commission commissioner john cos. >> itch peaching the commissioner of the irs service. >> we will view the senior congressional debate. join us tonight at 8:00 on c-span for congress this fall. >> book recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. >> i just finished the new brad ford thriller. he does great work with thrillers and my daughter baby sits for him in nashville. my kindle has quite a few science fiction books on it. i am reading time travel and science fiction and a couple classic science fiction just depending on how much time i get to read. generally it is just on the airplane.

>> 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 non-fiction. 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 europe's shadow: two cold wars and a 30-year journey

through romania and beyond." c-span: 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. c-span: why a book about romania? >> guest: because i have had a 30 -- a third of a century long obsession with romania because it's where, essentially in a spiritual sense, i started my professional life, where i realized i was finally doing

what i wanted to do. c-span: 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. c-span: 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 central-eastern 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 one-way 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. c-span: can't let it pass, gotta ask you about being a member of the israeli defense force, the idf, because you weren't 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 didn't want to spend my life there. i had wanterlust -- wanderlust. i wanted to see many other things. c-span: w45d you do in the idf? >> guest: nothing particularly

interesting, guarding, things like that. c-span: how long? >> guest: a year. 12 months. c-span: and the fact that you're 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. c-span: in the united states. >> guest: yes. c-span: where were you born? >> guest: i was born in new york city in 1952. c-span: 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 long-range future may be right, but the next 20 or 30 years in a significant part of the globe may be very bloody. it's not because of poverty so much. people don't go to war because they're poor. it's because these places are rapidly changing and developing. and developing is always environment, uneven -- violent, uneven and painful and cruel. c-span: that was in 1996. how'd 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 near-term future exactly, because so many decisions are made in the disfiguring whirlwind of human passions and individual actions. journalists also cannot predict the long-range 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 what's 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, that's the best that a journalist can do. c-span: back in 1996 you told us you'd been to 75 countries. how many more since then? >> guest: i've stopped counting. i've stopped counting. but i i never really covered latin america much. i never really covered many of the pacific islands much. there are places i've never been. i've 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. c-span: you told us that you travel alone. why? >> guest: because you want to be face to face with the landscape. you don't want your ideas and

reactions conditioned by somebody with you. because once with somebody is with you, you'll enter into a relationship with hem, and that will act -- with them, and that will act as a block to the landscape. you don't want to have your ideas and opinions conditioned by others. however, you can't 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. c-span: 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. c-span: 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 romania's 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. c-span: you mentioned something, i want to run some video from 1989, and we'll watch it a little bit and have you explain what this is. >> guest: okay. [background sounds] [speaking in native tongue]

c-span: 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. c-span: 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. c-span: 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 gorbachev-style, reformed communism up until the mid '90s when full democracy finally came to romania. c-span: and the middle of you writing this book back in november, there'd been some major corruption trials, and some people say it's the most corruption in the world over in romania. can you explain that? >> guest: yeah, it's actually a good thing, because it's 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. what's 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 corruption-free as humanly possible. c-span: who had they been trying and convicting? what kind of people in romania? >> guest: people in government often, people in business. i'm not sure about, you know, the exact people. but basically what's going on is the lesson that the old way of doing things will no longer work, because we're going to go after you. c-span: 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. c-span: 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 don't know anything about romania? what's the point? >> guest: because it's 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, romanian-speaking 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. c-span: what's 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 sub-saharan 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 we're there for you no matter what, please be there for us. c-span: 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 didn't 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, open-minded 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. c-span: by the way, how did they kill the couple? >> guest: they executed them by firing squad. c-span: you met with his son? >> guest: no, i never actually met with his son -- c-span: oh, you didn't. 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. c-span: 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. it's, i think it's about the size of oregon or, you know, about size of oregon or something. but what's 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 it's sort of the poland of the balkans in terms of its geopolitical importance. c-span: how did it change between '81 and 2013? >> guest: in '81 the colors were black and white, and in 2013 it's 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 semi-starved its own people. 2013 bucharest is admit oring, it's a mishmash -- glittering, it's a mishmash. it's got a lot of bad new architecture, some good architecture. beautiful plexiglas vancouver-like 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 hasn't been built upon. it's a mishmash. but it's -- but that's very humanizing in a way, because it doesn't have some archetypal, utopian belief. c-span: 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. c-span: we have some video of his death. how did he die, who killed him? that's him there. >> guest: he was executed -- c-span: you'll see that in a minute. >> guest: all right, okay. c-span: 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 pro-soviet/romanian regime that

was installed in the wake of stalin's victory this eastern europe in world war ii. c-span: we're watching that not only did they shoot him, then they came up with a pistol and shot him again and again. >> guest: yeah. c-span: 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 german-occupied to beland -- c-span: 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 can't be sure. then romania switched sides in the war. see, romania's 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 it's also a place where

there's 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 i'm telescoping history because the region changed and many times. c-span: 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 hitler's 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 it's 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 can't 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 wasn't 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 shouldn't did yet another book about this country. there is so much here. why don't i write about what i really know of out and are upset with deeply and just keep it to that even if it's less marketable so to speak. c-span: of those 16 books, which ones are the bestsellers? >> guest: balkans of course.

c-span: 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. c-span: 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. c-span: 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. it's very self generated. it's very personal. it's a book is something that you should have to write.

it shouldn't 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 what's a good topic that would shell in the marketplace? books are hard to write. you don't know how they will be received. you don't know what the news cycle will be when the book is published. i had a book published in the week after the presidential 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 didn't 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.

c-span: 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 country's? >> 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 mid-1990 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 there's 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 isn't 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. it's precisely because of that that we had to take action. it's only the darkest human landscape where intervention is ever contemplated even in the first place. it was a direct connection. c-span: 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. c-span: that was not a full-time job? >> guest: no, that's just a board to meet several times a year. c-span: who appointed you? >> guest: secretary of defense -- defense robert gates. c-span: 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. c-span: 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 that's a fair description of it. c-span: 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. i'm now a senior fellow at the center for new american security which is a boutique security defense oriented nonpartisan

think tank. c-span: 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. c-span: 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. c-span: 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. c-span: here's 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. c-span: 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 putin's intelligence services had said don't worry about ukraine, we can handle it. it turned out that they couldn't 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. c-span: when you were here for our three are in-depth 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 let's 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 doesn't begin the moment he landed in a country on a plane. it's been going on for a long time beforehand and not only do i read about the history but i also. about relevant political philosophy. c-span: a journalist, a reporter. in today's 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 it's in africa, where there's in east asia, where there's 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 it's building institutions that matter. c-span: 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. c-span: average or sit in being a journalist by you -- like you? >> guest: no. c-span: 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 i'm sympathetic. c-span: 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: it's close. deep down i'm a conservative but a conservative and many people say this, a real pillar of bin laden conservatism is edmund burke. burke believed that evolution's are bad and evolutions in the right direction are good because evolutions don't 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. i'm suspicious of overnight change. often leads to unintended consequences. c-span: back to your book on romania when was the first time in history the romanians voted

for their leader's? >> 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 anti-semitic evidence and to what was relatively speaking the cosmopolitanism, the tolerance and the humanism of the defunct habsburg empire. c-span: how good of a democracy is that now? >> guest: it's as good as can be expected. it has a 4% economic growth. last year and i think it leads europe in that regard. it's got a government middle of the world and on ideological technocrats. it's 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. mania's relationship with nato? >> guest: romania has good relations with nato. it's unambiguous. romania wants nato to be as small as possible. c-span: 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 i'd 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. c-span: 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. c-span: were you able to use the music while you are traveling around romania? >> guest: i thought of music a few times. here and there you'll see a reference to it. and i don't listen to music. i don't have an ipod. i don't travel like that. i want to hear the noises too. it's part of traveling. if you go to café as i did in one town in romania and moldova the part of moldova that's inside romania and there was a café of young people and there were all these what i consider

the most horrible music i've ever heard but that was part of the experience. c-span: how close is romania to russia? >> guest: it has a long border with ukraine which was the former soviet union so it doesn't have the border with russia per se but former soviet russia and ukraine. c-span: 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. c-span: for anybody for that matter decided they wanted to go

to romania on vacation and they had never been there and they didn't speak the language, what would it be like for them? >> guest: they would have a wonderful time. c-span: what about being this language? to these at there? >> guest: english is widespread in romania particularly since 1989. that's 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 mountain's 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 it's lovely and it is visited that it's not yet on the international tourist map so you wanting counter hundreds upon

hundreds of tourists. c-span: how are they commendations? >> guest: commendations? >> guest: via commendations are better and better. there boutiques and hotels throughout the most outlying countryside. c-span: 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. c-span: i'm sorry. >> guest: what is consciousness at its best? it's 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 it's ultimately all about unity in one form or another. c-span: 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 you'll 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, sub-saharan africa before the french came to sub-saharan africa. there was rolling into jenna's african empires.

so this is a book that is a laboratory in one country. c-span: 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. c-span: next but? >> guest: next book is about a sequel to the revenge of geography dealing with american geography and its relationship to foreign policy. c-span: when will it be published? >> guest: probably roughly speaking year from now. c-span: are guesses then robert kaplan in the book is called "in europe's shadow" two cold wars

and a thirty-year journey through romania and beyond. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you.

>> good afternoon.