Tom Clancy - Author, The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Without Remorse, Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, and Rainbow Six; all fiction books have ranked #1 on The New York Times bestseller list; author of several non-fiction books; former insurance agent.
photo: John Earle

 We all have this feeling that America has lost her way. Well, I'm here to tell you that that's really not true.

You see this belt buckle? Two years ago, I got it out at Fort Irwin, California, in the Mojave Desert. That's where we won the Persian Gulf War. That's where the U.S. Army plays guns for real with real guns. And, the Op-4, the opposing force, the "bad guys" there, were the eleventh U.S. armored cavalry regiment, the Black Horse. They're in my books. It's a real outfit. They're really out there, every day, being the bad guys and making the U.S. Army work very hard to win.

In the Persian Gulf War, CNN went to some staff sergeant, E-6 tank commander and said, "Hey, what do you think of the war, sarge?" He said, "Hell, we train harder than this." Do you know the Josephus book, the Jewish war, about the revolt of the Israelites against the Romans around two millenniums back? Josephus wrote that the Roman legions trained so hard that their training was bloodless battles and their battles were bloody drills.

That's the way it works.

At Fort Irwin, they play war, and it really is bloodless battle. As a result of which, in the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi military, firing real ordnance, was less formidable than the Op-4, which was just shooting with laser beams.

I was out there two years ago, my third time at Fort Irwin. It's Disneyland with guns. It's fun to go out there and learn how combat really happens while in a very safe and benign environment. I was invited out in 1997 to speak at their annual formal dinner. The regimental song for the black horse starts off, "We are the Black Horse…" I'm not going to try to sing. I don't sing in church; God would strike me dead.

"We are the Black Horse troopers, the finest in the land. We fight for right and use our might to free our fellow man."

That's America right there, in one stanza.

What does America do? Who are we? What is our military for? We have all our rights and the affluence today because people fought for principles. And the main principle is freedom. Not just for ourselves, but for others.

We forget, we didn't just defeat Germany in World War II. We liberated Germany from Adolf Hitler. We didn't just defeat Japan, we liberated Japan from a fascist form of government. They now have something akin to democracy. So do the Germans. We even bring freedom to our enemies. That's who we are; that's what we do. This is the United States of America. We do impossible things all the time. We do it so regularly, we don't regard anything as impossible anymore. That is who we are. That is what we do. This is America. We can do anything. We can even survive a bad president.

Democracy is a self-correcting mechanism. We've had bad presidents before. We've survived them. We will survive this one. If nothing else, Bill Clinton is proving to America how little the government matters. When the Republican Congress shut down the government not too long ago, everybody said, "Oh, my God." What the politicians were really saying was, "Oh, my God, what if the American people find out how unimportant the government really is?"

I've got a question for you. Except for Abraham Lincoln, what American president in the 19th century did more for America and the world than Thomas Alva Edison? Answer, nobody.

Edison gave us the electric light. His movie camera, movie projector, improvements in the telephone, did more for America and the world than the whole U.S. government did, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln who saved the union.

Which American president, except for Ronald Reagan, who destroyed the Soviet Union, was more important to America than Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who founded Apple computer and invented the personal computer which we all have now? Who?

Do you think Bill Clinton is more important to America and the world than Bill Gates, who runs Microsoft? And I'm not even a fan of Microsoft. I use some of their products. I think they are a monopoly and that they have to be slapped down. But what government program is more important to our daily lives than software produced by companies like Microsoft? The answer, none. The genius of America is that the government doesn't matter. The Constitution is a set of rules that mainly tell the government what it may not do. It can't tell us what church to go to, it can't shut the press down, it can't keep us from talking back and forth to each other. It can't take away our rights to own a gun. Thomas Jefferson said that, in the final analysis, the right to own a gun is important to protect ourselves against government tyranny. That's why it's the second amendment. Even Alan Derschowitz agrees with that. I had a talk with him once -- he doesn't like the idea that I'm allowed to own a gun, but he says it is the second amendment to the Constitution. That makes it important. Because it comes before thirty others.

This is the United States of America. We do the impossible stuff. There's a flag on the moon. It's ours. We put it there. We're building a space station now. It's going to have our flag on it.

You can take human history back as far as history goes. The first war in human history that we know much about is the Trojan War. It was the Greek city states against the trading empire of Troy. That's in the upper right corner of the Mediterranean, for those of you who've got a globe. In modern terms, it was a very minor regional conflict. But back then, it was a superpower war. The city states were, at the time, superpowers. The Greeks won. They got lucky. And Homer wrote about it. Actually, Homer created the epic poem that someone else later wrote down. That's why we know about the Trojan War.

As human civilization evolved, human governments, the city states and economies got larger. The scope of the wars grew, too. The Punic Wars matched Rome versus the city of Carthage three times. Romans won. Carthage ain't there no more. That was a battle to see who was the biggest kid on the block in the Mediterranean. Again civilization grew. Man's ability to trade, to communicate with others, grew. As that happened, the conflicts got bigger, too.

The conflicts are always over the same thing. They're always about money. They're always about economics. What else are you going to fight for, except maybe for ideas, which is America's gift.

Out of the war of the Spanish Armada, 1588, came a document called the Freedom of the Seas. That's an important U.S. policy, Freedom of the Seas. The seas are free for the innocent passage of all.

America, more than anything else, is a child of the enlightenment, of the British part of the enlightenment: Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, plus Voltaire, DeCartes and people from all over Europe. Their ideas came here and were allowed to blossom, because America is not a great big hunk of dirt from Atlanta to the Pacific. America is a shared idea. The rule book for our shared ideas is the Constitution, which works.

What we call the French Indian War here was the Seven Years War over in Europe. They had so many wars: the Hundred Years War; the Thirty Years War; the Seven Years War. War was such a common occurrence they sometimes didn't even give it a proper name.

There's a fundamental difference over here. I was driving along I-64 to my condo at the Greenbriar in West Virginia. And it hit me: One of the great differences between America and Europe is, in America, our cities tend to be in the river valleys. In Europe, they tend to be on the hilltops so they're more easily defended. Ever notice that? We kind of invented peace here.

But the human capacity for war didn't stop. The Seven Years War, French and Indian War, kicked France out of North America. It set the stage for the American Revolution because we did most of the fighting in the French and Indian War. After that, Americans started thinking, "Well, what do we need the Brits for?" There's only one answer for that, and that started in 1776. So America became a free country.

We muddled around a little bit and came up with a Constitution after the Articles of Confederation didn't work. Immediately had another war. We bumped heads with the Brits again.

Then we bumped heads with the Mexicans and got Texas and the oil fields and California and the gold mines out of that.

In World War I we had the first global conflict. It went all the way from the Mariannas Islands, which the Japanese took away from the Germans, to the Western Front in France. It took down a whole world order, took down the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs and the Hohezollerns. The Russian monarchy, the Austrio-Hungarian monarchy and the German monarchy were destroyed. It took down a whole world political order. Unfortunately, it only replaced that political order with scar tissue. We ended up with communism in Russia and German National Socialism, Adolf Hitler, in central Europe.

Then the second great European civil war was fought. That was essentially a battle over which idea is going to rule the world. We were down to three ideas by that point. Liberal democracy, that's us and the Brits. Communism, that was the Russians. And, German National Socialism, which was never systematized. It was just Adolf Hitler's lunatic ravings.

Well, we took care of Hitler, and then we had the Third World War, which blessedly was never fought. That was the finals, guys. West team, the champion, captained by the United States of America. And, the East team, captained by the Russians. We won. In 1980, we replaced President Malaise with Ronald Reagan. Reagan looked around and said, "Hey, you know, there's this arms race going on. It might be a little bit more fun if we ran, too."

It worked. Some people now say, in the decade of the 1980s all we did was spend the Russians out of business. What's the big deal? Oh, we spent the Russians out of business.

 Throughout the 1940s, into the 1950s, people lamented the fact that nobody had stood up to Hitler to prevent World War II. Now that we prevented World War III, which would have been incomparably worse, they say, "Oh, what's the big deal?"

And the people who say that are the ones who had said, "It won't work anyway. Don't even buy all the weapons and don't train the soldiers up and don't do the things which President Reagan did. For God's sake, don't call them an evil empire. That's going to hurt their feelings."

Do you remember that, when Reagan called them an evil empire, people said, "You can't say that?"

Well, hell, in Russia today, they have TV shows showing just how evil their own empire was. I saw one some years ago. On this show was an elderly guy with a Russian male hairstyle. Kind of like you back into a wall socket. The hair all sort of pops up. He had white hair and was wearing a dirty t-shirt.

Then the translation comes through. He's explaining that he was a shooter for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He used to execute people when Stalin didn't like them. He averaged four or five people a week. He explained that, when you shoot somebody in the head with a pistol, you want about a meter's distance between your muzzle and the target. Otherwise, you get stuff spattered all over your uniform.

You can just hear him coming home. His wife goes, "Oleg, how many times do I have to tell you? A meter distance between your muzzle and the head or I'm not taking this to the cleaners. You'll take this uniform to the cleaners. This was the last. I'm not going it anymore. You've got remember. Taking the damn uniform to the cleaners will remind you to keep a meter of distance between your pistol and the head of the enemy of the state you're doing away with!"

They were the evil empire. You know Joseph Stalin probably killed more people than Hitler did. He had a bigger country in which to do it.

The amazing part, the astounding part about communism is people actually believe it. Bad ideas can live an awfully long time. But, fundamentally, as Winston Churchill said, when the battlefield is of ideas, if truth is there, truth will win. Truth won.

They were an evil empire. They knew they were an evil empire. We knew it, but American academia didn't want to admit it. God forbid we should hurt their feelings by calling them what they really are.

Ronald Reagan -- to me, he'll always be my president -- Ronald Reagan won the Third World War. George Bush was there to collect the pot. But, hey, George Bush, good guy, he's always been very nice to me. A shame he didn't want the presidency all that much, but that's another issue. Losing to Clinton, dear God.

Reagan destroyed the Russians. And did so without getting people killed. There were a couple of casualties along the way, Major Nicholson in Germany and a few others. But fundamentally, the Third World War was bloodless. And it changed the face of the world.

For the first time in all history, now we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. All the way back to the Trojan War, it was Troy on this side and Sparta and Athens and the Greeks, duking it out over who's going to trade through the Hellespout and swap stuff with the Sythians, who lived in the Black Sea. It wasn't about Helen of Troy, who was a good looking babe and all that. But that's not really what was about. That was the excuse.

Kind of like the Mormon cow war we had in Colorado in the 1850s. That started off because some woman left a lame cow behind. The Indians stole it and ate it. Then the guy in the covered wagon decided, "Hey, that was a valuable cow." A little war started over it. It wasn't really about the cow. It was about the people who didn't like the Indians very much and the Indians who didn't like us very much. The cow just happened to be there at the time.

Similarly, the Trojan War was really about trading rights through the Hellespont into the Black Sea. The Trojans had a toll booth that you to pay to go through. The Greeks didn't like that, so they fought a war about it.

There has always been war. We talk about the pax romana, the couple of hundred years when there were no major wars because the Romans were pretty big in Europe. Well, that's not really true. The world, as it was understood to exist back then, was fairly circumscribed. The Romans were always sending their legions out to hack people up.

By the way, the rest of the world was fighting. The Chinese were fighting with themselves. The Japanese were hacking themselves up with the Samurai's. The Samurai were kind of a mechanism for population control. They just killed each other off. There were wars everywhere. The Pax Britannica was a peace only because the British had better guns. They went off conquering the whole world, and some of those nasty natives actually resisted because they thought it was their country, not the Brits' country. So Pax Britannica was, "We've got better weapons than they, so we can kick them." And they did.

Today, for the first time in all human history, we live in a world in which superpower conflict is a thing of the past. In addition to destroying the Soviet Union, President Reagan's legacy to the whole world is peace for the first time. The United States of America made that happen, with proper leadership. They said President Reagan wasn't really smart -- yeah, like a fox.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Reagan's political career was everybody who said that he really didn't know how to play with the big boys. They all retired before he did. You know House Speaker Tip O'Neill said, "We're going to show this actor how things happen in D.C."

A few years later, Tip O'Neill went back to making commercials. Reagan was still president.

And, oh, by the way, the Russians went belly up. Nobody ever thought -- I didn't think-- it was going to happen. I don't think many people in this room did.

Fundamentally, we faced the Russians with reality. The reality was they couldn't defeat us because their economic system was inferior to ours. The Soviet Union could not turn out weapons. It couldn't feed itself.

When I was researching Red Storm Rising in 1985, I kept asking myself, "Why are we afraid of a country that can't feed itself?" I mean, for crying out loud, everybody can feed himself, right? Not the Russians.

And it's not that they don't grow enough food. They grow plenty of food in Russia. They can't get it from the field to the table. It's the transportation system that doesn't work.

How hard it is to build a choo-choo? We've had transcontinental railroads in America since 1868. What they mainly do is take wheat from Kansas and bring it to New York so people can make bread out of it. Russians had not yet figured that one out. They're still struggling with it.

Democracy is going to happen in Russia for the simple reason that nothing can compete with democracy.

Democracy works better than everything else, because of the ideas of the British enlightenment, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, and people like Voltaire and René DeCartes. We brought all their ideas here, and here we made them all work.

Here we wrote the Constitution, which is a set of rules which tells people how they are allowed to operate. It mainly tells the government what it may not do. The government may not stop people from doing things as long as those people are not interfering with the rights of others. If there's any lesson that America has given the world, it is this: Given the right opportunity, anybody can succeed. Regardless of if they come from Africa or Europe or Ireland or Hungary, or Japan or China, or any place, bring them here. The first generation sets up a restaurant, the second generation goes to MIT, and the third generation has a senator. That is the magic of America.

I've known General Colin Powell for about ten years. God knows, there's a lot of stuff to like about this guy, but best thing about Colin Powell is he understands America. He really understands what makes us better and different. One of the reasons is his family comes from Jamaica. The family split into two pieces. One went to England; one other came here. The part that went to England turned out an assistant conductor of British Rail. The part that came here turned out Colin. He did okay for a ROTC grad from NYU. He took a geology major because, he said, it was easy degree to get. (Kind of like me at Loyola. English is easy. Anybody can get an English degree, if you can read and repeat what your teacher is saying.)

Another member of the Powell family is worth about $500 million and has ambassadorial diplomatic rank. Colin points this out and says that's the difference between America and England.

I love England. I'm an honorary yeoman at the Tower of London. I'm the only American that's ever been a Beefeater. I get the red dress and the pantyhose and everything. A month from today, I will be in London having a brewski at the Yeoman Waters Club. It's the best place in the whole world to have a beer. I love England. But England ain't America.

We're the new, improved United Kingdom here. We took the ideas which they were unable to transform into reality, and we made them real.

That's who we are. That's the United States of America. Not these bozos we have in Washington. Including the Republican bozos. Because, let's face it, politics is the method by which people of mediocre ability acquire power. As much as I'd like to believe that the fellows on the right side of the isle are different from the left side of the isle, for the most part, they're not.

The Democrats have Pat Moynihan. He's very contrary to my position on gun control -- to me, gun control means hitting the target, for him it's taking the gun away from people like me. But, he's a genuinely intellectual, intelligent, thoughtful, patriotic American. You don't have to agree with people to admire and like them. That's an important lesson which we sometimes forget. You're allowed to disagree with people you like. I mean, that's marriage, right? Think about it.

And we have dolts on the Republican side. We all know who they are. Somebody here may be related to one of them, so I'm not going to go too far into that.

 People go into politics because they want to have power and they don't know how to earn it in the economy. Bill Clinton, first American president who's never owned a house. Bush can go to Kennebunkport. Reagan can fly to his ranch in California. All Clinton's got is the East Wing or the West Wing of the White House. He's never worked an honest day's work in his whole life.

Of course, he's a Democrat, it's to be expected. He's been a government employee his whole life. The only time he wasn't holding elective office he was, you'll love this, professor of maritime or of admiralty law at the University of Arkansas Law School. I'm not kidding. He taught admiralty law at University of Arkansas School of Law. Arkansas, that's where they build aircraft carriers, right? And, they sail them out on the Mississippi River, yeah, right, uh huh.

Then he became attorney general of Arkansas and the rest is, God help us, history.

His current job makes $250,000 a year. Interestingly enough, that's where the tax rate jumps. At $250,000. The press never really commented on that. But, the tax rate takes a jump at one dollar above what the President makes. He probably thinks $250,000 is a lot of money.

For me, it's a chapter. And, when I'm close to finishing a book, a chapter is a day's work. That's when I'm really hopping. A chapter is a day's work. But, he and Hillary think that's a lot of money because they've never been in the economy. Because they've never done honest work. You guys all do real work in the real world, don't you? Okay, we don't have any elected people in here.

I don't trust politicians as a group because, mainly they're the lawyers who couldn't catch the ambulance. And they're people who think $120,000 a year is real money. Give me a break.

You don't have to be smart to be rich. You do have to work a little bit. You have to have the occasional idea. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, do you? We all know this. But these are the guys who can't make money on their own. In a society that offers more economic opportunity than anybody ever has.

I've met Bill Gates. He's a little nerdy, but now he's worth $50 billion. That's with a "B". He could buy the U.S. Navy. How did that happen? Number one, he's smart. Number two, he takes very good care of his employees.

I know a couple of people who work for Gates. One of them is buying a G-5 from Gulfstream, right up the coast. That's a $40 million toy that will fly anywhere in the world. Another one owns a MIG-15 because he likes to fly. He likes to fly fighter planes, so he bought a MIG-15. He hustles that thing around. These are Gates employees. He takes good care of his troops. That is the way you get rich: Number one, you have a good idea. Number two, you take care of your people.

That's the thing that keeps you in the Army. Take care of your people; your people take care of you. Well, Gates has got the good sense to know that. Not everybody in American business does, unfortunately, but Bill Gates does. So he's not the only rich guy in Microsoft. All his pals are rich, too. Keep that in mind, you business guys. Take good care of your people, your people take good care of you. It works.

Who's more important to America right now, Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? Who do you think? Probably Gates. The economy thinks so, and the economy usually defines who's really smart, who's really useful and who really isn't. That's why Mark McGuire's going to have a slight increase in salary this year. I'm co-owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Gee, I wish he was on my team.

That's America. When you fly around the world, you're flying on a Boeing airplane with Pratt and Whitney engines rather than some Jap airplane with Jap engines. The reason you fly Boeing with Pratt and Whitney's hanging on the wings is real simple. Our economic and political system rewards people for achieving. More so than the Russians ever did. Because of that, we lead the world.

The reasons we have the best weapons in the world are that people come up with ideas and we allow people to have good ideas. The reason the U.S. military is so formidable, and we are the most formidable military in the world, is actually quite simple. The guys have good weapons because the economy rewards people for having good ideas. As a result of that, you turn out good machines.

Somewhat more important, the soldiers in the U.S. military are citizens with a right to vote. When they have an idea, people are supposed to listen to them. As a result of that, we tend to have a very smart military. And brains is the biggest killer on the battlefield. It's not toughness, it's not meanness, it's not racism. It's brains, the foremost force on the battlefield. That's why the U.S. military's so damn formidable. We have the smartest Army and Navy and Marine Corps in the world. Why? Because our economic system encourages people to think and rewards people for thinking good stuff.

We are the United States of America. We do the impossible things because we don't care if it's supposed to be impossible? If you want it, you try to get it.

I used to be an insurance agent when I tried to write books. You think I had any idea I'd be making twenty million dollars a book? I didn't think there was that much money in the world. They'd have to open a new printing plant in DC for me. I didn't know you could push that many electrons down a wire to make a wire transfer. But this is the United States of America. When people do something useful, we reward them for it. As a result we get a lot of useful things done. We do it better than anybody. And the government can't stop it from happening. And we really don't need the government to think, do we?

One thing you want to remember about these idiots we have in D.C. working for us is they do indeed work for us, not the other way around. They are our employees, our servants, not our masters. They get there and they think -- and this is particularly true of people on the political left, "If only the bozos, the peasants out there, had the good sense to realize how smart we are and to know they should live according to our wishes..."

Kind of like the Michael Dukakis thing. People on the political left, in general, like to think of themselves as the new nobility. You have the Duke of Massachusetts, and now we have the archduke of Arkansas. These people think that they are so smart that they are entitled to tell us how to live.

If Al Gore gets to be president, you'll be able to tell. He goes to Yellowstone and hugs every tree, right? I hope he tries it with a grizzly bear, particularly a mamma grizzly bear with cubs. The Secret Service carries these little automatics. I don't think they can stop a grizz. Then the next guy's the Speaker of the House, who's one of us. But, hey, I trust a wrestling coach more than a lawyer any day.

Mainly people on the political left feel it is their right to tell other people how to live. Why? Because they think they're smarter than everybody else. We're supposed to display our intelligence by recognizing their intelligence and following their suggestions. Don't smoke, don't eat red meat, don't buy, don't drive an SUV because it gives you a better chance of survival than the average klutz driving a Yugo.

Hey, tough luck. If he chooses a Yugo and I'm getting my Mercedes M class, "Tough luck, Charlie. I'm not going to hit you on purpose." I've never had an at-fault accident in my life, but I want to be in the toughest car out there in case some bonehead drunk hits me. Is this unreasonable? Well, yes, according to some people on the political left.

In America we don't put people in Washington to tell us to do different things. They are not the nobility. We fought a war.

Back in 1985, I was researching Red Storm Rising, and HMS Brazen, a British frigate, was in Baltimore harbor. A friend of mine in the Royal Navy got me on board. He's now deputy supreme allied commander Atlantic, James Peron, a fine Naval officer. I wish he was in our navy. I'm walking around the ship. The guy who's taking me around gets called off to see the captain, so he dumps me in the war room. He says, "Oh, here's Prince Andrew. Why don't you chat for a bit."

My first thought, excuse me, ladies, was, "Oh s___." Because, in sixteen years of Catholic schools, eight years of Jesuits, nobody ever told me what you say to a prince.

You ought to be polite. He's a guest in my town and all that, but, Clancy, what do you say to a prince? I have five, four, three, two, one, oh, "Howdy, lieutenant." He shook hands, and that was that. The next day, James said that was exactly right. "He's a prince, but he's not your prince. In fact, you chaps fought a war over that once, you know."

I thought, yeah, James, you're right, he's not my prince. But he's a good kid. We did talk for a while. I've met Andrew and Edward. Their father was a guest at my house last year, Philip. They're all right. They'd make it over here. Prince Philip was a very fine naval officer, and Andrew's a pretty good helicopter pilot. If not he'd be dead by now. He lands on postage. He slams his helicopter on moving objects smaller than this room. It's fun to watch from a safe perspective.

We fought a war 220 years ago to eliminate the idea that people are born with the right to tell other people what to do. If you offer people suggestions on how to live, you do it from merit. And you let them decide. That's who we are; that's what we do.

America grew out of the basic idea that the average guy can look after his own interest better than the guy next to him. That he knows how to spend his money or, if he doesn't, then he'll learn. Experience, failure. Why are people afraid of failure? You don't learn from anything but failure.

The political left doesn't think that way. They don't understand America. They don't understand that people can make their own decisions and do the smart stuff without being told how by the God of brains from Harvard or whatever. Which is why we all know you're better off with a government full of truck drivers than Harvard professors. Because, at least truck drivers know about the speed limit and using their blinker lights.

 Who is America? We are America. What is America? America is a place that rewards people for having good ideas. It's that simple. America is a place where the government does not have the right to tell us how live. Where to go to church, how to talk, what papers to read. The Bill of Rights tells the government what it may not do, and that's important. In most places in the world, the government tells the citizens what they may not do. We don't do it that way here. That's why we're number one. Let's have some questions.

QUESTION: Is China a threat to us?

MR. CLANCY: China is going to be a democracy with a free market economy. Why? They don't have any choice. If they don't, they're going to fall behind. And they can't allow themselves to fall behind. It's going to be a nasty process. China is a place with a culture different from ours. Their idea of man's place in nature, the way man stands before God, is different from ours.

They've always been sort of communist at heart because of their great collective identity. But that doesn't work. And people hitch on to ideas that do work.

Now, is China a threat to us? No. China is a threat to Russia. To get to us, they've got to cross the Pacific Ocean. And we've got the Navy to stop that from happening. It will be a long time before the chinks build a decent navy. On the other hand, they can build a lot of tanks and try to steal Siberia, which is something they very much would like to do. Siberia is an economic and geological treasure house, which they want. They want the gold, the uranium the iridium and all the assets that you can find in Eastern Siberia.

If they try to do that, the Russians will resist, and the Russians have nuclear weapons. That can get very, very nasty.

If I were the Russian Joint Chiefs, my principal fear would be the Chinese. But, I don't think it will happen because nuclear weapons kind of stabilize the equation.

Is China a threat to us? No. Is China a threat to the Russians? Yes. Will war happen? Probably not. Again, because of the nukes.

Will China mutate into a liberal democracy? Yes, it has to. Because nothing else works. You know, the Russians tried very hard to compete with us, but it didn't work. A command economy does not work as well as a free market economy. A country's economy is the source of its military power. It's that simple. If they want to have power, they have to change the roles of their society.

Gorbachev saw that. Gorbachev changed the Russian society, or began the changes, in 1986, when he met Reagan at Rekyavik. He tried to talk Reagan out of SDI. Reagan said, "No. We're going to build it, whether you like it or not. We'll even share the technology with you, but we are going to build it."

Gorby went home knowing that the Soviet Union could not replicate that technology, and knowing that the nuclear weapons were the only thing that justified Russia as a superpower.

Remember, they couldn't feed themselves. The only thing that put them in the bigs, the big leagues was the nukes. Well, we were developing a system to neutralize the value of those weapons. That stripped away their legitimacy to be a superpower. Gorby saw that happening, went back to the Politburo in Moscow and said, "Guys, we've got to change the rules of the game because we cannot win under these rules. We have to change our own society"

Same thing must happen to China. They cannot compete with free market economies. Because of that, they have to change their rules. We sure as hell aren't going to change ours. It's that simple. You can't stop gravity. Nor can you compete with a better economic system.

Sooner or later, the Chinese Bill Gates is going to say, "Wait a minute, I'm bringing all this wealth in my country. You've got to listen to me once in a while. Because, if you don't listen to me, I'll move to Hong Kong, I'll move to Formosa. I'll move somewhere else, and I'll bring all the wealth into another country, and _____ you."

Democracy and a free market economic system is not something you can do halfway. Sooner or later, the people who make the money come into the country, who create the wealth, will demand a voice in the political system. You can't stop that from happening because, if you ignore them, they move away. You can't be half pregnant; you can't be half democratic. It just won't happen. It just doesn't work.

QUESTION: Just a question about the rise of or the continued struggle that we find ourselves in with Islamic fundamentalism, Mr. Bin Laden and others like him, how can --

MR. CLANCY: Mr. Bin Laden used to work for the CIA. But, go on.

QUESTION: Okay, how can our country best handle those threats?

MR. CLANCY: Okay, number one: Remember, Islam is a religion. Freedom of religion is the number one thing in the Bill of Rights. The most important thing for any of us is how each of us talks to God. The most fundamental personal decision anybody can make is: "What is your place before God?"

Islam is a religion. It is a respectful religion. It's got a billion adherents all over the world. They believe, for the most part, in the same things that we do. If you read the Koran, it's the Judeo-Christian Bible, somewhat re-arranged. There are far more similarities between us and these so-called fundamentalists than there are differences. So, let's concentrate on the similarities.

They believe in a God of justice and mercy and love. Same as we do. So build on that. Don't make them enemies. We are natural friends.

Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington is a very impressive gent. He may be the best ambassador in D.C. and there are some good ones there. He had a talk with a Baptist preacher one day about the Koran and, showed him a passage in the Koran about Jesus' mother, Mary. The Baptist minister liked it enough that he build a sermon around it. Then, after his sermon, he said, "Oh, by the way, this wasn't from the Bible. This was from the Koran." Nobody could tell the difference.

Islam is a religion of justice, love, and mercy. The same as our religions. Let's build on that. If you judge Christianity by those boneheads in Northern Ireland -- Catholics and Protestants are shooting each other and blowing each other up -- it makes Christianity look pretty stupid, doesn't it? You've got this Ian Paisley on one side and Gerry Adams on the other. These are not nice guys. They kill people.

The IRA knee caps. In knee capping, you take a pistol, you shoot through the back, and blow the knee cap off. That ruins your football career right there.

The Catholics tend to do it with pistols, the Protestants use Black and Decker quarter-inch drills. The noise must be fantastic. These are both people who call themselves Christians. If you judge Christianity by idiots like that we look worse than the Islamic fundamentalists. Don't we? But they're no more representative of Christianity than these terrorists, like Bin Laden represents Islam. So, let's build. These are people who go to church. How can they be our enemies? So you talk to them, you set up a dialogue, you work with them on the similarities instead of emphasizing the differences. And, soon or later, you make peace. It's that simple.

Moreover, this is the United States of America. We do not tolerate religious bigotry here. We don't do that in the United States of America. If they have a religion, and it's an organized and sensible religion, you respect it. Otherwise, you're not an American. It's that simple.

QUESTION: Tom, I notice on the Web that you have a new book coming on February 2nd, and they're taking orders for it now. 

MR. CLANCY: It's in May, actually, but go on.

QUESTION: Can you tell us a little bit about it, what the title is and especially how many chapters?

MR. CLANCY: It's called Every Man a Tiger. It's done in cooperation with General Chuck Horner, who was the air commander in the Persian Gulf War and a fighter pilot's fighter pilot. A hell of a guy.

It just goes to show you what can come out of a pig farm in Iowa. This guy is not just a fighter jock, he's also got a brain. I'm just reworking the forward now. It's pretty good. You ought to particularly pay attention to his comments on the war in Vietnam, which are going to surprise the hell out of everybody in this room. It's called Every Man a Tiger.

QUESTION: Will history give Ronald Reagan his due?

MR. CLANCY: Yeah. Eventually, it has to.

John Keegan, a friend of mine, may be the best military historian in the world. He's a Brit. In one of his books, he said, for too many historians, history is the application of political ideology to the past. But, sooner or later, the truth comes out. And the truth is we beat the Russians, Reagan was there when it happened, and it was Reagan's plan that made it happen.

About twenty years from now, and I hope I live to see it, somebody's going to write a book about how Reagan did it. Ed Meese knows stuff about this, but he wouldn't even be able to nod because of how classified it is.

Remember the time that Reagan was getting ready for his Saturday talk, and he ad libs something about we've just made Russia illegal. We start bombing in thirty minutes. He tells a joke over an open mike. That was not an accident. That was a deliberate act. When Reagan took over, the Soviets thought he was crazy. They thought he was mentally wrong. So the Soviets, the KGB, initiated an operation called Ryan, would you believe, RYAN, which is an acronym for surprise nuclear attack on the motherland. They had KGB guys running all over America trying to figure out if America was going to push the button on the Russians. That's how afraid they were of him.

Well, we knew this. So Ronald Reagan was the president who said go do it. The person who came up with the idea and went and did it was Bill Casey, director of Central Intelligence, along with Pope John Paul in Rome and the Saudi royal family.

Possibly the most impressive and successful psychological operation in all of human history, and Casey was probably the dark genius behind it.

They used to say about Casey, he's the only guy in DC that didn't need a secure phone, because nobody could understand what he said anyway. He was a really smart guy with a really good sense of history, according to senior people in the Reagan administration who described him to me. It was his plan. Reagan gave the go ahead and supported it, and it worked. And, the Soviet Union ain't there no more.

There are other examples. We were doing crazy stuff to make the Russians afraid of us. Like sending B-52 bombers right to limit of Russian air cover and just bringing them back, and doing so at random intervals, like we were rehearsing an attack against the Soviet Union.

The Saudis reduced the world price of oil, which cut Soviet hard currency earnings by about a third, or as much as half. And, Pope John Paul II was working through the Catholic church to de-stabilize eastern Europe.

Reagan wasn't just there when it happened. The Reagan administration had an organized cohesive plan to destroy the Soviet Union, and it seems to have worked.

Exactly what all the components of that plan were, I don't know. It's all highly classified stuff. About twenty years from now, somebody's going to put the pieces together and do a book about it. I hope to read that book. Because it will show that Reagan, from day one, knew what he wanted to accomplish and, by God, he made it happen. Was it the end of 1991? They hauled down the red flag over the Spasky gate in the Kremlin for the last time. They put another flag up. They ought to give that red flag to Reagan. He can hang it up in his den and say, yeah, that used to represent a country, but that country ain't there no more.