I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.

People seem to forget that Saddam was the only leader in the world who praised the attacks of 9/11 as a good thing.

I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.

The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab world.

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

Islamic State is mainly a direct result of the failure in Syria. That's where IS has grown. That's where IS spread from.