and critical studies and be university of new south wales canberra and the author of the dragons are the snakes how the rasc lawrence who by the way that i can come into great to talk to you congratulations on your latest book and you for having me it's great to be here now i know that it's not your original idea to refer to adversaries as reptiles and you're more a gift from. bill clinton's percy a director but since you build a narrative around it i see me if i did what he still poignant about it for you i think so just to say this book is a book about military adaptation and it's about how different players adapted by the time and i begin the book at the end of the cold war and as i was casting around for a way to frame what's happened since then i found jim moses comments in his

confirmation hearing extraordinarily apt it's a rather prescient dear of the international security environment of the ninety's but it really comes down to that one phrase where he says was slain a large dragon talking about the soviet union well now we find ourselves in a jungle still with a broader and broader for the snakes and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of and i think what he's trying to say here is that weak states failing states and non-state actors are the principal threat of the $99.00 is a. minute or until it is the total call and. it's also we have categorizing and it's essentially putting legitimate state actors like russia or china into the same group as non-state actors like isis and object * terrorist groups isn't just al just a little bit to give this to folks contrary i mean if you are not with asio or against that. so actually i think he's making the opposite point what he's saying

is there are 2 different characters that are very different from each other they're up here or in your state adversaries russia china perhaps and then there are a completely different category which is the non-state actors what he calls the snakes and my argument in the book is that we've spent basically 20 years of dissing on snakes on only particularly one snake international islamic extremism and the related terrorism and i think that the world that rules he describes in 993 was an accurate description for maybe 10 years but it is out of date now and we now harness if you like mal adapted to the modern environment it's interesting in the sale because i had a chance to interview mr holmes a few years back on the u.s. russia relationship actually struck me as somebody that very. well here and. he was

speaking about russia as a school principal to talk about is behaving student and i thinking even viewed their world as a dram that the united states. has the long run don't you think that batman of war no longer thinks the world at me all the time it's so i actually talk about this quite a lot in the book and i talk about how there was a period let's call it the uni pola you know a period after the. end of the cold war where the u.s. and nato countries and other people sort of wanted russia to become what they described as a normal country right what they meant by normal was a country that was democratic by western standards that was capitalist that was a member of the u.s. led international rules. the best order established by the u.s.

and as i point out in the book for a lot of russians experiencing shock therapy and privatization and harvard economists coming in response to a lot of political kristie in the west foreign policy that's also. yeah i think a lot of people saw that as sort of permanent 2nd class status in a u.s. led system and i think it's pretty clear that russia in particular has been pushing back on that. assumptions that a lot of u.s. policymakers i wouldn't actually put will see at the top of the list there the person. actually on albright who was the secretary of state for president clinton she made a comment in one in 98 when she said look if we have to use force it's because where the united states we stand tall we see further than anybody else and sort of we know what's what's good for everybody well actually can see the number i think

they have gotten my next question if the well is populated by the sneaks and the johns who is the wind down is it and i don't why not i've been signing aren't you know this is a great question and actually i had to add. a note to the to the book to specify what i mean by the west so you know i'm a military analyst i'm not a partisan political person and so when i use the term the west what i mean is 2 things one are geo political entities are generally u.s. led you know western countries naser the western alliance and the u.s. but i also include in that definition countries that fight in the same way that the us fights and it's really a military definition which a couple of years before was his testimony was the basis for the u.s. victory in the 1st gulf war and i kind of argue in the book that that victory

actually. they force pretty much everybody else to adapt and evolve in response to u.s. military dominance and the u.s. perhaps has become a little bit stagnant because it hasn't had to face an adaptive landscape that others have had to deal with each side just a moment ago that in your book here. specifically building our game and around the fact that after $99.00 to wind the west was left to fly be snakes while the dragons leaned out once and watched closely from baghdad how to fly the west and now the last. deal when the black this nation the dragons don't have the same nods of why it will neither russia or china at the lower trying have. adapted western areas secured to captain them a product chatteris they don't belong on airplanes they don't use as bad.

even if they are in a 2 month these 2 very different kinds of action into the same category as a class and they're essentially using the same method the the book talks about dragons and snakes is being very different but what's really different in the book from a lot of the research that you'll see in a lot of the analysis and it was he had attention is that it actually draws on a different body of knowledge from what we normally years so most military and it. is really a subset of business literature what i've done is to draw on which is just from the science of evolutionary theory. looking at adaptive landscapes and the way that a dominant president in an ecosystem creates a landscape that everybody else in that ecosystem has to adapt to and i think it is interesting i don't in any way. or suggest an equivalence between say the russian

federation an islamic state in any way or the opposite actually but what i am saying is that everybody whoever they are whatever the basis for existence is reacting to the in the period after 9 straight to us military dominance and one of the interesting things actually. is that people have started to copy each other and one of the case studies are $22.00 is the co-evolution of israel and hezbollah which is just a very clean example because it's a small geographical area in southern lebanon where these 2 people or 2 groups have been fighting each other for going on 40 years and you see over time they become to resemble each other in terms of their tactics not a new way morally right but in terms of the way that they are. now. in your book here also suggest or least several mechanisms of adaptation away the

evolution of anime including what you call artificial selection that is the west inadvertently building bad at class of terrorism by the way it's got its war on terror and i want to seems on that we're in a bird and maybe the last one deliberately uses militant terrorist groups it was a letter from afghanistan to syria it's it's hard to find a place that wasn't done. if our knight in shining armor wasn't trying to trying to sneak some ice don't you think that you know it would have a detrimental effect on dabbling. so yeah i think one of the points that i make is that it is a bell curve in evolutionary pressure if any so you assume a dominant factor in their ecosystem and then everybody else is adapting to the pressure they're getting from their act if the pressure on them is too low or too

little those that know if the pressure is too high they'll be destroyed and we've seen that with some groups but there's a sort of band in the middle in the middle of the bell curve where you're putting enough pressure on an adversary to force them to adapt and get better but not enough to destroy them and. i'm actually add to any. we not only you can see russia and china as adversaries because i'm not sure that your specific clique now calling these groups adversarial and we know that from history that it wasn't always the case the united states and the west deliberately supported a number of those groups starting from al qaida and many of the militant groups are leaving syria so isn't really about the fight after syria so much as you know like we have an expression here in russia to sort of. give our sneak a bit of space and it's half the light and we warm up needs that was amusing in the

book are not about russia and china they're about non-state actors are the specific example that i point to in the book their experience one is the way that israeli counterterrorism since the ninety's actually created a better cost of palestinian terrorists and my sources for that the surviving heads of shin bet which is the internal at the f.s.a. approval in israel and they are the 1st to say that the way that they approached this problem was as they describe it point specific old tactic snow strategy and that over time they actually bred a more capable adversary i also point to the u.s. i think there the way that we operated in particular in pakistan put enough pressure on the pakistanis how ban to make them danna to crayton into a single or unified organization and take them from a bunch of guerrilla groups in a valley in pakistan to a trans national act by 2010 right now seeing attacks in syria york city and the

argument here is that. i guess we can't return afford to keep succeeding in the way that we have been against these terrorist groups because the more we do here in this is it will either be the threat becomes. well look at polling as they like to say what goes around comes around they have to take a short break and we'll be back in just a few moments. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy you confront a shouldn't let it be an arms race is often very dramatic development only a silly i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very

critical time time to sit down and talk. they can come and blow our brains out at any given time we can't really do anything actually america is the only country in the world where you can kill people outside of war and legally get away with. all of the fire crawls stillbirth you all the trouble here is 3 failed the point it's hollow ploy to k.k.k. exists because america wants it to exist they are the biggest terrorist group to ever operate in this country and they're dead to me they're worse off than the people who destroyed the world trade centers are those crow white. white.

white. welcome back to all the 4 a great ending of cullen the author of the book think dragons and to snakes how the rascal learned to fight the west not take a color regardless of where we are in the world like right now i think we are all taking it and bad by what's happening on the american streets particularly in violent part. all tesing the jogging to the snakes to see i am running away to be about her theory does she think that the americans perhaps have lost sight of because she can see that i'm now coming home to roost. you know that's an interesting 3rd animal to to add into the mix the the other person that i think

described this very well in the not in seventies was the french radical philosopher michel foukara who said look about boomerang effect right there what an empire does overseas eventually comes back to be. applied domestically run russia sort this out of the end of the act the war in afghanistan for example the us or after vietnam and i think we're seeing some of that here the point that i have made in in response to others that have asked this is to say what we've seen across the west not not just the west but particularly in the west is a collapse of confidence in elites and institutions and experts of all times and one subcategory of that is military experts and i think that the 2 things are very closely linked the u.s. sort of lead. rules based world order that people talk about people have started to go in in western countries to take that for granted after about the middle of the

99 and not realizing i think that it actually rested on a very hard power foundation of american military effectiveness which is really a road it since that time and mystical in all due respect and i just. you hear about the world order i'm asking you specifically about the nasty quarter in the united states beach seems to be falling apart and these days a lot of people like quoting abravanel a girl who famously said of the danger that the east of america cannot come from abroad it must bring amongst us that's what he sad and this is not just a rhetorical question it's a question of how you to your priorities where you put your money as a security professional do you mean that actually is of funding priorities spending trillions overseas instead of holland program do you think back choice of priorities has made all where america. actually do make this point in the book i

say that we need to be ferguson much more heavily on resilience and home and get out of the business of. you know what the president trying to sort of endless wars overseas because that's what president obama wanted to do as well as what president bush wanted to do after his 1st term and also point to nato as another major plan nato has been focusing a lot on domestic resiliency that is you know guaranteeing its ability to continue functioning under conditions of chaos for about the last 4 or 5 years and of course we should be honest here and say that one of the main drivers for that is russian aggression in the baltics. crimea if they don't forget about that and pretty much everywhere else around the world now speaking about again the last 6 station in the united states we hear a lot because he's about to funding or diverting resources from the police the

people who are day have to be in town tram urgencies on the street but if you look again on america and be on on you know the the soldiers idling in poland on you know thousands and thousands of american soldiers overseas you know that team at a very huge price tag to the american taxpayers to be precise it was $700000000000.00 just last year alone. do you make america safer you do have the entire u.s. defense budget they're not really your services and actually it is in fact more expensive to bring those troops back to the u.s. than it is to have them overseas in many cases which has been part of the debate in the us about about the u.s. has forces in about 80 countries overseas in terms of bases much of the u.s. international posture relates to the end of the cold war and it is

a live debate and has been for quite a while in the united states about whether. those bases do make america safer or in fact on the other hand whether they draw america into conflicts that it might be bene to stay our friend and that is a you know it's a political debate that's probably as old in the u.s. as this period we're talking about it really started immediately after the end of the cold war last year the united states a state sponsor $114000000000.00 on law enforcement graphic law enforcement saves more than 6 times last than what it sounds overseas and we are now hearing at many many calls and even support from some like just later use at sea diver in that money and put that to the developer and all the disadvantaged neighborhoods again as a security professional deep think that's a good idea because i can think of dealings of ways that dragging this nation media beast get exploited that situation the absence of police or you know they handled

were all security functions to sound militarized brigades. yeah i don't think disease chance in the u.s. of the hannah no military functions to prison functions to the military there's a number of long internationals not not not military militant brigades i'm sure you're hearing about are as inside the admiral barrett may sensually you know force police out that they are now people you know with 8040 seventh's walking the streets and claiming police functions doesn't your azad one of russia's greatest exports i think the point i would make more broadly there is when you take us into if you own just the people you know i'm talking about the age of 47 as a as probably the most widely used. in the world but just a point just to go back to a couple of points you were complaining that the entire u.s. defense budget with the. u.s. policing budget and of course the u.s.

defense budget is not the same as what the u.s. spends a misses that includes all kinds of things including health care for members of the u.s. military and their families the cost of bases domestically a lot of things it's not just the overall and the legal coming in with me me me god damn i'm sick why didn't. the countries combined and i'm not it's clear that a superpower related i did states have to have ample security budget my question was about the choice of priorities because well so russia and china countries are not taking their security lightly but that bad balancing of damascus and anti-aids is a slightly different that they handle it but the basic right yes so the correct comparison i think would be to train their operational budget for wars overseas and the domestic budget in the u.s. which actually was about $1.00 to $1.00 at the height of the war on terror it

wasn't significantly larger overseas and domestically but the other question is whether it's a reasonable comparison right because well the u.s. law enforcement budget does is to aggregate state and local and federal funding there actually 800000 different police forces in the u.s. the question about whether you should. divert funding from public safety to other forms i think is a very valid conversation and i think we're going to see that playing out but i suspect that it's going to be more at the local like at the city level. and at the state level than at the federal level to the point in seattle it's worth mentioning we're talking about a 6 block radius of downtown. which has been in existence for what 48 hours but really going to yourself and speaking about the hundreds of hours since thousands of businesses look at. nearly many many millions of dollars in damages dozens of people killed many more injured we don't have

a precise. 20 you know pretty worrying statistics i mean you can accuse me or you know trying to amplify the fear back you know i have no interest in that i don't know how many. than i am by what's happening there. you know i don't think that is fine anything although i think your coverage has been quite amusing of the. no no i think it's actually the u.s. media that's amplifying a lot of this stuff and one of the issues that we have in the united states is with a very free and independent media we've also got a business model that really rewards. the media turning people against each other so i think that's part of the reason why we're seeing such significant. you know media coverage of it frankly you know it is widespread but it's a hell of a long way from a howler revolution and this morning let me take you. to

a point where you actually begin your book. 1901 because i strongly believe that an individual or a country only as strong as they believe themselves to be and one of the reasons not the only but one of the reasons the soviet union fell apart is big. yes you know people simply lost that national self-confidence they started rejecting all resulting dumb sounds their own history and. every single dollar from that point. do you see anything anything similar happening to the united states right now because for me as a russian who leave through those early 99 in. st petersburg it is a very very familiar picture even though we didn't have much violence you know the sounds of haiti who you are and hating your high and country's history that's

that's pretty similar. well i think it's interesting the concept that i don't really talk about very much in the book but i think it's very relevant here is your tax concept of hyper normalization and you may be familiar with his focus was about the last generation of of the soviets and he talks about how everybody thought that everything was forever until suddenly it wasn't and when the soviet union collapsed people looking back sort of realized that it was kind of inevitable but at the time nobody saw it coming i think president putin ashley made this point very well in a speech that he gave 2 years ago when he talked about how you know it was a geopolitical disaster and how you know hundreds of millions of people went to his bed in one country and work up in you know 25 different countries 25 different countries seeming 50 right and. just crying from from his that it is sure if it was that. in 25th then they maybe something lags and began to collapse of the

soviet union as some of the events in the united states right now even though i do hope. that it will be a disaster for the whole while but there is a major debt ran back in the early handle and it's me experience me. experience a major crease in the private. even more substantial if people had access to guns the last time i challenged american gun sales in the united states increased 80 percent year on year in me so people bought more than 1700000 guns in in the month of may alone bringing the total number of rounds to over 100000000 and the question i want to ask is the same question people ask nuclear scientists you know shamming morganton young people do you think that's a trance or perhaps in your taste and civil war i mean it's

a bit of both right i mean the us is founded on the rights rebellion and the idea that an armed populace that is defend a book that can defend itself against the say it is a guarantee of liberty and that is still a fundamental element of the way the us decisions often the way the us thinks about itself one of the interesting things about this very significant spike in gun purchases that you mentioned is that a lot of it is coming from people on the left and on the progressive ends of u.s. politics who traditionally have not been big donors and i think as this concept of defining miccolis. plays out that's going to be an interesting dynamic because the police are not going to come and save you and you are not able to defend yourself and that makes you very vulnerable to a concert disorder that we've. so that's a very interesting observation i think that kind of liberty that we see play out of

that american history has become too close for comfort even with a liberal of that's pretty striking something is really changing within the united states anyway the terrible problem and fortunately we have to leave it here even though i have many more questions for you thank you for sharing hearing for thanks are so great to talk to you and thank you for watching i hope to syria again next. we are the worlds apart. are. there. in. the world is driven by a dream shaped by phone person. no

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long term effects might not just be absence of benefit but actually that they might be causing long term. protesters set a restaurant ablaze while the police chief quit says another african-american dies at the hands of police on a night in atlanta in the us the main stories of the week plan flights mass of protesters in seattle occupy 6 blocks of the city center declaring it's not on a must as in trump demands lauren order and threatens to send in the army and its combat vehicles are frequently seen joining the fully protesting crease in the prize a us put this question. hello well.