When you have increased migration of peoples and ethnic and religious minorities, you develop a set of rules and language the larger society can accept and the minority community can accept.

As far as ideology or political beliefs are concerned, countries are very different.

Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?

Except under rare circumstances, I don't write responses to criticism.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

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.