the namesake of your center is margaret thatcher and ronald reagan came together and built throughout the 1980s sort of this peace through strength philosophy, a huge run-up in military spending, bankrupt the soviet soviet union. how are vladimir peaten and his advisers putin and his advisers or cronies, for that matter, changing their algorithms as they look at the united states right now? yeah. i think that a lot of the strategic thinking in moscow at the early stage of the trump presidency was flat out wrong. they underestimated the president. he s looking very, very forceful, he s willing to use military strength as we ve seen in syria and afghanistan. and i think the russians are getting the message. and we re also seeing a bigger u.s. military buildup in europe for a strong support for ukraine. and also, of course, very, very strong backing for washington from the nato alliance. and the nato alliance is fundamentally important to keeping the russians at.
matter is that president obama talked about syria, drew a red line, didn t enforce it after the serin gas attack, and donald trump did enforce it wait a minute, though. this is where we will disagree. he went and bombed an air base that planes took off of the next day and continued to shell that area and also didn t destroy the chemical weapons. i m actually kind of curious what we can believe coming out of this white house. the most hoodwinked people in this country have got to be the people who invested so much time and money and sweat and tears into him believing that the america first policy was real, that he was going to back us out of nato, that he was going to reset with russia. all of these things which none of them he has panned out on because they were never possible, and we ve been saying that for years. leland: eric, i m going to let you respond to being hood winked in a minute [laughter] but there has been, in fairness, a part of the american electorate, a part of do
mcfarland on the way to singapore to become the ambassador there. so, read into that what you will. this is also the second day in a row that president trump has spent the morning at trump international golf club. nothing official on this calendar, the easter weekend. this is billed as a family weekend, but he s continuing to be briefed by the national security council about this north korean threat. he s continuing to be briefed about the ongoing fallout from his decision to strike syria and the u.s. military decision to drop that big bomb, the mother of all bombs on afghanistan. so, of course, the big question now is what will president trump do if north korea decides to take any more provocative action? e tea of folks looking at leaves, you know, as to what exactly he might do. the big difference though, of course, between what happened in his decision to take military action in syria and afghanistan, those are not nuclear powers and, of course,
despite no nuclear missile tests so far, tensions between the u.s. and north korea are rising. here to weigh in, author of nuclear showdown, gordon chang. thank you so much for joining us, gordon, we appreciate it. thank you, elizabeth. elizabeth: focus across the globe are bracing for a test this weekend, but, in fact, another network said you didn t think it would take place this weekend. why? well, after the missile strikes that president trump authorized on syria, he did that while xi jinping, the ruler of china, was next to him. china and syria are really good friends, and i think what happened was that the chinese were stunned. they then lost whatever confidence that they had that they would be able to control trump, and they think probably that they couldn t figure him out anymore. so i think what the chinese did was work with the north koreans to make sure there were no provocations on day of the sun, and that s exactly what happened. now, we re going to have to see what
air to south korea to send a message to the north and to reassure our allies in the south. doug mckelway joins us with more on this multipronged u.s. response. doug, in so many ways it seems like the chinese are in the middle, and if you listen to president trump, as the mediator. reporter: yeah, so what to make of that, that s really the million dollar question, leland, and it s significant because china has tremendous economic and military leverage over kim jong un in north korea. here s what they said earlier in a statement today: reporter: but recall that earlier this week china took the highly unusual step of abstaining from a u.n. security council vote to condemn syria for its chemical attack. it almost votes with russia, but it did not do so this time. in addition, china this week