Without question, any deterioration in our NATO relationships undermines our military edge, diminishes our global leverage, and weakens our ability to wrangle China… all of which make our nation less safe. The abject disaster that is the war in Iran – recklessly entered without the broad allied military coalition characteristic of several previous U.S.-led Middle East campaigns – has already made this depressingly apparent.
For one, America’s premiere leadership role in NATO has given us the opportunity to have roughly 30 major/persistent U.S. bases, plus numerous additional military sites throughout Europe. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and congressional Republicans seem to think we have these bases in other countries as some sort of favor to them. That’s inaccurate. While it’s true that having the U.S. military around is advantageous for other countries, having a strong military presence in Europe allows the U.S. to not only project power in that region, but also in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Many of our military operations in the Middle East alone have heavily depended on these European bases, and our allies typically allow us wide-ranging access, whether they agree with our mission or not.
Dumping on our allies is also just bad business, because our strong relationships have not only benefited national security but our economy as well. How many times can I say it? We don’t have such an embarrassment of riches in this country that we can just blow everyone else off.
Trump, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth and the rest can rant and rave about Europe all they want, but American military manufacturers make a fortune from NATO members – building drones, Patriot missiles, helicopters, radar systems and our F-35 fighter jets that numerous NATO countries either fly or plan to fly. In fact, Europe accounted for 38 percent of U.S. major-arms exports from 2021 through 2025 – more than any other region in the world. The United States also supplied 58 percent of the major arms imported by European NATO members during that period.
Thanks to our current leadership’s thuggish behavior, however, the European Commission – the main executive body of the European Union (EU) – has stepped up efforts to increase the share of European weaponry in its arsenals and procurement contracts to effectively replace those of the United States to any extent possible.
In response – in what must be one of the most hypocritical statements of the year – the Trump/Vance administration actually had the nerve to say: “The United States strongly opposes any changes to the Directive that would limit U.S. industry’s ability to support or otherwise participate in EU member state national defense procurements. Protectionist and exclusionary policies that strong-arm American companies out of the market – when Europe’s largest defense firms continue to greatly benefit from market access in the United States – are the wrong course of action.” Do these guys even hear themselves?
Also, the EU outlined a plan in early June 2026 to expand its data centers, semiconductors and cloud computing capabilities with the goal of reducing its dependence on U.S. technology. The plan put forth by the 27 nations goes as far as excluding some American technology providers from sensitive government and critical-infrastructure cloud contracts if they fail the EU’s sovereignty and security requirements.
On the economic front, the European Union is part of the world’s largest bilateral trade and investment relationship with the United States, supporting millions of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2025, U.S.–EU trade in goods and services totaled approximately $1.6 trillion – about $4.4 billion every day – while goods trade alone reached $1.0 trillion and services trade reached $542.4 billion. The relationship is especially important for U.S. services: in 2025, the United States ran a $107.3 billion services trade surplus with the EU, an increase of 10.8 percent over 2024. This was offset by a $220.3 billion U.S. goods trade deficit with the EU, itself a 6.9 percent improvement from 2024.
This means our European allies can hurt us economically – big time. Even before Donald Trump’s first Greenland tirade, the EU had compiled a list of U.S. goods worth 93 billion euro – $107 billion – that they can hit us with in retaliatory tariffs (the list was made in 2025 in response to President Trump’s Trade War 2.0).
Another thing the EU devised is the “Anti-Coercion Instrument” (ACI) – sometimes referred to as their trade “bazooka” – that allows the European Commission to target almost any U.S. goods or services in Europe with an assortment of barriers and restrictions. These can include restrictions on investment, the lifting of intellectual property protections, the suspension of business licenses, and straight-up bans on market access to the Eurozone.
While Donald Trump remains convinced (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary) that his authoritarian, tough guy approach to trade will bring other countries (with their tails between their legs) to the table, that’s just not the world we live in anymore. All his clumsy attempts at hardball have managed to do is further alienate our allies, endanger our access to global markets, wreck our supply chains, and embolden our number one competitor.
So, now – huge surprise – it looks like our allies have decided to move on without us.… just like they did when, in the first week of his first presidency, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
TPP was an ambitious free trade agreement among twelve Asia-Pacific countries – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnan – designed to eliminate trade barriers and establish new market-oriented trade rules.
At the time, these twelve countries represented nearly 40 percent of the global economy. U.S. trade with TPP countries totaled more than $1.5 trillion in merchandise in 2015 and more than $276 billion in services in 2014. Annual U.S. foreign direct investment flowing into TPP countries totaled $61 billion in 2014, while TPP countries invested nearly $59 billion in the United States that year.
TPP was offering greater access to markets for service providers, and addressed tariffs on goods and services, nondiscrimination rules, investor protections, e-commerce rules, intellectual property rights, worker’s rights, environmental safety and stewardship, dispute resolution mechanisms, and restrictions on state-owned enterprises. The agreement also significantly lowered tariffs and other trade barriers on a wide range of goods. The agreement would have eliminated more than 18,000 tariffs that other TPP countries imposed on U.S. products alone.
After grueling negotiations, TPP was signed by the twelve member countries on February 4, 2016. But the agreement became a political lightning rod during the 2016 presidential campaign, with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton opposing it. Facing uncertain support in Congress, the Obama administration never submitted implementing legislation for a vote, and the United States therefore never ratified the agreement.
At the time, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank, estimated that TPP would “increase annual real incomes in the U.S. by $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, and annual exports by $357 billion, or 9.1 percent of exports, over baseline projections by 2030, when the agreement is nearly fully implemented.”
So, after all that hard work, President Trump sure showed the world who was boss when he pulled us out of the deal on January 23, 2017, just three days after his first inauguration. Wow, what a gutsy move! “America First,” baby!
Surely there was loud weeping and gnashing of teeth by the other eleven countries when we left, right? All eleven probably went into a fetal position because they had nowhere else to turn!!
Ummm… nope. Not even close. The other countries just carried right on without us, signing a new deal called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), an agreement designed to expand trade and investment, lower trade barriers and consumer costs, and increase economic growth and employment among its members. The United Kingdom joined in 2024, becoming its 12th member. China, Taiwan, Ecuador and Ukraine have formally applied to join; Uruguay is now in accession negotiations; and Costa Rica substantially concluded its accession negotiations in May 2026. Indonesia, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates entered preparatory accession discussions in June 2026, while South Korea and Thailand have also expressed interest in joining.
So, CPTPP didn’t just survive America’s departure – it has continued expanding. An additional bonus was that our exit from TPP gave China even more room to amplify what was already becoming a dominant presence in Asia, which is the last thing we needed to be doing at the time and a mistake we are paying for more and more by the day. We showed them all right!
President Trump made a huge mistake when he pulled us out of TPP, a fact he seemed to realize pretty quickly. One year after our withdrawal, he indicated during a television interview that he would be willing to get back in the deal and, in April 2018, he officially ordered his top administration officials to investigate rejoining the partnership.
Two years later, in a stunning lack of self-awareness, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan William Hagerty simply could not believe the nerve of Japan to forge an economic partnership agreement with the European Union and their nerve to continue with the CPTPP, which by that time had taken effect.
“By implementing these agreements before addressing our bilateral trade relationship,” he said, “Japan is effectively redistributing market share away from its strongest ally, the United States... Given the strength of our security and diplomatic relationships, our view is that we should have an equally strong economic relationship.”
We're sorry, who has what nerve? He had to be kidding. Sorry boys, that’s just not the way real life works. Has Mr. Hagerty never heard the phrase what’s good for the goose is good for the gander? Our guess is that Japan decided that, since the United States decided to turn inward and not be a cooperative world player, they should just Make Japan Great Again! We bet that would look great on a red hat!
After that delightful experience, one would think that Donald Trump & Co. would have gained some much-needed wisdom and insight but … nope… eight years later, it all started again.
But this time the world was ready. Immediately after President Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico on January 20, 2025 – his very first day back in office – then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed he and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to work together to fight back against his nonsense.
< Donald Trump has always had an inexplicable trade grudge with Canada, a beef that was still going strong in August 2026 when Canada suspended trade negotiations; which triggered President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods; which caused Prime Minister Mark Carney to say he would retaliate “dollar for dollar.” Trump’s long-standing grievance is bizarre because Canada is actually one of our best trading partners. Personally, we're convinced that Donald’s main problem with Canada initially started in his first term because then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was younger, smarter, thinner and looks uber hot in a suit, but we can’t prove it. >
President Sheinbaum also weighed in, saying Mexico’s response would include both tariff and nontariff measures, including an import-substitution program called “Plan Mexico” as well as a potential “carousel retaliation,” which would regularly but randomly rotate the U.S. products that were subject to Trump’s tariffs with products from other countries. This savvy move injected uncertainty into many American export sectors like agriculture.
South Korea’s president dispatched special envoys to Australia and Germany to discuss defense and trade issues, with plans to send delegations to several others. Brazil and India announced plans to increase their bilateral trade by 70 percent, to $20 billion, and Brazil and Mexico began deepening their relationship.
In January 2025, Indonesia became a full member of BRICS, the grouping of major emerging economies whose first leaders’ summit was held in 2009. It joined Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia was also invited to join and is listed as a member by BRICS itself, although Riyadh has stopped short of formally confirming its accession. The expanded BRICS represents nearly half the world’s population and roughly 40 percent of global economic output when measured by purchasing-power parity. Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan also became BRICS “partner countries” in 2025, with Vietnam subsequently joining them.
In May 2025, the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) –Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – met in Malaysia with the six Middle Eastern nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Timor-Leste, then an observer, was poised to become ASEAN’s eleventh member, with ASEAN leaders agreeing at their May summit to admit it formally in October 2025. The ASEAN-GCC summit sought to deepen economic ties between the two regions, including exploring a potential free-trade agreement. Meanwhile, India, which already maintains a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and extensive economic and political cooperation with ASEAN, was moving to deepen that relationship under a new 2026–2030 Plan of Action. Canada, an ASEAN Strategic Partner since 2023, was likewise developing a new 2026–2030 Plan of Action covering political-security, economic and socio-cultural cooperation.
Britain and the Gulf Cooperation Council concluded their free-trade negotiations on May 20, 2026. The agreement reduces tariffs and nontariff barriers and expands market access for goods, services and investment between Britain and one of the wealthiest regional blocs in the world. The UK government estimates that once fully implemented, the tariff reductions alone will eliminate nearly $800 million annually in duties on current UK exports to the GCC.
Within weeks after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory – well before he was even sworn in – the European Union reached a new political pact with Switzerland to deepen economic ties, update existing trade deals, and establish new cooperation agreements.
A couple of weeks after that, the EU struck a deal to increase trade with Mexico before finalizing an economic partnership with Indonesia. They then started negotiating trade deals with Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand and moved to build closer ties with India, South Africa, and other countries across South America and Asia. In May 2025, Britain and the EU announced a “reset” of post-Brexit relations and in June 2025, the EU and Canada struck a defense agreement, expanding their military cooperation.
In June 2026, the European Commission formally sent the EU–Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement forward for authorization to sign, and on January 9, 2026, EU countries approved a trade deal with the South American Mercosur nations, bringing together a market of more than 700 million consumers accounting for a quarter of global gross domestic product. Mercosur’s full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia, and the associated states are Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Suriname (Venezuela has been suspended).
At the signing, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, “We choose fair trade over tariffs. We choose a productive long-term partnership over isolation. We will join forces like never before, because we believe that this is the best way to make our people and our countries prosper.” Must be nice.
Two weeks later, India and the European Union finalized what Ursula von der Leyen called “the mother of all deals” – a free-trade agreement that is the largest such pact by population ever. The deal links almost two billion consumers and eliminates or reduces tariffs for over 90 percent of EU goods, potentially saving the EU around $4.8 billion a year. The agreement is expected to double the total value of goods that the EU exports to India within the next six years.
Of the deal, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that this was “the biggest free-trade agreement by India so far” and that the deal demonstrated India’s and Europe’s “shared commitment to democracy and rule of law.”
India, clearly on a roll, wasn’t even close to finished. After remarkably fast negotiations, India and New Zealand signed their new free-trade agreement on April 27, 2026. The agreement provides duty-free access for all Indian exports to New Zealand, while India will cut or eliminate tariffs on about 95 percent of New Zealand exports. New Zealand also committed to facilitating $20 billion of investment into India over 15 years.
THEN, India signed an agreement with the United Kingdom that entered into force on July 15, 2026 – wherein India substantially reduces tariffs on British goods, while the UK provides greatly expanded duty-free access to Indian exports. Britain estimates the agreement could increase bilateral trade by approximately $35 billion annually in the long run and increase UK GDP by about $6.5 billion annually. THEN, India and Oman’s Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement entered into force June 1, 2026. The deal gives Indian products duty-free access across most of Oman’s tariff lines and expands access for services and investment.
But once again, the biggest winner – by far – in Donald Trump’s Trade War 2.0 is Xi Jinping, because when the United States acts crazy, all roads lead to China.
The first time around, China helped facilitate the signing of the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), an agreement between the ten ASEAN nations and China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. Signed in 2020 after eight years of negotiations, RCEP became the world’s largest free-trade agreement by the combined GDP of its members, encompassing roughly 30 percent of global economic output and around 2.2 billion people – nearly 30 percent of the world's population.
Now, the haphazard, incompetent trade moves by the Trump/Vance administration have played right into Xi Jinping’s hand for a second time, helping him leverage the global goodwill he has cultivated for decades.
After President Trump’s January 2026 broadside against Europe, Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a new “strategic partnership” that will lead to “considerable” Chinese investment in Canada’s auto sector within three years. In a remarkable statement, Carney said, “In terms of the way that our relationship has progressed in recent months, with China, it is more predictable” – meaning, China is now more predictable than the United States of America. Wow.
Also in January, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer headed to Beijing, the first visit by a UK prime minister in eight years, and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said that he wants a “full-scale restoration” of ties with China. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo also traveled to Beijing and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a trip there as well. French President Emmanuel Macron would have probably announced a trip, but he had already been there in December.
China and Switzerland completed negotiations on a substantial expansion of their existing free-trade agreement on August 20, 2026, which expands rules covering services, digital trade, trade facilitation, competition and economic cooperation. Under the new terms, 99.8 percent of current Swiss exports will be able to enter China duty-free, compared with only about half under the previous arrangement.
After President Trump insulted Colombia with his Trade War 2.0 threats – calling Colombian President Gustavo Petro a “lunatic who has many mental problems” and “an illegal drug leader” before hitting him with sanctions – China’s ambassador to Colombia posted on X: “We are at the best moment in our relations between China and Colombia, which we’ve had for 45 years.”
Thanks to both Trump administrations, China’s trade with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has exploded. China is now LAC’s second-largest trading partner, behind the United States, with bilateral merchandise trade reaching roughly $510 billion in 2024. In South America, however, China has become the largest trading partner overall and is the number one trading partner of several of the region’s major economies, including Brazil, Chile and Peru.
In March 2026, President Trump met with leaders from across Latin America and the Caribbean for his inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit. The meeting was yet another attempt by the Trump/Vance administration to telegraph their supposed geopolitical primacy in the Western Hemisphere.
Although members of the Trump Bro-Club – like Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – showed up, leaders of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia (which combined make-up over half of the region’s GDP) were no-shows. This could be that, since Chinese banks have given over $120 billion in loans to LAC nations, they can keep their options open, or it could be because the Trump/Vance administration’s heavy-handed economic coercion approach isn’t sitting well with them.
Even those who showed up are playing both sides. Javier Milei – who gladly accepted $20 billion from the Trump/Vance administration and who has done things his buddy Trump wants, like rejecting an invite to join BRICS and blocking Chinese projects – has nevertheless overseen a remarkable expansion of economic ties with China. Argentine exports to China surged 125 percent year-on-year, and China even overtook Brazil as Argentina's largest trading partner during certain months. At the same time, Milei’s government has maintained important Chinese investments and extended Argentina’s multibillion-dollar currency-swap arrangement with Beijing.
Then there is China’s blossoming relationship with Mexico. After investing $140 million in a Nuevo León factory producing electric aerial work platforms, China’s Lingong Machinery Group (LGMG), a major construction-machinery manufacturer, announced plans with strategic partners and suppliers for a much larger industrial development in the state, with total investment estimated at $5 billion and the potential to create roughly 7,000 jobs. Nuevo León’s proximity to the United States and access to the broader North American market were major attractions. In 2024, BYD, China’s leading electric-vehicle manufacturer, sent a delegation to the Mexican state of Jalisco to explore establishing an EV manufacturing plant there.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – with a combined GDP of roughly $3.8 trillion – is China’s largest trading partner, while China is ASEAN’s largest external trading partner. According to Chinese statistics, bilateral trade reached $982.3 billion in 2024, roughly twice the value of U.S.-ASEAN merchandise trade. On October 28, 2025, ASEAN and China signed the ACFTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol, the latest expansion of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area, which was originally established in 2002 and fully implemented in 2010. The new agreement expands cooperation into areas including the digital and green economies and strengthens supply-chain connectivity.
China is the largest trading partner of both Japan and South Korea. Chinese manufacturers have also made startling headway into Southeast Asian consumer markets. In 2024, roughly 90 percent of battery-electric vehicles sold in Indonesia were produced by Chinese automakers, while Chinese automakers have increasingly challenged the longstanding dominance of Japanese brands in markets such as Thailand and Malaysia. Chinese smartphone manufacturers have likewise captured a large share of Southeast Asia’s smartphone market, collectively far outselling Apple’s iPhones in unit shipments.
In April 2025, Xi Jinping embarked on a three-nation tour of Southeast Asia – to Cambodia, Malysia and Vietnam – where he signed over 100 agreements addressing infrastructure, technology, education and health.
Between 2018 and 2022, Chinese investment in Vietnam roughly doubled, while Chinese exports to Vietnam surged 75 percent, reaching $147 billion. The relationship has continued to deepen. In 2025, investors from mainland China and Hong Kong together registered roughly $8.14 billion in pledged foreign direct investment in the strategically important Southeast Asian country. Meanwhile, U.S. registered investment in Vietnam fell from roughly $700 million in 2022 to $500 million in 2023. In 2024, U.S. registered investment fell further, to just $287 million – a 54 percent decline from the previous year – leaving the United States 12th among sources of registered foreign investment in Vietnam.
This is not good. It’s impossible to overstate how critical the manufacturing hub along the South China Sea is to global supply chain.
< The importance of the U.S. maintaining a strong relationship with Vietnam goes way beyond trade. An October 2025 investigative report from The New York Times revealed that Vietnam and Russia have strengthened their military and political relationship. The report found that Vietnam is secretly buying arms from Russia in defiance of sanctions, using third-party intermediaries to hide payments.
The NYT also reports that Vietnamese officials are frustrated by the Trump/Vance administration’s foreign aid cuts and unpredictable tariff games – developments that are pushing them farther away from Washington and even closer to Moscow. Plus, a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi – as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City – have infuriated Vietnamese residents because their leaders are granting the Trump family more generous concessions than anyone in Vietnam, however connected, receives. >
Then there is India. On January 20, 2025, India’s foreign minister was seated in the front row for President Trump’s second inauguration, a symbol of our special relationship with the world’s most populous democratic country.
Eight months later, after the Trump/Vance administration slapped the highest tariff rate in the world on India, a photo emerged of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The photo was taken in September 2025 at the Tianjin summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was attended by 20 foreign leaders, including the leaders of Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Belarus and Central Asian and Caucasus states (although Kim Jong Un didn’t attend the summit, he joined the group later for the infamous Chinese military parade).
In response to the alarming photo, President Trump posted: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” – as if he had nothing to do with it.
As of late August 2026, the comprehensive U.S.–India Free Trade Agreement that was negotiated in February is still not completed, but regardless of what happens with it, major damage has already been done … which may be one of the most outrageously irresponsible things the Trump/Vance administration has done yet regarding one of our closest allies.
For one, India is absolutely critical to our Indo-Pacific national security strategy. China’s aggressive moves in the Indian Ocean make it imperative that the United States and India have even more bilateral defense cooperation, certainly not less (more on this in a few minutes). India is also our best economic hedge against China. It is a vital geopolitical counterweight, offering supply chain diversification and a massive workforce with expanding manufacturing capabilities.
Before Donald Trump’s reelection, many American and multinational companies had begun planning major investments in India as part of what is known as “China Plus One” – a strategy in which companies reduce their dependence on China by adding manufacturing and sourcing capacity in other countries. India emerged as one of the leading beneficiaries. But in August 2025, the Trump/Vance administration levied tariffs reaching 50 percent on many Indian exports to the United States, including an additional 25 percent penalty tied to India’s purchases of Russian oil. The tariffs weakened India’s cost advantage for U.S.-bound manufacturing and threatened to undercut some of the progress it had made in attracting supply chains away from China.
What happened next was entirely predictable because the minute the United States turned into a bully and started acting shady and shifty, India had little choice but to turn to Beijing. Prime Minister Modi immediately booked passage to China, his first trip there in seven years.
China and India have an extremely complicated relationship, complete with soldiers facing off across their disputed borders in the Himalayas. That said, in classic Phase Two fashion, Xi Jinping is eager to cooperate with Prime Minister Modi, at least economically, because once again he recognizes what Donald Trump and JD Vance obviously don’t: India is a massive market with 1.47 billion customers.
Measured at current exchange rates, India is among the world’s five largest economies and is rapidly moving up the rankings as it closes the gap with Japan and Germany. The Indian government has explicitly set its sights on becoming the world’s third-largest economy. On a purchasing-power-parity basis, India has already achieved that ranking and accounts for roughly 8–10 percent of global economic output.
Think about it this way: middle-income countries are home to roughly 75 percent of the world’s population and account for nearly one-third of global GDP. During Donald Trump’s first term, researchers at the Brookings Institution – a nonprofit think tank that conducts research in the social sciences – reported that “just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, lived in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered ‘middle class’ or ‘rich’.” The middle class, they concluded, had already become the largest source of consumer demand in the global economy. Their projections at the time illustrated where that market was heading: by 2030, they estimated India’s middle-class consumption market could reach $12.3 trillion in 2011 purchasing-power-parity dollars, approaching the projected $15.9 trillion U.S. middle-class market.