American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.

We have our differences with Russia. And some of those differences produce conflict. But by no means is this the Soviet Union. We have far more areas of cooperation with Russia than we have areas of conflict.

I find that the great majority of public servants across the entire political spectrum come because they believe in the United States and they want to change the world.

I play a lot chamber music.As for something that's hard for me to play, before I leave this Earth I'm hoping to play Brahms' Second Piano Concerto.

It hasn't yet materialized that I went into sports management, but I haven't ruled it out yet, either. I only half-jokingly remarked that I'd love to be the commissioner of the NFL. But as I recently told current Commissioner Roger Goodell, that job looked a lot more appealing when I was struggling with the Russians and the Iranians everyday.

And we believe that our policies toward Iraq simply are to protect the region and to protect Iraq's people and neighbors.

We can't afford to let the international community and the world lose faith in the diplomatic track.