It's a hard question. I'll begin where you did, with North American co-operation with Europe and Asia. We talk about the west these days, but of course the west is actually global. It certainly includes Japan as part of the G7 and core rich democracies, but I would argue that over time, it increasingly should include India. India is the world's biggest democracy.
Frankly, they may have a lot more to offer developing societies as they come up in terms of their own level of development than obviously rich countries like Canada and the United States have. Thinking about the challenge, the Indian system is more acutely aware of the China challenge writ large, I would argue, than many of us are in the west. The Japanese have so much at stake because they are marooned in this region with these rising autocracies, powerful autocracies, in Russia and China. When we think about democratic co-operation in new ways, that should mean a core group of big democracies acting in concert together, because we are all dealing with the same challenges.
That's one. Two, the Venezuela thing is very interesting, because it is exposing Russia's interest in controlling oil prices by sustaining the Maduro regime in power. It's exposing China's enormous investments in this kleptocracy in the form of bonds and energy resources. Frankly, part of what we see in the IRI and NDI work around the world is resentment in countries—in Africa, in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean—of foreign countries' claims to their resources through corrupt political dealings with their leaders.
In the Maldives there was just a democratic transition a few months ago. You had an elected dictator who took power and abolished the Supreme Court and consolidated all control. He held an election because he thought he could win it, as these people often do, and 90% of voters turned out and deposed him. It turns out that they are now swimming in a sea of Chinese investment and infrastructure crooked dealings, just like the new Malaysian government is swimming in a sea of crooked dealings and trying to get out of it.
I think the more we collectively can expose some of these deals that often happen behind closed doors—behind, say, the Maduro regime and Beijing, or the Maduro regime and Russian oligarchic interests—the better, because citizens really resent that in those countries.