In my view, there's no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.

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.

Now we have a whole series of problems - energy, environment, proliferation - which go beyond the nation. And we also know that a conflict between major powers would be a catastrophe for which there is no compensation in anything you can gain.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

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.

If a Chinese plane landed at Los Angeles Airport having just bought down an American military plane, he wouldn't be permitted to leave the next day. So then we developed a framework which should have been acceptable as a concept to the Chinese, namely to express regret for the loss of life and maintain our position that we had a right to fly these missions.