If anybody,wants to get rid of us, then this is a different approach. However, we will get over it; you never know who is going to lose more with such an approach.

A foreign threat is useful to put things in order in one's own camp, to make one's allies follow the bloc discipline. Iran does not fit this role too well, and it is very tempting to revive Russia's image of the enemy. But nobody in Europe is afraid anymore.

Whatever we do, all the knowledge, the experience, they stay with us, we carry them on, use them in one way or another.

Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.

I will not offer my thoughts on what Japan could and should have done, this is none of my business, it is the business of the Japanese leadership. But we should understand how practicable all our agreements are as a whole given the allied obligations Japan has assumed, how much independence there is in making those decision, and what we can hope for, what we can ultimately arrive at.

I have never changed. I feel as young as I always did and remain close friends with Gerhard Schröder.

Here we have 40 million Russian citizens involved in the sphere of agriculture one way or another. This is very important.