That was pretty smooth, because you don`t want something to go wrong when you have a whole senior level of actings. That`s not a position you want to be in. It`s OK to replace your team, but usually you want them to be in place until the new people are confirmed.
Both the Bush people and [Barack] Obama people had no problem working with the holdovers. They weren`t out to get them.
The usual practice is that the people in their jobs keep their jobs until their successors are named. Now, that`s the way the [George] Bush administration treated the [Bill] Clinton people. And that`s the way the [Barack] Obama administration treated the [George W.] Bush people.
We`re a little bit low in the 1970s, right, post-Vietnam, Watergate era, malaise, all that, but this is more like the 1930s where the very notion of liberal democracy is being questioned, and that is disturbing.
Nothing can be taken for granted and this great achievement is now under assault by Russia. But what we did in my time is no less honorable. It is for the present generation to defend.
It was my honor to have done what I could do to help. I learned to never underestimate the possibility of change, that values have power and that time and patience can pay off, especially if you`re serious about your objectives.
I'm one of the many people who has said that the Hillary Clinton we know in private was effective, strong, courageous, and funny. And the campaigner we saw was less so, more scripted. Many people have made that observation, and it was my observation, too, but I'm grateful for what she did.
There are lots of secretaries who send off special envoys and yes, say, "Do a great job," and that's fine until it costs you something. And then they cut you off.
Diplomacy is not merely talking somebody into something; it's talking to somebody from a position of strength. You put your power on the table to open up the conversation; that's diplomacy.
John Kerry tried to work with the Russians on Syria, and the man was honorable, because he was trying to do the right thing, and frankly, playing a very weak hand, a hand that was weak not because of him, okay. He did the best he could, but I will say this to his enormous credit: he never offered a dirty deal. You can have Ukraine if you only help us out on Syria. Never - he never did that.
No great power is ever satisfied with its sphere of influence. They never are.
Realism as a foreign policy doctrine means basically you don't care about values; you consider them a luxury, and it leads to a kind of acquiescence in spheres of influence. Now, spheres of influence sound good if you're a graduate student, or a certain kind of - an academic with a certain habit of mind. But in fact, spheres of influence don't work out very well, certainly not for the victims, and there are always victims.
Be careful about a policy generated with enthusiasm in the rush of a moment. It usually doesn't turn out well.
Russia could be, in fact, it would have to be a different Russia, but it could be a splendid ally. I will say this for the Russians: on their - in their favor, they have the intellectual capacity and the habits of mind to act in the world on a strategic scale, and were they do to so in service of a better cause than their current set of grievances, they would be a natural partner.
Don't mistake the Russia you want to exist for the Russia that there actually is. Be realistic.
I think that Hillary Clinton has an appreciation that American power needs to be put in the service of American values, which is an American tradition and a pretty good one, and I think she was willing to do that.
It's said that Putin can't stand Hillary Clinton. I don't know that for a fact, but it certainly looks that way, but I think her approach to Russia stands up pretty well.
For two generations up through the mid-1980s, many thought we were losing the Cold War, even in early 1989, few believed that Poland`s solidarity movement could win, that the Iron Curtain would come down, that the Baltic states could be free, that the second of the 20th century`s great evils, communism, could be vanquished without war, but it happened and the West`s great institutions, NATO and the E.U., grew to embrace 100 million liberated Europeans.
My 40 years in the foreign service and the careers of many of my friends became associated with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the putting in order of what came after - the building of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. It`s hard to recall today how improbable victory in the Cold War appeared.
America is not a white man's republic.
We have a deep sense of American equality and opportunity, and that informs the way in which we brought our American power to the world, because we thought that other nations were entitled to that same opportunity in a rules-based system.
The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.
America is not an ethnostate. We are not rooted in blood and soil.
We are a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That's what makes us Americans. When we sign onto that belief, we sign onto the core American identity, and that's very deep in us.
Lincoln is quoted more often than he's understood, and he understood that the founding principle of our nation is, in fact, the Declaration of Independence.
