Some people have said, in so many words, that I'm kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.

Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

I fired a lot of senior people myself and I think the key, when you feel compelled to remove a senior official, is essentially to have all your ducks in a row at the beginning. Have everybody understand what the rationale was.

My one concern is that Hu Jintao may overestimate how much power China has in Pyongyang. They have - they do have influence, and they do have companies, and they do have economic relationships that could make life much more difficult in the north. Their balancing act is, "How much worse can we make it in the north without creating that which scares us more than anything, which is a collapse in the north." And then what happens to all those nuclear weapons. So they're going to work very hard to avoid that.

I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.

Things have gotten so nasty in Washington.

We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps - where 'every Marine is a rifleman' - one of America's cherished institutions and one of the world's most feared and respected fighting forces