Laurel, did you see much swords being beaten into plowshares in this session? What was the mood?

The mood was fairly downcast because there are so many conflicts that are raging today.

There is Russia and Ukraine.

There is Gaza continuing.

There is the war with Iran.

These are major flashpoints to say nothing of the regional conflicts around the world.

There was no tangible progress on any of these matters.

And how did the mood compare with, say, last year or during the Trump first administration or the Biden administration?

Are you nervous about it too, Laurel? You know this from, uh, the US side of things, and do you think he can portray his make-or-feel test as his version of America first?

I think there are threads that link the US under President Trump and Burnham's approach to really offering what that local, that regional impact is of foreign policy.

It's something the Biden administration tried to do.

It's something the Trump administration is talking about doing.

Um, it is very hard to link those two pieces together as we've seen from what President Trump's conflicts in Iran and Venezuela have, uh, elevated oil and gas prices, have led to a higher inflationary risk across the United States.

And so these are, these are difficult circles to square here.

Um, look, uh, foreign leaders, and Andy Burnham will be in this camp too, has two choices to make with the United States right now.

You can't really do that a second time in two years, and of course, the royal visit to the United States.

That is still a picture-

... startling and optimistic figures.

I was actually expecting to see quite the opposite.

So the optimism is there, and that is a deeply American optimism.

There also, though, when you start to peel back the onion of the possibility in the data to actually achieve this, you find a slightly different picture.

You see that there is much less mobility across socioeconomic indicators, that one generation is not necessarily better off than the one that followed them.

And so that is the core of the American dream.

What does that do to the country's own sense of its optimism, of its, of, of where you can get to?

So what does it mean to grow up American?

One of the things that I think makes the United States exceptional in being American is that there is no singular ethnicity that makes us American.

There's no single religion that makes us American.

There's even no single language that makes us American.

And that's also, of course, contested ground these days.

But in my view, that is one of the greatest national strengths that being American has.

We are all nations of immigrants.

grand strategy is a concept unto itself.