It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

Create the impression of endless willingness to compromise and you almost invite deadlines. That's the challenge we now have in North Korea and have had in North Korea for 10 years. In this sense, diplomacy and foreign policy and other elements of political activity have to be closely linked and have to be understood by the negotiators

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

Even paranoid people have enemies.

Everybody who has dealt with China over an extended period of time has come to more or less the same conclusions. There are nuances of differences, but not fundamental differences. I think that President Bush was heading in this direction, and I have no doubt that he will again wind up in this position. But right now he has to be preoccupied with the atrocity committed in New York and Washington.

Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?

Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.