The Alliance and NATO is two different things. France is a member of the Alliance. NATO is an organization not mentioned in the North Atlantic Treaty, has been built up in the course of history, in the course of history France has left that organization. Normally the Alliance has been lead by consent, building up consensus on important issues of questions, in many instances over the last 30 years that I have followed events closely. In many, many cases was being done under the spiritual guidance of the American President, that is true, but sometimes also at the guidance of others.

Leonid Brezhnev did not understand the enormous political importance of the decision to produce and afterwards deploy the SS-20s.

President [Ronald] Reagan never has tried to become an expert on military matters. He never has endeavored to learn the most important details in that field, which lead to a situation in which his aides played a much greater roles than aides would have played under President Ford or let us say in the whole Nixon-Ford-Kissinger era.

I've never been a classic Gaulist! Not a Gaulist at all.

Ronad Reagan might go down to history as a man who in the end of this administration brought about the first nuclear arms reduction treaty, the first arms reduction treaty at all in the modern world, and this is quite something.

I have had and still do have every confidence in Paul Nitze, a man whom I have known for decades, one of the wisest servants of the American nation but always willing and capable of taking into account the interests of their allies, whoever: the British, or the French or the Germans or others.

Admirals and Generals always want more ships and more weapons and they take the arguments where they can find them.