long time ago if there were easy options. the fact is we re dealing with a nuclear-powered nation. if we were to try to attack them, they would virtually wipe out seoul and 20 million people who live in seoul. and if it became a nuclear war, which is likely, millions of lives would be lost, and that s the reason we haven t pulled the trigger. you know, he s a great man, leon panetta. i ve known him forever. he used the word pull the trigg trigger, an unfortunate metaphor. what happens if this guy over here kim jong-un gets nervous and he hears talks coming out of this country about preemptive strikes and says, well, there s my excuse. i m going to release my artillery on seoul. this is my pretext for doing so. to me, that s scary. yes. so i think a lot of people right now are focused on whether or not north korea is going to do a nuclear test. tonight. tonight or potentially an icbm test. an underground test, the
ground troops but hawkish on air power. he definitely knows how to draw a bright red line in syria. dealing with isis, i m going to bomb the crap out of isis. he s been saying that for two years. also realizing that do we really want a crazy fat kid in north korea with nuclear weapons? why don t you keep calling him name easy. that s going to help. i m merely quoting senator john mccain here. i think what i m seeing is a lot of trump supportsupporters, we want to like everybody in this country, americans are pretty similar about this. they like neat, bite-size wars, quick in and out, accomplish a goal, send a message, and get out. but sometimes they re sticky situations. you start bombing something, they might start bombing you book. vietnam is an example. i think what we want to see here and what we are seeing up to this point is a reset of america, coming back to the
think there are questions about whether or not china really does have the level of influence over kim jong-un we re going to find out very soon. go ahead, sir. i might say i was over there the last few years. we did not pressure china as strongly as we could have. this is our strategy, american strategy, a strategic patience was really no strategy. you won t believe the meetings i attended where it s kind of like a drive-by. we talked to china about north korea earnestly, but it was not well thought through, not creative. now we have an opportunity to do so. thank you. also to ambassador baucus point, there were a panoply, an enormous number of chinese companies would were involved in helping north korea break sanctions. and under the obama administration, i think only one of those companies was sanctioned. that should be clearly on the table and, under trump, for better or worse it is. so i think you see the trump administration putting significantly more pressure on the ch
the experts seem to say that china, under max baucus, who was our ambassador for three years, they re not really willing to go all the way and put the pressure on. there s a lot of skepticism that they want to take on their communist ally in north korea and really push them. but i think trump is pushing it to say we have to deal with this now. we know that he has nuclear weapons. we know he has not gotten to the point of putting those okay. so we ve got to stop it right now. ned, tell me something i don t know. is he smart to gin this up? to heat it up rather than the slow, strategic waiting thing that went on before? is it better to push this thing now before they get strategic weapons that can reach us? brinit h now. force the reckoning now rather than wait. what s better? now or later? we ve taken eight years. we ve tried that path. let s take this path and john, where are you? pressure him now or wait? it s a gamble. look, we re pressuring him right now. what
big shot and have nuclear weapons that look like they re ready to go. how do we get him back from that sort of defcon one of his or whatever he d like to be on? i think right now the only option we have is china. and clearly trump is putting all his eggs in that basket again. but he s also trying to be transactional about it. for example, he offered china a better deal on trade if the chinese would play ball in north korea. but it s very clear that he s put significant pressure on china and also that he used the strike on syria as a way to show the chinese that he means business. so from that perspective, i agree with ambassador baucus, that he s playing this relatively correctly right now. the question is whether the chinese take him seriously enough to actually put the added pressure that is needed to be put on the north koreans to get them to begin to change their behavior. that s a big question. let me go over to ambassador hill again. go ahead. sometimes it s important to th