threatening. but you have secretary of defense jim mattis who looks to be trying to turn down the temperature overnight. he is talking about diplomacy. not about war. trying to pull back from the brink of that. i want to play for you what secretary mattis had to say and then we ll talk about it. my mission. my responsibility is to have military options, should they be needed. however, right now secretary tillerson, ambassador hallie, you can see the american effort is diplomatically led. it has diplomatic traction. it is gaining diplomatic results. margaret, you have secretary mattis talking about diplomacy. something we are not seeing from president trump himself. you have secretary tillerson on mattis side, it seems. nikki haley going to bedminister today to meet with the president. do we know what she might say? nikki haley s role is interesting because she was able to hold this coalition over the weekend where china and russia
this gives it the momentum to go ahead and start doing that. thousands of americans dying from this every month. thank you for that from our headquarters up at 30 rock. quickly, margaret and nick here. what do you think was the impetus for the president coming out and being very forceful on this. something wae de didn t see fros health secretary a few days ago. don t stand up and say there is a national emergency. you have tafile to file the doc. the other thing that happens, if it s a natural disaster or a medical outbreak, there s usually an end. i mean, a foreseeable end to it when the end of the emergency then happens. and this really is a much more complicated thing. socio, political, economic. that s what secretary craig said. they use it for time limited things, like swine flu. we ll come back to conversation later in the show. we have our teamed deployed as the president doubles down on the military threats against
with our b-1 bombers and allies. those are definitely sending the same signal you are describing. when it comes to the allies, there is real concern from them about what the president is saying, what the president is doing. rob portman talked about that this morning. here s what he had to say and i ll come to you, nick. i think you need to honor our red lines. on the last administration we failed to do that and that had a tremendous effect not just on our enemies but also on our allies. i think we do have to follow through on our threats. he talked about allies there. you have angela merkel out this morning talking about how military options are not the right solution here. nick, this is putting the u.s. and, again, in a precarious position. a lot of other foreign countries are saying the rhetoric should be retchting down and margaret made a great point between action. a contingency plan for everything at the pentagon. when they begin moving assets.
foreign policy at large really is and how to balance national security concerns and trade and you have these domestic purely political fights picking with his own party in congress which sort of destabilized like the teams. you ve got the republicans control the house and senate and white house no problem. but that is complicated things also. i think you do have, however, with mattis and also to a similar extent tillerson and mcmaster, three pillars of the national security military diplomatic community that have a lot of good faith in congress. if there was a case to be built with congress that s how it would proceed. margaret brought up afghanistan. you have john mccain releasing his own plan for afghanistan this week. the president will make a decision very soon on that. on the war power it s interesting with north korea it s different because it could be provoked. doesn t give an opportunity to go back to congress and long
are currently fighting now. how has that precedent led to where we are today? historically with a few exceptions, presidents have gone to congress as the constitution requires before starting a major conflict that happened with the two iraq wars and vietnam war a. president obama initiated a new war to overthrow the libyan government in 2011 without going to congress at all. that was a major breach of the constitution and of the norm that had developed and he also did a similar action with the war against isis. there the legal issues were more complicated. with libya, he initiated an unconstitutional war without congressional authorization and that s a precedent that president trump and others could potentially use. margaret? i think with the trump administration, you see a new administration that is still working through not just what its policy is on north korea but what the policy is on afghanistan. what its policy is on russia and