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

Nationalism is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.

The United States comes in 1945 and we basically blow the whistle.

I think the West is in a low point we haven`t seen since the 1930s.

We did really well for a generation after 1989 and the fall of communism. Our liberal values expanded in the world, our prosperity expanded.

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.

We should not assume that Russia is doomed to live according to its worst traditions. In fact, in Russian history, failed efforts at external aggression, when they fail, usually bring on areas of internal reform.