One of the things you learn in government is there's a long tail to American decision-making when it comes to foreign policy. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem, pulling out of the Iran deal, pulling out of Paris, not speaking up for democratic values - the world doesn't end the next day.

'Make America great again,' is not that different from Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union or tsarist Russia.

Mandela was a guy who didn't come in and just eviscerate the existing institutions. He sought to co-opt them. He brought white South Africans into his government.

There are a very limited number of people in senior roles at the White House, and time is their most precious asset.

Laos is the ghost of American military interventions past.

Talking and diplomacy is often seen as a concession in America, in a way that it is not in other places.

If you are a speechwriter, you have to know what the person you're writing for thinks. A lot of foreign policy advisers are thinking, 'How can I get my proposal into this guy's speech?' I was just thinking, 'What does he want to say?'

What's interesting about the foreign policy establishment critique is, you know, I think the Blob and I have more in common in some ways than people might think, but also, what I was saying can be misread.

When I think of the things that Trump has done, ironically, everything is sort of - we care so much about Cuba and the Iran deal. I think pulling out of TPP is just devastating.

The only place in the world where, I think, leaders have preferred Trump are in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia and Israel.

As people who know me know, probably to a fault, I am usually not without thoughts and words.

Billions of people around the globe had come to know Barack Obama, had heard his words, had watched his speeches, and, in some unknowable but irreducible way, had come to see the world as a place that could - in some incremental way - change.

It was wrenching to read about the brutality of Assad every morning, to see images of family homes reduced to rubble. I felt we had to do something in Syria.

The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero - someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

I had the Secret Service actually patrolling my block at some point. I didn't sign up for that. I went to work to write speeches for Barack Obama!

I was a relatively anonymous guy, and for whatever reason, I became one of the villains for the Right.

The fact of the matter is the West Wing never gets fully renovated because nobody wants to vacate it. And so you have basically patch-up jobs that are being done, but it's a tight and cramped environment.

When I first went to work in the West Wing, the most daunting thing was how small this place was... You walk in: it's three floors, and there's a few offices on each floor, and that's it.

The Benghazi attack was one of the more confusing, chaotic days that we had at work because you had these multiple violent protests taking place in the Middle East.

In the Arab Spring, that obviously came to a head in Syria. I found myself arguing for intervention, mainly just because I wanted things to get better, and I had this germ of liberal humanitarian interventionism.

Our basic assessment was that if America keeps going down these rabbit holes in the Middle East, we're just going to put ourselves out of business as the world leader because we're just draining resources and diplomatic bandwidth, and we're not producing outcomes.

What I do miss is foreign travel, because there really is no substitute for showing up somewhere and representing the United States.

There's this constant narrative of anxieties: Is the U.S. in decline? Is China rising? People forget... no other country is trying to play the role we play. They're not signing up to be responsible for security in the Middle East, responsible for the global economy, responsible for enforcing international norms.

We want a rules-based order in Asia-Pacific like we have had in the Atlantic.