Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanaticism.

No, I’ve always been impressed with the tremendous resilience of the American economy. I think over the years, over the decades, it’s demonstrated this tremendous ability to take severe body blows, if you will, and bounce back.

It’s clearly established in terms of training, provision of bomb-making experts, training of people with respect to chemical and biological warfare capabilities, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Iraq for training and so forth.

The biggest threat we face is the possibility of terrorist groups like al Qaeda equipped with weapons of mass destruction, with nukes, bugs or gas. That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.

We've gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be - to deploy a system that'll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strikes that might be possible by a nuclear armed North Korea or Iran.

The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes.

Except for the occasional heart attack, I never felt better.