Transcripts For CSPAN2 QA 20160901

Have you always been a reader . Yes, i have always been a reader. Science fiction has always been ply favorite followed by the political thriller genre. Does it help you in your work here . It it helps me unwind. There is a lot of reading to be done here but it is all bills and reports and nonfiction. One is the redistribution by the university of chicago professor who dives into the incentives that show americans not to work too hard. The other is the scandal of money by george guilder. He is from wealth and poverty. It deals with the Federal Reserve is right now making the wealthier People Better off but the policies over the last six years in particular have kind of hurt the average guy. This week on q a, Robert Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan discusses his book, in europes shadow two cold wars and a 30year journey through romania and beyond. Cspan you start in the proto logging by talking about books prologue by talking about books. Why . Guest because i think the ultimate goal of travel is to create a bibliography; beautiful landscapes, intriguing land landscapes lead you to books about them to explain their past in history. And those books lead you to other books and other books, often very obscure. So we travel in order to learn, and we can only learn by reed by reading. So the relationship between travel and good books is inextricable. Cspan why a book about romania . Guest because i have had a 30 a third of a century long obsession with romania because its where, essentially in a spiritual sense, i started my professional life, where i realized i was finally doing what i wanted to do. Cspan be 1973, your first visit . Guest my first visit was in 1973. I traveled as a backpacker after college through all the countries of the warsaw pact, staying in Youth Hostels from east germany down to bulgaria. And with that journey what that journey taught me was we were reading in the newspapers about all these countries were the same. They were all gray slaves of the soviet union. But what i found in 1973 was they were all extremely different from each other because even communism could not erase their ethnic histories, their geographies, their distinct cultures. But that trip in 1973 did not really start my obsession with romania. That happened later. Cspan when . Host it happened in 1981. In the fall. I was getting out of the Israeli Defense forces. I was in jerusalem. I found a book in a bookstore, an obscure book a seemingly obscure book by a canadian author, a canadian expert on central east europe, gordon skilling, and he talked about all the countries of the region the way i had experienced it back in 1973. So an idea came into my mind that i would travel again through centralEastern Europe, but israel only had direct air flights to bucharest, the capital of romania, because that was the only country it had formal diplomatic relations with. So i bought a oneway ticket. I had a little money. I had a few phone numbers. And i left the hothouse, glittering colors of the middle east for sort of the black and white engraving of the shiverly november balkans, kind of. And i did it because in the middle east there were hundreds upon hundreds of journalists all covering the same story which was a subsidiary of the cold war. When i got to romania, there was almost no journalist covering the main story of the second half of the 20th century which was the cold war itself. Cspan cant let it pass, gotta ask you about being a member of the Israeli Defense force, the idf, because you werent born in israel. Explain that and how long were you in the force . Guest i traveled through the arab countries of the middle east in the mid 1970s. I arrived in israel with very little money. I liked the country immensely, i stayed, i was drafted into the military. But over time i did not my liking for israel did not dissipate, but i didnt want to spend my life there. I had wanterlust wanderlust. I wanted to see many other things. Cspan w45d you do in the idf . Guest nothing particularly interesting, guarding, things like that. Cspan how long . Guest a year. 12 months. Cspan and the fact that youre jewish means you could serve automatically, had the dual citizenship . Guest yes, exactly. And then i left israel in 1981, and later on i, i renounced my citizenship in order to serve in government, do other things. Cspan in the United States. Guest yes. Cspan where were you born . Guest i was born in new york city in 1952. Cspan you were here for book notes back in 1996, and i want to run a little clip from that and see what you think about your prediction back then. Guest okay. For most of the people in the world during much of the time, things have gradually been getting better. One of the messages of this book is that for a Critical Mass of third world inhabitants, in more countries than we can deal with, things are getting going to be very tumultuous and perhaps violent over next 20 or 30 years. The longrange future may be right, but the next 20 or 30 years in a significant part of the globe may be very bloody. Its not because of poverty so much. People dont go to war because theyre poor. Its because these places are rapidly changing and developing. And developing is always environment, uneven violent, uneven and painful and cruel. Cspan that was in 1996. Howd you do . Guest i think i did fairly well. I like the way i looked better then than now. [laughter] obviously. But, look, a journalist cannot predict the nearterm future exactly, because so many decisions are made in the disfiguring whirlwind of human passions and individual actions. Journalists also cannot predict the longrange future because who knows what the world will be in 50 or 75 years. The best a journalist can do, and this is what i try to do, is to make us a bit less surprised and shocked by whats going to happen in the near term. In the middle term future, i should say. Five years. You know, if a news story or an essay or a book makes you a bit less surprised about developments in a given country five, ten years out, thats the best that a journalist can do. Cspan back in 1996 you told us youd been to 75 countries. How many more since then . Guest ive stopped counting. Ive stopped counting. But i i never really covered latin america much. I never really covered many of the Pacific Islands much. There are places ive never been. Ive never been to st. Petersburg, to my great regret. And be there are other places too. And so there are, you know, there are holes there. Cspan you told us that you travel alone. Why . Guest because you want to be face to face with the landscape. You dont want your ideas and reactions conditioned by somebody with you. Because once with somebody is with you, youll enter into a relationship with hem, and that will act with them, and that will act as a block to the landscape. You dont want to have your ideas and opinions conditioned by others. However, you cant completely travel alone. Often you need a translator, you need someone to make, you know, arrangements for you especially as i get older, i use that more and more. But the idea, the goal is to be as alone as you possibly can be. Cspan 1973 you were in romania a little bit, 1981, how long did you stay . Guest i stayed ten days, and those were the ten days that kind of changed, you know, that changed me, made me think differently about a lot of things. From there i went to bulgaria, to kosovo, to which was then part of yugoslavia. I went to the kosovo, serbian and croatian parts of yugoslavia, into hungary, into what was then czechoslovakia and east germany. Cspan how many times have you been there since 1981 . Guest i went back for a long report and trips to romaine romania in 1982, in 1983, in 1984. After 1984 i published an essay in the new republic called romanias gymnastics. And i got, i was no learning given a visa no longer given a vis a vis after visa after that. So i did not go back until 1990, four months after the 1989 revolution. And i spent two months in the country in 1990 traveling all over. Then i was back for another month in 1998 for a book, weesward to [inaudible] and then i went back for an extended visit in 2013. I made four visits, four extended visits in 2013 and 2014 for this book. Cspan you mentioned something, i want to run some video from 1989, and well watch it a little bit and have you explain what this is. Guest okay. [background sounds] [speaking in native tongue] cspan december 21, 1989. Who was he . Guest nikolai. [applause] chess cue who had been in power since 1965. He replaced the previous communist dictator who brought stalinism to romania. He was absolutely he was a brutal, a brutal tyrant. What he did along with his wife elena was to add the p north korean element to row main january stalinism in terms of the pageantry, the total personality cult. The president and his wife went to north korea, and most visitors to north korea are shocked. They were impressed. They said we can do this in romania, literally. And they tried to do this. And that was the moment, what you just showed, when the crowd turned against the dictator. And the facade of dictatorship collapsed. And from then on, a helicopter took him from the top of that building to an area north of bucharest, and it was there a few days later where, when he was executed. Cspan and his wife . Guest his wife was executed. The decision to execute him was made by several what you could call reformed communists who had fallen into disfavor. Among them was a man who had worked, who was a stalinist in his youth, who worked for the dictator until he broke with him in 1987. And i asked him about the decision to have the couple executed. He died a few years ago, and he told me, well, yeah, we decided that they both had to be executed or else they could have gathered the security around them, the intelligence service, and we might have had bloodshed going on weeks and months. We had to stop, you know, stop the chaos. So hen i asked then i asked the naive journalist question, i said, but did you have to execute her too, and he looked at me like i was a fool, and he said it was almost more important to execute her than him. Cspan what impact did that assassination have on romania . Guest first of all, it calmed things down, it quieted things. People knew that they had turned a corner. The violence stopped. Order was restored under officially a democracy, but in fact, it was reformed communists who took power. And they ruled in what you would call officially a democracy but really a gorbachevstyle, reformed communism up until the mid 90s when full democracy finally came to romania. Cspan and the middle of you writing this book back in november, thered been some major corruption trials, and some people say its the most corruption in the world over in romania. Can you explain that . Guest yeah, its actually a good thing, because its being exposed. Romania was endemically an extremely corrupt company because it had weak institutions that were very everything was based on bribe and double dealing. And what this shows is this is nothing new. Whats happening is that the romanian population has grown up and become far more sophisticated and is demanding careen government. Clean government. It is its number one demand. And an ethnic sax son german who was elected president of romania in the last year or so, he made he was elected on pledge that i will move us even closer to the west, and i will develop clean institutions as corruptionfree as humanly possible. Cspan who had they been trying and convicting . What kind of people in romania . Guest people in government often, people in business. Im not sure about, you know, the exact people. But basically whats going on is the lesson that the old way of doing things will no longer work, because were going to go after you. Cspan when did you finish this book . Guest i finished writing this book at the very end of 2014 which was about 14, 15 months ago. Cspan what do you want somebody wandering in a bookstore, seeing your book to know about this book, why you would pick it up and read it if you dont know anything about romania . Whats the point . Guest because its a deep vertical dive. So many of my former books were horizontal studies, many countries across a whole region. The ends of the earth, covering a minimum of six countries. Here i look at one country in depth9, and i use it depth, and i use it to explore great themes. I think great themes; the holocaust, the cold war, the challenge of vladimir putin. Remember, romanianspeaking moldova and romania have a longer border with ukraine than even poland has. The challenge and also about empire. Because romania is where the austrian Habsburg Empire overlapped with the tsarist russian empire, the soviet empire, it overlapped with the turkish empire and the byzantine empire. So to study romania is to study the legacy of empires. Cspan whats the relationship now and also back in 89 with this country, the United States, with romania . Guest in 1989 romania was a pariah state. Now, when i published that article in 1984, romanian gymnastics, what i was reacting to was the fact that there was a mini news cycle in the summer of 1984 at the los angeles olympics when the dictator sent a team to compete while the rest of soviet bloc boycotted the olympics. So he was a hero to uninformed americans for doing that. The purpose of the article was to disabuse them of the notion, that he actually ran the most oppressive state in the soviet bloc. After the revolution especially into the 1990s, romania felt very insecure like poland, other countries. And it wanted it trusted the United States and the pentagon much more than nato per se in brussels. So it had to prove that it was a loyal ally to the u. S. So romania sent troops not only to afghanistan, but also to iraq, the iraq war, and it sent troops to several u. S. Military exercises in Subsaharan Africa. Wherever the u. S. Wanted allies, the romanians came along as did the poles and the georgians and others. Because they wanted to say were there for you no matter what, please be there for us. Cspan what was our relationship with. [applause] chess cue . Guest throughout the cold war we tried to use him because this is very subtle. Romania always was different than its neighbors. It didnt speak a slavic language, it spoke a latin language. It always had much worse relations with russia, historically speaking, than the other countries of the warsaw pact save for poland perhaps. So that he was, you know, sort of in a vague way following a romanian tradition of separating himself a bit from the soviet union by having what was called at the time a maverick Foreign Policy where, for instance, he sent athletes to the los angeles to olympics, he had diplomatic relations with israel, that sort of stuff. But it was very superficial. He was no threat to the soviet union, because he ran the most lockdown stalinist state in the bloc. Gorbachev was especially annoyed because he was all about liberal, openminded communism. And so gorbachev the romanian revolution that killed the dictator in december 1989, that may have been the only one of the revolutions that fall that gorbachev actually liked. Cspan by the way, how did they kill the couple . Guest they executed them by firing squad. Cspan you met with his son . Guest no, i never actually met with his son cspan oh, you didnt. What happened to his son after his parents were killed . Guest his son, his son, i think, went into exile and died a few years later. I think of cirrhosis of the liver or some disease related to his excess be drinking. Cspan how big is romania . Guest romania is about 23 million people. Poland, i think, is in the high 30 bes or 40 million people, somewhere around that. Its, i think its about the size of oregon or, you know, about size of oregon or something. But whats important about your question is romania is the demographic and geographical organizing principle of southEastern Europe to the same extent that poland is to northEastern Europe. So its sort of the poland of the balkans in terms of its geopolitical importance. Cspan how did it change between 81 and 2013 . Guest in 81 the colors were black and white, and in 2013 its multicolored. In 81 it made a profound, deep, shocking impression on me because of the long bread lines, literally bread lines. People waiting in line more stale bread, you know . A mile long. It was the only communist regime in Eastern Europe that semistarved its own people. 2013 bucharest is admit oring, its a mishmash glittering, its a mishmash. Its got a lot of bad new architecture, some good architecture. Beautiful plexiglas vancouverlike buildings right next to vacant lots because, you know, this is part of the corruption. The property regime, who owns what after communism has still not been resolved in many places. So you have vacant lots because nobody can legally determine who the owner is, so it hasnt been built upon. Its a mishmash. But its but thats very humanizing in a way, because it doesnt have some archetypal, utopian belief. Cspan back in world war ii, what did what country was it allied with . Guest it was allied with nazi germany. It was a very, it was romania had oil. The fields near bucharest. And hitler needed the oil. And romania had a dictator, very interesting man who was, he was a militarist, he was nationalist, he was a realist, he was an authoritarian. He was not strictly a fascist because he purged fascists from his regime early on. But what his rule showed was that even realism, militarism, authoritarianism taken a bit too far can lead to hundreds of thousands of murders. Cspan we have some video of his death. How did he die, who killed him . Thats him there. Guest he was executed cspan youll see that in a minute. Guest all right, okay. Cspan go ahead. Guest he was executed by firing squad after being convicted of war crimes in 1946 at a prison fairly close to bucharest. He was tried and convicted by, essentially a prosoviet romanian regime that was installed in the wake of stalins victory this Eastern Europe in world war ii. Cspan were watching that not only did they shoot him, then they came up with a pistol and shot him again and again. Guest yeah. Cspan was that video available what year did he die . Guest he died in 1946. Antonescue met with hitler ten times. From the very beginning of his dictatorship to the very end, his last meeting with hitler was in 1944. And he came back from that meeting very depressed because he knew well, he started being depressed in 43 after stalingrad where he realized for the first time that, hey, the nazis may not win the war, and where does that leave me . Because up million that time he had been up until that time he had been murdering hundreds of thousands of jews in what is today moldova and east of romania in what used to be the soviet union. Even as he was but after 43 he changed. He kept hundreds of thousands of jews from inside romania proper from going to the gas chambers in germanoccupied to beland cspan why . Guest it was what scholars have called opportunistic mercy. He saw that hitler may not win the war, and he started to change his behavior, you know . Be you know, as a way to survive himself. But when he came back from that last meeting with hitler, he knew that his days were numbered, and he was overthrown in a palace coup in i believe it was august 44. I cant be sure. Then romania switched sides in the war. See, romanias interesting. It was the only country, even more so than italy, that actually switched sides in the midst of world war ii. Hundreds of thousands of romanian troops fought ferociously for hitler at stalingrad, and by the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of romanian troops were fighting ferociously against hitler in order to regain transsill vain ya from hungary. A connotative many good things and its also a place where theres a large minority of Ethnic Hungarians because that region had been part of greater hungary up until romania got it back at the end of world war ii. Actually im telescoping history because the region changed and many times. Cspan how many were murdered in the holocaust from romania . Basically, here is the record. Over 300,000 jewish were murdered by troops with the pure credit fingerprints all over it. In their regions outside romania occupied by the Romanian Army you know in the midst of hitlers operation barbarossa the captured the soviet union, the captured the soviet union. Romanian troops got as far as odessa, the black sea port in the middle of the black sea. I believe the number was 375,000 jews but its in the book specifically. All of this is the work gets trailblazing scholars who really said that allied solidified the records in the remaining archives after 1989, dead 90s and after. Inside romania proper there were about 300,000 jews who he kept from the gas chamber but nevertheless there were 10, 15,000 or so jews killed by the troops and the population inside romania, the most famous in 1941. Break out if i cant write this is your 16th book. When did you decide you wanted to do this book . Guest i had been thinking about doing a book on romania for years and years but i wasnt sure. At first sight that you know what i will do, i will do a project. I will start in the black sea of romania and i will travel to estonia and the baltic sea and do a travel book award used to be called by a polish war leader latin for between this ease. And so i started off in romania. I went to romania in the spring of 2013 but i got so swept up in it i said wait a minute, maybe i shouldnt did yet another book about this country. There is so much here. Why dont i write about what i really know of out and are upset with deeply and just keep it to that even if its less marketable so to speak. Cspan of those 16 books, which ones are the bestsellers . Guest balkans of course. Cspan said coors . Guest because it sold so far close to 40,000 copies worldwide in many languages. The end of the earth to a lesser extent, warrior politics, the coming anarchy, the revenge of geography. Cspan and your relationship with your publisher. Have you had the same publisher . Guest unfortunate that random house has published my last 12 to 16 books. Cspan how does that work works is that your idea on a book or is it their idea on a book . Guest i used to in the very beginning talk over ideas with editors. As i got older i kept it more and more to myself. Its very self generated. Its very personal. Its a book is something that you should have to write. It shouldnt be something, going to write a book because i can get a lot of speaking fees or i can make a lot of money on this and whats a good topic that would shell in the marketplace . Books are hard to write. You dont know how they will be received. You dont know what the news cycle will be when the book is published. I had a book published in the week after the president ial elections in 2000, and you know what happened then, the florida recount so all my interviews were publicity interviews were canceled and stuff. The book did well over time but it didnt have that initial burst so because of all these unknowable you are better off just writing something that you are possessed with that you have to do. That way you will have no regrets. Write to which book had the most impact on politics . Guest probably balkans ghost in a way that i did not want to did not intend. Cspan what happened . Guest what happened was i started covering the balkans and in their early part of the book i talk about balkan ghosts and its effect that i started covering the balkans in 1981 and i went back to romania every year until 84 when i was persona non grata but i kept going back to yugoslavia every year through 1989 every year and 1980s. Guest let me stop you for just a second. The ball can include the countrys . Guest the balkans initially include romania, bulgaria, the former yugoslavia, southEastern Europe. In other words what used to be called turkey in europe, the former Ottoman Empire with some overlapping of the former austrian empire. So in 1989 i was deep in the midst of writing this book balkan ghosts and i finished it at the very beginning. I finished it in mid1990 and the yugoslav crisis was still in the future so to speak. I had a long piece in the Atlantic Monthly before the berlin wall even fell in 1989 saying that the balkans will shape the end of the century in and a new sense just like vietnam and afghanistan did in earlier decades. Then the berlin wall fell and the media was writing heavily about the new concept in Central Europe which had emerged by old new trendy concert. I said the Central Europe, i wrote this in the wall street journal. I said Central Europe is the latest concept that the media is beating to death but theres another concept that will arise because of great instability called the balkans which the media will soon discover and in that article i described the breakup of yugoslavia. I also was not fatalistic or deterministic because i wrote this. If yugoslavia called the reformist notions on slovenia and others we could avoid this. It has yet to be determined is possible to abbreviate it. Balkan ghosts was published in march 1993, same month a published date long piece in Readers Digest which then had a circulation of 14 billion. Where i said we have to do something. We have to stop this. The result was that the Clinton Administration took the book, reportedly and used it as an excuse not to intervene in 1993 and did not intervene until 1995. If i had been arguing for intervention from 1993 in public form and you can say isnt that a contradiction to balkan ghosts which paints such a depressing dark feel of the balkans and how unsolvable they are, i would say no, not at all. Its precisely because of that that we had to take action. Its only the darkest human landscape where intervention is ever contemplated even in the first place. It was a direct connection. Cspan when was the first time he got involved in the government . Guest i only had a very brief superficial experience in the government. I served on the policy board for short period of time. Cspan that was not a fulltime job . Guest no, thats just a board to meet several times a year. Cspan who appointed you . Guest secretary of defense defense robert gates. Cspan to do that . Guest i thought it would a great opportunity to learn and more importantly to serve. I learned an enormous amount. I learned more from the lord than the board learned for me but the meanings are very insightful. Cspan you have also had other jobs besides writing and since you were here in 1996 what other jobs have you done . Guest i was a fellow at the new America Foundation when that inc. Tank for started it was basically a foundation that attempted to be bipartisan or an nonpartisan and tried to bring journalism into the think tank world. I think thats a fair description of it. Cspan who runs it now . Guest i believe anne murray slaughter is now the director. You know i have stayed writing for the atlantic periodically since 1985 actually. Im now a senior fellow at the center for new American Security which is a boutique Security Defense oriented nonpartisan think tank. Cspan who runs that . Guest the ceo is Michele Flournoy this undersecretary of defense for policy. Richard fontaine former adviser to senator john mccain and richard also served in the National Security council. Cspan what do they expect of you . Guest they expect you to write books and papers and articles about defense and Security Policy and tour mentor younger fellows and i have also been, i wrote a column for two years for a geopolitical risk Company Based in austin texas. Cspan i want to show you george freeman. He worked for him for how long . Guest for two years or wrote a column. I found a weekly column was not for me. Cspan heres some video from 2014. Kaplan said recently the russian danger is not the military but the subversive action. These actions happening in romania traditionally the russians had operated through subversion and Robert Kaplan we disagreed on the success. I look it via crane and i see a massive intelligence failure by the russians. They calculate about was going to happen in their intelligence of what was going to happen in kiev was bad. In this region there is a sense that they russians can do anything. But in fact the history of the past 30 or 40 years of the russian intelligence has been failure after failure after failure. Cspan what we think . Guest george is always insightful and europe. What i would say is there are few people who have been more insightful and prescient on europe than george has been. George saw the coming European Union economic crisis years in advance. He is always worth listening to and he is right. It was imparted intelligence failure because putins Intelligence Services had said dont worry about ukraine, we can handle it. It turned out that they couldnt and the anna kovacic regime failed but i think he downplays the power of russia in a country like romania says you can do a lot, you can do a lot through buying media through third parties, through subversion, through intelligence operations, through building a network of Natural Gas Pipelines high in central and Eastern Europe to russian natural gas. Romania is a bit stronger in that regard because romania is unique in that it has oil and natural gas of its own to a degree that other countries between estonia and bulgaria do not. Cspan when you were here for our three are indepth program back in 2005 the first question led to this kind of an answer because you talked about journalism and what you think it is in your book or if lets watch. Robert capania been described as a World Affairs expert, an anthropologist, travel journalists and a realist. How do you describe yourself . Guest i am a reporter who not only reads about the area and history where i report from because history doesnt begin the moment he landed in a country on a plane. Its been going on for a long time beforehand and not only do i read about the history but i also. About relevant political philosophy. Cspan a journalist, a reporter. In todays age what do you think they were journalist is a reporter is and how close can you get to the government and the revolving door and all the talk about and still stay independent . Guest i think what a journalist needs to be as someone who goes out reporting things that are important of which up until then are unreported or not reported in off about and what a journalist has to do whether its in africa, where theres in east asia, where theres covering nigeria or the south china sea, is to not only go there and report and develop sources but also. Seriously about the history of area, about the geography of the area and about as i said back then the relevant political philosophy and let me just give you an idea about that. If you read hobbes, hobbes is unfairly maligned as a depressing philosopher. Hobbes was actually in some ways an optimistic philosopher because he believed in rescuing the chaos of the dark ages by creating a strong state and a strong state can lead to a better life for people. He called that strong state aired revised on so hobbes had answers not just depressing descriptions and thoughts. And one of the points that hobbes makes is that between the difference between good and bad, good men and bad men and between what he calls the just and the unjust can only be decided if there is some coercive force. In other words the United States is not in chaos. Has the government. It has a complex legal system. You get into a car accident and drivers exchange their insurance information. It has electricity. Has agriculture, all this monday and stuff because there is order, because there is a government. First you need order. Order comes before freedom and in Foreign Policy you could argue interests come before values or values can only follow provided you have interests. But without order there is chaos and there is no justice for anybody at any point. That is what i kept in mind reporting from africa for instance which is through the bureaucratic institutional order. Anyplace can hold an election but its building institutions that matter. Cspan how many countries that he actually lived in . Guest i have lived in israel as we talked about earlier. I live in the berkshires. My wife and i have been there from us 20 years. When you were here in 1996 your son was 11. What happened to your son . E. Is 31. He is married really have a granddaughter. He works for Morgan Stanley in boston. Cspan average or sit in being a journalist by you like you . Guest no. Cspan you right in the middle of the book you say i am liberal in the 19th century sense. Actually i apologize. I wondered if that reflected on what your politics are . Guest from the profile i write im sympathetic. Cspan let me. What you said about him. John stuart mill the 20th century liberal philosophers such as karl popper Friedrich Hayek and ludovic von mises. Is that you . Guest its close. Deep down im a conservative but a conservative and many people say this, a real pillar of bin laden conservatism is edmund burke. Burke believed that evolutions are bad and evolutions in the right direction are good because evolutions dont solve anything. All they do is create another form of authoritarianism often. Burke was horrified at the french revolution as was Edward Gibbon who wrote the declining fall of the roman empire. Burke believed in gradual systemic change and that is what i believe in. Im suspicious of overnight change. Often leads to unintended consequences. Cspan back to your book on romania when was the first time in history the romanians voted for their leaders . I was there really. It was the spring of 1990. Chauchescu had been dead for five months and they held a National Election will wear a long time, and this was elected president and this began the air of where romania was officially a democracy and the people running the country were essentially communists but not stalinist take as the judge ask use. Civil liberties advanced that there was no capitalist development but that was the first time that i can remember in our lifetime where romanians went to the polls and actually voted democracy in that region between world war i and broke for two it produced often chaotic extremely corrupt often uni ethnic antisemitic evidence and to what was relatively speaking the cosmopolitanism, the tolerance and the humanism of the defunct Habsburg Empire. Cspan how good of a democracy is that now . Guest its as good as can be expected. It has a 4 economic growth. Last year and i think it leads europe in that regard. Its got a government middle of the world and on ideological technocrats. Its got a president Clouse Johannes the former mayor of who is an ethnic saxon german. The ethnic romanians elected and ethnic saxon german oppressed under the chauchescu era. He was underfunded in his campaign and was considered a dark force than they elected him basically for his message and his message was an even closer relations with the west and moving forward to developing a government, government institutions that are clean and transparent and impersonal. Manias relationship with nato . Guest romania has good relations with nato. Its unambiguous. Romania wants nato to be as small as possible. Cspan are they a member . Guest yes, they been a member since early 2000, and forget the year exact way. But there are two things here and id just like to go back to amend to johannes. Wonder the understated reasons that we have never said openly why johannes was elected was romania had a very happy experience with another ethnic german, king carol the first who moved romania from 1866 to 1914 and he built the modern romanian state. He built the institution. As they became corrupt and abuse that he started them from scratch and romanians associate that role with a strong role that built the modern bureaucratic apparatus and there was this big hope that here we have another ethnic german who perhaps can take this to the next stage. Cspan in the middle of this book from time to time you have kind of wandered off, looked at the mountains, and you bring up music. You bring up voc, he bring up stravinsky and you bring up hayek. Why . Guest because i am a lover of Classical Music, and extreme lover of Classical Music particularly chamber music, particularly baroque Classical Music and other travel writers will write about food. They will go on about food because they are chefs and cooks than and they are good at that. I love music so it naturally comes to mind. Cspan were you able to use the music while you are traveling around romania . Guest i thought of music a few times. Here and there youll see a reference to it. And i dont listen to music. I dont have an ipod. I dont travel like that. I want to hear the noises too. Its part of traveling. If you go to cafe as i did in one town in romania and moldova the part of moldova thats inside romania and there was a cafe of young people and there were all these what i consider the most horrible music ive ever heard but that was part of the experience. Cspan how close is romania to russia . Guest it has a long border with ukraine which was the former soviet union so it doesnt have the border with russia per se but former soviet russia and ukraine. Cspan what are the other other major country supporter romania . Guest we will go clockwise from the black sea. It borders the black sea. Has a long border with bulgaria, separated at the danube river and then it borders the former yugoslavia, then it borders hungary and then finally it has a border with ukraine and finally moldova which is formerly a socialist republic inside the soviet union. Cspan for anybody for that matter decided they wanted to go to romania on vacation and they had never been there and they didnt speak the language, what would it be like for them . Guest they would have a wonderful time. Cspan what about being this language . To these at there . Guest english is widespread in romania particularly since 1989. Thats the language to know and most young people know, have a working knowledge of english. They would fly to bucharest and they could rent a car and drive the beginning of transylvania and go all through the carpathian mountains which are absolutely lovely and drive through the painted monasteries to the northeast, the painted monasteries abu covina to the northwest to the wooden churches its lovely and it is visited that its not yet on the International Tourist map so you wanting counter hundreds upon hundreds of tourists. Cspan how are they commendations . Guest commendations . Guest via commendations are better and better. There boutiques and hotels throughout the most outlying countryside. Cspan you write this on page 214 new book, the ultimate purpose of human existence is to appreciate beauty and beauty requires the spiritual element and an intimidation of another world. Guest an intimation of another world. Cspan im sorry. Guest what is consciousness at its best . Its to appreciate beauty, beautiful art and a beautiful landscape and that is the tie to the spiritual. Other writers have written the beauty is a call to moral action by contemplating a beautiful work of art can energize someone to take moral action and some personal sphere or political sphere or something but its ultimately all about unity in one form or another. Cspan go back to what we talked about in the beginning. If you were talking to a College Professor who is teaching government, Political Science and hear she said to you why would i want my students to read this book, what would you tell tell them as the recent . Guest i would say if you read this book youll have a better understanding of the holocaust, the cold war, of putin of history and history is essentially imperial. For most of history people have been governed by one form of empire or another, not just in the west but throughout central asia, china, Subsaharan Africa before the french came to Subsaharan Africa. There was rolling into jennas african empires. So this is a book that is a laboratory in one country. Cspan last question, was dracula the ann taylor real person . Guest flood the ann taylor was a real person who filed the turks and was very ferocious anger rule and of course the writer brandt stoke still car in the late 19th century used it very vaguely for his gothic, for his dark gothic novel. They figure we are familiar with it but the myth of dracula is nonsense essentially. Cspan next but . Guest next book is about a sequel to the revenge of geography dealing with american geography and its relationship to Foreign Policy. Cspan when will it be published . Guest probably roughly speaking year from now. Cspan are guesses then Robert Kaplan in the book is called in europes shadow two cold wars and a thirtyyear journey through romania and beyond. Thank you very much. Guest thank you. Good afternoon