Realism as a foreign policy doctrine means basically you don't care about values; you consider them a luxury, and it leads to a kind of acquiescence in spheres of influence. Now, spheres of influence sound good if you're a graduate student, or a certain kind of - an academic with a certain habit of mind. But in fact, spheres of influence don't work out very well, certainly not for the victims, and there are always victims.
I think that Hillary Clinton has an appreciation that American power needs to be put in the service of American values, which is an American tradition and a pretty good one, and I think she was willing to do that.
It was my honor to have done what I could do to help. I learned to never underestimate the possibility of change, that values have power and that time and patience can pay off, especially if you`re serious about your objectives.
We did really well for a generation after 1989 and the fall of communism. Our liberal values expanded in the world, our prosperity expanded.
In my view, [Vladimir] Putin despises the West in general and the United States in particular, both for who we are, our liberal values, and for what we`ve done, which is to take down the Soviet Empire.
The American tradition of foreign policy exceptionalism, our grand strategy as a nation, reaches back much further. Really at the turn - the end of the 19th century, when we achieved power a generation after the Civil War, the outlines of an American vision came into focus, and what we - it was based on two things. One, our realization that our values and our interests were the same, and that our business interests would advance as our values advanced in the world.
I believe the liberal international order is under assault from Russia, and from other authoritarian regimes, and it is being questioned from within the West by nationalists, by nativists, and by people who doubt our - doubt the values of the West. We've gone through periods like this before; in the '70s, after Vietnam and Watergate, and certainly in the '30s, when people thought liberal democracy was dead, and the future belonged either to the fascists or the communists.
George W. Bush tried working with the Russians after 9/11; Obama had the reset. Both presidents achieved less than they wanted, but they both achieved something. Those policies made sense, and it's to the credit of both Presidents Bush and Obama that even as they reached out to Russia, they did not sacrifice core American interests, or core American values. We didn't give the Russians on the altar of better relations other countries. We were able to do two things at once.
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