I will start with the last one first.
Absolutely, we need to work together with concerted efforts, and be attuned to the fact that the Chinese government is really good at divide and conquer. I'm not sure that Montenegro was actually $1 billion. I'm going to have to check the facts on that one. I don't want to get that number wrong.
The tools of coercion that the Chinese are using are in some ways the business interests in all our countries. Before the pandemic, I participated in a conference in Australia where the defence and intelligence establishments were really trying to work at how to raise concerns and deal with the economic interests that they have, the economic interests in the United States and Canada and all of that. The important thing for politicians is to recognize that although they represent some of those interests, they also have a national obligation to national security.
It's a difficult message to deliver, but when I think of Chinese economic coercion, the first example that I think of—and it might not be the first—was when the Chinese cut off its imports of Norwegian salmon because of the Nobel Prize going to Liu Xiaobo. In some ways, it's like a test case. That's what I think the Chinese do a lot. Now the Chinese are doing this with Australia. It's a test case, with Taiwan and pineapples. It's a test case to see how the world will respond. We respond by increasing our consumption of Taiwanese pineapples, Australian wines, and all of that.
Some of it is really educating the business community that continues to believe that things are going to go well for them inside China, and they aren't necessarily going to go well. If it's resources, that's a different story. You're going to have to make the case that there are national security interests and that selling these products has a cost, right? They have a cost beyond any financial cost that's taking place.