Robert Gates: “I've been arguing for it for 25 years. If you took every foreign service officer in the world, it wouldn't be enough…”

I think the president is — based on what I read — is getting the sense that, as he put it, that Putin is 'tapping' him along.

I think part of the problem is that at the end of the Cold War, we were affected by triumphalism or hubris, whatever you want to call it.

We want everything that's possible, and a lot of things that aren't possible, in a new system.

He wants Ukraine, basically, to be a client state of Russia.