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.

Maybe it's my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard.

People say you favor assassination, what do you think war is? Except that it's assassination on a much larger scale, a much more horrific scale.

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 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.

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, then almost certainly Saudi Arabia will do the same, as will Egypt, Turkey and perhaps others in the region.

What we want for the Iranian people is control over their own government, which they don't have now. So you would do it through supplying resources and support from the outside to the indigenous people who are already quite unhappy. The mullahs have made hash of the economy since 1979, there's a huge amount of economic dissatisfaction. The young people, who are pretty well educated and sophisticated, know they could have a better life than this strict Islamic law.