What In the World is Going On?

“What in the World is Going On? An Intelligence Briefing for GVSU” October 20, 2009 Herb Meyer Loosemore Auditorium

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Gleaves Whitney: Well, good evening. I am Gleaves Whitney, Director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University and I wish you a warm welcome coming out and joining us this evening. We have a few special guests here and I would like to point them out. First of all, Ralph Hauenstein, our benefactor. [clapping] It was Ralph’s vision that makes tonight program and programs like this possible. There are also a number of other people here, Don Lubbers. Is he in here? Don? Yes, Don. [clapping] Don is President Emeritus here at Grand Valley State University and we always appreciate your being here with us as well. Also, we have two former senators from Michigan state government. Boy, could Michigan state government use people like Jessie Dalman and Joanne Emmons. Where are they? [clapping] And also, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize our cabinet, the Hauenstein Center Cabinet. We have several members here this evening – would you please stand and be recognized for all of your volunteer efforts behind the scenes? Our cabinet? Yes? Thank you. [clapping] Well, did you see the newspapers this morning? We were supposed to have a meteor shower out there in the heavens tonight. But when I read that article, I thought, my word – we are going to have a meteor shower and a light display right here inside in Loosemore Auditorium. We are delighted to have our special guest, Herb Meyer, with us this evening. Herb comes to us from the Seattle, Washington area. He has also been in Washington, D.C. for much of his career, so he can speak to both parts of the country. He is a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. We had the opportunity to hear him last winter in Florida and we realized that he is very powerful in reaching audiences with a very provocative message. He has delivered his overview of global trends and developments. It is called, “What in the World is Going On: An Intelligence Briefing for CEOs” to corporations, business associations, student organizations and public affairs groups throughout the world. We also learned during lunch about his many stories during the Reagan administration. I hope during question and answer period, he will have the opportunity to say a few things about his work in the Reagan administration. He served as special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and was vice chairman of CIA’s National Intelligence Counsel. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence estimates and other top secret projections for the president and his national security advisers. Mr. Meyer is wildly credited with being the first U.S. government official to forecast the Soviet Union’s collapse, a forecast for which he later was awarded the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service medal. And when he walks up here, you will see a little ribbon right here on his lapel and that is that medal. Formerly, he was an associate editor of Fortune, and I have learned that he got a grand piano in those days when he was at Fortune. I can tell you off script that he plays Bach and ragtime piano. We almost had him play for us a little bit earlier this evening. And he is also the author of several books including The War Against Progress, Real World Intelligence, and Hard Thinking. With his wife Jill, they co-authored the How to Write – and I have a copy of that – which he and his wife have published together, Storm King Press. And he is also the host and producer of the Siege of Western Civilization, which you no doubt saw on the table out front. He has written a number of essays on intelligence and politics that have been published in the Wall Street Journal, National Review on Line, Policy View, Primus, American Thinker, and we are delighted that he is going to share a wealth of insights into what is going on in the world tonight. Herb Meyer… [clapping]


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Herb Meyer: Thank you very much. Thank you, Gleaves. Thank you for coming this evening, especially those of you who are students here at the university. When I was a college student, I always went to lectures by out of town big shots and I did it for a very specific reason. I wanted to be seen by my instructors and thought to be a more serious student than they had thought I was based on the work I did in class. It usually worked. Every so often it went haywire. I would show up and circulate, make sure I was seen, and just as the lights were going down and the doors were closing, I would realize not a single one of my instructors had shown up. And now I was trapped. I had given up a perfectly pleasant evening in front of my television set and now I had to listen while some clown in a suit blathered on about politics or history or economics and I was stuck learning things. If there are any of you students here following in my undistinguished footsteps, my only piece of advice is, learn how to fake a look of intense interest. [audience laughter] It comes in handy in life, particularly at job interviews. Also on dates. [audience laughter] For those of you who are here because you want to get some sense of what is going on in the world, and for those of you who are students, what the world is going to look like when you finish your studies here and jump out into it, let’s turn to business. I want to outline three of the biggest things happening out there. Trends and developments that, in my judgment, will dominate the next several decades. I want to just outline them for you and then loop back over them and talk about where they are going and what it is going to mean. One point before we begin. I have been messing around with all of this for a long time now. In the last few years, a trend has developed in our country that is unhealthy. We argue before we understand. Not a good thing to do. When there are complicated and contentious issues, honorable people will disagree about what to do and that's fine. That is how we figure out our way forward. Intelligent people should be able to reach common understanding of what the problem is before we start yelling and screaming about it, and we have lost that ability. It is a shouting match. Watch any of the talk shows, even when I am on them. It is a shouting match. Look at any of our political campaigns. Let’s not do that tonight. I have left my politics at home. I hope you have, too. If you want to know what I think we should do about this, buy me a beer some evening. I will be happy to tell you in great detail. Let’s leave all the partisan stuff away. If we can reach an understanding of what is happening and what it is going to mean to us, we will have accomplished a lot and that is what I would like to try and do. When you look at the world out there, the first thing you find yourself looking at right now is the war. And of all the issues, this is the most contentious. Some people think President Bush did a terrific job. Other people think he made a God-awful mess of it. That is another conversation for another time and place. What is important is to understand what the war is about, because that may give us an understanding of where it is, and more importantly, where it is going, what is likely to happen next. To understand what the war is about, press the rewind button. Go all the way back into history. When you do that, you will see that history is the story of competing operating systems. If there is one thing we all understand, it is competing operating systems. When operating systems collide in the marketplace, things get very nasty, very quickly – technically and legally. The technical people work out patches and fixes, the legal people work out cross licensing agreements, consumers sort through what they like and what they don’t like


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and life goes on. Microsoft has a lot of money but does not have tanks. If Bill Gates had tanks, Apple’s corporate headquarters would look like a building in Beirut. In politics, there really are tanks, and when one operating system sets out to impose itself on another operating system, that's war. That is the definition of a war. Our operating system is western civilization. This is who we are. Western civilization started with the Greeks, but it took off in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries when Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world – the rabbis, the priests, the scholars – they figured it out. They paved the way forward. That triggered the scientific revolution itself. It ignited the greatest explosion of art, literature and music the world has ever known. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bach. When you stand back from it, here is what western civilization is. The individual is at the center of it. Church and state are separate. It is the rule of law, the idea of property rights, economic liberty, individual rights, human rights, women’s rights. In western civilization, we unleash the entrepreneurial talents of our people. We encourage intellectual curiosity. It is an endless struggle for equality among the races and the sexes. Is western civilization perfect? No, it couldn’t be. It is designed and operated by human beings; we make mistakes. But when all is said and done, western civilization is history’s most extraordinary accomplishment. It's the modern world. In just the last century, there have been two efforts by other operating systems to knock us off. The first was fascism in World War II. If Hitler and the Nazis, Mussolini and Italy, the Japanese war lords – if they had been content to impose that miserable operating system only on their own people, it would have been ghastly for their own people, but you wouldn’t have had World War II. It is only when they come after you. The same thing happened to the Cold War and that was the Kremlin’s effort to impose the soviet communist operating system on everybody else. And same point – if they had been content to impose it on their own people, too bad, but you wouldn’t have had a Cold War. It is only when they come after you. Stand back from history. There is one more operating system that has been out there a long time and that's Islam. The reason you can describe Islam as an operating system is that all too often in Islam, church and state are combined. They do not have that separation. Islam is a political structure as well as a faith. The individual is subservient to the church/state combination and by and large, you don’t have the option to opt out. Islam does not unleash the entrepreneurial talents of its people. It discourages intellectual curiosity. By the way, that is why there hasn’t been a scientific breakthrough from the Islamic world in a thousand years. This is one of the tragedies of human history. The Muslims are geniuses. They invented algebra. It is an Arabic word. They virtually invented the science of medicine. In every field of science and technology, they were the world’s leaders. And then everything stopped. There is no other example in history of that happening. But if you spend a thousand years crushing intellectual curiosity and slaughtering your geniuses, you won’t get new technology, you won’t get new science. The great tragedy is we have no way of knowing what we might have known if they hadn’t done that. There is one other feature of that operating system that is relevant. All too often, it treats women as though they were property rather than people. And very simply put, that operating system is incompatible with the modern world. And that is the glitch. This is what Pope Benedict was talking about when he gave that famous speech in Regensburg about three years ago. If you remember the speech he gave, it just exploded across the room. Whatever your faith, whether you have faith or not, this Pope has more neurons firing than any ten of us put together. He is


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absolutely brilliant. What he was saying in Regensburg is this. When you look at the history of western civilization, it is obvious we have made horrific mistakes. But over the centuries, we have learned to temper faith with reason and found our way forward. What you are telling us, he said to the Muslim world he was talking to in that speech, is that the Koran is the unalterable word of God. Now the Koran is a beautiful book. There are passages in the Koran every bit as marvelous as anything in the old testament with the new testament. But there are passage in the Koran that say very clearly, very unambiguously, convert the infidel or kill him. And what the Pope was asking in that speech, and he talked in that circumloquacious way that popes talk, is, do we have a problem? If that is unalterable, and it says, kill us, how do we live together? Boy did he ask the right question. He went to the heart of the issue in a way that no political leader had the brains or the guts to do. That is why that Regensburg speech exploded across the globe. Now, human nature does not change. Anywhere you go, the overwhelming majority of people are perfectly moderate decent people. They are raising their kids, they are going to school, they are doing their jobs, they don’t want to cause trouble, they just want to be left alone to live quietly. Most Germans weren’t Nazis. In the Cold War years, most Russians weren’t communists. The overwhelming majority of Muslim people are absolutely marvelousm wonderful people – you would be lucky to have then as your neighbors. But when the radicals are in charge, Islam attacks the west. That is what happened in the 7th and 8th centuries. Islam attacked the west; took over Spain, France, North Africa. Anybody see the movie, El Cid, with Charleton Heston – deals with some of that. I got to know Charleton Heston. He was one of President Reagan’s buddies and the President liked to invite his Hollywood friends to visit him at the White House. They would sit around and have a couple of drinks and would swap stories. That is how the President liked to relax. And Reagan being Reagan, he used to say, “The bad news is that there were so few conservatives in Hollywood. The good news is one out of three gets to be president.” [audience laughter] And he was, Heston was one of the two losers. Islam attacked the second time in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, they had reached the gates of Vienna. It was right outside Vienna in 1683 that the climactic battle took place between Islam and the west. The west won and we've and going forward ever since. Islam lost. Do any of you happen to know the date the climax of the battle outside Vienna in 1683 between Islam and the west? September 11, right. Isn’t that interesting? Next time you are wondering why you are studying history, that's why. On September 10, 2001, there was not one member of the Bush administration who had a clue that the next day was a crucial day in the history if Islam and they should have known it. That is what we pay them for. What we are seeing now, what we call the war on terrorism or overseas contingency operations, is actually the third attack on western civilization by radial Islam. Terrorism is a tactic. And the lesson of 09/11 is this: we live in a world in which a small number of people can kill a large number of people very quickly. That is what is new and that is what is different. They can hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. If they pour botulism into the Grand Rapids water supply, you can kill 50, 60, 70,000 people overnight. If they get their hands on a nuclear device, and they might, they can take out Dallas or Chicago, Rome or Paris. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong really fast, and remember, when you play defense, you have to win 100% of the time and you can’t. If we had the world’s greatest intelligence service – let's say it could stop 25 out of 26 terrorist attacks – that's very good. Except you are dead. The 26th attack got you. When


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you play defense, you are going to lose. The only question is whether you lose sooner, later or much later. So what do you do? And this was the jam that President Bush was in after 09/11. Keep playing defense, you get hit again. No one was crazy enough to say, well let’s just go turn everything into molten glass, you know, nuke the Mideast. That's crazy. He had to do something between the two extremes. What the administration set out to do was this: not to impose our operating system on them, what we wanted was for Islam to do what Judaism and Christianity had done centuries ago. Reconcile with the modern world. Join us in the 21st century. In effect, develop version 2.0. If they could do that, the level of violence would drop and we all would be a lot safer. That was the idea. The strategy for accomplishing that was to use our military power to knock out the radicals and give the moderates a chance to hold power. In some cases, the first chance they had in years, in other cases decades and in some cases centuries. Remember the moderates are the overwhelming majority because they are always the overwhelming majority. If they can get a grip on power and hold it, they might be able to reconcile their faith with modernity. Now when you look back over all these years we have been through, all the yelling and screaming, most of it about Iraq, was over our execution of that strategy. And fair enough – I don’t know anyone who thinks it was perfect or close to perfect – what happened is this: the whole objective of the war dropped out of the national conversation. Everybody started yelling and screaming about Iraq, and fair enough, but everyone lost track of what are we trying to do in the first place. I will come back to this in a few minutes, and I will show you where things are right now and what is likely to happen next. But the point is this: when you look at the war, watch it on TV, argue about it, you are looking at an effort to shift a billion and a half people from the 8th century into the 21st century fast. Anybody who thought you could do that easily without making mistakes or quickly is not being realistic. This war will dominate the rest of your lives. While that is going on over there, there is a transformation taking place in our own part of the world whose impact on our country, on our economy, on your lives, will be even greater. Our part of the world is western civilization, the modern world. What is happening right now in the modern world is something no one had anticipated. We have stopped breeding. Literally. Here are the numbers. If you want to keep a steady population in a country, the birth rate has to be 2.1 – 2.1 births per woman. You need to the two births just to replace the mother and father, then you need 0.1. Some children don’t live, don’t grow up and have their own children. So 2.1 is the key number. Today in Western Europe, the birth rate is 1.5 which is 30% below replacement. What that means is that by the time those of you who are students now are my age, the population of Western Europe will have dropped by 70 to 80 million Europeans. That is the biggest, fastest population drop in reported history. The birth rate in Germany right now is 1.3. Ask a German teenager how many cousins do you have? The kid says, “What’s a cousin?” If you have one child and the child grows up and marries someone who is also an only child, and then they have one child, there is no aunt, there is no uncle, there is no cousin. In Germany today, 30% of all women are childless. And among college educated German women, 40% are childless. That's shutdown. It means the population is actually dropping. The number of deaths vastly exceeds the number of births. Empty apartments, empty condos, empty houses.


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The two countries in Western Europe with the lowest birth rates are Italy and Spain. It is 1.2, trending down to 1.1. With a 1.2 birth rate, in twenty years, you lose 30% of your entire working age population. Take 30% of the working age population out of Grand Rapids, where is the economy? Who is in the schools? Who is in the restaurants? Who is at the malls? Who is buying the products and services the companies are selling? Where is the work force? And this is what is happening. It turns out, also to everyone’s astonishment, there is a powerful correlation between faith and kids. People of faith tend to lead traditional lives – grow up, settle down, get married and have a family. Europe has lost its faith. Europe describes itself as a secular, post Judeo-Christian civilization. That is their phrase for it, not mine. It is a polite way of saying their churches are empty except for a few old ladies and American tourists. If tyour whole population thinks there is nothing there, just a collection of molecules held together by gravity. At some point we activate it and at some point we will deactivate, I don’t know. Nobody is going to fight for anything. Why? You make yourself comfortable. It is a lot more fun to sit at a café or go skiing on the weekend than it is to stay up all night with a sick kid. So they stopped having kids. They also stopped getting married. Today in Europe, only one out of seven couples gets married. Marriage is pretty much over. In England in 2008, the total number of marriages was lower than the total number of marriages in England in 1895. They don’t like having kids. They don’t like getting married. They don’t like working either. Today, the average European gets an additional 450 hours per year vacation versus an American – that's ten and a half weeks. If every American worker had an additional 10-1/2 weeks vacation, the economy drops dead. The gap with Scandinavia is now 17 weeks. Statistically, one out of five working age Swedes is on permanent disability insurance. Which is odd, because they look healthy to me. [audience laughter] There is a young woman in Stockholm – she looks like she could be on the Swedish Olympic gymnastics team – she claims to be allergic to electricity and therefore cannot be employed anywhere electric power is used. So, she applied for permanent disability insurance and she got it. This is crazy. In the modern world, there is a deal. Don’t laugh – you're being culturally insensitive [audience laughter], which may be a crime. There is a deal in the modern world. The modern state is a welfare state. And I mean that in the nonpolitical sense of the word. The modern state has an obligation to its people, to the young, to the disadvantaged, to the poor, to the sick, to the elderly. We can argue over how to do it, republican versus democrats or France Gauls versus socialist, or an England labor versus conservative. But everyone accepts the idea that of course, the modern state has an obligation to its people. Boy, is that expensive. Well, where do you get the money from? Taxpayers. Well, where do you get taxpayers from? Kids. They grow up, they become taxpayers. That is how it works. Now, we used to understand this. When we were agricultural societies, everybody knew you needed a lot of kids, you've got to work the farm. They we became industrial and then post industrial societies and everybody said, we don’t need that anymore. Yes you do. You actually need more kids than you ever needed, and I will show you why. I was talking at a group about this and wound up talking with a young lady and she has one sister. So their parents produced two children to take care of two aging adults. Take care of in the sense of work, generate the tax revenues, Medicare, social security, everything including the


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little buses that run the senior people around to shopping malls and movie matinees, they just generate all the wealth and take care of them literally. Drive to the house on Saturday, have lunch with them, run them over to the dentist – things you do with aging parents. This young woman has a partner, not a husband, a partner, and they don’t plan to have children. Her sister is married, has one child, does not plan to have any more. So these four people produced one child to take care of them. Do you realize the tax burden on that one kid? It is crushing. And by the way, those four are going to live longer and no matter what health care plan we adopt, the cost of health care is not going to drop. Do the math. When you go from two or three kids to take care of two parents to one to take care of four, your economy collapses. And that is what is happening in Europe. They forgot to do the math. Well, if you forget to do the math, but you want to keep the machine going, you only have one choice. You import people. Well, who are they importing? Muslims. Today the Muslim population of countries like France and Germany is 10% and rising fast – they've got the higher birth rates. Now 10% is the correct number, but it is misleading. The Muslim population of France is now 10%. When you look at the population of France under the age of 20, Muslims are now 30% of the total. When I went to grad school in Paris. It wasn’t 30% - I doubt if it was even 1%. The problem is that these Muslims are not being integrated into European society. The Europeans believe very deeply in multiculturalism. Now there is a word you hear a lot, especially if you have kids in schools. Have you noticed no one ever defines that word? When all the intellectuals and talking heads use a big fancy word? Get the definition. The technical definition of multiculturalism is, people of different faiths and cultures are permitted to settle without being required to integrate. So the Muslims in Europe are settling, but not integrating. To give you a sense of how separate they are physically when you travel through Europe, all the major cities – Paris, Hamburg, Rome, Marseille, are literally reigning by housing developments, villages, and towns that are entirely Muslim. The police won’t go there. They call them “No Go Zones.” With all the car burnings in France, that is what you are beginning to see boil over. To give you a sense of how separate these communities are culturally today, the fastest rising crime on the continent of Europe is a father killing his daughter – these honor killings. About six years ago in Norway, the country’s leading poet was a 27-year-old woman, third generation born in Oslo, but Turkish. She announced her engagement to a Norwegian oil engineer – the kind of engagement you see in the style section of the Sunday papers. Her father and five brothers killed her. She was Norway’s leading poet. These honor killings have spread throughout Europe. They are happening routinely now in Canada. We've had one in Atlanta and two in Dallas. The whole effort to integrate is going backwards rather than forwards. In England last year, the city of Manchester school board suddenly noticed they are missing 3000 girls. They are just not there. The enrollment of girls, freshman to sophomore year, dropped 3000. They have no idea what happened. They are just not there. Whether they have been removed from school, sent off on marriages or done away with – they don’t know. Another example of how it is going backwards, England has a nationalized health care system, and with all the fussing over our health care system, we are beginning to notice that and study it. The British health care system is very heavily staffed by Muslim nurses and doctors who are very highly trained and very competent. Nine months ago, the association that represents women


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Muslim, nurses and doctors in the UK announced that from now on they will no longer scrub before surgery. Immoral to bear their arms to their elbow. These are not immigrants who just got off the boat – these are doctors. When the most educated people in your society check out of the 21st century, you are going backward. And you can see this playing out politically. Now the Europeans tend not to like American presidents. They did not like Jerry Ford, great guy though he was. Reagan was an amiable idiot. They couldn’t stand George W. Bush. He was the smirking Texas gunslinger, Bible thumping, knuckle dragging, moron chimp. They very much like President Obama, and the President went there a couple of months ago and he asked the Europeans for help. He said, look, will you help us out in Afghanistan, and they told him to take a flying jump. And he said, look, all of our economies are in recession and we have to come up with these stimulus packages and we would like you to do the same thing. The Europeans told him to get lost. It wasn’t Bush, it wasn’t Obama, it was Europe. They are not going to help us out on the war because to get elected in Europe, you need the support of the Muslim voters and they are not going to back us. They are not going to come up with a stimulus package to offload the debt onto the next generation because they don’t have a next generation. What you are seeing in Europe is a demographic death spiral. And the gap between the United States and Europe is widening very fast now. The same thing is happening in Japan. The birth rate in Japan is 1.3 – about the same as Germany, going down a little bit. What that means is 30 years from now, the population of Japan will drop by 50 to 60 million Japanese people. That is catastrophic. Now Japan is a different place. If you know Japan, they are not bringing in 50 million Koreans to run it or 50 million Turks. They are shutting it down. In Japan, they have already closed 2000 schools, K-12. They are now closing schools in Japan at a rate of 300 school closings every year. They plan to continue closing 300 schools a year as far ahead as they can see. They have already closed two universities, they are on the verge of closing a third and now they are talking about combining prefectures, which is their estate. That’s shut down. What happens is this. When your birth rate drops below that 2.1 replacement level, your whole population is aging because you don’t have enough young people to replace the older people. Japan is aging so fast that by 2020, one out of every five Japanese citizens will be over the age of 70. How you run a modern society like that, no one has any idea. The only thing they have come up with is this: at the age of 65, they will ship every Japanese citizen to the Philippines where they have lots of young people who work cheap to take care of them. That is the plan. Now look, Europe and Japan are two of the world’s great cultures. They are also two of the world’s economic engines. And if they are shutting down, that is serious. Here in North America, the picture is different. It is a little mixed. Our friends to the north in Canada now have a birth rate of 1.5 – right in the middle of the European average. We are too polite to say this out loud, but Canada is now a European country in North America. Here in the United States, you will be pleased to hear, with the exception of tiny New Zealand, we are the only country in the west bucking the trend. For thirty years, the U.S. birth rate was stuck at 2 – just below the 2.1 replacement level. So for thirty years, we were going in the same direction as everybody else, but not at the same rate. A more shallow path down. In 2008, for the first time


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in thirty years, we hit the 2.1 replacement level. Nobody is quite sure why. Sometimes you get an uptick of a tenth or a downtick of two tenths of a point – that doesn’t mean anything. One obvious explanation is this. If you break out the U.S. birth rate ethnically, in 2008, the Anglo birth rate in the U.S. was 1.8. The Hispanic birth rate in the U.S. was 3.2 – that is probably why we hit it. Remember I said there is a correlation between faith and kids? You can really see this playing out. If you take the famous red/blue political map – red is Republican and blue is Democrat – in the 2004 presidential election – I have not seen the numbers yet for the 2008 election – in the 2004 election, in states that voted for George W. Bush, the birth rate is 12% higher than in states that voted for John Kerry. That is a gigantic difference. You can even see this at the local level. If you take two American cities of approximately the same size and economic prosperity, Seattle and Salt Lake City, in ultraliberal Seattle, not far from where I live now, dogs now outnumber children by 45% and they are closing schools. It gets real nasty when you close schools. In Salt Lake City, kids outnumber dogs by 19%. They are building schools. You know, when you are in the television talking head business, you get to meet the other talking heads in the makeup rooms before you go on camera, going out for a cup of coffee when the show is over. Have you noticed when you watch all of these talk shows, particularly on Fox, we have what appears to be an inexhaustible supply of blonde political strategists [audience laughter]. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what they do with the rest of the day. They are all blonde, and they all have teeth like Chiclets. Off camera, when you are talking to the blonde political strategist with teeth like Chiclets who are Democrats, they are actually worried. The base is dying. In cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, the population is aging and declining, just like Europe. Off camera, the blonde political strategist with teeth like Chiclets who are Republicans are actually optimistic. That is where the tax revenues are flowing and that is where the families are growing, that is where the churches and synagogues are going up, where the schools are being built. And here is how this plays out politically. About eight weeks ago, in the midst of this terrible economic recession, 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when no one is looking, the White House announced that they are giving control of the 2010 census from the Census Bureau in the Commerce Department, which is where it lives, to Rahm Emanuel in the White House, and everybody went what? What are you doing that for? Real simple. If you let the 2010 census just go, these birth rate numbers are so powerful that Congress could flip Republican. And that is what they are trying to stop. The fault line in politics, not just here in the United States, all through the west, is this whole issue of faith and family. It is not a fight over whether the tax rate should be 18% or 14.6%. And no one saw that coming. This whole issue of faith, family, children, is the fault line in western politics. By the way, every statistic I have given you this evening is an official number. These are all World Health Organization numbers, government numbers – that's United Nations. I did not make these up. There is no alternate set of birth rate numbers. Everybody is using the same numbers. You just count. You can argue of what the numbers mean, but we all have the same number. There is no other set of numbers. If we spent a week going to colleges, universities, high schools, all over the United States, how many instructors do you think will find teaching that all through the west, birth rates are imploding. Not many. What most students learn today is that world population is spinning out of control. It isn’t true. It has not been true for thirty


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years and everybody knows it because we are all using the same numbers. That is ideology affecting education. That is people teaching that the worst thing that ever happened to planet Earth is humanity. We pollute, we use resources. You teach that to children for 15 years, and a lot of them grow up and they think bringing a baby into the world is committing a hostile act against the planet. Surprise! Birth rates drop. Here are the overall numbers. Our birth rates are way below the replacement level. The Muslim countries all have birth rates above the 2.1 replacement level. They go from about 2.4 to 6.8 – they're very, very wide. So world population is continuing to increase, but it is decelerating very fast now because we are pulling it down, and even their birth rates are starting to drop. What it means is this: according to the United Nations, over in your lifetimes, over the next 30, 40, 50 years, world population will top out and then begin go down. Those are the official United Nations numbers. That is actually what is happening. We are just getting to the peak of it now and then it starts to go down. There is an interesting trend inside the numbers. We are living longer, but having fewer children. So world population is aging. Now it is aging at different rates in different places. In Japan, it is aging catastrophically. In England, by 2032, one out of every four citizens is over the age of 65. How the other three are going to support them, we have no idea. But it is aging. According to the United Nations, we actually cross the line in 2045, and what it means is this: by the time you are my age, for the first time in recorded history, the number of humans over the age of 55 will be larger than the number of humans under the age of 15. This has never happened in recorded history. Remember, we are moving toward this every year. It is not that the switch gets flipped. But by 2045, it is over. Never in history have there been more older people than younger people. Who is going to mow your lawn? Who is going to help you carry groceries from the checkout down to the car? Oh, by the way – who's is going to defend you? They are going to have an army. This is unprecedented in world history and it will dominate your lives. There is a third thing happening and a much more optimistic one. Stand back from all the politics. Get yourself up to an altitude of about 90,000 feet, sort of in a space shuttle looking out the window with planet earth so you can see the whole thing. Here is what you see. Never in history have so many human beings emerged so swiftly from poverty. By 1980 or 1990, about two billion human beings have come out of poverty. Since then, about another half billion have come out of poverty, mostly in China and India. And as they come out of poverty, they are pulling people out of poverty all over the world because of the demand for raw materials, goods and services. For example, Latin American is politically volatile in places, but economically Latin America is growing at an annual rate of over 4%. That is very good. Africa has its disasters. Rwanda a few years go, Darfur now. It is a genocide and no one is lifting a finger to stop it. But today on the African continent, there are now 17 countries whose annual economic growth rates consistently exceed 4%. That is fantastic. Put all the numbers together and here is what you've go: each year, between 50 million and 100 million human beings have been emerging from poverty. The low estimate is 50, the high estimate is 100. I think it has been closer to the high estimate, but those are the two estimates that fit. With the worldwide economic recession, I assume it is going to be lower than that, may 30, 40, 50, 60 million a year emerging from poverty. And what that means is this: if we can sustain this trend – maybe pick it up a little bit if we can come out of the recession – within your lifetimes, the majority of human beings will be middle class. That is the biggest change of life on earth that has ever


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happened and it is happening right now. And it is the world’s biggest underreported story. The world is not getting poorer, it is getting rich. By the way, you can see it. You go off on a business trip or a vacation, you go to some country – you can’t even pronounce the name of the capital – and you get to your hotel, you go up to the room, you push back the curtains and you look out the window. There is traffic on the streets, a Starbucks down the road. You lean out over the window and there is a shopping mall down there at the street. Now when did that happen? The answer is in the last 25 to 30 years. It is happening because we have figured this out. We have cracked the code. We know how to bring people out of poverty. It is the free enterprise system. Property rights, the rule of law. Reasonable taxation, reasonable regulation. You put these elements of the free market economy into place, and boom, people come flying out of poverty. Everybody knows this. Today you want to be physically fit, eat sensibly and get a lot of exercise. I mean, everybody knows that. There is no one way to do it, but everybody knows that is how you do it. What everybody around the world knows, if you want to bring your country out of poverty, fast, massively, it is the free enterprise system. And what you have seen around the world now are more and more countries putting in place elements of the free market economy and their people are coming out of poverty. As a practical matter, you cannot bring, 3, 4 or 5 billion people out of poverty with everybody designing software. The world does not work like that. You need stuff. You need roads, factories, houses, whole new cities, shopping centers, schools, universities, medical centers. What you are seeing out there when you travel the world is the greatest burst of industrialization in recorded history as India, China and all these other countries build the infrastructure to create a middle class society. And you are seeing something the world has never seen before, the emergence of a global middle class. You need energy. Energy is to a modernizing economy what blood is to a body. A child’s body has three to four quarts of blood. An adult’s body is bigger – it has five to six quarts. What has driven energy prices up and what will drive them up again isn’t rich guys jumping in their SUVs and driving to the country club. It is the world coming out of poverty and the creation of a global middle class. You can no sooner tell a society emerging into the middle class to use less energy than you can tell a teenager to eat less food. You don’t say, go lie down for a while and you won’t be hungry. Body is growing and you need it. That is what has pushed up energy prices. It has also pushed up food prices. In the last eight years, meat consumption in China has more than doubled. That is a lot of cows and pigs. What do they eat? Corn, so corn prices have gone through the roof. Now these are problems when energy prices and food prices get out of whack and it is a serious problem. But what you have to realize is it is a reflection of a gigantic global middle class. All through history, year in and year out, very quietly, a couple of hundred million people would die of starvation. Now they are buying food. That is good. Bad news is prices are high. Good news is they are not starving. This is the single biggest fact of life on earth – that the world is getting rich, not poor. It is good for several reasons. First, there are a lot of human beings not starving to death and that is great. The second reason it is good is this: it means the total customer base for every product and service we Americans can provide is now growing at a rate of 50 to 100 million new customers every year. That is where your jobs are going to come from.


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We are going to export. That is why export has been going up over 20% a year. All these customers are out there and they want everything we can think of to sell to them. I will give you an example of how this works. Do you know the company Great Clips? Wonderful people. They operate barbershops in malls. So they are always looking for a new mall because they can get a barbershop in it. They find out there is a new mall going up around Grand Rapids, they get excited – they can get a barbershop in the mall. They found out a couple of years ago there are now 117 shopping malls in Nigeria. [audience laughter] Not the last time I was there! The last time I was there, a super secret trip with the CIA director, with Bill Casey. By the way, everything you have read in the spy books is wrong. They talk about his unmarked black C130 Starlifter – it's nonsense. It was gray, it wasn’t black. [audience laughter] We got to Lagos about 1 o’clock in the morning. The situation was so bad, rebels and all this stuff, that his security force had to wake up the off duty Marine guards at the Embassy, and said, “You guys come out to the airport with your guns and protect the plane.” The rebels were draining the fuel out of every plane that landed at Lagos airport. And if you landed at Lagos Airport, you grew old in Lagos – you couldn't get off the ground and you couldn’t purchase fuel at the Lagos airport. Nigeria is, what, the world’s fourth largest energy producer. You couldn’t by jet fuel at the airport. So you were stuck. So we had to get the guys to come out with their guns and guard the planes while we did what we were doing in Lagos and then got out of there. That is how bad it was. Now they have 117 shopping malls. That is a middle class. Do you ever order something by telephone? You know the call goes sometimes from here to India or the Philippines? What you may not realize is very often now it goes from India or the Philippines to Nairobi, Kenya. The world’s largest call center is called Kencall – it's in Nairobi. And you have a call center and there are jobs for people like you and they have offices and headphones and computers and cars, and they leave work and they want to go to the shopping mall and pick up their kids at daycare and go home and turn on a 42-inch flat screen TV and boom, you've got a middle class. This growing global middle class is what will create the jobs for you all through your lives. There is one final reason this is very good news. We middle class societies are boring. That is good. All we want to do is drop the kids off at school, do a day’s work, come home, see if the kid got into the college they applied to, see if Netflix delivered whatever movie we were waiting for, go to a lecture or watch some TV – we just want to live. The last thing a middle class society wants is a war. And you are heading into a world in which the majority of human beings, for the first time in history, will be middle class. Boy, is that a different world. Now, let’s take a fast loop back over these subjects, see what is going on and where it is going. The war – in some ways, the war is going very well. In Iraq, we've won. Now we could spend all night arguing over whether we should have gone in in the first place – that's a whole different subject. We could spend a week arguing about all the mistakes we made once we did go in. I am simply reporting to you we've done it. Iraq is now a functioning democracy that is not threatening anybody. Whether you are for it or against it isn’t the point. It is an extraordinary achievement by the troops. By the way, it is only the second one in the Mideast. The other one is Israel.


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The extent to which normal life is returning in Iraq is staggering. The oil is flowing, the schools are back in business, the electricity is getting turned back on. They have shopping malls. Go up to the northern parts of Iraq – they're are building huge tracks of middle class housing. The Baghdad School of Music and Ballet is open again and you want to get your kid there for dance lessons or piano lessons; you're on a waiting list. The extent to which normal life is returning is just beyond belief. The problem is this. You ever see a race horse stumble ten yards before the finish line? The horse is going towards the finish line, everything is great, and then it falls. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Something could still go wrong. It is not quite over yet. There could be a horrific bombing, political assassination and then the whole thing blows sky high. It probably won’t happen. Race horses usually don’t fall just before the finish line, but it might. And if something goes wrong, then the President is in a real jam. He did not want to be there in the first place. And that is his privilege entirely – a lot of people agree with him. Now it is his race horse. and if something goes wrong, he has a decision to make. He can say, “I told ya.” or he could throw in the fire power to win it and push that horse over the line. Tough call. Hope he does not have to make the decision, he probably won’t. We will be out of there by the end of 2011. And it will actually have turned out to be a success. Whether you are for it or against it, that is another argument. It is a functioning stable democracy that is not threatening anybody. What an achievement. That is beginning to flow through the Mideast. People see that and they like it, hey, they voted. The Baghdad Kiwanis Club meets every Thursday now. Normal lives are returning. A couple of months ago in Lebanon they had elections. Everybody thought the bad guys were going to win – Hezbollah. They got creamed. The good guys won. So stability is in good signs. Probably the best thing happening in the entire war is that for the first time now there is a global reform Muslim movement. Men and women, professionals like yourselves, religious leaders, scholars – they're meeting and they are talking about how to reconcile their faith with modernity. This is the conversation in the Mideast when people get together for dinner at the universities, on the radio talk shows, in the newspapers, on television. They are asking questions like, “Hey, we haven’t had a scientific breakthrough in one thousand years.” How could that be the Israeli’s fault? The only new technology we have contributed is the improved explosive device. Not very neat, huh? Then some idiot wants to set one off and has to get a cell phone from the west to do it. Is that the American’s fault? We are treating half our people like dogs, meaning the women. Whose fault is that? For the first time now, they are looking within and saying, “Wait a minute? Where did this thing go off the rails?” This effort by them to reconcile their faith with modernity is what we wanted to happen. It is actually happening. It does not get into the newspapers, it is happening. Where it goes, nobody knows. We don’t have a crystal ball, but you couldn’t have that conversation before everything started. If you opened your mouth, they shot you...and they wiped out your third cousin. And now this is the conversation in the Mideast. And what an extraordinary and very hopeful development. Remember I told you about the Pope’s Regensburg speak? If you remember when he gave that speech, everybody came down on the poor guy. An 81-year-old German Rottweiler- doesn't know what he is doing. After the fuss died down and no one was looking any more, 138 Islamic religious leaders got together and they wrote an open letter to the Vatican saying, “Okay, let’s talk.” Wow. That conversation between the Vatican and Islam opened in Rome on November 4, 2008. By sheer coincidence, our election day. Which is why you didn’t hear about it because


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that blew everything off the headline. My guess is that if November 4, 2008 is remembered by history 1000 years from now, it may be because that is the day the conversation opened in Rome between Islam and the west. And by the way, this guy is 81. I imagine his day job keeps him busy. In the middle of all that, he put himself at the center of the conversation between Islam and western civilization at an intellectual level no one else could touch. What an extraordinary act of global leadership. There is a lot of good stuff happening. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad stuff happening. Afghanistan we are losing. You see that on the news. The President has to decide what to do. It is worse next door in Pakistan. Pakistan is coming completely unglued. Here is what is happening. Over the last several years, al Qaeda and the Taliban established a base in Pakistan. They are trying to do to Pakistan what they did years ago to Afghanistan – destabilize it and take it over. They are doing it for one very simple reason – Pakistan has nuclear bombs. And if they destabilize Pakistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban have got the nukes. And that is what this is about. It is a raw fight for who gets Pakistan’s nuclear bombs. We had been relying on Musharraf to not let that happen and he wasn’t getting it done. So some genius in Washington had the bright idea to send Benazir Bhutto into the middle of all of this. She had been the prime minister twice. And the idea was if you could kind of get the two of them working together, kind of a shotgun political marriage, maybe they could get control of it. Well, it ended catastrophically. She was assassinated. Now the place is falling apart. Right now, the U.S. Army has what we call snatch teams. They are poised around Pakistan’s borders and they have one order – if it all goes to hell, just go in and grab the nukes. Yikes. When you are down to we have snatch teams to grab the nukes, boy are you in trouble. Where are they, how many and how much time have we got? We don’t know the answer to these questions. One reason we don’t know the answer to the questions and one reason Musharraf couldn’t get a grip on it, is there are a units of the Army and the intelligence service, the ISI, that are working the Taliban. So what you have here is a collapsing nuclear power and we are in the middle of a raw fight for who gets the nukes. And it may be out of control. This is absolutely terrifying. And if you keep going next door, you get to the big one and that is Iran. This is the classic case of nuts with nukes. This is terrifying. The problem isn’t the weather. China and France could destroy Grand Rapids tonight. No one has lost a second of sleep over it; it ain’t going to happen. Whatever our differences with China and France, they are not destroying Grand Rapids or Los Angeles or New York. It’s not going to happen. They are not nuts. In the Cold War, we used to say the Russians are bastards, but they are not crazy bastards. You can deal with them. They don’t want to lose Moscow. The people who run Iran – Ahmadinejad and the mullahs – are talking openly of building nuclear bombs and using them. Of trading their cities and populations for ours. In other words, giving up Tehran to Tel Aviv, New York, maybe Chicago and Los Angeles. That puts you in the nut category. Let me tell you something. There are two great lessons of the 20th Century. The first is crazy people sometimes get political power. Hitler was crazy. He was brilliant, but he was crazy. So is Idi Amin in Uganda. The maniac who took over Cambodia slaughtered two-and-a-half million people. Crazy people get power. The second great lesson is this. When crazy people get political power and tell you what they are going to do with it – and it is one of the oddities of politics that crazy people with power tell you precisely what they are going to do – believe it. That is the lesson of the 20th century. And


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of all the people who have learned it, it is the Israelis. As late as 1937-38, there were Jewish families who stayed in Germany – they could have gotten out, but they decided to stay. They owned businesses, they were professors, they were professionals, lawyers, doctors, architects...they had beautiful homes, season tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic. And they watched the Nazis come to power, and they said, “Look – this is distasteful and this guy is a little bit nuts, but what are they going to do? Kill us all?” Sure, as a matter of fact that is exactly what they did. That is the lesson of the 20th century. They mean it. You now have Iran that virtually has a nuclear bomb. Look, I used to do this for a living. They got the bomb, okay, but they will have it by next Thursday. They are there and they are talking about using it. Boy is that dangerous. Everybody I know tells me the Israelis are going to launch – we'll see. I am a little more skeptical about that. But everyone I know says they are going to launch. But we are coming to a head on this. Either they do something soon or you lose the option to do it. But you have the classic case of crazy people with nuclear bombs. The point I am making is this: there are good things in the war, there are bad things in the war. It is kind of like World War II in 1943 – we are in the middle of it and it could go either way. The war isn’t going to end soon. There will be good things, bad things. In the middle of a world war on whose outcome rests the survival of our civilization, and this war will be a dominant part of your lives as you grow up and move out into the world. Onto the demographics. I hate to tell you this – Europe is dying. Now obviously you can reverse low birth rates, but you can’t do it quickly. Now a congress or a parliament can change the tax rate over night. You can’t change the birth rate over night. The birth rates in Europe are now so low that to get back to the 2.1 replacement level will take two generations. In other words, you need a bigger generation to have a bigger generation. That is 40 to 50 years from whenever they start and they haven’t started yet. Some countries are at least alert to the problem – France. France has the highest birth rate in Europe. It is still below the replacement level, it is 1.8, including the Muslims, but it is still the highest. The French government has decided that the women most likely to have a child is someone who is already the mother of two. In other words, the mother of two is more likely to have a third than is a 32-year-old single career girl likely to have a first. So if you are the mother of two and you are willing to have a third, the French government will pay you $3000 a month for 18 years to raise them. Actually not a bad career, okay? In England, they don’t get it. The Journal of the British Medical Association has now published an editorial – this is the magazine that goes to every practicing physician in the UK – they published an editorial urging doctors to discourage women patients from having children because of the earth’s carbon footprint. Spain is in a demographic death spiral, so what do they do? They pass a law that it is now illegal in Spain to use the words mother and father on a birth certificate. They are sexist. The official words on a Spanish birth certificate are progenitor A and progenitor B and they are interchangeable – a mother or father could be either one. I don’t think that is going to help. My favorite example is Russia. You know, Peter the Great once said Russia is a country in which things that just don’t happen, happen. It's true! Putin is driving Russia into the same ditch


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the communists drove it into – and that's another conversation – but they do understand the demographics. The birth rate in Russia is so low now, the average life span of a man in Russia is under 58 years of age. The birth rate is so low, the population is plunging so fast, that by 2050 the population of Russia will be smaller than the population of Yemen, which has a very high birth rate. Now Yemen is a little place. Russia covers nearly one sixth of the earth’s land surface. So what do they do? Two years ago, the governor of the province of Ulyanovsk issued a proclamation: From now on, September 12 of every year is officially the Day of Conception. [audience laughter] Under the terms of the proclamation, on September 12, all workers are given the afternoon off [audience laughter] – I am quoting a proclamation – with orders to go home and create a patriot for Russia. [audience laughter] Only in Russia do they order this. The guy who is president of Russia, Medvedev, thinks “great idea.” So now they are spreading this out from Ulyanovsk to all of Russia. Somebody got to Medvedev and must have said he can’t call this the Day of Conception. So they had to rename it. Russian PR is like not great. The official word for September 12 is The Day of Marital Contact, [audience laughter] which strikes me as not a PR improvement. Here is a statistic we found out from Russia at the CIA, and we got President Reagan, and I will bet you haven’t heard it. The average Russian woman has eight abortions. Average eight, meaning half are having more than eight. Go ahead. Have nine, ten, eleven abortions and then give birth…mother and child have terrible health problems. It is a disaster. Last November 28, just about when we were having Thanksgiving, in the city of Novorossiysk, to everyone’s astonishment, the major and the city council passed a resolution – they declared a week of no abortions. Let’s see if we can get up to one week without an abortion. And they had advertisements on TV, they brought in counselors to talk women out of abortions, they ordered that pro-life movies be shown in all the schools. Could you image trying that around here or where I live? This is in nothing secular Russia – that is how bad things are. Here are the numbers: 2.1 is the replacement level on birth. Demographers tell us 1.3 is the suicide rate, the rate from which society cannot recovery a population. There is no example of a country whose birth rate dropped to 1.3 that ever got back up. Today on the European continent, there are now 17 countries whose birth rates are at or below 1.3. And so is Japan. Canada is 1.5. They want immigrants. Canada wants brains. In the last twenty years, most of the immigrants to Canada have been ethnic Chinese. Good for the collective Canadian IQ, terrific if you get any out in Vancouver. Canada says in the next twenty years most of the immigrants will be from the Indian subcontinent. Here is what will happen in the United States. Unless something changes radically, and I don’t think it will, in the next 25 to 30 years, we are going to bring between 60 and 70 million immigrants into the United States. That is the number we need to keep the machine going. That is why that number keeps coming up. That is a 25% increase in our population. Obviously, they will be mostly, but not entirely, Hispanic. The political question – and it will dominant your lives – is how do you want to do this? Traditionally, we have been a melting pot. Bring your food, bring your music, leave everything else in the old country – just be an American. Increasingly, we are taking the European approach. Remember the technical definition of multiculturalism. People of different faiths and cultures are permitted to settle without being required to assimilate. That is going to be the political fight we’re dealing with.


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Here is what the U.S. economy will look like as we come out of the recession. It is going to look like a hamburger on a very fat hamburger bun. The bottom half of that hamburger bun is 60 to 70 million immigrants. Look, good people – working hard, paying taxes. Even if we solve all the amnesty problems – that's a lot of immigrants very fast – it puts a huge strain on local and state government – social services, health care, education. It just does. The top half of that hamburger bun are the baby boomers in our 60s, starting to step aside and take out of the system. And this generation of baby boomers we are not going gently into the good night. We are going to bankrupt you, as you can see watching television every night. The hamburger in the middle is you. That is the productive economy. What happens is this: as your birth rates drop, you put a crushing tax burden on younger people to support the older people with the immigrants at the bottom. And when you put a crushing tax burden on young people, you can’t afford to get married. You get married later. You can’t afford a big house. You have a small apartment. You can’t have a lot of kids. And the whole birth rate spirals down. We used to have 16 workers in this country for every American on Social Security. Do you know how many we have now? Three. When it goes to two, which it will when you are about 30. So that is what is happening in Europe, that is what is happening in Japan, that is what we’re up against. This is now. So the demographics are very worrisome. Last point. Never had so many human beings emerged so quickly from poverty. Now this is great. This is the most optimistic, wonderful news in the world. But there is a problem. You bring 3, 4, 5 billion people out of poverty, and the air is filthy, we are choking on it, and you can’t drink the water, it is polluted. Yhat is a disaster. But the one thing we cannot say to these people is no. Sorry, too late. I have a big house, two SUVs, you can’t. That is inhuman. It's human. The fortunes will be made by those companies that can develop products that are clever, inexpensive and green. And that is why you are hearing them. This is no longer an environmental issue. This is not the core driving issue of global business. We know how to bring the world out of poverty – we just want to do it without trashing the planet. I can’t imagine a more interesting problem to have and you are going to have to solve it. It is not a government program. It is 100 million solutions. E-books. You know, if you want to buy one of my books, that is great. I cut down a tree to make it, I burn fuel shipping it to you. But if you buy the E-book, you get the same knowledge and no environmental damage and fraction of the cost. Clever, inexpensive, great. All over the world now, companies are trying to invent products and services that are clever, inexpensive and green and you are going to have to figure this out. Look, this is the most interesting problem any generation has had in world history. We are that close to bringing the world out of poverty. And we want to do it without trashing the planet. Go ahead, figure it out. And by the way, those are your jobs. This is a fun problem. This is fun, this is exciting. The two countries leading the way are India and China. Things are changing very fast. China is in a lot of trouble. What they have accomplished is extraordinary, but the place is still run by a bunch of commies and that is not a great government structure for the 21st century. They shoot dissidents, they build schools out of unreinforced concrete. When there is an earthquake, all the schools collapse and kill the kids. They cheat. Please don’t tell me the girls on the Olympic gymnastics team was 15. You know, if they are going to cheat on that, they are going to cheat on trade arms control. They have a


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more serious problem, China has a critical shortage of professional managers, people with MBA types. They are aware of it, but they are just falling further behind. They can’t fix it fast enough, so projects are slowing down, things are going haywire. It is the third problem that I think ends it. You have heard that China has a one child per family policy? Here is what that means by the way is all the schools that collapsed, every child killed is an only child. Makes the catastrophe even worse. With the one child per family policy, the birth rate in China is 1.1. China is now the most rapidly aging country in the world. Japan had the good sense to get rich before it got old. China is doing it the other way around – it doesn’t work. Do the math. Within your lifetime, the population of China will drop about 35% - about to go right off a cliff. Remember the birth rate is lower than in Italy and Spain. And the suicide rate is 1.3. China is at 1.1. Keep your eye on India. India is coming up fast on the outside. Birth rate is 2.8. They speak English. They've got the rule of law, it is a democracy. My guess is India is going to blow past China and be the real star of it all. Now we wish them both well. These are marvelous wonderful countries, great people, I hope they all come out of poverty and hope they are all customers for the goods and services we can sell and we'll buy stuff from them and we’ll have these gigantic middle classes. And whatever problems we have, let the diplomats settle it up. I don’t want war with anybody. We are all in this together. Giant middle classes. China and India share a problem. And it is kind of icky, so it doesn’t get talked about much in polite company, but I think you need to be aware of it so I am going to talk about it. Back to the demographics. Before I give you the demographics, give you a short lesson in biology. When we have children, you get 103 boys for every 100 girls. That is the human ratio. It is not Republican versus Democrat or American versus Oriental. The human ratio is 103 boys born for every 100 girls. Today we have the technology to know which is which. Virtually everywhere in the world now, expectant parents know the sex of an unborn child unless they said they don’t want to be told. In India and China, there is a cultural preference for boys. So they are aborting the girls. So many, that in India and China, instead of having the normal human ration of 103 boys to every 100 girls, the ratio is 118 boys for every 100 girls. In some provinces of both countries, the ratio is now 130 boys for every 100 girls and there is a province of China that just reported a ratio of 192 boys for every 100 girls. What this means in real numbers is that right now in these countries, there are more than 100 million boys growing up who will never find wives. It is unprecedented in world history. And let me tell you something, the single most destabilizing force in the world is a bunch of unmarried men. [audience laughter] Unmarried women don’t cause trouble. Unmarried men do. [audience laughter] India and China are in panic mode. Both governments have now made it a crime for an obstetrician to disclose the sex of an unborn child. The government of China says by 2050, the population gap in China will be over 200 million. The thought of 200 million single guys descending on Shanghai and Beijing on Friday nights is an absolute nightmare. It takes some real nasty bounces. You all watch the Olympics in Beijing? Here is what they didn’t tell you. What they do now – there's a shortage of wives? - they load up 747s on Friday nights in Shanghai, Beijing and their other cities and they fly them over to Saigon – sorry, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam – and these companies arrange receptions at the hotels with all the Vietnamese single girls. Chinese men are


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sweeping across Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia and bringing back wives. They are arranging the courtships, the immigration, the marriages. The social mess this is causing as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are basically losing all their single people and they are going…it is a disaster. They have the same problem in India. Wife shortage, different solution. In India, if you are one of the men lucky enough to have a wife, you can rent her to someone who doesn’t. Cultural sensitivity... On average, it is $175 a month for three months. The average income is $22 a month – that is real money. India has a woman president now. In their system, the prime minister is the head of the government and the president is the head of state – she's the head of state. She is very competent and is an extraordinary woman. She says, now that they have made it a crime for an obstetrician to disclose the sex of an unborn child, more girls are being born and that was the idea. According to the president of India, each day more than 7000 newborn girls are being murdered by their parents. So what they have done, is they have set up a network of facilities, kind of drop off points. If you have given birth to a daughter and don’t want her, don’t kill it, drop her off – sort of like a FedEx drop off point. And India is setting up a whole network of facilities – they are not actually orphanages, because the parents aren’t dead, but they are the same thing – to raise the unwanted girls in hopes of fixing that ratio. Now, we wish India and China well, but I have noticed more and more in the last few months people talking about the India and Chinese models and something we Americans should perhaps adopt for the 21st century – no thanks. Now in the last bit of time here, we have made several orbits around the planet and you have been very patient. I wanted to cover a lot of territory. Here is what it means. This is the world you are walking into. This is what is going on out there. There is only one purpose to knowing what the future is and that is so you can change the future before it happens. That is the whole point of knowing the future. What makes weak human beings different from all the other species is we can project the future and then change it. What I have tried to do this evening is give you a sense of what is going on out there. The world you are going to be walking into for those of you who are students. What do you want to do? What policies do you think we should adopt? How would you like to live your lives? Honorable people can disagree about these things and that is fine. First we have to have an understanding of what is going on and then we can argue about it. What I have tried to do is set the stage for you that so over the next few days, few weeks, few years, you can decide what you would like the future to be, and is it going there and if there is a gap, how do you want to fix it? As people campaign for office, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, green – are they talking about this? Is what they are saying related to this? Does is suite what you think is best? This is the task before you. To understand the world, to see what the future is going to be, and if you don’t like it, change the future before it happens. That is the whole point of an intelligence brief. I will leave you with one piece of advice, and this is something we learned from President Reagan. Be an optimist. It is easier to get up in the morning and is a lot more fun. But much more importantly, it is the optimists who solve the problems. Pessimists can define a problem, they can talk it to death. It's the optimists who get up in the morning, go into their shops, their offices, their factory, the universities, and they come up with solutions. They figure out what to


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do. Jerry Ford, your great president – he's an optimist. I was lucky – I got to meet him a few times. He is a neat guy. He always figured the future would work out okay. He is very American. Probably the most American president we have ever had in the sense of, got it. This is a man now that says, “We are Americans. We fix the future.” So despite all the problems, I am an optimist, you are Americans, I hope you will also be optimists. And thank you. [clapping] I think we can take some questions… Male voice: Your evaluation of the performance of the CIA during the past ten years, please. Herb Meyer: Ghastly. [audience laughter] It’s been terrible. So we’ve spent a whole evening and several beers on this, but it just isn’t the kind of intelligence service adequate to what we need. What we should have done after 09/11 is build an intelligence service on the World War II model, the OSS – the Office of Strategic Services. That was much more effective model of an intelligence service – that's what we did in the Reagan years. And instead we built one that kind of looked like United Airlines. It is big, it is bumpy and it doesn’t have enough speed, smarts. So it is not a very good intelligence service. Wonderful people by the way, working very hard to keep us safe and we owe them our gratitude, but it is not the right model. Female voice: Would you answer this? I was wondering if it isn’t the real problem for the modern Muslim who would like to become part of society. They have no leader. Whereas, you know, the Catholic church has the Pope and we have our leaders. The modern Muslim world does not have a leader. Herb Meyer: Well, now you can go right to the heart of it. Here is what is happening. Male voice: Would you mind repeating the question… Herb Meyer: Does the moderate Muslim have a leader? Who is out there? It is a very good question. What you’re seeing is, for several centuries now, there has been a civil war within Islam. Think of it as the moderates versus the radicals, okay? Never get in the middle of somebody elses civil war. It’s like getting in the middle of your neighbor’s marriage problems – they will not appreciate your interference. But if you are sitting in the living room and a bullet comes through the window, suddenly it is your business, okay? So we had to get to the middle of their civil war because they attacked us. You do have a lot of moderate Muslims. Your average human being is moderate. Your average mom doesn't want to see her kid become a suicide bomber. The trouble is the moderates are very quiet. And the reason is, in that part of the world, you open your mouth, they kill you. What is changing now is for the first time the moderates may be getting the upper hand in some places and that is what is encouraging. Now the trouble is our media does not report this. You know, “Airplane lands safely” is not headline. So as soon as the news started getting better, as soon as the moderate Muslim started speaking out, when the electricity got turned back on, when the Baghdad School of Music and Ballet reopened – suddenly everything dropped out of the headlines. So in fact, there are moderate leaders, and it is a very good sign. And by the way, politically, the elections that they just had in Iraq a few weeks ago were better organized and were honestly counted than anything you will see in Chicago for another fifty years. [audience laughter] Okay, sixty years. No. I mean that


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quite literally. And Al-Maliki and these guys, they kind of came over at not very pleasant types. They are actually turning into very skillful politicians, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, building coalitions, which is a whole new thing in that part of the world. So the moderates are there, but you know, moderates tend to be quiet, they are home, they are raising the kids, they are doing their job. It is the loud mouths who cause all the trouble. So they’re there. The pity is our media isn’t highlighting them and telling us that, so you get a false impression. But yeah, what we want to do is back the moderates so they can beat the radicals and then the level of violence drops. That is the idea. Honorable people can disagree over how to do it, but that is the idea. Male voice: With respect to your comments about Pakistan and the destabilization of Pakistan and the threat posed by advanced destabilization, what do you think if any, is India’s interest in any stabilization or what action would you be prepared to take or not take if that continues? Herb Meyer: India is absolutely terrified. You have a failing nuclear state next door and they have dozens of nuclear weapons and there are missiles all pointed at India. India is absolutely scared – I mean and rightly so. Just as we would be scared stiff if Mexico had a nuclear bomb. So, everybody is trying to figure out how to pull this thing together. No one has good idea, okay. It’s a nightmare. It wouldn’t surprise me if you wake up one morning and there has been a military coup in Pakistan. Everybody will denounce it and privately everybody will be a little bit relieved because maybe they can get a better grip on things. Nobody knows. I mean, this is absolutely terrifying. It's a nuclear super power coming unglued. That is what’s happening. It doesn’t get more scary and because units of the Pakistani army and intelligences services are working with al Qaeda on top of that, you can’t get a grip on where the nukes are. I wish I had better news, but we ain't got it. Male voice: With the ever prevalent multiculturalism within the Islamic community and their persistence to stay isolated, before the world becomes at least a semi-harmonious, global entity, do you foresee another major attack by their community upon the civilized world or is the one that we have experienced within the last decade maybe the last? Herb Meyer: You can safely assume that while we are sitting here and talking tonight, there are people planning on how to kill you. I mean that’s a given. Now I remember the Cold War years, everybody said, you are not going to get through the Cold War without another nuclear bomb going off. And please don’t tell me Hiroshima was the only one – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There have to be others. Well there wasn’t. The Cold War went on for what, 40, 50, 60. There was no nuclear war. So, it happened. Maybe there won't be another attack. Maybe. I am sorry I keep giving you these non-answers, but we are in the middle of a global struggle and you are up against people who want to destroy you. Now as I keep saying, honorable people can disagree about what to do. The first thing is you recognize the problem. Then you go out. What worries me the most is you get a lot of people who won’t except the fact that you are in the middle of a clash of civilizations. I would say people disagree over how to fight it and that is fine, but we have a problem. So, you know, all the experts will tell you, sure you’re going to have another attack, but I also remember all the experts saying there’s going to be another nuclear exchange and there wasn’t.


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Male voice: Am I correct in saying that the alliance between the United States and western European powers and now some eastern European states has been in the past a stabilizing force for the modern world? You mentioned that western European politicians are concerned about the Muslim vote. The Muslim population is increasing in Europe significantly. Is this alliance that we have had with western powers in danger because of a growing Muslim population and the different political outlook in Europe and a lessening population? Herb Meyer: Yes. [audience laughter] You've got it exactly right. Basically the gap between Europe and the United States is why? By the way, the new word for Europe is Eurabia That is the new word. That's what they call it. So the answer is yes. The young people in Europe are Muslim. Just look at the numbers. But which army? They're not going to go fight. Because what Europe wants to do now, and I’m generalizing, obviously, but what they want to do is they wish to grow old gracefully. Boy, do the Europeans know how to be graceful – they're really good at it. They are not raising a generation. All the their birth rates are either at or below the suicide level. So they just want to be comfortable; they don’t want to fight. And then you get some guys like George W. Bush who goes over there and says, “We’ll go fight the enemy.” You're crazy! So the answer is yeah, Europe wishes to be left alone to live out it’s years in comfort. Male voice: Is that then, there’s no longer the power center… Herb Meyer: And who is the power center? Male voice: Then who do we rely to have a power center to protect the modern world? Herb Meyer: What everybody talked about through the Bush years, and you didn’t hear this through all the noise, is what he used to call the coalition of the willing. Another word for it was the Anglosphere. What it meant was, who wants to help? It is either the United States, to some extent England, Canada, Australia definitely, India definitely, Poland. So if you put together a new coalition of basically western civilization – countries that have the energy and the will to defend western civilization, and that is what you are doing. Now we’ve kind of the Poles overboard with the missile defense thing, we’ve kind of walked away from that when the President cancelled the missile defense thing. So he basically we told the Poles, you are on your own now. But the question is, what do you do if the United States is not there? What you are seeing right now is the whole world holding its breath to see whether the United States will lead the world. Now, I know you think it’s political, I am just reporting to you. Everybody moans and groans about the United States, but when the world gets in trouble, I mean big trouble, who do they turn to to pull them out? Us – sweaty, hairy chested, Bible thumping, knuckle dragging, gun toting morons. We’re rescuing everybody. And by the way, we win more Nobel Prizes than everybody else. You're not allowed to say that. What do you do if we're not there? Who are you going to call for help? France? And the whole world is holding their breath waiting to see what the Americans are going do. And that's where we are. Female voice: I have a question. During your listing of all of the countries, Islamic countries, you did not mention Saudi Arabia. And Bin Laden of course is a Saudi. A number of


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people that performed in the 09/11 catastrophe were Saudi. It is quite a known fact that the Saudis are funding al Qaeda. What is your comment about this and why have we stood silent on this issue? Herb Meyer: I agree with you. Saudi Arabia is not our ally, it is our enemy. And our failure to recognize that and act on that has been a catastrophe. You are absolutely right. Now to some extent, we have been stuck because we need their oil. But everything you look at in Saudi Arabia says this is not your friend, this is your enemy. Now, there are some indications in just the last few months that they are getting scared. Good. Get scared. Maybe they will flip. But you are absolutely right, and I don’t have any explanation other than we needed their oil, of why we did not treat them that way because everything they did was hurting us rather than helping us. Everything you said is correct. You are right. Male voice: Aside from the stock market going into convulsions, what kind of escalation do you see happening if Israel attacks Iran? Herb Meyer: That is an interesting question – we were chatting about this at lunch. I'll tell you an interesting story that may give us a clue. Everybody forgets us but back in the late 70s and early 80s, Saddam Hussein in Iraq was building a nuclear bomb. It is amazing how everybody forgets this. They were building the Osirik nuclear reactor right outside of Baghdad and that was going to produce the plutonium for Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb. He would have had by 1983-84 at the latest – everybody was terrified. Osiraik was being built by our good friends and great allies, the French and Germans. And they wouldn’t stop. There was a hell of a lot of Iraqi oil money sloshing around Paris and Bonn. Saddam Hussein had bought every politician in France and Germany. The prime minister of Israel then was Menachem Began and Begin was a tough little guy. Begin took one look at this and he said, no. This is an existential threat to the existence of the state and that is when Begin gave the orders to the Israeli Air Force – take out Osirak. This is one of my favorite stories of the time. The Israelis were going to use six fighter bombers to do it. It is a long way from Israel to Baghdad and back. And when you are flying Israeli fighter bombers, there is nowhere to land and refuel. Not in that neighborhood. You can’t drop down at a gas station outside Tehran, give them your Israeli pilot Visa Card and say, fill the tank and do the windshield – they're not going to make it back. So they welded extra fuel tanks under the wings. Even with the extra tanks, the calculation was they were not going to get back all six planes. So if nothing went wrong, you weren’t going to make it, okay? Six volunteer pilots who said they would fly – and this looked like a one-way mission for the existence of the state. And they trained for the mission. The Israelis do a better job of training for specific missions than anybody, probably because they've had more practice. One of the things they trained for was flying wing tip to wing tip. Not a figure of speech – I mean flying wing tip to wing tip. When you take off from a runway in Israel, when you clear the runway, you are out of Israeli air space. It's not like taking off from O'Hare in Chicago – you're are still in the United States. Over there, you clear a runway, you are over another country. These guys took off from their base and they are over Jordan. You have to go over Jordan to get to Baghdad. This is a long answer to your question. You have to go over Jordan to get to Baghdad. What happened was, because of the way they were flying wing tip to wing tip – and I mean wing tip to wing tip – when the Jordanian air traffic controller who was on duty that day, picked them up on his radar screen, he saw one blob. So he came on the air and said, “Excuse me, are you a 747?”


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To which the lead pilot replied, “Yeah, we are.” And he cleared them through. That is how they did it. [audience laughter] This air traffic controller is no longer with us. [audience laughter] They took down Osirik. And by the way, all six pilots made it back. When they landed, the tanks were empty. They had no idea how they did that. It was either the greatest flying six guys ever did or more, but they actually they did it. The tanks were – all the dials were on empty when they landed. Interesting sideline, one of the six pilots, Ilan Ramon – he's the Israeli astronaut who went down in the space shuttle accident in 2003. Anyway, the Iranians aren't stupid – they know what happened. They dispersed their nuclear facilities – 15, 18, 20 sites around the country. The Israeli air force isn't big enough. They can hit it, but they can’t kill the nuclear program – they don't have enough airplanes. Not only are these sites underground, they're under 15 feet of concrete. You've really got to hit these things. That is why the Israelis have asked us for help. They could use a little help knocking out the Iranian nuclear facilities and we said no. The shortcut to Iran is over Iraq, if you look at a map, and we control Iraqi air space. And so the Israelis said would you mind if fly over Iraq? And the President doesn't quite want to give them the green light. So that is what is going on. The Israelis are looking for a little help, little ways so they can really nail this thing. Don’t know what is going to happen. I will tell you one thing that is really funny – when the Israelis hit the Osirak site in Iraq, the United Nations went berserk. Everybody was denouncing the Israelis, the United States. See, we were listening to their private conversations. And what the Arab government was saying privately was, “Boy, that is a relief, isn’t it?” And it was hiliarious, we were passing notes to Jean Kirkpatrick at the U.N while she was listening to these guys blow the roof off. But we knew what they were saying privately. The Saudis have actually passed word to the Israelis, if you want to go after the Iranis, it is perfectly okay with us. They wouldn’t mind a bit because they’re scared stiff of these guys. So that is kind of what you are up against. The question is what is the retaliation? What happens next? Here is the way it is playing out in Israel. The Israelis are not worried that Egypt launches its army across the Sinai. They are not worried that Syria launches its tanks up through the Golan Heights. Israel is going to stop the tanks. They control the firing down. What the Israelis cannot survive is about 75 or 80,000 of these rockets raining down on Israel. These Katyusha rockets, these Kassam rockets that you see in the news all the time. They're all around Israel. Hezbollah has put them in Lebanon, Hamas has put them in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah and Hamas are subsidiaries of Iran. Iran owns them. The reason they put these tens of thousands of rockets is precisely to stop the Israelis from launching an attack. About two years ago, Israel went into Lebanon and pushed everything back. If you remember, in January they went into Gaza and pushed everything back. They went into Gaza in January…of course, President Bush was still in the White House. The Gaza operation ended under on Inauguration Day. And there were no coincidences. It looks to me like the Israelis are clearing the ground for an attack. If they could push the rockets back far enough so they are not a threat, they can hit you. Now everybody I know tells me it is going to happen. I am more skeptical than that. That’s where we are. So you are looking at a war that is getting nastier rather than quiet. There are some good things that will happen. Don’t be discouraged, but there are also some bad things. And what I have tried to do is give you a sense of this. Now look, there isn’t a single one of you in this room who knows what I think we should do and that is fine. My opinions don’t matter. I’ve left my opinions out of this presentation. Understand the problem. Then start an argument over it. What do you want to about it? And remember, honorable people can disagree. But don’t get


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into the habit that we people have gotten into, the older people who are arguing before we have a stand. Don’t let it become a shouting match. The greatest strength we have is being able to think our way through. And if you remember that and get into a conversation and not an argument and understand that before you start yelling and screaming, we will be fine. And with that I better get out of your way...and thank you very much.

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What In the World is Going On?