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I think it's kind of a stretch. You know, it's one thing if somebody working for the U.S. government has sold secrets to the other side, it's another if they have something in their personal life that they're hiding for which they could be blackmailed. Having evidence that they didn't tell the truth to somebody in the same building where they work, maybe it's just the old intel guy, is - it's a problem.
Every time we have come to the end of a conflict, somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the nature of mankind and the nature of the world have changed on an enduring basis and so we have dismantle our military and intelligence capabilities. My hope is that as we wind down in Iraq and whatever the level of our commitment in Afghanistan, that we not forget the basic nature of humankind has not changed.
And I want every one of you, every one of us, 100 senators to look in that camera, and you tell your people back home what you think. Don't hide anymore; none of us. That is the essence of our responsibility. And if we're not willing to do it, we're not worthy to be seated right here. We fail our country. If we don't debate this, if we don't debate this, we are not worthy of our country. We fail our country.
If possible, to be in a position to announce who is going to step in as the interim immediately. And if possible, to announce who you're going to nominate to replace that person. For that to be somebody of impeccable integrity and reputation disarms a lot of the worst criticism that it's some kind of a power play. It's a professional approach to replacing a senior official, which is always going to get a lot of attention.
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.
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 in the context of senior government positions, I think an anecdote of what I told President-Elect Barack Obama when we had our first meeting. And I said, "You don't know me. Can you trust me? Why do you think you can trust me?" and so on. But at the end, I said, "You can count on me to be loyal to you. I will not leak. I will keep my disagreements with you private. And if I cannot be loyal, I'll leave." Loyalty means doing what you think is in the best interest of that person as well as the country.