South Korea-Japan Summit, U.S. Border Policy Changes, U.S. Annual Threat Assessment, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Japan and South Korea hold a summit amid warming ties, U.S. border areas prepare for an influx of migrants as COVID-19 policies expire, and top U.S. intelligence officials brief Congress on threats facing the country. It's May 4th, 2023 in time for the world next week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's kick things off In northeast Asia. On Sunday, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio is due to land in South Korea to meet with President Yoon Suk-yeol. And this is a meeting that has been anticipated for quite a bit. It's hopefully carrying further momentum into a warming of ties between Japan and South Korea, which have had very strained relations continuing from the legacy of Japan's colonial era abuses in South Korea. Now in recent months, these two staunch U.S. allies have taken some big strides to thaw tensions. So what do we owe this to? What do you see as the triggers for the rapprochement?

ROBBINS:
So Bob, we can thank Kim Jong-un more than anybody else in the relentless barrage of North Korean missiles flying over South Korea and Japan, as well as an increasingly assertive China for this reconciliation. Nothing like having common enemies to make friends. And this weekend's visit follows Yoon's visit, as you noted, to Japan and March, which I believe was the first formal Japanese-South Korean summit since 2011. So my favorite part of their March visit was this image, I don't know if you saw it, of Kishida and Yoon trying to look relaxed in a Ginza restaurant as they toasted each other with these enormous glasses of Japanese beer mixed with Korean soju, which is a distilled rice spirit. It's sort of a Japanese Korean boilermaker. And for guys who are about to down something that probably had a pretty big kick, they look pretty uptight. 

So this relationship, of course, is still shadowed by the history of Japan's brutal occupation of Korea from 1910 to '45. And it took twenty years after that, for Japan's defeat in World War II, for the two countries even to establish diplomatic relations. And since then, there have been regular breakdowns due to a host of unresolved issues. The most recent of these breakdowns came in 2018 after a South Korean court ordered two Japanese companies to compensate forced laborers from the war and from the occupation. The Japanese said no way and insisted they'd resolved the issued in '65. The Japanese don't like to admit what they did. They're still denying that there was forced labor, so they rejected the ruling, removed South Korea from their so-called white list of preferential trading partners, and the South Koreans did the same, and relations unraveled from there. 

So Yoon, who was elected last year, has been eager to find a way out of this impasse. And before his trip to Tokyo, his administration announced that a South Korean fund, a private fund would compensate the Korean forced laborers. Not surprisingly, this agreement is very popular in Japan with some 57 percent of people polled approving of the deal, while a similar number of South Koreans expressing their dissatisfaction. But the March visit seemed to have done the trick during Yoon's visit. The two countries said they're going to increase direct sharing of intelligence on North Korean threats, they're going to deepen their cooperation on strengthening supply chains, the two are improving their trade relations, and Japan notably said that it would relax restrictions on exports to South Korea of chemicals it needs for its large semiconductor industry. And so I suppose we can expect these same issues, North Korea, China, and supply chains to dominate their talks when Kishida goes to Seoul this weekend.

MCMAHON:
That's a great setup, Carla. I'm wondering whether we're going to hear much about the first thing you mentioned, which is Kim and North Korea, and the extent to which the two countries announce anything new on the sort of security coordination collaboration front. Is that something that we've heard stirrings about?

ROBBINS:
I haven't heard anything new. I think the big sort of breakthrough for Yoon was when he was talking to President Biden. He had been threatening that he might insist either that the U.S. put nuclear weapons on Korean soil, which would've driven the Japanese completely nuts, or and he even hinted that he might want to build his own nuclear weapons, which would've driven the Japanese even more completely nuts. So Biden said that they would involve the Koreans in more nuclear planning, which seemed to calm all of that down. So I think the big focus is really going to be trilateral. Up until now, the U.S. had to talk to the Japanese, and they had to talk to the South Koreans, and then tell these two incredibly close U.S. allies what the other side was saying. So all of this is going to be leading up to the G7 meeting, which is going to be in Japan, and where also the South Koreans will be invited.

And so this really is an attempt to bring all three together in a way to push back against the North Koreans. And this really is a shared enemy. And the North Koreans have been pretty much getting out of control. North Korea conducted sixty-eight missile tests last year. And so far this year, has conducted twelve missile tests, including one in mid-April, which led the Japanese government to issued a so-called J-alert telling millions of people on the northern island of Hokkaido to seek cover in anticipation of a missile attack. And this led to enormous amount of criticism because it turned out that the missile came nowhere near Hokkaido, but it shows you exactly how nervous everybody is in both countries.

MCMAHON:
And as you say, the timing is really important for this summit because it then hands off in a way to the G7 summit in Hiroshima, which we'll talk about at a future podcast I'm sure. But it is, as you say, also hugely big news for the United States, potentially ending at what you refer to as that shuttling between capitals to try to share information. Maybe they can truly develop more of a trilateral way of communicating as we enter this sort of strange new dangerous world that seems to be happening, not just in the region but elsewhere. So anything else we should see coming out of this meeting? Any other so-called deliverables?

ROBBINS:
Well, the Japanese have very tense relation with the Chinese, and the Koreans would rather talk less about this. We talked about this before when the expectation was the Biden administration was going to overtly pressure Yoon on providing weapons to Ukraine. And the Koreans don't want to get into any situation that's going to lead either Russia or China to give more support to North Korea, but Japan has been having lots of trouble with the Chinese over flying over disputed islands. These are the Senkakus. They're uninhabited islands, but they have lots of disputes with the Chinese. And the Koreans aren't crazy about the Chinese either, but they certainly would like to go a lot more softly with this, mainly because of China is someday they hope going to come onto their side and pressure North Korea to behave. So we'll see how much China comes up in this meeting and how much it comes up when they meet in the G7, because the U.S. would certainly like South Korea and Japan to be totally on side with that competition.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And I would just add that despite their differences with each other, these have continued to be, even in these days of democratic erosion. South Korea and Japan seem to be pretty durable democracies at the moment, pretty robust.

ROBBINS:
They are. I will say that Yoon is facing, as durable democracies do, very low approval ratings. And this deal on forced labor, as I said before, was hugely unpopular. And they have a very naturally cautious public, was fearful alienating China. The nuclear deal that Yoon cut, such as it was with Biden, was seen as very unpopular in a lot of quarters. A lot of people were saying that he gave up a lot and didn't get very much from it. He seems like a pretty courageous guy, not least his willingness to sing American Pie during his White House visit. He seems like a guy is willing to stick to his guns, but the polls haven't been very strong in his favor, but there's nothing like a summit meeting, as well as couple of visits with an American president, in theory, that should bolster his standing.

MCMAHON:
I think that's a really good point. So let's see how this continues to resonate, not just in the region, but in the U.S.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, let's move over to the United States. Next Thursday, the COVID-19 public health emergency expires. There's a lot of good news with that, but including Title 42, a policy that allowed immigration officials to turn back hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border without permission, including those requesting asylum. U.S. authorities have announced the deployment of 1,500 active duty U.S. troops to the border with Mexico to help deal with what is an anticipated influx of migrants, a lot of pent up demand there. So what do you expect to happen now?

MCMAHON:
Well, there's a great deal of anticipation, and it does seem a little bit odd that a date that has been looming really since January since the administration announced Title 42 was going to expire on May 11th, that there's been a flurry of announcements directly related to that occasion just in the past week, which is includes the 1,500 troops that you mentioned going to the Mexican border. That's added to, I believe something like 2,500 mostly National Guard troops who have been helping in the area. These are helping with, I think mainly tasks that will allow border officials that are dedicated to issues like border security and asylum processing and so forth to be able to do more of their work. But in still, it's a big gesture. Under Trump, I believe the number was overall 5,000 troops, both regular active duty and National Guard were at the border. So it's a measure of how much they're expecting an influx. 

On top of that, the administration's been active on the diplomatic front. They have announced that there's going to be some processing centers for people who want to seek asylum in the U.S., Spain, or Canada. Those centers will open in Guatemala and Columbia. And also just in the past couple of days, an administration official Homeland Security Advisor, Liz Sherwood Randall has met with the Mexican President AMLO, and other top officials, where they agreed on a series of steps, including Mexico agreeing to accept migrants from the big four countries that have been driving migration recently, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua, that Mexico will continue to accept those migrants who are turned away at the border, and the U.S. will continue to allow individuals who have ties, especially individuals from Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, who have family in the U.S. to be eligible to live and work there.

So there is a lot of things going on. There's a lot of anticipation. And certainly, the number of people building up at the border has created estimates of something like 10,000 crossings per day once this border policy known as Title 42 is lifted. So it's already created a great deal of U.S. domestic political churn as well, and we will certainly hear a lot more as soon as we start seeing more numbers of people coming over. And we should say in the midst of all this, the very human stories of the people who are fleeing, truly awful situations. Whether it's in the countries we just mentioned or elsewhere, it's sort of state collapse, it's economic privation, it's things like earthquakes, it's a rampant crime. A number of people, amid the migrants who might just be called purely economic migrants, the number of people are facing real hardship and real threats and have a legitimate asylum claim to make, that's now going to be caught up in this whole process. It's going to be an incredible strain on U.S. officials, but it's going to also add sort of fuel to the political fire in the U.S.

ROBBINS:
And fuel to the political fire from both sides in the case of the Biden administration because there are already people who are saying, "Wow, this looks a lot like what Trump did. Don't tell me, well it was 5,000 and it's only 1,500 in your case." And of course, people on the other side who were saying, "What are you talking about? You're opening the borders to illegals." And so you can't win on either side here. 

U.S. officials, it sounds like that they're doing a lot diplomatically, but this is not a problem that can be solved diplomatically, and this is one of these generational challenges. But U.S. officials have also said the administration would significantly raise the numbers for refugee resettlement programs, find other ways to enter legally. Have we heard any details of that?

MCMAHON:
I have not heard anything more on that, other than that there continue to be these efforts to raise the prospect of a legal process, of a process in which people from certain countries are allowed to stay legally, temporarily. Again, these are countries like Venezuela and Haiti, but it just doesn't keep pace with the numbers that we've seen so far. So it's going to be a real test of patience, amidst, we should say political rancor, pressure from both sides, as you said, but things like... We're continuing to see the Republican governor of Texas, Abbott has been sending by busload, hundreds up to the thousands to various so-called sanctuary cities for migrants. So Chicago, we've seen it in Washington, we've seen it in New York to some extent. This is a measure of how tense and how much frustration there is in this issue, and how much, again, the people who are caught up in it are the people who don't deserve to be treated like this. 

And also the fact that the government...Republicans and Democrats have been unable to sit down and come up with comprehensive immigration policy to deal with not only this sort of pressure, but across the board immigration policy that will allow a legal process, but also find some sort of common way to deal with the overflow, to deal with excess numbers, which is something that's common really throughout the developed world at this point in time, Carla.

ROBBINS:
And there's a lot of unsettled business, tragic business from the Trump administration, children who were separated from their families that they were going to do a full accounting on. And there's still numbers that we don't know about. There's human tragedy everywhere in this, and failures on political leadership. And so let's see how the Biden administration handles this in coming days. A lot of this problem is not one of their own making and very challenging to deal with, and nothing good usually happens. And as you said, Bob, real human beings are caught in the middle of this.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and it's real humans are caught in the middle. The Biden administration is caught between migrant advocates and secure the border advocates, for want of a better term. And in fact, we're going to see some legislation introduced by House Republicans in the week ahead, it looks like, called the Secure Border Act of 2023. Among the things that the Biden administration did when it took office was it stopped the major buildup of a border wall and said there are other ways of better securing the border, but Republicans have responded that it's resulted in what they call border chaos. So again, this back and forth over what the U.S. border control should look like and what should be both a humane but workable policy in what seemed like a no-win situation for the administration.

ROBBINS:
Maybe they should take some of that money and build a grand stand for all the grand standing.

MCMAHON:
That would be a large grand stand, Carla.

ROBBINS:
It's really tragic.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's stick around in Washington and avoid the grandstand and talk about the briefing going on as we speak, actually as we're taping this podcast. Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, are presenting the annual threat assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. While the assessment has been public since February, this report now starts to resonate with briefings like this. So what's at the top of the list, Carla?

ROBBINS:
So Bob, one of the first things to note is how different things are from the Trump era, when the president unleashed a Twitter tirade after his intelligence chiefs released a threat assessment like this one that disagreed with his views on North Korean Iran. And the IC was so spooked. Remember, he said these intelligence chiefs should go back to school and they were just completely wrong, but they were so spooked by it that they didn't issue a public report the following year in 2020. Things have calmed down. They've gone back to normal on this. And these assessments, they're the consensus views of all eighteen members of the intelligence community, are extremely cautious and sanitized, but there are still things you can learn from the testimony before the various oversight committees. And as you said, this came out in February, but this rolls out over several months. And each time they testify... First, they test and fire in front of the intelligence committees, and then in front of the armed services committees.

Each time they come, they're more on top of current events than the report itself. And there are usually some intriguing and concerning things that come out of the testimony, and some intriguing concerning things. If you read very closely, Easter eggs, if you will, that are inside the written reports themselves, as well as an occasional sign of disagreement within the community, like an apparent ongoing debate in this year's report over the community's majority judgment that it is "very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported Havana syndrome." What they refer to as "an anomalous health incident." I found that one particularly intriguing. 

So today, Haines, as you said, is going to be joined by her military counterpart, the head of the DIA. And the number one thing we will be listening for, if we weren't talking to each other right now, is whether and how much either one is willing to say about the damage done by the discord intelligence leak, that leak of classified document by a young Air National guardsman. I'm also going to be listening, when I go back to listening to this, for any comments they'd may be willing to make on the substance of the leak documents, including their assessment of the state of the fighting in Ukraine, a topic that's going to come up, whether or not they're willing to talk about these documents, which I suspect they will deny, they will refuse to. We may hear questions about the status of China's plans to send weapons to Russia, and questions about the Wagner group, which was a big part of the leak documents that were particularly intriguing. 

As for those Easter eggs I mentioned in the written report, one of the most interesting parts for me was its section on China's small but growing nuclear program, and it's finding that Beijing is increasingly worrying about the likelihood of a U.S. first strike. That's really chilling. The report also warns about, Xi's declared aim of controlling key supply chains. And among the list of vulnerabilities, it notes our strategic minerals, including rare earth. It has 60 percent of the mining for this, and these things are used in pretty much every high-tech device. PRC based companies are on track to control 65 percent of the market for lithium ion batteries. And China already produces 40 percent of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients, and they're talking about China's ability to choke these things off. So good times, Bob.

MCMAHON:
Good times. And yeah, I think the extent to which they share information on China or are asked about China, which is likely to come up, I think will be a big feature, as well as, as you indicated, the breaking news is likely to intrude on this, including just what's been transpiring in both Moscow and Kyiv. You had this somewhat murky reporting or accusation of drone attack on the Kremlin, which Moscow first attributed directly to Ukraine, and then today ominously said it's really the hands of the U.S. that was behind this. One of the reactions to it included a former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saying Zelensky must be targeted in retaliation.

ROBBINS:
We used to consider him the most moderate of Russian leaders. He's really gone off the deep end. Yes.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. His comments of the last six to eight months are troubling, to say the least, when you kind of start parsing them, regardless of what he's trying to accomplish with them internally. But raising the specter of the U.S., this is coming from the presidential administration right now, and so it raises concerns about what's behind that, whether this drone attack, which caused very minor, if any, damage, whether or not is a pretext for some new chapter that we're going to start seeing, as everybody anticipates a ramp up from the Ukrainian side, but also everybody anticipates some sort of gesture on the Russian side coinciding with May 9th Victory Day commemorations, which is usually a moment of great patriotic fervor marking the World War II era victories, but now is going to possibly take on a different role. So I guess what I'm saying is a lot of Russia and China seem like they're going to dominate this hearing.

ROBBINS:
Well, a lot of Russia and China dominates all of the strategic assessments of the U.S. government. This thing with the drone, it'd be interesting to see how much they know and how much they're willing to talk about it. I suspect it's pretty early days on this. Haines is really good at these testimonies. She's intrinsically cautious, because everyone in the IC isn't intrinsically cautious. But if, in any way, shape, or form, they can tamp this down, and particularly, as you said this morning, the notion that the Russians are accusing us, when you watch the senators, they all have their own particular hobby horses and they will try to push on this. I would suspect we're also going to hear demands about knowing things about the origins of COVID. The report is itself continues to be saying that the IC continues to investigate the source of it, maintaining that the community is agnostic, which is quite interesting.

I suspect we'll hear about TikTok. Last time that there was testimony from the IC chiefs including Haines, that they were basically saying we won't know what we know about what's going on in TikTok, but we'll probably hear a lot about these other hobby horses as well, and other developments in technology. One of the other intriguing things that I read in going over the report for today is it talks about new technologies in the report and of how they're being developed and proliferating faster than companies and governments can shape norms, protect privacy, and prevent dangerous outcomes, and that's a rather chilling warning. And we'll see whether anyone digs into that. The senators tend to focus on TikTok and specifics, but I think maybe it's time to start talking about our robot overlords and ChatGPT as well.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's coinciding with a visit that's taking place, I believe soon, if not in the course of today with some major tech chiefs and the White House, including people who developed ChatGPT and chiefs of Google and Microsoft, and so forth to talk about just this very issue. So I do think AI is not just having a moment. It's sort of ushering in a new era. And U.S. doesn't always move very quickly to try to regulate such new eras.

ROBBINS:
So one final thing that I would love to put a bet on, will anyone ask a question about terrorism? Once the enormous main focus of these annual threat assessment reports, it comes very close to the end of this year's report, and it just shows you... I always feel like we're jinxing it when we don't focus on terrorism, but it shows you how our focus tends to change. And it does talk somewhat about ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but the days of terrorism, we've moved on to big power conflict again.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. That's a really good point, and I don't think we're likely to hear a lot about that, and it sort of reflects what our colleague Paul Stares has found in his annual preventative priority survey as well, where for years, it had been dominated by terrorism threats as chief among the threats to consider, and now it's this big power conflict and all the sort of sub-issues related to that that are dominating.

ROBBINS:
Bob, I think it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week, which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. And this week, our audience selected, "Janet Yellen warns of U.S. debt default." So how close are we to the edge? And do you see any chance of a deal?

MCMAHON:
I guess I throw myself into the camp, Carla, of those who say we have to have a deal. So I do see a deal, partly because I want to, and it's hard to fathom not having one, which means a debt default, and we'll get into what that means in a second. Let's just recount what Janet Yellen had said. She got everybody's attention by moving up, much earlier than expected, the deadline for a default, as early as June 1st. And she said "We have learned from past debt limit impasses that waiting until the last minute to suspend or increase the debt limit can cause serious harm to business and consumer confidence, raise short-term borrowing costs for taxpayers, and negatively impact the credit rating of the United States." 

Now, some Republicans have taken that as more of a political move by Secretary Yellen than a sort of sober, straightforward economic estimate, and then basically have said, "Look, we could have until well into the summer before this is settled. She's just trying to for some sort of a compromise at this point." This sort of speaks to the moment that we're in, which is distrust on both sides, a lot of sort of playing chicken frankly with the U.S. credit rating. And something, by the way, that in a bipartisan way has always been avoided. No matter how tough things were between the two main parties, they had usually settled on this. But as our experience in 2011 showed, we're in a new era now, and so we've got this meeting looming on May 9th that President Biden has called with what's called the Big Four, the party leaders from each House of Congress. Kevin McCarthy, who's been traveling this week has agreed to meet. No signs that there's any sort of compromise looming, but the two sides tend to play these things closer to the vest until these meetings take place.

But it's getting really close, and it's getting, as many would say, unnecessarily close because it's really throwing into doubt that sort of the reliability of the U.S. And we've all heard of reports about the primacy of the U.S. dollar being affected, as well as the U.S. credit rating. The bottom line is that U.S. debt and the role it plays in the world is outsized. And if it does default, the repercussions are going to cause major problems, an estimate of 5 to 7 percent of market collapses, as well as a recession globally and all sorts of other bad economic tidings that will take a while to sort of dig out of. 

Now, there are all sorts of efforts to avoid this that go beyond a broad agreement between Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden. That includes... There's a resurfacing of this idea that the U.S. could invoke the 14th amendment, which some legal sellers say, requires the federal government to pay its debts. There's been talk of minting a trillion dollar coin, which Janet Yellen has said previously is not really a serious option. And then there are other maneuvers going on politically on the Democratic side of the house that could try to force some of the issues as well. 

But time is getting short. If you go by Janet Yellen's clock of June 1st, time is getting very short. There's a very few days when both houses are in session and you can get some real work done. So we're going to see how the two sides play this out, whether or not there is any room for compromise in what seems to be a zero sum position on both sides, with Joe Biden saying, "Let's pay our debts first and then talk about any sort of cuts we want to make to spending," and the Republicans saying, "No way, this is the time to lock in some runaway government spending that's going on. Let's sort of take some steps to do something." Surely, they will get some sort of compromise out of this. But again, the unfathomable could be something that actually plays out in some small way before a change comes. We saw in 2011, the U.S. get a downgrade in its credit rating for the first time, and other things like this could be lurking.

ROBBINS:
And downgrades, of course, lead to more debt because we have to pay higher interest rates.

MCMAHON:
That downgrade, yes, cost tens of billions of dollars to the U.S., and it did end up forcing some sort of compromise move in which the debt ceiling was raised, set in motion a whole series of steps that did not really solve much. And two years later, they were back wrangling again about the issue. One hopes that the concern and whatever sort of fallout happens from this year leads to some sort of permanent move to sort of move beyond this brinkmanship that happens in a recurring way. Let's point out, by the way, that under President Trump, the government raised the debt ceiling multiple times, and he himself pointed out that he didn't want to get into that kind of brinkmanship. For all his flaws and his rancor with Democrats, he was able to work out an agreement on that, and Republicans went along with it. They are now not so mindful of going along with President Biden.

ROBBINS:
So there was one other potential, if not hail mary, potential compromise, face-saving effort that I read about this morning, this notion of a... Congress loves these short term compromises, extending this to September 30th when they have to get some sort of an agreement on a government spending bill to keep the... So you can either say that this is a super crisis. You could have a government shutdown and a debt limit crisis, or since the White House already expected there was going to be a lower budget for next year with the Republicans in charge of the house, this was the way that the White House could compromise because they're not cutting past spending, they're cutting future spending.

So if the Republicans wanted to find a way to compromise and the White House wanted to find a way to compromise, this one seemed to make a certain measure of sense to me. The question is, can McCarthy, who has such a tenuous hold on his own caucus, come up with any sort of a compromise or agreed to any sort of a compromise? And is Mitch McConnell in the Senate willing to lean on him, or capable of leading on him?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's a really big question. You're right. That is a distinct possibility that you kick the can down the road for a few more months and try to sort something out. We've heard from lawmakers in both parties that they would rather not revisit this yet again in the near future, but once and for all, or at least in the present period of time, get this one sorted out. But the way things are lining up right now, it's just looking doubtful that they can raise a debt ceiling by the initial deadline that the treasury secretary is pointing to.

ROBBINS:
Well, my 401k says, please fix this.

MCMAHON:
Your 401k and many other mortgage talks and all sorts of people are starting to look very wary at their savings and sort of what had been seen as a locked in sort of sense of security involving debt and the way the U.S. government functions and the way the economic system functions. All of this is up in the air now, which is, again, why I think people are not really grasping it, because it is so unfathomable. But I think it's really time that people start to pay attention and start to pressure their lawmakers to make a deal that works for the country because it's getting really dangerous.

ROBBINS:
Pull your socks up, guys.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our look at the world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Indonesia will host an ASEAN Summit, King Charles III is formally crowned, and Russia marks the aforementioned Victory Day, invoking World War II era patriotism.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. 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. 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 matter of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. And special thanks to Sinet Adous and Rebecca Rottenberg for their research assistants. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Carla Robbins saying so long and happy Cinco de Mayo.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying once more, may the fourth be with you, and let's be careful out there.