We never could have believed that this nightmare would go on for so long, but I’m just overjoyed that it’s about to be over.

No matter what the aggressor intends to do, when the world is truly united, it is then the world, not the aggressor, determines how events develop.

So the 20th century taught the world not to use nuclear weapons and not to proliferate. This is not a good strategy because recent history has shown that wars could erupt with equal devastation.

[Angela Merkel] showed what can be achieved when politicians take the right course of action and work to find solutions to the world’s challenges rather than simply shift responsibility to others.

The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

On composure

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

It’s the worst humanitarian and human rights crisis in a decade, when both sides have committed serious crimes.

We could become a failed state.