I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?

America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy.

A great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle, but it is also a struggle that has to be waged intelligently.

The legitimacy of the leadership depends on what that country thinks of its leaders. When we lay off, more and more Iranians tend to be critical of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The more abusive we are and the more pressure we put on them, the more nationalism fuses with fundamentalism in Iran.

The Eastern Europeans invested too many of their hopes in the notion that somehow or other the missile shield, even if directed at Iran, would reinforce their security links with the U.S. vis-à-vis Russia.

Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

Because you can't intervene everywhere, you don't conclude you can't intervene anywhere.