holid holiday and they used the money to buy back stock and they told us ahead of the tax cut vote they would use the money for that. i think it will be a challenge going on the road into some of the heartland places where people flipped for this president, working class democrats so-called reagan democrats flipped for this president. katty, i took a road trip this holiday through those areas, through a coal mining town in west virginia, and i stopped and talked with some of the people there, and a lady who told me that she was all in for trump. she said i ll admit it. i was all in. but i don t see it happening. i don t see the coal jobs coming back, and i think that is the risk that this president runs in many parts of those blue states that west virginia is not one of them, but in places like pennsylvania and ohio that flipped for this president,
want that. right. oftentimes when we talk about china s growing role we assume that means it would just supplant us eventually. that s not the case. you talk to anybody across the board, people basically agree that s not where we re headed. but where we are headed is something quite novel. and that is that this is a moment in which we are witnessing a remarkable coincidence, an intersection of two very different strategic visions in which the united states is seeking to pursue a smaller role in the world by withdrawing from the paris climate agreement, but withdrawing from unesco and threatening to overturn the u.s. korea free trade agreement. a whole range of ways donald trump has described. at the very same moment that china is seeking a larger role in the world. this is something that s talked about doing quietly for decades. it hasn t really wanted to do it overtly in order to enflame the united states. it s concluded a year into the
china, to tighten the noose. it really is in the a military option for us. and this makes that clear that north korea has other ways of going around the united states to achieve its means. so i think the president is going to have to reevaluate this approach of poopooing diplomacy and something that his own secretary of state has been trying to pursue on multiple occasions to show that, yeah, there has to be some other route here, because north korea is not going to just cower and do what we say. they re going to find other ways of working around us. i think the last thing, i no ewe will get later to the pakistan story this shows while there is something of a playbook for dealing with enemy, sanctions, possibly, threats of use of military force, maybe negotiation, it turns out in foreign policy, it can be more difficult to deal with friends and allies. i think we will see that between washington and seoul and walk and islam obad.
trump administration that this is what s known in chinese as a period of strategic opportunity. that s how they describe china today and donald trump s administration today when they talk about it in beijing. so evan this is david ignatius. i wanted to ask you, it s a marvelous piece. one of the issues it raises for me is whether the u.s. is making china move more quickly toward taking this larger global role than it would have wanted to. the china expected this would take place over a more protracted period. you have a marvelous quote where a chinese official says trump is america s gorbachev. is that a problem here for china that this is happening too quickly before they were really ready to be the global superpower? you re right, david. the interesting thing here, this is a story about unexpected
states being the issue inside of iran, which sometimes the united states can be a handy political football. that was president obama back in 2009. the last time we saw major anti-government protests that gripped iran, that approach is being closely re-examined as president trump forcefully weighs in on the current demonstrations across the country. welcome back to morning joe. beautiful pictures of the white house there. it s tuesday, january 2nd nd. joe and mika are off this morning. morning joe unfortunately has been hit by the flu. until the healthy return, we have former treasury official steve rattner, former aide to the state department, alise jordan, and richard haas. richard s book is out in paper book a world in disarray .