to have this comprehensive strategy. and that disconnect, as you re reporting, as nbc s reporting said earlier, that makes him look weak in the eyes of putin and i think he really needs to come out, maybe make a major statement, major speech on russia so that the russians understand there is not a disconnect between the president and his own administration. to rick stengel, what do you see in terms of these mixed messages and how they re received in europe as well as in moscow? well, i think tom and mike did a spectacular job of summarizing everything. i ll connect the dots in one respect which is that what we saw with the annexation of crimea and the invasion of ukraine and the beginning of a containment policy i agree needs to be continued on. what we saw there was, in a way, a test run for what russia did here in the election of 2016. so i think this idea of containing russia in terms of the messaging it does, in terms of the violations of international norms, i mean what they d
the restart treaty that obama started, trump raled against it because it was something obama today. everyone knows that in diplomacy you build on what the folks did before you and trump has to do that. in fact what he s doing, tom, is trying to unravel what was done before him with the iran deal and other issues. john bolton. what influence might he and mike pompeo, who are both a lot more hawkish on russia and other issues, what influence might they have on the president going forward? well, a couple things. one is to reinforce what mike and rick just said. one of the oddest aspects of american foreign policy under president trump has been the refusal to criticize vladimir putin. despite the fact that we ve gone through there list of actively hostile measures that russia s taken to undermine the west and the united states. it is an inexplicable, to this point, aspect of american foreign policy. second, with respect to ambassador bolton and director
pompeo, there seems to be in the administration no shortage of expertise and understanding what the russians are up to except on the part of the president in terms of his accepting the advice that he gets. there still remains this distance between the advisors and administration itself and the president. we ll have to see if ambassador bolton or director pompeo when they come in their new roles can narrow that gap. mike mcfaul, what other steps would you recommend we take, economic sanctions perhaps against oligarchs? what do you think might really get vladimir putin s attention? well, i like tom s list. write that down, tom. send that memo in to the new national security advisor. and what s important about it i mean i would put at the top of the list sanctions against those business people close to putin, especially those that do a lot
but if president obama would have done that to you, if you had gone to munich and made a statement of fact, which general mcmaster did do, and then the president were to tweet or issue a statement saying, tom donlin should have said x, y and z, what would you have done? that wouldn t have happened. we would have had coordinated statements. this is a differenproblem with administration. there is a difference between what the national security says and what the president says. it gives a lot of uncertainty to the world because you don t know what to make of it. you don t know who really speaks for him. what is also an important challenge here, as i said, i think we have a serious challenge to our system to the west by the russians and others in the world. the president s failure to confront a really serious problem, and a big part of the problem is the president has the platform to speak about this, to talk about the challenges, to do things that could really make us
of a hoax, collusion. he didn t say it was a hoax, he said it was barack obama s fault. like you talked about with tom donlin in the last segment, he said he didn t totally represent his interests as it relates to the 2016 election. today he s been doing even more on twitter. and the old one we always come back to, donald trump and russia. we have a 37-page charging document that alleges a widespread strategy aimed at helping to elect donald trump and not elect or hurt hillary clinton. donald trump seems to be the person in the administration who doesn t believe that. the intelligence community does, chris wray does, mike pompeo does. can sarah sanders be more definitive, and if she can t, will she undermine the subjects