 through this and I think I'll start with Stu Eisenstadt in Washington who can take us into the weeds a bit and just tell us how the impact is going to be on the new with the president and the new Congress. Stu? Thank you Jim and thank you for permitting me to participate. First of all the decision by the electors in the midterm election was really quite astounding. Normally in an off year election the president's party loses an average of 25 to 35 seats in the House and 2 to 4 in the Senate. In this election the Democrats lost no speech in the Senate in fact picked one up and lost only a net of 70 seats in the House. This is remarkable given the fact that polls show that 70% of the public felt the country was going in the wrong direction with high inflation and with the lingering pandemic. The biggest loser in the election was clearly Donald Trump, his endorsed candidates almost universally lost and it was a win for moderates both in the Republican and Democratic communities. The most recent poll just taken a couple of days ago shows that the Florida governor to stand for now for the first time has a quite decisive lead among Republican voters for a hypothetical 2024 election return and one symbol of how fast Trump has fallen is the Rupert Murdoch controlled New York coach which in announcing Trump's decision to run for president had at the bottom of the first page four of man decide to run for president C page 26. Nevertheless, although the Republican hold on the House is very slim, they will control the health agenda and all the committees. This means an end of Biden's domestic legislative agenda and that he will have to govern in the next two years, domestically by executive order. Many of those steps will be tolerance in court. The Republicans have the subpoena power and they will hold hearings galore starting with Hunter Biden, the president's son and trying to implicate the president himself in his sons dealing with China. They'll be hearings on the Afghan withdrawal and many more. Now one thing that I think this will lead to is the president becoming a more foreign policy president. He will spend much more time than he did in the first two years on foreign policy where he has much greater flexibility as commander in chief. And that I think is a good thing for the United States engaging the world. Now let's look at what is likely to happen on foreign and trade policy. First with Ukraine, the administration is seeking as we speak a $37 billion supplemental appropriation for Ukrainian arms that will last a full year. This is done in anticipation of the fact that when the Republicans take over there will be a significant percentage of the new Republican majority which holds Trump's nationalistic America first neo-isolationist policy and which is more skeptical toward aid to Ukraine. So they want to get under their belts at least one more full year of a major aid package to Ukraine. Now having said that about the House Republicans, the Senate Republicans under Senator McConnell as the minority leader can continue to be expected to support aid to Ukraine if anything to be critical of the administration for not sending enough sophisticated weapons. Putin's policy is clearly to divide and weaken the West to make it war weary, to create higher energy prices and in Ukraine itself a darkness and a lack of electricity to force a territorial compromise. My fear is that many of the Europeans going through this rough winter will press Zelensky for just that type of North Korea, South Korea DMZ type compromise. The President is not likely to follow that path and I think will follow Zelensky's lead. With respect to China, even with the midterm elections, there is bipartisan support for a hard land position against China. I think this will continue and Biden coming into a potential presidential race is not likely to want to be seen or to be criticized by the Republicans as being quote unquote weak on China. In many respects this is unfortunate because the President has kept many of the same policies toward China that Trump put into effect. In particular, there remain $200 billion of tariffs against Chinese products coming into the United States, which I believe the administration was prepared to drop before Speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. But given the very heavy blowback by China, they backed away from that. That would be inflation reducing and it would be at least some bow toward China. In the recent summit between Xi and the President, they sort of put a floor under the collapsing relationship, but it has declined very substantially. China is running rings around the United States and Asia and in the Middle East. Xi has met with some 37 heads of state. His visit to Saudi Arabia was in sharp contrast to Biden in which the Saudis laid out the red carpet and gave him a much warmer relationship than was extended to Biden. They signed a strategic partnership agreement which was unthinkable only a few years ago and while the U.S. remains the main arms supplier to the Saudis, clearly the Middle East suffers from a vacuum in American leadership. So does Asia. When Trump pulled back from the trans-Pacific partnership agreement, it left a huge vacuum. The remaining 14 countries signed their own trade agreement without the United States. In 2020, they signed an additional tariff-reducing agreement among 15 Pacific and East Asian countries and it left the field open for China's own comprehensive economic trade agreement for many of those same countries to join in China's initiative. So what was intended to be an instrument to increase U.S. leverage was left in the last few months this year to a sort of weakened trans-Pacific, what the U.S. led, called the Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. And that is in rule compared to the TPP. It involves some actions on digital standards, on supply chains, on clean energy, on dealing with anti-bravery and money laundering, but no tariff reductions jump, no market access to the United States, and it is very thin competition. It is not the kind of pivot that will let the United States compete with China. The centerpiece of Biden's foreign policy was and remains rallying the democracies against autocracies. He's done that with a Democratic summit this year. There will be an African summit coming up in the next few weeks and that is all to the good. As shown by President Macron's recent visit, the first state visit in 21 months in the president's tenure, there was a good deal of tension over the Inflation Reduction Act, huge subsidies, but not going to any non-American country unless they have a free trade agreement with the United States, which most European countries do not have. So that is a source of tension with Europe. It's a very time we need European cooperation with Ukraine. If I could just interrupt for just a second, Stu, I'd like to get to some of the other guests here. We've got a very limited timeframe here, but I think those points are well taken. Your point about the Middle East vacuum, we just heard from a panel here two sessions ago about the clamoring from some of the Middle Eastern countries about where is the United States and where is the leadership of the United States? In any case, I think what you're saying is a bit what John Claude was saying from New York, and that is that basically the Americans have won a number of things with the war in Ukraine, even if they don't particularly like to think of it that way. I wonder if, Stu, do you think the Americans feel like they're winning in the Ukraine because the Ukrainians are winning? Yes, I think we are showing real solidarity, but I want to say this more broadly. Biden has really in two years totally changed Trump's foreign policy. He's reinvigorated the NATO alliance. He's reinvigorated the U.S.-European Union relationship. He has reengaged in a very serious way on the climate change negotiations. He has dropped the section 232 national security sanctions against European steel and aluminum. He has begun to reengage not as much as I would like, but certainly begun to reengage with Asia through the new trade arrangement. He made a visit to Saudi Arabia, so I think we're going to see more of that, and the Ukraine situation will be a real test because the Europeans are going to want to cut a deal with Russia, and Biden will be against that unless Zelensky agrees to it. But I think the long and the short of it is that Biden has reengaged with the world, and I think in the next two years, particularly because his domestic agenda will go nowhere with the Republicans controlling one of the two houses, he will be even more of a foreign policy president and will reengage even to a greater degree with the world, and I think that's to the benefit of all the democracies. He feels very strongly about supporting democracies against autocracies, and I think that will remain a centerpiece of his foreign policy as will engagement on climate change.