One Of The Toughest Battles In Intelligence

My One Concern Is That Hu Jintao May Overestimate How Much Power China Has In Pyongyang. They Have - They Do Have Influence, And They Do Have Companies, And They Do Have Economic Relationships That Could Make Life Much More Difficult In The North. Their Balancing Act Is, "how Much Worse Can We Make It In The North Without Creating That Which Scares Us More Than Anything, Which Is A Collapse In The North." And Then What Happens To All Those Nuclear Weapons. So They're Going To Work Very Hard To Avoid That.

I Think That Vladimir Putin Is Certainly Getting A Lot Of Publicity For What The Russians Are Doing. And I'm Not Sure That's Unwelcome To Him. I Think This Is A Guy Who Saw The U.s. Basically Come Out Against Him In His Reelection Campaign In 2012. He Saw The U.s. Being Behind All Of The Color Revolutions In Eastern Europe And In Georgia And Ukraine And So On. So His View Is The West Has Been Interfering In His Politics For Years.

I Think That - That The Disruptive Nature, The Tough Talk On North Korea, The Military Deployments, Sending The Missile Defense System To South Korea, I Think These Are All Good Things To Have Done.

Soviet Foreign Ministers Would Come In To See The President All The Time, Routinely. Jimmy Carter Stopped That After The Invasion Of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan Resumed It In 1984, I Think. And So The Fact Of A Meeting Like That I Think Is Not That Big A Deal.

It Has Become Clear That America's Civilian Institutions Of Diplomacy And Development Have Been Chronically Undermanned And Underfunded For Far Too Long - Relative To What We Spend On The Military, And More Important, Relative To The Responsibilities And Challenges Our Nation Has Around The World.