welcome back to the beat. i m joined by rachel maddow, host of the rachel maddow show, right here on msnbc. her new book is blowout, about how the oil and natural gas businesses can corrupt governments around the world. and we can announce right here, right now, it is again number one on the new york times best seller list. that is new and for the second week in a row. thank you. that s brand-new news. that s awesome. it s weird. mostly awesome. it s weird. thank you for stopping by. you re doing a million things. sure. why is it important to understand oil and business as an agent of a foreign policy problem around the world? i got interested in this topic in part because i was trying to figure out like why was the motive force for why russia attacked us in 2016. and where i got pretty quickly, to make a long story short, is
jason johnson is politics editor at theroot.com. all of them are msnbc contributors. david, i want to start with you because this has been one of those we ve been talking about this inside our own news room for quite some time going there is this giant foreign policy problem sitting at the president s desk. but it s hard to articulate because the problem is inaction. you did a good job of articulating it in this big picture, but this isn t the easiest story to explain to the public. explain what we mean by by inaction? so, chuck, it is a complicated world. today s a day when we felt as if the world was on fire. but it s a day when i was reminded that president trump s response to the world to this complicated difficult world from the day he took office has basically been retreat, his
iran is a member of that, that red line would really start with guarantying surveillance and escort of certain vessels but we need britain and others to make it happen. heather: when you say get on board, what do they need to do to help the situation? they have to decide that they want to take the task escorting in some cases their own ships, britain, france and germany has had important with brexit going on, not easy thing to arrange, britain needs to show that they can protect their own ships and they need to start working with the u.s., i think in this case we have seen this is not something that the european 3 can handle on their own, too big of a foreign policy problem at this point. heather: what about russia and china? russia and china are loving every minute of this, sold iran a lot of small boats that they
modest for this summit. this is a very difficult problem set, an entractable foreign policy problem that s been going on for 70 years. i would like to see progress on road maps or maybe working groups set up. i d be happy with that as well as jon roberts mentioned, the president s keeping his cards close to his chest on this issue. including relationship building, which the president feels is key to his foreign policy dealing with kim jong-un. neil: obviously it s not by accident that they re meeting in hanoi and vietnam. the closeness of the crucial issue to the north korean leader who can t travel very far, so the president is making the ten-hour trip. vietnam has become an economic juggernaut in that region. there s favorable views that the vietnam citizens have of the united states. does he hope magic strikes twice
whole say it will not stand. the number one foreign policy problem for russia was these sanctioning, rig sanctions, right? yeah, they wanted to control ukraine, and that led to sanctions. this brings me to what is collusion, what is direct, what is circumstantial. we re hearing richard bird, and he doesn t use the word direct evidence, he uses factual evidence of collusion, our wording said direct evidence, explain what that means, tom. direct evidence would be let s think of another crime and maybe a simpler crime to understand like a homicide. direct evidence is we have tom winter on videotape, a gun we recovered from the scene with his fingerprints on it. it is registers to tom winter