I can't remember the exact quote, but one of the Caesars said of Europe that you can impress the Spanish with your wealth, the French with your sophistication, the Greeks with your knowledge, but the Germans only respect brute force, and they will either be at your feet or at your throat.

The rest of the world is like the Germans. They're bullies who only respect force. What the US just did [in Afghanistan] was to bring a gun to a fist-fight, and pop the other guy between the eyes while he's trying to punch you. The rest of the world respects that, because they could be next.

I'm a firm believer that the reason there hasn't been a world war since 1945 is that the US has the most lethal and advanced military in the history of the world, and nobody wants to go toe-to-toe with us.

Unfortunately, when we choose mediation and negotiation to achieve our foreign policy aims, the rest of the world sees it as weakness, rather than supreme confidence and strength.

In our world, only the powerful deign to negotiate - if you don't negotiate from a position of strength, you can't win. But the rest of the world thinks that you only negotiate for the things you can't take by force, and so when we try to be peaceful with them, they sneer at our perceived weakness.

Osama Bin Laden thought he could take us down on 9/11 precisely because he viewed our responses to other terrorist attacks as signs of weakness -- we pulled out of the Lebanon in '83, we pulled out of Mogadishu in '93, we didn't attack anyone after the first WTC attack, the USS Cole, the Embassy bombings, the Khobar Towers bombings, the attempt on Bush's life in Kuwait, and on and on.

We chose the "high road" and the rest of the world misread our intentions and thought we were weak.

That was one of my major disagreements with the previous administration's foreign policy -- they were extremely talented in dealing with western democracies, but in the rest of the world, power comes from the barrel of a gun (as Mao said...) and they chose to treat those countries like western democracies, and were held in contempt because of it.

It is my sincere hope that, at the end of this, the people of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Sudan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the PA, and Yemen will have governments of whom the world will someday be proud.