secretary tillerson, but they didn t. he should be the guy being quiet and let, in my view, and let his secretary of state and his secretary of defense be either the good cop/bad cop and him weigh in at the appropriate time. but that s not what s happening. i think by doing that, he s limiting his option and making things a little bit tenser. admiral kirby, again, he seems to be setting up a confrontation that somebody has to blink on august 15th. yeah, this is brinkmanship. it s playing chicken on a geopolitical scale. look, i still think there s room for diplomacy. if you listened to secretary mattis today, in his comments to the press, he still wants to stay in that diplomatic trade space. and i think there is still room for this. the problem is, trump ratcheted up the rhetoric, closing down decision space. he s actually taking away some of the oxygen that tillerson and mattis want to have, to let the diplomacy play out. not to mention he s forcing kim
often to set up other negotiations with the north koreans. and, you know, i think part of the way the united states has to think about this at this moment is what is it the north koreans are thinking about doing with their weapons? leave aside the threat to attack guam for a moment, which i don t think is serious. i don t believe they re intending to attack us with these weapons. they re intending to preserve their own regime and that puts a different complexion on this. i don t think it s a time for escalating war of words here, playing chicken with them. i think mattis has this right. get it in diplomatic channels, start to move it back. look for face-saving ways out. nothing to be gained by anyone in a confrontation at this point. cory shocky, so back channel talks, no preconditions at all? well, i think starting talks
practices last week and that speech was postop with no explanation from the white house and now, putting two and two together, i think they told trying to we will hold off on that if you vote with usus on saturday. before we stopped about an billion dollars of sanctions on them. inr, seafood, coal, that was with a lot of damage.se at the same time, china can help them skirt that and prop them up. china does not want a humanitarian crisis on their border. that will be dangerous.ri they also don t like south korea, the united states, and japan, messing around in their sphere of influence. so china, next week and will do some naval exercises as a show of force. n we ll see what happens there. it s just like apl bunch of peoe playing chicken. hopefully, no one miscalculated. right now, kim jong-un is the guy who you play basketball talks a ton of trash but can t hit a shot. but you have to guard him anyway. dana: even i could dunk on him. [laughter] jesse: probably true.
we often say the same thing about president trump. do you agree with that sentiment? perhaps. he has to speak to his public and has to be worried about the security of his regime and we have to understand the internal politics of north korea. i m just afraid of the implication of playing chicken with nuclear weapons. i m afraid of playing chicken with north korea. i am skeptical of all this saber rattling. i am skeptical of the enthusiasm around the xreexercise of u.s. military power. there s a reason why north korea hasn t been cracked and a reason why administrations prior to trump have not thought about force as a way of getting north korea to get in line. because of the implication. the consequence. not only for seoul, south korea, but for japan, the region. i think we need to be careful, we need to ratchet down the rhetoric, and see what we can do and what china can do to get north korea to the table. all of this saber rattling is
sandra: when oh, boy, here we go. let me quote chuck sheemer, it s going to be uphill climb to 60. playing chicken with the nuclear option or playing chicken with reversing what the senate used to be is a tough spot for democrats to be in. with that being said, this is donald trump s supreme court nominee. if he really wants gorsuch on the court he has seven democrats sandra: which he does. he needs to campaign for it. he talked about him in the beginning. we heard nothing from the president on neil gorsuch. i would argue the opposite. it would be better if let mcconnell get his votes and the president can be a a distraction, he has a lot things to do this week. this is an inside game. this is either going to be the democrats are going to lose it