It's been a longstanding agreement but we've never managed to actually get it done. So it was sort of a sore point, an open issue.

If we are to bring the alliance to where it needs to be in the 21st century, then we need to dramatically accelerate, across the board, to make up for the time lost to indecision, indifference and procrastination.

The idea here is we resolve hopefully in one fell swoop all or almost all of the longstanding issues that we have and sort of inhibited the alliance going forward.

Our intention is to formally accept this specific proposal later this week by including it as one of several realignment actions to be jointly recommended in our bilateral report.

Hopefully, with the decisions and discussions that are going on today ... we will have a comprehensive implementation plan to present to our leadership either later this week or early next week.