Parts of the United States are taking on a Third World look.

If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.

If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The Iranian issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons ­nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources.

I don't really think there have been transitional periods to socialism. There have been efforts, but they have usually been destroyed by a combination of external force and internal corruption.

When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.