 So we're going to open this up to questions and answers now, and I'm going to exploit my position as the chair to ask the first question. I just have a question about, you know, you hear a lot about how NATO is obsolete, but you also hear maybe more valid arguments that, although might not be obsolete, the North Atlantic Treaty is a little bit anachronistic in the sense that it was written in 1949 when the big threat was other states. And now you have the non-state actor threat, and the idea of an armed attack could be anybody, it could be an individual in Paris and London. And the only time that article Clive has really been invoked was after 9-11, and that wasn't accepted by the United States. And there was talk about it being invoked after Paris, but they decided it wasn't relevant because non-state actors can't be targeted. They don't have a home address in the same way. And that also matters for the difference between military spending, because although non-state actors can be a military threat to the United States, they're a law enforcement problem in Europe, and that changes the budgeting aspect, okay? Europol is also spending money. Does that count towards protection? Because these are people who are homegrown. So I'd like you to talk about the changes that non-state actors have and non-state terrorists have on those kind of dimensions, and on the North Atlantic Alliance, and on arguments over budgets and spending in military versus law enforcement. First point is that even though terrorists are individual, small groups, states still matter, because those terrorists have to be physically someplace, which they're residing in a state. They have to get money through something, and therefore they're going through institutions over which states have control. So you can't write states out of the equation. These are not free-flowing actors like aliens who come down and visit horror films and then disappear again. So states are still part of the equation. I think where your question is especially germane is the intersection of internal and external security. So the handy-dandy division that, you know, NATO did the outside, and police forces did the inside, that no longer pertains, because there's too much crossover. I mean, there's a whole big debate in critical security studies about whether the response to 9-11 should have been about the FBI rather than the Department of Defense. So, you know, what was the whole Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, all that came out after 9-11 was precisely the wrong thing. It should have been treated as a judicial issue for police forces rather than militarized and securitized in the way that it was. But nonetheless, you do have that intersection between external security and internal security. So NATO still has a role, not only because states still matter, but also because, and here I take a little bit of issue with the way the question was framed, you know, we can sit here, in this geopolitical position, and say, oh, who's going to invade who? Well, as I said earlier, the Baltic states know exactly who could invade who. And NATO, in fact, has done a bit of a 180-degree turn in the last 5 to 10 years. Precisely because of the post-Cold War era, the assumption was, oh, NATO was now sort of the floor of a European UN with TEAF, and they'd go off and do things in Afghanistan and do what they said. But now territorial defence is back front and centre, and people are buying old-fashioned tanks and old-fashioned jet fighters and old-fashioned submarines because they see a very specific state threat on the horizon. So NATO has that job to do, if it can do it. But you're absolutely right in as much as there are new actors, new constellations, and new intersections that have to be pursued. And in a sense, that is a lot of what Margarini has been talking about in terms of the European security defence strategy, delivering security, not just in the old-fashioned sense of guns and bombs and borders, but also delivering security in terms of migration, in terms of refugees, in terms of police and security, in terms of Europol, in terms of Frontex, in terms of European coast guards. There's an entire menu there that's available, and you can't even begin, you know, just plug cyber in there on top of that, and you know, you've got a huge, a huge agenda. So I think the short answer is you've got different courses for courses. NATO has a job to do, the EU has a job to do, OSCE has a job to do, and what we need the European Union to do is to get its own act together in terms of the tools at its disposal, and then to work cooperatively with NATO, with OSCE, with all the multilateral agencies and bilateral government in order to address what you will correctly identify as a much broader security agenda than perhaps we used to. Does anybody else have any questions? I'll come to the floor. Thanks Ben for that, I thought it was pretty interesting, I actually have a 50 question. You can have 10. My first one is Tesco and Dr. Bruce. That opens up the dreaded word, which is neutrality, you know. I don't like to use the N word, but that's okay. I'm wondering firstly how, if this should be reopened in on, and secondly how you would reopen this to the public who naturally are massively against it from what it seems. The second one is about migration. Extreme right-wing politics and kind of, in some places, the breakdown of politics in Europe Is migration a new kind of root cause to this, or is this the struggle that comes back after alarm issues after the last 15 years? In terms of globalization and pressures. Is migration the thing that, is this the main problem, or is this just the last problem that is the struggle that comes back? Okay, neutrality first, well it's never known, it's always there, you can talk about it. I think there are two important things to say, first of all. First of all, much of the debate in this country about neutrality is, and I don't mean this in any way to be offensive, but it's a dialogue of the death. I mean, people talking about something, the definition of which they bitterly disagree on. So for Irish government neutrality simply means we're not members of NATO, and we will not join a European security alliance, European defence alliance. That's all it is. Everything up to that point is fair game. So there's nothing in the agenda that I outlined earlier that an Irish government could not do and put its hand on its heart and say this is entirely consistent with our traditional military neutrality. Now, the problem for the government is that not many other people accept that as a definition of neutrality. You know, the People's Republic of China is neutral, but I wouldn't set them up as an ethical example of international behaviour. Those who talk about neutrality are very often not talking about neutrality, but all of the values that they ascribe to neutrality. So neutrality for many people is about being the good guy. Neutrality is about being anti-imperialist. Neutrality is about being pro-development. Neutrality is about being pro-sustainable development. Neutrality is being about anti-nuclear. But none of those things, with the possible exception of the nuclear, but we could come back to that, none of those things require you to be neutral. If I want to say things that, you know, piss off friends and colleagues in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, I very often like to say, you know, I will take the foreign policy of Norway, Canada, Denmark, maybe even the Dutch from time to time, but it depends. You know, in terms of an ethical scorecard, and set it up against Irish foreign policy any day of the week, and they're full on NATO members. And I will take a neutral country, I mean a properly neutral country, the one that's really not an exemplary neutral country, Switzerland, and I will talk about their ethics down here in terms of what the Swiss actually do that is normatively ethical as opposed to what happens to be good for Swiss business. So don't tell me that neutrality equates with goodness, because it doesn't. But the counter argument, and I always make this, you know, for 800 years this country suffered from its geopolitical position. It was crucified on the base of its geopolitical position for 800 years. The last 50 we've been able to make hay in the sunshine, because all the trouble is way far away. I think it's a big ask to say to the Irish people, you know what, take all these burdens onto yourself and contribute to the security defense of faraway lands and faraway babies. Now, I would make the argument that's a very unethical argument to make, but a former T-shirt made that very argument with respect to Greece and Turkey. Bertie Herndon at some point was asked of the Irish who traveled him, well, why would we come to the aid of Greece or Turkey? Okay, your members of the T-shirt being union, but that's cool, but if that's the attitude you want to take, that's the attitude you can take. So what I come down to is basically this, any decision the government makes on engagement in the agenda that I outline, or even if the prospect of, and it's not an immediate prospect of an actual common European defense was laid on the table, that is for an Irish government to sit down, do a hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis and say, right, should we be in or can we stay out? And what is the balance of interest with respect to that? And then they have to have a conversation with the Irish people. I would rather they had a conversation with Irish people in advance of that, but no Irish politician is willing to do it. No substantial Irish politician is willing to do it. I have an individual in this house, I was sitting right there, where you are now, and I'm not giving any way by saying the gender, but he was standing right there, and I said, you know, in the context of the thing he was talking about, you know, why wouldn't you at least have a conversation about the power? And his response, fear-dos, perfectly honest, was, I don't kick sleeping dogs. Now that's not my definition of political leadership, but nonetheless, for an Irish politician that's a pretty fair, safe and honest answer. On your migration question, that's really tough. First of all, migration is not a problem. It's the sources of the migration, that's the problem. The problem with migration is the civil war in Syria. The problem with migration is the poverty in North Africa. The problem with migration is the lack of water in North Africa, the lack of opportunity, the lack of democracy, the lack of human rights in lots of places. That's the problem with migration. If you're talking about dealing with the outflows of those problems, which we could address, if we choose to, and deal with those problems, then yes, that puts social systems and political systems under pressure. But compare and contrast Germany and the United Kingdom. Look at the scale of migration that Germany has handled. And compare that, for example, to the UK. I mean, I was at a thing, again, because it's being recorded in broadcast, I was at a thing where I met a man. And he was, like most of you in this room, happy, clappy, western, proto-liberal, cosmopolitan, car-carrying member of the British Labour Party. And he voted for Brexit. And the reason he explained he voted for Brexit was because his neighbours in the working class, a place in the North England where he lived, they had been done down by all these Romanians and Poles. And they couldn't get jobs because the Romanians and Poles were taking the jobs because the Romanians and Poles were willing to work for the salaries that were on offer. And they were getting, and there was pressure on housing, and there was pressure on the National Health Service, and there was pressure on all these things. And he could understand and explain and agree why they should get out of the European Union was to stop all this damn migration, which took away housing, took away social services, and took away opportunities. And my response to him was very simple. If the British political system had chosen to deal with those issues in the way that the Germans have dealt with those issues, that is to say, pay for the goddamn health service, pay for education, pay for training, pay for hospitals, pay for housing, they wouldn't have had the problems that they're facing. But they chose not to. And that's not a damn thing that suggests to me that any future British government is going to invest in education, health, or housing in a way that they haven't done 20 years ago. Which is why I was arguing to him that I thought Brexit was an absolute country. But that, I think, you know, very long-winded answer to your question, to deal with migration is, again, a whole-of-government approach. And it does demand sacrifice and contribution from people putting hands in pockets and governments willing to make tough choices. But we've seen, and again, talking on words, sorry, you know, Angela Merkel seems to have managed to do that in Germany thus far. Jamage is certainly, threats, obviously, but nonetheless, she has done much more with many more than the UK has. I mean, you know, don't even get us started on how little the Irish government has done. Yeah, on the bathroom. Yeah, on Irish neutrality, sorry. And thanks for a great talk, Professor. Is there not an argument to be made that we could increase our defence expenditure by a significant factor and still add no capacity to European and NATO capacity and that our greater additions value-added come from things like our United Nations or a seat at the UN or a seat at the United Nations Security Council or a perceived neutral state that we're able to influence political arguments, advance European norms and also just to defend European interests amongst nation-states. It wouldn't talk to the Germans. It wouldn't talk to the British or wouldn't talk to the French because of their imperial past, for example. Is that an argument that you find compelling at all? I find it an argument. But they seem to be talking more regions with no difficulty. I mean, who set up the Oslo process? Why is it the Oslo process? I'm a researcher here at the Institute. I'd be interested to hear more on what you said about PESCO. Specifically, what do you think has been the main barrier for member states after European Union to take advantage of that mechanism? Has it just been a sort of, if you will, over-reliance on NATO? Is there something else to the sort of formality of it all that has been, if you will, scaring of member states? And you mentioned that there were member states interested in engaging in permanent structure cooperation. Do you think that is the way forward for developing a more meaningful European defence capacity? Or do you see any danger in the sort of fragmentation that's coming soon? The problem with PESCO is the member states couldn't find a use for it. Because for the member states looking at PESCO, this was supposed to be an advanced guard, intense cooperation in the area of security and defence. Doing things that other states couldn't or wouldn't do. The response from the member states was yes, we should have that kind of group but we should all dissipate. Which invalidates the whole notion of having an advanced subset because if everybody's in, there's no rationale for PESCO. So what they've been struggling with really is to identify what specifically PESCO can do that while it is open and voluntary to anybody to join provides actual added value. Now allegedly, and I haven't read the implementation report that you published the day before yesterday on the security and defence implementation plan, allegedly they have a framework they've identified a way in which PESCO becomes in a way modular. So that within PESCO, and I'm just taking stuff out of the air now so don't call me, but within PESCO you could for example design a new attack helicopter. And that a number of member states would come together with PESCO and would agree to have let's say 50 of these super advanced, attack helicopters, and they'd share the development costs, they'd all buy it together, they'd all train together, they'd all train together, and that if an EU battery needed to go to some place, they would all guarantee that they'd all take their helicopters and go together. So you'd have that deepened level of integration cooperation above and beyond anything you'd have outside. But you'd do that in different areas with different parts and different consolation members. The problem with that is, or at least as hard as it is, now, you don't actually need PESCO to do the kind of thing I've just described. But, and I think here you get the politics of it. Here you get into modeling and looking for some big wins, you know, identifying an opportunity, seeing high level of member state ambitions and being able to sell a concept as a means of fulfilling that heightened set of ambitions. So I think there's much more politics in it than there is in terms of what PESCO can actually do. Does it lead to fragmentation? Well yes, but I think in the area of security defence you're never facing that. Because, you know, again, and we have to remember this, you know, when you're talking about security defence, this is the nae plus ultra of any sovereign state. Defending its citizens and defending its borders is the core central capacity of the West Australian state. To ask any sovereign state to begin to share that with other states is a big ask. So I think you're talking fragmentation but there has to be fragmentation. And I guess what Margarini has to hope for is that adding up all the individual parts creates a much bigger kind of collective momentum. I was just wondering why you would think regarding NATO. So let's say if in 2020 Trump loses re-election and you get someone who's a more standard stable US president, stable, coherent, do you think other member states of NATO at that point can overlook a four-year span as just something strange that happened and everything is kind of back to what it was now when we can trust in Article 5 or is it sort of a core threat that's perhaps shaken NATO to a point where even if you have that in 2020 it's still a question Marguest if it's really a valid alliance. That's a really good question. I have two very contradictory responses. On the one hand I would never underestimate the potential politicians just to forget and to pretend it never happened. That was a nasty blip. There was a lunatic in the White House for four years. Normal service has been resumed. I would not underestimate that capacity. On the other hand, you'd have to if you were forward-thinking enough kind of politicians say, well, if the American political system with all of its alleged checks and balances and the amazing insights of founding fathers could deliver that kind of lunatic in the White House, it might do so again. And what's worse, it might deliver a lunatic who actually could rationally put together a program. But as long as there's a service master there as opposed to an actual alliance there I think we can survive and live through it. But as I say, if the blueprints can do that once, why can't it do it a second time? So that genuinely has to make a forward-thinking politician think, well, how solid is this alliance anyway? And remember, when you look at NATO and we think of NATO and here I get into my post-structuralist critical security kind of vibe here. If you read Article 5 it's not a lot. There's no great ringing declarations and promises in the show. It just says, if one member is attacked, paraphrasing slightly, other members shall come to its aid and assistance by whichever means they deem most whatever. I mean, it's pretty wishy-washy in terms of text. What has given NATO and Article 5 serious theft is the fact that A, you have an organization behind it where you have a big man. You have had U.S. troops in Europe. And you have had U.S. presidents since 1949 who have restated again and again and again that Article 5 matters to you. And now you have a president who wouldn't say that. And that has to be a pause for concern. Yeah, right here. Thanks very much. So I've got kind of two points I'd like to ask your opinion on in a sort of general way. It's very different. The first one is about something that wasn't mentioned today which is sort of soft power in a way through capital flows. So a lot of Chinese investment in Europe, for example, Hinkley Point, for example, property, Russian investment, etc. How that affects these dynamics and also around, for example, the Arctic as a source of energy. So you're looking at those Baltic states and they are launching pads for the Arctic. You're looking at that part of the world being under more intense focus now. So how energy flows and capital flows and energy dynamics, how that affects all of this, that's a bit of a broad question. The second one is around populism, I guess. The power of people to put a message into a large amount of people's heads and for them to act on that a la Brexit, a la these other populist dynamics again coming through. Part of the European decision making mechanisms, I guess, is that perception of people in a room somewhere in Strasbourg or wherever making decisions. But it's kind of like the adolescents growing up saying they want to make their own decisions now. And with all of these abilities of everybody to come together and affect policy in a way that just wasn't possible before, is there a way that needs to be changed in decision making? How do we go about dealing with that? It's only so long you can say, block that person. It's only so long you can try and mute that. There are people I know who are dealing with counter-violent extremism. They go online and they literally try and let's just stop this for young people who are getting radicalized. Is that the way forward? So those two points like to your opinion. I wasn't taking notes, but I remember the first question because I remember snow and money. Sorry, snow, money and energy. Not my area obviously. But there are people who do a lot of work on this. And particularly with respect to the specific case with respect to China. What I'm told by people who know China is to say that China has and Chinese policymakers have their eyes on the long far horizon. So in terms of an idea that the Chinese are going to sit in a room and pull the plug on the euro or pull the plug on the European finance capital. I don't think so because they have themselves invested in. Therefore they want to benefit from. Therefore their business is not in destabilizing. But if you look at the other act, you look at Russia and you talk about the Arctic and you talk about energy. They're usually a very different kind of scenario. Because we've already seen the Russians use energy as a power tool. We've already seen them close an open pipeline. We've seen them use corruption in terms of getting pipelines and stopping pipelines. So that is clearly of the moment that we see. We also had in this house not too long ago a colleague from the Norwegian military who was talking about the Arctic. And talking about the Arctic in a very interesting way as much as dividing relations in terms of science and the environment where the bilateral relations are very, very good and have continued regardless of political difficulty or contestation. But on the military side, the Russians are back to what's called the Arctic and we saw the papers today. Russian jets are having to be escorted across Baltic airspace. Russian submarines are challenging Norwegian waters and Swedish waters. The Norwegians are investing in eight new high-tech submarine hunters. Stuff you didn't even think you have to think about since red October, back in whenever. So my answer to the first question is it requires a very sophisticated response. A very multi-level response. One that is targeted. You can't simply say that and say, well, everything is threatening and everything is dangerous and we just pulled down the shutters. You have to go out and find the opportunities when you can get them. As with China and the environment, you know, maybe you do bracket human rights while you deal with China on the environment, maybe you have to. And maybe that's why Margarini's paper has been criticized for promoting that kind of very verigated heterogeneous response to security threats and challenges. And the second question is just a reminder. I mean to my undergraduate students, I always love to describe the European Union as the bastard child of democracy and diplomacy. The European Union is neither one thing or another. It's not a full-on state, it's not a federal state, not a confederal state, where you can have very standard, federal kind of decision-making with a European president and a European cabinet, responsive to a European parliament directly elected by European people. Net, clear, everyone knows that model. We can't do it. Why? Because the human is also a community of states. So states are represented and diplomacy is one of the main ways why and how decisions are taken. And diplomacy does not like sunlight. Diplomacy is about women and men in small rooms making deals and doing deals outside of the political firmament and trying to bring in technocrats and address problems without engaging in political passions. The problem with that is it then turns around to European publics and say, well, this is the consensus, this is the agreement, there is no alternative. We are where we are. Yes, we have euro austerity to support the euro, and there can be no change from that. There can be no challenge to that. And if you do challenge that, you will end up like Greece. Now that is a lesson for somebody who hasn't, as I said earlier, got a vested interest in the system, who hasn't got a nice room in the global cosmopolitan liberal household says, well, screw it, let's blow the house up and start again. So I think there is a fundamental challenge to politics in the European Union context and the European Union has got to move from the diplomatic more to the democratic. But then that raises the ancient question of the f-word. And I don't know that anybody is ready to revisit the f-word of European federalism. But that is what a democratic Europe would look like. We have this bastard child because it worked to this point. It's not working now to some extent and we do need to rethink and re-jig and re-look at how that works. And political parties, domestically, have to take their share of responsibility. Because if a minister goes off repeatedly to Brussels and when she comes back says nothing but, oh, they made me do it. They made me do it. They made me do it. I have no response, but they made me do it. Well, who the hell are you going to blame? But again, you begin to look at the psychology of individual politicians and that's not a pretty picture. It's not a pretty picture, Irish. Hannah? Hi, I work at the institute. So just to clarify on that point do you think federalism is the only way to enhance European democracy? No. Because obviously the strict and candidate process in the last European election was a big time to towards that. Do you think that resonated on the street? No, but I have a question around this. Do you think that looking toward 2019, that would be a way to enhance European democracy? And if not, what ways do you think we can do that work? Well, I wrote a book. I co-wrote a pamphlet when I was in Trinity College. It was called Trinity Blue Papers. It was the first Trinity Blue Paper I've written on an electoral model for electing a European president. And it had an electoral college and because I was working with people who knew all the electoral systems and blah, blah, blah and it's very detailed and John Bruton actually commissioned us to write it because at the time we had the presidency this was one of his big ideas, was a direct elected president. I mean, I think you need to do something of that scale if you really want to break the president. If you really want to make people look at the European Union in a different and fresh light, you would have an election of a European president amongst 450 million Europeans. Short of that big bang, which you've never I mean, Bobby McDonough wrote a very famous book on the negotiating the Amsterdam Treaty and said you never hear in European negotiations it's a big bang. It's all small iterative steps. So in the spirit of small iterative steps one of the things I think the European Union has got to do is to break this austerity stranglehold. Between the European Central Bank between the Commission and between the member states, you know, they have got to come to an agreement that there has this one size fits all unless it's offset by some degree of fiscal federalism, you know, this thing in the long run isn't that sustainable on the back of what is happening to Greece at the moment. And you can't blame technocrats for that. That's not Brussels bureaucrats selling and insisting on austerity. That's German chancellors Finnish prime ministers, Dutch finance ministers, you know, those are the people who've got their foot on the neck of European austerity because for their domestic publics, they don't want to see their money washing south. If solidarity means anything we have to revisit and reclaim and recapture what European solidarity means. And it does have to involve some cash. Just on your sorry, I'm talking about how you're proceeding with a European start effecting where you have neighbouring countries that are not in the slot candidate for example, or you have a Baltic slot candidate that takes over, that actually is a very complicated electoral system but it's awfully good. Because obviously what you're going to find is you're going to find big state candidates because if you're a German candidate you're going to have that many votes in the Electoral College possibly locked up. But there are ways in which an Electoral College can be designed to try and offset those effects. You can weight things in different ways. There are lots of clever things you can do. But the bottom line is yes, if you want this sort of big bang approach that John Group was advocating at the time you're going to have to have a system that galvanizes people's attention. That says you have got four choices for President. You've got a green radical who's fighting for her agenda on climate. You've got a Muslim socialist from France who's fighting on his agenda and you've got some rock-rim Bavarian running on their agenda but you've got a visible choice. And yes, it might be mostly large state countries but they're going to be divided in terms of politics too. You're not going to get German social Democrats voting for a Bavarian CSU candidate and then you begin to develop the kind of sense of we're Europeans but we're left wing Europeans we're green Europeans, we're right wing Europeans that the way the European Parliament is organized is supposed to foster but you've got to develop that amongst people who think they actually have a political choice. If they don't have political choices they're going to be pissed off. You've got a speaker at the institute recently who's suggested an idea of taking the UK's outgoing seats in the Parliament and creating Europe-wide lists at MEP level. Do you think that kind of step is just too small if you're talking about galvanizing? Oh, I hope I don't like the person that you've said that. No, I don't because I think that diminishes the contact between the citizens and the parliamentarian even more. I know Israel has a single list system, I think maybe the Netherlands the only people who run those lists are the political parties. I mean the one saving grace of our system and the Germanism and others is at least you have a link, that is my member of Parliament and if I'm pissed off I'm going to knock on her door and complain about things. Now, we all know that members of the European Parliament, second order elections, people don't actually do that but that at least there is that link and I think with Europe-wide lists it's just that all evaporates and suddenly these are another 75 European cosmopolitan that some people vote over and nobody knows who they are. Any more questions? I'm curious about two of the advocacy references in your presentation. At first, I'm going to go to Leo she's been given due credit for her more humanitarian response to the refugee crisis and she goes, been described in certain court as the new leader of the free world. I've described her as such. At the same time you also referenced in your presentation the sort of fetishisation of austerity and there's been no more substantial figurehead of that trend in Europe than in America. In a sense, just because it didn't lead to such a certain people out of worry about being popular in Germany or in illiberalism, it certainly did in other countries. You referenced Greece several times. The other actor I'm curious about with whom we may have a contradictory relationship is NATO. You also referenced that even NATO, people wondered if it was a post-Covol relic and had reached a level of obsolescence and now and look where we are now. I wonder, did NATO to some extent create its new relevance by its outward expansion in Eastern Europe? Short answer to the last question, no. Short answer to the last question, no. NATO's enlargement was back at the start, understood, acknowledged and accomplished. Multiple concessions were made to Russian sensibilities or outgoing Soviet incoming Russian sensibilities in terms of stationing of troops, in terms of the whole agenda. I think knowing only that much about Russian foreign policy, Russian politics I think Russians are always going to be hyper-sensitive about that question of encirclement and what that entails and what that might involve and that goes back centuries, that's not a new phenomenon. But, you know, Russia had multiple opportunities in terms of the NATO-Russia framework, in terms of the NATO-Russia partnership, in terms of partnership for peace where all of this stuff could have worked. What I think happened that went badly was what happened in respect of Libya. Because what happened in respect of Libya and what also to Leicester happened was that Russia was sort of in the councils, but not of the councils. And decisions were made which presented the Russian government with FETICON, please. And for multiple reasons that have more to do with Putin's personality, domestic Russian politics, the instability of the Russian state, the notion of a strong leader, all of that comes together in the constellation where NATO is now the most convenient hobbyhorse to which I can beat around the head to generate domestic political boa. So, no, I don't think NATO made its bed and I don't think the EU made its bed and I think those are wrong analyses for all kinds of different reasons. And sorry, I'm bringing back the first question which is Angela Merkel and fetishization of austerity. Again, I'm wary, I mean, I call her the free world, so I'm guilty of this myself, excessive personalization. That austerity politic isn't just German. It is Finnish and Dutch and so they're more than creditor countries, they're all in this together. And Germany, by reason of its size and its weight and its responsibility was in the Lillevac camp. The problem to my mind was that she wasn't effectively offset. She wasn't offset by an effective incredible French leader. That is what Hollande was elected to do as a French socialist. And I don't know why, but it just didn't work. So you didn't have the constellation of forces to balance out the famous Franco-German engine. And I don't think that the austerity politics is that ingrained in Merkel. I think it's much more about Scheule. I think it's much more about the CSU. I think it's much more about a certain tranche of conservative Germans that span the CDU, CSU and often now into the AfD. So I think if you get Merkel, or if you get Macron and Merkel with an effective relationship, if you get Merkel with a kind of a political windy has behind him out of the metaphor, I think you have a window. And I don't think, nothing that I have seen of what Angela Merkel has been quoted as saying, has ruled out anything that Macron has put on the table as of yet. Now there are certain things Macron has not yet put on the table that might be his back pocket, but I think that is part of a journey that they're both on. I just think the journey has to speed up a little bit. And before we go, I do want to ask you to settle one bet that we have around the office. In one word, is Jeremy Corbyn at thrash civilization? No.