in that. so i think it s getting hotter with no real clear plan. as you know, you can take different actions. if you don t take action now, you have a lot of north korea lives off extortion, off extortion from its neighbors. if there is a military strike of the kind we saw in syria, you put at risk hundreds of thousands of people in south korea and possibly japan. so there s no good answer. i don t see north korea backing off a bit. they have this whole sort of pride thing that this is i don t see them backing off. it s more than pride. i m not saying it in a good way. not as a good thing. in ses essence, north korea is trying to rewrite the bargain we have negotiated for 20 years. you can have a normal country, a normal relationship with the united states if you give up your nuclear weapons. what north korea wants to do is say i want to have a normal relationship and keep my nuclear weps. i m sympathetic that the current situation is nothing to talk about. that would be ok
it. well, that didn t happen. at the end of the obama administration, they were still sitting down at the table with the russians trying to come to a diplomatic solution. while they re building up their chemical weapon stockpile. but i m saying it is very other than the air strikes, the position that we heard the white house put forward today is actually very similar to that. we re going to continue to have these talks to try to get assad out, but we re also going to keep fighting isis on the ground. very similar. meanwhile, anne, we have incredible displacement of syrian civilians. these refugee camps are overflowing and people are starving and dying. we don t know yet whether the same set of calculations that clearly changed trump s mind about whether this kind of air strike, remember, we have been doing air strikes for more than a year, just a different kind of air strikes. they re not against assad specifically. and the same the images and the moral compulsion that he
whether that will translate to a change of heart about syrian refugees. at the moment, he official as still wants to keep serious regees out of the country. they re the me people. matt, the thing that was pointed out to me and i m going to try to speak this in a polite way is that people are horrified by the images right now of the chemicals, as they should be, but the reason they aren t horrified by the by the barrel bombs is because the people are blown to smith renes and you don t see them. you know, so it s like suddenly people are all upset. the people blown to smithereens by the barrel bombs are no better off. and just the images alone, we have seen for some time. i mean, we have known about the atrocities in syria. it s sort of how much have we been paying attention to it. i think president trump responds to images. and those images on last week were very graphic and upsetting. i think he sort of rapidly
supposed to. anne, francesca, anne mentioned the idealogical impact when one wins over the other. when you look at what happened in syria, the president waw aggressive in syria. the threat is jared kushner is much more of a globalist, and steve bannon is more let s take care of things at home. the things steve bannon wanted came first. the travel ban, health care. while they didn t go well, they were at the top of donald trump s list. that s one way to look at it. that hurts steve bannon, though. if they had gone well, he would be riding high. but it also shows how much donald trump also values those things. how much he wanted to get them did. i don t know how much and now, now, but he also likes to win. and those were not successes. so he s moving on and doing other things such as his tax plan or infrastructure as well. when it comes to syria and it comes to foreign policy, i think president trump has made it very clear that jared kushr is someone who he trusts on that
that s what the problem is. a dictatorship murdering their own people. so general, if you were the adviser to the president, and look, mit, there s no perfect answer to this. it s really like you want to look for the least worst answer to this because of the terrible situation, but what would you advise president trump, because we have seen even when we do help topple these dictators that sometimes we don t have anyone to replace them. it gets even worse. if you were advising president trump tonight, general, what would you tell him? i tell you, it s mess. we have no vital security interest at stake on the ground in syria. the obama administration essentially deferred and allowed the russians to enter the conflict on the ground and in the air with naval forces. my only by the way, strongly felt viewpoint is we should have significant amounts of humanitarian aid as in a billion dollars a month to sustain these