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Let's build on the conversation. He's ten years younger without a tie. Amastok Staying the former Senior Advisor for Energy and Investment and must welcome to the program.
Thank you, it's great to be here.
Good to see you're seeing happy. We can get into that a little bit later. This came from Javier Blasts just in the last week. Can I have read the pace? What Ukraine has is scorched earth. What it doesn't have is read. Surprisingly, many people, not least US President Donald Trump, seem convinced the country has a rich mineral endowment. It's a folly. What's your view on all of this?
Well, first, I think Javier has done a lot of research into this rare earths. I've never seen any evidence of rare earths in Ukraine. There probably are critical minerals which are different from rare earths in Ukraine, but not at a stage where they've been identified and there's been any exploration drilling, not in any of the commercial quantities
that you are aware of. There may be, and there are, you know, I'm sure there's some data there behind some of this that suggested there is, but to get from a green field from a discovery to a production can take many, many years. It's not a This is not expanding existing deposits.
So I think this is.
A worthwhile conversation to have with Ukraine about how to develop.
Their mineral resources.
We should talk about how to redevelop their gas resources, how to develop their green power resources. Ukraine I believe can be a major supplier of power to Europe. Critical minerals I think is going to be regardless of how this turns out, is going to be many years away when it.
Comes to all these commodities. Wasn't a discussion like this on the table when you were working in government under Biden.
This has been under the discussion since I was working government in Obama administration, so this has been many, many years. We've always wanted to see Ukraine develop its resources because that will give them economic boost, that will allow them to be more independent from Russia and to grow their economy. The corruption was the issue, right, but the resources were there. The issue is we shouldn't be taking the revenue from it.
We should want them to have the revenue so that they can invest in the country, so that the Ukrainians across Europe that had to flee can come back and they can rebuild a country, a military security apparatus and a future for their people.
You mentioned corruption, so I'm reminded of an opinion piece you wrote in twenty twenty when you left the supervisory board of NAFTA Gas. So you've done a lot of work in Ukraine when it comes to this sector. Do you think the corruption has gotten better since then? Tackling the corruption not really.
I think there's a lot of corruption predates Zelenski. It was a corrupt society before the Maydan Revolution. The idea was let's make it better. I think it did get better, and then some of those efforts stalled. There's been a tradition government when there's a little bit of stress to go and use that moment to rob the kitty from state owned enterprises. That's a problem that sort of ebbs and flows. I think it continues with the state control
and during the war. It's hard to criticize during a war when you're having your city's bombed regularly, how you.
Don't do that. So there's a lot of temptation there.
But I think it's a systemic issue that the international community should tackle.
Just ignoring some of the more heated rhetoric around the Ukraine Russian War because of the lack of accountability of where funding is going. Do you think that there is validity in pushing back unjust how much the US and even European nations are contributing to the Ukrainians in this Ukraine Russian War.
You guys separate a couple of things.
One is, we need to support Ukraine because another country invaded.
You can argue whether or not the.
Words that Zelenski used before the invasion were smart or not.
Was it good or bad?
Nothing gives you the right to invade another country because you don't like what the leader said. Can't You just can't do that. So they invaded another country and we should support it. And they invaded Georgia in two thousand and eight, and if we didn't intervene, they would control all of Georgia today and Ukraine. So you got to stop that then, I think one hundred percent. And we
talked about this already in the Biden administration. There's a lot of concern about where's this money going and who's in control of it, And this came up in many conversations with Zelenski with his peap.
Top people about our concerns.
So what you should do is tighten the controls on the money and put the oversight in place so that you know where the money is going. But you can't do it while also saying, well, because of that, we're going to allow the Russians to take a whole bunch of territory and win the war. So it's a really tough balance. But you know, government's hard.
When you left the government, where was the Ukrainian situation in terms of how much territory Russia had taken and this sense of the balance of power at a time where it seemed like Russia was making some inroads.
So Russia was making some inroads, but largely the confident had been frozen for a long time. Where Russia makes a little bit of inroads, then Ukraine makes some inroads somewhere else. On a netnet basis, Russia was making more inroads than he was losing, but it wasn't massive amounts.
Of territory, so it was largely frozen.
But that was in order to get to a negotiation. I agree with the Drum administration that enough is enough. Let's get to a negotiation. I think you have to force both sides to come to the table, and you got to force some tough choices by both sides.
Need to make some tough choices.
Freezing the ward place and saying, okay, we're done, let's call this a border is really tough because hundreds of thousands of people have been killed to do what just to allow for the parts of the country to go away? And then what is there a disarmed Russia on the other side, I don't think so. So they invade again in two years, in four year. So you have to create a negotiation that has both sides at the table, that allows for some kind of resolution that both sides don't like, but that.
Ends the war.
Some people might the argument that the current president, President Trump is attempting to shock the Europeans into action. Can you walk us through your experience with the European allies? How frustrating was that?
I think for us, For the United States, it's always a bit frustrating. I think we like to go a little bit faster and we want to do things more aggressively when it comes to areas of conflict and negotiations. On the other hand, on the economic policy we tend to go a little bit slower in the environmental issues.
We were as a green pro green administration, were frustrated by how far sometimes the Europeans would go without thinking through the consequences of where they were going, and then they would suffer the consequences which affects us and they create high water marks that we then have to deal with our constituencies of why didn't you're dealing with the Europeans and it's a bad and so we say, well, wait two to five years, you'll see why we're not
dealing what the Europeans are doing. So I think there's always been frustrations there. We tried to do trade policy with Europe in the Obama administration, the Biden administration, the Trump administration, now the again very frustrating, very difficult to
do it. So it's built into the system. But at the end of the day, these are our allies and we have to recognize that the argument with them is our This is the argument inside the family versus the arguments with others which is outside the family.
But don't almost sometimes need to maybe shake them up. You were part of the Obama administration telling Germany not to go ahead with Nordstream too.
Yet they did it, yes, and if they didn't do it, large parts of why their declining economy is now would have been avoided. They bought in to the argument of your heroin dealer, the first hit is free, and after that you pay a big price, and some of that. I went to Journey before the Ukraine War five months before and said, something's wrong. You're you're in trouble, and
they insisted that they weren't. When the Russians were playing a game of filling their storage in the winter from their own storage instead of from Russia, I said, how is it possible your pipeline's empty but your storage is filling.
What took the Europeans so long to see the intelligence that the Biden administration was seeing, and that Jake Sullivan was openly telling the press from the podium.
We shared all the intelligence.
I think sometimes they had the exact same intelligence we had on the invasions. We knew, we were saying the invasions coming on this day, on this week, on this day, at this hour.
They refused to see it. No, this is just an exercise.
I think sometimes being the neighbor, you kind of can't see us being an ocean away, we see it with clearer eyes. We've missed plenty of intelligence, so I don't want to you know, we've we had nine to eleven that people were training inside the United States and we didn't see it. So I think they were just too close to the Russians and always making the excuses for him, and that was the problem with and others that were making the excuses.
No, he doesn't mean it, and.
I think we have to learn a lot of lessons, and Europe has to learn more lessons, but I think they have learned a lesson. They don't want this war to end this way because they're worried that this war it doesn't end here. In five years from now he invades another country.
I wanted to finish on this because we could talk to you all day. I mentioned this a couple of times, and I was half joking but semi serious. Of course, ten years younger without the tie. I've said this a few times. There are some really really smart, intelligent people that work inside our administrations here in the United States. We spoke to one last week secretly best some of the Treasury. I worry more and more as years passed by that those kind of people want to go into
US government. I consider you part of that. The lead sing another at am I really talented, intelligent individuals. You might disagree with them on their politics, but when it comes to policy, they've thought things through. Do you worry about that too.
I think it's getting harder and harder to come into government. I mean, obviously, the hours are terrible. The stress is why your family time is terrible. I've seen so much damage to people's families just by making the choice, especially if you're at the White House.
Or at senior levels in the government.
And the problem is if you're not already wealthy, it's becoming even harder because the income is relatively lower and I get it, it's higher than the average American salary, but it is lower relative to what the earning potential is for the people that are in those jobs. And the stress on it and the amount that it costs you to manage your life the government doesn't pay for.
And the scrutiny.
I mean, I have protesters outside my house yelling that I'm accusing me of genocide, going after my daughter and putting her on Instagram, my thirteen year old that comes with the job and it's not like the Secret Service.
Was there to help me or the cops. I mean they're just standing there watching.
So what you get, the blowback that you get and is in to manage your life is really really difficult. The process for confirmation by the Senate is out of control, and.
For relatively low level positions.
So to come and be an assistant secretary in some random agency, you are now supposed to hire lawyers and accountants and to do a forensics auditing of your life, of your personal life, of your financial life.
I mean it's too much.
And so I worry that outside of it being you know, I made a lot of money, so I'm going to go into government and play with that for a little bit. And that happens at both parties. I worry that that it gets harder and harder to get good people to come in.
I think a lot of people share that worry. Almost as good to see you, to see hipee. We'll catch up again soon, Amaso stain there. They form a Senior Advisor for Energy and Investment to President Biden.