 Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames, messieurs, c'est d'etats d'acéditie, welcome to this session the Middle East in 2030 respect geopolitical and economic perspectives It's my plan. I'm sorry. We're a little late, but I think lunch was too first of all delicious during grossing and we started a little late and then always very very stimulating conversations at lunch. However, we are here at last and it's my pleasure to introduce you to Ibtisam El-Ketbi who is the president of founder of the Emirates Policy Center Next to her is Bernadino Leon Gross Director-General of the Anwar Guresh Diplomatic Academy and a man who is very involved in the Libyan settlement, which fingers crossed may work, we hope so and then Muna Maklam Ibnid who is a Egyptian senator and who's always very very eloquent and who is insulted by my determination to keep her to six minutes Next to Muna is Volker Pettis who is a special representative of the Secretary General for Sudan and head of the UN integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan. Sudan, of course, rather interesting country and has just signed the Abraham Accords. And so the final panelist is Itamar Rabenevich, well known to many of you here who has been a very distinguished Israeli diplomat, who was the ambassador in Washington, DC and also a very distinguished academic and spent quite a long time in the years past negotiating with a Syria of Hafez al-Assad So he's had his work cut out. Now Yogi Berry, the American baseball player and manager, famously said that it's It's very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future So we are thinking now about the next nine years up to 2030 Now if the past is any kind of prologue, I think we're actually in for rather a tough decade because if you look at the past decade really have the ten years from the so-called Arab Spring and it hasn't actually worked out very well Even in Tunisia, which was hailed by many as a great success story. I think you've got Chris Said now taking powers that disappoint those who thought that Tunisia was becoming a fully-fledged democracy Libya, of course, we've got what is effectively a civil war Syria Still, a civil war really, Idlib for example is not controlled yet by Bashe al-Assad regime Iraq is Well, it's it's evolving Towards a better future, but it would hard to say that it's really entirely Pacific Let's look at let's define first of all what we mean by the Middle East. I think for practical purposes We should probably go from Atlantic Ocean from Morocco all the way to the Gulf here and include obviously Iran Now, I think the subjects that we need to deal with it Why are we in a pretty difficult situation at the moment and what is going to be well? What are the? Germs of optimism that we can find in the next decade