Thank you very much.
I'm happy to begin the discussion. I have two sets of comments in reply.
The first is that I think there's a dangerous tendency to believe that the current environment we are in favours hard power almost exclusively as opposed to soft power, and I don't completely agree with that. I do think that the soft power resources, particularly of liberal democracies, are going to remain incredibly important, because we have a number of countries in the world today that are incredibly worried about an international system that becomes divided between great powers and in which they will be forced to choose a side.
Therefore, we need to understand in very granular ways how and why they take the positions they do on certain issues like the Ukraine invasion, in which the ambivalence of many countries in the global south was in many respects a surprise to diplomats and others in the western world, when I think a deeper understanding, through the exercise of soft power and closer relations, may have provided information that would have helped. I think culture also can help in countering narratives. It can be a very attractive way of creating closer relationships.
I would say in conclusion that I've been sitting for the last year on a panel by the Council of Canadian Academies on Canada's scientific and innovation partnerships. One of the messages is that it's precisely in an era of geopolitical competition where relationships among scientists—and I include here not just hard sciences, but social sciences—are absolutely critical. U.S. and Chinese scientists are still engaging with one another today, and that is precisely the kind of co-operation and engagement we need to sustain.