Sea Control - Sea Control 305 - No Escape from the Port of LA

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Links1. "Cookie Monster's Supply Chain Crisis and WTO Update," Trade Guys Podcast, CSIS, October 21, 2021.2. "No Escape from LA: Lingering Supply Chain Insecurity at Los Angeles Ports," by William Alan Reinsch and Aidan Arasasingham, CSIS, November 4, 2021.3. "CIMSEC Holiday Reading List 2021," by the CIMSEC Podcast Team, CIMSEC, December 17, 2021.4. "Beyond Defense: America's Past & Future Interests at Sea," by Jimmy Drennan, CIMSEC, October 25, 2021.5. "Protecting the Maritime Shipping Industry from Cybercrime," by Nicholas Glavin, CIMSEC, December 20, 2017.6. "Shipping as a Repository of Strategic Vulnerability," by Michael Haas, CIMSEC, August 16, 2013.7. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021.8. "The Next Shipping Crisis: A Maritime Labor Shortage," by Adam Minter, Bloomberg, November 6, 2021.9. "White House Port Envoy Joins Port of Los Angeles Executive Director to Discuss Supply Chain Solutions," Port of Los Angeles, October 14, 2021.10. "U.S. Mariner Mental Health & Wellbeing During COVID 19 and Beyond, by Dr. Marissa G. Baker, PhD, University of Washington School of Public Health, November 2021.

Hey, Voshared here. Anna is handling hosting duties for us today, and she'll have most of your intro verbiage for you. One thing that I did want to plug, though, was the Right Fight Win holiday donation campaign. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. Right Fight Win. Beginning with Giving Tuesday, going through December, we are holding our annual Right Fight Win holiday donation campaign to support SimSec into the new year. We're proud to say that since our founding, SimSec's content has been free and always will be. Especially as more websites build paywalls or pursue intrusive advertising, we hope those in the SimSec community who value our free, no-ad model consider supporting us with monthly donations. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hey folks, Anna here. Thanks for tuning back in to Sea Control. Today we're talking with Mr. Bill Reitsch and Aidan Arasan-Sinkham of the School Chair for International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies about their article, No Escape from LA, Lingering Supply Chain Security at Los Angeles Port, which was published online in November. And I want to take a moment to wish you all a very happy holiday season from myself and the SimSec Podcast Network. If you're interested in our holiday reading list,

please check them out at our website, www.simsec.org. As always, we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network. In our second podcast feed, The Bilge Pumps, you can find Alex, Drac, Jamie, and a pile of empty iron brew bottles on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify,

or wherever else you download your podcast from. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain and Nuitville history. Bill and Aidan, thank you for joining us today. Would you please tell our audience a bit about yourselves and your background? Well, thank you, Anna, for having us on. It's always fun to talk about our research work. We're both relative newbies at CSIS. I've been there, I've headed into my fourth year coming up, but I've been doing, I've had a long career. So before this, I ran a trade association, the National Foreign Trade Council for 15 years,

where I represented large multinational companies. Before that, I served as Undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, running export controls, dual US export controls. And before that, I spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. So it's been an opportunity to work on trade and trade policy issues, which is my field for a long time. And yeah, thank you for having us, Anna. So also a newbie to CSIS, I'm a program coordinator and research assistant with the economics program, where I study international economic policy, global economic governance, and the domestic foundations of U.S. economic power. And before CSIS, I spent some time working for the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, the Los

Angeles Business Council, and as an economic mobility policy advocate in California. And then also with respect to the article, I actually grew up not too far from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. So I've always been fascinated by issues of the shipping going on around that area. Thank you both. And as a reminder to our listeners, all views expressed are our own, not necessarily representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. Can you recap for us the shipping crisis which this article is about? Sure. So the focus of this article is the ongoing shipping crisis at the Los Angeles Ports Complex. It's the topic I'm sure we've all seen in the headlines about this,

especially now that we're nearing Christmas and when all of us are hoping to have our gifts come before the 25th. But even before this pandemic, you could see the underlying symptoms of port failure at the complex. Before the pandemic, West Coast ports were barely keeping up with global shipping demand and had limited access capacity. But the strength of the logistics industry and its just-in-time model meant that arriving container ships often went to an open berth to unload cargo without any issues. But during the pandemic, that changed, and we started to notice the symptoms of the system breaking down due to the various public health, labor, and supply chain disruptions that we've all been grappling with over the past year and a half.

And that really reached a peak this fall. By mid-November, ships had wait times at anchor of up to 17 days before reaching a berth. And you can get a sense of the scale of this problem at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach by looking at the number of ships at anchor outside these ports. Prior to the pandemic, there were typically about 17 ships at anchor at any given time. But by late October, that number was over 100, just showing you the scale of this issue. And these short-term symptoms inspired us to study a larger problem, which was, what are the long-term economic, environmental, and national security risks of so much U.S. trade flowing through this one significant but still very fragile port ecosystem? So some may believe

that the supply chain chaos was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you believe that's accurate? Well, I think it's fair to say the immediate cause was the demand spike, which was a reflection of the pandemic. I think most economists would say it's a function of the fact that everybody was staying at home. And there's a huge drop in spending on services because people weren't going out, people weren't traveling, people weren't going to the movies, people weren't going to restaurants. And I think somewhat to the surprise of economists, what they did instead was buy stuff. And what that meant was a lot more stuff coming in. And that takes us to the current problem. I think we work our way through a demand spike,

although with the fact that COVID is not going to suddenly be gone, it's going to be with us, I think, for quite some time suggests that the recovery is going to be uneven and changes in demand are going to be uneven. But if you think about it, and Aidan referred to this, this is not an immediate short-term problem. This has been a problem that's been building up for a very long time. And part of it is due to really the failure of the United States to spend enough money on port improvement, port expansion, and port enlargement, which in turn, I think, reflects our failure to keep up the data on infrastructure generally. I mean, the Congress just passed and the president just signed a major infrastructure bill that addresses a good bit of that, including

port improvements. But, you know, we've had stories for decades about bridges, roads that are falling apart, the decrepit state of our railroads. And here on the East Coast, that's been a particular issue. So, you know, it's a problem that's been building up and the importance of it has been exacerbated by what Aiden said, which has been the shift over the last couple decades of just-in-time planning and just-in-time delivery. And so that magnifies the difficulties when there's a blockage, because in the days when everybody kept hefty inventories, you know, if you had to wait an extra two weeks, you know, you just work down your inventory. In the current situation, you don't have the inventory. So if there's a blockage, you stop manufacturing. So

the impact is much greater. So it all came to a head thanks to COVID, I would say, but the ingredients have been there for years. Thanks for clarifying that. So why doesn't the U.S. have a higher volume trade port than LALB? Why is our trade distributed across ports the way it is? And does that make us stronger or weaker? Yeah, well, a lot of that is due to history. And of all the U.S. ports, the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two of them are the highest volume trade ports in the United States. If you combine the volume of TEU's container units moving through the ports, there are 17 million shipping containers passing through them in just the last year of 2020 alone. By comparison, the other two major West Coast US

ports, Seattle, Tacoma, and Oakland processed between 2.5 and 3.3 million shipping containers that year. So you can really see the difference in scale. And so together they serve as the largest shipping hub in the Western Hemisphere. And a lot of that is because of trade with Asia. The two ports are responsible for processing 40% of all U.S. maritime imports, most of them being from Asia. Part of that's responsible because of the geography. Los Angeles is on the West Coast, and unlike Seattle-Tacoma or the port of Oakland, there's no kind of geographic barriers like the Puget Sound or San Francisco Bay Area that are limiting the amount of ships that can come in at a given time. But also historically, major federal investments came into the L.A. area during World War II, gearing up for the Pacific theater because of all the manufacturing and the aviation and the armaments and the shipping industries during that time. And those investments in the ports complex stayed even after during the peacetime period.

So in the period that followed, growth in Asian manufacturing and the accession of China to the World Trade Organization also led to a boost in trade through the ports of Los Angeles. Knowing the history, you can see exactly why that a century of developments and investments in the L.A. area have led to this rich ecosystem of shipping, trucking, rail, warehousing, manufacturing, all the kinds of logistics firms needed to move things from the West Coast into the interior of the United States. And that ecosystem is hard to replicate. It's something very unique about the L.A. area. I'd only add to that, this is not entirely, but in significant part, a regional phenomenon.

And the East Coast ports are not, at least most of them, are not experiencing the same problem. I had an email a few weeks ago from a reporter in New York asking me that question. And I said, you know, there's been some problems in Savannah, but a lot of the other ports, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, are not experiencing what L.A. is experiencing. And he wrote back, why? You know, why is there a difference? And, well, you know, the imports are all coming from Asia. Theoretically, you know, you could go through the canal, but then you're adding, you know, you're adding weeks in time and substantially in cost.

So as long as we have large trade deficits with our Asian partners, and as long as substantial amounts of imports are coming from Asia, you're going to have a West Coast problem. And you're not going to have a problem to the same magnitude on the East Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico, for that matter. The layman might ask, why not just reroute this shipping to another West Coast port? Well, you know, I was thinking that as a layman. as I was researching this before I knew much about it. And it's an intuitive idea. I mean, why don't you just reroute ships from one port to another, maybe the port of Oakland, which just is

a hundred miles up. And in fact, the port of Oakland actually tried to make a pitch for rerouting. They launched an advertising campaign this fall to woo ships waiting in Los Angeles to their empty berths just up the coast. But as your listeners probably know, the modern maritime system is deeply complex and it's some things are easier said than done. And in Oakland, one of the limiting factors for why ships couldn't go there is because of channel depth. That's a limiting factor that means post-Panamax 3 ships, which are very large container ships that have hundreds of containers coming from Asia that are increasingly a larger share of fleets, won't be able to dock there. And its terminals also lack on-dock rail connections, which means that shipping containers

have to be moved out by truck, which limits the throughput for containers making their way deeper into the continental United States. If you go up the coast even further, Seattle-Tacoma is another option. But air draft limitations because of bridges in the area also limit the size of ships that they're able to accommodate. Our article also looked at foreign ports in our allies in Canada and Mexico. So Vancouver and Manzanillo, the other largest ports on the West Coast, are also options. But because they're outside of the United States, that also adds logistical and regulatory complexity that shipping companies are often kind of worried to undertake because of the just-in-time nature of our shipping system, those uncertainties aren't as sure as maybe just

waiting out a bit longer in Los Angeles. So even if you somehow did make it through those different difficulties and decide, I'm a ship waiting in Los Angeles, I'm going to go somewhere else up the coast, there are additional fuel bunkering birth and labor costs associated with that, in addition to the sunk costs you've already paid in Los Angeles. So at the end of the day, that shipping capacity expertise and the economies of scale in Los Angeles that I mentioned and Bill was talking about regionally, they're really tough to replicate anywhere else in the U.S. So it makes it a costly proposition to distribute that trade volume more equitably across other ports without large federal investment. I could add something. The point Aidan made about

SeaTac and Oakland is particularly relevant in that you have to think of the supply chain as one sort of continuous thing. It's not simply about docking at the port and unloading. You have to have a connection to the interior of the country. All that stuff doesn't stay in Orange County or in LA. It has to move and it has to move halfway across the country. A lot of it moves to Chicago, it turns out, and then it's further distributed. But that means you need rail lines and you need roads and you need easy connections, you know, offloading the containers onto rail cars or onto truck beds, truck chassis. And if you don't have that, then it doesn't matter if report is efficient and modern and up to date. You've moved the blockage from one place to 100

yards farther inland. You have to look at the whole thing and not just one individual piece. How likely are we really to see the market conditions again that cause this issue to occur? Well, I hope it's unlikely, but I think the work we've done on supply chains generally suggests, as hinted in the beginning, was that I don't think this is an episode that's simply going to disappear and everything's going to be fine. I think demand will normalize eventually. It's going to take a while, but dealing with the problems that have been exhibited over the past year, it's clear that it's going to take long-term solutions to do that. I mean, poor improvements are on the way. The infrastructure bill is now law and it's on a, you know, everything in the

government is not speedy. It takes time. But as in government speak, it really is on kind of a fast track in that there are a variety of 60-day deadlines and 120-day deadlines to get all this stuff out. And the transportation department is busy actually rolling out money and signing checks. So I think they're moving not only as fast as they can, but faster than I've ever seen government move. But still, the kinds of improvements that are being financed are ones that are going to take years, a single digit number of years, but years to put into place. So it's going to be with us for a while. It's not simply going to go away and everything's going to be fine. And digging ourselves out from under it is going to be kind of a time-consuming

process. Some might say that, oh, we're not in a crisis. This is just normal boom and bust in global shipping trade. Do you think that's true? I don't think that's true. I think I would disagree and say that what we're seeing right now is not normal. Bill alluded to a few of these factors, but a few of the things that led to the supply chain disruption that have made it more pronounced than ones in the past are really unique because of this pandemic and not because of the normal business cycle. As Bill mentioned, pandemic stay-at-home orders coupled with federal stimulus to households has led to a massive increase in consumer demand. It's something that, you know, I remember at the height of the pandemic, you can't go out and go to dinner. You can't go out

to see a movie. One thing that we did in my house was just puzzles all the time, meant ordering puzzles off of Amazon. And those often come from Asia. Everybody else in the United States, I think, had some version of that shift from services to goods. And a lot of those goods are made in Asia, and it has to come through somewhere. And that somewhere is the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. COVID-19 has also greatly disrupted labor reliability in the United States. Dock workers, truck drivers, and warehouse workers continue to get sick because of the uncontrolled nature of the pandemic in this country. And that also disrupts operations and leads to the kinds of slowdowns that we've been seeing. And then a new thing that we've been seeing this fall is the

resistance to public and private vaccine mandates. That's also exacerbating the issue that we're seeing as leaders in business and the public sector face difficult decisions between retaining vaccine-hesitant workers for the sake of efficiency or letting them go for the sake of public health. So all of these factors are new and not normal. But what remains to be seen is the extent to which they reflect a new normal. And I don't think we'll know about that for a while. So what, if any, is the long-term strategic risk of so much trade flowing through such a narrow port ecosystem? Well, that really hits at the question we aim to answer. And there are a number of risks, both nationally and locally. We already talked about some of the economic risks of the

supply chain fragility, and we're seeing that play out real time right now. But in the longer term, the concentration of so much trade through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach also presents a major national security risk. If you think about it, God forbid, a terror or natural disaster related disruption of the ports complex could risk the lives of thousands of the people that work there or live nearby, as well as billions of dollars in transported goods. Now, since 9-11, state and federal government officials have prioritized securing the ports complex. A number of federal agencies, state agencies, and local law enforcement are responsible for that. But underfunding and aging infrastructure compounded that issue and led to increasing port security

fears in recent years. And something I also saw growing up and in the communities nearby is the concentration of so much shipping at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach also brings some acute environmental impacts to local communities. If you combine all the land and sea vehicle emissions around the ports, the Los Angeles Ports Complex is actually the largest source of air pollution in all of Southern California, more than any manufacturing, more than the cars, more than the airports. And the California Air Resources Board actually estimates that 120 premature deaths per year can be directly attributed to diesel particulate emissions at the ports, which is a really shocking statistic. And communities of color nearby in the nearby neighborhoods face

some of the highest cancer and asthma rates in the nation. So these negative national and environmental security risks leave policymakers with a tough choice, one that we've kind of been alluding to throughout this discussion. On the one hand, you can think about embracing a diversification strategy of shifting trade to other ports to mitigate these risks, splitting it up between Oakland, SeaTac, other ports along the West Coast. But in doing so, you'd face long ramp-up times and diminished cost competitiveness that leads to a higher cost of goods. And on the other hand, you can further enhance the Los Angeles port ecosystem, really lean in on its strengths, but continue to shoulder the national security environmental risks of concentrating so much

trade through one port. You know, that last point I think is important. If there's a lesson you can draw from this on many levels. It's a really simple old one, which is don't put all your eggs in one basket. That's coming home to us in multiple different ways. And you see it in the Biden administration's emphasis on supply chain resiliency, which has become a new watchword. And from the standpoint of supply chain managers, what they grew up learning was let's develop supply chains based on lowest price, best quality, best delivery times. And now they're not only being told, but they've learned because of COVID that you have to build in a fourth factor as well. I mean, it was always there, but you have to give it more weight, which is resiliency,

have your eggs in multiple baskets. So if something goes wrong, you have some recourse. COVID is the obvious case, but if you think about it, we're having more and more climate events. And so think earthquake, think flooding. I played a simulation game some years ago in China that in the simulation, there was an earthquake. The earthquake didn't affect the coal mines, but it destroyed all the railroad tracks, roads and bridges leading from the coal mines to anywhere else. And so there was an energy crisis in the game, not because miners died, but because the infrastructure necessary to get the fuel from one place to another had been disrupted. And so, you know, supply chain managers have to start thinking about alternatives and building those in. And what I think you're going to see happening, in fact, what you saw happening not only before COVID, but, you know, even in the Obama administration, you saw this happening, is manufacturers are looking at ways to shorten their supply chains. They want to be nearer their customers. They're concerned about political risk in problematic

countries abroad, China being one of them. They're concerned about uncertainties of ocean shipping and shipping costs. If oil prices fluctuate, you know, panic ensues because all of a sudden, you know, your shipping costs could go way up, which is exactly what happened in the case of COVID, but for a lot of reasons, I think manufacturers have started to think, well, some time ago, started to think about how do we shorten the chains, which means looking more closely at Canada and Mexico and Central America, and basically then creating other options, either truck options or options up through the Gulf of Mexico. That will take pressure off the West Coast ports. It may not be good news for the Virgin Marine, but it's also going to take time

for that to happen. Some people tend to think, you know, changing the supply chain is easy. You turn off the lights in Shenzhen and you turn them on in Austin two weeks later and everything is fine. And it's not like that. It's a lot more complicated. We did a study a couple of years ago on rules of origin in the automobile sector. And we had one auto company tell us it takes them seven years to certify a new supplier. And, you know, if you're making stuff that is regulated for health, safety, or environmental purposes, you've got to satisfy yourself first as to quality, scalability, consistency of quality in particular, and you've got to deal with the regulators and get your new supplier appropriately certified. That all takes time. So this is not going to happen

overnight. It's not a solution to the current problem, but it is a suggestion that 10 years from now, a total shipping profile may look very different than the one we have today. So our audience is familiar with the naval blockade as a essential element in traditional studies of sea control. But based on what you're saying, can the opposite, an open environment of freely flowing demand-driven trade, become as much of a problem as, say, a natural disaster? Well, I've been thinking about that since you told me you were going to ask it. I guess the, you know, the short, the easy answer is sort of yes, that's kind of what happens. I mean, there are differences. Naval blockade is, I think some people would interpret it as an act of war, number one. I think international law interprets it as an act of war. And second, it's sort of an offensive act of government. The problem that we're dealing with now, the free flow of goods and the blockage as the result, that's not the result of a government action. It's the result of government failure to act and government failure to do anything. And I mean that government at multiple levels, because it's not all the feds.

You know, there's things that the state of California can do and things the Port of LA, the Port of Long Beach can do in their own interest to improve their port facilities and to improve their throughput times. So yes, but the situations are not exactly comparable. Those who follow cargo control and screening issues know that there are risks involved with increasing throughput in any way that bypasses cargo screening measures. Do you have any opinions on the right balance between cargo screening and free flow of trade? I think the short answer is no.

That won't stop me from providing a longer answer, though. It's kind of an issue of where there are competing priorities and conflicts. The Customs Service doesn't inspect much, physically inspect much cargo. I mean, this is mostly done with documents and electronic processing. I think we're down now to probably less than 2% of the cargo is actually physically inspected. You know, it's hard to say it's locked. On the other hand, are there security issues there? Yes, indeed, there are security issues.

In fact, one of the issues that I had a conversation earlier today about, which is not exactly an ocean freight issue primarily, but the customs de minimis level, you know, Congress raised that to $800. One of the consequences of that is a whole bunch of packages coming in below that level, including packages that contain contraband material, particularly drugs, that are just arriving through the Postal Service and escaping review because they're below the de minima, so they just come in. So there's a lot of security issues. But as with everything else, if you're going to attempt to solve security issues, and have a more effective screening regime, that requires resources. And that requires not only financial resources, but it requires people. You know, if you're going to screen, somebody has to do the screening, somebody has to operate the equipment, somebody has to review the documents, somebody has to be on the dot, if necessary, to physically, you know, open a container and inspect what's inside. And we're not equipped to do that right now. In fact, the person I was talking to was sort of speculating, what would happen if we lowered the de minimis level? Because there's people that want to do that for the reasons I just said. And my reaction was, well, the first thing to ask is, would it really make any difference? I mean, it would make a lot more entries eligible for inspection, but if the people aren't there to do the inspecting, you know, it's kind of, it really won't make any difference in practice. It just creates a difference of liability, I guess. So yeah, there's a problem, but I think it would take a major staffing up of CBP to do anything about it. Thank you. And the fact that you bring up people again, I appreciate that very much. Aiden, it was also clear in your writing that you're conscious of the issues with staffing for Merchant Marine, as well as the labor issues in the ports. Ports are not only massive complexes of equipment and trade, they're enterprises of people with varying different specialized skill sets. And the ships that come into the port have mariners on them who have been through a lot during COVID.

And if you want to expand any further on the people aspect of this, I would welcome that. Well, unfortunately, I think it's sort of the American way to figure out who you want to blame. We're good at blaming people. We always try to figure out whose fault something is when something bad happens. I think the answer more often than not, particularly in this case, is all of the above. But one of my neighbor's sons is in the Merchant Marine. And his comment was, well, if you talk to the longshoremen, it's all the truckers' fault.

And I'm quite confident that if you talk to the truckers, they're going to say it's all the longshoremen's fault. I think the truth is, as we were saying earlier, we have a very complicated set of supply chains. We have a very complicated structure. I mean, not just us. They're all like this globally. This is what globalization has done. But where the ports depend on the longshoremen to get the stuff off the ships, onto the docks,

Then we depend on the truckers and we depend on the railroads to get it to its destination. If they're not all working together, the system is going to fail. And that's what we're experiencing. Unfortunately, you know, we then waste time arguing about whose fault it is. And the answer is, you know, realistically, it's probably everybody's to some degree. And we could more constructively spend our time figuring out how to work together more effectively and efficiently. And I'd agree on that point.

And I think one of the things that, you know, in the research for this article I was seeing is some of the finger pointing is because of just the place where our U.S. ports rank competitively to world ports. The World Bank puts out a kind of efficiency of container ports index and U.S. ports are far behind, you know, Asian, Chinese counterparts. A lot of that is because of the automation that you see in those ports. And, you know, maybe that's not the right answer for our ports in the United States. As mentioned, it's a vibrant ecosystem of different workers, marine, truckers, logistics operators that really make our system function. And it's not really an issue of, in my opinion, labor, but more an issue of coordination to make sure that this ecosystem runs better. And the better we can integrate technology with workers, I think that's the future of this rather than just moving towards some other models you're seeing around the world of pure automation. Okay. Tell us a bit about what current professional projects you each have coming up

or where the audience can find you on social media. For the Shoal Chair, right now we're doing a lot of climate work. We have funding from two different foundations, one European and one American, to look at the intersection of climate and trade policy. So we're looking at negotiations on tariffs for environmental goods. We're looking at border adjustment measures in particular called CBAMs, carbon border adjustment measures, and we're looking at the different policies that China and the EU and the United States pursue and how they might better work together. We've just finished a very long 10-part series on digital trade regulation in the European Union, and we're continuing our supply chain work. We're about to

start a second project on supply chains and nearshoring as opposed to reshoring in the pharmaceutical sector. We tweet. The main thing we do, we have a podcast called The Trade Guys, which is, for those of you that are of a certain age, modeled after the car guys, PBS. We're not as funny as they are, but we're working on it. And so I had a conversation with another think tank in Washington, also as a podcast, and we both characterized theirs as being aimed at graduate students and ours being aimed at sixth graders. So if you want to get the monosyllabic interpretation of what's going on in trade, listen to The Trade Guys. You can go to www.csis.org and find it. And I do a weekly column as well that you can find there if you want to subscribe.

Aidan is now in a different program, so he will give you a different agenda. I'll also make a plug for The Trade Guys. It was my number one podcast on Spotify wrapped this year. It is a very funny and very informative show. But for us on the CSIS economics program, We'll be focusing on different economic issues in the Indo-Pacific, so expect and stay tuned for projects related to semiconductor supply chains in Europe and Asia, a longer research report on the Biden administration's trade and economic strategy in the Indo-Pacific region, and then also some work looking and studying at economic coercion from China and how that impacts the U.S. and its allies. And you can keep up with this research by looking up CSIS economics program on the website that Bill mentioned, www.csis.org. Then also, I have a personal Twitter at Aiden, A-R-A-S, Aiden with an A. Thank you, Bill and Aiden, for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Pleasure.

Thank you. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in to Seek Control. There I met with Greasy Alley Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob-I, put it in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley Help me, Bob-I, put it in the alley Put it on the shimbo now

A pot of rum and a pot of gin, oh Way, hey, put it in the alley A pot of wine, both white and red, oh Oh, help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts. Why are they bullying the addicts? Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts. Put it out, it's your fault now.