If there's any country that has the capacity not to control North Korea, but to influence North Korea, it's still China. The Chinese always say they have very little influence. They have more than they say they do. We should put pressure on them to do it and there's finally, we're seeing the first signs of a little bit of Chinese disaffection. At some point they're getting tired of the antics of this country. This is a dangerous ally for China to have. And the more Chinese can pressure them and put the economic screws on them, the better it will be for everybody.

China likes the idea of sovereign rights when it comes to organizing their politics as they see fit, and their economics. But they may grudgingly come to understand certain things differently in the area of climate or disease. China is a country fairly integrated into the world. Yet China is uncomfortable with this idea because they worry it will constrain their freedom, politically and economically, to do what they believe they need to do to maintain political stability and cohesion.

Hillary Clinton is pretty much what we would call a foreign-policy realist, someone who thinks the purpose of American foreign policy should be to adjust the foreign policies of other countries, work closely with traditional allies in Europe and Asia towards that end.

I think it was going to be hard to work with Russians on Syria. There is some potential overlap between the U.S. and Russia in that the Russians don't want to see the Syria situation unravel to a point where they have to escalate their own involvement. But at the moment, I don't see the U.S. and Russia on the same page in Syria. Russia seems much more interested in consolidating government control over liberated areas. It seems to me that the U.S. and Russia are proving they can disagree for independent reasons in any number of theaters.

We ought to be doing much more in North America. We are on the cusp of an energy revolution. And we do need to be doing more at home. The biggest national security threats facing the United States right now are not in the Middle East. They are domestic.

Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change.

Jerusalem is a holy site for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Israelis and Palestinians both lay claim to it as their capital. Jerusalem is the most sensitive of all the issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. But Donald Trump determined an important aspect of the United States' position towards Jerusalem before any agreement. Most of the rest of the world feels that it ought not to be dealt with first, that it ought not to be dealt with separately, and that it ought not to be dealt with unilaterally.