significant shift in the american foreign policy in the post world war ii era. i don t think we should under play that. first on the economic front, kasie, we are reordering our trade relationships around the world, preferring more unilateral, in some cases bilateral cases. ending the regime. more politically, undermining the nato alliance, undermining our historical alliances including with the u.k. and really embracing russia. this is a fundamental shift. so then west virginia e of course, the indictments that show definitively russian government officials comprehensively not just meddled in the election, but actually launched a very sophisticated cyberattack against the united states. and yes, it did occur during the obama administration. the trump campaign happened during the obama administration. but it is very clear, and i think you see this from the president s own words leading up to the summit, he doesn t take this seriously. he doesn t accept the intelligence and he will not
kgb spy master, someone who has, you know, completely studied and examined donald trump, and a president who spent the weekend golfing and has not been preparing. there were no principal meetings, no planning for the summit, no deeply organized strategy sessions, what is the agenda, what are the goals, what do they want to get out of it. so, we could be surprised, they could come out and say we ve made progress on nuclear weapons, that we re going to revive, expand, extend, start nuclear weapons agreement which expires after 2022. but will donald trump confront putin on the fact he s already busted out of one medium-range, the inf treaty by deploying a banned missile? unlikely. he doesn t know those kind of details. he hasn t been with his advisors. we ve seen him all over the lot as he crisscrosses europe the last week. and it s really startling that he s going to be meeting one on one.
first amendment as american secretaries of state and presidents go to moscow or beijing or now erdogan s turkey. to any of these totalitarian regimes, they go in, hold press conferences, the new secretary of the state pompeo did, rex tillerson did not as a regular matter. emphasizing the importance of a free press. for him to use that phrase right out of josef stalin s book on the eve of a summit with vladimir putin is so deeply offensive to american values. it s quite remarkable. and, mike, to andrea s point, this is going to be something of of a stunning display. usually there has been this rule that you don t criticize the american president when he goes abroad, but also american presidents have a history of defending their own free press. you i know have covered carefully the russia investigation and have read through these indictments. what did you see in there that you think we should be paying attention to tomorrow? kasie, i m going to send you
bash. politics reporter for the daily beast and msnbc contributor betsy woodruff. the man who puts memo, nbc news national reporter mike. joining us from london, london school of economics brian class. and from helsinki finland, chief correspondent affairs, host andrea mitchell reports nbc, andrea mitchell. it s such an honor to have you here. thank you for staying up with us. thank you. absolutely. i have watched so many of these meetings, dozens of types of meetings with foreign leaders over the years. this seems like everything this president does, stunning in a way that is extraordinarily difficult to kind of understand and explain. what s your latest reporting going into this summit? and can you put it in some historical context? what do you think is important here and different than what you ve seen before? sure. i think this is unique because we ve never had a summit with a
we re not going to have a record of this one on one meeting. and that is alarming to a lot of former advisors in both political parties who have worked so closely to plan a summit like this. this is even less planned and more impromptu than singapore was, and that s saying a lot. andrea, i mean, this is somebody vladimir putin has a history of being, as you point out, the former kgb official who does things to either flatter and try to embrace his host in a way that puts them off guard as he did with george w. bush, or tries to unsettle them as he did with angela merkel at times. do we have any indication that that s kind of where vladimir putin might be going with this? and the last time that they did talk, there seems to be some agreement on how to handle issues in syria that then quite frankly putin walked away from. it seems like the policy stakes could be very high. well, there are a lot of issues there, especially with syria, because the administration is planning really ra