It's very personal in its politics, very bitter and very negative.

Every country has an aspect to it that rubs up people the wrong way.

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.

You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on political consultants to tell you what you think when you already know what you think.

Iran is barely over 50% Persian, and Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and many other groups feel left out of the society. That regime has a lot more weaknesses than people see.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command. This is the sort of investigation that some people who live in Fairyland might like to undertake, but which bears no relationship at all to conditions in the real world.

The press tend to stick with that the people don't care about foreign policy in their daily lives and aren't concerned about it and so on and so forth. I don't think that's actually true.