completely broken down. there is no national security process to speak of. it s basically whatever the president wants on any given day and people try to carry out his wishes. and second is there have been real fundamental splits because without a process to preside over, john bolton was basically relegated to being in essence a fox news commentator, a hawker commentator inside the white house. and in that role, that pit him directly against the president s instincts. the president wanted to have photo ops, headlines regarding north korea, regarding the taliban. john bolton said we can t cozy up to a dictator in north korea. we can t give him a world platform without getting anything concrete in return. likewise with respect to the afghanistan decision, i think john bolton s deep concern which i ve heard echoed across the national security establishment is why are we having a negotiation in which the first thing being discussed is the withdrawal of american military and intelligence of
more hawkish positions. this has been a fundamental question throughout the trump administration and that is to what extent is he going to be a traditional republican and what extent is he going to be an isolationist. trump s impulses on this are clear. he wanted to draw down from afghanistan. he wanted to get out of certain wars. you saw that with syria as well. the president wanted to bring down troops there. even though president trump criticized president obama for what trump said at the time was withdrawing from iraq too soon. the question of the hour is how fundamental is this split within the administration now or is it clear that the isolationists have won, and are there any counterweights to this bolton/trump. mike pence was on the other side of the afghanistan decision. mike pence cannot be dismissed. he is a constitutionally ensconced figure.
they re already unnerved by the syria decision, the afghanistan decision and by the mattis departure. this is one more thing that just indicates that there s needless instability going on here, even if the underlying appointment isn t problematic. and, admiral, what does it say that the commander in chief is not the one who would make that phone call to mattis, to say your last day is going to be january 1st instead of february 28th, but instead the secretary of state mike pompeo. yeah, that s really strange. that s the first i heard of that, listening to barbara. that doesn t make any sense to me at all. i guess that tells you how much trump leans on pompeo. it s weird to get a call from the secretary of state. there s absolutely no precedent for that. that s not the way it s supposed to be done. if it weren t the president himself, you would think it s the chief of staff. we only have an interim chief of staff right now. i would think it would be much more gentlemanly thing for t
before that a lot of america, the military establishment was making the case that america was in syria for the long run and all of a sudden that policy was quickly reversed without much process because of a phone call between donald trump and president erdogan of turkey. arthel: who will seek the position? if that person is only going to rubberstamp donald trump s wishes how does that portend for the military and national security? will take that position? some people who probably couldn t be confirmed by the senate and those who are mentioned as contenders disagree with the president on his syria decision and afghanistan decision. i don t know who the president will pick that both agrees with his foreign-policy and can be confirmed by the senate. that is a tricky thing to find out. not many candidates out there. arthel: we have to leave it there, see you soon.
syria decision, and now the afghanistan decision has happened in the wake of this. i see why those would be key issues for him. essentially, is this a pile of things that grew too large or were those qualitatively different issues? these are specific security issues. the ban on transgender service members, having a parade, i think these are things that secretary mattis had an opinion on but he wasn t willing to go to bat with him to the point of having to resign. a confrontation? exactly. slow done ash there were ones that weren t as well reported like when president trump wanted to pull all dependents off the korean peninsula. he he slow rolled that. if you look at syria, there are 2000 isis fighters left in syria. they re in a relatively small pocket. in the next couple months, the syrian democratic forces in the u.s. could probably have cleaned that out. so why now? all this what this does right now is leechlds them theraves t