A New U.S. Grand Strategy: The Case for U.S. Retrenchment Overseas, With Stephen Wertheim

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the case for U.S. retrenchment.

With me to discuss whether and where the United States should do less in the world is Stephen Wertheim. Stephen is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and analyzes contemporary problems in American strategy and diplomacy. Stephen is also a visiting lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Prospect Magazine has named him as one of the world's fifty top thinkers of the COVID-19 age for his writings. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, and he recently wrote "Why America Can't Have It All: Washington Must Choose Between Primacy and Prioritizing" for Foreign Affairs.

This episode is the first in a series I will be doing periodically between now and the presidential election in November on U.S. grand strategy. With all of that behind us, thank you, Stephen, for coming on The President's Inbox.

WERTHEIM:
My pleasure. And as they say, I am a longtime listener, first time caller.

LINDSAY:
Much appreciated. So as I said, Stephen, I want to do this as part of his series on grand strategy. So perhaps you could begin with how you would define the term and whether you think it's useful at all.

WERTHEIM:
So I think the term is useful. I have to say I once wrote a piece suggesting that maybe it wasn't, so I've come around to this view. My own definition, I kind of like two definitions that I've heard. One is a state's theory of how to create security and prosperity for itself. That comes from the scholar Barry Posen. Another is a state's overall aims in the world and the military or hard power means to secure those aims. So that hones in on the question of hard power, which is often what people discuss under the umbrella of grand strategy. But I'm very open to the idea, although there are not many people who do it, that we should be discussing a broader range of issues under the rubric of grand strategy, including economics and transnational challenges like climate change.

LINDSAY:
I would share that assessment as well. I do think it should be conceived of broadly because a country's interactions with the rest of the world cover a broad range of subjects and it is fundamentally about securing security and prosperity. So let's talk where you come down on these big issues. You have often been described as a proponent of U.S. restraint and retrenchment. Is that a fair assessment?

WERTHEIM:
Yeah. I think it is. You know, one way to define restraint would be against the opposite of restraint, and that is U.S. military primacy. And so I think you could consider restraint in different ways, like somebody who wants to exit from security commitments and force deployments from everywhere else but the Western Hemisphere that would go back to say the America First-ers, but not many people actually hold that view today. So most proponents of restraint think that the United States has basically made a mistake or can no longer be the onshore premier military power in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East simultaneously. And they would argue that the United States ought to pull back considerably from at least one of those regions.

LINDSAY:
I want to get into your critique of U.S. grand strategy, U.S. foreign policy over the last three decades, maybe over the last seventy-five years. Before we do that, Stephen, some of your critics would argue that you're an isolationist. And so I want to get your take on whether you think that term is meaningful, whether it can be usefully used to describe you, whether it's a term of description or an epithet. And I know you've written a lot about isolationism, so how would you respond?

WERTHEIM:
In short, it's an epithet and there are very few figures in American history, much less the present who would describe themselves as isolationists, which tells you something. I actually just came out with a chapter in an edited volume that traces the conceptual history of both internationalism and isolationism in the United States. And so let's put aside for a moment whether there are isolationists today, we'll come back to it. But if anyone's an isolationist, it would be the original America First-ers leading into the second World War, the ones who really wanted the United States to make some difficult sacrifices to try to stay out of that looming war. And they didn't call themselves isolationists, their opponents did.

LINDSAY:
So it was an insult.

WERTHEIM:
Absolutely. So this is a combat concept, part of U.S. political discourse, and what did the America First-ers actually believe? Well, they wanted the United States to guard the entire Western Hemisphere, to have a sphere of influence over a very large portion of the world that goes beyond U.S. territory proper in North America. Ask Mexicans, ask Latin Americans, is that isolationism? They also wanted the United States to, in general, they had a range of other views, but trade and engage with the world in non-military ways. And their opponents argued that the practical conclusion of their policy prescription would be to leave the United States "isolated" and unable to trade and engage in a kind of basically U.S. compatible world order with Europe and Asia if the Axis powers were able to conquer their way to dominance in Europe and Asia.

And obviously that's the view that prevailed, but even from the start, we should really question whether the people who are popularly known as the isolationist par excellence in fact meet that description, which I think inevitably connotes a desire to retract U.S. engagement in all of its forms, not just military, from potentially all of the outside world, outside of the United States proper. It doesn't even work as an analytic in military terms let alone in other kinds of terms. 

Fast forward to the present, we're now seeing a resurgence of isolationism discourse in response to Donald Trump's candidacy again for the presidency. I thought we had gotten over this. I thought that during the Trump years people had realized, wait a minute, we were calling him an isolationist before. He uses the banner of America First, but in fact he promises to make U.S. military dominance "unquestioned." This is the term that he used in his first campaign in his administration. He didn't exit from a single alliance, didn't really end wars. He didn't start new wars. I don't know if that makes you an isolationist. And he led the United States in really adopting a bipartisan, heightened threat perception of China. Now Trump is a complicated figure with I think maybe an openness to pulling back in the world that other politicians don't have. And so there is something certainly to discuss about him, but to say that he's an isolationist or that any really substantial part of the constellation of American politics is isolationist, I think is just to use a category that doesn't make any sense.

LINDSAY:
Okay. We may come back to former President Trump's foreign policy, indeed current President Joe Biden's foreign policy, but I really want to drill down on your critique of American foreign policy, Stephen, as it has played out over the last three decades, maybe over the last seventy-five years since the end of World War II because obviously you've written quite well about that subject. It's something you know a lot about. So sort of lay out your critique of American grand strategy for let's say the last seventy-five years.

WERTHEIM:
How much time do we have again?

LINDSAY:
You have to give us the CliffsNotes version. I understand you have a whole book and I refer people to it because it's a very well argued piece of work.

WERTHEIM:
Fantastic. Well, no substitute for buying the book, of course, but basically the United States decided to depart from its tradition of avoiding "entanglements" in Europe and Asia in World War II because of the actual existing threat of totalitarian powers that could dominate and for a time did dominate Europe and Asia. As a result of that, the United States adopted a pretty hazy national security logic about what its defense perimeter was, what its vital interests were. It consisted in maintaining a kind of favorable, liberal, basically liberal or open American style world order and left a lot to be determined. 

Now I find it unimaginable for the United States not to have entered World War II and stopped the very worst powers. And I think the United States did play an important role again in the Cold War on much the same logic, the Soviet Union, we have a totalitarian power that had the capability of overrunning Europe. Europeans couldn't balance against it, likewise in Asia, and if the Soviet Union were able to find dominance of Europe and Asia, it would impose a communist system that would then limit U.S. economic opportunities and create the potential for security problems down the road. Again, not a direct threat, you know, that would allow the Soviet Union or any power to somehow go across the oceans and conquer the United States, but not a desirable situation for Americans either. 

Now things change radically after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The United States seems to do the kind of same thing that it had been doing throughout the Cold War. It maintains its Cold War alliances. It keeps large numbers of U.S. troops, although diminishing numbers, of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia. They're still there in Japan. And after the Persian Gulf War, it actually establishes a much heavier onshore presence in the Middle East, which it hadn't done during the Cold War. And then it decides to grow its alliances, especially through the process of NATO enlargement. 

And here I think the United States adopted a different kind of rationale for global dominance. Under unipolarity, yes, there were no more major threats that necessitated such a role, but on the other hand, why not? The costs were low in the first several rounds of NATO enlargement, which included enlarging the U.S. security umbrella to the Baltic states right next to Russia. Nobody thought that Russia was going to invade those countries anytime soon. So we're now entering, I think, a distinct security environment from both of those two eras. Many say China is kind of the successor to the Axis powers and the Soviet Union, and there's some truth to that though I wouldn't go that far. But the costs and risks to the United States of maintaining primacy are considerably higher today than they were in the unipolar moment.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Can we stop there? I want to sort of drill down 'cause there's obviously a lot there, and I guess in terms of thinking back over whether it's the last seventy-five years or just the last three decades, Stephen, is your critique fundamentally about the policy or the execution of that policy? And I ask because, you know, as you know very well after the end of World War II and after some period of time, there was this sort of coalescing in the U.S. foreign policy establishment around a policy of containment yet for different people, containment meant very different things. And so one could go back and say, "Yes, I thought containment was a smart policy, but we misapplied it by going into Vietnam." So I'm trying to understand to what extent your critique is about principle or execution.

WERTHEIM:
Well, it depends what you define as the principle or the policy.

LINDSAY:
Fair enough.

WERTHEIM:
But, you know, essentially I am comfortable with, let's say, the broad approach that the United States had in the 1940s. I think it was fraught with risk and set the country up for problems and a very expansive view of its interest and its role in the world. But the negative consequences of that I think really start to manifest in the post Cold War period rather than back then. 

So, you know, the original conception of containment that George Kennan has, he tries to make distinctions among places that the United States had a strong interest in defending, places that it didn't. He tries to avoid an overly militarized view. That's something that is broadly acceptable to me. 

But what I think has happened is that in our own time, the quest for primacy has become something like an end unto itself. It's a forever project. We can't imagine conditions where we would say, "You know what, mission accomplished and the United States should pull back" or, "We're failing and the United States now needs to concentrate its efforts and that means departing from a grand strategy of primacy." I think we still had a chance in the Cold War and World War II to say that there were specific conditions that called for a U.S. counterbalancing response specifically to mass conquering totalitarian powers.

LINDSAY:
Would you feel different, Stephen, if the Iraq War had not happened? I mean, to what extent does your argument turn on the fact that the Bush administration chose a war against Iraq, which had multiple negative consequences for U.S. interests both at home and abroad? And I will note it was an invasion that was not driven by entangling alliances. It wasn't our allies urging us to do it. In fact, many of them, particularly in Europe, begged us not to. So I'm just trying to understand how the Iraq War, which clearly is a pivotal event in U.S. foreign policy history plays into your thinking.

WERTHEIM:
Absolutely. If only we had listened to our allies at that time. So there's a slightly different answer on a personal level and on an intellectual level. On a personal level, I can't deny that the experience of Iraq shaped me. I think it shaped a generation of Americans. It's still reverberating in American society. I think that's an interesting story. It's partly to do, I think, with the lack of grappling with the problems with the Iraq invasion that happened in public view at a high level, but theoretically actually this critique has little to do with the invasion of Iraq, except in so far as I would ascribe some of the motivations for invading Iraq to a desire to shore up American primacy after the United States had been grievously attacked on September 11, 2001.

LINDSAY:
I think that's clear from the statements of Bush administration officials that they saw the invasion as a way of sending a message to the rest of the world about American primacy, American dominance essentially, "Don't mess with us."

WERTHEIM:
Exactly. The so-called demonstration effect. So I think that has to factor into our explanation for Iraq, but it's not, you know, implicit in the grand strategy of primacy. So on an intellectual level actually, I think the greater falsification of the theory of primacy comes from what we're seeing now, an intensification of major power competition against the United States. The original theory that was laid out by the Pentagon in 1992 in a document called the Defense Planning Guidance, this is Dick Cheney's Pentagon, under the first Bush administration.

LINDSAY:
Which President Bush ended up disavowing when it was leaked to the New York Times.

WERTHEIM:
Correct. But disavowing some of the language or the way it was framed when it was leaked, I would say not so much disavowing the substance. So the original theory was, and as a theory, it's very elegant and it's appealing. I mean, if it works, it works. I don't have a problem with it. I'm not such an American anti-imperialist that I would say that American dominance would be undesirable if it could do what these planners said it would, which was to suppress security competition, make no power see an interest in challenging the United States in its own region, and therefore you have a kind of theory of perpetual peace and order more or less. So that kind of works until it didn't. 

And in our own time in the last ten or even five years, we're seeing, you know, if there was any way to falsify primacy, and I think actually in practice, it's not a falsifiable theory, but if there's any way to falsify it wouldn't be through U.S. misadventures, through regime change wars in the greater Middle East. It would actually be the fact that primacy did not dissuade China from rising and being quite opposed to U.S. global dominance. It has not dissuaded Russia from committing aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere and being opposed to the U.S.-led European security order. So the whole debate among political scientists in the grand strategy literature from the end of the Cold War to the late Obama administration basically boil down to, does American global dominance produce a suppression of security competition? In which case, great. United States can do this at reasonable cost to Americans and considerable benefit to the world. Or does American global dominance inspire balancing by other powers and resistance by groups like terrorist groups?

LINDSAY:
Okay. And so your argument is that the search for primacy, while it may have made sense in its own terms, actually was counterproductive. It produced the formation to, I guess we can call, the axis of the aggrieved, states that want to challenge U.S. primacy. So that's the critique. Let's talk about the solution. You are one that has called for retrenchment. So walk me through your thinking on that. In particular, where are we going to do less? And what is the theory of the case for doing less in those places? And I say that against the backdrop, Stephen, of the fact that U.S., particularly security involvement in places like South America and Africa while it exists is actually quite small. The real investment would be in Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia. Who are we going to say we will do less to?

WERTHEIM:
Well, if I had my druthers, we'd say that to Europeans and those in the Middle East. We would not say that to those in Asia. And I agree with you, the problems that retrenchment are trying to solve on a grand strategic level aren't very much implicated in South America or Africa with some question marks around our creeping increasing military role in Africa. There are three basic reasons why I think the United States should be interested in some significant form of retrenchment in Europe and the Middle East, and you can boil those down to overcommitment, overstretch, and domestic politics. The overcommitment part, we've touched upon. In my view, the United States has accumulated defense obligations since the Cold War and after to countries, some of which don't make sense for U.S. interests and don't fit the world we're in now. 

As we talked about when NATO began to expand, the justification for it was less because the United States was prepared to defend new members. Then because it assumed that those new members wouldn't have to be defended. Should the United States really go to war with Russia if Russia invades one of the Baltic states? If it weren't for the Baltic states already being in NATO, not many people, I think, would be able to list specific U.S. interests that would warrant such a serious cost, what President Biden has called World War III, a direct conflict between the United States and Russia. Of course, this is in reference to Ukraine. And this is I think why there isn't a constituency today for going to war with Russia directly over Ukraine. 

In the Middle East we have informal security assurances to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and a range of other countries. So that's, I think, an independent reason, overcommitment. Right? If you agree with that, then I think you're already sold. But there are other independent reasons that are more specific to the times that we're in today.

Overstretch, United States faces real resource constraints to be the primary country that is militarily deterring Russia and Europe and China and the Indo-Pacific to say nothing about trying to deter all manner of bad things in the Middle East. The Pentagon used to have during the unipolar moment, a two war standard. U.S. forces were supposed to be sized and capable to handle two major regional contingencies at once, like a war with Iraq or and war with North Korea. Well, it's abandoned that goal. It's precisely as it has turned to a major power competition because the United States is not, at the current level of exertion, capable of going to war with both countries at once. Real question about how capable are we just to go to war with China in Asia? So overstretch is a real problem because if we were to have to make good on one of our major security commitments against either Russia or China, that would hand the other party in opportunity for aggression in their own region, and then we're really in World War III, first of all.

LINDSAY:
Well, I think the Biden administration is worried about that particular problem at the moment given the war in Ukraine, given the Israeli-Hamas conflict, and a lot of speculation that perhaps China will see an opportunity to move against Taiwan. So I think that is a actual practical policy problem that the administration is concerned with. And I think some people would argue that has governed its approach toward Israel in particular because of the fear that the conflict there could expand to a broader Middle Eastern war.

WERTHEIM:
Absolutely. So you could agree that maybe primacy made sense in the 1990s, but you could say, look at the situation we're in now. We face the potential for overstretch. And of course, even if we don't initially get into a major conflict, you could have a deterrence failure because one of the U.S. adversaries believes that the United States is overstretched. That brings us to the third argument, which is U.S. politics, political reliability. Will our politics in a sustainable way support the level of commitment that the United States has around the world? This is essential. We have to have some kind of basic domestic political consensus to have a large foreign policy, which I'm still calling for.

LINDSAY:
Well, it's quite clear because you want the United States to have a significant security presence in Asia, and I want to get to the question.

WERTHEIM:
I thought I was an isolationist, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Well, I know that's why I'm trying to sort of color inside and outside the lines and help people understand why some of the terms that get tossed around do more to muddle our thinking than to clarify, but go ahead.

WERTHEIM:
Good. Yeah. So I mean, if you're looking at American politics, maybe you thought Donald Trump was an aberration, and Joe Biden would restore normalcy defined as the post-World War II consensus. That doesn't seem to be happening, and I think U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, are very worried about this. So, you know, it's not just a person of Trump, it's the fact that the unipolar moment is over. The United States went on a spree of expanding its military commitments and positions when it had the unipolar moment, which was always called a moment.

We always knew it was going to end. And there was such a consensus in our politics around the grand strategy of primacy that in a sense, I think, it took some kind of outsider kind of populous force to bring it to the fore if our own foreign policy "establishment" or let's say foreign policy community, because again, I'm a nice guy, not an isolationist, et cetera. So I'll say foreign policy community, no pejorative there, wasn't going to bring these options to the fore. So I think we'd be dealing with these problems if it weren't for the emergence of Trump, but Trump certainly puts a point on it.

LINDSAY:
So why Asia as the priority, not Europe, not the Middle East?

WERTHEIM:
Well, Asia stands alone because, you know, 40 percent of the world's economic activity is produced in Asia. U.S. interests therefore are very high in the region, higher than in Europe, much higher than in the Middle East, and the potential threat to those interests, while I'm not alarmed about it, wouldn't classify myself as a China hawk, nevertheless in the Indo-Pacific uniquely, you have a country that is illiberal, that is fairly hostile to or suspicious of the United States, China, that has enormous latent military power and quite a bit of actually existing military power that without the United States military there in some form as part of a counterbalancing coalition, you know, China could decide to achieve a kind of regional dominance that could shut the United States out. And that could really make us think twice about would China be able to have "room to roam" militarily and encroach into the Western Hemisphere? And now we're thinking along the lines of the kinds of considerations that the people I wrote about in my book in 1940 and '41 were thinking about, the Axis powers.

LINDSAY:
Okay. That's the case for Asia or China. What's the case against making Europe or the Middle East a priority?

WERTHEIM:
So the characteristics I pointed to with respect to Asia are not present in the other regions. So Europe, the United States has a higher interest, and yet Russia has nothing like the military wherewithal to trespass, you know, U.S. vital interests by seizing a large part of prosperous Europe and overturning the European security order. Russia is a bad actor. It is shown through its behavior to be more aggressive. I would say, than China, although it's hard to compare. They're very different countries facing with different interests, et cetera. But, you know, look, Russia has invaded fully Ukraine with an attempt to change the regime. This is a very problematic actor to say the least, and yet it has not even succeeded in taking neighboring Ukraine. The European allies and partners of the United States, excluding Russia, now have a high threat perception of Russia, certainly higher than it was several years ago, and they have enormous economic and demographic advantages combined over Russia were Russia to do something extremely foolish and try to attack a member of NATO.

LINDSAY:
Okay. The Middle East.

WERTHEIM:
In the Middle East, different from Europe, here much lower U.S. vital interests. In the Middle East I would say the United States has an enduring interest in securing the naritime commons, allowing for the flow of energy and other goods from and through the Middle East. That's the main kind of permanent interest the United States has in the region, although one must say it is shared by other countries in the region and by countries outside of the region, including China.

LINDSAY:
But China doesn't seem to be interested in helping to pay the price to maintain those maritime commons. It seems that the Chinese, at least when it comes to the Red Sea, is more interested in free riding off the Americans rather than standing up and contributing.

WERTHEIM:
Indeed. And I think the Chinese would say, "Why would we? First of all, you Americans are causing some of the problems."

LINDSAY:
But I think it's more that , "You can carry our water for us, so go ahead."

WERTHEIM:
Yes. Exactly. So we seem to be in the role of paying the costs to protect the flow of oil out of the region, mainly to Asia and largely to China, and I think Beijing is fine with that. Whether it makes sense for the United States, I have my doubts.

LINDSAY:
Oh. That's a longer more complex argument, but we can put it to the side for the moment.

WERTHEIM:
Right. So enduring U.S. interests in the region, very limited. Keep the sea lanes open, perhaps prevent one power from dominating the Gulf. That could be an outside power like China or Iran or other countries in the region, and prevent terrorist attacks directly against the U.S. homeland.

LINDSAY:
Yeah. I think, Stephen, actually, that observation points to something quite powerful about foreign policy or quite significant in foreign policy that often gets lost. You can have goals where you're trying to prevent something versus having goals where you're trying to create something. And generally speaking, trying to create is a lot harder than to prevent or deter. I want it close, Stephen, by getting to critiques of your argument. Let me offer up two. 

One is that someone could argue that we've actually already tried retrenchment and they would say, look at Europe at the end of the Cold War, 1990. The United States had something on the order of two-hundred-ninety thousand troops. Today we only have sixty-four thousand. Indeed if you were to go back to January of 2022 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the great concern was that NATO was falling apart. The president of France famously said it was "brain-dead," and some people would argue that that encouraged Vladimir Putin. 

Likewise, we had the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. We all know how that went. There are a number of people who argue that that signaled American weakness, a lack of staying power, and that by retrenching, we brought on more crises. In essence, contrary to the argument that you made where primacy sort of encouraged the axis of the aggrieved, our retrenchment or withdrawals brought it about because the other powers could smell, in essence, blood in the water. How would you respond?

WERTHEIM:
Well, those critiques show the, I would say, the unfalsifiable logic of primacy in action. So anytime the United States pulls back, that's the cause of disaster. But the actual U.S. actions that are being undertaken are sins of commission, if you will. Those don't count. Only omitting U.S. power causes a big ruckus politically. I think we've got to get away from that mindset. Now, if you look at the Middle East, overall U.S. troop levels have not changed very much since the end of the Obama administration. You know, we're talking about around fifty thousand forces permanently stationed in the region. The United States continues to be, you know, allied with one set of unsavory actors in the region against another set of unsavory actors in the region. 

So if you look structurally at the Middle East, and yes, I thought it was wise to withdraw from Afghanistan, and if you want to call that some measure of retrenchment, fine. It was. But the core U.S. objectives and military posture in the region hasn't really changed in this decade in which we've seen so much political discussion of "getting out" of the Middle East. So structurally, we've got to make that change and adopt a different goal, not of dominating the Middle East, but of doing, I think, it will take pretty modest actions to defend the U.S. interests that we talked about. Now with respect to Europe, yes, of course, if you judge against Cold War levels, the United States certainly drew down, but it very explicitly wanted to maintain itself as the primary security actor in Europe. Madeleine Albright famously told European states that they shall not duplicate capabilities that NATO has, meaning the U.S. as the primary actor, and shouldn't displace the U.S. role. 

So the United States, you know, wanted to be in charge, and there's a theory of the case that says the United States gets benefits from being the primary security actor in Europe. I just think that the benefits are exceeded by the cost, certainly at this point in time. So I think there the United States to achieve real retrenchment should set a goal of making Europe responsible for the lion's share of European defense and capable of defending itself without U.S. support if it comes to it or with a minimum of U.S. support. And I think there's an understanding on both sides of the Atlantic that as of now, Europe is pretty dependent on the United States being there in the event of a contingency with Russia. And so I think if we were to take two terms of a presidential administration, eight years, we could achieve substantial shift toward the United States, not necessarily leaving NATO, but moving toward a supportive rather than primary role in European security.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Stephen, I want to thank you for coming on. This is obviously a big topic, could have gone on for a lot longer. I want to have you back on at some point with some other people to discuss the future of NATO. But for right now, let me just say thank you for sharing your expertise and insight.

WERTHEIM:
No. This was really fun. Thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.