The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

It is steady, reliable, tough. It never yields to panic. It is never defeated one-sidedly. It achieves everything attainable by character and tenacity.

Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

Well it did not make excessive sense to say that 20 million people are the recognized government of a billion people that have their own institutions. We did not change it in the sense that we said this has to end, but there was a U.N. vote that transferred the legitimacy of China from Taiwan to Beijing. Beijing was recognized as the government of all of China. Then, under President Carter, we followed what the U.N. had already done eight years earlier.

To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.

Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us.