Israel's international position is very badly damaged. A country which started off as a symbol of recovery of a people who were greatly persecuted now looks like a country that is persecuting people. And that's very bad.

We cannot have that relationship if we only dictate or threaten and condemn those who disagree.

Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.

I was confident about America and the idea that in America people can become American without masking their ethnic identity.

I think the sheer attrition of American global domination will create circumstances in which the Chinese will be tempted to reach out for more influence, including in regions in which we have special interests, such as the Middle East, from which they already obtain a great deal of their energy. And that region will be seeking some new superpower patron.

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.

Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.