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 toda