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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

George W. Bush tried working with the Russians after 9/11; Obama had the reset. Both presidents achieved less than they wanted, but they both achieved something. Those policies made sense, and it's to the credit of both Presidents Bush and Obama that even as they reached out to Russia, they did not sacrifice core American interests, or core American values. We didn't give the Russians on the altar of better relations other countries. We were able to do two things at once.

What [Russians] want to do is undermine the Western liberal order.