until the ninety's but it really comes down to that one phrase where he says we slain a large dragon talking about this so he but now we find ourselves in a jungle filled 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 ninety's. but minutes or until it is the total call and. it's also way of categorizing and it's essentially putting legitimate state actors like russia or china into the same group as non-state actors like isis and oddly * terror groups isn't just al just a little bitty divison folk contrary i mean if you are not with ass you're 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 snake and my argument in the book is that we've spent basically 20 years focusing 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and i think that the world that rules he describes in $993.00 was an accurate description for maybe 10 years but it is out of date now and we now harness if you like maladapted to the modern environment it's interesting at the same because i had a chance to interview mr holmes a few years back that 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 he's behaving student and i thinking even viewed

the world as a dram that the united states. needs the time has long gone don't you think that batman of war no longer thinks the world that we all. so i actually talk about this quite a lot in the book and i talk about how there was a period where the goal of the uni polar you know 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 based 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 and rick santorum a lot of people kristie in the west foreign policy that's also. 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 the assumptions that a lot of u.s. policymakers i wouldn't actually put the 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 we're 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 an expression it well is populated by this nice and john nance who is there was is it and i had that white knight in shining armor 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 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. yes them countries naser the western alliance and the us 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 this testimony was the basis for the us victory in the 1st gulf war and i kind of argue in the book that that victory actually force pretty much everybody else to adapt and evolve in response to u.s. military dominance and the us perhaps has become

a little bit stagnant because it hasn't had to face the adaptive landscape that others have had to deal with each side just a moment ago that our in your book here. specifically building our game and around the fact that after 99 to wind the west was left to fly be snakes while the dragons lay down once and watched closely from baghdad how to fly the west and now the last. deal when the black this nation the job wins don't have the same nods of why it will now i'm in russia or china at the lower trying have. adapted western areas killed a captive them a problem chatteris they don't belong on airplanes they don't use terror as that. isn't even fair you know to the very different kinds of action into the same

category and to claim that they're essentially using the same methods 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 are 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 i point to is the 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 in any way morally right but in terms of the way that they are. now. in your book here also suggest or list several mechanisms of adaptation a way the evolution of that i mean including what you call artificial selection that is the west inadvertently build a barrier at class of terrorism by the way it's got its war on terror and i want to

seize on the word inadvertent maybe the last line deliberately uses militant terrorist groups in many war zones i mean from afghanistan to syria it's it's hard to find a place where that wasn't done. if you are not in shining armor wasn't trying to trying to sneak some eyes don't you think that you know it would have a detrimental effect on babbling. so yeah i think one of the points they make is that there's a bell curve in evolutionary pressure if 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 to induct. i'm actually ad taking issue with not only you getting russia and china as adversaries because i'm not sure that's the case but you're specifically now calling those 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 it isn't really about fighting over syria so much as you know like we have an expression here in russia to sort of. give our sneak a bit of space on the chaff. so i mean we are needs that was amusing in the book are not about russia and china they're about non-state actors the a 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 are the surviving heads of shin bet which is the internal of the f.s.b. 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 all tactics no 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 than to make them danna to crayton into a single 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 can we can 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 to go colin 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. some

control for a middle class talk of a night muslim are very hardworking people who want to get ahead that have either have some some health issues or have some of the others trick about luck the whole time joel moon told me his pay for a place to live and missing just a month's rent can get you a victim to gunpoint if anything bad happens to any thing that just throws your budget off slightly. better catch up real quick or you're going to have a judgment of possession against you and get addicted to anyone that's homeless is history like garbage people look at you like a monster or someone bad or you chose to be there most of the time it's not the case see how it is to be in the world's richest country.

welcome back to will the 4th column the owner of the book the dragons and how the brass learns. by the way to take a problem regardless of where we are in the world like right now i think we are all taken and bad by what's happening on the american streets particularly in violent part of. all tesing be jogging to this makes you see i am running away with the about every theory does you think that the americans perhaps have lost sight of big sheep plans that are now coming home to roost. yeah that's an interesting 3rd animal to to add into the mix 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 at 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 us this is to say what we've seen across the west not not just the west and 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 us sort of lead. rules based world order that people talk about people have started particularly 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 eroded since that time. political middle due respect and i don't ask you about the

world order i'm asking you specifically about the matchstick order the united states gets seems to be falling apart and these are not. 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 bad 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 mass extinction in the united states we hear a lot because it'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 sure 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 lot of 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 they not it's a state sponsor $114000000000.00 on law enforcement graphic law enforcement so it's more than 6 times last than what it sounds overseas and we are now hearing at many many calls and even support from some i just made a mess 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 like militarized brigades. yeah i don't it is easy chance in the us of the handing out of military functions to policing functions to the military there's

a number of long international not not not military militant brigades i'm sure you're hearing about are as inside the arab am essentially you know forced 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 our make is more broadly there is when this isn't a fair and just people you know no 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 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 mrs 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 come i mean you would agree

with me that damn i'm sick why didn't. the countries combined it and not it's clearly going to superpower related out of states have to have ample security budget my question was about the choice of priorities because whilst russia and china anacondas are not taking our security lightly but that bad balancing of him after iowa is a slightly different and they have a new face 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 in 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 are 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 seattle which is in existence for what 48 hours but really going to yourself and speaking about the hundreds of hours since thousands of businesses look at. needy 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 revive if you're a bad actor you know i have no interest in that i don't know how many different i

mean. by what's happening there. so i didn't write it 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 evolution and. 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 the. yes you know people simply lost that national self-confidence they started rejecting or resenting bin sounds their own history and. every single. point. do you see anything anything similar happening to be 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 as 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 truman 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 58 right and i'm. just quoting from from his that it is sure if it was that. in 25th in may may be something lags and begin to collapse of the soviet union as some of the events in the united states i value and i do hope that that will be a disaster for the whole while but there is a need to death ran back in the early ninety's and it's me experience russia

experience a major crease in the private. even more substantial if people have access to guns the last time i shall american gun sales in the united states increased 80 percent year on year in me so people block more than 1700000 guns in the month of may alone bringing the total number of. war 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 you see in a 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 there 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 the 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 cons a disorder that we've learned 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 that even with a liberal of that's pretty striking something is really changing within the united states anyway don't tackle problems and forcing that we have to leave it here even though i have many more questions for you thank you for sharing hearing thanks good

to talk to you and thank you for watching i hope to syria again next. we are the ones apart. are. there. are. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then.

is your media a reflection of reality. in a world transformed. what will make you feel safe. isolation or community. are you going the right way or are you being led so. direct. what is true what is faith. in the world corrupted you need to descend. to join us in the depths. or a maybe in the shallows. it's hard to take some from somebody if you know have some to replace. the want to see

a new. i don't use the market in that they take me. there are more serious. so how can i tell you stop selling drugs if we'll hire someone to put the money in a box. they just mean the way it is like it's almost been basically a color speech before the words do you guys know what secret new security positions i've been in that. day were jacked me again. you see people get all their cars and i'll see you coming the hard in this seems like they'll hurry up and run into the house like they don't want to they don't want to talk see her get your mail or anything like that. i just want to go. and do that. just try

read a. good chance someone give me. both just such a restaurant to blaze while the police chief quits as another african-american dies of the hundreds of police turbulent nights in atlanta in the us. the main stories surf the week black blogs lots of protesters in seattle locate by 6 blocks in the city center declaring it. president from demands law and order and threatens to send in the army. has come up vehicles and drones are frequently seen during the george floyd protest the fleecing militarization of the us police comes into question.