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.

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.

Don't mistake the Russia you want to exist for the Russia that there actually is. Be realistic.

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.

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.

Russia committed an act of aggression in Ukraine, and that's the first time since 1945 a European country has seized the territory of another European country. That's serious business. They started a war with their neighbor. Their troops as well as the separatists funded and controlled by Russia are killing people just about every day.

There are a lot of policies that don't work out that are nevertheless worth doing.