Be careful about a policy generated with enthusiasm in the rush of a moment. It usually doesn't turn out well.

[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.

Our mistakes, blunders, flaws, and shortcomings notwithstanding, the world America made after 1945 and 1989 has enjoyed the longest period of general peace in the west since Roman times, and decades of prosperity.

The Russian myth that they broadcast to the world, and have their various surrogates in the West repeat, is that somehow the West took advantage of them, that we were mean to them. That writes out of history everything Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton tried to do with Boris Yeltsin. Strobe Talbott leaned forward doing everything he could to help the Russians, and frankly, I have little patience for the notion that we gave them nothing but bad advice.

The usual practice is that the people in their jobs keep their jobs until their successors are named. Now, that`s the way the [George] Bush administration treated the [Bill] Clinton people. And that`s the way the [Barack] Obama administration treated the [George W.] Bush people.

Putinsim is not necessarily the end state for Russia. Russia has moved in many directions since the early 1980s.

Internal reform in Russia would require a better relationship with the West.