out. john. brianna keilar in new hampshire. chris christie speaks at the washington conference on the americas which brings together government and diplomatic officials with business and policy leaders. the governor is the only state official to speak. he visited canada and mexico on trade missions last year. this could be seen as an effort to beef up his foreign policy. jeb bush is headed overseas to visit poland and estonia in june. bush wants to get a first hand view of the economic and security challenges. the former governor will declare his white house candidacy after the trip. vice president biden called ukraine president petro poroshenko on monday over the humanitarian aid.
country at this point in time. michael is saying, which is do we triage the situation and do we actually, you know, drop our insistence the regime change happen and start working with him. i don t know if we re there yet. john kerry sort of hinted at something like that and it was quickly backtracked last week. assad seems to say he s not going anywhere. i reported in a story last week there s link willage that officials in this administration are concerned if we ramp up such port for the syrian rebels fighting assad that iran which defends assad, might try to go after our guys in iraq. this is all tangled up. there are a bunch of reasons why we might be laying off assad a little bit including the fact we re deciding that he s not as bad as isis and al qaeda and everybody else that could be running the country. katty kay, if you top to 100 top policy leaders in washington, d.c. and say if you can turn back the clock, do you wish we hadn t said saddam must go, assad must go gadhafi
you know, at least to the late 80s, early 90s, a support for the mubarak regime which was hardly a model of human rights and democracy, to say the least. so we have practiced a real policy there, a balance of interests, and now because of the arab spring, because of what s happened in this remarkable scenes from the square over the past couple of years, we have this question of, if you have a democratically elected government, a, what does that mean? and b, what if you get a democratically elected government that you believe is ultimately bad for the security of the region, which is our national interests in this? unfortunately, jon, there seems to be a shortsightedness among some policy leaders and certainly some members of congress, that the enemy of our enemy is always our friend.
our military has served valiantly, fantastically, they have done everything that has been asked of them or more. but now it is time for the policy leaders in this country to begin to bring our troops home from this mission, which has no definition. we have no reliable partner, and we have an inability to shape this country to the decent outcome that we had all hoped for earlier in this decade. year 12. i think what s most striking is the continuity between the obama administration s approach to afghanistan and the bush administration s approach to afghanistan. this is a country with bad options and worse options. while karzai s been an unreliable partner, he s been the best of options. there s been no fast changes, this doesn t speak to any weaknesses in american foreign policy, it speaks to the difficulty of the country and speaks to a place where we didn t have a lot of good options. so i think there s something reassuring about the fact that
then you add this development. i think it gets to a point where the question is, yes, engaging in some way and providing e resources on the ground are risky but riskier than where this is heading? how long do we wait? obviously, this is a country exhausted by ten years of war going into iraq for all of the wrong reasons a decade ago. our policy leaders remembering that but are we like generals fighting the last war who have the human catastrophe in front of us? 70,000 killed. so many displaced. how long do we we don t mind sitting out of humanitari humanitari humanitarian castastrophes. since 1998 most thing millions of people have been killed. we are looking at this for digit reasons so let s not fool