All you need to know is that when faced with the choice between doing what is best for Canadians and what is best for their own electoral fortunes, the Liberal Party will always pick the latter. I challenge anyone to find an example otherwise, and particularly in the party's current incarnation where the pursuit of power appears to be their only goal.
I thought this was a negotiating tactic, but it's clear they saw polling that concessions and a deal we could all live with would make the party less popular than throwing it all out and going full Elbows Up supported to an infinite degree by their cheering media insisting we are at "war".
They appear willing to burn your entire livelihood and the purchasing power of the money you sell your finite life in painful struggle to obtain, to keep a bunch of lobotomized retirees in a perpetual anti-American froth thinking Mark Carney is their defending hero. Until the polls tell them otherwise, and that could take a long, long time.
Article on economic theory? Response: the LPC are evil mean people who want to poison your puppy!!! Article on best bbq recipes? See previous response.
I've been voting since the early 80s. Doing what's best for Canadians and doing what's best for their own electoral fortunes is absolutely 1000000% not the exclusive domain of the Liberal party. Conservatives did the same thing when they were in power. Both parties ran Canada via the PMO. Trudeau 1.0 started government run by the PMO.
Not defending the liberal party, btw. But in politics all politicians lie and it's always about getting elected.
Politics tends to select for ruthlessness to some degree, to be sure, but there are few examples where "follow the polls and do whatever it takes" is taken as far as the Liberals do. Conservatives, Bloc, NDP, and even Democrats and Republicans are constrained by ideology and principles (whether you agree or disagree with them) and are willing to white knuckle through a polling hit hoping their 'superior ideals' will be vindicated in the long run. Liberals, I would argue, are not. Doug Ford's PC's have successfully imitated this model to some degree.
Did you forget about Pierre Poilievre's own August 9th open letter demanding that the Carney government commit to "no more caving" to the Trump administration? Poilievre would have been first in line to smack-talk the government for being too compromising with the bad-faith Trump regime.
And Pierre was right. "Caving" isn't negotiating. It's capitulation without receiving anything in return. Carney caved on several issues without anything to show for it. Pierre's point was to incorporate those issues into a broader trade deal so we could extract something of value for them. BTW, nobody mentioned Pierre. If you haven't noticed the Conservative party are not in government.
Negotiating means the exercise of bargaining leverage to achieve a desirable outcome. Being willing to walk away is part of how you exercise bargaining leverage - yet KRM seems critical of that choice to walk away.
I was the first to mention Poilievre, but KRM was the first to bring partisanship into a non-partisan subject, so my citation of Poilievre's stance was a response to that.
And that might have been bad for Liberal polling. And now it isn't.
A deal that's seen as too compromising is really Carney's only bad political outcome here. Of course the opposition will try to paint any deal as a bad one. No-Deal-Trade-War on the other hand pretty much means there is no opposition.
In international affairs, game theory recommends tit-for-tat, or "dollar-for-dollar", or fighting fire with fire, but it presupposes a rational actor pursing a clear national interest. What if Trump doesn't care about the American people, or the Republican Party, or based on recent posts, even understand the concept of money? What if retaliation - using tariffs - only acts as reinforcement learning for Trump? Maybe with someone like Trump, we should try fighting fire with water. We should be "threatening" Trump by lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers on China and the EU. When he threatens to increase taxes on Americans we should threaten to lower taxes on Canadians.
One small quibble: game theory is about choosing your best strategy, keeping in mind that the opponent or opponents also have a strategic choice set.
So, I would respectfully disagree with the notion that game theory demands “tit-for-tat” retaliation.
A Nash Equilibrium is achieved when no player can improve his own outcome, given the fixed decisions of any other opponent.
Canada’s best choice, in my opinion, is to reject the notion of tariff escalation, and to convince the Americans that a special deal is in both of our best interests. We try to improve our lot by tariffing, and then tariffing again, and again, we end up far worse off than we would have been if we had just “accepted” the tariffs in the first place.
"Canada’s best choice, in my opinion, is to reject the notion of tariff escalation, and to convince the Americans that a special deal is in both of our best interests."
I'm wondering how you differentiate this approach from Canada's actions to date, prior to the breakdown of talks in mid August?
A reasonable quibble, but I think my use of recommend versus demands allows for some variation in game theory's application to international affairs. Also, I notice when explaining game theory to friends or colleagues their eyes glaze over around the point the Nash Equilibrium is introduced, which is when I give up and tell them to just watch the movie ;)
Anyone who. endured watching some of the CBC coverage of the US trade retailiations had the opportunity to watch an interview with a Quebec dairy farmer. It was instructive and utterly dispiriting. An entirely privileged individual eager to counsel more Canadian retaliation while enjoying virtually an guaranteed income , all at the expense of the Canadian consumer.
For Carney to not end Canadian protectionism in dairy to avoid what occurred last night should have been a no brainer.
No better are the buffoon Premier so keen to preserve liquor bans of Kentucky bourbon and California Pinot must confront the devastation of Canadian liquor production that is only viable if the US market is preserved.
Ultimately this is a test of Canadian realism and its capacity to actually measure whether there is no to gain from greater economic integration versus the costs of a preserving some fatuous "freedom to act" at odds with economic and geographic reality..
Carney will only provoke more costs on Canada by further retailiation. Surely, he knows this.
One totally robust and constructive action he could take is to tell those Canadian Premiers extolling further retaliation to simply shut up.
These US trade issues transcend Trump. Carney knows that too.
It might be admirable even if not wise, to punch bullies. In my experience bullies do not respect someone who takes on what they can't come near to finishing. One might ask if, in Canada's case, we are doing ourselves more harm than good, and are we even contenders in this trade war of which we are fanning the flames? Has anyone asked the question "what will lead to prosperity and building a country less vulnerable:? That's what Carney says he wants to do, but since he can't figure out what the situation is currently, we can't trust him to figure out long term development either.
Another warning sign is the lack of transparency the Carney Liberals show all the time. There is no list of what the new trade agreements obtained. He did not come clean on the bridge. Voters have no idea what the US offered that Carney did not take. I could go on.
There is a lot of murkiness around what transpired in the failed negotiations, but both sides seem to more or less agree that the U.S. was insisting on some kind of veto over Canada's trade negotiations with other countries elsewhere.
CUSMA included protocols that discouraged trade deals with non market nations. Carney did a deal with China anyway. And it’s Carney’s idea that the US wanted to curtail - but in the context of the China deal. Whatever is he talking about? Why don’t voters have that info?
"Retaliation has one goal and only one goal: to make the other guy re-think his actions."
All evidence shows that he is more likely to escalate than "re-think" anything. He would have needed to "think" in the first place. The "bloody nose" we are giving him is just the splash back from punching ourselves in the face. Sometimes "we have to do something" is objectively worse than doing nothing. His own actions are creating more consequences for Americans than any of our retaliations could even hope to achieve.
I wish I was seeing more humility from both sides of the "we should impose counter tariffs" debate. Trump is an unpredictable menace. Might counter tariffs "work" in the sense of getting him to "back down"? Sure, but they might also fail and make things dramatically worse for us. Nobody knows, which is the point here.
The only *certainty* is that us imposing tariffs *will* make things worse for us financially. So, given that and the impossibility of knowing whether counter tariffs will actually "work", it seems to me that the most prudent course of action is to ride this out, at least for a while, without us imposing more tariffs. As G&G have rightly (I think) pointed out, the USA populace does not have a great appetite for Trump's tariffs so that may cause him to come to his senses without us taking further actions to harm ourselves. And there is sufficient ambiguity surrounding the break down of the talks that both sides can return to the table while saving face by saying (as we are already seeing), "oh, we misunderstood what they meant about the discoverability/[insert other issue] - that changes things so let's get talking again".
Also, for the "we must retaliate" crowd, they seem to be overlooking the fact that the mere act of walking away from a deal is *in and of itself* a demonstration of backbone (we should stipulate that we have no idea whether walking away was the right decision given the lack of information about exactly what was in the deal but let's accept that it was for discussion purposes).
I would assume Adam Smith was assuming that all actors were rational. The difference is that Donald Trump isn’t rational and he doesn’t care if he gets a bloody nose or not. There is no reasonable deal to be had with him and the internal costs of tariffs to the US will eventually be seen and Trump will be forced from Americans to change his policies. I don’t think the retaliation from Canada changes that. Because Trump isn’t negotiating in good faith and there is no honor or care for others in his words.
So I think the retaliation in this case fails to serve a purpose. And it’s why the rest of the world aside from China hasn’t done it. There’s no point to it unless we simply want to anger Trump more.
What Mr. Fellows shares is a rather famous passage from Adam Smith’s greatest book.
I suggest, with respect and without malice, he is applying it incorrectly.
Canada is a small trading Nation that seldom can affect the terms of trade. We are price takers, for the most part.
The United States is a large trading Nation, whose actions can affect the terms of trade; they can be price influencers.
Retaliation is very harmful, especially to the small trading Nation, and that cannot be disputed.
Retaliation often leads to spiteful escalation, which, in turn, becomes even more harmful. I believe we are witnessing this in real time, in our current trade dispute.
This is, of course, why most classically trained economists despise tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade.
Once tariffs get into the hands of Smith’s “…insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician…..”, there is actually no end to the damage and carnage he can deliver.
Are you suggesting that Canada should be a doormat and not respond at all, hoping it goes away? What would make you think this will ever go away? I think this is existential now. Are we Austria in 1938?
"Viewed from abroad, the judicial branch of the U.S. government no longer appears to be a check on, or balance against, the powers of the executive branch."
Viewed by anyone paying objective attention, this is utter nonsense. To wit, the Supreme Court has struck down the use of national guard troops in Chicago, the birthright citizenship limitations, the effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, and yes, even the vast majority of "Liberation Day" tariffs.
Further, while the Court has ruled in favor the Trump administration in other cases, some of those were things on emergency injunction where only temporary relief was granted until the full case could be heard.
The only way you can arrive at the conclusion Dr. Fellows makes is by assuming a certain narrative, and then either ignoring the actual cases entirely or cherry picking a limited number of cases and not looking at the entire body of work. Mind, there's been a lot of that sort of analysis on the US side of the border, too. But I thought my graduate alma mater had higher standards.
Even if retaliation doesn't cause the US to change their behaviour, the best move is STILL to impose counter-tariffs. Letting our manufacturing sector melt away is a sure path to poverty and subjugation. Yes, there are economic costs to retaliation, but there is no no-cost option here. The cost of NOT retaliating is huge.
Trump is unravelling 40 years of integration, and Canada needs to decide if its going to be a sovereign nation with its own capacity to make stuff and control its own destiny, or not.
This article suffers from the “politician’s syllogism”: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
I am happy to support counter tariffs. Are these the right ones? Tariffing raw materials like steel, lumber, copper etc hurts our manufacturing sector. Shouldn’t we be focusing on finished goods? Ideally, luxury goods. Things that we can live without.
And what about thinking more holistically. If we’re putting tariffs on US dairy products why not increase the quota for the duration of the trade war? Why are we flushing milk down the drain?
Adam Smith showed a remarkable understanding of politicians of all stripes,"crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs.” Sadly both the US and Canada are dealing with crafty animals and we, the public, are kept in the dark while being asked to trust and support our "honourable" leaders.
I do agree with the premise that we must hold firm as I believe we are in a very strong position and only hope we (Canadians) have the nerve to ride this out. The President & his team have so many negative balls in the air and the majority of Americans against most of these. With the midterms just around the corner I can only imagine much of the conversation going on at the current Republican Conference in Dallas is expressing their displeasure about his actions. Also with the vast majority of American citizens not supporting his aggressive actions against there longtime friend, ally & interwoven business interests they are indicating this is not a fight they want. Throw in friday being the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the video of the outpouring of compassion for thousands of Americans at the Gander Airport & you have yourself a PR nightmare having people asking why we need to go to WAR against those vicious Canadians.
In the long list of areas of chaos going on the US right now this is really smallball so I think the US powers to be will try to get this off their plate & go on to the much bigger issues like Iran, Ukraine/Russia & trying not to get wiped out in the midterms.
All you need to know is that when faced with the choice between doing what is best for Canadians and what is best for their own electoral fortunes, the Liberal Party will always pick the latter. I challenge anyone to find an example otherwise, and particularly in the party's current incarnation where the pursuit of power appears to be their only goal.
I thought this was a negotiating tactic, but it's clear they saw polling that concessions and a deal we could all live with would make the party less popular than throwing it all out and going full Elbows Up supported to an infinite degree by their cheering media insisting we are at "war".
They appear willing to burn your entire livelihood and the purchasing power of the money you sell your finite life in painful struggle to obtain, to keep a bunch of lobotomized retirees in a perpetual anti-American froth thinking Mark Carney is their defending hero. Until the polls tell them otherwise, and that could take a long, long time.
Article on economic theory? Response: the LPC are evil mean people who want to poison your puppy!!! Article on best bbq recipes? See previous response.
Are we relying on another group of idiots not to blow up our lives to get a polling bump?
I've been voting since the early 80s. Doing what's best for Canadians and doing what's best for their own electoral fortunes is absolutely 1000000% not the exclusive domain of the Liberal party. Conservatives did the same thing when they were in power. Both parties ran Canada via the PMO. Trudeau 1.0 started government run by the PMO.
Not defending the liberal party, btw. But in politics all politicians lie and it's always about getting elected.
Politics tends to select for ruthlessness to some degree, to be sure, but there are few examples where "follow the polls and do whatever it takes" is taken as far as the Liberals do. Conservatives, Bloc, NDP, and even Democrats and Republicans are constrained by ideology and principles (whether you agree or disagree with them) and are willing to white knuckle through a polling hit hoping their 'superior ideals' will be vindicated in the long run. Liberals, I would argue, are not. Doug Ford's PC's have successfully imitated this model to some degree.
Did you forget about Pierre Poilievre's own August 9th open letter demanding that the Carney government commit to "no more caving" to the Trump administration? Poilievre would have been first in line to smack-talk the government for being too compromising with the bad-faith Trump regime.
And Pierre was right. "Caving" isn't negotiating. It's capitulation without receiving anything in return. Carney caved on several issues without anything to show for it. Pierre's point was to incorporate those issues into a broader trade deal so we could extract something of value for them. BTW, nobody mentioned Pierre. If you haven't noticed the Conservative party are not in government.
Negotiating means the exercise of bargaining leverage to achieve a desirable outcome. Being willing to walk away is part of how you exercise bargaining leverage - yet KRM seems critical of that choice to walk away.
I was the first to mention Poilievre, but KRM was the first to bring partisanship into a non-partisan subject, so my citation of Poilievre's stance was a response to that.
And that might have been bad for Liberal polling. And now it isn't.
A deal that's seen as too compromising is really Carney's only bad political outcome here. Of course the opposition will try to paint any deal as a bad one. No-Deal-Trade-War on the other hand pretty much means there is no opposition.
It would have been bad for Liberal polling with a little help from Poilievre.
In international affairs, game theory recommends tit-for-tat, or "dollar-for-dollar", or fighting fire with fire, but it presupposes a rational actor pursing a clear national interest. What if Trump doesn't care about the American people, or the Republican Party, or based on recent posts, even understand the concept of money? What if retaliation - using tariffs - only acts as reinforcement learning for Trump? Maybe with someone like Trump, we should try fighting fire with water. We should be "threatening" Trump by lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers on China and the EU. When he threatens to increase taxes on Americans we should threaten to lower taxes on Canadians.
One small quibble: game theory is about choosing your best strategy, keeping in mind that the opponent or opponents also have a strategic choice set.
So, I would respectfully disagree with the notion that game theory demands “tit-for-tat” retaliation.
A Nash Equilibrium is achieved when no player can improve his own outcome, given the fixed decisions of any other opponent.
Canada’s best choice, in my opinion, is to reject the notion of tariff escalation, and to convince the Americans that a special deal is in both of our best interests. We try to improve our lot by tariffing, and then tariffing again, and again, we end up far worse off than we would have been if we had just “accepted” the tariffs in the first place.
"Canada’s best choice, in my opinion, is to reject the notion of tariff escalation, and to convince the Americans that a special deal is in both of our best interests."
I'm wondering how you differentiate this approach from Canada's actions to date, prior to the breakdown of talks in mid August?
I wasn’t saying you were wrong, exactly.
I had a small quibble and that is all. Actually, I just wanted to see if I could still present this stuff!
Great chat, friend.
A reasonable quibble, but I think my use of recommend versus demands allows for some variation in game theory's application to international affairs. Also, I notice when explaining game theory to friends or colleagues their eyes glaze over around the point the Nash Equilibrium is introduced, which is when I give up and tell them to just watch the movie ;)
Anyone who. endured watching some of the CBC coverage of the US trade retailiations had the opportunity to watch an interview with a Quebec dairy farmer. It was instructive and utterly dispiriting. An entirely privileged individual eager to counsel more Canadian retaliation while enjoying virtually an guaranteed income , all at the expense of the Canadian consumer.
For Carney to not end Canadian protectionism in dairy to avoid what occurred last night should have been a no brainer.
No better are the buffoon Premier so keen to preserve liquor bans of Kentucky bourbon and California Pinot must confront the devastation of Canadian liquor production that is only viable if the US market is preserved.
Ultimately this is a test of Canadian realism and its capacity to actually measure whether there is no to gain from greater economic integration versus the costs of a preserving some fatuous "freedom to act" at odds with economic and geographic reality..
Carney will only provoke more costs on Canada by further retailiation. Surely, he knows this.
One totally robust and constructive action he could take is to tell those Canadian Premiers extolling further retaliation to simply shut up.
These US trade issues transcend Trump. Carney knows that too.
It might be admirable even if not wise, to punch bullies. In my experience bullies do not respect someone who takes on what they can't come near to finishing. One might ask if, in Canada's case, we are doing ourselves more harm than good, and are we even contenders in this trade war of which we are fanning the flames? Has anyone asked the question "what will lead to prosperity and building a country less vulnerable:? That's what Carney says he wants to do, but since he can't figure out what the situation is currently, we can't trust him to figure out long term development either.
Another warning sign is the lack of transparency the Carney Liberals show all the time. There is no list of what the new trade agreements obtained. He did not come clean on the bridge. Voters have no idea what the US offered that Carney did not take. I could go on.
There is a lot of murkiness around what transpired in the failed negotiations, but both sides seem to more or less agree that the U.S. was insisting on some kind of veto over Canada's trade negotiations with other countries elsewhere.
CUSMA included protocols that discouraged trade deals with non market nations. Carney did a deal with China anyway. And it’s Carney’s idea that the US wanted to curtail - but in the context of the China deal. Whatever is he talking about? Why don’t voters have that info?
"Retaliation has one goal and only one goal: to make the other guy re-think his actions."
All evidence shows that he is more likely to escalate than "re-think" anything. He would have needed to "think" in the first place. The "bloody nose" we are giving him is just the splash back from punching ourselves in the face. Sometimes "we have to do something" is objectively worse than doing nothing. His own actions are creating more consequences for Americans than any of our retaliations could even hope to achieve.
I wish I was seeing more humility from both sides of the "we should impose counter tariffs" debate. Trump is an unpredictable menace. Might counter tariffs "work" in the sense of getting him to "back down"? Sure, but they might also fail and make things dramatically worse for us. Nobody knows, which is the point here.
The only *certainty* is that us imposing tariffs *will* make things worse for us financially. So, given that and the impossibility of knowing whether counter tariffs will actually "work", it seems to me that the most prudent course of action is to ride this out, at least for a while, without us imposing more tariffs. As G&G have rightly (I think) pointed out, the USA populace does not have a great appetite for Trump's tariffs so that may cause him to come to his senses without us taking further actions to harm ourselves. And there is sufficient ambiguity surrounding the break down of the talks that both sides can return to the table while saving face by saying (as we are already seeing), "oh, we misunderstood what they meant about the discoverability/[insert other issue] - that changes things so let's get talking again".
Also, for the "we must retaliate" crowd, they seem to be overlooking the fact that the mere act of walking away from a deal is *in and of itself* a demonstration of backbone (we should stipulate that we have no idea whether walking away was the right decision given the lack of information about exactly what was in the deal but let's accept that it was for discussion purposes).
I would assume Adam Smith was assuming that all actors were rational. The difference is that Donald Trump isn’t rational and he doesn’t care if he gets a bloody nose or not. There is no reasonable deal to be had with him and the internal costs of tariffs to the US will eventually be seen and Trump will be forced from Americans to change his policies. I don’t think the retaliation from Canada changes that. Because Trump isn’t negotiating in good faith and there is no honor or care for others in his words.
So I think the retaliation in this case fails to serve a purpose. And it’s why the rest of the world aside from China hasn’t done it. There’s no point to it unless we simply want to anger Trump more.
What Mr. Fellows shares is a rather famous passage from Adam Smith’s greatest book.
I suggest, with respect and without malice, he is applying it incorrectly.
Canada is a small trading Nation that seldom can affect the terms of trade. We are price takers, for the most part.
The United States is a large trading Nation, whose actions can affect the terms of trade; they can be price influencers.
Retaliation is very harmful, especially to the small trading Nation, and that cannot be disputed.
Retaliation often leads to spiteful escalation, which, in turn, becomes even more harmful. I believe we are witnessing this in real time, in our current trade dispute.
This is, of course, why most classically trained economists despise tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade.
Once tariffs get into the hands of Smith’s “…insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician…..”, there is actually no end to the damage and carnage he can deliver.
Are you suggesting that Canada should be a doormat and not respond at all, hoping it goes away? What would make you think this will ever go away? I think this is existential now. Are we Austria in 1938?
I take umbrage with this line:
"Viewed from abroad, the judicial branch of the U.S. government no longer appears to be a check on, or balance against, the powers of the executive branch."
Viewed by anyone paying objective attention, this is utter nonsense. To wit, the Supreme Court has struck down the use of national guard troops in Chicago, the birthright citizenship limitations, the effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, and yes, even the vast majority of "Liberation Day" tariffs.
Further, while the Court has ruled in favor the Trump administration in other cases, some of those were things on emergency injunction where only temporary relief was granted until the full case could be heard.
The only way you can arrive at the conclusion Dr. Fellows makes is by assuming a certain narrative, and then either ignoring the actual cases entirely or cherry picking a limited number of cases and not looking at the entire body of work. Mind, there's been a lot of that sort of analysis on the US side of the border, too. But I thought my graduate alma mater had higher standards.
Even if retaliation doesn't cause the US to change their behaviour, the best move is STILL to impose counter-tariffs. Letting our manufacturing sector melt away is a sure path to poverty and subjugation. Yes, there are economic costs to retaliation, but there is no no-cost option here. The cost of NOT retaliating is huge.
Trump is unravelling 40 years of integration, and Canada needs to decide if its going to be a sovereign nation with its own capacity to make stuff and control its own destiny, or not.
This article suffers from the “politician’s syllogism”: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
I am happy to support counter tariffs. Are these the right ones? Tariffing raw materials like steel, lumber, copper etc hurts our manufacturing sector. Shouldn’t we be focusing on finished goods? Ideally, luxury goods. Things that we can live without.
And what about thinking more holistically. If we’re putting tariffs on US dairy products why not increase the quota for the duration of the trade war? Why are we flushing milk down the drain?
The field of "economics" was formerly called "political economy" before it went blinkered down the econometrics path.
Perhaps it's time to reassert the older, broader paradigm.
Adam Smith showed a remarkable understanding of politicians of all stripes,"crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs.” Sadly both the US and Canada are dealing with crafty animals and we, the public, are kept in the dark while being asked to trust and support our "honourable" leaders.
I do agree with the premise that we must hold firm as I believe we are in a very strong position and only hope we (Canadians) have the nerve to ride this out. The President & his team have so many negative balls in the air and the majority of Americans against most of these. With the midterms just around the corner I can only imagine much of the conversation going on at the current Republican Conference in Dallas is expressing their displeasure about his actions. Also with the vast majority of American citizens not supporting his aggressive actions against there longtime friend, ally & interwoven business interests they are indicating this is not a fight they want. Throw in friday being the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the video of the outpouring of compassion for thousands of Americans at the Gander Airport & you have yourself a PR nightmare having people asking why we need to go to WAR against those vicious Canadians.
In the long list of areas of chaos going on the US right now this is really smallball so I think the US powers to be will try to get this off their plate & go on to the much bigger issues like Iran, Ukraine/Russia & trying not to get wiped out in the midterms.