I think what Mr. Trump has made clear is that he would not undertake optional wars, what I have called wars of choice, a la, say Iraq in 2003 or Libya, for the purposes of transforming another country. It's not clear whether Hillary Clinton, if she were to have the opportunity, would do such a thing again or whether she would have taken a - the lesson from both Iraq and Libya that we ought not to be undertaking those kinds of wars of choice.

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.

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.

The reason I called the president Donald Trump a disrupter is that he came into office 70 years after World War II, 25-plus years after the end of the Cold War. Like any president, he didn't come into office with a blank slate - he entered with an enormous inheritance of relationships with institutions, policies and the like. And in my view he is much too quick to pull the U.S. out of various institutions and various agreements, and he's been much too quick to question the value of allies and alliances.

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.

Television was our chief tool in selling our policy.

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.