My 40 years in the foreign service and the careers of many of my friends became associated with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the putting in order of what came after - the building of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. It`s hard to recall today how improbable victory in the Cold War appeared.

If we blunt Russian efforts now to be aggressive, we may be pleasantly surprised by the policy options that become available to us, in terms of working with a better Russia.

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.

[Donald Trump administration] didn`t ask me to stay and 40 years seemed like enough.

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.

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.

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.