I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits.

Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.

I don't stand on protocol. Just call me your Excellency.

I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life.

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.

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

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.