In the eyes of God, a child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child. We - we can't distinguish between them in terms of their worth and their inherent dignity and that they're deserving of shelter and love and education and opportunity. We can't isolate ourselves. We can't hide behind a wall.

In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.

For me, personally, the most difficult moments had to do with not just terrorist attacks, but also shootings.

Battling terrorism must go beyond belligerence vs. isolation.

Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela -- what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term. It takes more than a single president. It takes more than a single individual.

Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It's about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don't exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation. And I know, because America, we, too, have had to work hard over the decades, slowly, gradually, sometimes painfully, in fits and starts, to keep perfecting our union.

I'm confident that America's foreign policy rebalance to the region will endure beyond my presidency because it's in the national interest of the United States.