he ordered the cruise missile strikes, 59 cruise sis missiles in syria, sending a carrier strike force to north korea, question, what message do you think he s send to go allies sending to allies and enemies? let s step back to context, the obama years saw decrease, not following it up, and cuts to the defense budget of more than 20% since 2010. and during that time, we saw invasion of crimea, the chinese building islands in the south china sea, et cetera, president trump is taking a different approach, thank goodness. he is sending a message that now the united states is going to stand up for our interests and make sure we have the military capability to prevail if we choose to use force. it s a different message than has been given before.
chris: let me ask you a different part of the equation, how effective is u.s. missile defense both to protect our allies in the region and to protect the u.s. homeland? we can knock down missiles, but we need to step on the accelerator to do more for missile defense. it is it is remarkable going back to president reagan speech in 1983 there has been political opposition in this country to doing more on missile defense and we ve been scraping for more money, both to deploy more of the systems we have and to put research into new systems. we have been fighting that fight during the obama years. this is the time to step up on the gas because it s not just north korea, it s also the iranians as well as others who are pushing for missiles, we need to be able to knock those down. chris: i want to take a bigger 30,000-foot look at this, president trump has authorized the use of force several times in the last two weeks. he ordered the cruise missile
it s possible that the u.s., which now has more leverage in the game will be able to push russia on certain issues, but it s still unclear, kate, whether they have the political will to do so. on the syrian/turkish border right now. thank you, appreciate it. joining me now to continue this conversation is ambassador nicholas burns for political affairs under george w. bush and also, of course, served under president clinton. jack kingston, former republican congressman from georgia and now a cnn political commentator. ambassador burns, i just gave you another job. ambassador, it seems that they are, when you look at these two top diplomats, that they are offering conflicting messages. but from your perspective and from a diplomatic standpoint, are they? well, i think the problem here is that the trump administration had to move its position, change it entirely last week with astonishing speed after the chemical weapons attack that president ordered the cruise missile strikes. i t
we re also learning that options have resumed. is syrian government is now calling the united states a partner of isis. peter berg season joining me you now from washington. those u.s. missile strikes were intended to send a message to the assad regime. but today we see air strikes. were president trump s actions effective? was his message received? we don t really know. typically, we have seen this before, inna, where the united states has sent cruise missile strikes. you recall in 1998 after the embassy attacks in africa after aek killed 200 including americans, they launched cruise missiles attacks at al qaeda training camps. one set of cruise missile strikes is clearly, you know, is
responsibility to protect humanitarian interventions. in both cases they didn t stop at that. i think watching what happened last night what does history tell us how likely they are? everywhere u.s. forces are deployed they are taking on additional missions. this is not just a slippery slope as people described. it is actually like all military interventio interventions. they come at risk. there are other complimentary objectives. so the initial humanitarian impulse later became for regime change and you can imagine now how initial cruise missile strikes will lead to regime change against assad. i want to bring an american civil rights attorney. i think anyone who has been watching syria basically feels almost paralyzed by the aura of it all.