The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Emma and Jeremy discuss the end of U.S. unipolarity and what that means for the American ethos, and how potential Democratic candidates are thinking about building a foreign policy that aims to resonate emotionally with the American people. Emma and Jeremy’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy. *The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Emma and Jeremy discuss the end of U.S. unipolarity and what that means for the American ethos, and how potential Democratic candidates are thinking about building a foreign policy that aims to resonate emotionally with the American people.
Emma and Jeremy’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy.
*The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Emma Ashford: The 2020s are likely to be a pivotal decade in determining the future of America’s role in the world. Global dynamics are changing. The era of unchallenged U.S. global dominance is ending. And China and other states are rising. At home, the United States is also going through a period of transition and change in foreign policy - from bipartisan consensus to debate and division. The only thing certain is that change in U.S. foreign policy is inevitable.
In these discussions, our guests engage with some of the most challenging questions facing U.S. policymakers, bring distinct perspectives to bear on these questions, and offer their own vision for the future of U.S. Grand Strategy. These are the Strategy Sessions.
Hello, I'm Emma Ashford, a Senior Fellow in the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. Welcome to the Strategy Sessions, a series of discussions with forward-looking out-of-the-box thinkers on the future of U.S. foreign policy and Grand Strategy. Joining me today is Jeremy Shapiro, who is the Director of Research at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome.
[00:01:18] Jeremy Shapiro: Thanks. It's exciting to be labeled an out-of-the-box thinker. My mother used to say that I was the reason that they invented the box. But I still cherish that description.
[00:01:30] Emma Ashford: Well, we are looking for different takes on U.S. foreign policy and Grand Strategy and where it might be headed. And I think your essay for this series really does that. We're going to talk a little bit in the session about the need for emotions and belonging in foreign policy and how that impacts Democratic foreign policy. But before we get to the Eat, Pray, Love part of the session, I do want to talk more generally about how you see the emerging world, right?
Because part of the reason why we're having these discussions is that U.S. foreign policy is going through a period of transition as we see new states rise, the world looking quite different, debates about foreign policy here at home. And so, what is, I guess, your sense of the world that we're heading into and how it differs from, let's say, the post-Cold War period, the Cold War, anything else you'd like to compare it to?
[00:02:23] Jeremy Shapiro: Okay, I thought the questions were going to be easier, but that's a fair question. I start off with a base assumption that at every given moment in time and every given moment in history, the people living in it think that they're in a time of massive change, which is utterly without precedent and completely incomparable to what anything that has ever gone before. And they're occasionally right, but not usually.
So, I am a little bit wary of the sort of epochal pronunciations of radical change that are happening in the world today. But I'm also susceptible to the common view that there does seem to be a quite a lot going on. I don't think that we are on the precipice of, or the inflection of anything, but I think we are in the midst, in the middle, perhaps of some reasonably long decade-long trends, which are changing the world. I guess we always are. But certainly, it feels as if some of them are quite important right now. I would maybe point to three, because I always have three, that I think are not, you know, new to this year or new to the Trump administration, but have been going on for a little while, and I expect to continue and have already had big effects.
The first is one that you kind of already alluded to, which is a loss of U.S. unipolarity, a relative decline of the U.S. in power terms. It's sometimes it's a little bit difficult to get the handle on because the United States is still an incredibly powerful country, and actually, along most of the indicators that you would look at hasn't actually decreased in recent years, but I think that power is a relative concept and it's very clear that, various emerging powers, particularly China, have risen. And so, necessarily, that means the U.S. power has relatively declined, and you can already see that it has an increasing inability to sort of regulate the world, especially relative to where it was in the 1990s.
The second thing, which is I think quite related, is an erosion of international institutions. An erosion of international rules of the game. You know, it's not, shouldn't be too surprising that in a sort of unipolar era, the hegemon was able to impose quite a lot of regulations on the world, and then not follow them itself, but make sure that everybody else did. And that was cool, especially from a U.S. perspective, but it very much seems that in recent years it's eroding. Other countries have realized they don't really have to follow the rules, particularly when the United States doesn't. And the United States itself has rebelled from the rules to a certain extent because people are now expecting them to follow the rules in the way that other countries have. And they were never that interested in that.
And then, the third is what Abe Newman and Henry Farrell have called the Weaponization of Interdependence. And this is the quite surprising result — surprising to me at least, maybe those guys saw it all along — of the fact that the interdependence that 20 or 30 years ago everybody thought would bring us closer together, has been in the sort of ways that bad marriages do, has sort of turned all the things that bring us together, against ourselves.
And we've managed to use all of various countries. United States certainly, but many other countries, too, are using the interdependence links as levers and as weapons. And that's changed fundamentally international relations because it's made countries start to think about the vulnerabilities that come from interdependence and start to hedge against them and reduce them, and that's meant that there's been a reversal of globalization, a reversal of the increase in trade, a reversal of the increasing sophistication of supply chains and all of that.
[00:06:09] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I mean, it feels like all three of those are interconnected or even driving each other to some extent, right? That the U.S. is declining in a relative sense, but some of the inclination by other countries to defer from institutions to push back is actually being driven by that weaponization of interdependence.
[00:06:27] Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely. I think they're all definitely interrelated. It’s sort of arguable as to where you draw the boundaries between them and what you find to be the most important motive force. I think it's very convenient for me as an American to be thinking about the loss of relative power as the sort of central guiding force, and I think it's very important. But at the end of the day, it places the United States at the center of the story.
So, I'm a little bit wary of my desire to do so. I think that, if you were sitting in Brazil, you would see it in slightly different terms. Not that you would disagree with the loss of relative power, but you would see the rise of the others. You would see their recognition that they had become independent actors and that they could create their own destiny as more of the driving force than the loss of U.S. power.
[00:07:14] Emma Ashford: So, I guess that's a great segue into basically asking you, I mean, what role do you see for the U.S. in the coming decades? What role does the U.S. play in a world that no longer sees it as, you know, the be-all and end-all of everything, is no longer sees it as indispensable, perhaps?
[00:07:31] Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah, well, it could have a bright future, but it's going to need some therapy. You know, the loss of empire is a cultural trauma in a certain way, if we look back at other countries that lost empires. But it's not a condemnation to irrelevance or poverty or even a lack of good movies and entertainment options. In fact, the loss of empire in that in a lot of ways can be relieving on your domestic politics, because it can reduce complications. The United States has enormous opportunities to become a normal country that prospers and that can provide for security and that can contribute to all sorts of global public goods at reasonable levels.
And that should be a relatively easy future for the United States to create for itself, given its incredibly favorable geographic position, its level of security and prosperity, which are almost without par. So, to say that the U.S. won't be the global leader is not to say that the U.S. isn't going to be in an incredibly advantageous position in global affairs. But it does, I think it just requires some adaptations of the mind, really. Which is a social phenomenon at the political and cultural levels, to be able to sort of look at a problem in, I don't know, Azerbaijan and Armenia. I mean, that's a... It's a good example because it's a problem that, you know, I’ve become a little bit close to in a variety of ways.
It sort of matters to me. And there's all sorts of domestic politics around it in the United States, which means it's often been on the U.S. agenda in a tangential level. But what does it really matter to the United States? Actually, not at all. And do we have the kind of political system that can take a problem like that, which might have a particular appeal to a few nostalgics and some diaspora interest groups and a couple of crazy senators who got some campaign donations or just have a ethnic affinity with the problem, and actually push that off the agenda. The recent history of the United States shows that we don't have the cultural and social discipline to do that, but it doesn't strike me as impossible.
[00:09:46] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I was going to ask you, you know, what do you think the guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy should be? And that's sort of one of these big grand strategy questions, but it kind of sounds like you're saying that we need to, you know, heal yourself first. That it's basically, that it's much more about internal social or even ideological change in the ways we think about the world. More so than, we need to do something very specific overseas and for a policy.
[00:10:12] Jeremy Shapiro: Yes. I think that's fair to say. I think I would've put it as that the first guiding principle needs to be a capacity for strategic discipline and a capacity for prioritization amongst foreign policy. The general U.S. approach to prioritization, at least since 1989, has been... "We can walk and chew gum at the same time." Which is something that literally Joe Biden said, and you know, I mean, that sounds like something the U.S. government should be able to do. Intriguingly, it's a bit of a tangent. Admittedly, I actually, literally, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time; the gum comes shooting out of my mouth.
And so, it's harder than it sounds, but what Joe Biden was referring to was the idea that we could easily fight or sort of participate in the Israel-Gaza War and the Ukraine War at the same time without diminishing either, or our other foreign policy priorities. I think that that is very clearly wrong, given our relative power situation and given the way in which our government works and our sort of societal attention span works.
So, I think that the single most important guiding principle I would have for U.S. foreign policy is that we should take very seriously the idea of prioritization. And we should take very seriously the idea of strategic discipline, which means if we have a sort of sound principle, like we should be shifting our prioritization to the Asia Theater if somebody comes along with a shiny object like the Ukraine war, we shouldn't necessarily chase it like a cat after a laser pointer, and we should retain the capacity to follow through on the priority that we identified.
[00:11:52] Emma Ashford: Easier said than done, I'm afraid. But I you know, I...
[00:11:55] Jeremy Shapiro: Absolutely.
[00:11:56] Emma Ashford: I do rather agree. So, let's pivot then and talk a little bit more about your paper, which comes at this, I think less from a grand strategic angle, like some of our other papers in this volume, but a little more on the sort of political or policy agenda side, right? So, you are looking specifically at one group – it’s Democrats. They don't really seem to know what they want or what they want to do about foreign policy. You know, if we go back to Trump one, they just opposed everything he did, even if they actually liked it. Under Biden, they kind of attempted to reset the status quo. But looking forward, I mean, they've lost an election, and I don't know what Democrats want in foreign policy. Can you just talk a little bit about where they are right now?
[00:12:43] Jeremy Shapiro: No, I can't. They are a political party and not even a political party in the European sense; they're really from a European perspective, a sort of coalition of parties. When they're in opposition — like in the Republican Party, it's the same way — they have no leadership structure; they have no capacity or culture of coherent thought. They have nothing like a shadow cabinet or a shadow government or anything like that.
So, I think it's asking the wrong question to ask where the U.S. opposition party is on an issue, and actually, that's one of the starting premises of my paper. U.S. opposition party never has a policy, really, until it sort of anoints a new candidate for the presidency, or maybe slightly before then, you can see there's a process through which that narrows in the course of the very long primary campaign. What I think happens in opposition, and I looked at this a lot with the Republicans during the Biden administration, is that there is an intellectual firmament, in which there is a search for policies, including foreign policies, which can work with the electorate. Which can attach themselves to specific candidates, perhaps someday, and which can work with the various ideologies that populate any of these coalitional parties that are the Republicans and the Democrats.
So, the position, even though I agree with the position that you described, the Democratic Party, I think that's actually always true of opposition parties, and it's not surprising or even troubling. But I want to recognize, that firmament and I want to try to understand what might emerge from it when a candidate does, and maybe more specifically, since I'm just a foreign policy analyst and I'm not a politician and I'm not a domestic policy person, I want to understand how a foreign policy can be supportive of the kind of thing that a primary candidate is likely to want to do overall in policy and then secondarily in foreign policy.
[00:14:45] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I mean, so it sort of sounds like, you know, from what you're saying, that the foreign policy is this interaction between what a candidate themselves, specifically one person, believes, with what experts associated with the party do, and then what they think the voters want. And these are all very nebulous, and you could come to different answers. I mean, where do you think sort of the bounds of discussion are at the moment within the Democratic Party? What are the issues that are driving that ferment or, you know, specific topics that people are focusing in on?
[00:15:17] Jeremy Shapiro: Right. So, I think that there's a bunch of different, let's say oppositions, within the Democratic Party, that are driving the discussion. One is the same one that's in the Republican party is this question of leadership versus restraint, to sort of what we covering in our early answers. And I think, Democrats to a degree, even more than Republicans, have long been dominated by the leadership school. But there's a growing sort of double objection to that. One from the progressives, who are saying that the leadership school has not been sufficiently instilled with American values, and the other from the restraint school, which is saying that the leadership school has not prioritized and has not understood the growing scarcity of resources.
That's the sort of, I would say, the foundational divide, the foundational opposition within the Democratic Party. It expresses itself in several different issues. I mean, the most prominent in recent years has been the Gaza issue and the Israel issue, in which the progressives have been kind of out of their mind over the ways in which this has not represented American values. The restrainers are a bit pissed off that we're there at all, but the leadership people see this as a sort of cornerstone of both the American leadership abroad because Israel is the sort of quintessential ally. And of course, it also trickles into American domestic politics in ways which aren't foreign policy at all.
So, that has been the single biggest issue divide, but there are many, many others on things like Ukraine defense spending, the question of China, and prioritization of China, and all of these things, I think these divides actually are not terribly different than the divides in the Republican party. It's funny when you sort of compare the issues, you can find climate is a bit of an exception. Climate seems to be a partisan divide in foreign policy, but almost every other issue that you would point to, all of the different opinions are represented in both of the parties.
So, the real question as to which foreign policy we'd be adopted is, for the most part, climate excepted, likely to be less about which party gets elected than the narrative that the candidate finds, the emotional connection that the candidate creates in order to attract the voters, and the foreign policy, or the... Well, first the policy that that entails — or at least, encourages, because there will still be plenty of options — and then the foreign policy that follows from that.
[00:17:46] Emma Ashford: So, the thing that I actually really, I really like about your paper is it kind of tosses aside all of these big issues, right? It's... You are arguing that it's not a question of the Democratic Party having a position on Gaza going into the next presidential election, and that instead it's about building, you know, for different candidates trying to build a platform or a package of ideas into which foreign policy can slot, can you, can you...
[00:18:14] Jeremy Shapiro: And be supportive of? Yeah.
[00:18:15] Emma Ashford: Yeah. And be supportive of, and so I guess, could you talk just a little bit about that? Because you're focusing in on issues that, you know... Again, it's not specific issue areas, it's... Instead, it's concepts like dignity or equality or things like that. So, could you tell us just a little bit more about it?
[00:18:30] Jeremy Shapiro: Sure. Let me back up a little bit and say that this comes from a certain image of the voter, which I think is verified by a lot of research and is a very difficult image for people like you and me to accept — at least it is for me. Which is, it's more than people don't have views of foreign policy, it's that they really don't care. And of course, if you look at the average American, it's pretty rational for them not to care about most foreign policy issues. You know, trade is something that they can probably do care about, certainly immigration, if we consider that foreign policy.
These foreign policy issues, which touch on domestic life, are certainly salient. But the issues that foreign policy people tend to talk about — Iran, Israel, Russia, China — these things don't matter to people's lives, at least in obvious ways. They don't care about them. All the research suggests that they get their views on them through a partisan lens, through listening to their leaders. And you can see their views shift on them. You know, 30, 40, 50 points when Donald Trump changes his mind. Which definitely supports the idea that these views, even though they will give views to pollsters, are not deeply held.
So, I don't think that's going to change. I don’t know. I'm not sure I want it to change, and what does it mean for a candidate? For what does it mean for somebody who's trying to form a foreign policy? Well, on one level, you have to govern. So, your foreign policy can't be purely about politics and emotions. You have to have behind it some expertise, some thinking about how the real world really is, but that's not going to be your first consideration. Your first consideration is going to be what works.
And generally speaking, my understanding of how the candidates are understanding the public is derived from them. Because I'm just a foreign policy analyst, and as I think I've told you before, I'm not in touch with the country. I only even go to Virginia when I have to get to the airport. And I don't know how 350 million people are feeling about things, and I don't trust the polls to tell me about issues that people aren't really thinking about.
So, how am I going to understand these things? The only way I can understand them is by looking to the professionals. And the professionals are the politicians. And I think that good politicians, politicians who win elections, tend to have a sort of preternatural feel for how people think. They get it from the stump; they get it from the reactions of voters. They get it from just being good at their jobs. And I'm not good at that job. And I've actually never met a foreign policy analyst who is.
So, what are they doing these days? And it's really interesting to see what they're doing. There is, within the Democratic Party, a recognition that the Biden administration, in the words of Jennifer Harris, a Biden administration official, "Fed the body but not the soul." And what she means by that is that the Biden administration looked at the electoral problem that the Democrats had had in 2016 and saw that they were losing lower-middle-class voters. And the lower-middle-class voters were complaining about their shrinking economic share of the pie and all the economic problems that they were having. And they said, "Well, we need to design policies that will give them more money."
And they did that. And not only did they do that, but they implemented those policies in the Biden administration, with a spectacular level of success along the indicators that would supposedly matter. Pretty much all of them. And this was the Biden administration really delivered for this precise segment of the electorate that they had identified as having to deliver for; they delivered the economic goods. This is just an objective fact. There is no way to dispute it in the statistics, but clearly it had no political impact; to the contrary. They lost more of these people.
So, what happened? It seems to me that the politicians have diagnosed that what happens is that, even though they fed the body, they had to feed the soul, which means that they had to have an emotional narrative that, even though people were expressing their frustrations in economic terms, their actual frustrations were more cultural and social, that there's a crisis of meaning and of purpose and of community in the United States. The people were crying out to be solved, and they don't even have the language to express it. And oddly, Donald Trump had fastened upon a narrative which responded to that, where he wasn't saying, "I'm going to make you wealthier."
I mean, he did say that, but that wasn't the core of what he was hoping to deliver. What he said was, "I'm going to make you stronger. I'm going to make you believe in yourselves again. I'm going to make America great again. As a community, as a nation." And that Democrats by saying, "Oh, well, we're going to increase your GDP by 0.7% per capita," weren't really giving that type of narrative. So, I think all the candidates are looking for that kind of narrative, but they're not coalescing on — all the potential candidates — they're not coalescing on what that narrative is.
They are about adapting an emotional narrative to Democratic principles. And that's why things like dignity, community, accountability are words that we're hearing increasingly from Democratic candidates. But I think there is still a firmament out there about which of these narratives, if any, will catch on, and which will be most effective at creating a sort of emotional bond in the sense of purpose with the American people.
[00:24:09] Emma Ashford: So, I think this really interesting in part because I think the Biden administration tried in the foreign policy space to have that. You can see all these attempts to build, you know, the U.S. as the defender of democracy globally. You can see the arsenal of democracy language around Ukraine. Ukraine is a just struggle against autocracies. And they even leaned on it during the election to some extent, they think about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky going to Pennsylvania and touring an arms factory. But it seems like the American people were picking up what the Biden people were putting down on that front. Is there a reason why do you think the Biden folks just misjudged what Americans wanted in terms of a narrative?
[00:24:53] Jeremy Shapiro: Maybe, I would say that the candidate that comes up with a successful narrative, and I don't know what that successful narrative is, won't be a candidate that starts with foreign policy and tries to build the narrative around that, which may have been the Biden administration's mistake. People are not interested in a narrative of meaning that starts with America's mission in the world. And all of the narratives that I talked about are fundamentally domestic, political, and cultural narratives. And that is the narrative that you need. Make America Great Again is not a foreign policy narrative. It is a domestic cultural narrative that has a foreign policy associated with it.
This is again, I think, something that's difficult for foreign policy analysts to accept, but if I'm right about the way that the political class is operationalizing this, foreign policy will have a supportive role at most. That can be important and useful. I don't think that will get too many of us fired, but it isn't going to be the central feature. The central feature will be this emotional connection based on a domestic political, cultural narrative. What any candidate, seems to me, who has an idea about this emotional narrative of purpose will want from foreign policy is that foreign policy supports that narrative.
Not that it's the core of it, but that it reinforces it, and at the very least, that it doesn't subtract from it. You can't be having a narrative, for example, of accountability and sending weapons to the Israelis to kill Palestinian children. That's just not going to work. But you're not going to form a narrative around your Israel policy.
[00:26:42] Emma Ashford: Yeah, I think that last point about a foreign policy narrative that doesn't hurt is really more important than I think people actually grasp. I mean, because the other arguments are of against what you're saying here is that the sort of commonly held view that, you know, a lot of politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, have come to the campaign with a very fully fledged domestic and economic and social policy, and then they pick up some standards, Democratic foreign policy advisors and just tack on the status quo as a foreign policy, but it kind of feels like that's just not working anymore.
[00:27:16] Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. I think that's right. I think that your foreign policy needs to be supportive and coherent with your overall narrative. And that it very often hasn't been, and I think that perhaps, in previous years and not just with the Democrats, it's been the view that foreign policy can stand apart. That it doesn't have to be either supportive or not supportive. That it can be just something that elites do in the back room, when the public isn't looking. I don't think that's on anymore. I think it actually has to be more than just not subtractive. I think it actually has to be supportive if we're going to sell it to a candidate.
One of the things I noticed the Republican foreign policy thinkers doing in the interregnum between Trump's terms was thinking about, "Okay, Donald Trump doesn't really have a foreign policy ideology, can't really locate most countries on a map." But he has a narrative, and he has an emotional connection. So, what we're going to do is take our ideology and we're going to build a bridge to Trump's mind, from our ideology to his narrative, and essentially constructing a set of arguments and altering their policy when necessary, to make their foreign policy ideas coherent with Trump's narrative, in a way, in which always admitted that Trump's narrative was the dominant force.
And I think various Republican thinkers to a greater and lesser extent, succeeded at that. They're still struggling with it, admittedly, but I think that that's the model that we, Democratic foreign policy thinkers, have to adapt. We have to be thinking about, "Okay, where is this candidate? What is his narrative? How can we adapt with, you know, our foreign policy preferences in a minimal way, of course, relative to our desires?" But doing as much as we need to, to make our foreign policy ideas consistent and supportive of that candidate's narrative.
[00:29:16] Emma Ashford: I really, I just love this idea of making foreign policy, you know, something that is beholden to domestic interests rather than something that, yeah, as you say, stands apart.
[00:29:27] Jeremy Shapiro: It's not a radical idea to be honest with you, but apparently it is in the American context.
[00:29:31] Emma Ashford: It is in the American context. So, we are running out of time a little bit, but before we wrap up, I do want to ask you one last question, the one we're asking everybody. So, the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program here at Stimson, we're all about testing assumptions in foreign policy, and so I want to ask you, what is one assumption or common wisdom about foreign policy that you think really deserves to be challenged?
[00:29:52] Jeremy Shapiro: Wow, there are many. I think we brought up several, but I would, I would maybe, talk about one that we haven't mentioned. I'm not sure it's the one that most needs to be challenged, but it certainly bothers the shit out of me, which is this idea that in the absence of U.S. leadership or U.S. participation in a given problem, there will be instability, chaos, or just worse outcomes. I think in very many, … This is, I guess, sometimes true. But it's not ipso facto true.
And when I was in the U.S. government, I noticed that basically every government official believed this about every problem in the world. In fact, you see very often that the withdrawal of U.S. interest, the withdrawal of U.S. power from a region or a problem actually increases stability. There are opposite cases too. So, I don't want to posit or rule, but I think the assumption that the presence of U.S. power and U.S. leadership in a given problem is necessary and indeed essential for stability is a very, very questionable one.
[00:30:59] Emma Ashford: And overcoming that might actually help us get to a better place and foreign policy. So, thank you so much, Jeremy. I really appreciate you taking the time today. and thanks to everybody else, we'll see you next time.
[00:31:11] Jeremy Shapiro: Thank you.
[00:31:15] Emma Ashford: That's all for this episode of The Strategy Sessions. You can find the full set of episodes along with the accompanying essays at stimson.org or by searching for us on your favorite podcast app.
A big thanks to Stimson's communications team for their assistance with the taping and to University FM for providing audio editing services. I'm Emma Ashford. Thanks for listening!