 connections on St. Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. It's the one o'clock block on a given Wednesday, and we're talking to Carlos Suarez, we're talking to him about reflections, his reflections on Ukraine, because he's had time, time in country, so to speak, and time in a variety of Eastern European countries in that area. And we want to get the, you know, the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd from his experiences there as a Fulbright. And if you didn't know, then he doesn't show it right now. But Carlos's middle initial is F, and the F stands for Fulbright. Yeah, Carlos. Well, thank you, Jay. It's always a pleasure. And gosh, I can think back in the years that, you know, we've been doing this, having this ongoing conversation. And, you know, it was here in Hawaii years ago, where I'll never forget. I can't remember how many 15 plus or 20, where you had this great idea that one day we're going to just have this content. And here we are, we're just rolling it out. And over that course of that time, I guess, I'm delighted to join you today and offer some reflections. Because on one hand, you know, I look at what's happening right now in Ukraine, and I see it as an international relations, you know, scholar, now a professor emeritus. And you know, what does this mean for the international system, you know, great power politics, you know, conflict, and all of that. But then Ukraine is a place that I also had the opportunity to visit and see. And I wanted to just share some of that in, you know, even actually mentioned some links with Hawaii that have been long standing with this country that on one hand, it seems so far away, so far removed from us. But there are very much, you know, people to people connections between us. And maybe just beginning, you know, as you know, let's say the professor in me, I spent a little over 20 years here in Hawaii Pacific University. And during that time, you know, my main area was mostly Latin America and East Asia, kind of looking at the contrasting models of development and sort of political economy. But back in around the year 2003, I got an invitation through the Fulbright program to go to Czech Republic, in Central Europe, post-communist, you know, and this was in the year 2003, they were just about to join the EU 2004. They had just joined NATO. And of course 2004 was the year where the European Union expanded the largest 10 new members would join, most of them from that post-communist Eastern Central Europe, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, etc. Romania and Bulgaria would join in 2007. So I was there 2003 and again 2005. And from that period on over the next 10, 12 years, I had a chance to travel pretty regularly, quite a bit through, you know, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and several shows that we were able to do even from Krakow. I'm forever grateful you connected me there with this amazing man, who, of course, you know, Holocaust survivor that Bernard offered. Yes. And wow. And so it really moved me. And of course, Krakow, one of these cities that even the time I saw it, I said, man, this is a very special place. Well, as I came to learn that it would be a few years later, I think 2006 or seven on one of my trips back there, I was able to travel to Ukraine. I got an invitation to give a talk at a university in Western Ukraine, a city of Ivano-Frankivsk, smaller town, but the bigger city of Western Ukraine, of course, is Lviv. And we've seen it now on our news every night. This is the major sort of area. I'm sorry, it's a, you know, a very important cultural center for Ukraine. And it's a longstanding, you know, one of these cities that has a rich history like Krakow, like, you know, Prague and Budapest. It was once part of this large circle of sort of, you know, very important country. I want to show you first an initial map. I think I'm sorry, there's a picture, I think that we can show of just the city. And it's, you know, it's a classic case of a city with charming really more European and certainly Western Ukraine, this part where this is located, is that this city Lviv was once capital of what was known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodemiria during the Hapsburg Empire. I've got another map, a second map, if you can pull that up. And this is the map of Europe in the year 1815. This was the famous Congress of Vienna when leaders came together and sort of, you know, multilateral diplomacy. But the more important, what we see here, the red lines are the current countries. And you can see Poland is the big one. Ukraine is there and you can see Lviv that's in yellow. What that means is the yellow refers to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So this was integral, it was part of that. And it had a lot in common with again, Krakow, Budapest, Lviv are like this, you know, three cities that were kind of a, if you will, like a triad of some kind. And so this city of Lviv very much became, you know, the story is long, it goes back and it became part of the Soviet Union in 1939, after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. You know, when the Nazis invade Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union pretty quickly divided up and it becomes absorbed into the Soviet Union. Right at the end of World War II, 44 to 46, there was an interesting, very important population exchange between Poland and Ukraine. And the reason that there's no where there is, because today we see mass exodus, everybody leaving there, Poland is sort of the gateway in many ways. But you have to appreciate that there are people in Poland who obviously have, you know, legacy heritage, you know, had been maybe former residents of this part. They have a Ukrainian heritage. Now they've kind of been polis, whatever you call that, polisized. And anyhow, it would then, you know, so there was a massive exchange of people at that time. But again, this charming city, you know, has a lot of the cobblestone streets and buildings that survive, both the Soviet and the German occupations in World War II, largely unscathed, pretty like Krakow-Poland, unlike Warsaw, which was of course, leveled and flattened. You know, these cities, Krakow, even Budapest, a beautiful architecture for centuries. And today, Leviv is, of course, home to many cultural institutions. It has a Philharmonic Orchestra and it has a very classic I want to share one more picture. I think I have of the Leviv Opera House and it has this opera and ballet theater center that's quite spectacular, again, reflecting really clearly a more, you know, the classical Central European, you know, Austro-Hungarian heritage. The historic center of Leviv is part of the UNESCO World Heritage List, you know, country, I mean, I'm sorry, just a very important cultural center. And as I look back, I mean, I was there visiting, of course, from what was then the new Europe, the, you know, the Europe that was suddenly now about to be part of the EU. They were excited. It was, you know, a tremendous time. Now I've been going back since and, of course, that honeymoon has long ended and places like Hungary, in particular, and even Poland would begin shifting to the right and, you know, more anti-democratic. One of the ironies is that my own travel there and the reason I was invited to go is that they were very interested in the case of the Czech Republic, but in general, the region, the transitions that have been happening in Latin America and in Asia away from authoritarianism to democracy. And that, you know, that's long been an area that we look at today. Ironically, we look at now transitions to authoritarian rule, in other words, the erosion of democracy, including in many of these new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. But all that aside, I mean, obviously, Ukraine is at this border. And the word itself, Ukraine, it refers to the borderland. That's a literal translation. And sometimes we've heard in the news and some people trying to clarify, is it the Ukraine or Ukraine and, you know, long referred to as the Ukraine. But the Ukrainians today in part wanting to assert their own autonomous identity, it's like, no, no, we are Ukraine. The Ukraine suggests it's like something you can grab and maybe the Soviet Union or, you know, the Russian Empire has a little piece. Anyway, that's just a little nomenclature there about the word. But it's a fascinating place. And let me show one last slide that gives us a quick look at right now in this crisis where we've had now millions of people exiting. We have a map of, you know, where are people fleeing to? And it kind of shows there from Ukraine. Of course, Poland is really the big border. Romania, Moldova, most people are trying to get out into, you know, Poland, the UK, Sweden. I mentioned earlier, even some Swiss friends that I have have just told me they're about to receive some refugees in Switzerland in their own home. That happens to be a friend who came here some 10 years ago, a middle school teacher came to Hawaii on a sabbatical. And now he'll be I'm going to be visiting at the end of April, parts of Central Europe there. And he's told me that they've got some some refugees in the house. And so I'm going to kind of be pushed aside to the little smaller bedroom. And man, I'm just honored to be able to, you know, connect with them. And what I see clearly, we've seen it throughout the media. Obviously Europe has opened up to help facilitate this massive movement. Now there are some criticizing it. You know, why didn't they do the same for the Syrians or your others? These are complex issues. But at the end of the day, Ukraine, I mean, these are their neighbors and brothers and cousins in a way that far away refugees that come from different places simply aren't. And so there are limits. The other challenges that these are people coming with a lot of uncertainty. Of course, they hope they can go back to their country. But we don't know what's going to happen, how it's going to play out. Is this we're going to continue to the point where literally they've left a completely destroyed country. And that's going to present challenges for the rest of Europe that is, you know, currently housing this movement of refugees. Will they be there forever? Will they, you know, be the next wave like the Balkans War of the 90s? Suddenly a mass mass influx of Ukrainians all around. It'll be interesting to see. But you know, beyond that, as I reflect back my impressions, and let me offer a quick one on that, I had been traveling at the time in Poland. And, you know, Poland to me was quite impressive. I, you know, I grew up like a lot of Americans, we used to make a lot of Polish jokes and you had this image of them being, you know, like, you know, bumbling fools. What I saw was a really, you know, at the time, early 2000s, a country that was on the move and dynamic and more than that, because I was in Czech Republic and the Czechs were a little bit melancholy and, you know, maybe like a great cloud. The Poles, by contrast, they had more joie de vivre, a little more, more passion and even the food, you know, had more, a little more vibrancy like the Hungarians. But the point is, when I got to Ukraine, it was night and day from that central Europe where they were all, you know, joining the EU, excited, things were happening. I went into Ukraine and it was like stepping back in time. It was like this is the former Soviet Union. It was a shock to me, because, again, I had been traveling for a few years throughout this new Europe, as we would call it. And, you know, just getting over the border, you had to change trains because the rails aren't the same size. And there was a whole ritual of many of the passengers. They, you know, they obviously bring condor man or things that you can't get in Ukraine. And so I've seen this in other countries where, you know, the people are just bringing back anything from, you know, cooking oil to, you know, whatever items. And then a funny anecdote, when I was on this train, I had one of the scariest moments in my life. I had, I kid you not. I had to get a visa because you can't go to Ukraine without one at the time. And you get it through the San Francisco consulate. You mail them your passport and you wait and you wait and you wait. And quite literally the day before I had to go on this trip, I was traveling to several places. I had to go get an emergency passport because I didn't have one. You know, you have to pay many hundreds extra. So I get the passport. And on the day that I'm off to the airport, the package arrives from the consulate with my visa. But that's not the scary part. I got the visa OK. So I take it with me. I'm on the train crossing the border there from Poland. And this, you know, once you're in Ukraine, the custom or not the immigration guy comes and I give him my passport. I have the new one, which is valid and I have the one with the new one. And I have the visa in the other one. So I'm a little bit. I've got two. It's confusing. And then get to that. I don't speak Ukrainian, of course. And pretty soon there's this testy back and forth. He's asking me questions. What's going on? And I'm like, confused. I'm beginning to fear that I'm going to end up in a Ukrainian prison, you know, with Igor next to me. And who knows what? Well, it turns out I didn't have my new passport signed. I hadn't put my signature on it. And that's what eventually we figured out. It wasn't valid like it didn't have a signature because he was just confronting me. He couldn't explain it. And so for a very brief moment, I thought I was not going to leave Ukraine. It got through and everything went well. And I had a good experience. I mean, it was just a eye opening. It was a charming city. But I had this feeling like it was stepping into again, this world of sort of organized crime and mafia because I remember arriving very late at night and you see these big like limousines and dark cars, you know, just very mysterious and it just looked like a, you know, a place that didn't have, let's say, a feeling of a vibrant democracy that was emerging. It wasn't quite. But having said that, compared to the far Eastern parts, this was the part more connected to Western Europe and obviously were pro-European Union sentiment has long been obviously strong. But I think back at those times and, you know, I had a window into there. Let me add finally an interesting connection with Hawaii because at the time I was at HPU, I was overseeing some of our programs and linguistics and teaching English to speakers of other languages. And Hawaii, the state of Hawaii and the community in linguistics has had a long-standing collaboration with Ukraine, basically, you know, faculty and, you know, scholars exchanging. And we hosted at HPU a visiting Fulbrighter from Ukraine about maybe a little 15 years ago, a woman who came with her family and had a great experience. We're still in touch with her. But I guess I say that because while it is a place that seems so far, so remote, at the end of the day, it is a small world. And we have these human to human connections. We have basically, you know, links that, you know, make this more than just an abstraction. This is very real. And, you know, I have people I know there that it makes, it makes it hard for me. I struggle with this, you know, looking at it as a academic, you know, sort of what does this mean for the international system and war and conflict. And then looking at it, what about Marina, this friend I know there? What about, you know, the people that are affected? And so it's a tough dilemma. You climb over there, then, and your time, if you were to go, if you will go, hopefully there's something left to go to on your trip here in a few months, I'm guessing you're going to find that people are really different. They're more global. They are thinking beyond their borders. Nothing is going to join NATO, but because they got people who want their borders, who want to take them over, they become, you know, under the spotlight, global spotlight. And so when we talk to them on television and think tech has talked to a number of them, you know, on think tech or streaming. They're articulate. They're smart. They're middle class. They dress well, I mean, in the circumstances. They have decent lives or they have had decent lives, speaking English, a lot of them, maybe halting sometimes. But they're they're people, you know, you would have a beer with their people who are, you know, they're kind of conically related middle class people. And I wonder, you know, did something happen to Ukraine between the time you were there and now did something make them, you know, they're young, they're vital, even in wartime, they're young and vital. It's a joy to talk to them, even though they're having a terrible, horrible, horrific time. What has happened? Yeah, well, on one hand, the country has has this long division between the more pro West, more Western side of the country and those, you know, not just there, but in the big, you know, even key of the big, you know, capital city people who are connected to the outside world. Obviously, social media and just, you know, the ability to work across borders through the technologies has helped. So the mindset has changed and you have a generation today. Look, it's been 30 plus years since the end of the Soviet Union. So people today have grown up with this one single independent autonomous country. And while there's a long history in Russia has always been there's a very asymmetrical relationship. Russia is the big bear. It's the giant. Nevertheless, they have had relative autonomy from that, running their own, you know, place. Now, we know, of course, the story 2014, they annexed Crimea and they begin to then, you know, foster this, you know, this region in the eastern border that they would then suddenly use the pretext to recognize as independent republics. Nobody else recognizes them. But maybe my point there is that I think if I think back of these last, you know, at least the time since I went 15 years ago and even the last 30, clearly more people are aware that the outside world away from Russia is also better. I mean, the situation in Russia is, you know, in terms of people's rights and liberties. And of course, now with the war and the disinformation, they're going to erode any semblance of credibility that the government has. And here, I think the challenge we all face is that it's easy to suddenly put the, you know, all of Russia as the scapegoat and they're all bad. And this is the challenge. How do we do it? Because the Russian people, while they may even support their leader, they obviously are doing it on the basis of not having full, open information. And, you know, that changes everything. But again, I look back at Ukraine and I mean, this new generation has come up and they want like what everyone else wants. They want obviously mobility. They want freedom. They want, you know, you know, they want a Western Europe pass. Exactly. They want to be Europeans and in many ways they are Europeans. Just like Western Europe. Yeah. And I think, you know, you have a debate now in the international relations area, because back in 2009, I think it was, there was an important meeting of NATO officials in which basically an analysis was made. I think in US government, essentially I'm trying to remember where the statement came from right now. But anyway, the idea was that the carrot was dangled to Ukraine that, hey, yes, you will one day join NATO. And so some are arguing, well, back then we kind of planted the seed because we needed to understand the Russia and their fears and this and that. Well, you know, it's a debate that will go on. But are we to blame for that? Or is it, you know, well, again, it will continue as a debate. But at the end of the day, bottom line is you've got also in the case of Putin. I mean, people trying to figure that out, but he's trying to recreate some, you know, image of a larger Russian people and arguing that they're all the same. Well, no, today those identities, which are very fluid and move over time. It's fair to say that many of the Ukrainians don't see themselves as, you know, somehow the same as Russians. They are very much a distinct culture. Yes, a lot of common, you know, roots and heritage and even the language similarities. But at the end of the day, who they are as people. And, you know, what we're hearing, I think, from the case of Putin trying to describe this, you know, this sort of pan-Russo or whatever we want to call it, bringing together the white Russians and the, which are the Belarus and the Russians and Ukrainians as one people. But that, you know, that's the classic story of a dictator, you know, trying to reframe the narrative, make it simple and stir up a lot of national sentiment. It's a tough one. But one thing, one thing that strikes me from your recollections and your description of this is that, you know, here in Hawaii, we have multiple races and multiple cultures all got together. And, you know, we are consolidated. We are together. The melting pot has melted in many, many ways. This is a great strength of ours. And when you describe the history and, you know, current the current melting pot, if you will, of Europe, you realize that borders have changed. They're, you know, borders are arbitrary. Borders are the result of war. Borders are the result of, you know, a lot of unappetism. But there they are. And that means that means that people who lived in one place moved to another place. I mean, the Romans would get up in the morning and say, let's let's take gold today. Let's take Britain. Let's just take it. Redraw the map. Redraw the map. The map has been redrawn many times. And the cultures have grown up over people who stayed in a place for a while. And so you may have all kinds of DNA floating around in Ukraine. But the culture is there. And the culture, they have worked very hard at achieving over a period of time. And I think you have to reflect the culture, respect the culture. So when I, I'm still trying to understand this. I think we all should try to understand how this melting pot works in Europe, because it's different than in different places in the world. But one thing is clear. It's that the liberal world order, and I did want to talk to you about this, the liberal world order requires an agreement among all nations that they won't wake up one morning and say they're going to take glory or Britain. That they are not going to take territory, hurt people, enslave people for breakfast. And the liberal world order actually only arose after World War II, which was traumatic, but also very educational. And it happened largely in Europe. And so we had that for a while. We had that from 1945 on. We had a general understanding as expressed through the United Nations that you didn't take your neighbor's lunch or your neighbor's territory. But that now we're at a tipping point. Now it's different. It's changed. Something popped, something changed, profoundly changed. And unless we can get back to a liberal world order, we're going to have what existed before, the liberal world order. We're going to have a lot of wars, a lot of border changing, a lot of pain and agony and killing. So your thoughts about that, especially through the lens of your travels there and the friends and connections you've made in all those trips you've taken. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think as you've put it very clearly, I mean, this is really a new and additional shock to the international system that we already had from the pandemic. And even before that, let's say the election of Donald Trump, that represented as well as shock to the liberal world order that you've described. And it's a paradox. And it's also, I want to say, something that could go different ways that we just don't know. We don't know. And what I mean by that is that it's been remarkable to see the relative of a unity and considerable alignment in the Western Europe and US response to this. Pretty strong and solid. And I think that tomorrow, Joe Biden is going to be in Europe, and I have to re-form those up. And that has been remarkable, including announces by Germany increasing its defense budgets with a very interesting new foreign minister, young woman from the Greens Party that is taking on a feminist foreign policy. And even Switzerland, normally always ardently neutral, is taking the stance against some of the Russian assets and the like. So what I'm getting at there is that on one hand, we're seeing this as an opportunity to kind of re-affirm that because we've gone through five, six years now of a rather tumultuous shock to the system. And yet there's another part of me that when I look at that period I went, which was the honeymoon for these new post-communist, central Eastern, I mean, they were in 2003, four, five, it was just, it was the honeymoon. I mean, they were getting a lot of EU money. They were now being kind of given the good house keeping seal of approval. They were now stable market-based economies, freedom, democracy, liberty. Well, you fast forward 10, 12, 15 years and it's, there's a little, the honeymoon is over. We've seen this lurch to the illiberal, sort of authoritarian tendencies, the erosion of democratic norms left and right. So I think it's a threat to their economy. Remember all the trouble? Some of those countries were failing and they had to be bailed out big time. And then of course you, and then you have to crank in the migrants from North Africa and the Middle East who came and did trauma essentially to the economic and political structures in Europe. So all of this has been a huge assault on old fashioned Europe in the last few years. Absolutely. So again, I just say, it's hard to say which way it can go. On one hand, there are some forces where we can see a unity at least among some, but what does that mean? Does Putin survive this and he kind of limps along or is there eventually some implosion that happened much like the fall of the Soviet Union? I mean, I was a graduate student in the mid late 80s when all happened. And if in 1988, if somebody would have proposed, hey, this is all gonna fall apart like a deck of cards. You'd be left that. And I was studying at UCLA and they had a partnership with Rand Corporation where they had a program on Soviet international behavior and all the best minds about the Soviet, nobody predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. What I'm getting at there is that right now we can envision several scenarios that could get really bad and ugly, it could muddle through, it could be an increment. But in the end, we're just gonna have to wait and see how it plays out. And of course, hopefully, mitigate and avoid the worst, but boy, we're dealing with a man in the case of Adam or Putin that we don't know how it's gonna play out. Is it gonna be an internal struggle or what? But how this impacts the bigger, larger picture, I don't know, I think on one hand, the more things change, the more they're the same. We see over time and maybe every generation or so these dramatic shocks and the system kind of comes back around. But on the other hand, it's hard to imagine going back, even post-pandemic, but now even post-Russia war in Ukraine, going back to anything that resembles where we were before this. This has changed. It's really hard to predict it, I totally agree. Not only is it hard to predict it, but the change, the transformational change, profound change could happen very quickly, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bingo, it was down and Putin was there, by the way, grinding his teeth. But I guess what I'm interested also is aside from the little bit of world order, then aside from how these great powers are gonna organize themselves and the world around them over the next few years, what about places like Ukraine? What about all those Eastern European countries? I mean, it seems to me that they're, in a larger sense, they're a target for Russia. They're also of great interest to Western Europe. And there's so many of them. I mean, we have only begun to study in this horrific process here in the last few weeks how many Eastern European countries there are and capitals and how different they are and how the Austrian, Hungarian empire left them. It reached very far by your map, you know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. What's the natural, this is a hard question. I'm sorry, I'm asking you Carlos. What's the natural progression here? Is it consolidation? Is it destruction? Is it one eating the other? Or is it an agreement among a number of them forming or participating in the EU or NATO and creating a European continent, if you will? I mean, what appeals in terms of a possible future for all these fragmented, I have to say that, fragmented countries? Yeah, boy, not an easy quick answer in our last minute or two, but I guess a quick thought would be, I think we're entering into some terrain where we just don't know, because there are different factors. The role of social media and information now is just really changing the dynamics because we suddenly have two realities. We may look at it and see this, but guess what? The people in Russia today, for example, are not seeing the reality and even, those would argue that what we're seeing is sort of its own Western biased view and a lot of social media, I read a degree for the Latin Americans, it's very easy to say, well, hey, what about Iraq? What about Afghanistan? Yes, you're talking about war criminals there, but what about Donald Romsfeld and so on? And it's easy to just throw that out and say it's the equivalent and on some fundamental level it is, but when you dig a little deeper, well, there are some real differences. But beyond that, I just think also, we've opened up a can of worms in that, you know, it can't go back to what it was and the Ukraine again has developed this identity and we can speak of that, but guess what? We don't know if a month from now, Putin has the ability to literally bring this to rubble and quite frankly destroy the whole country and that opera house gone, you know, like that. And then what? Because the West is not going to invade and take on Russia. So even in that worst case scenario, I hate to even think, you know, a small nuclear bomb, but let's say just massive destruction. What next? If you just have a broken place, he occupies it, it's very possible. That's a scenario that could happen here in the next days or weeks where literally this resistance fold. Now, it won't just disappear, it'll be there and it'll just be like a frozen mess. But I don't know, I don't want to think too much about that and I don't know much about that. It'd be like a dustbin. It'd be like some of the American states after the depression, nobody was there. They all went to California or whatever. And I think it's a fair possibility that he will destroy the whole place even today as we speak. And what's left in the opera house and everything else, every element of society and civilization will be undermined, the tactors are fled out, destroyed. And then the question, and including their agricultural sector. And then the question becomes, this is the last question I'm gonna ask you. Then the question becomes, what happens? Who moves in? Is it left like Oklahoma in the 30s? Is it becoming a desert, south of North Africa? Does it become a desert? Is it going to be populated? Is it going to be recreated? Or is it just gonna be a huge World War I kind of a no man's land? Now it's no women's land too, by the way. Do you have a vision of that? Or is that also impossible to predict? No, I mean, it is hard to predict, but my vision is one where we essentially see it broken up just as we've seen those maps over the last 200 years, Ukraine and this and that. Clearly, Crimea is gone. That's not going back. They're all Russian there anyway. That Eastern borderland, they're all pro-Russian and they're Russian anyway. So I don't see a reunified Ukraine consolidating everything it had 10 years ago. I just wonder and beyond that, again, it just depends on where this ends or how it plays out. I mean, if Putin decides to just grind it into this massive, it's just going to break everything. And at the end of the day, this is a major, major food basket for Europe, not just Russia, but even many parts of Europe. And but then I'm left with this last point. We now got, and it's hard to know the figures, millions and millions of Ukrainians that are now spread out all over Europe and not just in Poland, they're everywhere. Some of those are going to be stuck and they're not going to come back and they're not going to want to come back because what are they going to come back to if it's a disaster? So that's going to leave a lasting impact. We're going to have much like the Balkan Wars in the 90s. Today, it's very common from Sweden, from Germany, from Switzerland. You've got second generation Bosnians and Serbs. We're going to see the next generation of Ukrainian Poles, Ukrainian Swiss, Ukrainian Germans that are probably going to, well, I mean, they will, whatever, they will enrich this environment, call it that, but at the same time, it's going to leave behind a pretty desperate and desolate area. And so it's not a pretty picture. I don't see easy positive outcomes. Let's just hope it's not the worst. And that's why I suggest to you, the EU and all the member countries of the EU are so concerned about supporting Ukraine, even if it's sometimes halfway, because they know, they realize, as you and I do, that whatever happens here is going to have a huge, profound and long lasting permanent effect on Europe in general. This has redrawn the map since World War II. In other words, I mean, let me rephrase, obviously the end of the Soviet Union, no doubt. Of course, I mean, I don't want to just downplay that, but since then, we've not seen, you know, Yugoslavia broke apart, but it didn't have the geopolitical implications of this because we haven't even talked about China and India and how they're going to play out this is such a powerful shock to the international system. And again, I'm having trouble separating, you know, trying to analyze that because we don't know the outcome, we can envision scenarios, but that's not even entirely clear, but it is a shock. And then we're going to continue seeing it evolve in the coming days, weeks, years, but this is a big one. Great place to observe that, having traveled, having done all those Fulbright's, having taught here in Hawaii and HPU, having taught in Mexico, and now with the East-West Center, you're in a great spot and you can see it. And that's why you and I have to get together again and connect the dots on this, Carlos. Yes, absolutely. No, we do, and I thank you for this opportunity to share some thoughts and we'll continue this dialogue as we always do. Thank you, Carlos. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.