Soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the president all the time, routinely. Jimmy Carter stopped that after the invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan resumed it in 1984, I think. And so the fact of a meeting like that I think is not that big a deal.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

On the foreign policy side, there's the risk of being too spontaneous and too disruptive where you end up doing more harm than damage. And figuring out that balance is where having strong people around you matters.

If possible, to be in a position to announce who is going to step in as the interim immediately. And if possible, to announce who you're going to nominate to replace that person. For that to be somebody of impeccable integrity and reputation disarms a lot of the worst criticism that it's some kind of a power play. It's a professional approach to replacing a senior official, which is always going to get a lot of attention.

I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.

When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to, because they had no pilots.

I don't think any president that I worked with has ever said 'pretty please.