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.

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

We Americans are focused on Russia`s attacks with our electoral system and we`re consumed with that. But Russia is pushing against the West generally.

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.

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.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.

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.