Should unstable nuclear theocracies decide the fate of the world?
You hope I mean Iran. I do not mean Iran.
Should unstable nuclear theocracies decide the fate of the world?
You hope I mean Iran. I do not mean Iran.
This is a long essay, and one that I’m quite worried about publishing. These are volatile times and the risk of taking a position is that circumstances change and make that position unethical and untenable. But I must speak and so I have.
Part One: Pakistan
"Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state," said then Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq in 1981. "Take out the Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse."
…Zia, an instrumental figure in the Islamization of Pakistani society, was saying something quite obvious: Pakistan and Israel are historical twins.
Pakistan has become a crack house on the street corner of modernity. We can learn from it as a bad example.
The struggle for the liberation of the Indian subcontinent has a historical complexity which spans a thousand years and probably requires scholarship in three or six languages to fully comprehend. There’s no way I can do the topic justice. I’m not even going to try. Try the movie. It’s not that inaccurate. You’re not going to get down to the core of the history and politics of Indian independence and Partition far enough to have an informed opinion; don’t even try, it’s impossible.
We have to throw our hands up in the face of the complexity. This will be important later.
Once partition is done, Pakistan and India build their separate identities. Pakistan’s course is far from smooth, but other than the shifting alliances of the Cold War and the catastrophic civil war/genocide not much of global note happens until we get to The Bomb.
Pakistan goes nuclear in 1998. We don’t remember this as a Big Deal now, there were no screaming klaxons in the papers, because in the 1990s “Islamist” wasn’t really A Thing. Rational elites ran the country. They were semi-trusted. There had been the Iranian Revolution but Pakistan wasn’t Iran, and maybe bets were being hedged on containing India in some future scenarios. Keep India as a potential superpower occupied with its own problems. A Pakistani nuclear bomb probably won’t come back to bite anybody later right?
But now Pakistan is in deep trouble. I googled “Pakistan political stability” to find a suitable link for this article, and in fact there’s so much to read there I’m just going to link you straight to the search results. This Brookings piece highlights five issues: the election (now postponed), the economy (hammered again by climate change), flood recovery from the climate horror show last year, the arrival of the Taliban fresh from their victory in Afghanistan (they clearly intend to overthrow the Pakistani government and start to establish a nuclear superstate), and civil-military relations: does a Junta come to power again to fight the Taliban and for-gods-sakes-at-all-costs defend the nukes.
Concerns about the integrity of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability go back for decades but the urgent risk of the Taliban getting nuclear weapons should probably be our number one global security concern. On top of all the others. The Taliban branch in Pakistan is extremely active in attacking Pakistanis and, of course, the Taliban operating bases in Pakistan gave them shelter during the Afghan war. Pakistan is practically a home base for many of the Taliban, although they are now hiding out in Afghanistan and attacking Pakistan rather than the other way around. Can the Taliban or Islamic State (etc.) win in Pakistan? Not without a little luck but if the secular government runs into any serious headwinds—economic collapse or major earthquakes or yet more flooding—they could easily expand into the more “failed state” areas of Pakistan and from there its much like Afghanistan all over again: a slow creeping grind-down until one day there’s no other government left.
And who gets the nukes then? The amount of advanced military hardware that fell into Taliban hands in Afghanistan is staggering. Who is to say that if Pakistan follows a similar trajectory the next piece of hardware to change hands won’t be nuclear? They won’t have long to use it either: those things take maintenance and one would hope that getting it back would be a substantial priority internationally. The pressure to “use it or lose it” might be irrational and irresistible.
It’s the kind of scenario that is too scary to make a Hollywood movie about these days.
Iran, by way of contrast, is in no danger of turning into a failed state. Much as there is great concern about the Iranian nuclear program, although people would like to paint Iran as fragile, in fact it’s pretty hard to find much evidence of decay. There’s a decent chance that as the Old Guard ages out they’ll go through a secular counter-revolution and wind up as a sort of Feminist Muslim Italy. I say Italy because Iran is an ancient and cultured place with long traditions and a pretty middle class outlook on the world. Allowed to trade again standards of living would rapidly rise and the old cultural norms would probably restore a reasonably healthy society in half a decade. This is not to under-appreciate how dangerous the Iranian regime is now, but the people that run Iran and the people of Iran are separated by a gulf as wide as an ocean, and eventually the majority will get what they want.
Alas, poor Pakistan is a leaky ship being constantly bailed out by all hands. Anybody and everybody with any influence on the situation is trying as hard as humanly possible to prevent Pakistan turning into a failed state as the inevitable problems caused by decades of failure to modernize pile up against a strong theocratic strain in the foundation of the State. One would like to believe the nukes would be secured or scuttled early on in the state failure process.
Perhaps the Government-in-Exile takes the nuclear arsenal with them to Saudi?
Part Two: Israel
As states that came into existence to protect and promote the interests of religious minorities, Israel and Pakistan have more in common than is generally recognized. Their histories overlapped in many ways. As nations in the making, they had to create identities, impose languages, and contend with strange boundaries.
https://www.meforum.org/348/the-strangely-parallel-careers-of-israel
As with the Indian independence and partition processes which gave birth to Pakistan, the history of Israel and Palestine is complex beyond all hope of human understanding. More than a dozen empires that washed over the area including Romans, Persians, Greeks, Ottomans, British, and a dozen others. Almost all of this before any conveniently Westphalian notion of the Nation States.
The pivotal events of 1948 which resulted in the formation of the State of Israel as we know it are similarly complex and are potentially the most politicized periods of 20th century history. What was given and what was taken? What was bought and what was stolen? The legalists on all sides want to claim the evidence supports their positions. As if mere facts have any power now.
I prefer a different way of looking at the formation of the State of Israel: the fighting in Palestine in 1948 is the tail end of WW2.
Of course, after the Holocaust the Jews needed a homeland, Europe and America having made it abundantly clear that they were safe nowhere else by running a genocide and refusing to take the refugees respectively. The worst thing in the world had happened, on our collective watch.
It’s hard to imagine how deeply integrated Jews were in European society before WW1, and how close the end of antisemitism seemed to some people at that time. The Holocaust removed all pretense. Similarly, the outrageous American refusal to accept Jewish refugees is a moral stain on the same “mortal sin” level as slavery.
Antisemitism raged like a plague.
Both Berlin and Jerusalem end WW2 as divided twin cities, cut in two as the final lines were drawn in the post-WW2 settlement.
Berlin was cut into two until 1989. Jerusalem was cut in two until 1967. The unification mechanisms could not be more different. The German people wanted to be one and peacefully removed what divided them. The same cannot be said for Jerusalem. War is hell. Jerusalem was united by the sword. The UN and a bunch of other hopeless dreamers still have some story about Jerusalem eventually being administered by them. It seems more plausible the Mormons will be put in charge, frankly.
Anyway back to the real world. Having massively over-performed militarily using conventional arms in the Six Day War and other conflicts, Israel goes nuclear. A deep shroud of secrecy surrounds the Israeli nuclear weapons programme and what capabilities were developed when but it’s reasonable to assume the Israelis were a leading nuclear power by the 1970s.
With a full nuclear arsenal we are no longer dealing with the tail end of WW2. We’re dealing with Israel carving out a path into the future as a very tiny superpower. Israeli statehood was a fragile and delicate seedling until backed up with a nuclear deterrent: after that, by any reasonable standard, the future of the Israelis was as secure as could be hoped for given the circumstances.
As with Pakistan, the division between secular and religious factions shapes the course of the nation. The nuclear deterrent serves to provide security against vastly more numerous enemies, not on the polarizing axis of the Cold War but in the context of regional security. Israel’s internal politics are a heaving mass of divisions loosely bound together by a proportional representation system that makes starting a new political party easier than opening a shoe shop. Every time something goes wrong, four more political parties start. Three of them get elected. The political culture is best described as vigorous, and not above Machiavellian skullduggery involving their notional opponents, Hamas. But the governments have been historically unstable, flipping with disturbing speed. This makes it very hard to be sure which hands will be on the steering wheel in future, particularly given long term demographic trends in the area creating the near-certainty of an eventual Muslim majority in any potential One State future.
Nuclear deterrence against non-nuclear opponents should be a no-brainer but the conventional military threats against Israel continue right into the present day. Israel develops into an intelligence and cyber-superpower with a multi-year lead in several areas of high tech weapons development, espionage, and special forces doctrine as evidence by occasional shows of capability. Integration between the Israeli and US defense community proceeds apace after 9/11 resulting in a united front during the Global War on Terror. But overall the show is chaotic and the failures are occasionally spectacular. Israel just can’t seem to find a stable groove.
It’s during the GWOT years that the wheels begin to come off. Again, the complexity eludes me — full-time Israel watchers would do a better job of summarizing the trends, but there are four major developments in my mind:
Neoconservatism starts as a joint American-Israeli project, but then starts to severely twist Israeli domestic politics
Straight up insane American Evangelicals start preparation for the Third Temple of Jerusalem, going as far as to clone pure red cows for the project. American Christian Zionism is as nuanced as freight train derailment and is broadly-speaking heresy within mainstream Christian denominations. It is also vastly powerful and persuasive to the right wing.
Israel starts to see a decline in overall quality and legitimacy of government, eventually resulting in strongly worded official denials that the country is headed into a civil war to defend the independence of the judiciary. This is a heck of a thing to have to deny. The resulting economic impact of this instability can only be multiplied by war.
Continued mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza starts to confuse antisemitism and respect for human rights, resulting in debacles like the ouster of Jeremy Corbyn, UK Labour Party leader.
These are all symptomatic of a deep malaise in Israel. There is also the matter of the Haredi who are around 13% of Israel’s population and who often have a highly conflicted relationship with the concept of Israel as a nation state, and are seen as being economically unproductive and unhelpful on Israel’s defense commitments.
Although less relevant to the overall quality of Israeli governance, the politics of the Haredi are extremely close to the identity questions at the heart of Judaism. If Israel is a country founded on a religious identity why do the most visibly religious Israelis have so much friction with the State? There are no easy answers, and nobody expects them.
Israel and Pakistan are both unstable nuclear nations defined by religious identity. Although neither country is officially headed by religious leaders as with Iran and Uttar Pradesh (Yogi Adityanath, a right wing Hindu firebrand who many suspect will ascend to be the Indian premier) the veil of secularism is worn thin: these countries both run on a common shared belief in a specific religion, have nuclear weapons, and are each turning into basket cases in their own way — Israel through political division and excessive violence, and Pakistan through economic collapse and Talibanization.
Did I mention the nuclear weapons?
The combination of nuclear weapons with fragile religious enclaves with uncertain governance is a poor one. We have two nations that fit this profile now. It should not be allowed to become six. Non-proliferation efforts on nuclear and particularly biological warfare are critical global security projects. On top of all the others.
A lot of people will object to the comparisons between Israel and Pakistan. But we have the Saudi activity in Yemen, chemical warfare in Syria, Christians in Lebanon and so on for about 50 other causes and problems, probably more. Almost anybody you can think of is being persecuted by somebody in the Middle East. Israel part of a broad spectrum of regimes with terrible, intractable, military-level human rights problems and we should not be making special exceptions because Israel a friendly regime or a trading partner.
The whole area is a rough, rough situation and the less clear who it is that is holding the big stick the greater tendency there is to use it just to find out. It’s all kind of horrifying particularly when taken all at once. As of the time of writing, the US has just committed another aircraft carrier and 2000 troops.
What could possibly go wrong?
Part Three: Peace in Our Time
“…because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.” - Israel’s military posture as summarized by Thomas Friedman https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-war.html
In all probability the nuclear superpowers will not use nuclear weapons in limited ways. Mutually Assured Destruction remains the heart of superpower nuclear doctrine. Even Russia is unlikely to crack out the tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine while they still have options like strategic bombers. Once a superpower throws a nuke, everything changes.
Likewise, use of a nuclear weapon against a superpower opponent like India invokes MAD. But suppose that Israel uses a nuclear weapon against Iran.
Is anybody going to risk retaliation?
What exactly is the response of the international community?
Iran is certainly a credible nuclear threat: the international community has been stomping on the Iranian nuclear program for decades with very good reason. So at this moment in time Iran cannot establish Mutually Assured Destruction and therefore deterrence with Israel, while continuing to attack Israel seemingly by all accessible means including the current atrocities.
This seems to be poking the bear in a rather severe way.
Of course it could be that Iran is relying on another country’s nuclear deterrent to provide cover under its nuclear umbrella. Russia being Russia such a deal would not be visible, they do not tend to trumpet their intentions. Such a deal also opens up the potential for massive pressure on the EU and NATO with a two-front war. Ukraine on one side with Russian ground troops, and a large scale fracas in the Middle East with Russian nuclear cover to hold the Israeli deterrent in check while the ground troops sort out their affairs.
“In Soviet Russia perhaps bear pokes you” to make the Usenet-era Russian joke.
As of the time of writing, the attacks on Israel have killed (proportional to population) twenty times as many people as 9/11 killed in America.
Judaism places a lot of value on human lives. Retaliation is ongoing and certain.
But how exactly does this end? How many terrorists do you have to kill until there are none left?
The US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is simple. Terrorist math is not hard. You start with one terrorist, you kill that terrorist, and now you have three terrorists.
Short of genocide, “no terrorists left” applies at the scale of a single room but when applied to a society grief turns to lethal anger often enough that there is essentially a limitless supply of motivated “enemy combatants” or whatever we are calling them this year.
The confusion between the tactical removal of terrorists and the political removal of terrorists seems to be eternal. The paradox that killing terrorists makes more terrorists is at the heart of our inability to secure our societies and indeed our world. Political defeat is about defeating terrorist recruitment, in essence. But tactically there’s simply no way to destroy the operational capability for long. Certainly not longer than one generation.
As with Ukraine, if somebody is willing to fight and an external party can provide them with weapons, the conflict continues. Israel has much the same problem with Gaza that Russia does with Ukraine — which is not at all to equate the two situations. These are genuinely very different conflicts. But as long as the weapons keep flowing in, somebody is willing to die while using that gun, and the stream of guns, fighters and blood will continue far into the future.
In the Middle East blood is more abundant than water. People will fight until they run out of bullets.
As long as Iran and others are bound-and-determined to keep funding and supporting proxies against Israel there will not be peace. Even the Saudis, who seem to have taken over from the CIA as the Mujahideen’s primary funders sometime in the 1990s, are unlikely to tolerate anything they would perceive as total war or genocide against civilian Muslim populations. Critically, the balance of power is not what it once was, given how internally divided America is, and how desperately America needs Saudi liquidity to keep the global financial system running.
So to summarize, what we’re looking at is a situation where a potentially-failing state with enormous military power (or at least a state with very low quality governance and severe internal issues, but a healthy economy) has just gotten smashed in the face by traditional enemies. It does not help that the US is at a low point in terms of their ability to project military confidence having recently abandoned Afghanistan.
There are just very few cards on the table here for Israel to play other than pounding civilian populations into the ground attempting to exterminate the terrorists. Which will not work other than in the very short run, and risks massive escalation. And we’ve got multiple potential superpower conflicts including Ukraine and Taiwan just waiting in the wings, plus rising inflation and rapidly increasing domestic economic pain as a result. And Iran to consider. What do they actually want out of this, both their government and their people?
This is much worse than 9/11.
9/11 happened when America was at the peak of its peacetime economic strength and the countries involved presented no meaningful threat to America. Sinister idiots went so far as to distort the intelligence to make the threats from these nations look credible. Competent state involvement was minimal.
But since then everybody has had 20 years to learn the American playbook, refine their plans, and form alliances.
This is not 9/11 v2.0.
This is much, much worse.
The massive global wave of antisemitism which has been ignited is reopening wounds all over the world. Jews no longer feel safe in London and many other cities around the world. The Harvard antisemitism scandal is going to run for years. Black Lives Matter has picked a side in the worst possible way, dragging their supporters into a terrible position they did not ask to be dragged into. Post 9/11 anti-Americanism is nothing to what Jewish people face all over the world now, and this is only going to get worse unless there is a non-military solution.
However, if pounding civilian populations in Gaza and surrounds is the only available Israeli strategy, we all know what the result will be: more and more terrorism.
The entire Israeli action will be used as a gigantic Hamas / Hezbollah / etc. recruitment exercise. It’s going to seed homegrown local small-cell terrorism all over the world and unwind most of the progress (if any) made during the Global War on Terror. It is a disaster. Outrage travels fast online. Rage is a virus. Nobody can keep control.
And so we must ask ourselves, given a constant river of blood from Gaza and money from Iran, how big can Hezbollah get? Can alliances be built with enough of the other factions to produce a united front?
How unified can the Muslim world become given a constant stream of outrages against Muslim civilians? The Americans did not unify the Muslim world against them because their PR and diplomacy were exceptional. America was genuinely believed to be fighting violent extremists (not Islam) by a critical mass of moderate Muslims.
Even the outrages against human rights and common decency in the post 9/11 period were largely written up by the American press as “we did a very bad thing here” and even the government showed some contrition. Civilian reprisals and similar atrocities were avoided, and the opponents were odious enough in many cases that the world turned a blind eye to the collateral damage. It is a miracle that the GWOT did not turn into a vastly broader engagement. It certainly could have.
Here in 2023 as we go into the second phase of the Global War on Terror or whatever this becomes, the decks are stacked in a completely different way now than at the start of hostilities after 9/11, and they are 100% very definitely absolutely guaranteeably verifiably not stacked anywhere in the general direction of our favour.
Even slightly mishandled the current situation in the Middle East could trigger a truly apocalyptic war in which a unified Muslim world fights an existential battle in the Middle East and even in the UK and mainland Europe over events that happened in Gaza and Israel, but that detonate existing societal time bombs.
Part Four: The End of Dialogue
God is my witness that up to now, my only aspiration in life is to be a useful element within the army! I have for long been convinced that, to safeguard the country and give happiness to the people, it is necessary first of all to prove once more to the world that our army is still the old Turkish army. — Ataturk
Turkey, for example, has recently been punching well above its weight as a weapons manufacturer and supplier to Ukraine. There are Ukrainian folk songs about how great the Turkish drones are. There is also that nasty conflict where the Armenians got brutalized by Azerbaijan with Turkish drones.
Are the Turks looking for a war? It’s a half day drive to Israel, and a short flight time for the drones. They’ve been pretty quiet since WW1 compared to, oh, the past thousand years. How sure are we that they don’t want to take the army out for a stroll, in support of their Muslim brothers?
Turkey has about 8% of it’s population as men between 15 and 24. Call it seven million people. Germany has 5% in that age range, and about the same population. Call it four million people. The median age of Europe is 42. The median age of the Middle East is 30.
The Ottoman Empire used to cover three million square miles. It was to all intents and purposes the Roman Empire run from Istanbul through to WW1. That’s Turkey.
We’ve never really understood the Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Rome in Europe because we think of Rome as being a place rather than an ideal. But Ataturk is as great an emperor as any Roman ever was and the Turks are as capable as any Roman legion. It’s not as if these folks can’t fight. They ran the show for a long, long time.
And I don’t mean to single out Turkey here. Quite a few empires or at least very large kingdoms got severely bossed around by the British Empire at the height of their power: the Ottomans, India and China to name but a few. They’ve all caught up to a remarkable degree as Europe rather lost its respect for militarism after the end of the Cold War and decided they’d rather work on civil rights instead. But our genteel way and declining military spending come potentially come at a price.
The Turks are back with a high tech weapons trade and a newly reawakened interest in political Islam, not the decadent old ways of their high culture period, but the scrappy fundamentalism of people clawing their way up after falling from a millennia of greatness. Ataturk’s secularism has been beaten back. Turkey didn’t make it into the EU, and… well… who are their new friends?
Right now they’re sitting on their hands. Which is just as well.
But if Israel goes into Gaza hard, and Hezbollah comes over the border from Lebanon, and Iran decides it’s time to risk getting nuked and back up their rhetoric with action, how long before a grand alliance of Muslim nations becomes inevitable?
Saudi money.
Iranian proxy war groups. Or simply the Iranian army.
Turkish high tech weapons and manpower.
If the Israelis are not very, very careful they’re going to unite the Muslim world in a way not seen in living memory. They’re a tiny little country and their enemies are right on their doorstep. The Americans are far, far away and increasingly unwilling to get involved in land wars.
Israel might turn to Europe, but there are an awful lot of radicalized Muslims in European cities, easily enough that if somebody ran them real weapons we could have terrorism problems everywhere pretty much overnight. The UK has at least four cities where handing out a few dozen AK47s from the back of a van would start actual wars. God forbid RPGs. Or grenades. Or MANPADs. Or all of the above. Pretty similar in France and several other European countries. If the Europeans dredge up all the old history with a Crusade in the Middle East, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect large scale insurrections from the local Muslim populations to result. Everybody wants to be a hero, at least if they’re male, 18, and unemployed.
As long as somebody is willing to supply weapons, and somebody is willing to die, the fighting would continue. I can’t imagine how Europe would cope.
For example, France is 10% Muslim. The median age of French Muslims is likely 10+ years younger than the rest of the French. What that means is that in terms of young idiots who want to run around in the streets maybe one day with automatic weapons, Muslims could be 25% of the fighting men in France.
Deep moral outrage and a perception that this is the Final Battle between Christianity and Islam could cause a mass uprising in Europe where smuggled weapons and local radicalization would result in persistent guerilla warfare on European soil. Radicalization did not kick off on a vast scale over Iraq and Afghanistan but there is no guarantee that miracle will be repeated around Israel and Hamas. A lot has changed, including the Taliban in Afghanistan. There is a lot of water under the bridge since 9/11.
This whole thing could light up from one end of the world to the other, and the treatment of Palestinian civilians is a credible source of bloody sparks which could set the entire world on fire.
Part Five: Hope for the World
What I have portrayed here is a nightmare scenario, but what is happening on the ground in Palestine is a nightmare. It’s the kind of nightmare which is contagious, passed around like covid. What we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan is simple: killing civilians is how you get terrorists, and use of military force against terrorist targets kills a lot of civilians, which recruits yet more terrorists.
This doesn’t mean that terrorism works but when terrorism fails to meet its political goals it is generally not because it was defeated in combat.
Generally terrorism is defeated by rising standards of living.
Terrorism is defeated by a sense of optimism about the future, instead of nihilistic rage.
Terrorism is defeated by a sense of fairness and justice restoring the trust of the civilian population.
In the end, terrorism is defeated by hope. (A phenomenal legend about Yassir Arafat and Black September.)
The realistic hope of a better life demobilizes terrorist armies.
Nothing else will do it.
Without a bedrock of injustice, grief and rage, very nearly all of the people inclined to terrorism confine their activities to comments on the internet. These potential fighters are inactive, like spores. But fertilized with a river of the blood of innocents and shipments of weapons, they become gangs then armies.
Getting people to kill is hard. They need reasons.
We should stop providing them those reasons. We can stop the blood a lot more easily than we can stop the weapons.
Conclusion: Do Not Poke The Bear
I’ve visited the Muslim architecture in Spain. It is amazing. It is also a long, long way into mainland Europe. But not nearly as far as Vienna.
To give Muslims a common enemy and a common cause at this point in Europe’s demographic and military decline will be the worst and potentially the last mistake of European history. America has less immigration and is separated by oceans: guerilla armies can’t just work their way up city by city. Europe could find itself in a two-front engagement: Russians expanding out of Ukraine on one side, and Muslim armies working up from the South aided by massive insurgencies in the cities with smuggled arms and local Muslim youth.
In stark contrast, the American worst case is likely civilian outrages rather than a replay of the past 1000 years of land wars with Muslim empires, plus Russian tanks at the Fulda Gap.
So in Europe it is simply different. We have a very different kind of skin in this game. If we see the start of a 5, 10, 15, 20 year cycle of escalating violence with a re-unified Muslim world it’s going to look more like WW1 than WW3 or perhaps more like Yugoslavia at 50 times the scale.
I don’t think Israel’s refusal to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis in Palestine is worth risking total war with the Muslims for. It’s not that hard to sit down and talk at a table, make some concessions, replicate the lessons from South Africa and Northern Ireland and so on, and just work this out.
It’s been done before. There is nothing in the Israel-Palestine situation which is so bad it cannot be resolved using the well-worn techniques of peacemaking. But this will only happen if war is no longer an option.
The time has come to end the cycle of violence. If we don’t end it now it might burn the world.
Or at least Europe and the Middle East.
Very good, lots of fun scenarios to consider there.