Geopolitics & Empire

Geopolitics & Empire · Christian Costamagna: The ‘Special War’ Doctrine to Destroy Yugoslavia #78 Dr. Christian Costamagna brings to light new research on the Yugoslav “Special War” describing the foreign interference and destabilization of Yugoslavia in the 1980s which exacerbated the existing internal crises and led to the bloodiest war in Europe since WWII. Show Notes Archival Documents Reveal Late-Yugoslav Strategic Thinking on the ‘Special War’ http://www.balkanalysis.com/blog/2018/02/05/archival-documents-reveal-late-yugoslav-strategic-thinking-on-the-special-war OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on United Europe, 1948-60 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf Website https://costamagna.wordpress.com http://unipmn.academia.edu/ChristianCostamagna About Christian Costamagna Dr. Christian Costamagna is an Italian scholar specialized in the history of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. During the academic year 2014-2015, he taught Contemporary History and History of Eastern Europe at the University of Eastern Piedmont. He obtained his PhD in Historical Sciences at the same university in July 2013, with a thesis on Slobodan Milošević’s ascent to power in the second half of the 1980s in Serbia. Dr. Costamagna previously undertook a seven-month internship at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade in 2011. In 2012 he spent an additional semester at the Faculty of Arts at the University in Ljubljana, completing research at the National Archives of Slovenia. Dr. Costamagna has written for various Italian and other European journals about history, politics and geopolitics of the Western Balkans. He is also a member of the Scientific Committee of EastJournal.net (Italy). *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJHMLAm3Ozo Former U.S. diplomat Jim Jatras discusses President Trump’s rush to war in Syria, the false flag chemical attacks warned about by Russia, Putin’s options in case of U.S. strikes, and the real geopolitical game being played in the Middle East which can lead to fatal escalation. Transcript G&E Podcast:                     We are speaking with analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy advisor to the Senate GOP leadership, Jim Jatras. We will be discussing the U.S.-Russia tango in Syria. Let’s start with Russia. First it was U.S. election meddling, then Olympics sports doping, then the Russian media acting as foreign agent, and now this incredulous Salisbury nerve gas attack. What’s next? Am I going to discover that my mother has actually been a KGB spy my entire life? Is there any truth at all to the neo-McCarthyism? Jim Jatras:                           Well, I think calling it neo-McCarthyism is unfair to Joe McCarthy, that back in his day there really were Stalinist agents at the State Department. Even if his methods went a bit overboard, there was a real concern. What we’re seeing today is made out of whole cloth. I think this is simply part of a political campaign against Russia. The term “deep state” has gone from going virtually unknown to being totally overused, but I think there is a reality behind that concept. It’s not just U.S. deep state. It’s not just the CIA and NSA and FBI, the Department of Justice. It also includes our British friends, MI6, the GCHQ. I’ve been writing for months that there are British fingerprints all over the Steele dossier, all over the whole Russia-gate, FISA-gate thing. We see it, obviously, all over the Skripal case. [spoiler] Jim Jatras:                           It looks like that is coordinated with these latest accusations on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which, unfortunately, looks like it will lead to military action as early as tonight Washington time. Where I am it’s a little after 10:00 p.m., and the talk is now within a few hours we should be launching an attack against Syria. I had hoped that that would have been held off until the OPCW investigators, who are on their way to Damascus, would have had a chance to look at the evidence. Honestly, I think there are people in this town, and certainly in London and some other capitals, who don’t want there to be an independent investigation, that do not want their handiwork being exposed. Jim Jatras:                           This has nothing to do, really, with chemical weapons at all, in my opinion. It has to do with the fact that at the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States emerged as the sole Superpower, unipolar moment and all that. There are people who are willing to risk plunging the world into a third world war to preserve that global hegemony against a Russia that’s reasserting its own national interests, and, of course, also China. G&E Podcast:                     Let’s just backtrack a bit. You are a former diplomat. Can you tell us about the significance of the recent, unprecedented, expulsion of Russian diplomats from the U.S. and the E.U.? I don’t think this even happened during the first Cold War. It’s quite startling. As you mentioned, it’s fabricated chemical attacks with the neo-McCarthyism, and now this expulsion. If we put that all together what does this mean? Jim Jatras:                           I think what we’re seeing is the kind of demonization against a target country, and especially its leader, personally, in this case Vladimir Putin, that we’ve see so many times in the past, whether it was Milošević in Yugoslavia, or Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Gaddafi. Everybody is Hitler. We call it “The Hitler of the month club”, is that we frame the target as this horrible, evil person who must be destroyed. Animal Assad now, President Trump is calling him. That means that the rules of normal conduct are suspended because, after all, if you’re literally Hitler nothing could be out of bounds. I think that’s the kind of mentality that’s being used here. Jim Jatras:                           Right now Russia is the target country. Syria, of course, too, but Russia is as well. The fact of the matter is Russia’s not a pipsqueak little country you can do this to. Let’s remember that what was done with the expulsion of these diplomats, supposedly based on the Skripal case, and the certainty that the Russians did it, even though there’s no evidence that they were involved at all, but a lot of evidence that MI6 was involved. That this is part of isolating and setting up a country for regime change. I would also add that the latest round of America sanctions, which seemed designed to … I think the thinking is if they can put enough squeeze on Russian oligarchs, and, of course, Russian rich people are oligarchs, but America rich people like George Soros or Zuckerberg or people like that, they’re not oligarchs. That they somehow can stage a coup to remove Vladimir Putin from power. Anybody that knows anything about Russian know that that’s not going to happen. This is not the 1990s when the oligarchs are powerful enough to do that. Jim Jatras:                           All it means is that, I think, the Russians are increasingly going to take the view that they are being targeted for destruction, that war is going to become inevitable. That’s a very dangerous notion that should end up in their consciousness because where does that leave us, then? What steps may they take on their side in anticipation of hostilities that may, to them, appear inevitable? This is far more dangerous than what we saw even during the first Cold War. No Soviet leader was ever demonized, not even Stalin, ever demonized in the way that Putin is. G&E Podcast:                     Going back to the deep state you mentioned, at a university where I was teaching years ago I would introduce these topics with my students, and people on campus sometimes would mock this idea of deep state and conspiracy theory. I even Skyped people like yourself into my classrooms. We talked to Peter Dale Scott, who they call one of the grandfathers of the deep state, deep politics term. You recently wrote a piece called Mikhail Octavian Trump, that the best we can expect from President Trump is make some kind of deal with North Korea, not bomb Russia, withdraw from Syria, avoid impeachment in order to preserve some semblance of the America republic. G&E Podcast:                     However, it seems that, in this moment in time, Trump is, perhaps, forfeiting everything he campaigned on if he goes through with the Syrian attack, which is not unlike every predecessor. Obama, “I’m going to close down Guantanamo.” A year later nothing happens. Pull out of Iraq, they put more troops in Iraq. Then you say that this will have fatal consequences for Washington, and usher in or accelerate the collapse of the empire. We’re hanging by a thread. Can you tell us more about the situation Trump finds himself domestically with the deep state? I understand they just raided his lawyer’s home. Jim Jatras:                           That’s right. I’ve been saying, maybe my timeline is a little wrong, but I’ve been saying that our situation here in the United States, or let’s say on the eve of the 2016 election, was, in many respects, comparable to the situation of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. A system that had become completely unworkable, that urgently needed some kind of reform. That’s what Gorbachev tried to do. Instead of saving the system and revitalizing it, he ended up destabilizing it further toward its inevitable collapse. I think that there are other examples like that in the past. The most obviously one being Octavian in the late Roman republic who replaced it with the principate. That’s what we tend to think of as the empire, which, I would argue, wasn’t the death of the republic. In many ways the only way the republic could have been salvaged at that time. Jim Jatras:                           I think if you look, for example, Madeline Albright has this new book out where she’s warning against fascism. Everybody’s a fascist, Trump’s a fascist, Putin’s a fascist. Viktor Orban is a fascist. I think there is a counter movement against the dysfunction of the neo-liberal globalist order where people want to return to their roots, return to some sense of identity and of self-respect, and in many cases return to religion, as we’ve seen, not only in Russia, but in Poland and Hungary and other countries. I think to some extent Trump was tapping into that revival of traditional American identity, which, as we know, is synonymous with racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and so forth because the globalist order doesn’t like that kind of unique respect for one’s own tradition and culture. Jim Jatras:                           I think that’s all the more reason why Putin needs to be destroyed because, in many ways, he is seen as kind of the prototype of a, let’s say, a new return to the old ways. A new return to the old bedrock sources of social tradition and strength. I think even China is doing this in its own way, except their values are not Christian, they’re Confucian, and I respect that. Those are not my values, they’re China’s values. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think that it’s a complete reversal of the Maoist anti-Confucian campaign whereas now Confucian thought as very highly-respected in China. I think this is a positive development. Jim Jatras:                           I think the global order is very much opposing that, and that is, at least in our country, center within the organs of government, which are, in some ways, kind of like the old Soviet nomenclature. They have their genetic code. They do what they do. Then don’t even necessarily think, the people are just cogs in a machine, but they see Trump as a threat to that machine. They’ve don everything possible to neuter him, and especially to make sure he cannot deliver on his campaign pledge to reach out to Russia and to, basically, end the new Cold War and what has now developed into a regime change impetus from Washington. That’s what scares me very much because these people, I don’t think, fully realize the danger of the course that they’re setting us upon. G&E Podcast:                     Just to add to that, I spent three weeks in Russia last year. We went with a group of 30 Americans. We met with people Vladimir Pozner, Gorbachev himself, and spent time with normal Russians. Now living also in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, even my Russian language teacher last night was commenting that the people, in general, here espouse these religious, traditional more conservative values, the majority. The Western Europeans and Americans need to come over here, and they can’t just call out Putin when the population itself espouses these values. To move on, just briefly, you mentioned the chemical attack. The Russians warned a few weeks ago that any future chemical attack in Syria would be a false flag operation. The U.S. track record in Iraq and Libya are full of holes, no WMBs, Hillary’s emails proved that they went into Libya for the gold, the silver, the oil. G&E Podcast:                     The Russians have a clean track record under Putin in terms of foreign military adventures. The Georgia war in 2008 was instigated by Georgia and backed by NATO, for example. These white helmets, Russia’s UN representative stated, I guess just today, to the U.S., “You don’t want to hear that no signs of a chemical attack have been found in Douma. You’ve only sought a pretext, and it was eagerly provided by the white helmets provocateurs.” Who do we believe then? Jim Jatras:                           Well, that’s right. In fact, there’s even a film that’s come to everybody’s attention, well, of course, not being reported in our media, but shows a training exercise that the people, the emergency workers, showing kids how to lie down, applying phony foam at the mouth and so forth in preparation for exactly this sort of thing. It’s very interesting to compare Douma to the other accusations of chemical use in Syria. In those other cases, for example, the one that occurred in Idlib in April of 2017 that Trump, for the first time, responded with military force, although, people characterized it as proforma, as a kind of demonstrative strike, was that nobody disputes there was a chemical attack of some sort. Although, the ones saying that Assad was not responsible for it differ on whether there was a chemical storehouse there that maybe was bombed by a Syrian air force raid, or if it was a deliberate release of the chemical agent by the terrorist in order to blame the government. Something there definitely happened. Jim Jatras:                           I noticed that today, and the last couple of days, over the incident in Douma the Russian and Syrian side are saying specifically there was no chemical attack at all. It was all staged. It was all phony, and that their inspectors went there and could detect no evidence of chemical weapon use. I find this very interesting for a couple of reasons. One is, every time you get one of these incidents, whether it was the shooting of the Russian ambassador in Turkey, whether it was the guy who plowed down all those people in Marcé with the truck, you have people popping up on the internet and saying, “Oh that’s all phony. It was all staged. That really didn’t happen,” et cetera, et cetera. I generally don’t buy into that. Jim Jatras:                           I tend to think most of these things, most of them, anyway, are real, unless I have good reason to think otherwise. When you look at the films that are being shown of Douma, they really do look rather fishy. You don’t really see much of anything, except some hosing other people off with bare hands and no breathing protection or anything else that would indicate concern over a real chemical attack. I really do wonder what the story is there. Jim Jatras:                           That leads us to the other key. Unlike the other cases where in Ghouta 2013, or in Idlib in 2017 the area was still controlled by the terrorist forces whether Jaysh al-Islam or Al Islam, et cetera, et cetera. You could make a plausible case, “Well, the inspectors can’t go there. It’s not safe.” Why wouldn’t it be safe since these are wonderful freedom fighters? I don’t know, but as everybody knows they’re really Al Qaeda linked terrorists. In the case Douma on the very day that the attack occurred, Jaysh al-Islam had negotiated with the Russians an evacuation of Douma. The area is now back in government control, and the inspectors are being invited in. They can actually go to the site and firsthand collect samples and conduct a real investigation. That is, evidently, what the Western powers fear most of all. G&E Podcast:                     Yeah, indeed. Getting into the meat of the conflict, previously NATO commander Wesley Clark warned us that the Pentagon planned to take out seven Middle Eastern countries, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen are more or less down for the count. Syria and Iran remain. As we speak, U.S. warships and aircraft are currently hovering off the coast of Syria preparing for strikes. What do you think is going to happen, and is Syria part of a larger game between the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Russia? What’s going on here? Jim Jatras:                           I would, in fact, say it’s really not about Syria at all, just like the problem in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine. It is a theater in a much broader conflict. Obviously, with respect to Ukraine the real objective there is Russia, that having a regime change in Ukraine where then we could draw Ukraine into NATO. For example, people will say, “Well, the Russians shouldn’t have seized Crimea.” Maybe they shouldn’t have, but I don’t know what their alternatives were because if they hadn’t you can bet your bottom dollar there would already be a NATO base in Sevastopol. Jim Jatras:                           As far as Syria goes, it’s not really so much about Syria. It’s about Iran, Iran, Iran, that if you look at the team around Trump, if you look at his first trip overseas, first to Saudi Arabia and then to Israel, who are really calling the shots on America policy. People like me thought we were voting for put America first, not put Saudi Arabia and Israel first, but that’s what we ended up with here. Yes, they see Iran as their regional adversary, and they want the Americans to do their dirty work for them. Given how much influence the Israelis and the Saudis have over the America nomenclature, they have managed to have Trump dancing to their tune. Jim Jatras:                           Now, maybe he was never anything but a fraud. I don’t know. I think the fact that he keeps saying, “We want to get out of Syria. We want to get along with the Russians,” indicates to me that, at some core, he really wants to do these things consistent with what he said in the past, but for whatever reason he has found himself like a wheel attached to an axle, and all he can do is spin. It’s very, very sad, but I think the fact is is that we are carrying out the wishes of other countries in the region. We don’t have a dog in that fight if you look at our national interest, but, unfortunately, our national interest have very little to do with it. That there are other countries, and, I would say, very powerful interests within the United States that want to make sure that Trump goes down the same dismal road as Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. G&E Podcast:                     He does, indeed, sound like sort of a prisoner, as you say. Maybe that explains why one week he says, “Let’s get out of Syria,” and then they push him to bomb Syria. You wrote another piece where you cited James Mathis declaring that great power competition with Russia and China is now the primary focus of U.S. national security, and that this is a World War I scenario. The Chinese and Russians did not veto the UN authorization for kinetic action in Libya the last time, and neither of these activated a world war scenario. The UN Security Council failed to pass resolution on Syria today, but Nikki Haley has previously stated that, “Come hell or high water the U.S. is going into Damascus.” G&E Podcast:                     This morning I was watching a Russian TV news segment where they were discussing Russia’s options, all of which are no good. If Russia stands down it basically folds, goes home, and signs its own political and military death sentence, writing itself off from geopolitical games in the Middle East and the world. Even if Russia doesn’t respond, the situation could still spiral into a war. If Russia does respond it could, obviously, escalate quickly. Is Syria the geopolitical red line in this game of empires, and what do you think can happen from here? What can Russia do? Jim Jatras:                           It largely depends on what the Western powers with our Saudi friends, who, of course, we know are so passionate about democracy and human rights that they will definitely be part of the intervention in Syria as well, assuming it occurs as, I think, is almost certain at this point. It really depends partly on what the magnitude of it is, how many Russians are killed, if any Russians are killed. Jim Jatras:                           If you listen to the America media, if you watch Fox News on the right, or MSNBC on the left, who are virtually identical on this issue, by the way, if the issue is raised, as it sometimes is, but not often, what happens if some Russians get killed? They tend to respond with kind of almost like a bloodthirsty glee of saying, “Well, if they do, they’ll remember what happened a few weeks ago in the Euphrates when some of their forces or contractors crossed the river there and tangled with the Americans and we slaughtered them in droves. That really bloodied their nose, and they’ll think twice before they do something like that again because they’ll get worse next time.” That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with here. Jim Jatras:                           Now, maybe some of the people in the professional military, I am the son of a career Air Force officer, will be a little more realistic this. When General Gerasimov said that they would respond with a counter attack against the attacking forces in such an eventuality I don’t know he was just blowing smoke. I don’t think he was saying that without authorization, but it does put the Russians in a bind. If they don’t do anything, you’re right, they’re slinking away with their tail between their legs and signing their own geopolitical death warrant. Jim Jatras:                           Now, maybe they’re saying to themselves at that point, “We know war is coming. War is inevitable.” As Vladimir Putin has said growing up on the mean streets of, in his case, not Saint Petersburg, Leningrad, that if you know you’re going to be in a fight, and it’s inevitable, you strike first, and at a time and place of your choosing. Which is, itself, a very, very scary thought, to think that we could end up in a direct war because the other side decides it’s inevitable, and they strike first in a way that’s most advantageous to them. I hope we don’t get to that stage. Jim Jatras:                           What they may have decided is if that’s true that they don’t respond in Syria because they’re biding their time strategically. Or, they may decide that we are weak enough now in comparison, or at least within the theater, that they can strike back, bloody our noses back, and then we’re still left with the same strategic standoff, the same balance of terror, but then the ball is in the Americans’ court to see how we’re going to respond. I don’t know. You know that kind of gaming is happening in various people’s minds, but you don’t know what kind of conclusions they’re reaching. Jim Jatras:                           One of the fears I have is that if we attack Syria, kill a bunch of Russians, and then they do respond, and then kill some Americans, the hue and cry in this country will be deafening, “The Russians are killing Americans.” Nobody will say, “Yeah, but didn’t we kill some of them first?” Because that won’t matter because we are, let’s say, very cheap with the blood and lives of people in other countries, but anybody who impugns anybody on our side, well, they’ve done something bad to Americans, so that’s a different scale of values entirely. G&E Podcast:                     That’s the American exceptionalism. What of international law? Now we’re seeing false flag operations, basically, openly being carried out. The UK handling of the Skripal affair was a violation of international law and protocol. The U.S. breeches of UN protocol in the past with Nicaragua, the case in the 80s, Nikki Haley now saying, “Even without a UN resolution we’ll go in.” What’s happened to international law? Jim Jatras:                           It is not a factor at all. Just as the U.S. Constitution is no longer a factor here domestically, the international legal system and the UN charter is simply not a factor. That’s why, by the way, you start getting suggestions from various quarters that the single country veto of the permanent members has to be dispensed with, or at least Russia’s veto has to be dispensed with, has to find a way to circumvent it. You hear this all the time. For example, even in 1999 when the attack was launched against Yugoslavia about Kosovo you heard people say, “Well, we couldn’t get it through the Security Council, so we decided to work through NATO instead.” As though NATO is a legal equivalent of the Security Council and confers any legitimacy on it. We have simply lost the language. If you listen to any of the discussion on the floor of the Congress or anywhere in the America media, you very rarely will hear anybody say, “Gosh, is this legal?” Even under America law they don’t even raise the question of whether it’s legal, much less under international law. It’s simply not a factor. Jim Jatras:                           You mentioned exceptionalism. Look, exceptionalism means different things to different people, depending on the discussion. I think America is exceptional in some ways. It’s exceptional in the way every country is exceptional. It’s my country. You have your country. He or she has his or her country. There’s only one country for each of us, and it’s unique in that way. We also, I think, have a decent American exceptionalism in the sense that the ideals of the America Revolution, that people should govern themselves, their rights should be respected, they should be able to be governed with their consent. I think that was unique and exceptional in world history, and was an inspiration to many people around the globe. Jim Jatras:                           What I don’t think anybody should respect is this kind of exceptionalism of extraordinary privilege where we can do things that violate the sovereignty of other countries, violate the solemn treaty obligations that we have signed, and that serve as protections for us as well as for other countries, and say, “It’s okay because it’s us.” I would say that’s the kind of exceptionalism of Bolshevism. In fact, what’s his name, what’s his name, Mr. Larov, whom I greatly respect, said in 2007 that America policy is reminiscent of the experience of Bolshevism and Trotskyism, that we are the vanguard of all progressive humanity. We can do what we please because history is on our side. In fact, you hear this phrase all the time, that the Russians are on the wrong side of history. What are we? We all a bunch of Marxist or something? Who invented this stuff? Now, I almost feel sometimes when you look at the way Russia is that it took 75 years, but the whites finally won the Civil War, but, unfortunately, the reds control Washington and London. G&E Podcast:                     I would completely agree with you. I personally espouse the original exceptional America values, although I have a problem because I have three citizenships now. Jim Jatras:                           What’s your third one? G&E Podcast:                     Croatian and Mexican now. I just got- Jim Jatras:                           Mexican, I forgot Mexican. We’ll have to build a wall to keep you out. G&E Podcast:                     I was referring to Putin’s opinion piece in the New York Times that he wrote in 2013, if you recall- Jim Jatras:                           Yeah. G&E Podcast:                     … about this problem of the American exceptionalism. Finally, what about the information and media war? I’ve spent two years in my spare time building up this channel, and it’s moving along. Now we’re seeing independent media being completely shutdown almost on a weekly basis. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google are literally terminating accounts. You’re a frequent guest on Russia Today and other news media. Russia Today America has just been kicked out of Washington D.C. last week. It seems the censorship is intensifying, and reminiscent of Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. What’s your take on the media situation? Jim Jatras:                           In 2016, I published a paper called “How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice”. It got into all the issues of the Deep State and atrocity porn and how the media served as like a, I wouldn’t even say a servant, but as an integral part of the ruling establishment, and used these visuals to justify these aggressive policies. That what I hoped would be new, it’s not really the existence of foreign outlets like RT or Press TV or any of the others, Al Jazeera, that give us another point of view, but the existence of the internet and all the alternative media, which operate, in a sense, kind of the that Samizdat did in the Soviet Union and other communists countries. Jim Jatras:                           The problem is is that even though the truth may be out there against the propaganda campaign, it doesn’t become realized until the media itself acknowledge it or pick it up. You end up with this sort of two-tier reality where the media report everything that the government says, and then you have the other media coming from the outside or within the alternative media, and that, unless it’s reported in the official media, is conspiracy theories. The truth is out there, but as you’re right, what they’re trying to do is progressively police it. Jim Jatras:                           We’re finding now not only shutting down things like RT, but also I noticed also here in Washington they dropped CGTM, the Chinese station. That, as far as the alternative media goes, social media goes, we are seeing a lot of pressure to police the media for not only Russian bots, but for hate speech. Basically, the official ideology will become the judge of what is fake news, what is real news, what is healthy debate versus illegitimate speech like “hate speech”. Jim Jatras:                           Yes, I think that the organs of official media are working together with the authorities to shut down these alternatives, and also to cast dispersions on the personalities and integrity of the people who appear on them, like yours truly, where you’re made out to be the equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose during World War II. I fear that the event of hostilities, that that becomes something that is actionable from a legal point of view once the time comes. G&E Podcast:                     So you’re saying you’re not a Russian agent. Jim Jatras:                           No, I’m not a Russian agent. I have this crazy idea I’m an American agent. Back in the old days when I worked with the Senate after my State Department years we used to say, as conservatives, “You know what we really need at the State Department is an American interest section.” Especially for those on the conservative side of the spectrum who want to preserve what’s left of the American nation and thought that Trump was our friend by saying he wanted to make America great again, preserve our national and cultural identity, if he goes into Syria or he does go down this road I think it would be something close to the ultimate betrayal. G&E Podcast:                     Any final comment or thought to leave us with? Jim Jatras:                           Despite everything, I try to be an optimist. I look at the fact that, look, in 1917 and through the civil war in Russia, through everything that then ensued, I’m sure a lot of people despaired that their country could ever be itself again, but it turned out it did. I think it’s something close to a miracle, maybe it is a certifiable miracle in that respect. I don’t know that we will be that lucky in our country, especially given the fact that this could unfold in the context of a global war. Somebody asked me, “Are you talking about the first Word War?” I said, “No, this could be the last world war,” that if this goes terribly, terribly wrong we may never get a chance to recover our country, even through an improbable or circuitous path that may last over several years or even decades. Jim Jatras:                           I want to believe that something good will all come out of it, but right now things are looking very, very bad. I looked at Trump’s election as kind of the last gasp or the last chance for our country to rescue itself from the direction it had been going. I spell this out in that 2016 study that I mentioned. If it goes wrong I don’t think we get another chance, not in a way that is foreseeable to us right now. G&E Podcast:                     All right, it’s tough these days to keep an independent opinion, and we do hope you continue your important work and analysis, Mr. Jatras. Jim Jatras:                           Thank you. G&E Podcast:                     I will post the links. You’re on Twitter. Your website’s JimJatras.info. Thank you again for this interview. Jim Jatras:                           Thank you, Mr. Moric. [/spoiler] Show Notes Mikhail Octavian Trump https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/04/06/mikhail-octavian-trump.html The US-UK Deep State Empire Strikes Back: ‘It’s Russia! Russia! Russia!’ https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/18/us-uk-deep-state-empire-strikes-back-its-russia-russia-russia.html Can the Impending Collapse of Russiagate Halt the Slide Toward a Nuclear 1914? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/02/can-impending-collapse-russiagate-halt-slide-toward-nuclear-1914.html Attack on RT Is Another Step Towards Sovietization of American Media https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/11/18/attack-rt-another-step-towards-sovietization-american-media.html Website https://twitter.com/JimJatras http://www.jimjatras.info About Jim Jatras Jim Jatras is a Washington, DC-based attorney, political analyst, and media & government affairs specialist. He formerly served as a senior foreign policy adviser to the US Senate Republican leadership, and before that served as a diplomat in Mexico, the Office of Soviet Union affairs, and the Office of the Under Secretary for Political Affairs. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Chris Devonshire-Ellis: China’s Silk Road & Eurasian Game #076 Chris Devonshire-Ellis provides insight into the Belt and Road based on extensive travel in the region and sees China as spreading peace through trade. Show Notes The Belt and Road: Five Opportunities for Foreign Investors https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2018/03/30/belt-road-five-opportunities-foreign-investors Belt and Road Initiative Ushering in New Trade, Logistics, Blockchain, and 5G Technologies https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2018/03/22/belt-road-initiative-ushering-new-trade-logistics-blockchain-5g-technologies Venezuela to Pay Russia With Own Cryptocurrency for Automotive Parts https://sputniknews.com/business/201804041063187781-venezuela-pay-russia-cryptocurrency China’s ‘petro-yuan’: The end of the dollar hegemony? https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2018/03/china-petro-yuan-dollar-hegemony-180331091248813.html NSA Monitors Financial World http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-international-bank-transactions-a-922430.html Website https://www.silkroadbriefing.com http://www.dezshira.com Books China’s New Economic Silk Road: The Great Eurasian Game & The String of Pearls About Chris Devonshire-Ellis Chris Devonshire-Ellis is the Founder of Dezan Shira & Associates and Chairman of the firms International Board of Equity Partners & Directors. He is now based mainly in Europe, however has a 30 year career in Asia, including 25 years living in China. He advises multinational corporations and foreign governments on their investment strategies for China and Asia, and has expanded this in recent years to include the OBOR regions, particularly in regard to European integration with China’s “One Belt One Road” initiative. His 2014 book “China’s New Economic Silk Road“has been a best seller. Over the past 25 years he has facilitated several billion euros worth of investment into Asia on behalf of his clients. Chris was ranked one of the top ten most important consultants in China by Accountancy Age Magazine in 2011, and ranked 1st in influence by Asia Law in 2015. He is an occasional lecturer at Cambridge Universities Dept. of Politics and International Studies, while his books and papers are regular course material at multiple Universities across China and Europe. He also fulfills pro-bono work on a number of Intra-Asian think tanks, including the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) business advisory council for Northeast Asia, which includes the governments of China, Russia, Mongolia, North Korea and South Korea, serving as Vice-Chairman of their business advisory council, in addition to a main board directorship with the India-US Business Network based in Cincinnati and with the Gateway House Indian foreign policy think tank based in Mumbai. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Wong MNC Center in San Francisco. Chris is a member of the Royal Overseas League and St. James Club in London, the Institute of Directors in Hong Kong, and a lifetime member of the Hanoi Press Club and Scott Polar Research Institute He also holds the title Baron of Coigach, the 19th in a line stretching back to 1511. In 2012, he commissioned a new piece of classical music encompassing Chinese, India and European themes to mark Dezan Shira & Associates twentieth anniversary. He is a regular contributor to numerous regional charities, ranging from education for orphaned children in China (Care for Children) wildlife protection in Mongolia (Snow Leopard Trust) and Sri Lanka and the preservation of ancient buildings and reconstruction of hospitals and orphanages in Tibet (Surmang Foundation). He regularly travels around our offices and the region and is based from his properties in Sri Lanka and Malta during the winter months and St. Petersburg and Tallinn in summer. He is a competitive sailor, a qualified Ocean skipper and competent horseman. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Edward Curtin: False Flag Operations Will Start New War #075 Professor of Sociology Edward Curtin discusses the attempts by the US, Britain, NATO and Israel to create false pretexts for an invasion of Syria and war with Russia. He discusses how the Deep State has concocted RussiaGate and how media and propaganda make it difficult to tell fact from fiction. Transcript G&E Podcast: We are speaking with Professor Edward Curtin, who teaches sociology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has been writing on the precarious situation the world finds itself in, regarding the potential for a new world war emanating from the Middle East. Professor Curtin, you’ve been writing about the American Empire on your website edwardcurtin.com. Could you tell us a bit about where you’re coming from, what prompted you to write on these issues and how you view the American empire? Edward Curtin: Thank you for having me. Yes, I’d be glad to tell you why I write on these things and what my motivation is. It goes back a long time to when I was actually in college, and after the next few years after college. I had the good fortune to have a wonderful college teacher by the name of Bill Frain, who introduced me to, actually one book I remember in particular, it was about a German, a peasant fellow, named Franz Jägerstätter, who defied Hitler and refused to serve in the armed forces in Germany, and was subsequently beheaded. He did this against the advice from his family, from the Catholic Church, from all the authorities. And it really inspired me. [spoiler] And then subsequently I was in the Marines and was introduced to father Daniel Berrigan, a famous anti-war priest who became a mentor to me. I became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and so since that time, I’ve been disturbed by the American empire, which has a long history, which goes back to the founding of this country and what they call manifest destiny, in which Native peoples were slaughtered and people were brought into slavery from Africa. And then over the years, I’ve been addressing these issues and the American empire has, of course subsequent to World War Two and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency, taken on a new form and spread further around the world. And it seems to be everywhere these days, trying to conquer nations, instigate and start wars. And so I was very disturbed from a young age by all of this. And I suppose you could say it was my conscience that disturbed me. It has gotten me very mad and ashamed of this country. And so that is why I write about it. G&E Podcast: Did you start your blog not too long ago? Edward Curtin: Yes, I started the blog to post what I write, probably a couple of years ago, at the instigation of my daughter and son-in-law, because they felt that my writing should have one place for it. But I’ve been writing about these things for a long time. Many of my works were never published by the mainstream press because they were too critical of the establishment and this goes back many years. But with the introduction of the internet and many good alternative websites, my voice has gotten out there more. G&E Podcast: And one of the pieces that became recently very popular and was reposted around the internet and independent news sites and alternative media sites was The Wars to End All War, and in there you discuss how the U.S. and Israel are looking for pretext to start a proper war in Syria, which would spread into Lebanon, Iran and perhaps beyond. Most of America’s wars have been based on lies. Some of the most famous are Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. Non-incidents, Iraq’s non-existent WMDs. At this moment, Russia and Syria are being accused using chemical weapons, when we know they were, a few years ago, they were handed over to the West and gotten rid of, so there are none. We also know that the U.S. supported Jihadis in Syria are the actual culprits and the Russian military has recently openly stated this, and finally, the evidence in the London attack against this double agent Sergei Skripal, continues to support this line. There’s no evidence and Britain and the U.S. are just shouting at the top of their lungs and it sounds again like the Iraq, Vietnam, and so on. So how can they keep on getting away with this and can you comment on this? Edward Curtin: I think it all is what John Pilger, the eminent journalist calls a carefully constructed drama, and this drama has been going on a long time. And there have been so many false flag attacks, the list is so long, it goes way back in history. But I would add to what you said, I think perhaps before I get to this recent case of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, one of the most important, if not the most important is the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the subsequent linked anthrax attacks, which have been documented and analyzed astutely by Graham McQueen, who’s a Canadian researcher and writer and who also just wrote a tremendous piece about manufactured war triggers. And I think the Skripal case, sometimes it just makes me laugh, it’s so absurd, but because it’s so serious, you want to cry. It’s just patent propaganda. And where it’s leading is in a very dangerous place because there’s a massive propaganda campaign to blame Russia, not only for that, but it seems for everything else in the world. I think there’s growing evidence that in Syria or in Lebanon, the Russians will be blamed, together with the Syrians, for some kind of gas attack, sarin attack, chemical attack, without any evidence, and this will lead to a greatly expanded Middle East war. G&E Podcast: On this podcast, Geopolitics and Empire, we try to look at things objectively, everybody’s biased and we have our own perspectives, but I try not to look at it ideologically. And no one’s really a good guy here, we’re not trying to say the Russians are good guys, necessarily, because I taught a course at university on 9/11 and terrorism. I was actually asked to teach on that and we looked at everything and you mentioned 9/11, that it looks like a military intelligence operation with elements of the United States government. Anyone who seriously analyzes that. And in 1999, in Moscow, in Russia, there were a series of apartment bombings and there’s American academics who have published on this, where the evidence shows that likely too was a state-sponsored terrorist operation. So we’re not trying to say that this is something that every state does in history, but in this moment in time what’s going on is very serious, and in this moment in time, in this context, Russia just seems to be minding their own business, and if you can just comment on Russia Gate, because to me, Russia Gate looks all concocted. Again, there’s no evidence and it seems to be either to start a war or to distract the American public or for some other reasons, there hasn’t been evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump and people like Ray McGovern and the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, WikiLeaks, Kim Dotcom and all these other experts have explained, there was we’re no election hacks. What are your thoughts on the whole Russia Gate and making Russia out to be a monster? Edward Curtin: Let me say this, I agree with you about the apartment bombing in Moscow in ’99, and none of these countries are innocent little children. We’re talking about major states, whether it’s Russia or the United States, but in recent days, as you said, Russia has been minding their own business. The Russia Gate affair is again, in Pilger’s words, another carefully constructed drama. I believe it was conjured up when Trump, probably as a surprise to him as well, was elected president. Actually, it started before then, and I would call it a plot, a conspiracy, to make sure that if Trump somehow was elected, the Russian connection would be the reason to use to undermine his presidency. And as I wrote a year ago, used the deep state forces to undermine him as best they could. And I think we know now that the Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Hillary Clinton team and the Democratic National Committee was very instrumental in that. And that the FBI, the Obama administration were all involved in this, including the people in the news these days, Comey, McCabe, Mueller, etc. It’s simply a false story. G&E Podcast: Looking at the media, one final question that I wanted to ask about the media, which for me, this is very interesting and I’d like to hear what you have to say on this, on the coverage of this, it seems if I’m not mistaken that the right-wing media at least on Russia Gate, seems to have gotten it right, while the mainstream media and left-wing publications have been getting it wrong, except for a few. But you mentioned in your article, what amazes me, are certain publications such as WhoWhatWhy and I’d like to say that I have great respect for Russ Baker. We’ve interviewed him a couple times and I like the work that WhoWhatWhy does, I’ve donated to them, but I can’t understand … he buys into the Russia Gate issue and I can’t understand how some organizations get things that I think are obvious wrong, and my sense is that individuals or media outlets subject themselves completely to their ideology. If you’re right-wing or left-wing, you will find any justification to support, to go against your enemies. Like if your left-wing, Trump, Republican, right-wing, Putin and Russia are your enemy, so you will use any ammunition you can even if it’s not true. I think we need to be more nuanced and follow the evidence where it leads, regardless whether if we are right or left. So what’s your take on these media organizations that get some things right and then some obvious things wrong? Edward Curtin: I agree with you, some of my writing is published on conservative websites as well as far left, anti-empire websites, which I’m proud of. Because I think it’s important to have that nuanced view that you speak about. Robert Parry, Ray McGovern, Paul Craig Roberts, these people have all written about Russia Gate and I think it’s very obvious if you follow their writing, that this is a conjured trick, to put it that way, to get Trump and to get Russia at the same time. And WhoWhatWhy, for example, Russ Baker, I know him, they seem to be obsessed with Trump for some reason, and of course I don’t like Trump and I never did and I think he is more or less a real estate TV reality guy who got elected to his surprise. He’s more or less a clown, but why they keep focusing on that, to the exclusion of the obvious falseness of Russia Gate, I don’t know. I can’t really answer for them, but they’re not the only publication, there are others as well. G&E Podcast: That’s something that’s been bother me for a while, but we’ll just have to- Edward Curtin: A lot of the so-called liberal press is totally caught up in this anti-Russia hysteria, a great deal of it, actually, and it’s very frightening, actually, that now liberals are on this anti-Russia bandwagon, which is leading us to a possible nuclear war. G&E Podcast: And that was my next question, to talk about your article, you recently wrote a second piece. What do you think is America’s agenda in the Middle East? We have NATO war games maps from a decade ago that show a map of the Middle East where it’s Balkanized. And there’s even a 1979 map by Bernard Lewis, which similarly shows the Middle East Balkanized. There’s this idea for a greater Israel or perhaps it’s all for a longer term game, as a forward deployment towards Russia. Once Syria is taken down, that can be used to forward deploy to the real, perhaps the real main dish, Russia. I don’t know. What are your thoughts there? Edward Curtin: I agree with you, the ultimate goal is Russia, to take down Russia, but it runs through the Middle East, which is another part of this chess game that they’re playing, this dangerous chess game. As the last few weeks, there have been multiple war games in the Mediterranean between the USA, NATO, Israel, major war games. There has been an Israeli military drill simulating war in the Middle East with Russia, when Russia intervenes in Syria after the Israelis attack Syria. I believe that the overall agenda is for greater Israel, under the government in Israel today, to destroy and partition Syria, to destroy Yemen and to create chaos in the Middle East, leaving only Israel standing, and this aimed also at obviously, Iran. And I think one of the keys to it all are the Palestinians, who are considered totally dispensable to the United States and to Israel. And they are being squeezed and squeezed, more and more and suffering more and more. They’ll have the tiniest postage stamp to live on, at the end of all of this, if it keeps going. So I think that’s basically … but the ultimate goal, Russia, I would agree with. G&E Podcast: And in your article, you sounded almost sure you think the U.S. and Israel will invade Syria and Lebanon. They’re trying their best to sell the war to world public opinion, but you think they might back down if they can’t sell it? You think they’re going to go in? Edward Curtin: I hope they back down, but I do think that they will … the United States is already in Syria obviously, as is Israel, and in Lebanon, but I do think that there will be a major assault on Syria. I don’t think the United States will … the U.S. works hand in glove with the Israeli, of course, it’s almost like one country in the Middle East. I don’t think they can allow the Assad government to stand and to triumph over these terrorists, who are trying to take down the Syrian government. So yes, I do think, when it will happen? I don’t know, but I think this is where it’s moving. But I hope, as I think you do, that it never happens. But all signs point in that direction. These war games, Israeli military drill at the highest levels of the IDF, they all point in that direction. Let’s hope not. G&E Podcast: I would agree with you, this is why we do podcasts like this and you write articles, is that to draw people’s attention to these things because we want peace, who wants war? We want peace between peoples. We had Rex Tillerson who was just booted out, he had only financial business experience, no military intelligence experience, and he was replaced by CIA Mike Pompeo, and immediately the first reading I got was they’re going to the next level by putting somebody like Pompeo in, who has this military intelligence background, and they’re getting more serious about war. Edward Curtin: I think that was a turning point, putting him in. He hasn’t been confirmed yet, but he probably will be, and he is far more belligerent in terms of war and further to the right then Tillison was. And that’s an ominous sign. And then they’re trying to put this woman, Gina Haspel in, as head of the CIA. She is a promoter of torture and ran a torture center, I believe it was in Thailand, and that’s a further provocation in the direction of war. But then the CIA is, as the esteemed author Doug Valentine says, they’re organized criminals, this is what they do. So if she’s ever confirmed, which I hope she isn’t of course, but it’s another sign. All these signs are popping up. And as you said, the reason I write about all of this from many different perspectives actually, is in the hope that it can all be stopped. That we don’t move, because if we keep going in this direction, it will be a confrontation with Russia. G&E Podcast: We haven’t mentioned also that for the U.S. midterm elections that 25% of the Democrats that were running for the Democratic offices were CIA military intelligence. So you’ve got Pompeo, you’ve got this new potential head of the CIA having personally carried out torture and then 25%, you have them moving into office, these people with CIA, military intelligence backgrounds. That’s like another sign. It’s becoming this military, full-on military state. Edward Curtin: Absolutely, it sure is. And you I’m sure are familiar with something called Operation Mockingbird, which was the CIA program that allegedly ended years ago, but which is in full operation still, perhaps under a different name, in which the CIA places their people throughout all of the media worldwide. And now as you say, they’re placing them into elected office throughout the United States. I guess you could say the mainstream media or the corporate media or what Paul Craig Roberts calls the press-titutes, is a CIA operation. The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and down the line. They have CIA analysts on all the time, or ex-CIA analysts. They don’t have Ray McGovern on there, but they have these other characters who push for war and give the viewer a sense that they’re in the know, when in fact they’re in the dark. G&E Podcast: Before going on to talk about this conflict with Russia, what are your thoughts on President Putin and Russia? Like we said, they seem to be minding their own business, they’re trying to re-establish themselves after having suffered economic and political instability. And I was in Russia last year, I’m living in a former Soviet republic in this moment, and I think one thing Americans really don’t understand, that if they have not been to Russia and spoken to Russians, they really have to understand how bad Russians have suffered in the 20th century and the effects that are still felt here. They do not want war. I don’t believe the people want war, I don’t think the politicians in Russia want war. And so what are your thoughts as an American and perhaps the people around you, where you live in the U.S. that you come across on a daily basis? What’s your feel for Putin and Russia? Edward Curtin: I think most of the people that I encounter in my daily life and I’m a college teacher, so students are rather out of it when it comes to knowing what’s going on in the world, but many, quote, liberal people, think of Russia as the devil, they think of Putin as the devil and they’ve been subject to so much propaganda for so many years. But I agree with you that Russians and Putin, I believe as well, do not want war, they’ve suffered tremendously, they have been pushed into a corner by the betrayals of the United States and NATO, moving up to their border with missiles, that Putin correctly said, could be converted to offensive weapons within an hour or so. And so Russia is surrounded by American military might and if that’s not a provocation, I don’t know what is. So I think that Putin is trying to be, and is in fact, quite statesmen like in his approach to these things, and is trying to avoid at all costs, war with the United States. Because as he said, he knows where it’s leading. If it leads to a nuclear war, that’s the end for all of us, he knows that. I’m sure he’s not suicidal, nor are the Russians. So I agree with you, I think he’s been backed into a corner and it’s been years of propaganda, and he was lied to when NATO and the U.S. said they would not move and they’ve moved as far east as they could possibly get, to surround Russia today. And he said just recently, and I said before that, imagine if you were the United States and there were Russian missiles and troops in Canada, in Mexico, in Cuba. Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. What would Americans think? What would the American president think? So I respect President Putin for the efforts he’s taking to avoid war. G&E Podcast: And recently the U.S. released their Nuclear Posture review and if I’m not mistaken, they said it was okay to use tactical nukes and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov recently stated that U.S. and NATO are preparing for war with Russia by training European armies in the use of tactical nukes. So let’s just talk about the scenario if this really happens, if the U.S., Israel went into Syria, this just escalated, World War One, World War Two, nobody knew how it would happen, things just led one thing to another. What would this third world war look like in your opinion? Would it be just the use of tactical nukes or what? Edward Curtin: What a horrible thought, all around, isn’t it? I don’t think it could be limited to tactical nuclear weapons. I think there are too many accidents. I think there are too many unpredictable scenarios. There are too many crazy people in charge, especially here in the United States. I know that in Ukraine, the Poroshenko just this week or last week in eastern Ukraine, his so-called anti-terrorist operation, he has just handed it over as a joint forces operation under the deputy chief of the armed forces. So it’s now gone from anti-terrorism to general armed forces fight called joint forces operation or something like that. That’s a very ominous move as well. So again, it’s all so unpredictable where it will lead, but I don’t have much confidence that it could stop at a tactical nuclear exchange. I would just add that Daniel Ellsberg recently wrote a book on nuclear war and nuclear strategy. I think he makes it clear in that book how precarious our situation is, how close to midnight we are. But most people don’t believe it, they think it’s not possible and I think they’re living in an illusion. It’s very possible. G&E Podcast: You’ve previously written about Martin Luther King, how he was assassinated for opposing the wrongs of the empire at home and abroad. We don’t really need to discuss that he was assassinated by the government. The King family themselves, again, most people won’t know this, in 1999, they took the government to court, they reopened the case, they won the verdict that stated that government agencies were involved in the assassination. And it’s on the King Family Center’s own website, the thousand pages of transcripts there. So people can go look at that, the evidence is there, so we don’t have to discuss that. But the U.S. likes to boast from their moral high horse about how countries around the world imprison or kill dissidents, like with the latest case with Skripal, and America is the best, we will do no wrong. It is this idea of American exceptionalism, yet in America we see dissidents blacklisted, exiled abroad, like Snowden and many others. And even die under suspicious circumstances as well, like Skripal. You had Michael Hastings, the journalist, Pat Tillman, the athlete soldier, and you can go on and on. So if you can comment a bit, you mentioned John Pilger earlier, Daniel Ellsberg. How dangerous and important is descent today in America? Healthy descent, nonviolent descent, why are there only a handful of people like John Oliver Stone? Rand Pauls of the world. Why don’t more people speak up? Edward Curtin: I think they’re afraid. You mentioned Oliver Stone, just a wonderful artist, citizen, world citizen, U.S. citizen. He’s known primarily, probably for his film on JFK in the JFK assassination, which is crucially important in this whole issue of descent. Because we know what has happened and continues to happen around the CIA state-sponsored assassination of President Kennedy. How many people have died, have been disappeared down through the years? The same is true to a lesser extent with Martin Luther King, and then we have Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and a whole series of people who have been killed by the U.S. government. And I think people are afraid, traumatized, actually. And they’re living in some bubble, some illusionary world, a world make-believe because it’s too harsh a reality to face. At the same time, dissent in America is under assault. We have Facebook and Google, all of these media companies cracking down on left-wing sites. We have RT having to declare the self a foreign agent, we have an attempt now to do the same to Al Jazeera. So it’s a very dark time and I think there’s a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety. I suppose that’s why there aren’t that many dissidents or people like Oliver Stone or Jim Douglas, the author of the book JFK and the Unspeakable, or William Pepper, the author of the book on King or David Talbott, the author of the book on the CIA and Allen Dulles. So many people like that. Fear, I suppose, fear. G&E Podcast: And is there any other point you’d like to comment on that I may have missed, something important? Edward Curtin: If I could say this about how to get through to people, regular people, and I think regular people are generally of goodwill around the world, but they’re subject to so much propaganda, it’s really hard to reach them. I know for myself, speaking for myself, I tried to do this in various ways, not just by writing directly about the political, sociological, the propaganda directly, but to do it through satire and again, satire has fallen on hard times. People don’t get it these days. I guess they’re not in the mood for laughing. But we need new approaches to try to reach regular people. I’m not sure how to do it. I’ve been trying to do it as you might notice from my blog site, my website, where I published a lot of personal essays that have this political element to them. G&E Podcast: I would agree, satire is one of the best ways to do it, and it’s not easy, it’s difficult and just on that final thought, you teach at a college and I also taught at high school university, and I find it’s tough to get through to this generation, to get them to care. But not only … you have brilliant students as well, but they also get this huge bias at the university and I feel like we’re outnumbered in a way, because they go through this educational system that puts in so many biases and it’s hard to undo that. Do you have any comment on the younger folks? Edward Curtin: I do, yes, first I’d say that they have been induced to become drug addicts, the drug being the phone and they are addicted to social media, can’t keep their eyes off it, can’t keep themselves off the phone. And within the university setting, the universities have totally capitulated, totally, with rare exceptions, to this propaganda onslaught. Throughout academia, as far as I can tell, there are very few people who are willing to broach the subjects that you and I have just talked about, out of fear. Fear via runs rampant throughout the university system here in the United States. And I think it’s the liberal capitulation to the warfare state, to the propaganda, and people want careers, they don’t want to step out of line. They don’t want to dissent. And many of them don’t realize what’s going on. Obama is a perfect example. He was just loved by most liberal university type people and he waged at least six wars, he killed people with drones, he was an abomination. And now we have Trump and they’re all up in arms about Trump, but he’s just a continuation of Obama. And Obama was a continuation of Bush. And Bush it was a continuation of Clinton, and it goes down the line, it goes all the way down the line. With one exception, I would say, and that was in the last year of his life, President Kennedy, who turned against the warfare state and was assassinated as a result. The only president of the United States who changed, by a miracle, really. G&E Podcast: Speaking of Kennedy and that last point, just a few days ago, it was released, the speech that he was going to give that day in Dallas was reconstructed through technology with him actually speaking it. They were able to recreate him speaking that speech, so people can find that online. And we thank you professor Curtin, people can find your writings at edwardcurtin.com, and I’ll post the link. We hope you continue writing, your pieces get reposted in many places, I know Global Research and many other websites. Thank you again. Edward Curtin: Thank you Hrvoje for having me on, it’s been really good talking to you, even though the topics are not the happy face topics. G&E Podcast: People can go elsewhere for that. Edward Curtin: Yes, they can. Thanks. [/spoiler] Show Notes Triggering War. A Manufactured “Catalytic Event” Which Will Initiate An All Out War? Are We Going to Let this Happen Again? https://www.globalresearch.ca/triggering-war-a-manufactured-catalytic-event-leading-to-all-out-war-are-we-going-to-let-this-happen-again/5632549 Further Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game http://edwardcurtin.com/further-signs-of-more-war-a-most-dangerous-game The Coming Wars to End All Wars http://edwardcurtin.com/the-coming-wars-to-end-all-wars Denying the Obvious: Leftists and Crimestop http://edwardcurtin.com/denying-the-obvious-leftists-and-crimestop Website http://edwardcurtin.com About Edward Curtin Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, I teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. My writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Analyst Richard Heydarian explains President Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power and the geopolitics and foreign policy of the Philippines as it struggles to find its way between a military alliance with the United States and its economic integration with China and the New Silk Road, all in the shadow of the ongoing South China Sea crisis. Show Notes How fear and paranoia about China’s rise breathed new life into the ‘Quad’ – at Asean’s expense http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2135860/how-fear-and-paranoia-about-chinas-rise-breathed-new China nearly done militarizing South China Sea http://www.atimes.com/article/china-nearly-done-militarizing-south-china-sea Duterte to China: ‘If You Want, Just Make Us a Province’ http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/duterte-china-%E2%80%98if-you-want-just-make-us-province%E2%80%99-24599 Rodrigo Duterte Is Key to China’s ‘Post-American’ Vision for Asia http://nationalinterest.org/feature/rodrigo-duterte-key-chinas-post-american-vision-asia-20825 Richard Heydarian: Duterte’s Rise in Perspective https://thediplomat.com/2017/11/richard-heydarian-dutertes-rise-in-perspective Website https://www.twitter.com/richeydarian https://www.facebook.com/Richeydarian Books https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Javad-Heydarian/e/B00J3URNJY/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1521562690&sr=8-1-fkmr0 About Richard Heydarian Richard Javad Heydarian is an Assistant Professor in international affairs and political science at De La Salle University, and previously served as a policy advisor at the Philippine House of Representatives. As a specialist on Asian geopolitics and economic affairs, he has written for or interviewed by Al Jazeera, Asia Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Diplomat, The Financial Times, and USA TODAY, among other leading international publications. He is the author of How Capitalism Failed the Arab World: The Economic Roots and Precarious Future of the Middle East Uprisings (Zed, London), and the forthcoming book Asia’s New Battlefield: US, China, and the Struggle for Western Pacific (Zed, 2015). You can follow him on Twitter: @Richeydarian. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Rupert Darwall: Radical Environmentalism and the Climate Deep State #073 Author Rupert Darwall discusses the totalitarian roots of radical environmentalism and the “Climate-Industrial-Complex” or “Climate Deep State” composed of NGOs, government agencies, oligarchs, academia and green technology companies. He explains how the climate change movement began as a political agenda with roots in Nazi Germany and 1970s Swedish technocracy and that renewable energy cannot feasibly replace carbon energy sources. Show Notes Renewables have brought rising costs, unreliability and puny results https://capx.co/renewables-have-brought-rising-costs-unreliability-and-puny-results Green Ideology’s Failed Experiment https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/02/green-ideologys-failed-energy-experiment Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/science-proves-kids-are-bad-earth-morality-suggests-we-stop-ncna820781 Brown advocates for one world parliament https://www.theage.com.au/national/brown-advocates-for-one-world-parliament-20110629-1gqz1.html Scientists warn of unusually cold Sun: Will we face another ice age? http://www.ibtimes.co.in/scientists-warn-unusually-cold-sun-will-we-face-another-ice-age-759865 New study confirms that nature is responsible for 90% of the Earth’s atmospheric acidity https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/11/new-study-confirms-that-nature-is-responsible-for-90-of-the-earths-atmospheric-acidity/#more-54630 POOP BURGER: Japanese Researcher Creates Artificial Meat From Human Feces https://inhabitat.com/poop-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces Website https://twitter.com/RupertDarwall Books https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/green-tyranny https://www.amazon.com/Rupert-Darwall/e/B003VN7VAU/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 About Rupert Darwall London-based Rupert Darwall has two decades’ experience in finance and public policy, specializing in the intersection of the two. A graduate of Cambridge University where he studied economics and history, Mr Darwall was an investment banker at Swiss Bank Corporation (now part of UBS) before becoming a special adviser to the chancellor of the exchequer at the UK Treasury in 1993. He has advised companies on their bids for multi-billion dollar government  public-private partnerships;  on their regulatory and anti-trust strategies; worked with leading Private Equity houses on public-to-private transactions and in 2008, he advised on a major proxy battle regarding the US assets of one Britain’s largest corporations. In the public policy sphere, Mr Darwall co-founded one of London’s leading think tanks and was a consultant to the Conservative party during the 2005 general election.  His published writings on reforming Britain’s civil service and tax credits have been widely cited and he has written three major articles for the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review.  He has also written for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal on British politics.  His books Global Warming: A Short History and Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate-Industrial-Complex are available in bookstores everywhere. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Marc Faber: Markets, Petroyuan, and World War #072 Renown Swiss investor and publisher of “The Gloom, Boom and Doom Report” Dr. Marc Faber discusses the global markets, housing and bond bubbles, central bank manipulation, gold, Trump, the petroyuan, the New Silk Road and what a potential conflict between the U.S. and China might look like as old empires die and new ones are born. Show Notes Financial insiders contemplate “imminent” 2018 US stock market crash of up to “50%” https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/city-of-london-financiers-contemplate-imminent-2018-us-stock-market-crash-of-up-to-fifty-ed217752428 Trump’s $4.4T budget would move U.S. deficits sharply higher http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-budget-1.4531653 Real Estate Bubbles: The 8 Global Cities at Risk http://www.visualcapitalist.com/real-estate-bubbles-8-global-cities-risk How China Is About to Shake Up the Oil Futures Market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/how-china-will-shake-up-the-oil-futures-market-quicktake-q-a India to build major military facility in Seychelles amid growing China influence http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/india-seychelles-china-military-facility-indian-ocean-islands-a8217596.html Empire of Chaos : With President Trump, Is the American Experiment Over? http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176387/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_tom_engelhardt%2C_through_the_gates_of_hell/#more The US is Executing a Global War Plan https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/18/us-is-executing-global-war-plan.html Website https://www.gloomboomdoom.com About Marc Faber Dr Marc Faber was born in Zurich, Switzerland. He went to school in Geneva and Zurich and finished high school with the Matura. He studied Economics at the University of Zurich and, at the age of 24, obtained a PhD in Economics magna cum laude. Between 1970 and 1978, Dr Faber worked for White Weld & Company Limited in New York, Zurich and Hong Kong. Since 1973, he has lived in Hong Kong. From 1978 to February 1990, he was the Managing Director of Drexel Burnham Lambert (HK) Ltd. In June 1990, he set up his own business, MARC FABER LIMITED which acts as an investment advisor and fund manager. Dr Faber publishes a widely read monthly investment newsletter “The Gloom Boom & Doom Report” report which highlights unusual investment opportunities, and is the author of several books including “ TOMORROW’S GOLD – Asia’s Age of Discovery” which was first published in 2002 and highlights future investment opportunities around the world. “ TOMORROW’S GOLD ” was for several weeks on Amazon’s best seller list and is being translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and German. Dr. Faber is also a regular contributor to several leading financial publications around the world. A book on Dr Faber, “RIDING THE MILLENNIAL STORM”, by Nuri Vittachi, was published in 1998. A regular speaker at various investment seminars, Dr Faber is well known for his “contrarian” investment approach. He is also associated with a variety of funds and is a member of the Board of Directors of numerous companies. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Jefferson Morley: James Angleton and the Birth of the American Deep State #071 Washington author and veteran journalist Jefferson Morley discusses his latest book on CIA Director James Angleton who was one of the founders of what is known as the American “Deep State”. Show Notes 5 of the Most Important JFK Files the CIA Is Still Hiding https://www.alternet.org/top-5-jfk-files-cia-still-hiding-coverup-secrecy Sure, #ReleaseTheMemo—Along With All of the Underlying Documentation https://www.alternet.org/all-means-releasethememo-and-all-underlying-documentation The New JFK Files Reveal How the CIA Tracked Oswald https://www.alternet.org/new-jfk-files-illuminate-cia-surveillance-oswald Websites http://jeffersonmorley.com http://www.jfkfacts.org http://www.alternet.org https://twitter.com/jeffersonmorley Books https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Morley/e/B001ILHJ9K/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1517637068&sr=8-2-ent About Jefferson Morley Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and veteran journalist whose novelistic non-fiction books explore untold chapters in the history of the American nation. A skilled investigative reporter, Morley combines granular detail with storytelling verve to capture unknown realities of subjects as disparate as the Central Intelligence Agency and America’s legacy of racial violence. Morley’s newest book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, tells the story of a paranoid genius who was perhaps the most powerful unelected official in the U.S. government. At the height of the Cold War, Angleton’s secret influence extended from Moscow to London to Jerusalem to the Vatican, to the White House. If there is a “Deep State” in American life as some contend, Angleton was one of its Founding Fathers. The Ghost is a companion and sequel to Morley’s first book Our Man in Mexico, a biography of an improbable American spy. Winston Scott was an Alabama math teacher turned FBI agent who joined the CIA at its founding, became close friends with Angleton and became the chief of the agency’s Mexico City station in the 1960s. “Every decade or so a talented writer provides a genuinely new glimpse of the Central Intelligence Agency,” said historian Thomas Powers of the book. Morley’s second book, Snow-Storm in August, was described by best-selling author David Mariniss as “History so fresh it feels alive.” A vivid account of a white riot that swept the nation’s capital 25 years before the Civil War, Snow-Storm’s “plunge beneath the surface of history exposes realities more true to daily experience than executive proclamations or speeches in Congress,” said the Washington Post. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it “elegant and readable.” Morley is one of the world’s most credible authorities on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is editor of the blog, JFK Facts. He sued the CIA for certain records related to the Kennedy assassination in 2003. Fourteen years later, his lawsuit, Morley v. CIA is still active in federal court. Morley is married and lives in Washington D.C. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Geopolitics & Empire · Gideon Levy: Israel, Palestine and American Empire: #070 Author and journalist Gideon Levy discusses Israeli politics, the fate of Palestine and the role of American empire in the Middle East. Show Notes Netanyahu’s son caught on secret recordings outside strip club talking about major energy deal http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/09/netanyahus-son-caught-secret-recordings-outside-strip-club-talking Abbas Is Right. Why Does Israel Keep Saying He’s Wrong? https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/abbas-is-right-why-does-israel-keep-saying-he-s-wrong-1.5744750 Gideon Levy: Does unconditional support for Israel endanger Israeli voices? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGO3eBxQX7Q Gideon Levy: Americans “Are Supporting the First Signs of Fascism in Israel” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-QNP4Zw-KQ Website https://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/1.4968119 Books https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Gideon+Levy&search-alias=books&field-author=Gideon+Levy&sort=relevancerank About Gideon Levy Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper. Levy was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso Publishing House in London and New York. *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJtm_0VMIZo&t=25s In this interview we speak with Sayasat Nurbek who is the managing director of the Astana International Financial Center and the director of the Public Policy Institute which is associated with the Kazakh government’s “Nur Otan” political party. We discuss the geopolitics of Kazakhstan and what it’s future looks like as it integrates into the global economy with a new stock exchange, cryptocurrency and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Show Notes Understanding Kazakhstan’s Politics https://thediplomat.com/2015/05/understanding-kazakhstans-internal-politics This is America with Dennis Wholey and Sayasat Nurbek, Nur Otan Political Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T09hssHX3Yk Websites https://twitter.com/sayasatnurbek http://www.aifc.kz About Sayasat Nurbek At a very young age, Sayasat Nurbek has been fortunate in achieving significant heights in education and career. A graduate of educational institutions in the United States, Italy and Kazakhstan, he held internships and various training courses in public administration and public policy, HR management, management of technology in the USA, Singapore, Belgium, Japan, the UK and the Netherlands. In 2000-01, he worked as an assistant to Congressman Mark Smith (USA) and was employed by the Government of the State of Iowa (USA). In 2006-2009, Sayasat worked in the Investment Projects department of the Sustainable Development Fund Kazyna, and held positions of Head of the HR Policy Division of the Administration of the President of Kazakhstan, Vice-Rector of the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Kazakhstan, Executive Director and Department Director of HR policy of National Welfare Fund Samruk-Kazyna. In 2009, he was appointed Director of the National School of Public Policy. The President of Kazakhstan has decorated Sayasat Nurbek with several medals and commendation letters. [spoiler] Sayasat was elected as a young leader and member of various councils and state committees on youth policy, public service and human capital development. He represents Kazakhstan in the Bologna Process Working Group on Mobility and Internationalization where he contributed to the implementation of the EHEA Mobility for Better Learning Strategy. He is an active member of the Youth Policy Council under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan where he took part in formulating youth policy and implementation of youth-oriented projects. Since 2007, he has been on the board of the National Expert Commission, a body in charge of selecting top candidates for the Bolashak scholarship. As a long-term member of the Expert Council of Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Civil Service Affairs, he participated in the new reform of civil service currently implemented in Kazakhstan. He is also an active member of the Alumni Association of President’s Bolashak International Scholarship. In 2012, he succeeded in launching the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community hub which brought significant social change to the development of Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. As President of the Center for International Programs for three years (2010-2013), Sayasat was entitled to administer the Bolashak international scholarship programme – one of the most successful strategic initiatives of President Nazarbayev. He managed to reshape the Bolashak program and carry it to the next level of perfecting the leadership skills of its scholars. The programme’s impact on a national level is profound. Many graduates have also reshaped the national policies through their work in important ministries, governors’ offices and national companies. In 2012, Kazakhstan’s rank in the Global Competitiveness Index jumped from 72 to 51, and numerous Bolashak scholars have contributed to this growth. In addition to accumulated knowledge, the programme has also brought about a social multiplying effect in Kazakhstan. Bolashak scholars are commonly viewed as agents of change. These talented and educated people generate new knowledge in their workplaces and bring sophisticated work ethics. Globally, Bolashak works towards preparing the next generation of leaders to be able to act as ethical global citizens in the face of daunting challenges that will be thrown upon them in years to come. Using all his institutional power and policy tools at hand, he has been continuously passionate about helping identify young leaders with strong values and then support them to develop to their fullest potential. He has recently completed and published a monograph on Bolashak Presidential Program and its impact on human capital formation of Kazakhstan. In October 2013 Sayasat Nurbek was appointed as Director of the Institute of Public Policy – policy think tank affiliated with ruling Nur Otan Party. He was invited as Department Director of the Almaty City Government by Mr. Baibek since October 2015, and after almost a year of civil service has decided to switch to the corporate sector where he joined the new ambitious project of the President – the Astana International Financial Center aifc.kz as Member of the Board in charge of HR, Strategy and International Cooperation. ​[/spoiler] *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon) English Transcript: Hrvoje Moric: I recently had the opportunity to meet Sayasat Nurbek who I would consider one of Kazakhstan’s thought leaders and most forward-thinkers. He has degrees in International Law and Geopolitics from universities around the world and he speaks 8 languages. Sayasat has worked in the US Government as Congressman Mark Smith’s assistant and has held numerous positions within the Kazakh public and private sector. He is the Director of the Kazakh government’s first think tank, the Public Policy Institute and is one of the managing directors of the Astana International Financial Center. In this interview we discuss the geopolitics of Kazakhstan and what it’s future looks like as it integrates into the global economy with a new stock exchange, cryptocurrency and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. I hope you enjoy the talk and please do share the interview on social media, subscribe to the Geopolitics & Empire weekly newsletter and YouTube channel. Also think about donating $1 a month on Patreon to help support the work we do. [spoiler] Sayasat has worked in the U.S government as congressman Mark Smith’s assistant and has held numerous positions within the Kazakh public and private sector. He is the director of the Kazakh government’s first think tank, the Public Policy Institute and is one of the managing directors of the Astana International Financial Center. In this interview, we discuss the geopolitics of Kazakhstan and what its future looks like as it integrates into the global economy with a new stock exchange, cryptocurrency and China’s Belt and Road initiative. I hope you enjoy the talk and please do share the interview on social media. Subscribe to the Geopolitics and Empire free weekly newsletter and YouTube channel. Also think about donating one dollar a month on Patreon to help support the work that we do. We are here today with Sayasat Nurbek who is the managing director of the Astana International Financial Center. It’s great to have you here. Sayasat Nurbek: Thank you. Thank you. Hrvoje Moric: I’d like to discuss the geopolitics of Kazakhstan, the economics, and it’s development, and my first question for you is, how would you describe the geopolitical position of Kazakhstan and by this I mean its current relationship with its neighboring countries as well as the big powers such USA, Russia and China? Sayasat Nurbek: Okay, good. Well, let me start by an interesting example I had in Canada. So, I was attending a conference in Canada a few years ago, 10 years ago. So I asked them, “How are you doing in Canada?” They said, “Well, it’s like sleeping in a bed with an elephant.” Meaning the US. You always have to keep one eye open. So in our case, then the colleagues of mine, they said, “Look, but you know, we are okay. We would survive. But we are really worried about you guys. Do you ever sleep with two elephants in your bed?” That meaning, they are China and Russia. And you know, the 90’s when Kazakhstan first gained its independence, there were a lot of really negative, very really negative, negative scenarios and a lot of experts in geopolitics, a lot of the politicians, public policy advisers, they agreed that Kazakhstan was a powder keg. They coined a term a powder keg. Why? Because all the arguments, all the background information, the situation, geography, and there’s this great book, Curse of Geography; was against us. You have a multinational country with 130 ethnic groups living under the same roof with lots of religions and a very bad, very unstable neighborhood with this Soviet Union inertia, with a lot of ecological problems. We’re the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world. So a lot of people are wondering, “They are not gonna survive. The country would be split with such huge territory with such small population. This country inevitably will fall in pieces, will fall apart.” But you know, history proved it wrong. A lot of these assessments, it proved it wrong. We did, not only we were able to keep our independence and keep our territory and unity, we also showed some significant economic development, political development. But of course the neighborhood, I mean the curse of geography, it does play its role. So five to seven years ago, the geopolitical situation in the region was quite stable. Right, so we had a tripod situation; Russia, China and United States. United States primarily had a huge interest in energy sector, in minerals and of course US had interest in Kazakhstan as the biggest country in the region in keeping it stable because the Kazakhstan’s stability means the regional stability. You have five countries in the region and Kazakhstan is the largest not by population but by economic prosperity in terms of political heft, in terms of logistics, in terms of infrastructure. It is this binding country for the whole region. So in terms of energy resources, pipelines, uranium production, mineral production, US was quite interested in keeping this country stable. Russia was very interested in keeping the whole region stable. Russian political scientists, geopolitical experts, they have a saying that Kazakhstan is the soft underbelly of Russia. Why? You look at Russian’s map, map of Russia, the Ural mountains, they divide Russia into two. There’s the European part and the Siberian part, Eastern part. The European part is the most developed, and most populated and most of the infrastructure and most of the manufacturing, the factories, plants, manufacturing sites are located in the Western part, in the European part. But all the raw materials, the energy sources, food, the raw materials, minerals, ores, wood, oil and gas, they all come from the Eastern part, from the Siberian part, which is not populated, which has a very scarce population. And Kazakhstan kinda dives in and it kinda divides Russia into two, and the thinnest part, like if you look at Russia, it’s a very long country. The thinnest part is where Kazakhstan plunges into Russian territory. And historically, central Asia was always seen as a threat to Russia’s unity. You remember the great game when British empire and Russia empire, it is beautifully described in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim about this young boy Kimball O’Hara who was hired by British intelligence services, and there was a great game. And back then, in 18th/19th century, when we talk about central Asia, it was a much wider concept. It would start from western Siberia, the central Asia as we know it. The five countries, the Stans; Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, partially Iran and it will go all the way to Northern India. That was the original Central Asia. And Frederick Starr, John Hopkins’ very own Frederick Starr, he has this, a lot of series of beautiful articles describing the cultural, educational and trade space that used to be called central Asia. Rediscovering central Asia, which is one his … One of my favorite of this article. So now Kazakhstan, Russia was always interested in keeping the region stable because then it would influence Russian unity and any case of de-stability here, it would threaten this flow of supplies between the Eastern and Western part. China again was interested in keeping this region stable. Why? It is crucial for their One Belt One Road initiative. Now it’s called BRI, Belt and Road Initiative, officially. So there were a lot of, when we talk about One Belt, One Road, it’s not just one road. It’s actually a series of maritime and land routes, several of them. But one of the key direction is passing through central Asia, and through central Asia, especially through Kazakhstan. Not only China is envisaging to provide this continuous supply of trade with European market, but also it can diversify through Kazakhstan, through central Asia, you could go not only through Russia and Della Russia to western European. You could go through Caspian sea and Azerbaijan until to the Black Sea and Mediterranean to the well established logistical infrastructures. Or you can go down south through Iran, through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and you get access Bandar-Abass and Karachi ports. And you have to access to Persian gulf who have well established logistical infrastructure as well. So central Asia is becoming this very important hub, very important region again. It is key to many, many, many other regions. You know how they call it, and one of my favorite one as well … Chinese call central Asia and Kazakhstan now buckle in the belt. They’ve got like One Belt One Road, but buckle in the belt, they wanted binding to be a very … Is the central Asian region. So we had a tripod situation, which was quite stable. So we had three major powers with their own interests in the region and none of them was interested in destabilizing the region. So that also helped Kazakhstan and central Asian countries to keep the stability. If you look at the regions, you can compare it to Middle East, you can compare it to Northern Africa, you’d see in these 25 years that we had all kinds of revolutions and conflicts- Hrvoje Moric: Arab Spring. Sayasat Nurbek: Arab Spring, and counties falling apart, their presidents being killed like in Libya. But this region, despite all odds, despite all the arguments we had was able to be stable, was to keep its stability because the bounce of powers was there, and that it was quite big, and it was one of the key factors that helped to keep that stability. Yeah. So nowadays, we do see some signs of destabilization. Why? Because, USA has pulled out of the region. We don’t have a tripod anymore. We have two legs left, that is Russia and China. And in China, and that vacuum, which was created after withdrawal of United States is quickly filled with Chinese presence, with Chinese self-power, with Chinese influence. Why? Because with 37 trillions of GDP and 1.7 trillions of Russian GDP, we are not talking about partnership here. We are not talking about equilibrium here. We are talking about one global power, which is increasingly becoming more important, more influential with lots of resources, trying to push its own interest in the region. Well, the balance of power is not there anymore. There is a new balance of power, which is not very balanced. That would lead to my conclusion. Hrvoje Moric: And on that point, I was gonna mention, we’ve seen an example. Kazakhstan will be switching from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, which does signal a kind of change to a greater national independent and sovereign identity and Astana has been hosting a series of these Syrian peace talks. And I was gonna use the analogy. Is it Kazakhstan can be considered a Switzerland of central Asia? Is it more neural? You said Washington has pulled out and so is Kazakhstan looking to work with all countries and be its own, form its own identity? Sayasat Nurbek: Yap. Well, one great thing about our political leadership, and mainly our president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, from the very first years of independence, he was always trying to pursue what we call a multi-vectorial foreign policy. I mean, working with all the global powers. Working equally with all the regional powers, trying to keep the balance. Balance was the key trademark of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy. Trying to promote ourselves as these peace keeping … Well Switzerland is a good example, but we are not Switzerland. I mean Turkmenistan, they tried to become this Switzerland. It’s like, “Guys, we don’t wanna deal with anybody. We just wanna be the safe haven thing.” So in a way, we are trying to promote ourselves as safe haven, not only economical but also political. I mean through this 20+ years of stability, of continuity, we try to promote ourselves, we are politically safe haven, but we are active safe haven. So we were trying to seek a more active role in regional peace keeping measures, and the larger areas as well, through Shanghai Cooperation Organization for example, through our participation in OECD, organization of security in Europe, and through United Nations of course. So we do have like this kind of a more than regional political ambitions. And nuclear non-proliferation and we had the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world. I mean, it was quite big an argument. Muammar Gaddafi, I’ve got interesting facts for you. Muammar Gaddafi in 90’s, you know the Libyan president and ruler, he wrote a letter, it is a fact, through diplomatic channels, official diplomatic channels to Nazarbayev, the first years of independence. He writes a letter to our president and says, “Can you please keep your nuclear weapons? And I’m ready officially to provide billions of dollars in financial aid to make sure this nuclear arsenal is kept, is maintained, and we will provide all the financial support to keep it. And let’s make the very first Muslim A-Bomb. Let’s have a joint project to develop the very first Muslim A-bomb.” They were like direct offers, keep it guys. I mean, it’s a big stick you have, and not many Muslim countries, or countries in the region, of course Soviet countries have that kind of stick. Keep it. We were the only one with that kind of arsenal. The fourth largest in the world. But I think it was a very wise decisions. And look, when you look at the countries who do not have scientific research potential, who do not have stable democratic institutions or any power institutions and do have nuclear weaponry, it’s a disaster in many cases. A disaster or you become an outcast, a global outcast. Or bring the country in turmoil. Instead, we were able to create a security network. Instead, we were able to trade in our nuclear arsenal for security guarantees, for creating this kind of, promoting our image of a very stable, very peaceful country. And its was very highly appreciated on the United Nations’ level for example. You know, just next year, Kazakhstan officially becomes chairman of security council of United Nations. So in January, I think the second half of January, our president is traveling to New York to officially speak to United Nations building in order to accept the chairmanship of the security council. That was partially thanks to that nuclear non-proliferation policy. So the only problem we have right now is we live in a really bad neighborhood, a really bad neighborhood. I’ll tell you a joke. It’s like a legend, saying, old saying. Do you know why chipmunk has three stripes on his back? Chipmunks, you know, they have three stripes on their back. So, a chipmunk was a good friend with bear once. So one day, bear wakes up in a very good mood. And he comes to his dear friend chipmunk and says, “Oh, my dear friend, let me pat you on your back. You are such a good friend.” And you know the bear’s claws are not retractable. So the- Hrvoje Moric: This is [crosstalk 00:16:08] Sayasat Nurbek: The maxim, the logic behind … The philosophy behind that maxim says, if you are friends with bear, even if he is in good mood, you have to be careful. No direct allegations or anything are made in this maxim. It’s just an old legend of some sort. But we have to be really careful. We live in a very difficult, very interesting neighborhood. So we have to be really, really careful. And last thing to mention. So far, so good. If you asses the overall situation, we are doing great. We are doing just enough to survive so to speak, and not to have troubles with any neighboring countries. That waves a lot. I mean, they say the most expensive thing in this life is independence. You always have to pay a high price for being independent, impartial, neutral. So I think we are able to navigate our way, our policy, and foreign policy and regional policy in a way. But we are not making any foes. We are friends with everybody. Yeah? Hrvoje Moric: And maybe if we could also mention a bit, the economic aspect. I’m here in Kazakhstan working with the 2020 development strategy in education. You have the 2050 modernization 3.0 development program. And I also understand there’s a new stock exchange that’s, I think, going to be created soon. And Kazakhstan, as well, I found this interesting that president Nazarbayev has been recommending the creation of a Kazakh cryptocurrency. So could you tell us a little bit about this development, the economic developments, the cryptocurrency, the stock exchange and where you see economically Kazakhstan in the future. Sayasat Nurbek: So what happens economically, we were one of the fastest growing economies in the region. We had the highest GDP, still have the highest GDP and GDP per capita in the region. But inevitably we fall into what is called by economists, the middle income trap. You might have heard the expression, the term. So it is really easy, for many countries to develop quickly thanks to traditional macro-economic instruments, the public policy, the capital allocation, big public tenders. Of course the oil prices helped us a lot. Then you can’t mention that, I mean we are an oil exploring country. So we did really well, and the prices soared. We’ve been really good. All this money was flowing into the economy. Now, we inevitably came to a point that we found ourselves in this middle income trap. And many countries tried. So there are many countries who have showed some quick results to a certain level, and then they come into this middle income trap. It’s like a glass ceiling, you can’t break through. And not that many countries, the true success stories comes with the countries who are able to bypass. To pass this threshold of middle income. To get themselves rid of this trap. And that’s through success stories about modernization of your economy, diversification of your economy. Building smart economy. Build knowledge based economy. Providing some intellectual products. Building strong solid research infrastructure, solid education infrastructure, solid, the manufacturing, engineering human capital. That’s where we are stuck. And all these programs, modernization 3.0, industrialization 4.0, Kazakhstan 2050 strategy are all built around these stumbling blocks, improving education. Look at where we sit. It’s a beautiful building, where we have a lot of investments in education and research, building, improving the human capital, improving their capacity. But here’s the problem. Here we are a little bit stuck. The oil curse, it did happen to Kazakhstan. I haven’t seen any country, which actually got rid of oil curse. It did happen. Resource curse, we did. The Dutch disease, we did inevitably fall in the trap of Dutch disease. So, the biggest challenge for Kazakhstan right now is how do we rebuild ourselves. How do we bypass? How do we jump over this trap, middle income trap? Human capital is partially an answer to that. We are building new schools. We have Nazarbayev University in Astana. We are trying to up-bring new generation of researchers and policy makers and so on and so forth. But, my personal opinion, we are a bit late. We should have started this a bit earlier. So we were like enjoying this prolific years of high income, oil income, and we lost I think five to 10 years. But the idea is, the understanding of a problem is there. So I think if, they say 50% of success, of overcoming a challenge is accepting the challenge, that you have a problem. So I think that we clearly understand that we have problems. We need to tackle these problems. The strategies, well, you can write the best strategy ever. You can hire the best strategies ever. You can write a very beautiful piece of paper. It’s all about implementation again. It’s all about efficiency. So what happens now, there are several challenges that are really impeding this process. One, an efficiency of our bureaucracy, of our bureaucratical machine. But bureaucracies all over the world are now facing huge challenges. The Alvin Toffler the famous American scientist, the political scientist and the sociologist, he coined this term, The Burden of Power. The power over everywhere in the world, it has a burden. It has to fight its own inefficiency. It has to fight a lot of challenges. The information overflow, the inefficiency. Another great American political scientist, Amitai Etzioni, he’s was born in Germany. He teaches in Israel. He coined his new term, Responsiveness. How quick can a political system respond to a different feedbacks, different inquiries from different parts of society? How can it digest and give the feedback back? How can it quick responsiveness? We lack that responsiveness, unfortunately. And one of the last thing, I think, it comes and you might have heard about the Daron Acemoglu’s and James Robinson’s Why Nation’s fail. It’s a new book. Hrvoje Moric: Of course yeah, Why Nations Fails. Sayasat Nurbek: A new game of theory on institutions. Why nations fail, because of the different types of institutions that define the political and economic reality in those countries. And they talk about inclusive and extractive institutions. And institutions, that rules of the game basically, that provide free access, that give more rights, that include, involve more people; that provide freedom of speech, that provide freedom to act, that provide and to prove it … That force or push for entrepreneurship, for risk taking, innovation. These type of economies usually are more sustainable, more flexible and more competitive. So I think the biggest challenge in terms of Kazakhstan lies in redesigning our public institutions. As a foreigner, you could see, that it’s the value systems and institutions in this country are still, there’s a path dependence from Soviet Union. People are still very quite afraid to speak up their mind. And there’s a direct co-relation between the institutions and value systems that reflect on economic growth, that reflect on entrepreneurial activities, that reflect on innovation, innovative initiative. I’m conducting a research, and that might be a topic for a different blog, for a different interview. From about four or five years ago, I started a research, and I’m using the methodology of world value survey run by Professor Ronald Inglehart from Michigan University, and we are using their methodology to define how value systems, how value structures are changing, reshaping in Kazakh society, in modern Kazakh society. That might be a very interesting piece of work for you, because what we’ve seen is that, the resistance of this old value systems, it actually curbs, it actually limits the potential of many, many parts of society. You know, like starting business, innovate, take risks. And it directly reflects in political institutions, the freedom of speech, elections. We have a very high number of people showing up on elections for example, because nothing depend on me, it is not my responsibility. I don’t like to take any risks. Why should I show up and vote? Everything is pretty fine. So there are these kind of mentality things that actually … And I think the biggest challenge that we have right now is changing that mentality, is changing those values. Trying to get rid of some value systems in public institutions that curb initiatives. I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have right now. Hrvoje Moric: We are out of time, but just really quickly, could you answer this question? What are some things that Kazakhs can do practically to help transform their country. This is what you were saying about … Now what’s one final thing you can tell your people. Sayasat Nurbek: No, just one final thing. Now let me just finish my thought, because you mentioned the cryptocurrencies, you mentioned the financial hub. Things are moving so quickly now. There are countries who were not leapfrogging. There a term, an economic term, leap-frog where let’s say you are two steps back and in their economic development or some industry thing, developed countries, we are just way ahead. And you would stay three or five steps back. So instead of taking every single step and stage these developed countries have passed, instead it’s much easier to leapfrog, to bypass some stages and take direct hit at these new stage of technologies. China did this. And leapfrogging has a lot of advantages. Sometimes, the biggest, the quickest example comes from construction. To demolish an old building and build a new one, a completely different architecture and design building, it takes you much more resources than building this very building from scratch because demolishing takes a lot of resources. You have to take out, clear the garbage, take out the foundation. You have to dig in just to demolish the foundation. If you have no foundation, no old buildings, it’s much easier to build something from scratch. You save a lot of energy and resources. And China did this. Instead of trying to build an old, kind of to create vast old traditional industry, they leapfrogged. They jumped directly to IT. Look at the companies they are developing now. Their biggest company, Alibaba, Transcend, The WeChat, Mobile Finance, the financial technologies, the artificial intelligence. And they should be actually now building much more plants and factories, old traditional factories. But they said, “No, no, no. We are not gonna disperse our resources on something, which is already outdated. We will aim for future. We will save our energy and resources and time. We will try to focus on what’s next.” You remembered that famous expression, Wayne Gretzky, who played hockey? So he said, his most famous expression, “I’m a good player. I’m a good hockey player not because I followed the pack. I tried to be there where the pack will arrive.” [crosstalk 00:29:30] Right. I’ll try to be there when the pack comes, right? So I’m not following, I’m predicting the trajectory. So that’s, I think, in a way the cryptocurrencies, these are big new things. Some experts say that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology will change, will reshape, redefine the financial industry. In 10 years time, they say the whole, the financial industry as we know it, five or 10 years will change completely. Banks will change their role. Financial institutions will change. There will be companies issuing their own currencies. Some experts say on the other hand, miracles are happening. Revolution is not happening. There is so much was invested in existing financial infrastructure. It’s not that easy to make that change. So anyway, we are trying to be, as Wayne Gretzky said, we are trying to be where the pack will go. And that is all the initiatives, Astana Financial Center is saying this type of thing. There are about 800 financial centers in the world right now, if you believe Global Financial Center’s index. And a lot of these countries who are trying to have their own financial hubs, Mexico city, Istanbul, Bombay, Mumbai, Bangkok, Moscow, now Astana. So apart from this well established financial centers, there’s like London, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, Shanghai. Now all these countries are trying to cut their own financial centers. Why? Because, they are trying to keep the money in the country. Because what happened is a lot of these developing countries, a lot of capital, there’s a huge capital outflow and money tends to go to financial centers, hubs, where they believe they have more diversified, more high quality financial services. So China for example, they had Hong Kong. They are now investing a lot in building Shanghai financial center. Why? Because we don’t want our money to go out of the country. We want it to stay here by providing same conditions, same terms by introducing British law, by providing security, by providing safe haven type of territories, in order to keep the money in the country. And we can serve, attract the money from the region because in the region you will look in the regions, there’s this huge Asian region, there are no financial centers. The closest one is at Dubai, Moscow is shut down, is being shut down. Istanbul, Hong Kong going there, we are talking about 500 kilometer empty space. Hrvoje Moric: So in this case geography… Sayasat Nurbek: Geography does play a role. And the final question. I think, everybody now talks about this modernization and there’s this new program. You can’t actually properly translate it into English. Spiritual Renovation the call it sometimes [Foreign Language 00:32:23], you might have heard about it at these lectures and other things. And in a nutshell, it talks about changing your mentality. It talks about challenge. It talks about changing the way we do things. Changing the way we look at things. And it starts with every single citizen because still, we have this very strange kind of post-Soviet mentality. We always look up to someone. We say okay, “When will they give us the directive? What should I do? What should I speak? Where should I go?” I mean, you’ve seen that mentality. As a foreigner here, you talk to people and they say, “You know what? Let me go and talk to the director, principal. He would know better.” Hrvoje Moric: I get in trouble. I just started doing things- Sayasat Nurbek: Doing things that are not … You can’t do that because we have to talk to someone. We have to get approval. We have to comply. We have to get advice. We need to get this approved by someone. And it’s not a bad thing in a way. It’s kind of a mentality thing. But that’s the biggest thing that actually curbs initiative. It actually curbs taking risks. It actually curbs innovation in a way. So it’s a very strange situation. On one hand, we want people to innovate. We want people to make new things. We want people to have start-ups. We want our children, the pupils in this school, “Go ahead. Make new things. Take initiative.” On the other hand, we are curbing this very initiative by one thing. And I’ve found an answer to that. It’s the culture of mistake. We had a very different culture of mistake. Making mistakes is bad in our culture. It’s so bad, it can be lethal for you. You cannot make mistakes. You have to play the role. All the social roles we have with our society are close to ideal. You look at all these kids and people and principals, they are like wow! The ideal people, yes. Nobody wants to make any mistakes. Hrvoje Moric: So this is why- [crosstalk 00:34:43] Sayasat Nurbek: You sit in a meeting, and there’s a principal talking. Nobody can raise his voice and say, “Shut the fuck up. I have my own opinion on this.” No, you can’t do that. Why? Because the price you might pay for that mistake might be lethal for you. From kindergartens, we are brought up with that single idea. Making mistakes is bad. So the proper culture of mistakes … You’ve lived in US and Mexico by the way has got the same mentality, no mistakes. Hrvoje Moric: A little bit, yeah. Sayasat Nurbek: [Foreign Language 00:35:14] No, no, no, no just you know, no, no, no mistakes. He said no, he said no. In America for example, it’s a very different culture of mistakes. Hrvoje Moric: Make mistakes. [crosstalk 00:35:30] Sayasat Nurbek: Making mistakes is good for you. You get experience. In order to not make mistakes, you have to have experience. In order to have experience, you have to make mistakes. You have to learn from your mistakes. And it’s interesting how it’s reflected in legislation. For example, bankruptcy in American legal system, bankruptcy of physical persons is allowed. You start a business, it didn’t go well, go bankrupt. It’s not problem. You started another business, it didn’t go well, go bankrupt. In our countries, going bankrupt, it’s a very bad thing. Geez, you have this black label on you. It’s a very painful process and it just stays with you forever. In American system, wow this guy has a bankruptcy history, let’s employ him. Why? He has experience. He is a trained guy. And if you see how it reflects in the mentality and culture and pop culture and movies, you take any Hollywood movie, you take any American movie, it’s all about mistake. It’s like catch me if you can. Pursuit of Happiness, Will Smith, you make a mistake, the protagonist of the movie makes some mistakes, has a very painful experience, learns his lessons. And then there is this critical scene in the movie, and he makes the right decision, why? Because he had a painful experience and he had learned from it, and he made a mistake. Hrvoje Moric: It’s like our president as well, president Trump, he’s had that same history mistakes- Sayasat Nurbek: All over again. All over again. Hrvoje Moric: A lot of mistakes, the same, and he’s been successful. Sayasat Nurbek: I drowned, I stumbled, I’ve fallen but I was always able to rise and get back what’s mine, and get back what’s mine. So that’s kind of typical American success story, rise and fall, rise and fall, learn from your mistakes. You take any speech by any of these big start-up leaders, like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, whatever, connecting the dots. They always talk about failures. They have this fuck up nights thing. Like, “I made a mistake, I acknowledged it, I learned from it and that helped me to excel. And that helped me to perfect the product. That helped me to be successful.” So I think one of things, one, we have to start from … Each citizen has to start looking back to his own story. And acknowledging we cannot go on like this anymore. Acknowledging … Have you watched, have you seen that series Newsroom? Hrvoje Moric: I haven’t seen it. It’s on Netflix, yeah. Sayasat Nurbek: Very famous one. Why America is not the greatest country in the world, you have see that? Hrvoje Moric: Of course. Daniels, Jeff Daniels. Sayasat Nurbek: Daniel, Jeff Daniels, Why America is not the … I want a [inaudible 00:38:07]. Well, America is not the greatest country in the world anymore, why? We are number one tatata, then he goes on and says, “Look.” He says, “Let’s accept that. We are not the greatest country in the world anymore.” Hrvoje Moric: I know, we’d move on. Sayasat Nurbek: Accepting, acknowledging is the first step in rebuilding yourself. So I think, firstly, we have to accept we can’t go on like this. Oil curse, it did happen. Dutch disease, it did happen. We are not that efficient, we have to acknowledge it. We are not that efficient. We have some crappy bureaucratical system? Yeah, we have to acknowledge that, and we have to rebuild ourselves. And one thing we have to fix is this culture of mistake. We have to fix and acknowledge that it is okay to make mistakes. It is okay to learn from them. No, no, no. It is not okay making mistakes and not learning from them, and being punished, punished to such a level that you don’t wanna make any mistakes anymore. It’s about carefully bringing up the experiences, combining those experiences and building a better country and a better future for all us. God bless … All right. Hrvoje Moric: All right, we’ll have to end it [crosstalk 00:39:15]. Sayasat Nurbek: That sounded like a presidential speech, didn’t it? In a presidential debate. Hrvoje Moric: God bless Kazakhstan. Sayasat Nurbek: God bless Kazakhstan. And all the citizens of Kazakhstan, with your help and support, we will rebuild this country and it will be the greatest country in the world. Let’s make this country great again. Hrvoje Moric: Well, I’ve been here three months, and I’m enjoying my time at Kazakhstan. I invite other people to come and visit and I do wish peace and prosperity for Kazakhstan and- Sayasat Nurbek: Thank you. Hrvoje Moric: Thank you for the interview. Sayasat Nurbek: Thank you. [/spoiler] Russian Transcript: Hrvoje Moric: Недавно у меня была возможность встретиться с Саясатом Нурбеком, которого я бы назвал одним из авторитетных и дальновидных личностей Казахстана. Он имеет ученые степени в области международного права и геополитики в разных мировых университетах, и говорит на 8 языках. Саясат работал в правительстве США в качестве помощника конгрессмена Марка Смита и занимал многочисленные должности в государственном и частном секторах Казахстана. Он является директором первого аналитического центра правительства Казахстана, Института общественной политики и является одним из управляющих директоров международного финансового центра «Астана». В этом интервью мы обсудим геополитику Казахстана и ее будущее в условиях интеграции в мировую экономику с новой биржей, криптовалютами и Китайской инициативой «Один пояс – один путь». Надеюсь, вам понравится беседа, и, пожалуйста, поделитесь интервью в социальных сетях, подпишитесь на еженедельную новостную ленту Geopolitics & Empire на YouTube канале. Также подумайте о том, чтобы пожертвовать 1 доллар в месяц на Patreon, чтобы помочь поддержать работу, которую мы делаем. Сегодня с нами Саясат Нурбек – управляющий директор международного финансового центра «Астана». Очень приятно с вами встретиться. [spoiler] Sayasat Nurbek: Спасибо. Спасибо. Hrvoje Moric: Я бы хотел обсудить геополитику Казахстана, экономику и ее развитие, и мой первый вопрос: как бы вы описали геополитическую позицию Казахстана, я имею в виду ее нынешние отношения с соседними странами, а также с большим державами как США, Россия и Китай? Sayasat Nurbek: Хорошо, позвольте мне начать с интересного примера, с которым я столкнулся в Канаде. Я присутствовал на конференции в Канаде несколько лет назад, 10 лет назад. Так я спросил их: «Как вы поживаете в Канаде?» Они сказали: «Ну, это как спать в постели со слоном». Подразумевая США. «Вы всегда должны держать один глаз открытым. Это, в нашем случае – они сказали – но вы знаете, мы в порядке, мы выживем. Но мы действительно беспокоимся за вас, ребята, вы же спите рядом с двумя слонами?» Они имели ввиду Китай и Россию. Знаете, в 90-е годы, когда Казахстан впервые обрел независимость, было много действительно негативных, очень негативных, негативных сценариев и многие эксперты в области геополитики, многие политики, советники по государственной политике, они согласились, что Казахстан – пороховая бочка. Они использовали термин пороховая бочка. Зачем? Потому что все аргументы, вся информация, ситуация, география, и эта великая книга «Проклятие географии»; были против нас. У нас многонациональная страна, 130 этнических групп, живущих под одной крышей с множеством религий и очень плохим, очень неустойчивым соседством с этой инерцией Советского Союза, с множеством экологических проблем. У нас был четвертый по величине ядерный арсенал в мире. Поэтому многие люди обеспокоенно говорили: «Они не выживут. Страна с такой огромной территорией и с таким маленьким населением будет расколота. Эта страна неизбежно развалится». Но вы знаете, история доказала обратное. Многие из этих суждений были опровергнуты. Мы сделали это, мы не только смогли сохранить нашу независимость и сохранить нашу территорию и единство, мы также продемонстрировали значительное экономическое развитие, политическое развитие. Но, конечно, соседство, я имею в виду проклятие географии, оно играет свою роль. Так что пять-семь лет назад геополитическая ситуация в регионе была довольно стабильной. Так, у нас была треногая ситуация: Россия, Китай и США. Соединенные Штаты в первую очередь интересовались энергетическим сектором, полезными ископаемыми, и, конечно же, США были заинтересованы сохранить стабильность в Казахстане как крупнейшей стране в регионе, потому что стабильность в Казахстане означает стабильность в регионе. У вас есть пять стран в регионе, и Казахстан является самым крупным не населением, а экономическим процветанием с точки зрения политического роста, с точки зрения логистики, с точки зрения инфраструктуры. Это обязательная страна для всего региона. Таким образом, с точки зрения энергетических ресурсов, трубопроводов, добычи урана, добычи полезных ископаемых США были очень заинтересованы в том, чтобы сохранить стабильность в этой стране. Россия была очень заинтересована в том, чтобы сохранить стабильность во всем регионе. Российские политологи, эксперты геополитики, говорят, что Казахстан – мягкое подбрюшье России. Почему? Вы смотрите на карту России, карту России, уральские горы, разделяют Россию на две части. Есть европейская часть и сибирская часть, восточная часть. Европейская часть – самая развитая, наиболее населенная и большая часть инфраструктуры и большая часть производства, заводы, производственные площадки расположены в западной части, в европейской части. Но все сырье, источники энергии, продукты питания, сырье, минералы, руды, древесина, нефть и газ все они происходят из восточной части, из сибирской части, которая не заселена, которая имеет очень скудную популяцию. И Казахстан будто погружается, и будто делит Россию на две части, и самая тонкая часть, как если бы вы смотрели на Россию, это очень длинная страна. Самая тонкая часть – это та, где Казахстан присоединяется к России. И исторически Центральная Азия всегда рассматривалась как угроза единству России. Вы помните великую игру, когда Британская империя и Россиская империя, она прекрасно описана в романе Редьярда Киплинга «Ким» об этом мальчике Кимбале О’Харе, который был нанят британскими спецслужбами, и была отличная игра. И тогда, в 18-м / 19-м веке, когда мы говорим о Центральной Азии, это была гораздо более широкая концепция. Она начиналась бы с Западной Сибири, Центральная Азия, как мы ее знаем. Пять стран: Кыргызстан, Узбекистан, Таджикистан, Афганистан, частично Иран, и она бы протянулась до Северной Индии. Это была Центральная Азия И Фредерик Старр, из университета Джонса Хопкинса, у него есть серия красивых статей, описывающих культурное, образовательное и торговое пространство, которое раньше называлось Центральной Азией. «Повторное открытие Центральной Азии» – одна из его … Один из моих любимых статей. Итак, теперь Казахстан, Россия была всегда заинтересована в стабильности в регионе, потому что это повлияло бы на единство России и любая дестабилизация этого региона поставило бы под угрозу этот поток поставок между восточной и западной частями. Китай тоже был заинтересован в сохранении стабильности в этом регионе. Почему? Это важно для их инициативы «Один пояс и один путь». Теперь это официально называется BRI, Belt and Road Initiative. Хотя когда мы говорим о проекте «Один пояс и один путь», это не только одна дорога. На самом деле это серия морских и наземных маршрутов, несколько из них. Но одно из ключевых направлений проходит через Центральную Азию и через Центральную Азию, особенно через Казахстан. Не только Китай планирует обеспечить этот непрерывный товарообмен с европейским рынком, но он также может диверсифицироваться через Казахстан, через Центральную Азию, вы могли бы пойти не только через Россию и Белоруссию в западноевропейские страны. Вы можете пройти через Каспийское море и Азербайджан до Черного и Средиземного морей, до хорошо развитой логистической инфраструктуры. Или вы можете спуститься на юг через Иран, через Казахстан и Туркменистан, и вы получите доступ к портам Бандар-Аббас и Карачи. И вам нужно получить доступ к Персидскому заливу, у которого есть хорошо развитая логистическая инфраструктура. Таким образом, Центральная Азия становится очень важным центром, очень важным регионом. Это ключ ко многим, многим и многим другим регионам. Вы знаете, как они это называют, и один из моих любимых – Китайцы называют Центральную Азию и Казахстан теперь – пряжкой в этом поясе. У них есть «Один пояс и один путь», но пряжкой в этом поясе является регион Центральной Азии. Таким образом, у нас была треногая ситуация, которая была довольно стабильной. Так, у нас было три основные державы с их собственными интересами в регионе, и ни один из них не был заинтересован в дестабилизации региона. Это также помогло Казахстану и странам Центральной Азии сохранить стабильность. Если вы посмотрите на регионы, вы можете сравнить с Ближним Востоком, вы можете сравнить его с Северной Африкой, вы увидите за эти 25 лет, что у нас были все виды революций и конфликтов – Hrvoje Moric: Арабская весна. Sayasat Nurbek: Арабская весна и развал государств, их президентов убивают, как в Ливии. Но этот регион, несмотря на все разногласия, несмотря на все конфликты, которые мы имели, смог сохранить стабильность, потому что был баланс сил и что он был довольно большим, и это был один из ключевых факторов, который помог сохранить эту стабильность. Да. Итак, сегодня мы видим некоторые признаки дестабилизации. Почему? Потому что США вышли из региона. У нас больше нет треногой ситуации. У нас осталось две ноги, это Россия и Китай. И Китай. И этот вакуум, который был создан после вывода Соединенных Штатов, быстро заполняется китайским присутствием, китайской властью, китайским влиянием. Почему? Потому что с 37 триллионами ВВП и 1,7 триллионами российского ВВП мы здесь не говорим о партнерстве. Мы здесь не говорим о равновесии. Мы говорим об одной глобальной державе, которая становится все более важной, более влиятельной с большим количеством ресурсов, пытающаяся выдвинуть свой собственный интерес в регионе. Баланса сил больше нет. Существует новый баланс сил, который не очень сбалансирован. Так бы я подитожил. Hrvoje Moric: И в этот момент я хотел бы упомянуть, мы видели пример. Казахстан переидет с кириллицы на латинский алфавит, что свидетельствует о каком-то изменении большей национальной независимой и суверенной идентичности, и в Астане проходит серия сирийских мирных переговоров. И я собирался использовать аналогию. Можно ли Казахстан считать Швейцарией Центральной Азии? Является ли он более нейронным? Вы сказали, что Вашингтон вышел, и так, стремиться ли Казахстан сотрудничать со всеми странами и оставаться обособленным, формировать свою собственную идентичность? Sayasat Nurbek: Да. Что же касается нашего политического руководства, и главным образом нашего президента, Нурсултана Назарбаева, с первых лет независимости он всегда старался преследовать то, что мы называем многовекторной внешней политикой. Я имею в виду сотрудничать со всеми глобальными державами. Сотрудничать в равной степени со всеми региональными державами, пытаясь сохранить равновесие. Баланс был ключевым товарным знаком внешней политики Казахстана. Пытаемся продвигать себя, как страна поддерживающее мир. Швейцария – хороший пример, но мы не Швейцария. Я имею в виду Туркменистан, они пытались стать этой Швейцарией. Это типа: «Ребята, мы не хотим иметь дело ни с кем. Мы просто хотим быть безопасным местом». Таким образом, мы пытаемся продвигать себя как безопасное место, не только экономически, но и политически. Я имею в виду, что через эти 20+ лет стабильности, непрерывности мы стараемся продвигаться вперед, мы политически безопасны, но мы активны. Поэтому мы стремились к более активному участию в региональных миротворческих мерах, а так же в более крупных областях, например, через Шанхайскую организацию сотрудничества, посредством нашего участия в ОЭСР, организации безопасности в Европе и, конечно же, через Организацию Объединенных Наций. Таким образом, масштабы наших политических амбиции больше региональных. И ядерное нераспространение, и у нас был четвертый по величине ядерный арсенал в мире. Я имею в виду, это был довольно большой вопрос. Муаммар Каддафи, у меня есть интересные факты для вас. Муаммар Каддафи в 90-е годы, вы знаете, ливийский президент и правитель, он написал письмо Назарбаеву, это факт, письмо по дипломатическим каналам, официальным дипломатическим каналы, первые годы независимости. Он пишет письмо нашему президенту и говорит: «Можете ли вы сохранить свое ядерное оружие? И я готов официально предоставить миллиарды долларов финансовой помощи, чтобы этот ядерный арсенал сохранился, поддерживался, и мы будем обеспечивать финансовую поддержку, чтобы сохранить его. И давайте сделаем первую мусульманскую А-Бомбу. Давайте запустим совместный проект по разработке самой первой мусульманской бомбы». Это были прямые предложения: «Ребята, сохраните ядерный арсенал». Я имею в виду, «это большая палка, которой вы владеете, и не многие мусульманские страны, или страны в регионе, страны советского союза владеют такой палкой. Сохраните ее». Мы были единственными с таким арсеналом. Четвертый по величине в мире. Но я думаю, что это было очень мудрое решение. И посмотрите, когда вы смотрите на страны, у которых нет научно-исследовательского потенциала, у которых нет стабильных демократических институтов или каких-либо силовых институтов и есть ядерное оружие, во многих случаях это катастрофа. Катастрофа или вы становитесь изгоем, глобальным изгоем. Или приведете страну в смятение. Вместо этого нам удалось создать сеть безопасности. Вместо этого мы смогли обменять наш ядерный арсенал на гарантию безопасности, для создания такого рода, продвигая наш образ очень стабильной, очень мирной страны. И это очень высоко оценили, например, на уровне Организации Объединенных Наций. Вы знаете, что в следующем году Казахстан официально станет председателем Совета безопасности ООН. Поэтому в январе я думаю, что во второй половине января, наш президент едет в Нью-Йорк, чтобы официально выступить с речью в Организации Объединенных Наций, чтобы принять председательство в совете безопасности. Это частично благодаря политике ядерного нераспространения. Единственная наша проблема сейчас – это то что мы живем в очень плохом окружении, в самом плохом окружении. Я расскажу вам анекдот. Это как легенда, старая притча. Вы знаете, почему у бурундука на спине три полосы? Бурундуки, вы знаете, у них на спине три полосы. Итак, бурундук был в хороших дружеских отношениях с медведем. В один прекрасный день медведь просыпается в очень хорошем настроении. И он подходит к своему дорогому другу бурундук и говорит: «О, мой дорогой друг, позволь мне похлопать тебя по спине. Ты такой хороший друг». И вы знаете, что когти медведя не убираются. Sayasat Nurbek: Логика, философия этой легенды в том, что если вы дружите с медведем, даже если у него хорошее настроение, вы должны быть осторожны. Никаких прямых аллегорий или чего-либо в этой легенде нет. Это просто старая притча. Но мы должны быть очень осторожны. Мы живем в очень сложном, очень интересном окружении. Поэтому мы должны быть действительно, очень осторожны. И последнее, что нужно упомянуть. Пока все идет хорошо. Если вы оцениваете общую ситуацию, мы отлично справляемся. Мы делаем достаточно, чтобы выжить, так сказать, и не иметь проблем с соседними странами. Это влияет на многое. Я имею в виду, они говорят, что самая дорогая вещь в этой жизни – независимость. Вы всегда должны платить высокую цену за независимость, беспристрастность, нейтральность. Поэтому я думаю, что мы способны проложить наш путь, нашу политику, внешнюю политику и региональную политику. Но мы не делаем никаких врагов. Мы дружим со всеми. Да? Hrvoje Moric: И, может быть, если бы мы могли немного затронуть экономический аспект. Я здесь, в Казахстане, работаю в рамках стратегии развития образования 2020. У вас есть программа развития 2050 – модернизации 3.0. И также, как я понимаю, здесь скоро будет создана новая биржа. И Казахстан, также, мне показалось интересным, что президент Назарбаев рекомендовал создать казахстанскую криптовалюту. Не могли бы вы рассказать нам немного об этом развитии, об экономическом развитии, о криптовалюте, бирже и об экономическом будущем Казахстана. Sayasat Nurbek: Так что же происходит экономически, мы были одной из самых быстрорастущих экономик в регионе. У нас был самый высокий ВВП, по-прежнему имеем самый высокий ВВП и ВВП на душу населения в регионе. Но неизбежно мы попадаем в то, что называют экономисты, ловушка среднего дохода. Возможно, вы слышали это выражение, этот термин. Очень легко, многие страны быстро развиваются благодаря традиционным макроэкономическим инструментам, государственной политике, распределению капитала, большим открытым торгам. Конечно, цены на нефть очень помогли нам. Вы не можете не упомянуть это, я имею в виду то, что мы являемся страной экспортирующая нефть. Так, у нас все было действительно хорошо, и цены взлетели. У нас все было действительно хорошо. Все эти деньги вливались в экономику. Сейчас мы пришли к выводу, что мы оказались в этой ловушке среднего дохода. И многие страны пытались. Есть много стран, которые показали быстрые результаты на определенном уровне, а затем они попадают в эту ловушку среднего дохода. Это как стеклянный потолок, через который вы не можете прорваться. И не так много стран, истинные истории успеха идут со странами, которые могут обойти, пропустить этот порог среднего дохода. Чтобы избавиться от этой ловушки. И этот успех благодаря модернизации экономики, диверсификации экономики, создание умной экономики, построение экономики, основанной на знаниях, предоставление некоторых интеллектуальных продуктов, создание прочной исследовательской инфраструктуры, надежной инфраструктуры образования, производственного, инженерного человеческого капитала. Вот где мы застряли. И все эти программы, модернизация 3.0, индустриализация 4.0, стратегия Казахстана 2050 построены вокруг этих камней преткновения: улучшение образования. Посмотрите, где мы сидим. Это прекрасное здание, большие инвестиции в образование и исследования, строительство, улучшение человеческого капитала, улучшение их потенциала. Но есть проблема. Здесь мы немного застряли. Проклятие нефти, это случилось с Казахстаном. Я не видел ни одной страны, которая избавилась от нефтяного проклятия. Это случилось. Проклятие ресурсов. «Голландская болезнь», мы попали в ловушку «Голландской болезни». Итак, самой большой проблемой для Казахстана сейчас является то, как мы перестроим себя. Как нам преодолеть, как нам перепрыгнуть через эту ловушку, ловушку среднего дохода? Человеческий капитал частично является ответом на это. Мы строим новые школы. У нас Назарбаев Университет в Астане. Мы пытаемся воспитать новое поколение исследователей и политиков и т. д. и т. п. Но, мое личное мнение, мы немного опоздали. Мы должны были начать это немного раньше. Так, мы наслаждались этими плодовитыми годами высоких доходов, нефтяных доходов, и мы потеряли, я думаю, от пяти до десяти лет. Но идея в том, что мы осознаем проблему. Поэтому я думаю, как говорят 50% успеха в преодолении проблемы, это принятие этой проблемы. Я считаю, что мы четко понимаем, что у нас есть проблемы. Нам нужно решать эти проблемы. Стратегии, ну, вы можете написать самую лучшую стратегию. Вы можете перенять самые лучшие стратегии. Вы можете написать очень красивый лист бумаги. Все дело в реализации. Это все об эффективности. Итак, что происходит сейчас, есть несколько проблем, которые действительно препятствуют этому процессу. Во-первых, эффективность нашей бюрократии, нашей бюрократической машины. Но бюрократия во всем мире сталкивается с огромными проблемами. Элвин Тоффлер, известный американский ученый, политолог и социолог, придумал этот термин «Бремя власти». Власть повсюду в мире несет бремя. Она должна бороться с собственной неэффективностью. Она должна бороться с множеством проблем: переполнение информации, неэффективность. Другой великий американский политолог Амитай Эциони, он родился в Германии. Он преподает в Израиле. Он придумал свой новый термин «Отзывчивость». Как быстро политическая система может реагировать на разные отзывы, разные запросы из разных частей общества? Как она может переварить отзыв и вернуть обратно? Как быстро она может реагировать? К сожалению, нам не хватает этой отзывчивости. И одно из последних, по-моему, и вы, возможно, слышали о книге Дарона Аджемоглу и Джеймса Робинсона «Почему одни страны богатые, а другие бедные». Это новая книга. Hrvoje Moric: Конечно слышал, «Почему одни страны богатые, а другие бедные». Sayasat Nurbek: Новая игра теории об институтах. Почему страны терпят неудачу? Из-за различных типов институтов, которые определяют политическую и экономическую реальность в этих странах. И они говорят об инклюзивных и экстрактивных институтах. И об институтах, которые управляют игрой, которые обеспечивают свободный доступ, которые дают больше прав, в том числе, привлекают больше людей; которые обеспечивают свободу слова, которые обеспечивают свободу действий, которые обеспечивают и доказывают это … которые толкают к предпринимательству, к риску, к инноваций. Такие типы экономики, как правило, более устойчивы, гибки и более конкурентоспособны. Поэтому я считаю, что самая большая проблема Казахстана заключается в переделке наших государственных институтов. Как иностранец, вы могли видеть, что система ценностей и институты в этой стране все еще есть, есть зависимость от Советского Союза. Люди все еще очень боятся озвучивать свои мысли. И существует прямая взаимосвязь между институтами и системами ценностей, это же отражается на экономическом росте, на предпринимательской деятельности, на инновации, на инновационных инициатив. Я провожу исследование, может быть это тема для другого блога, для другого интервью. Примерно четыре-пять лет назад я начал исследование, и я использую методологию мирового исследования ценности, проводимую профессором Рональдом Инглхартом из Мичиганского университета, и мы используем их методологию для определения того, как меняются и перестраиваются системы ценностей, структуры ценностей, в казахском обществе, в современном казахстанском обществе. Это работа может быть очень интересна для вас, потому что то, что мы видели, это сопротивление старых систем ценностей, которые фактически противодействуют, ограничивают потенциал многих и многих слоев общества. Потенциал как начать бизнес, внедрять инновации, рисковать. И это напрямую отражается в политических институтах, свободе слова, выборах. У нас очень много людей приходят на выборы, например, но все еще с менталитетом что от меня ничего не зависит, что это не моя ответственность. Я не люблю рисковать. Почему я должен идти и голосовать? Все достаточно хорошо. Существует такой менталитет … И я думаю, что самая большая проблема, которую мы имеем сейчас, – это изменение этого менталитета, изменение этих ценностей. Попытка избавиться от некоторых систем ценностей в государственных институтах, которые пресекают инициативы. Я думаю, что это самая большая проблема, которую мы имеем сейчас. Hrvoje Moric: У нас остается мало времени, но просто очень быстро, не могли бы вы ответить на этот вопрос? Какие действия казахстанцы могут сделать на практике, чтобы помочь преобразовать свою страну. Это то, о чем вы говорили … Теперь, что-то одно, что вы можете сказать своему народу. Sayasat Nurbek: Позвольте мне закончить свою мысль, потому что вы упомянули криптовалюты, вы упомянули финансовый центр. Сейчас все движется так быстро. Есть страны, которые не «прыгали». Есть термин, экономический термин, «прыжок лягушки», где, скажем, вы на два шага позади и в своем экономическом развитии или в какой-то промышленности, а развитые страны далеко впереди. И вы отстаете на три-пять шагов. Но вместо того, чтобы проходить каждый шаг и этап, которые проделали развитые страны, вместо этого гораздо проще перескочить, обойти некоторые этапы и сразу же попасть на новый этап технологий. Китай сделал это. И «прыжок лягушки» имеет много преимуществ. Иногда самый большой, самый быстрый пример – строительство. Чтобы снести старое здание и построить новое, совершенно отличающегося по архитектуре и дизайну, вам потребуется гораздо больше ресурсов, чем строительство этого самого здания с нуля, потому что снос требует много ресурсов. Вы должны убрать, очистить мусор, убрать фундамент. Вам нужно копать, чтобы снести фундамент. Если у вас нет фундамента, нет старых зданий, гораздо проще построить что-то с нуля. Вы экономите много энергии и ресурсов. И Китай сделал это. Вместо того чтобы пытаться построить старый, создать обширную старую традиционную индустрию, они перескочили. Они прыгнули прямо к ИТ. Посмотрите на компании, которые они сейчас разрабатывают. Их крупнейшая компания Alibaba, Transcend, WeChat, Mobile Finance, финансовые технологии, искусственный интеллект. На самом деле они должны строить гораздо больше заводов и фабрик, старых традиционных фабрик. Но они сказали: «Нет, нет, нет. Мы не собираемся расходовать наши ресурсы на что-то, что уже устарело. Мы будем стремиться к будущему. Мы будем экономить энергию, ресурсы и время. Мы постараемся сосредоточиться на будущем». Вы помните это знаменитое выражение, Уэйн Гретцки, который играл в хоккей? Он сказал, его самое известное выражение: «Я хороший игрок. Я хороший хоккеист не потому, что я следовал за шайбой. Я пытался быть там, куда прикатится шайба». Верно. Я постараюсь быть там, куда придет шайба, верно? Поэтому я не следую за ней, я предсказываю траекторию. Так вот, я думаю, в какой-то мере криптовалюты, это большие новые вещи. Некоторые эксперты говорят, что криптовалюты и технология blockchain поменяют, изменят, переопределят финансовую отрасль. Через 10 лет они говорят, что вся финансовая индустрия, какой мы ее знаем сейчас, через пять или десять лет полностью изменится. Банки изменят свою роль. Финансовые институты изменятся. Будут компании, выпускающие собственные валюты. Но, с другой стороны, некоторые эксперты говорят, что, чудес не бывает, революции не будет. Очень много было инвестировано в существующую финансовую инфраструктуру, Не так легко все это изменить. Так или иначе, мы пытаемся быть, как сказал Уэйн Гретцки, мы пытаемся быть там, куда придет шайба. И это все инициативы. Финансовый центр Астаны говорит об этом. Сейчас в мире около 800 финансовых центров, если верить индексу Глобального финансового центра. И много стран, которые пытаются создать свои собственные финансовые центры: Мехико, Стамбул, Бомбей, Мумбаи, Бангкок, Москва, теперь Астана. То есть, помимо этих хорошо зарекомендовавших себя финансовых центров, таких как Лондон, Гонконг, Нью-Йорк, Сингапур, Шанхай, сейчас все эти страны пытаются создать свои собственные финансовые центры. Почему? Потому что они пытаются удержать деньги в стране. Потому что во многих развивающихся странах, большой отток, огромный отток капитала, и деньги, как правило, идут в финансовые центры, в центры, где, по их мнению, есть более диверсифицированные, более качественные финансовые услуги. Так, на например  Китай, у них был Гонконг. Сейчас они вкладывают много средств в строительство финансового центра в Шанхае. Почему? Потому что мы не хотим, чтобы наши деньги выходили за пределы страны. Мы хотим, чтобы деньги оставались здесь. Предоставляя те же условия, введя британское законодательство, обеспечивая безопасность, предоставляя безопасный тип убежища, мы хотим удержать деньги в стране. И мы можем привлекать деньги из всего региона, потому что в регионе, если вы посмотрите на наш регион, есть этот огромный азиатский регион, и нет финансовых центров. Ближайшие центры – Дубай, Москва закрыта, закрывается, Стамбул, Гонконг, и мы говорим о 500-километровом пустом пространстве. Hrvoje Moric: В этом случае география… Sayasat Nurbek: География действительно играет определенную роль. И последний вопрос. Думаю, сейчас все говорят о модернизации, и есть новая программа. Правильно перевода ее на английский не существует. Духовное возрождение, вы возможно слышали об этом на этих лекциях. В двух словах, в программе говорится об изменении вашего менталитета. В ней говорится о вызове. В ней говорится об изменении наших действий. Об изменении нашего мировоззрения. И оно начинается с каждого гражданина, потому что все же у нас есть этот очень странный вид постсоветского менталитета. Мы всегда ждем чьих-то указаний. Мы говорим хорошо: «Когда они дадут нам директиву? Что мне делать? Что я должен говорить? Куда мне идти?» Я имею в виду, вы видели этот менталитет. Как иностранец здесь, вы разговариваете с людьми, и они говорят: «Вы знаете, что? Позвольте мне пойти и поговорить с директором, он знает больше». Hrvoje Moric: У меня неприятности. Я начал делать что-то – Sayasat Nurbek: Делать то, что не … Вы не можете этого сделать, потому что нам нужно спросить у кого-то. Мы должны получить одобрение. Мы должны подчиниться. Мы должны получить совет. Нам нужно, чтобы кто-то одобрил это. И это не плохо. Это своего рода менталитет. Но это самая большая преграда, которая фактически сдерживает инициативу, препятствует принятию риска. Препятствует инновациям. Так что это очень странная ситуация. С одной стороны, мы хотим, чтобы люди внедряли инновации. Мы хотим, чтобы люди делали новые вещи. Мы хотим, чтобы люди начинали стартапы. Мы хотим, чтобы наши дети, ученики этой школы, «Идите вперед, создавайте новшества. Возьмите на себя инициативу». Но с другой стороны, мы чем-то сдерживаем эту инициативу. И я нашел ответ на этот вопрос. Это культура ошибки. У нас была совершенно другая культура ошибок. Ошибаться в нашей культуре это плохо. Это так плохо, это может быть смертельно для вас. Вы не можете ошибаться. Вы должны сыграть свою роль. Все социальные роли, которые есть в нашем обществе, близки к идеалу. Вы смотрите на всех этих детей, людей и руководителей, они – вау! Идеальные люди, да. Никто не хочет совершать ошибок. Hrvoje Moric: То есть поэтому… Sayasat Nurbek: Вы сидите на собрании, директор выступает. Никто не может повысить свой голос и сказать: «Заткнись, у меня есть свое мнение по этому поводу». Нет, ты не можешь этого сделать. Почему? Потому что цена, которую вы заплатите за эту ошибку, может оказаться смертельной для вас. С детского сада в нас воспитывается эта идея. Совершать ошибки – плохо. Итак, правильная культура ошибок … Вы жили в США и Мексике, кстати, такой же менталитет – никаких ошибок. Hrvoje Moric: Немного, да Sayasat Nurbek: [Иностранный язык 00:35:14] Нет, нет, нет, нет, просто знаешь, нет, нет, никаких ошибок. Он сказал нет, он сказал нет. В Америке, например, совершенно другая культура ошибок. Hrvoje Moric: Ошибайтесь [crosstalk 00:35:30] Sayasat Nurbek: Совершать ошибки – хорошо для вас. Вы получаете опыт. Чтобы не ошибаться, у вас должен быть опыт. Чтобы иметь опыт, вы должны совершать ошибки. Вы должны учиться на своих ошибках. И интересно, как это отражено в законодательстве. Например, банкротство в американской правовой системе, банкротство физических лиц допускается. Вы начинаете бизнес, все идет не так, обанкротились. Это не проблема. Вы начали другой бизнес, все пошло не так, обанкротились. В наших же странах, обанкротится – это очень плохо. Боже, на вас эта черная метка. Это очень болезненный процесс, и это клеймо на всю жизнь. В американской системе, «ничего себе, этот парень имеет историю банкротства, давайте наймем его. Почему? У него есть опыт. Он обученный парень. И если вы видите, как это отражается в менталитете и культуре, поп-культуре и фильмах, возьмите любой голливудский фильм, возьмите любой американский фильм, все они об ошибках. Такие как «Поймай меня, если сможешь», «В погоне за счастьем», Уилл Смит, вы ошибаетесь, главный герой фильма совершает какую-то ошибку, испытывает очень болезненный опыт, учиться на своем опыте. А дальше в фильме есть критическая сцена, и он принимает правильное решение, почему? Потому что у него был болезненный опыт, и это послужило ему уроком, и он допустил ошибку. Hrvoje Moric: Как наш президент, президент Трамп, у него были такие же ошибки Sayasat Nurbek: Снова и снова Hrvoje Moric: Много ошибок, но он был успешным. Sayasat Nurbek: Я утонул, я споткнулся, я упал, но я cмог подняться и вернуть то, что мне принадлежало, вернуть то, что мне принадлежало. Это типичная американская история успеха, взлеты и падения, взлеты и падения, учитесь на своих ошибках. Возьмите любую речь любого из этих крупных стартап лидеров, таких как Элон Маск, Стив Джобс – соединять точки. Они всегда говорят о неудачах. Например: «Я допустил ошибку, я это признал, я узнал об этом, и это помогло мне преуспеть, и это помогло мне улучшить продукт, это помогло мне добиться успеха». Поэтому я думаю, что один из вещей, один, мы должны начать с … Каждый гражданин должен начать с изучения своей истории. И признавая, что мы больше не можем так продолжать. Признавая … Вы смотрели, смотрели ли вы телесериал «Новости»? Hrvoje Moric: Я не смотрел. Он идет на Netflix, да. Sayasat Nurbek: Очень известный телесериал. Почему Америка не является величайшей страной в мире, вы смотрели это? Hrvoje Moric: Конечно. Даниелс, Джефф Даниелс. Sayasat Nurbek: Я хочу … Ну, Америка больше не самая великая страна в мире, почему? Мы – номер один – татата, затем он продолжает перечислять, и говорит: «Хорошо, давайте признаем то, что мы больше не величайшая страна в мире». Sayasat Nurbek: Принятие, признание – это первый шаг в восстановлении себя. Поэтому я думаю, во-первых, мы должны признать, что мы не можем так продолжать жить. Проклятие нефти, это действительно случилось. Голландская болезнь, это произошло. Мы не настолько эффективны, мы должны это признать. Мы не настолько эффективны. У нас есть паршивая бюрократическая система. Да, мы должны признать это, и нам нужно перестроить себя. И одна вещь, которую мы должны исправить, – это культура ошибки. Мы должны исправить и признать, что можно ошибаться. Хорошо учиться на ошибках. Нет нет нет. Нехорошо просто совершать ошибки, и не учиться на них и быть наказанным, наказанным до такой степени, что вы больше не хотите делать никаких ошибок. Речь идет о тщательном изучении опыта, объединении этого опыта и построении лучшей страны и лучшего будущего для всех нас. Да благословит Бог … Хорошо. Hrvoje Moric: Хорошо, но нам придется остановиться здесь Sayasat Nurbek: Это звучало как президентская речь, не так ли? В президентских дебатах. Hrvoje Moric: Боже, благослови Казахстан! Sayasat Nurbek: Боже, благослови Казахстан! И всех граждан Казахстана, с вашей помощью и поддержкой, мы восстановим эту страну, и она станет величайшей страной в мире. Давайте снова сделаем эту страну великой. Hrvoje Moric: Я здесь три месяца, и мне нравится в Казахстане. Приглашаю других людей посетить эту страну, и я желаю мира и процветания Казахстану. Sayasat Nurbek: Спасибо. Hrvoje Moric: Спасибо вам за интервью. Sayasat Nurbek: Спасибо. [/spoiler] *Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)