Pipeline mania how the Gulf is trying to bypass Hormuz Econ World

Hey there. So I feel like I need to give you guys a heads up before we get into this episode. I don't want anyone to feel cheated. Because, you know, the show is meant to be about the economic ideas behind the news. But the truth is, for this week's episode, I feel like geography and geopolitics and maps are more important than economics and graphs. You see, I'm taking another look at the economies of the Gulf. That's the six countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC. So Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, as well as Iraq. The US-Iran conflict has really exposed these countries' geographic vulnerability. They're way too reliant on a single choke point to get their oil and gas exports out. That's the Strait of Hormuz, of course. Iran has shown it can close off the Strait. And even if a permanent peace can be worked out between Tehran and Washington, and that's a big if, the truth is, the Hormuz genie is out of the bottle. That's a line I nicked off my colleague, Reuters energy columnist Ron Busseau, by the way. I like the Aladdin reference. But what it means is that future closures are now a real and persistent risk for the Gulf countries, threatening their livelihood, exports of oil and gas. So they're all scrambling to bypass the Strait, developing new export routes if they can. It's creating a gold rush for pipelines. But building that kind of infrastructure is tricky. You have to rely on your neighbours. And that can be tricky in a neighbourhood like the Gulf, where relations can be, well, tricky. So on this week's show, I want to dig into this effort to reroute the Gulf economy. And to do that, I'm going to talk to one of my colleagues who's an expert in the geopolitics of the Gulf. So stay tuned for the conversation. I'm Carmel Crimmins, and this is Reuters Econ World. Every week we go deep on the economic principles and ideas driving the biggest news around the world on this week's show, rerouting the Gulf economy. So to talk us through what to expect next for the Gulf economies, I'm joined by our chief correspondent for Saudi Arabia, Timur Azari. Timur, how is it going? It's good. Nice sunny day here in Riyadh. Nice sunny day here in Ireland, actually, which I can boast of for once. We're all sweating, which is, you know, we're unused to this. Normally we're just wet from the rain. Timur, you moved to Saudi Arabia about nine months ago. Is that right? Yeah. So you were our bureau chief in Iraq. Did you think you were going for a quieter life in Saudi Arabia? I did. You know, over the last decade, I've covered Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. And I definitely thought I was going to come here and work on some slower things. How's that working out for you? Yeah, you know, but at least I'm in my element. Exactly. This is not unfamiliar to you. It's not going back to what it was, Timur, right, for the Gulf economies. It's a new situation for them. Yeah, it really does feel like everything has changed. And I think we're only really starting to come to grips with that now. You know, the fog of war has a way of obscuring things. But I think we're going to see these changes. I mean, the region has fundamentally shifted. It feels like Iran is stronger. It feels like US power, which the region has relied on so much, has been challenged. And the balance of power might even have shifted. And vulnerabilities have been exposed in these economies that previously were marketing themselves as safe havens. So definitely huge shift. And that last point is crucial, right, for the Gulf, right, for these economies. I mean, fundamentally, they can no longer rely on the Strait of Hormuz as a guaranteed entry and exit point for their exports, right? Yeah, for sure. And today we're seeing a race to sort of find alternatives. And so you've got pipeline mania across the region, where you've got all of these different ideas. Obviously, most of them will never see the light. But you know, it's sort of, yeah, it's like a gold rush for pipelines today with everybody seeking alternative routes. And now you even have a place like the UAE saying they want to have zero reliance on Hormuz. They want to be able to completely divert from it. So that is the big thing in the region today, is how to sort of get around that and how to have a failsafe when things go wrong again. The economies of the Gulf have been very badly affected by what's happened, right? So in particular, say, for instance, Qatar has been a big loser, right? Yeah, I mean, what this war has fundamentally shown is that no matter how much these Gulf economies have tried to diversify, I mean, you see, you know, you see Qatar on the shirts of football teams around the world and Emirates, right? They're global connectors. They've got these glass towers. But fundamentally, they still rely on oil. I mean, hydrocarbons, gas, oil are still the fundamental of all of these economies. And that was made clear by this war. And yes, I mean, those who were more affected basically are those who were A, more oil reliant and B, more Hormuz reliant. So if you've got both of those things, like if you're a country like Iraq, where more than 90% of your budget is oil, and you export almost all of that through the state of Hormuz, you're looking at a pretty bad situation. Similar for Qatar, you know, similar to Bahrain, although they have much smaller exports. Then when you go to a country like the UAE, they had a pipeline that allowed them to move some of that around, I think less than half they managed to get through to the Indian Ocean. Saudi Arabia has an east-west pipeline, which was built in the 80s when you had a war at the time. And that proved to be extremely useful. They managed to get most of their oil supply out. And then you have Oman sitting on the edge of the Gulf, which actually did really well in this conflict. And you know, exports are up, its revenues are way up. And so the picture is mixed across the Gulf. And it really boils down to geography, doesn't it, Timur? It's like kind of geography and I suppose infrastructure, right? Like, so, you know, a country like Iraq, a country like Kuwait, they're stuck right in there. They need that straight. Whereas, you know, Saudi Arabia has this east-west pipeline. It has this coastline along the Red Sea that it was really able to Yeah, geography spoke extremely loudly in this war. And, you know, it's sort of a 101 of politics and political science that geography is key. And again, that showed to be very true. So a place like Dubai that marketed itself almost to be outside the Middle East, and, you know, I remember the day the war happened, many influencers were sort of saying, like, we didn't realize that, you know, sort of where we were. Well, the Middle East came crashing into you. And so, yes, geography was extremely important. And now we see the race to sort of circumvent geography, or at least find ways to, you know, to have ways around it. I mean, talk a little bit about the winners and the losers here. I mean, if I can say, I mean, of course, everything is relative. But if we look at the figures, it seems like Qatar is potentially facing a drop in annual output of, you know, nearly 9%. I mean, it's one of the world's biggest exporters of gas, and their facilities were hit hard by the Iranian attacks, right? So that's really put their economy on the back foot. Yes, I mean, Qatar's GDP has swung about 10%. GDP growth has swung about 10%, you know, in the compared to what it was forecasted last year. Now, they do have a massive sovereign wealth fund, and they do have a very small population. So they are able to sort of insulate themselves from that. But still, we have seen sort of, we have seen some, you know, some impact on people in Qatar. I think that bonuses were withheld from some people at Qatar Airways this year. So we do see an impact there. You have a country like Saudi Arabia, which is, you know, very large, and is more able to absorb some of these shocks. But still, it has a huge population, right? I mean, the Saudi population is, the population in Saudi Arabia is more than 30 million. And so you have to deal with a real society there, right? You have to deal with, you know, 10s of millions of people who need money. And Saudi Arabia has been trying to diversify over the years. It has had successes in some place, but it hasn't been so successful in others. And so, you know, it's not just about how much oil you can move, it's about how many people you need to, you need to sort of, you know, fund. And so, yeah, that's one of the ways in which we see sort of the, you know, the different impacts. It doesn't just mean that if you were able to get around Turmos, that you're doing great. Timur, Iraq, which, you know, was your home up until relatively recently, has been particularly badly affected. It has. The question in Iraq is whether they'll be able to pay salaries next month, right? So millions of people in the public sector, almost entirely dependent on oil. And this country, a couple of years ago, when I was there, was looking up, you saw, you know, skyscrapers being built in Baghdad, development happening, infrastructure projects. There is now no money for those projects. It's basically on, you know, surviving at this point. Obviously, the interesting wrinkle there is that Iraq is a pretty major ally of Iran, right? And they weren't even able to get their ships out of Hormuz. So the map has shifted. I mean, today, we have Iraq trying to export oil through Syria, led by a leader who, you know, they don't exactly have great relationships with. But yeah, certainly the situation in Iraq is, I think, the most critical in the region, one to really look out for. And it's summer, temperatures get to about 50 degrees. It's hot. They can't even keep the power on most of the time. So it's kind of a cauldron there that's boiling over. In the early days of the conflict, I mean, there were real questions over whether, you know, Dubai and the other Gulf states, but, you know, particularly Dubai, Qatar, their kind of safe haven status, which they spent years building up, you know, that they're this safe sort of oasis in the Middle East where you can come and, you know, have a vacation, park your capital, buy an apartment. There were real question marks of whether that status was, you know, gone. You know, we were now further down the road. How are things looking? Like, for instance, the Dubai property market, is it showing signs of people selling up? So, I mean, yeah, the UAE definitely, and Dubai particularly, one of the most impacted here with that safe haven status. I would say it's definitely dented. I wouldn't say it's completely shattered. I mean, I spent a month there during the war. It was sort of the last 10 days of the war and then the first ceasefire we had in April. And you definitely felt that the atmosphere was dampened and there definitely were not so many tourists around. I spent a night at a hotel there, a very famous hotel, and it was mostly empty. They were having nice offers for people on staycations there, you know, the kind of thing which you would never receive during the normal season in Dubai. At the same time, a place like Dubai is pretty resilient to these shocks for quite a lot of reasons. One of them being that many of the people who are in Dubai are there because the countries they're from are not safe or they can't make a living there, right? So, whether it's workers from Southeast Asia or the hundreds of thousands from Lebanon, from Syria, from other places who are there, these are people who are not going to move very quickly. So, it's really a sort of 1% of people who I think get a lot of the media noise, people who are seen to be moving to Singapore or to other capitals. But a lot of people do have to stay there and they will stay there. And that's certainly what I hear from my friends there and from others. And Dubai also has a big piggy bank to lean back on. Right, the sovereign wealth funds. I mean, speaking of staycations, that's something that kind of was a sort of a feather in Saudi's cap, right? In the sense that, again, going back to geography and its Red Sea coastline, it has resorts along the Red Sea. So, you did see, you know, domestic demand continue for vacations along that coastline. So, you know, I hear what you're saying in terms of Saudi has a big domestic population that it needs to, you know, meet their requirements, but it also is a source of demand for the economy. So, it can help prop it up, I suppose, in times like this. For sure. And that's certainly what they're banking on. I mean, Saudi Arabia has been in a phase of what they call reprioritising some of the targets under the Vision 2030 plan, right? This is the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plan to diversify the economy away from oil and also to transform society. This vision was launched a decade ago this year, and it had some pretty fantastical projects, things I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard about. The line, you know, that 100-mile steel and metal structure in the desert. There was also the Muqab, which is this cube 400 metres by 400 metres that was, you know, going to be built in Riyadh. These kinds of projects we have reported and also the Saudi government has implicitly confirmed are now no longer going forward. That was the plan before the war. And now, instead of that, they're going to lean into things like logistics, ships arriving in the Red Sea ports, trucking goods across to Kuwait, to the UAE, to Qatar, regional connectivity, and yes, tourism as well, you know, in areas like the Red Sea. So that shift from sort of these fantastical, you know, geometric designs to looking at Saudi's place in the region, you know, one regional financial put it to me as a shift from geometry to geography. And I think that's kind of a shift that we're going to see expedited in the years to come. Okay, quiz time. The United Arab Emirates recently left the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. So can you tell me in which Gulf city was OPEC founded? Was it A, Baghdad, B, Riyadh, or C, Dubai? I'll have the answer for you at the end of the show. Up next, how exactly are the Gulf states planning on diversifying? Timur, you mentioned there's like a like a gold rush for pipelines right now, right in the region, people realise that they need to build pipelines to sort of diversify away from the strait. Saudi has really kind of shown the way it was it was ahead of the game on this with its east-west pipeline. What was the kind of the genesis of that? Well, that was during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s when when Iran was firing on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. So a little bit of a sort of deja vu there. And at the time, Saudi Arabia decided to build this pipeline across the kingdom, more than 1000 kilometres across the desert. And, you know, for many years, for decades, it wasn't very useful until it was. So there was definitely some foresight there. And definitely some Saudi officials were taking a victory lap on this one. So what's everyone else doing? As you say, diversification is the name of the game. So talk us through what looks what are some of the plans that are afoot now? When you look at the UAE, for example, the government has said that they're going to expedite plans to build a second pipeline to Fujairah, which lies outside of the Strait of Hormuz. They want to get that done by 2027, which will double their capacity. And they basically said that they want to have zero reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. So that's a concrete plan we have there. Now, we hear a lot of reports and we speak to officials and analysts to tell you about all kinds of projects from Qatar, from Kuwait. Qatar is a particular one because their exports are mostly gas. So you would need gas pipelines and probably some kind of infrastructure to then turn it into LNG wherever you're exporting it. And for Kuwait as well, you need to build a pipeline through Saudi Arabia all the way to the Red Sea or potentially through Oman. The question there, though, also is, if you're a GCC state like Qatar, do you really want to rely on Saudi Arabia, for example? It was less than a decade ago that Qatar was under an embargo by Saudi Arabia. They cut off relations. So did the UAE. So not all is good and not all has been well in the Gulf House. And you certainly couldn't say that it necessarily would be in the future. So you're really looking at hard choices here. And infrastructure is quite a capital-intensive investment. It takes time to build, and it doesn't really create many jobs either. So it's a bit of a sort of, how can we say, a bit of a dud of an investment until you need it. Right. And, you know, it's not just logistics that these states, these Gulf states are going to be spending money on and pipelines. It's also defence because, as you mentioned, it seems like the balance of power has shifted in the region, right? So these states feel like they need to spend more on their own defence. Certainly. I mean, as one official here put it to me, don't look at anything for the next few years other than logistics and defence. I mean, in Saudi Arabia, you had, I think, eight or nine defence ministers from European countries visit during the war. Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, came twice. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states struck deals with the Ukrainians to get some of their technology, their interceptors, but also to have their teams assist them. They're looking everywhere they can. The Gulf states have long shopping lists for tech. They also are seeking to produce locally where they can and to build other partnerships in the region that can provide some kind of deterrence. Timur, this sounds like a really dumb question, given that when a lot of us think of the Gulf, we think of, you know, massive sovereign wealth funds, loads of money, basically. Where are they going to get the money to fund these pipelines, to fund this defence budget? Are they going to raid their rainy day funds or are they going to raise money on the debt markets? Where are they getting it from? I think we could see a mix of these things. Saudi Arabia's budget has already sort of gone beyond its projected deficit in the first quarter. And the finance ministry, when we spoke to them, attributed that actually to increased spending on defence, right? Yeah. So I think we'll see that. I think we'll also see this kind of unfold in the reprioritisation of where some of the money goes. That's the big kind of like petrodollar question, isn't it, right? Because the tradition has been the Gulf states earn a lot from their, you know, sales of oil and gas and then they invest it overseas, you know. Hello UK Premier League, England's Premier League, right? Exactly. England's Premier League, you know. Gulf. Trump going around the region and getting increasingly large pledges of investment, right, during his tour last year. Computer games. Exactly. So, I think that, you know, some of those investments are strategic and will remain in place. But when we look at some of these fantastical pledges of a trillion dollars, you know, for example, by Saudi Arabia and the US, or I believe it's, you know, between 600 million and that figure by other Gulf states, Qatar, the UAE, there are always questions about how that would look. And I think there will be more questions on that front now. So, I was at a Saudi investment conference in Rome recently and the governor of the public investment fund, the Saudi Second World Fund, sort of went to pains to say, while we are focusing more as a percentage of our investments domestically, the total number will rise, you know, abroad and within Saudi Arabia, right? So, the percentage will go up in Saudi, but as a total, the numbers will increase. So, they definitely want to, you know, assure, you know, markets and global partners that they will continue to, you know, be spenders and continue to sort of grease the wheels of the global economy. But at the same time, we do see some evidence to the contrary. Saudi Arabia has essentially pulled its support for LiveGolf, a golf tournament it put $5 billion into in the past year. A smaller scale, they dropped support for the, I believe it was the Met Opera in New York, the $200 million, and they cited the war there, right? And so, I think we will also see more of this. And frankly, I think, you know, many people from the region, many Saudis, you know, won't be sad to see less spending on some of these projects and more money spent at home. Did it cause resentment? Certainly, you see that a bit in the Twitter sphere. You know, when stories come out, for example, talking about freezes to payments to consultants in the kingdom, or the appointment of more Saudis to senior positions, you get a sort of wave of people online saying, you know, finally, we have Saudis in the senior roles, not these, you know, expensive foreign foreigners. Or yes, finally, we're teaching these consultants a lesson. You know, and consultants definitely are also blamed for some of these fantastical projects we spoke about, right? The situation where you have things like the line where the technology doesn't even exist to build it. And yet, you know, it's proposed, right? So yes, there was resentment. And yes, this sort of like, I think also, you know, people are happy to see some of those excesses, you know, taper off. I mean, you mentioned that some strategic investments will remain, and there certainly have been big pledges to the US and to President Trump, right? Will they remain, do we think? There was always some vagueness around some of those pledges, right? So when we asked about the 1 trillion Saudi pledge into the US economy, we weren't given a direct answer on how exactly that looks, we were told was the entire Saudi economy, it's, you know, it's government plus businesses, etc. There was always some vagueness around that. And I think, you know, it's hard to answer the question, because we weren't really given a clear roadmap of what that looked like. But there was a lot of skepticism, let me say. They've also got big targets, don't they, for like data centres for the AI boom, will they... Across the region, yeah. Yeah, not just Saudi. What about there? Will those, you know, those projects proceed? We certainly haven't seen anything yet, to the contrary. What I have heard is that perhaps rather than having massive centres, you might diversify sort of the placement of them a bit more, build smaller centres, obviously also talk about enhancing the security around them, you can get sort of defences for those. So I don't think the AI dreams are gone. But I think they'll have to re-evaluate sort of some of the plans for that. If you're enjoying this show, why not check out some of Reuters other podcasts. We've got a special one for the 2026 World Cup called Reuters Pitchside. Check it out wherever you watch your podcasts. In the final part of the show, we look at the politics behind these pipeline dreams. There are also plenty of countries who also rely on, you know, inflows from the Gulf. You know, I'm thinking about like Pakistan, Egypt, right, like the Gulf economies have traditionally helped their neighbours with, you know, for strategic reasons with their finances. There's also big remittance flows, right, from workers, you know, from Southeast Asia, maybe working in the Gulf, sending them back home. They're also at risk, right? I mean, we have seen, yeah, we've seen particularly affected by layoffs are people who work in these sectors in the Gulf. And that's particularly on the, you know, the states on the eastern coast of the Gulf, Qatar, the UAE especially. And are people going home? Voluntarily, but some people are being kicked out. There were also some people being kicked out apparently or allegedly on the basis of their religion, whether, you know, they were Shiite Muslims or otherwise. We had some reporting on that at Reuters, particularly on Pakistanis being sent home. So that's a factor. And then in terms of the contributions to states in the region, I think what we've been hearing out of the Gulf for a while sort of is that they are looking more internally. So for example, the UAE, Saudi Arabia have projects in Egypt, you know, sort of resort projects. We were always looking whether there would be more of those. And I think the language we were hearing for a while was like, no, I think we've got what we've got, right? So I think, again, they'll be a bit more strategic with that. At the same time, you will see them step in when it's necessary. So if you look at Pakistan during the war, Saudi Arabia did step up to put several billion dollars in essentially the Pakistani central bank after the UAE withdrew its funds. And, you know, there was a sort of tension in the relationship between Pakistan and the UAE and Saudi Arabia stepped up there to support, you know, a country with which it also has a defence pact. So I think that's kind of illustrative of where we are. Right. And you spoke before about the kind of the geopolitical kind of consequences of what's on, relationships, you know, alliances is changing. The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE is super interesting. I mean, how has that been affected by everything that's happened? Because it's the case, isn't it, that, you know, Saudi Arabia sort of coveted what the UAE had. They want, Saudi wants to become a more sort of diversified, international, outward looking economy. And, you know, during this conflict, Saudi has done better comparatively than the UAE. So how is that rivalry now? Yeah, I mean, certainly the rivalry has been going for years and it has recently gone towards rupture. I think we saw that late last year over Yemen. They were supporting different factions. The UAE backed faction basically, you know, overtook or overran the country and then the Saudis pushed back. You had the unprecedented action of a Saudi airstrike on UAE shipment of military equipment, right? This is between Gulf states for one Gulf state to strike another. I mean, that's massive. And then you have the war, right? And the war takes hold and suddenly they're all threatened. And we're kind of looking at it and we're like, okay, we see calls between the leadership of both countries and there's some analysts to come out and say, oh, look, you know, it took Iran to get, you know, a thaw in this relationship. Right. You know, and soon after we saw the UAE actually exit OPEC, which is essentially a Saudi-led organization. Not only did they exit OPEC, they exited OPEC just as there was a meeting of the GCC in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah, right? So as these leaders are sitting down, the UAE announces it's leaving OPEC. The UAE has of course said there was no politics, this is a sovereign decision, but you don't do that at that moment, you know, without delivering a message. And they took divergent paths in terms of their policy during the war. The UAE was more hawkish. They did want to see, you know, Iran sort of responded to in a more heavy way, whereas Saudi Arabia from the outset didn't want the war, wanted it to end when it began and, you know, thought that really pushed the diplomatic path. And in the end, we did see the UAE sort of come back to that. And so now there's a question, I think, and the big question is, what does this war do to the GCC? I mean, certainly if you were looking at it from the outside, you would say, these are states with pretty similar setups, you know, all bordering each other, facing one enemy. Shouldn't they build alliances, be that military, be that economic, be that other? Isn't this a unifying moment? Exactly. Isn't this a unifying moment? We haven't seen that yet. We have not seen it. We've seen Oman kind of go its own path, as it has done for a long time in terms of its proximity with Iran. We saw the UAE take another path. Obviously, it has normalized relations with Israel. It has planted into that relationship. We see Saudi Arabia meeting more frequently with the Pakistani-Turkey-Egypt coalition than the Arab states. So, I would say so far, it's difficult to see that. And in fact, we have more disorder. Now, there's a question for the smaller states like Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. I mean, probably, you know, for them, it's more likely that they do lean into their strategic depth, which is Saudi Arabia. But for those three players, the UAE, Oman and Saudi, I think it's unlikely we'll see them on the same page anytime soon. And how does that, these sort of geopolitical undercurrents, how did that play into the sort of the rush for pipelines? Like, what's the pipeline politics? Well, that's the big question. So, if you're Qatar and your relations were cut off with the Emirates and Saudi before, do you want to run a pipeline through Saudi? If you're Kuwait, do you want to lean on Saudi Arabia that much? I mean, historically, you've had a pretty good relationship, but who knows what that will be in the future. So, big questions on that front. So, where does this leave the Gulf, Timur? Where does it leave the Gulf? I would say it's not an enviable position. Certainly, everything we've heard here is that they would like to get back to February 27th, the day before the war began. That ship has sailed though, no pun intended, right? It has sailed. And so, now the idea is, well, how do we get to something as close as that and move forward somehow? So, Saudi Arabia has floated the idea of a regional non-aggression pact. In 2023, Saudi Arabia re-established its relationship with Iran, mediated by China, and that was after years of enmity, supporting different parties and conflicts in the region. And what I basically understood is that they are looking to do something like that, but with the region this time. And they even say that eventually, the goal is to have economic links, because that's the best way to sort of ward off war. I mean, look at Europe after the World War and the European Union of Coal and Steel, I believe it was, which was the precursor for the European Union. And so, I think you have similar ideas kind of being floated here. But we're very far from that. I mean, the Saudi foreign minister speaking a few days ago said, we need to first rebuild trust. Since then, we've heard this idea, which we've seen in the MOU of a 300 billion fund for Iran. I think a lot of people in the region are pretty shocked at that. I mean, Gulf states have been attacked, they've suffered billions of dollars of losses. Where is the talk of a compensation fund for the Gulf? And is the Gulf supposed to put up the money for this war, which they didn't want? So a lot of questions there. A big thank you to Timur for his time and insights. You can catch his work on the Reuters app and Reuters.com. Now for that quiz. I asked you in which Gulf city was OPEC founded? Was it A. Baghdad, B. Riyadh or C. Dubai? And the answer is A. Baghdad. Five nations, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela signed an agreement there on September 14, 1960 to create OPEC. The aim was to coordinate petroleum output to influence the price of oil. Today, it includes 12 countries, mainly from the Middle East. This is Reuters' EconWorld. Every week we go deep on the economic principles and ideas driving the biggest news around the world. If you like what you see, subscribe to the show, recommend us to your friends. And if you want to tell us what you thought of this episode, just drop me a line in the comment section of your favourite podcast platform. This episode was produced by Eliza Davis Beard. Sound design and engineering was by Alex Summer and Jonathan Steyers. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretzer. Remember, for all your daily news, just ask your smart speaker for Reuters World News, seven days a week. I'll be back next week.