The Chinese military budget today is officially listed as, I think, about $15 billion. But even if you double it, that's only a tenth of ours. So the possibility of China challenging the United States for the next ten years over the Pacific is next to zero. There could be a conflict between us and China over Taiwan, but I think that, too, will not occur with the proper policies on both sides.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.

Almost every peace process that has gone on between the Arab side and Israel, the United States has been somewhat isolated because most of the countries in the world, what they really want is to accept the Arab peace plan or so-called peace plan, which in its present form would lead to the destruction of Israel.

Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don't really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.