our friends and indeed, supporting the countries which were not. where the arab spring started was with iran. right after president obama was inaugurated he gave a speech at cairo university and called on the muslim people in the arab world to stand up for their rights, and demand freedom. when the iranian people did just that, and went to the streets, president obama turned the other way to the point where those people were standing in the streets saying obama, obama, where are you, you have forsaken us, given up on us, and president obama did. he turned his back on the reform movement in iran because at that point he thought he was going to negotiate with the iranian regime and convince them and charm them out of their nuclear plans. so that's where we are in the arab spring movement. the second thing that we are today, i think this is the greatest threat to american security in the immediate sense is iran's nuclear weapons program. iran has tried to do two things. they want a nuclear weapons,

they want to be a nuclear weapons state, they are working fast and furiously towards possession of nuclear weapons, and at the same time, they want to expand to the entire region. they want to be the most powerful country in the persian gulf region in the middle east writ large. why? because that is the check point of world's oil. 40% of the world's exported oil goes through the strait of hormuz. that's past the iranian border. if iran controls the strait of hormuz and controls the persian gulf region, iran controls the world's oil and if iran controls the world's oil, iran controls the world's economy. so that is the second greatest threat facing america today and it's one that is present and is, you know, they really don't see that there's any impediment to what they're about to do, become a nuclear weapons state. the third thing that's important to think about today is israel. in the last four years, we have basically walked step by step by step by step away from israel.

now, some people say that's a good thing, that we were too pro-israeli and we were too anti-arab in the past, but what it does is it convinces israel increasingly that they're on their own and if they feel that america doesn't have their back, particularly this administration, they're going to feel compelled to deal with the second threat i just talked about which is iran's nuclear weapons program. israel has said time and time again the israeli leadership, both political parties, elites in israel have said iran as a nuclear weapons state is an existential threat and that is how they view things. if they feel the united states is not helping them stop iran, they will and probably in short order feel it's necessary to take things into their own hands and attack iran's nuclear weapons sites. the next thing that's facing the united states today is the reset with russia.

it hasn't worked out very well. president obama came in saying we're going to reset relations with russia because they have been so bad. and the russian leadership looked at president obama and said well, where do you want to reset things back to, 1990s? the 1990s, russia was on its knees. the russians were quite pleased with the way things were going in the bush era because they really felt that they were reclaiming their super power status, they were reclaiming their place in the world. so when president obama and secretary clinton sort of misfired by saying this is a reset of our relations with russia, the russians looked askance at that and really for the last four years, increasingly vladimir putin, who has been in charge all along, has increasingly felt that he's got president obama right where he wants him. he's put him in a box and he now to the point where the meeting they had two weeks ago, vladimir putin basically lectured obama the entire time, that he really didn't understand history. now, obama had thought this a reset with russia would improve our relations not only in

stopping iran's nuclear program, but in controlling and helping usher in a new era in the middle east and it really has not worked. in fact it's probably been the greatest failure of the obama administration. then the final thing i think that we face today but nobody really talks about it, it's like the elephant in the room, we know it's there but we're not really focusing on it, is the indebtedness we have to china. every dollar that our government spends, 40 cents is borrowed. of that 40 cents, half of that is borrowed from china. now, hillary clinton has even said you don't pick a fight with your banker. it puts the united states in a position where we don't want to be. it puts us in the position where we're not able right now to challenge a lot of the things the chinese are doing. the chinese, for example, have a very large cybercommand in china dedicated to stealing intellectual property and military secrets from the united states. they've hacked into the pentagon computers. they hacked into lockheed

martin. i'm sure if any of you represent any large major companies, you have been hacked, too. what the chinese have done with that is they are able to steal at the click of a mouse something that's cost us years and hundreds of billions of dollars to develop. estimates are that the chinese have already stolen and had access to $1 trillion to $2 trillion of our critical infrastructure and intellectual property and our military development. so for example, lockheed can spend years and billions trying to develop a new stealth bomber. the chinese click the mouse and then before you know it, they've got exactly, it looks exactly like the model that we were rolling out but it turns out the chinese rolled it out in advance of ours, much more quickly, much more cheaply but it sure looked a lot like ours. that's the next problem we face. we're not in a position to really challenge a lot of that because again, you don't pick a fight with your banker. now, where are we four years from now. let's assume that there's no

change in leadership and that we continue on with the trajectory that we have. i think you can assume four years from now, iran is a nuclear weapons state. why do we care. well, we care because if iran gets nuclear weapons, the other countries in the region have already announced they, too, will get nuclear weapons. the saudis have said they will get nuclear weapons. united arab emirates say they are interested in nuclear power. they say they're interested in nuclear energy but if you're an oil-rich country you don't need nuclear energy. it's just a means to an end towards a nuclear weapons program. the turks, turkey will not stand by and watch a nuclear iran, a nuclear saudi arabia and not develop nuclear weapons of its own. so within the next four years, and i'm not talking about four years at a few crazy far right wing people who are hysterical say that will be a nuclear

weapons region. the secretary of state has said this, once they make the decision to go ahead with it. we are talking about four years from now you will definitely face a nuclear iran and a nuclear arms race and the single most unstable dangerous part of the world for which the world looks for its energy. i think the second thing you would see four years from now if there's no change in policy is a real issue of how secure is the future of israel. if israel feels again that the united states is not going to help them stop iran, israel is probably going to feel compelled to attack iran's nuclear sites by itself. it has in the past, in 1981, when iraq was developing a nuclear weapons site, nuclear enrichment plant, israel attacked that. three years ago, when syria was developing a nuclear weapons enrichment plant, israel attacked that. i think it's a safe assumption that the israelis are already considering an attack against

iran's nuclear sites. what does that do? it doesn't stop there. israel can start a war with iran but we would be brought into that war because israel can't finish that war. so where would we be four years from now? we may have a nuclear region. we may also have seen another arab-israeli conflict and one that would bring in the united states and if nuclear weapons were there, you know, the more likelihood of nuclear weapons being used in an area where everybody's got nuclear weapons. a nuclear region in the middle east means that the next war in the middle east and there's always another war in the middle east. for thousands of years, there's always another war in the middle east, could well be a nuclear war or one in which nuclear weapons were used. the third thing i think you'll see in 2016, if we don't have a change in direction, is the united states' relationship with china will be a very different one. the chinese are a status quo power. in other words, they're kind of sitting back right now playing

by the rules, building up their economy, lending us the money, building up their military to the point where at some point in the not too distant future they can claim to be the world's greatest economy and then all the rules change. if china f we are now talking about and we have just seen the decision, governor brewer spoke about it, others have spoken about it, we are now putting the social welfare spending on steroids, so the amount of money we are already borrowing is 40 cents of every dollar. we can't -- there's just not enough rich people to tax them all to make up the difference between all the social spending that's going to happen in the next four years, especially as the baby boomers continue to retire in greater numbers. so what will happen is the united states will have to borrow more and more and more money, and where is that coming from? it's coming from the loan shark who's lending us the money, which is china. four years from now, the united states i think will have ceded economic sovereignty to china unless we figure out a way to turn that around.

that's today. that's a pretty scary four years from now. and so you conclude that this is just dreadful, right, the world's about to end. well, i actually am a real pessimist. i have been trained as a nuclear weapons expert at m.i.t. i'm one who is always looking at the glass as being half empty. i'm always looking to see what can go wrong in the world. i actually in the last two years have become a real optimist. i'm not talking about the kind of optimist who thinks everything is going to be great, just don't worry about it. there are two competing theories of world history. one says that all nations have their moment, they rise, they have their moment in the sun, then they inevitably collapse. the other theory says that the united states is exempt from this, that we're somehow different, that we're special, that we are, you know, we're just americans and it's a different system. ronald reagan certainly believed that. i actually have come around to conclude that that second theory is the right one. now, why?

i spent my life studying why nations go to war, why some thrive, why some just sort of fall by the wayside, and i have come up with a couple of things and america stacks up pretty well in that sort of formula. first, nations go to war because they don't like their neighbors. we've got pretty good neighbors to the north, we've got a friend, to the south we have trouble, but not a trouble that's necessarily a military invasion of the united states, and east and west, we have a moat. so we don't have a lot of the problems that have plagued europe, for example, with unfriendly neighbors. the second thing we have going for us is that we have really solved a lot of the tribal ethnic and religious problems that tear other nations apart. in the middle east right now is torn apart by tribal and ethnic and regional problems. libya, we used to have a strong libya. now you have 17 tribes fighting against each other. in afghanistan, it's all tribal, all ethnic.

we in the united states are not perfect but we have really come a long way towards solving those tribal, regional, ethnic, racial problems. so we're ahead of it. the next thing is good governance. now, we kind of throw it away although thank goodness, glenn beck is trying to educate us again, we really were given a great government. a lot of countries when they were founded had leaders who were in it for themselves, who were corrupt, who were incompetent. we didn't. we have a nation of governance where our laws are respected by all, where we have a succession plan. look at what's happening in the middle east today. a lot of what you're seeing in these middle east countries is people going to the streets because there's no succession plan. when mubarak tried to hand over the government to his son, is when the egyptian people said no, we don't want that. the same thing happened in tunisia and morocco. we kind of figured it out. we may go to the ballot box but we don't go to the barricades

when we change our leadership. the next thing we have going for us is demographics. i like to think about demographics as a sort of goldilocks and the three bears. you don't want to have too much, you don't want to have too little. you want to have it just about right and we actually have a pretty good demographic situation. right now, china is a demographic time bomb. they have limited themselves to one child per family and that means they'll have a lot of old people retiring on the backs of one child and it means because of their preference for male children, there are some parts of china where there are 140 males to 100 female births. nobody knows what that scientific experiment is going to be but we all know it's not going to be good. the united states has some economic -- i mean, some demographic population growth but not too much. again, part of the problem in the middle east today is that 75% of most of the countries in the middle east have a population under the age of 30 and they don't have jobs.

that's a revolution in the making. russia has the opposite problem. so does japan. they're not reproducing themselves at a rate to sustain economic development. so the united states, we rll pretty good demographic ratio going forward. the next thing that we have that a lot of countries don't have is wome ambassador ware and i have been out there on the forefront of women's movements but in a lot of countries, women are educated but aren't allowed to enter the work force. japan would be an example. economists tell us that women who are educated and join the work force is a 30%, 40% increase in gnp. we have that one solved. so we're riding pretty good. the only problem that we have, i think, is our debt and deficit problems. we can't seem to summon the political will to pay off our debt or to balance our budget,

and for that, the good lord and divine providence have thrown us a lifesaver because if you look at countries, since the industrial revolution, why do countries go to war, we fight over energy. world war i was in part germany trying to get hold of the coal fields of central europe and world war ii was in part the japanese trying to get access to oil and the last two gulf wars have been over oil. we have found in the united states in the last three years two things have happened. our engineers have developed the technology that we can look deep underneath the oceans and under the surface of the earth for energy, oil and natural gas, and when we have looked, we have found we have an abundant supply. we have more oil than saudi arabia. we have more natural gas than russia. we have enough energy in oil and natural gas to really be the world's energy super power for the next not 100 years, but 500 years. so at the end of the day, what

is that going to do? that's an energy renaissance that's going to revitalize american industry. it's going to help us pay off the debt. it's going to balance our budget and it's going to bring jobs back to the united states as american manufacturing becomes competitive again. so i in fact have great confidence in the future but the only thing that stands between us and the future like me and lunch is that we have to have the national will to do it. we have to have the national will to develop our energy resources. we have to have the national will to say leading from behind just isn't going to be good enough. we have to have the national will to say we are indeed different. the american system of government is different. american people are different. america's future is different. we need to develop that. now, how do we do that. i would challenge every one of the young people in here to say this is your moment. i was part of the reagan revolution. when i went to washington with president reagan, it was a bunch of old people in charge, a bunch

of real adults but there were a lot of kids who were really the revolution. whatever happens in november or in the next november or in the next november, this is an opportunity for the young people of america to get involved. this only happens once a generation. we have to relearn those lessons every generation as reagan taught us that we have to relearn the dedication to individualism and entrepreneurial spirit and can-do and get away from the notion of entitlement and whining and feeling sorry for ourselves. who's going to do that? it's the young people. any young people in the room, go get involved politically, get involved in a campaign, run for office yourself, go volunteer. for anybody in the room like me, alan and i have five children. if you're graduating from college today, you're facing 50% unemployment, so mom and dad, kick the kid off the couch, tell him to go get a job, if he can't get a job, go get involved

politically. that's how we will actually get to the future that we all want. so with that, i am standing here and you guys get to be sean hannity and ask me the tough questions. we have time for a couple questions? >> absolutely we do. >> good. >> thank k.t. mcfarland. >> thank you. >> thank you. thank you. [ applause ] >> not bad for starting out as a college student and moonlighting with a little job at henry kissinger's typist in the white house situation room. the rest is history. >> john can say that because he was the guy across the street in the executive office building writing speeches for president nixon. we don't look old enough to have been there together but in fact, we were in the nixon administration together. >> back in those days we were both blond.

if i had gone brunette i might have succeeded as well. secrets you learn only at the western conservative summit. there are microphones in some of the aisles, friends, and you need to come to those. it's hard for me to see you against the lights but we need you on mike because we have the honor that c-span is covering all day of summit saturday and it will be on the air nationally very soon. is there a question -- how about over here, please. >> by the way, you know who i am, you know who john is. we don't know who you are. you have to identify yourself. >> my name is joe. i wonder if you might comment about whether or not you think the financial crisis in europe will serve as a sort of cautionary tale to us for us to get our house in order. >> you know, i think it depends. i think what happened was when sarkozy was thrown out of france and when angela merkel had the

elections in germany, when you have that summit in chicago, the g-20 summit, they all looked at each other and said well, let's see what austerity did. that was the austerity budget in france threw sarkozy out. what france has electeds a socialist take the rubber band off the wallet big spender. i think the lesson that president obama has learned, i'm not saying the american people but president obama has learned is that whatever you do, don't start cutting back. start spending more. so in fact, i think it probably may have had even an opposite reaction in washington. now, i think the american people look at that and are horrified. we could be greece. i do think the sort of my take on what's happening in europe today and the spending and where it goes from here, i think germany frankly has finally figured out how to win world war i. they're not doing it with tanks or battleships or bullets. they're doing it with bonds and

bailouts because either the european union and the european community plays by germany's new rules in which case germany will bail them all out, or they don't, in which case they will all go bankrupt and germany will buy them out of bankruptcy. that's the real lesson. to me, the take-away of the lesson of europe and germany should be the lesson of the united states and china. >> let's go over here to your right, please. i think all of you are capable of going to your right. i see one of my favorite colorado bloggers and talk radio hosts. ross? >> hi, ross. >> hi, k.t. >> good to see you again. >> thanks. you, too. >> you better tell people where they can hear you, ross. >> i'm on 850 koa on sundays at 11:00 unless i'm preempted by sports from time to time. unfortunately, i'm going to miss some of dick morris tomorrow. i have to run over and do the show and then try to get back here. >> everybody listen to dick morris, not to ross tomorrow, please. >> i second that, actually. k.t., i know why i think

america's relationship with israel is important. can you tell us really from a strategic point of view why is our relationship with israel important and maybe a second part to my question, do you think american domestic politics play an important role in what israel would decide to do with iran? >> yeah. for sure. both of those. i think israel and the united states have a relationship that if the united states abandons israel, and europe certainly did after the 1973 war, i think that tears at the soul of america. there's one country in the middle east that has stood by us, is a thrive democracy, a group of people that have gone to the desert and turned it green, is israel. we owe them a relationship where we stand by them. not where we stand by them at the expense of all else, but we should -- the survival of the state of israel [ inaudible ]. period. now, what happens if israel is

looking at the clock and i think netanyahu probably wakes up every morning and there are three alarm clocks next to the bed. one says how much time does israel have before iran develops nuclear weapons. the second clock is how much time does israel have to stop iran, israel/the united states to stop iran, either with an attack, either with sanctions that we've just instituted, or with cyberattacks. the third clock is the american election because just think of whether the swing states likely to be in the election, florida, and if the israelis feel that president obama is going to be a re-elected president, i think there's a real question in the minds of the israeli leadership whether obama would support them in a second term. if there is an arab-israeli war, israel needs the united states. and if they feel, if they sort of thought ahead and concluded a reelected obama is not going to

be in israel's best interest and we are facing an threat, then they have to launch a preemptive attack before the election. no candidate for president of the united states is going to walk away from israel right before the election because of the consequences of the jewish vote. the second thing, though, i think is timing, timing-wise, is the state of israel has to conclude that time is not on their side with the growth of the militancy, shall we say, of the arab world after the arab spring. >> k.t. mcfarland and her husband alan are our guests for the remandremander for the rest this afternoon. are you leaving? >> john, fox news cannot live without their resident brunette. i have to go back to work tonight. >> okay. she'll be around a little while. that's the point i was trying to make. we're going to go to the last question now to help us keep on

schedule and there would be an opportunity for you to chat informally with k.t. and alan a little bit as we move into our break ahead of lunch which is the next thing as she has reminded us several times. let's take the last question from over here on audience left, please. >> yes. do you think islam and radical islam is destroying europe? >> you're going to hear a lot about that later today by people who feel that it is. i think it's -- i think it depends. one thing that has happened in europe as they started out by welcoming the islamic contribution to their character, shall we say, and angela merkel of germany, the french have said it, the brits have said it, multi culturalism, we tried it, it has not worked. what we in the united states always thought was our saving grace was that when people come and emigrate to the united states, they become us. i'm of italian descent, italian

american, whether jewish american, hispanic american, whether your family came from germany or japan or china, you become americans. maybe the first generation is whatever the home mother country was. by the second generation, the kids are in the mall, they got the earphones in, they're just normal american kids. we integrate them into our society. europe has failed to do that for a whole lot of reasons, and i think that that then presents a very different threat. i think what you'll see politically is the europeans continue to go to the polls is that's a voting bloc they cannot ignore and the worry is that as europe faces economic crisis, the margins of victory are ever, ever closer in any election, that they cannot ignore that voting bloc. if that voting bloc is radicalized, then i think yes, it becomes a really serious and major problem for europe. >> k.t. mcfarland, as in ambassador ware, hold the

applause, if you would, in k.t. mcfarland as in ambassador ware, as in many of the women in public service or private life in colorado today and across the country, conservative women, women who love freedom, women who know what's at stake, in k.t. and in all of them, all of you lives the indomitable spirit of margaret thatcher. how grateful we are k.t. could be with us today. thank you all so much. [ applause ] all right, friends, the summit rolls on. let me just cover a few important announcements and then we will allow the hotel staff to get us set up for our founders luncheon with the honorable william j. bennett. please be aware that there are many book signings going on just

about everyone who speaks has got book signings that will occur immediately after they speak out in the exhibit area to your right as you leave the exit doors. it's a tricky thing because the program moves relentlessly but some of you may want to play hooky and go on out and get that book purchased and signed by the speaker. please be aware that those are ongoing. i also want to notify those with the blue ribbon on your badge who were with us probably last evening for a blue ribbon event upstairs, there's another such event right now as we break in a couple of minutes ahead of lunch. finally, let me call to the stage two special guests. i told you we keep augmenting and enriching the program even after it's gone to print. i would like to have join me up here right now for just a moment two friends that you are going

to enjoy knowing, state senator curtis oleson of north dakota and our friend, martin zuris of michigan. gentlemen, will you come up here and flank me, please. the senator contacted me just the other day and told me that he hopes a project of his called the national debt relief amendment could be highlighted at western conservative summit. just a couple days previous to that, i made friends over the phone and realized immediately we must include this man as well in the summit, martin zuris from michigan, indeed, the southwest corner of michigan where my mother's family is from, near grand rapids, where i was born, and i want by way of just a little interview here to have each of you know what's special about these gentlemen so that you can take advantage of knowing them