 A study in the UN in the early 2000s found that from the end of the Cold War until 2002 more peace agreements were signed and had been arrived at in the entire two centuries before 1990. There was a major peace dividend. Sadly, the years since 2010 we enter the bad news story. All of the indicators have been moving in the wrong direction. The number of armed conflicts was 50 in 1990. It was down to 30 in 2010. It is back up above 50 today. 2010 is just before the Arab Spring. The aftermath of the Arab Spring has produced intense armed conflict in Syria, Libya, Yemen. Military spending started to pick up in the late 90s and the early 2000s and especially with the re-equipment programs for the US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now it's up at a high plateau back up above the 1990 level. That was 1.5 trillion. It went down to 1.1. It's now up at 1.7 trillion dollars again. Conflict problems which are being driven by issues like rising inequality, the increasing impact of climate change, the pressure of competition for natural resources are being exacerbated by shifts in the balance of power which are weakening the institutional framework that we were working with really quite successfully. Generally speaking, each conflict has its own drivers and we should treat each one individually. Whether it's more bilateral diplomacy, more economic engagement across borders, more infrastructure investment and confidence building measures. If you look at the states that we consider to be the most hostile or belligerent, North Korea right here is the most obvious example because here you see all the lights are off. But if the logic holds that if you entrench states in the system and give them less incentive to be belligerent, how will sanctions help that cause? How will trying to isolate a regime such as North Korea further help to give it the incentives to be part of the system? Infrastructure is helping to diminish conflict and they certainly have in places like Southeast Asia where countries that were at war with each other during the Cold War are now building peaceful cross-border infrastructures as a way of really uniting in the way that the European Union has. In several parts of the post-colonial world you see that countries that have realized over the last several generations that they are relatively small, poor, weak, isolated, overpopulated with poor infrastructure need to pool their resources in some ways to become more attractive to international investors to take advantage of the resources they have and bring them to market. In the East African region here you can see a growing density of cross-border infrastructure as these societies, as these countries centered around Kenya start to make those cross-border investments and that becomes something of a model if you will for the rest of Africa as they see this catchment area of 250 million people becoming a more peaceful sub-region. That's the kind of model we want to see spread across the world. Then there's cases where infrastructure is seen as something more potentially aggressive, expansionist like what China is doing with one belt and one road. We see the bilateral tensions over infrastructure projects between China and its individual neighbors but we clearly see these projects are moving forward. So will they help create a united and peaceful Asia or will those be dyads of conflict that remains to be seen?