A lot of people tend to think I'm a dogmatic ideologue, which I'm not.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.

America doesn't border on Muslim countries. European countries do and that seems to be a fundamental difference.

The core of the American set of beliefs has remained pretty constant.

I think in theory, the United States finds it much easier to deal with situations where there is a leading country. You can go to the leaders of that country and say, for example, to India, "There are all these problems in Bangladesh, we really have to do something about it, what do you suggest we can do to work out a common policy?" But when you don't have the equivalent of India, you have to go capital to capital trying to put together a coalition, which is extraordinarily difficult, especially in the Arab world, because of the historic rivalries and branches of Islam.

Since the revolution of the 18th century, America has basically had an ideology of liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.