which several countries have announced they're leaving the West African group known as ECOWAS, and these countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have had their activities suspended from the African Union just in the past week or so. We've had Senegal's leader postponing elections until the fall after an alignment was happening for pending elections that he didn't like. And there's been military forces going into the parliament and pulling out opposition lawmakers a very, very alarming display in a country that had been seen as more stable and hopefully on a road towards greater democratic stability. That's not the case. 

So it's going to be important for the AU leaders to talk about that. They had been taking a growing role in trying to create a ground floor for democratic norms and for observing them and what to do when countries vary from those, but then also playing a really important role in peacekeeping that Africa continues to this day to dominate global peacekeeping efforts and resources. It's the focal point of UN peacekeeping certainly and UN has increasingly seeded or collaborated with the African Union to make sure certain admissions can be staffed and resourced and so forth. African Union continues to play a role in Somalia, and as you said, Somalia now finds itself at odds with the host nation of the AU summit, Ethiopia over this port agreement involving Somaliland. 

So it's going to be a summit in which it's going to be really important issues on the table, but also a sense of how is this AU organization going to prioritize these major either existing or looming conflicts, and then what kind of shape is it to basically resource the efforts needed to mediate, to provide peacekeeping. Some of the African peacekeeping initiatives are not just uniform forces patrolling streets and separating sides, but it's mediation efforts. It's dealing with other sort, what they call confidence building efforts and that takes time. It takes patience, but it takes presence and it takes credibility. And so it's a really big moment for the African Union. And so I think it could get certainly overshadowed in some of the other press coverage of places like Munich, but I think it's going to be worth watching what comes out of Addis and whether it's showing a sense of resolve or a sense of resignation.

ROBBINS:
The AU's outgoing chairperson was the president of the Union of Comoros and he made quite a big deal, rightly about rising sea levels and the blue economy, and it's not all about war. Also, obviously climate displacement also leads to the huge national security problems. Did they make any progress on that topic during his tenure?

MCMAHON:
I think the one bit of progress to point to is just having it on the agenda and having a voice on that and having the fact of these countries that, for example, if you look at the various data viz around carbon emissions and impacts from extreme climate, there's an incredibly disproportionality between what sort of emissions are generated by Africa, which we obviously relates to the continent's industrialization or lack of, and then what it's dealing with in terms of drought, in terms of rising sea levels, in terms of all sorts of things.

So I think getting that on agenda at places like the COP meetings at the end of the year, but also having their own summits organized in Africa to draw attention to this have been important and important as a way of building a groundswell of support for these kind of lost damage funds that are also increasingly on agendas at meetings like COP at various global fora where you have richer countries that have benefited from industrialization and from intense carbon emissions to sort of remind them that there are countries that are disproportionately paying the cost.

So I would say in terms of that, in terms of raising it as an issue, I'm not sure about the concrete impact, Carla, as in so many other areas in the climate front, it tends to grind along pretty slowly. And so that is also something when you're in the midst of all these looming conflicts or concerns about conflicts or concerns about democracy, climate's going to take a backseat and so I'm not sure how much we'll see it come up at this particular summit, but it is interesting to mention also the leadership or the chairmanship of the next session, which will fall to either Morocco or Algeria and they're getting into a bit of a face off over that issue.

ROBBINS:
Do we have a dog in the fight? We put money on it. Okay.

MCMAHON:
I should add one other thing that the U.S. has its top African officials attending this summit as always, and I think it's going to be keenly interested in both being a presence there, being seen as an interlocutor at a time when you have countries like certainly China and its massive infrastructure efforts, but also Russia in being invited by countries especially in West Africa to step in and help out in "peacekeeping." That's also has certainly gotten the attention of the U.S. and European states.

ROBBINS:
Was that peacekeeping with air quotes around?

MCMAHON:
That's air quotes, major air quotes around that.

ROBBINS:
That was like Wagner group.

MCMAHON:
That's major Wagner group presence, yes.

ROBBINS:
Wagner group peacekeeping. Is there the same or close to the same level of anxiety in the AU at the potential presidential transition in this country in that the U.S. retreat, or is there potential relief at the notion that we're not going to be so engaged in the world?

MCMAHON:
That is an issue to watch. It's sort of consuming all the oxygen seemingly in Europe right now, but in Africa it's not clear. I think African nations in the past resented some of the blunter comments of President Trump regarding donations, but-

ROBBINS:
We can't say them in a family podcast.

MCMAHON:
No, we cannot say that on a family podcast. But by the same notion, it was a bit of neglect that they weren't necessarily bothered by, but others were because again, it was a bit of an attention deficit that allowed certainly an acceleration of Chinese and Russian interests on the continent, I think some would say. 

But Carla, let's move across the globe to North Korea of all places they are marking a birthday, the eighty-third birthday of Kim Jong Il, who is the late father of Kim Jong Un, the current leader of North Korea. Now festivities are coming at a time when North Korea is asserting itself in new and concerning ways. In the last week, Kim moved to halt efforts for reconciliation with its southern neighbor, South Korea, and even threatening to go nuclear if provoked. It has been cozying up to Russia. It has become more of an armed supplier to countries like Russia, and it has been very active in recent years in the cyber realm as well in hacking and ransomware attacks and so forth, but it all adds up to an escalation coming out of Pyongyang seemingly. Carla, do you know what's leading to this escalation and is there a U.S. role in deescalating?

ROBBINS:
So it's intriguing to think about how this birthday and this latest escalation fit together or actually how they sort of compete against each other. North Korea is a country built on a cults of personality and the cult of Kim Il Sung, who's the country's founder and the current Kim, Kim Jong Un's grandfather, and the father of the guy whose birthday we're going to be celebrating is long believed that that cult is such a big deal that the current Kim had plastic surgery before succeeding to the throne to make him look even more like his grandfather.

And for years, his haircut and his clothes, horn-rimmed glasses, the Mao suits were clearly styled to mimic the old man. We know so little about what goes on there that when the current Kim shifted his sartorial choices, it even made news in the West. So we watch all of these things. How much do they celebrate the birthdays? Is dad less popular than grandpa? All of these things, this is as close as we get to understanding what goes on in the heads of these people, all of which makes Kim's recent defiant break with family precedent even more surprising. 

This all started in mid-January actually when he declared to his parliament that North Korea was abandoning his father's longstanding objective of peaceful unification with South Korea. And he said he wanted to quote, "Shake off the unrealistic pretensive dialogue and cooperation," and Kim is really never a man who does anything by half. He ordered a rewriting of North Korea's constitution to define the south as its most hostile foreign adversary. He ordered the dismantlement of all state agencies responsible for reconciliation with the south and satellite photos showed that the government in late January demolished this nine-story arch of reunification built by his father.

In February, he said he had no desire for diplomacy and as you said, started to beat the nuclear drum. As for what's really going on, some experts warn that the north might actually be getting ready for war, but pretty much everybody else sees this as another bid for attention. Kim really tends to have hissy fits when he is being ignored, and the Biden administration, which is focused a lot more on encouraging a rapprochement between Seoul and Tokyo, and now of course Ukraine and Gaza has taken all of the oxygen. So pretty much everyone's been ignoring him. And this is more than anything else, probably a bid for attention and a bid for more aid, lifting sanctions, whatever it is he's looking for.

And Kim may also be posturing as a way to bolster his new romance with Putin in Russia. And if the White House is focused on anything, it's that relationship that they find more concerning than the possibility of an all out war. Pyongyang is sending artillery shells and short-range ballistic missiles to Russia and all of that is already showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine. And in exchange, the north is supposedly getting cash and advanced satellite and missile technology and anything that boosts its missile development program and its potential to sell this stuff to other rogue states is really, really worrying.

So could things go awry? Always, because we all know that the North Koreans do wacky things occasionally shelling South Green Islands occasionally throwing stuff over Japan, so things could go poorly. We have a whole bunch of troops in South Korea and they do have nuclear weapons, but more than anything else, people are watching that relationship with Russia.

MCMAHON:
And Russia was part of this diplomatic effort that seems like a very long time ago, it wasn't terribly, but that involved Kim's father, which I think it was called the Six Party Talks. And it had a goal of denuclearize North Korea with all sorts of carrots thrown in, including assurances about its security and so forth that would allow it to open up its facilities. And it did for a fairly brief moment allow that to happen or at least dismantle some, I think plutonium related facilities.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, they canned fuel. They did do that, 

MCMAHON:
Yeah. 

ROBBINS:
Americans actually went in and were part of it-

MCMAHON:
Americans went in and this was again, as you noted, that in the midst of time of the two Koreas being engaged in various enterprises and this sense of, okay, well they're clearly if they're working together through shared growth and some economic ties, we can make this thing work. It just feels very far away from that right now. And you're right, we do tend to see these surges in rhetoric and other things and testing plans and so forth when other things preoccupy the world. And Kim, by possessing a growing number of nuclear weapons and a growing capability to mount them onto warheads that can travel thousands of miles, is able to get attention quite quickly when he reminds everybody of that. So it's just of all the panoply for want of a better term, that problems going on, this is a recurring big one.

ROBBINS:
Well, of course the last flutter of enthusiasm did come during the Trump administration when President Trump met with this Kim and stepped over the border there, but it wasn't clear what the United States was asking for. And I think there's a really pretty fundamental question, and I think this is true in any nuclear negotiation, which is would the north ever give up its nuclear weapons? And that's been a pretty big question all along from the beginning. 

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons guarantee regime survival and autocrats know that, which doesn't mean it's not an admirable goal and one that we would all very much like to see because the potential for miscalculation with a nuclear state, particularly one that is so opaque and so hard to read, which is why we spend so time looking at the guy's clothes and trying to figure out what's going on inside his head and reading things like why did he demolish an arch built by his father, which is why we'll also be looking at how big is the birthday celebration to try to figure out what's going on inside his head when he has just renounced a policy that was his father's policy. This is a really hard place to read and it's particularly scary because he's got enough nuclear fuel for fifty or perhaps sixty warheads and we've got more than twenty-eight thousand U.S. troops still based on South Korea, pretty fraught.

MCMAHON:
And not to mention bases in Guam and other places that could be targets. We should note there's a recent piece from our colleague Scott Snyder that lays out what the latest trajectory of North Korean actions and their capabilities.

ROBBINS:
Trajectory.

MCMAHON:
Trajectory.

ROBBINS:
Always a good verb when you're talking about North Korea.

MCMAHON:
Oh yes.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week, and this is a figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_orgs Instagram story. And this week, Bob, our audience selected, "Shehbaz Sharif Nominated Pakistan's PM." So Bob, we've talked about this with Imran Khan blocked from running. We were predicting Sharif would get the job, but we just thought it was going to be his brother Nawaz Sharif. So what happened? This is a different Sharif.

MCMAHON:
It is a different Sharif and let's not underscore the capability of dynastic politics to prevail in Pakistan. And so Shehbaz is the younger brother of Nawaz and Nawaz, according to his daughter, had indicated that he was not interested in running what appeared to be a minority coalition government after having been involved in running majority governments. And so the baton was passed to Shehbaz.

ROBBINS:
Shehbaz has done this before.

MCMAHON:
Who has done this before in recent history, but this all came out of a surprising election result in which people who were supporters of Imran Khan were able to run not through the party of Imran Khan, but were able to run as independents and did quite well. And they did quite well in part by dint of the enduring popularity of Khan, who initially was supported by the very powerful military in Pakistan but has run afoul of them. But they were able to make use of all sorts of technical means, high tech means to get the word out, including fascinating reports about using artificial intelligence. And I'll just cite one of them that I came across: Through messages conveyed to Khan's lawyers, Khan was able to get information out to his party supporters who then used technology to generate content in his own voice, which then basically ensured that he could reach millions of Pakistanis ahead of the polls and after the polls to keep the base energized to keep them fired up, but more importantly, to go to the polls and create this turnout, which showed them winning a large number of seats. They won ninety-two seats the most of any party. 

The now two other acronym parties I'm going to name the PMLN, which is the party of the Sharifs and the PPP party, which is the other main party in the country, they won the second and third most seats and are forming this coalition. We'll see how long it lasts there. These are two parties from different sides of the spectrum and both have been leadership at different times. Again, the military calls the shots in the country, but we'll see whether Shehbaz is going to be a caretaker only whether Khan has any sort of increasing or enduring staying power or what's going to happen.

As you said in the setup to these elections in our podcast couple of weeks ago, Carla, there's so much going on. This country needs a little bout of stability to be able to try to sort out its severe economic problems, its severe security problems and just create a little bit of political stability to try to forge ahead, but this is anything but.

ROBBINS:
Sigh. What did we say? I think it probably even last week, I think we said that no Prime Minister has ever completed his term.

MCMAHON:
That's correct, yeah.

ROBBINS:
And do we know what they're promising? Do we know what they're saying they're going to do or is this all is just basically they're doing whatever the military is going to tell them to do?

MCMAHON:
I think it's going to be kind of same old, same old, like not rocking the boat too much is fair to say. First of all, they have to get control of the narrative in some way and indicate that they are legitimately forming this government and can serve because again, even with those artificial intelligence successes of the Khan supporters, there were a lot of allegations of misuse happening by the military of censorship of locking down the internet. By the way, supporters have also been accused of online trolling and misinformation and so forth, so there's a lot of that going around. But again, this ruling coalition, which our colleague Josh Kurlantzick says is going to be pretty weak, is going to have to try to get the narrative going that it's in power and that it's going to be able to deliver for the people. I think economic is going to be really important. I'm not sure what the program is for that, frankly. 

I think the army is trying to pacify certain areas, including with the always restive Beluchis in the south, but also it's got northwest concerns as well, and it has to sort out its relationship with the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan, which have been in a bad way recently. So I think we're just going to kind of see first of all how they can consolidate, move ahead and start to see how they can govern and whether or not Khan continues to press the pedal to the metal and try to challenge the results, try to foment unrest and really create some sort of disruption that might cause him to be put away and out of sight and out of contact with his supporters at all.

ROBBINS:
Well, I suspect we will be discussing this. I see what the U.S. and the Brits are calling for investigations into claims of interference or fraud. I suspect that's not going to happen.

MCMAHON:
I would be surprised to see that happen Carla, yes. 

Well, that's our look at the wild and wooly world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. NATO's Parliamentary Assembly meets in Brussels. Thailand hosts the Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development. And, the EU Digital Services Act enters into force.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. And I hope we can put up my favorite Economist cover was a picture of the Kim whose birthday we're going to be celebrating. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang and Sinet Adous, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra and special thanks to our intern Olivia Green for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.