described as nationalist and they believe he could be undercutting the president s agenda. he s been in trouble before. the question is will he survive this time. kristen welker, thank you so much for all of that. joining me here is juan zarati. welcome, it s good to see you. we have certainly set the table. lots to talk about. let s talk about not just the dysfunction and decision making, because they have this afghan review much delayed. the president pushing back against further troop deployment, and also the influence of bannon. the disruption of the bannon influence. yeah, i think national security process is hard to run in normal circumstances. when you have not only so many incidents around the world, so many crisises that seem to be boiling over o north korea, terrorism problems and you have infighting at the senior most
aggressively to generate those options to manage crisises. what about back channel talks with the regime? as you sit in the state department, how do we approach back channel talks which are reported today to be underway with a regime we say we re not talking to? i don t know anything about the talks. we do have a lot of experience talking with the north koreans over many administrations. there i would inject a note of caution, which is our experience has been that when negotiating with the north koreans they lie and cheat. a previous nuclear agreement when they agreed to cease their enrichment program they were enriching it covertly. one of the most important elements is intrusive verification and monitoring up front. otherwise you can t have any reason to have confidence that
leaders may try to fulfill this role. are they sacrificing their principals or something? do they believe they are doing so to try to mitt gate this president? they re all americans and he is the president. they are members of administration and the same party as him. they want to get the president s inspiration to meld with them. it is a little more difficult today. the president has gone off mitch mcconnell on twitter. they want to make sure that the president is getting the best information that he can get so he can make the best decisions he can make like the kind of crisises he has going on now. i think it is interesting in how they pick their battles. they know not to challenge the president on things they are
seen from the many, many other self-inflicted wounds, crisises that have been manufactured from the oval office. and there have been a lot of them. and this is not one that the likes of paul ryan can say, i m going to shutout the noise. it s not noise. it s real. that s coming from people who are close with donald trump, people inside the white house, people outside the white house. it was an omg moment, no question. however, the big unanswered question, jim, is what this means in real terms. right. it certainly is knocking the white house off its game, knocking the republican agenda off its game to the point where it s unclear, frankly, whether it can get back on track. but in terms of this particular issue, the next big thing is going to be jim comey s testimony and then that will open up the floodgates for whatever happens next. gloria borger, you talked with a friend of president trump. i m curious, does the president believe that this one is
has the right to pursue that. aagree with that. if he wants to engage in a broader conflict, then i certainly think he should come to congress and it would behoove him to do that because congress has to pay for it. but as of last night, what he did was the right thing. where are we right now? what do you think happens next? what is interesting here is i do believe there is a national security council that has been working on a strategic plan for syria. obviously, you can t control these crisises. i hope there is a growing realization that as long as assad is in syria and in control, not only will he continue to commit crimes, there will be radical groups in syria as long as assad is in power. even if you destroy isis, they are being replaced. so the removal of assad in