security room. we have deputies meetings. they have classified top-secret encrypted phones, red phones on every desk where we can talk to each other. so it s an astonishing incoherence in the process. but it all you know, it was interesting listening to the line about essentially warning the president don t congratulate putin. who needs to warn the president of the united states not congratulate putin on a sham election in a country where he s almost running a kleptocracy? you know, the 50 biggest oligarchs hopefully in the last couple months have lost $12 billion. the russian economy is in shambles. the sanctions are working. so i ve never seen anything like it. let me take you all the way back to friday night, the last time you and i spoke, general. and we were talking about the cruise missile strikes in syria.
in the white house national security room. we have deputies meetings. they have classified top-secret encrypted phones, red phones on every desk where we can talk to each other. so it s an astonishing incoherence in the process. but it all you know, it was interesting listening to the line about essentially warning the president don t congratulate putin. who needs to warn the president of the united states not congratulate putin on a sham election in a country where he s almost running a kleptocracy? you know, the 50 biggest oligarchs hopefully in the last couple months have lost $12 billion. the russian economy is in shambles. the sanctions are working. so i ve never seen anything like it. let me take you all the way back to friday night, the last time you and i spoke, general. and we were talking about the cruise missile strikes in syria.
we have deputies meetings. they have classified top-secret encrypted phones, red phones on every desk where we can talk to each other. so it s an astonishing incoherence in the process. but it all you know, it was interesting listening to the line about essentially warning the president don t congratulate putin. who needs to warn the president of the united states not congratulate putin on a sham election in a country where he s almost running a kleptocracy? you know, the 50 biggest oligarchs hopefully in the last couple months have lost $12 billion. the russian economy is in shambles. the sanctions are working. so i ve never seen anything like it. let me take you all the way back to friday night, the last time you and i spoke, general. and we were talking about the cruise missile strikes in syria.
are going to do things, at some point, you have to do them or else you lose face, you lose credibility. and so the president i understand that in his briefings with his national security team, he keeps demanding military option. he thinks there is some quick option like his cruise missile strikes on syria. but north korea is not syria. you hit north korea and they will strike back. the fear is that the president overrules his national security advisers and take a risk, just as he recovery yuled them in his speech at the nuu.n. his senior aides did not want him to make these threats. they knew what would happen and they knew this was risky behavior but the president at the last minute put them back into the speech and made them at the u.n. podium and triggered this current es ka cycle. is there a way to walk back from this with the president?
national security incidents and how the u.s. responds to them under the commander in chief trump. in syria s case, things changed with cruise missile strikes and a retaliatory strike that would not have happened under obama lightly. with north korea, there s a whole different ball game. there is no military option and there aren t enough people or north korea observers and nuclear experts and ex-military officials who can say that loudly enough. there are no good military options. but that doesn t mean as we should say the pog will say they never take the military options off the table, but even a small surgical strike, say the u.s. just wanted to hit the launch pads or just the labs or the underground facilities, that s still a much different type of attack on kim jong-un s regime than it is in the middle of the syrian war, for example, on the other side of the world. and nobody thinks that kim would just sit there and take it, that he would allow some sort of surgical strike to wip