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.

I believe the liberal international order is under assault from Russia, and from other authoritarian regimes, and it is being questioned from within the West by nationalists, by nativists, and by people who doubt our - doubt the values of the West. We've gone through periods like this before; in the '70s, after Vietnam and Watergate, and certainly in the '30s, when people thought liberal democracy was dead, and the future belonged either to the fascists or the communists.

[Russians] want to bring us down to make them feel better about the failure of the Soviet Union. I don`t mean bring us down as in collapse, but bring us down a notch in a big way.

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.

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.

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.