If I may, I want to give that a very broad context, because I agree with you that it's around the world, and I'm glad you mentioned Syria, because that is fundamentally important as well.
What we have done over the last 60 years—Canada, the United States, western Europe—is we have built a global, democratic, market economic and secure community of nations. It's not universal, although it'd be great if it were, but certainly substantial and one that has provided great benefit, great value to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people around the world.
What we are seeing today is the deliberate rolling back of the edges of that system; whether it is Russia seeking to reassert authoritarian rule inside Russia, dominate its neighbours, and acquire territory by use of force, or whether it is by religious extremists, in the case of al-Qaeda and what we see in the Sahel, or whether it is petty dictators such as we have in Assad, who is fighting to control his territory and actually stimulating some of the religious blowback that we're getting.
All of these are assaults on the kind of human development that we have all been sponsoring and have been beneficiaries of for so many years. I don't think any of us can sit idly by as these challenges to this way of life, this order that has developed in the world, are being played out. We can throw into this mixture authoritarian capitalism coming from China, or even democratic nationalist economies such as we see in the case of Brazil with, for example, a neo-mercantilist approach to some industries. So I think we have to invest in this world order and promote it.
That all being said, the most acute crisis today, because it is live, it involves substantial numbers of military forces potentially, and it involves all of our allies in Europe, is the crisis in Ukraine, because it can expand, as we talked about earlier, with Putin's ambitions.
The second most important one is Syria. I think it is on a humanitarian level far graver, far worse: over 140,000 people killed, a third of the country now refugees, spilling into a regional conflict, and fueling ideological hatred that's going to be with us for a generation. That also is something we need to deal with. From day to day, I'm more worried about what's going to happen in Ukraine tomorrow, whereas Syria is at a low burn, but we can't ignore Syria either.