Well, we ought to make clear to everybody that the next Korean War, if one were ever to happen, is going to be the last Korean War because it's going to end with a unified peninsula, and it's go to be under Seoul, not Pyongyang.

You cannot be effective if those who work for you are not. So building their effectiveness ought to be a priority.

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.

I've worked for four presidents, and I've concluded that almost nothing is inevitable. History is to a significant extent the result of the interaction of personalities and ideas. And so I don't believe war between the U.S. and China is in any way inevitable, and it's well within the province of diplomacy and statecraft to avoid it.

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.

Sovereignty must be redefined if states are to cope with globalisation.

Globalisation thus implies that sovereignty...needs to become weaker.