WW3 WARNING — AMERICA’S EMPIRE IS COLLAPSING Faster Than You Think | Prof. Jeffrey Sachs

uh first we have the long-term US aspirations uh to to run the world uh and uh that is a longstanding issue that uh continues until today. Second, we have the reality of deep global change, especially the rise of China uh which is a a fundamentally important historical event and in my view a very good one uh because China is a great civilization and I'm uh think it benefits the whole world when China is doing well. China is not a threat. China is a a great asset to the world in my view. And third, we have Donald Trump uh who is uh as an individual uh psychologically uh disturbed uh and uh absolutely in the wrong job without question. Uh the job of real estate development was already too much. uh the job of uh deciding on war and peace is something that um makes us shake in our uh in our shoes uh because he's utterly incompetent and psychologically uh imbalanced. It's not only uh that he's a nasty man. Uh he is a dark triad personality. uh and this is real uh and we've seen it for his whole life and it remains true today but with a lot of further decompensation in my view with age and with uh a lifelong megalomania uh playing right now. So these are three interacting uh variables which make the the world seem very complicated in our lives. uh we've seen three phases of geopolitics. Uh the US was the predominant power by far after World War II and determined a great deal of the shape of uh global change. Some of it for the very good, much of it uh absolutely horrendous because US foreign policy given all that power was basically uh formed on the basis of regime change. If you don't like your counterpart, you don't need to negotiate with them. You just need to overthrow them. uh and this has been American foreign policy for uh the period after World War II and especially after the formation of the CIA and this is dozens and dozens and dozens of cases almost all of which end badly. Um but after World War II uh the US uh basically took the baton from the British Empire and said now it's us and uh but confronted a uh a nuclear counterpart the Soviet Union and um we had a a US predominance over much of the world. uh uh US uh uh machinations over places that wanted to be neutral. That was the worst thing you could be uh in the Cold Wars neutral. That means you were an enemy of the United States. And um we had a Soviet Union which had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Uh so it was and uh pretty sophisticated uh uh uh military technology. Um and so that was the cold war era. The second phase was the demise of the Soviet Union which was a miracle the way that it happened. Uh a man of peace came to power. The system was decrepit, but it wasn't in outright collapse. But Gorbachev was a a great statesman. Uh I think a wonderful human being and rather than kill a lot of people, he allowed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and we were absolutely blessed by that. I happened to be an adviser of his economic team in 199091 and of his successor Boris Yelson in ' 9293. I had one uh main responsibility which was to try to raise emergency financial support from the western world to ease what was a very deep economic crisis. But the US was not interested uh in uh any help or partnership uh with the Soviet Union or its successor state Russia. Uh what I got to see close up was when Gorbachov came and offered peace, the United States said, "Thank you very much. We win. We have won. Uh now we run the world and you are uh not only of no interest. we would rather bring you to your knees rather than to see you stable uh and prosperous anytime soon. So the second phase of geopolitics in our lifetime was the so-called unipolar moment uh which was uh a delusional state of American thinking that with the end of the Soviet Union the United States truly did run the world. And that period lasted roughly from uh 1990 or so or 1991 which was the end of the Soviet Union to around 2010. Um it was never true that it was a unipolar moment. This was a a conceit of the United States that there was a unipolar moment. when you're 4% of the world population, you can't really run the other 96% period. Um, but you can think that you can. And there's no doubt that under Clinton uh and George Bush Jr., they thought uh they could run the world. Around 2010, the delusion faded when somebody opened their eyes and saw China. I can tell you from my own career, nobody in Washington paid attention to China other than as a kind of play against Russia, but not as a power in its own right until around 2010. The unipolar moment never in my understanding uh reflected on the fact that well in 1992 we're very powerful but in 20 years from now China will be four times the size and a lot more powerful. I never heard that once from uh any president or policy maker or secretary of state uh or chairman of the council of economic adviserss or anybody else in the United States. China was an afterthought, a place where you could make your components uh but not something to quote worry about. Around 2010, they started to worry because China by that point had had 30 years of very rapid and very skilled development. Really remarkable uh achievements. And in the official data, China was closing in on the United States in absolute economic size um in international prices or purchasing power prices. And this started to scare the US. Then uh in 201 134 15 China took a number of initiatives. One is called the belt and road initiative to uh look outward and to finance connectivity between China and the rest of the world. And uh even more consequential was a program called Made in China 2025 which was a brilliant piece of industrial policy where China listed the Chinese state council listed 10 high technology areas that China should excel in by the year 2025. And they built an industrial policy around this and it was enormously successful. And it by 2015 uh the unipolar idea had been replaced by uh the rhetoric that the rise of China was a great threat to American dominance. Uh that China was an evil force in the world and that China's rise must be contained. So these are the three broad uh uh periods that I would emphasize. China did nothing in my opinion to justify fear uh except that it was successful uh in uh industrial production and in science policy and in technology innovation and in creating a system for very rapid economic catching up and then for moving from catching up to outright innovation. And so I applaud China's success. It's truly remarkable. But I don't believe for a moment that China is a threat to its neighbors or to the United States or to anybody else. And I don't think that China's rise in any way hinders our well-being or has hurt our economy. Uh it definitely hurt some import competing sectors. That's how international trade works. Uh that some lose and others win and the winners are more than the losers and the winners should compensate the losers. The big problem in American politics is that winners never compensate losers. Uh if you are a loser, you're a loser in America. Uh in the United States, uh this is a tough, nasty, corrupt political system. Uh and the rich don't want to give up anything. And so if they win a lot from China and workers in the American Midwest lose from import competition, there's no sharing in America. Believe me. Uh what you get instead is a Donald Trump who says China's your enemy. Uh and I'm going to take care of your enemy. So we entered in this most recent phase uh the great American competition with China which to my mind is a economic nonsense um because basically China's not a threat and of course it's doing very well so it should be a spur to us to do better but not seen as some dire national security threat. So all of this uh um these changes and I should add one more major development in our economies and inside the United States which was a dramatic rise of income and wealth inequality in the last 40 years which really is the result of technological change that favored professionals and disfavored uh uh bluecollar workers whose jobs could be automated. We ended up with a very divided society. We ended up with the perception of great threat and insecurity stoked uh by politicians who wanted to point to outsiders as the big threat. And um we ended up with Donald Trump. Uh this is a very peculiar particular phenomenon. It's on top of everything else. It's one of those bad accidents of history and it very dangerous and we don't know exactly what the outcome uh still will will be of all of this. Maybe we'll just get lucky and he will end up just going away. he will not be successful in the sense of achieving uh what his base thinks he's bringing them. He has no economic plan, no economic policy that can deliver for the working class. His taxes cuts were for the super rich and his tariffs are paid by uh his voters. And so they're starting to figure out that this guy is not uh what he claimed their savior. He's just a very confused old man and his uh popularity is declining. Um and so the instability as a result of all of this rises. What does this add up to in terms of American foreign policy? Well, part is just idiosyncratic confusion. Um there's no doubt a high degree of confusion that is not based on deep forces. If Biden had been president and compassment and he was not a good president, by the way, so I'm not partisan in this. He was an awful president as far as I'm concerned and non non-compassment for two years. Um but in any event, he would not have kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Uh that's not a deep state uh or deep foreign policy. That is an idiosyncrasy of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. It's not something that can be explained on a fundamental level. Even grabbing the oil is not really what's at stake there. The whole thing is bizarre, childish, dangerous. uh really nuts actually without uh a strategic direction. Um but there are some deeper forces at play that we should understand and one of them is that Washington and the security state of Washington which runs Washington u still believes in American hegemony that it's worth fighting for. Uh and so Trump has his uh uh very profound idiosyncrasies, but the idea of American hegemony has not been abandoned at all. Uh and the fight with China is taken very seriously. And America is still playing to win if you want to put it that way. I in a in in a football metaphor. It's bizarre. This is not the way the world should be thought of. But America is still playing to win. And if I could try to discern what the American strategy it is is, it is roughly the following. First, America owns the Americas. Uh that means from Canada down to tiara deluego. So you are the 51st state in the deep state view. Uh you can humor yourselves thinking you're a separate country, but don't take it too seriously. Uh, of course I'm I'm joking, but this is basically the view that we will run the Americas and no one's really going to uh have any other say and we're not really going to allow China and Russia to trade in the Americas. Uh, it's really going to be an American show. So that's how we're going to keep agemany in our own corner of the world. By the way, this is not in the remotest what the Monroe Doctrine was about. The Monroe Doctrine was not about the United States running the Western world. The Monroe Doctrine was the United States saying that Europe should not meddle with new colonies in the Western world. It's something completely different. But in any event, the strategy is the Americas are ours and so is Greenland. Uh so we just have to look at a map and because of climate change the Arctic is becoming more important. So Canada really is ours. Uh because how could you leave something as valuable as the Arctic to something that isn't the United States? So this is one part. Second is Europe. Europe will be our vassel. Uh and it will be our vassel that actually will now pay for its own defense. We don't want to pay for their defense, but we certainly don't want them to be independent. So Europe we still own. Uh this is another part of the idea. There's no independence in Europe. They're going to pay for their own military defense, but they're not going to have any real sovereignty. Africa doesn't register except for cobalt. We'll get the cobalt one way or another. Um but other than that there's no interest in in Africa. The Middle East we own. Okay, we don't own it. Israel owns it. But we will back Israel and Israel will have hegemonic power in the Middle East. And uh the Arab world is basically ours anyway because the military our military bases are all over the Gulf. uh and if we can just take care of Iran in the next 48 hours uh then the whole Middle East will be under uh US uh US uh sovereignty. India will be ours because they're afraid of China. So we'll side with India in the so-called Quad uh the United States, India, Japan, Australia. And what can India do? who they're afraid of China, so they're on our side. Uh, and then Southeast Asia, it's half and half, but we have enough footholds in Singapore, in Vietnam, which is anti-China, in the Philippines, which we still own. They think um that we really have a lot of Southeast Asia. Of course, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand are ours. So, what are we missing? Uh we're missing Russia, but h it's okay. Uh we'll make some deals with Russia. And our big threat is China, but we basically have China cornered. Uh and China doesn't really have friends. Uh and we're going to make sure they don't have friends and they won't operate in any of the places that I just mentioned. And so in the end, we're still going to run the world. That to my mind is how in to put it in 3 minutes how Washington views the world. It's nuts. Of course, not any part of the world would agree with that assessment, but that's the Washington view of the world. Europe thinks, well, we're Europeans. We're not the United States. Uh but the US thinks differently. Latin America actually doesn't really accept that it's run by the United States. Uh nor does Canada. Um Africa will be a quarter of the world population in 2050. Um India actually is a is a big place that doesn't feel like it's a a part of the US system. It's the most populous country in the world with a civilization 10 times older than the United States and it's not about to be played by the US. China is enormously successful and has a production capacity that is multiples of the United States and is the lead trade partner of 120 countries in the world. So there is a big disjunction between the American view of the world, US view of the world, which is in the end we're still going to run the show and the reality of the world. And that means that we have a lot of tension and confusion for years to come. I should add by the way academia is not very helpful in all of this uh because the whole east coast is owned by the militaryindustrial complex. I'm sorry to say I've spent 45 years in two wonderful universities but the funding what's taught how it's viewed is completely Washington ccentric. Uh so of course we have critical voices but it's not really uh institutions that the Harvard Kennedy School is not a critical voice. Uh SEIPA uh at Colombia is not a critical voice. Our lead faculty is now Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo, Victoria Nuland and Jack Louu. Uh so it's unbelievable. Uh so in this sense we don't really have uh much uh sanity and intelligence in the debate right now. There's a lot of confusion. Uh I regard Foreign Affairs magazine more as a psychiatric journal uh of American neuroticism than I do a foreign policy journal because the main purpose of foreign affairs is to reassure Americans that they're still number one despite all evidence to the contrary. So almost every issue, every article is in the end we're still going to beat China. In the end we still have the choke holds. In the end, we still can do uh whatever we want. Okay. So, let me just um say a a positive side about the world. Um the American view is is absolutely incoherent and with Trump it's not even a view. uh it's uh it's an emotional outpouring day by day and so it's quite dangerous um and I can't really predict in the short term from a if if I look uh try to look ahead 20 years or 25 years um and assuming that we avoid the worst um then what I would say is that the multipolar ity of the world will increase. Uh China is an enormously successful society. India is economically and technologically rapidly on the rise and I would and and Southeast Asia similarly uh in very close trade and financial and technological relations with China is also becoming a you know ve very much a a middle income region of the world uh with strong technology. I believe that Africa too uh will play a positive and rising role. Excuse me. Sorry. will play a a growing role in the world economy because there's a basic tendency uh in the world for poorer countries to be able to grow faster than richer countries because they can leapfrog technologies and they can uh put kids in school and do things that uh and the reasons for the impoverishment fairly reliably. So I believe we're moving to a more uh equal multipolar world and if we can get rid of our illusions and delusions about that and not become terrified by this and rather celebrate it, um the world could actually be okay. Uh we could even address climate change. uh we could decarbonize our energy systems. Uh we could denuclearize we if we calmed down and understood that we're not in some kind of existential struggle. Uh that these are not enemies. These are just parts of the world catching up from a a very strange historical juncture in which the so-called western world ran so far ahead of the rest of the world for 150 years that it created this lopsided reality. Um if we could just take a deep breath and get a hold and welcome uh the rapid advances of other parts of the world, the world could be um not bad actually. So I'm not profoundly pessimistic. We're not running out of earth. I when you hear that we're using one and a half Earths and so forth, that is only true if we don't change technology. If we decide we're going to stick with fossil fuels and old technologies rather than moving to decarbonization. We don't lack, in other words, the technologies to make a sustainable, prosperous world for everybody. That's the very good news. There's no reason for conflict. Uh only our own our own flawed emotional systems. And um the main thing we should learn in life is not to have people like Donald Trump as president. This is absolutely the bottom line. You can't have a bigger failure than that in your politics. Well, let's hope we just get rid of him soon. um and that he finishes, leaves uh and the world will look a little bit better after that. So, that's a quick overview, John. And back to you. >> Okay. Thank Thank you so much. Uh thank you for ending with a little bit of positivity because it was getting fairly negative there. Um but but definitely it's appropriate because we have some very big challenges here. So, we have uh we have about 10 minutes. So, what can if you got uh I see there's already a couple of hands. So, maybe I'll if you guys are quick, we get three questions to Jeffrey and then see if we can get to another one. Uh Ar, you're first on the list. Go ahead. Can you >> uh >> Yes. Uh thank you very very much for for a very good but short presentation. Uh to make it quick, uh your uh characterization of of China as not really being a threat to anyone, I for the most part share. uh there is little evidence that uh they have any intention to of invading any country around the world and indeed of course haven't done so since uh since their skirmish with with Vietnam almost 40 years ago. However, uh when one talks about about China, the thing that always comes up is authoritarianism and their own human rights record and in particular the policies with regard to Xenyang and uh and Tibet. Uh, and I wonder whether you could address those concerns um, uh, with regard to China. >> Good. Very good. >> Paul, you're next. Can you keep it brief? I think you're muted still. >> There. How's that now? >> Good. >> Thank you, Jeffy. Thanks. I'm teaching some of your stuff tomorrow actually in my global health class. So I my quick question is though um um I'm trying to understand you know there's a posity of brain cells in Donald Trump's head and and really within US politics what one thinks of though is configurations or you know aggregations of various forces that dominate different time at different times and right now there's a domination of a particular strand of you know hyperaggressive internal looking things so I'm not worried about Donald Trump other than he represents the ability to promote some of the, you know, some of the very very aggressive militaristic uh strands within that country and that that we don't see that and we're aiming kind of at the wrong place unless we're thinking about how those forces have come together to dominate US politics at the current time. >> Great. >> All right, George, you've got a question. Try to keep it brief, please. Yes, thank you very much for that presentation with regard to um your discussion about the multi-olar world uh and the uh and your hope that uh uh that is something uh to come in the future. Do you think that other countries like China and India uh have the same kind of view of the benefit the potential benefit of a multipolar world or are they still uh isolationist in a way? >> Uh that's my question. Thanks. >> Excellent. Thank you very much for all uh three uh deep questions and I apologize for being very brief uh about them. Uh China is a very well-ordered society. Uh and it feels and it there is really a civilizational depth. People behave. uh there is a very low level of violence. I have dozens or hundreds of friends who live wonderful lives. They travel, they're tourists, they're professionals. uh the academic colleagues of mine incidentally at Peeking University or uh or Chinua University have more input on public policy than academics do in the United States uh because China takes very seriously its advisory groups and its consultative groups and its discussions and so on. The idea that this is a a deeply repressive totalitarian state is utterly false. It is a state though that is not uh organized around uh electoral uh competition. It's organized around promotion of demonstrated talent. It's an administrative state like China has had for 2,000 years under the Confucian framework. And what impresses me is uh the talent of the counterparts that I see and the basic organization of the Chinese system both in the party and in the state apparatus is that you start out at a local level and if you do well you get promoted to a larger place and if you do well you get promoted to a larger place and if you do well you get promoted to Beijing and if you do well, etc., etc. Uh, one very impressive individual that I work with in one of the most senior positions in China is the party secretary of Shanghai. You could imagine how important that position is. What is his background? He was a star PhD engineer at Chinua University. Then he became dean of Chinua. Then he became president of Chinua University. Then he became minister of environment at the federal level. Then he became party secretary of Shanghai. At each step he performed. Because he performed he was promoted. Um and this is an enormously talented uh group of people. I did a quick analysis. By the way, the US cabinet has no PhD in it. Not one out of the 35 uh people in the cabinet. The highest technical degree is one master's degree uh from MIT. Uh the rest are lawyers or business people, but not a single high uh degree. China has 11 PhDs uh in its cabinet. uh and in the uh pullet bureau it's a similar count. So this is a a very big difference is just the level of competency. I preface I say all of this because what is said also about Shinjiang in Tibet is not right. Um there is no genocide underway in Shinjang. There actually is, by the way, a genocide underway in Gaza with the full support of the United States government. In Gaza, a 100,000 or more innocent people were killed uh before our eyes using our weapons, our financing, uh our facial identification systems. And the United States didn't breathe a word about that. In Shinjiang, the claim isn't even that anyone has been killed. Not one. The claim is that there are detention camps and so forth. That's what's called a genocide. Almost all of this is propaganda. Not all of it because China cracked down on an independence movement. Um, and there I went to I've been to Shinjiang. there was a um there there really was a um a kind of insurgency. I don't know everything that has happened, but I can tell you it is no genocide. If you want to know about a genocide, Israel, unfortunately, is committing a genocide. Uh and we should pay attention to that because we're funding it, supporting it, uh and abetting it. When it comes to Tibet, this is also an absolutely fascinating uh issue. And I don't want to uh oversimplify it, but both Tibet and Shinjiang were brought into theQing Empire 300 years ago. And what happened was that at the end of theQing dynasty and the uh Chinese uh um the establishment of uh the Republic of China in 1912. Uh Tibet declared its independence and the uh nationalist government of China rejected it. Said you're part of China. you've been part of the empire for uh for 300 years. The British being the British uh s started signing treaties with Tibet in 1914. Uh and that's by the way where a lot of the current problems come from. Um and when the people's republic of China was uh established as a again a unified centralized state, it reasserted its uh uh control over Tibet. Uh Tibet calls it or it's called an invasion. uh China calls it a not even a restoration saying Tibet has always been part of uh China since the last 300 years. It raises a lot of questions. I don't want to oversimplify anything, but it it's it's not the kind of reality that causes us to think that this is uh you know a country out to take over the world or a threat to us. This is their history over the past 300 years. And incidentally in Tibet, Shinjiang and Mongolia, they don't even view their conquest as by China in theQing dynasty. They view it as by um oh my god, sorry. um uh by I'm sorry by the Manchus uh who were uh who were theQing dynasty. So the Manchus coming from the step region of northeast China invaded China controlled Ping and invaded the other step regions. So when you go to Mongolia for example and ask you know how do you feel about the period of Chinese occupation they say we weren't ever uh under China we were under the manus uh so it's very complicated but I do want to say about Chinese foreign policy China never once in a thousand years invaded Japan China never once in a thousand years invaded Korea China invaded Vietnam twice. once in 1410 615 years ago and for one month in 1979. China is not an overseas expansionist country and never has been in its 2,200 years of unity. So I want to underscore that I do not believe that China is any threat whatsoever to the world or even to its nextoor neighbors. So just to say all of that George asked well what do China and India believe about a multipolar world? They really believe in it for the same reason. Basically, India was under British rule essentially uh from you know the arrival of the East India Company in uh in the early 1600s but really from 1757 to uh 1947. They don't like that. Uh this was not a pleasant experience. They don't want to be recolonized. China from 1839 to 1949 was what they facing what they call a century of humiliation. Uh and what they mean by that is first the British showed up in the first opium war. Britain went to war to demand that uh China be open to opium trade. Absolutely astounding. Uh they did that twice in 1839 and in uh 1856. Uh then came all of the European imperial powers and the United States demanding extr territorial rights at the end of the 19th century and the so-called open door policy which means we will run Shanghai and your coastline not you. And then Japan uh basically brutally uh and repeatedly invaded China from 1894 to 1945. So China China's main view in the world is don't do this to us again. That's the main idea. Not that we want to run the world, but we don't want to be picked apart. We don't want to be uh invaded. You know, China lost 15 to 20 million people to in World War II. We don't even know about it basically, but it was a horror story under the Japanese. And China's most important foreign policy is don't meddle in our affairs. Don't try to pull us apart. Don't play games in Taiwan. Don't play games in Tibet. Stay out of our territory. We're not threatening you, but don't come close to threaten us. If I could summarize Chinese foreign policy and so when you ask, do China and India want a multipolar world? Absolutely. They want peace. They don't want the United States breathing down their neck. They don't want uh they don't want new neoc colonialism or dominance or American choke points. uh or the CIA playing games in Tibet or in Shinjiang or elsewhere to try to create unrest. Um so this is to my mind the right answer. They've experienced the other and they don't want it. And then finally, what what's at play in the United States uh in in this foreign policy? Part, as I said, is idiosyncrasy. But of course, there are deeper forces at work. The deepest force at work is that the United States became a military regime basically in 1947 with the invention of the CIA. And it's not an accident that Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address warned the American people about the military-industrial complex. That was not just a light goodbye. That was a the lead general of the United States telling the American people, you are run by the military and you're basically run by a security state. And this is true of American foreign policy. It's really shocking, but this is why the United States has tried on about a hundred occasions by my count to overthrow other countries governments uh in so-called regime change operations. when Kennedy was killed in 1963, I think by uh the CIA uh with very high likelihood, um this was a reinforcement of that point. And it's stunning to think within a month of Kennedy's assassination, Truman wrote an op-ed that said, "The biggest mistake of my life was signing the CIA into existence." That was not an innocent observation. That was Truman saying, "Who killed your president?" He didn't put it exactly that way, but the timing was completely unmistakable. And this I think is the deepest part at work. There's nothing honest about our foreign policy. Uh it is organized around power. And when you have someone as inmperate as Trump, it adds of course to the complexity. But Biden was not a peaceloving man. Uh and uh O and Obama Obama signed the CIA order to overthrow the Syrian government. Obama signed the order to uh overthrow MMA Gaddafi. Obama uh presided over the coup in uh the Maidan in February 22nd, 2014 that set the path to the Ukraine war. Now the one who did that, Victoria Nuland as I mentioned is my colleague uh at Columbia University. Um so this is this is the deep state. It's real. It's extremely powerful. It's very nasty. Uh and um the public is not actually the American public is not militarized. They don't want a war in Iran. uh they don't want any of these wars. Uh they just see the price tag all the time and they say no, but they American public opinion has no constraint uh on this. Now there's a very specific point uh which deserves more time but the Israel lobby is very real and it shows that uh you can have a security state that is also deeply influenced by a particular interest group. This is Christian Zionist, Jewish Zionists, whatever they are because it's a mix. Uh this is a another peculiarity and it's a reason for a lot of the wars over the last 30 years. If you look at the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabe, I don't know if people saw his interview with Tucker Carlson a couple of days ago. The man's a complete nitwit uh and a simpleton, I'm afraid. uh but he read uh Genesis uh chapter 15 uh and uh that's the basis of his foreign policy um or I mean his projection that if Israel wants to take the rest of the Middle East well that's it's God-given right. So this is and that's a very powerful part of Trump's base. maybe uh 35% of his vote came from uh Christian evangelicals that uh might subscribe to Huckabe's uh thinking. So there are a lot of specific peculiarities in the US but the deepest problem is we have a militaryindustrial state that runs foreign policy. Uh it is not in any civilian control. Uh it has the delusions of grandeur and it has made a big mess in the world for decades.