 I think the first time we met each other was around 20 years ago when you were still the chief of staff of then Senator Joe Biden, but you started your career as a lawyer. How come that most of your professional life you have devoted to the security and foreign policy of your country, the United States of America? Well, you know, Rob, I had the great experience of having been born in New York, drawing up actually outside of the United States from age 9 to 18 in Paris, in France. And when you have that experience, you learn to see your own country from and through the eyes of others. And you wind up spending a lot of time defending your country, but also thinking about it. It's great strengths as well as it's weaknesses. And I think that instilled in me a great interest in foreign policy and diplomacy and in thinking about how peoples from different nationalities, cultures, backgrounds can get along. And while I did do a number of different things, ultimately I wound up in government working on foreign policy. And I've done that until leaving the Obama administration for the last 25 years. Starting out with Bill Clinton, working then in the White House for him, going on to the United States Senate for the Foreign Relations Committee that Joe Biden was then the chairman of, and then finally the last eight years working for President Obama in one capacity or another. You know, we're all the product to some extent of our own stories, our own narratives, our own family histories. And in my case, I had many immediate relatives who were recent immigrants to the United States or even refugees. My father's father, my grandfather came here at the turn of the last century fleeing pogroms in Russia. He was welcomed into the United States and built a life and contributed. My stepmother fled communism in Hungary literally in the middle of the night as a young girl getting on a train with her mother, a sham marriage that allowed her to come to the United States, be welcomed by the United States, build a life here and contribute. And then finally my stepfather who passed away a year or so ago. He was one of 900 children in his hometown school in Bialystok, Poland, but the only one to survive. And he spent the war in all of the unfortunately infamous concentration camps, Dachau, Maidanek, Auschwitz, and at the very end of the war he was on a death march from one of the camps and he made a run for it in the Bavarian Forest and he made it to the woods and he hid out in the woods for a couple of days. And then he heard a rumbling sound and he looked out and instead of seeing the dreaded swastika he saw a five pointed white star and he ran for the white star on a tank and the hatch of the tank opened and an African American GI looked down at him and he got down on his knees and he said the only three words in English that he knew that his mother had taught him before the war, God bless America. And the GI picked him up, lifted him into the tank, into the United States in effect and into freedom. That's the country that I know. That's the country that I grew up learning about. That's the country that I hope will remain at the forefront of freedom and hope for people around the world in this 21st century. Why is freedom not self-evident? I think in a sense it is self-evident to the extent that it is perhaps the highest aspiration of human beings everywhere but it's not self-evident in its realization because we're dealing with human beings and because we're dealing with other elements of human nature that sometimes make freedom on a personal level or even at a national level challenging to achieve and so it's dealing with all of those different human elements to get to a place where that value, that is a universal value, not a Western value, not an American value, where that value is able to come to the fore but ultimately we're dealing with human nature and it's different manifestations. Europe remains the partner of first resort for the United States. Wherever we have a challenge around the world our reflex is to look first to Europe, sometimes to countries in their individual capacity, sometimes to the European Union as a collective and most Americans continue to believe in the European construction project. I think part of the challenge has been that the further and further we get away from the reasons that the EU came into being in the first place, the easier it is to forget and not to give place value in that and so when one is familiar even in the slightest with the history of Europe as well as the United States in the 20th century you're reminded why the EU is such an important project to begin with but generations today are far removed from that so I think we have to remind ourselves of what brought this project about in the first place but then like anything it's not just about defending something it's about amending it as necessary to better reflect the times to make it effective to make sure that it's working for more people and right now the divide that we see in the world increasingly especially in the United States and Europe is not between left and right or conservative or in our case Republican and Democrat it's between those who believe that faced with these incredible forces of change our best bet is to remain open connected and to try to shape them to our advantage and those who believe that the best answer is to protect ourselves and be defensive it's between the difference between those who would build a wall and those who would continue to build bridges that's the divide that's the debate that's what we have to reckon with