You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.

What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.

The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.

When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.

Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.

They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.