I wouldn't give up on Russia, and with oil at $90 a barrel, they can refurbish their strategic capabilities and under an authoritarian regime, those nuclear weapons are still there and in the wrong hands we might have a problem again.
It's very personal in its politics, very bitter and very negative.
I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors.
THe Chinese like the satellite state [North Korea] between China and our forces, they fear that in a reunified Korea, American troops would be at the Yalu River and they've seen that movie before. They didn't like it the first time they saw it and they don't like it any better today. So they are quite happy with the divided Korean peninsula and that's a fundamental difference between the way they see things and the way we see things.
I have looked at public opinion polls in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of Marshall Plan aid. They had a very negative attitude towards the United States then. There were negative attitudes towards the United States because of Vietnam. There were negative attitudes about the United States when Reagan wanted to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles. I don't think the president should base his foreign policy on American public opinion polls, let alone foreign public opinion polls.
We need a strong and effective State Department. We can't conduct American affairs in the world without it.
You have to negotiate from positions of strength. And right now with Iran, we're not negotiating from a position of strength. The Europeans are negotiating from the position of "Please give up your nuclear weapons program, and by the way if you do we'll give you several boatloads of carrots." The Iranians are quite willing to keep on negotiating on that line for a long time.
The press tend to stick with that the people don't care about foreign policy in their daily lives and aren't concerned about it and so on and so forth. I don't think that's actually true.
What we want for the Iranian people is control over their own government, which they don't have now. So you would do it through supplying resources and support from the outside to the indigenous people who are already quite unhappy. The mullahs have made hash of the economy since 1979, there's a huge amount of economic dissatisfaction. The young people, who are pretty well educated and sophisticated, know they could have a better life than this strict Islamic law.
Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
I want to make sure that, not only in the Republican Party but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States.
The International Criminal Court uses a prosecution-only approach. And by putting their fate in the hands of outsiders, countries are really dodging responsibility for actions taken in the name of that country, in the name of the people in that country, by the people of that country themselves. That is, I think, fundamentally the wrong direction to go in.
A lot of people have said to me, 'That's a great idea, running for president. You'll get booked for more speeches. You can write a book.'
I have decided not to run for president.
Maybe it's my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard.
I don't think Hamas will be satisfied simply ruling the Gaza Strip.
I don't much believe in bumper sticker characterizations of foreign policy.
The U.N. is one of many competitors in a marketplace of global problem solving.
I've been in the government bureaucracy, I've practiced law, I've done a lot of different things.
There is no excuse for waste, fraud, and abuse in the Defense Department budget.
It's not natural disasters that are to blame for the deprivation of the North Korean people, but the failed policies of Kim Jong Il.
My priority is to give the United States the kind of influence it should have.
As you know, I have over the years written critically about the U.N. I have consistently stressed in my writings that American leadership is critical to the success of the U.N., an effective U.N., one that is true to the original intent of its charter's framers.
I am not a professional politician.
Texas is a big state. It's a major force in the Republican Party.
