Nationalism is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.
Partisanship is not part of my professional makeup.
ISIS is the near-term threat, and that the longer - or the mid-term challenge is managing the rise of China. There's some evidence that that's the thinking of the [Donald Trump] administration. That's a perfectly reasonable approach. Well, if that's the case, then you surely want to have a united West to deal with both, and you want to have Russia alongside, but maybe not this Russia while it's busy trying to undermine your chief asset, which is a united West.
I think that President George W. Bush was ahead of most of his government, in realizing that Putin was not the person we thought he was.
We intend to leave it without further discussion. We respect this request by the government of Uzbekistan
The world should contemplate a nuclear weapons-armed Iran with the greatest of concern.
At least in my country, we have come to accept the flags burning, but what we cannot accept is violence, burning of embassies and intimidations, and there is no excuse for that.
Realism is important in foreign policy. You have to be realistic about what you can achieve, and about the pitfalls, and problems along the way, of which there are plenty. Nothing is easy. It's always rough.
The United States comes in 1945 and we basically blow the whistle.
Internal reform in Russia would require a better relationship with the West.
If we blunt Russian efforts now to be aggressive, we may be pleasantly surprised by the policy options that become available to us, in terms of working with a better Russia.
Remember, the American grand strategy works when other countries feel secure. But it doesn't work if we acquiesce in the aggression of other countries.
The Russian myth that they broadcast to the world, and have their various surrogates in the West repeat, is that somehow the West took advantage of them, that we were mean to them. That writes out of history everything Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton tried to do with Boris Yeltsin. Strobe Talbott leaned forward doing everything he could to help the Russians, and frankly, I have little patience for the notion that we gave them nothing but bad advice.
The same people the Americans sent over - that we sent over to advise the Russians, we also sent over to advise the Poles about how to build a post-communist economy. Same people, same advice, with radically different results, which leads to suspicion it's not our advice which was the crucial variable. It was the Poles, on one hand, and the Russians on the other. The Poles succeeded; the Russians didn't. Don't blame us.
There are a lot of policies that don't work out that are nevertheless worth doing.
9/11 was a genuine trauma, and President George W. Bush rallied the country. I think the Iraq war was ill-considered, but there - it was done in the wake of a national trauma. And that the errors made under such circumstances are different than errors made in the cold.
Russia is an aggressive revisionist power. And they are working - there's evidence they're working to interfere not just in our electoral process, but the electoral processes of Europeans with the same toolkit - money, fake news, propaganda, and what those Soviets used to call aktivniye meropriyatiya, active measures. This is serious.
I think the West is in a low point we haven`t seen since the 1930s.
The West in its modern form since 1945 is a miracle, and that`s in our American interests. It`s its good that the West is strong and at peace, and we should want more of that, not less.
The European Union, ok, right, it has a bureaucracy, right. It`s sometimes difficult to deal with but so what? You hire a couple of people like me to work the European Union, and it can be done. It`s pretty good.
We should not assume that Russia is doomed to live according to its worst traditions. In fact, in Russian history, failed efforts at external aggression, when they fail, usually bring on areas of internal reform.
Putinsim is not necessarily the end state for Russia. Russia has moved in many directions since the early 1980s.
Russia comes from a place of deep resentment against the West, in general, and the United States in particular. They are rapacious, because they want back as much of their empire as they can grab. And we need to resist that. At the same time, we should be able to look for areas of common interest.
The American tradition of foreign policy exceptionalism, our grand strategy as a nation, reaches back much further. Really at the turn - the end of the 19th century, when we achieved power a generation after the Civil War, the outlines of an American vision came into focus, and what we - it was based on two things. One, our realization that our values and our interests were the same, and that our business interests would advance as our values advanced in the world.
America's security and prosperity didn't work unless other nations were also secure, and prosperous. There had to be something in it for them, so we weren't looking simply to grab territory, or widen our sphere of influence, or anything like that. We wanted to make the world a better place, and get very rich in the process.
