There's no doubt that Iran funds and supplies Hamas with weapons.

If you get a President (Hillary) Clinton, you might well find, just as after Vietnam, that there is a retraction from Iraq and of American influence in the world. And in a couple of years the Europeans will be complaining about that too.

There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

The real issue of dealing with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical or biological is: What is your tolerance for risk? And my tolerance for risk for WMD proliferation is pretty close to zero. Because otherwise, we and our allies are at the mercy of regimes like Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran, or Kim Jong Il and the Hitler-in-the-bunker mentality in Pyongyang, or others who don't share our calculus on the value of human life.

The only way to resolve the North Korean problem is to change the regime.

I'm not saying that you need a State Department that looks like the litigation department of a major law firm. But you need people who are not afraid to make the case for the United States, who are not afraid to stand their ground, not afraid to be isolated in international organizations when that's the correct approach for our diplomacy. This is a cultural change that has to be effected through incentive systems, promotion systems, career training systems. This is not something that you can do with the stroke of a magic wand, it's going to take years to make this change.

You have to negotiate from positions of strength. And right now with Iran, we're not negotiating from a position of strength. The Europeans are negotiating from the position of "Please give up your nuclear weapons program, and by the way if you do we'll give you several boatloads of carrots." The Iranians are quite willing to keep on negotiating on that line for a long time.