What we do right now, today, matters.

People talk about [Bashar] Assad running Syria. He doesn't control his own country. He's down to about 20, 25 percent of the country. What is this fiction that he is somehow the only person who can save Syria? There's - with Assad there, there is no Syria. So that's what the Iranians and the Russians need to really begin to focus in on.

I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.

Great challenges confront our great nation. We seek to meet them by rising to the task, not by defining our country down.

I know that our country is strongest when we lead the world, when we lead strong alliances. And that's the way Eisenhower and Reagan and Kennedy and others did it.

We achieved a deal with the Russians that didn't wind up in two days of strikes that would have sent a, quote, "message," but would not have removed the weapons. We struck a deal to get all of the declared weapons out of Syria. Never before in a conflict has that ever happened, that during the conflict weapons of mass destruction are taken out of the zone of conflict. And thank God we did that, because if we hadn't done that, today ISIL would have those chemical weapons in large parts of the country.

What is happening is policy in Israel is being driven by the settlers who don't support a two-state solution, who want their settlements to prevent the possibility of two states. They openly say that.