SUMMARY:A court on Tuesday sentenced Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to more than two years in prison. Since his return from Germany last month after an assassination attempt in Russia, tens of thousands have taking to the street to protest his detention. Special correspondent Stuart Smith reports from Moscow.
SUMMARY: Negotiations over new action to stimulate the economy are moving into higher gear Monday. After releasing a $1.9 trillion aid plan last month, President Biden held a first meeting with Senate Republicans who are pushing an alternative plan. White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor reports.
SUMMARY:President Biden is out with a raft of initiatives Tuesday directed at the U.S. southern border, and the man who will manage immigration policies, Alejandro Mayorkas is joining his Cabinet after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security. Yamiche Alcindor reports.
SUMMARY:President Biden appears ready to continue the push for his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan a day after he met with Senate Republicans to discuss its size and scope.Jared Bernstein, who was appointed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the Biden administration’s stance on the plan.
SUMMARY:President Biden signed a series of executive actions Tuesday undoing many of the Trump administration's signature immigration policies. This follows orders he already signed that reverse other controversial Trump era immigration items, like reinstating the DACA program and stopping construction of the border wall. We spoke to some of those who are immediately and directly impacted by the changes.
SUMMARY: In Arizona, people are feeling the impact of President Biden's order to halt border wall construction. While the wall's presence has already had a profound impact on border communities, its enduring legacy under a new President remains unclear. Amna Nawaz reports.
SUMMARY:One of the Biden administration's primary foreign policy challenges is how to end the United States' longest war. A new bipartisan report urges the administration to remain committed to Afghanistan and ongoing peace talks. Nick Schifrin reports.
SUMMARY: President Biden's plans to pass a $1.9 trillion stimulus package picked up some momentum Friday as Democrats in Congress approved a basic blueprint. While the measures don't have the force of law, lawmakers are expected to begin writing the details of a major package next week. Yamiche Alcindor reports.
SUMMARY:The U.S. has reached a short-term agreement with the Taliban that could pave the way for ending the war in Afghanistan that has endured for nearly 20 years. Under the plan, U.S. forces and the Taliban agree to a temporary cessation of violence and a phased approach to the withdrawal of American troops. But is the Afghan government on board? Nick Schifrin joins Judy Woodruff from Munich to discuss.
SUMMARY:After tensions with Iran nearly resulted in U.S. airstrikes last week, President Trump has fired a different type of weapon, levying new economic sanctions specifically targeting the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. At the same time, top U.S. officials pursued diplomatic measures while visiting the Middle East. But Iran said the U.S. is the aggressor. Nick Schifrin reports.
SUMMARY: President Trump welcomed controversial Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to the White House Monday, breaking with recent presidents who shunned the right-wing nationalist. Like Trump, Orban has made restricting immigration a cornerstone of his agenda. William Brangham talks to Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown University about the significance of the alliance.
William Brangham (NewsHour): For people who have not been following Viktor Orban's career or really appreciate where he sits in the orbit of European politics, tell us a little bit more about him.
Charles Kupchan, Georgetown University: Well, as your piece said, he starts off as a disheveled liberal post-communist progressive.
He has one bite at the apple as prime minister from '98 to 2002. And then he comes back in 2010. And he's been there ever since. And he essentially tracks from the left to the right to the further right over the course of his political career, and, in many respects, is a person that's ahead of his time, in the sense that he became anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, close down the borders, take over the media, compromise the independence of the judiciary, well before it became mainstream.
You now see it happening in Poland, in Italy. The far right is gaining ground in Germany. It's a widespread phenomenon. He was in many respects the person who blazed that path.
William Brangham: Former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon once referred to Viktor Orban as Trump before for Trump. Is that an accurate characterization of him?
Charles Kupchan:There's no question that there is an ideological affinity between Trump and Orban.
There is, I think, an effort to create what you might call an illiberal alliance, in which Trump sides with Orban, Salvini the head of the League in Italy, Kaczynski the head of what's called Law and Justice Party in Poland, Alternatives for Germany in Germany, the National Rally in France.
They're trying to create a political movement that pushes democratic politics to the right and in the anti-immigrant direction. I don't think it's any accident that this meeting today occurred less than two weeks before votes for the European Parliament.
It's a bellwether election. No question that the far right, the anti-E.U., the anti-immigrant forces will gain ground. The question is, how much ground will they gain? How much influence will they wield in the new [EU] Parliament?
SUMMARY:President Trump announced Thursday that the U.S. will now recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic 40-mile strip of land on the Syrian-Israeli border. The decision, which Trump announced via Tweet, overturns decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The Woodrow Wilson Center's Aaron David Miller joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the implications for both politics and policy.
SUMMARY: In his first official address, national security adviser John Bolton took aim at the International Criminal Court, but also at the Palestine Liberation Organization, announcing the closure of the PLO's office in Washington [DC]. Nick Schifrin joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the connection to Middle East peace efforts, and Bolton’s world view.
SUMMARY: Two months, two summits, two mysteries: What did President Trump promise in his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo faced the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend the administration and reassure lawmakers, while both Republicans and Democrats repeatedly expressed concerns. Nick Schifrin reports.
SUMMARY: Did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo successfully address the Senate’s concerns about President Trump's approach to dealing with Russia and North Korea? Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) tells Nick Schifrin that Pompeo did an excellent job putting those worries to rest, making an excellent case for the ways the administration has been tough on Russia.
SUMMARY: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told senators that the Trump administration has been tougher on Russia than its predecessor, and that the President has the prerogative to have private conversations with his Cabinet and with other leaders. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) tells Nick Schifrin that Trump has actually been very slow to act, and has had to be “dragged, screaming” into taking any firm stand.
After an attack on a former spy, the State Department pondered placing that label on Putin’s government. Instead, the Trump administration continued a longtime U.S. policy of treating Russia as a partner in fighting terrorism even as evidence of its misbehavior mounts.
The attempt to kill a former Russian spy in England bore an ominous signature: The assailants used a lethal nerve agent of a type developed in the Soviet Union, and British investigators quickly concluded that only the Kremlin could have carried out such a sophisticated hit.
Soon after the March attack, Rex Tillerson, then the U.S. secretary of state, ordered State Department officials to outline the case for designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism under U.S. law. Experts in the department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism began to assemble what they thought was a strong case.
But almost as quickly as the review began — within about two days — the secretary of state’s office sent new instructions to drop the initiative, according to State Department officials familiar with the episode.
“There are a lot of issues that we have to work on together with Russia,” a U.S. official said. “Designating them would interfere with our ability to do that.”
The State Department’s reluctance to impose the terror designation was not a product of Trump administration sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. officials say. Rather, it reflected an ambivalent and at times contradictory policy toward Russia on terrorism issues that stretches back more than a dozen years, American intelligence officials and foreign-policy experts said.
Even as Washington [DC] has grown more concerned about an array of Russian security threats, it has continued to seek Moscow’s cooperation in combating terrorism. Although the approach has yielded few victories against the Islamist militants that the two countries vowed to fight after 9/11, advocates of the policy argue that it has been one of the few areas of common ground in which cooperation remains possible during a period of increasing confrontation.
“Russia is clearly a bad actor on the world stage,” said David McKean, a former director of policy planning at the State Department. “But terrorism is an area where we have to keep trying to talk to them. They can either play a negative role or not play a negative role — or occasionally play a positive role.”
Yet, as Tillerson’s order for the review suggested, the calculus in Washington [DC] has begun to shift. Throughout the civil war in Syria, Russia has strengthened its backing for the regimes in Damascus and Teheran, which Washington [DC] has long accused of supporting terrorism, and their ally Hezbollah, an officially designated terrorist group. Russia has intervened more directly in Afghanistan, Pentagon officials have said, shipping arms to the Taliban with little apparent regard for the geopolitical consequences. And the Kremlin has methodically pursued its enemies overseas, ordering a series of assassination attempts in Europe, Turkey and the Middle East, national security officials said.
As the evidence of Russian support for terrorism has grown, the Putin regime’s campaign of cyberattacks and other subversion in the United States, Europe and elsewhere has raised new questions about the utility and viability of narrow efforts at cooperation on issues such as counterterrorism.
“We assume the Russians are like us, and if we would just do a better job of explaining ourselves, they would come around and be allies on counterterrorism,” said John Sipher, a former deputy chief of Russian operations at the CIA. “Russia has been more consistent. They have seen us, not terrorism, as the main enemy all along.”
In the case of the former Russian spy poisoned in the English town of Salisbury, Sergei Skripal, the Trump administration eventually joined Britain and other allies in retaliating for the attack. Washington [DC] and its allies expelled scores of Russian diplomats and imposed financial sanctions on oligarchs and political leaders.
To formally name Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, however, would represent a more significant step. The State Department’s list, which now includes North Korea, Iran, Syria and Sudan, reflects a formal determination that a foreign government has repeatedly supported acts of international terrorism. (Secretary Tillerson was fired days after he ordered up the aborted review, apparently for reasons that were unrelated. His replacement, Mike Pompeo, has not commented publicly on the prospect of such a designation.)
Under a process first implemented in 1979, the designation results in sanctions barring the country from U.S. foreign aid, arms sales and various forms of commerce. It also restricts U.S. trade and diplomatic contact with nations that do business with countries on the list.
But both Republican and Democratic administrations have wielded the State Department’s terrorism sanctions primarily against countries where the United States has limited interests. Washington [DC] has used the tool far more sparingly against powerful nations like Russia, where U.S. relationships include substantial competing equities.
In November, for example, the Trump administration aggressively pushed through the designation of North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism, despite what officials in the State Department and other experts considered a relatively weak evidentiary case.
“Russia much more neatly meets the definition of a state sponsor than North Korea does,” said a national security official familiar with the issue.
The Trump administration cited a series of complaints against North Korea, including the mistreatment of an American college student who died after being released from North Korean custody. But the primary new evidence of repeated support for terrorism was an act that some officials and experts consider insufficient: the 2017 assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
“I am delighted to see us get tough with North Korea,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “I’d rather we chose another label.”
Pakistan, by contrast, has been spared from inclusion on the State Department list despite what U.S. officials say is a well-documented history of funding, training and protecting terrorist groups including the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Even after U.S. counterterror agencies have directly implicated Pakistani intelligence officials in such flagrant activity as the 2008 terror attacks that killed 166 people — six of them Americans — in Mumbai, the U.S. government has continued to treat Pakistan as an indispensable, if untrustworthy, partner.
Russian leaders have bristled at the idea that they might qualify for inclusion on the terror-sponsors list. Particularly since the 9/11 attacks, the Putin government has cast Russia as a Christian bulwark against the threat of Islamist militancy. Putin was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush to express his sympathies after the attacks. As the Bush Administration scrambled to strike back against al-Qaida, the Kremlin provided diplomatic and logistical support for the U.S. military’s operations in Afghanistan.
Russian security forces also worked with Western counterparts to track threats related to Chechnya. And Moscow avoided criticizing the Americans’ use of brutal interrogation methods and secret detentions, despite years of U.S. human rights criticism of Russia’s own counterterror operations.
From the start, however, some U.S. intelligence experts warned that Moscow played by different rules. Sipher, the former deputy chief of Russian operations, recalled his reaction after learning that the then-CIA director, George Tenet, had told Bush that Russia would be a key ally in the new war on terrorism.
“Tenet asked us to put together a paper on how the Russians were going to help us,” Sipher recalled. “We were dumbfounded. We said someone needs to tell the President they are NOT going to be an ally. They are not going to help on counterterrorism.”
It was not long before signs of Russian duplicity began to surface, Sipher recalled. In the mid-2000s, the CIA learned that Russia had given its allies in Central Asia a database of suspected extremists that included the names of some CIA undercover officers.
“When our officers showed up in certain countries at the airport, they were handcuffed because we popped up on the list as terrorists,” Sipher said.
In what some U.S. intelligence veterans see as a reflection of Putin’s background as a career officer in the Soviet KGB, Russia has mixed fierce tactics against Islamist militants in Chechnya with cooperation and collusion, officials said.
Russian opposition leaders and journalists have accused the Kremlin’s security forces of masterminding a string of mysterious bombings in Russia in 1999. About 300 civilians were killed in the explosions at apartment buildings. The attacks, which the government blamed on Chechen militants, helped then-Prime Minister Putin bolster his standing ahead of the Presidential election he won in 2000.
The U.S. case against Russia as a sponsor of terrorism has grown substantially over the past decade, national security officials said.
As Islamist militants began moving into Syria in 2012 to join that country’s civil war, law enforcement agencies in Europe arrested scores of would-be jihadists. By contrast, U.S. officials have said, Russia’s principal internal security agency, the FSB, appeared to encourage militants from predominantly Muslim regions like Dagestan to go to Syria ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The FSB carried out this activity to reduce the threat at home during the Winter Games, according to U.S. officials, despite the fact that such militants were likely to join the Islamic State’s fight against the Syrian government, a close Russian ally.
“There must have been senior approval,” said Michael Carpenter, who served as National Security Council director for Russia during the Obama administration. “There was facilitation, payment, passports. There were hundreds, at a minimum, who went to Syria during this period.”
There have been more direct examples of state-sponsored violence in the pursuit of Chechen rebel leaders and other Kremlin enemies far beyond Russia’s borders, U.S. officials said. Russian spies have been convicted of or accused of murdering suspected Islamist extremists in Dubai, Qatar and Turkey, according to officials, court verdicts and published reports.
Both the United States and Israel have often killed suspected terrorists overseas, notably in drone strikes conducted by the Pentagon or the CIA. But Russia has targeted its own exiled political dissidents with growing frequency — an action that would qualify as terrorism under U.S. law if there is an intent to intimidate a group of people.
In the Skripal case in England, Carpenter said, the seemingly obvious signature of the nerve agent used to try to kill the exiled Russian spy on March 4 was integral to the plot. “I think the Russians planned it as a hit that would lead everyone to think the Kremlin was behind it, and that would spread a chill among former spies,” he said. “Is it terrorism? Yes. It targets that population of former Russian spies and dissidents and sends a message to stop cooperating with the West.”
Russia had convicted Skripal of working as a British double agent, but released him from prison and sent him to Britain in a spy swap in 2010. The former military intelligence officer, 66, had lived quietly for eight years in the riverfront town of Salisbury until, British officials say, suspected Russian agents smeared the nerve agent Novichok on the handle of his front door.
Skripal was in critical condition for weeks before his health began to improve. On Friday, he was released from the hospital. Authorities moved him to a secret location to continue his recovery. The other two victims — his 33-year-old daughter and a British police officer — were released from the hospital weeks ago.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said that only Russia had the weapon, motive and operational experience to carry out the plot, an assertion that U.S. intelligence officials have endorsed. Because the Russian state tightly controls access to Novichok, American intelligence officers think the order to use it had to have come from high-level officials, a U.S. intelligence official said.
Russian leaders have denied any involvement in the case, and have even accused the British security services of staging the attack themselves in order to frame Russia. After the director of the MI5 domestic intelligence service said last week that the Kremlin was at risk of becoming an “isolated pariah,” the Russian embassy in London declared: “This shows to what lengths London is prepared to go in order to keep the Western bloc in the UK-led confrontation with Russia.”
The Skripal attack recalled the 2006 assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer who had also worked with Western intelligence services. After fleeing to London in 2000, Litvinenko had publicly accused Putin of plotting the 1999 bombings in Russia, among other crimes. He was killed by two Russian operatives who poisoned his tea with polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance produced by a Russian military laboratory. A British court convicted the two Russians in absentia, but one of them, Andrei Lugovoy, a retired KGB officer, received a medal from Putin and was elected to the Russian parliament.
A dozen other suspicious deaths in Britain — the victims were Russian expatriates or Britons linked to them — drew less attention over the past 15 years. In the aftermath of the Skripal attack, however, British authorities said they would reexamine those cases, which prominently include the death of Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch and enemy of Putin who was initially ruled to have committed suicide in 2013.
When Tillerson ordered the review of Russia’s record on terrorism in March, State Department experts examined a history of Russian-sponsored violent activity in neighboring Ukraine as a key element of a case for designation.
In 2004, an anti-Putin presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, blamed Russian operatives for trying to kill him with dioxin. The poison badly disfigured Yushchenko, but he survived and won the Ukrainian election. In another case last October, Ukraine’s attorney general accused the Russian FSB of teaming with a politically connected gangster to assassinate a fugitive Russian legislator in Kiev.
One of the most serious elements of the case against Russia, U.S. officials said, may be the government’s alleged involvement in the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines flight by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014. A Russian-made missile killed all 298 people aboard and was part of a wave of separatist bombings and other violence against civilians blamed on Russia after its forces occupied the Crimea region.
“It is the current Russian regime that provided the missiles, the launcher, the software, the training, and perhaps even the triggerman to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” Carpenter testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in November.
U.S. military commanders have also accused Russia of increasing support for the Taliban. Although the Afghan insurgency originated with the Islamic militant fighters who battled the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Russian forces have provided funding and small arms to the Taliban as part of an effort to undermine U.S. policy in the region, Pentagon officials have said.
Amid calls for stronger retaliation against Russia for the Skripal case and its meddling in the 2016 elections, some members of Congress have pushed the Trump administration to consider designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Even if the case seems strong, U.S. officials say the action would imperil remaining lines of communication with Moscow and create legal problems for the United States in dealing with nations that do business with Russia.
The Trump administration recognizes Russia’s record, officials said, but senior intelligence officials have emphasized their continued support for a better counterterrorism partnership with the Putin regime.
U.S. intelligence agencies went so far as to extend a highly unusual invitation to Russian spy chiefs, which resulted in a meeting between the sides in January to discuss counterterrorism cooperation. The directors of the FSB and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, held talks in Washington with the then-CIA director, Pompeo, and the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats. The Americans reminded the spy chiefs that the CIA had relayed a lead that foiled a terrorist plot in Saint Petersburg in December, but the Russians have so far declined to share any comparable intelligence, a U.S. intelligence official said.
“The intelligence agencies want to have a channel open to the Russians,” the official said. “Historically, at times of political tensions, the spy services have been able to de-escalate while Presidents like Putin are playing to domestic audiences. It’s important to keep that back channel.”
Critics of the meetings took a less optimistic view, saying the U.S. intelligence community sent a message that it is not serious about confronting Russia’s aggressive conduct. The Salisbury attack just weeks later underscored the futility of the outreach effort, those experts said.
“These are the guys behind the interference campaign in the U.S. elections, the guys directing Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine and ordering hits like the one on Skripal,” Carpenter said of the meetings. “Words escape me to express how bad it was.”
SUMMARY: The leaders of China and North Korea held an unofficial summit this week, waiting until Wednesday to announce it to the world. Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping came face-to-face for the first time in Beijing, Kim first venture abroad since he became North Korea's supreme leader in 2011. Judy Woodruff reports on how both countries have characterized the visit.
SUMMARY: Why did North Korean leader Kim Jong Un go to China, and what impact will that visit have on its nuclear standoff with the U.S.? Judy Woodruff gets two views from Michael Pillsbury an adviser to the Trump administration, and Michael Green a former National Security Council staff member.
SUMMARY:Including the U.S., over a dozen countries announced expulsions on Monday of more than 100 Russian diplomats accused of being intelligence officials, in a united attempt to isolate and punish Russia for the alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. Nick Schifrin reports on the Trump administration’s measures, its harshest punishment of Russia to date.
SUMMARY:Sixty Russian diplomats are being kicked out of the U.S. in a bid to punish the Kremlin for an attack on a former Russian spy in the UK. Is that the right response? Nick Schifrin gets reaction from two former State Department officials, Victoria Nuland of the Center for a New American Security and Paul Saunders of the Center for the National Interest.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including President Trump choosing John Bolton for his third National Security Adviser, the departure of John Dowd from the President’s Russia probe legal team, plus former model Karen McDougal sues to be able to tell her story of an affair with Trump.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): And that brings us now to the analysis of Shields and Brooks.
That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
So, gentlemen, I’m actually going back to what we were talking about earlier in the program, Mark, and start with John Bolton.
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: OK.
Judy Woodruff: The President making a lot of news, making news on his own, tweeting last night the surprise announcement that H.R. McMaster was out, John Bolton’s in, and this on top, as you just heard from Yamiche, one change after another at this White House.
What are we to make of this?
Mark Shields: Well, first of all, I would like to associate myself with the remarks of Nancy McEldowney, who was on the show. I think she’s absolutely right about John Bolton.
John Bolton is not just ideologically fixed where he’s been. Unlike his apparent foes within the administration, Jim Mattis, secretary of defense, and Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he [Bolton] has never comforted anybody dying in battle. He’s never written to a next of kin.
He avoided military service himself, yet it’s his prescription for virtually every situation that arises, whether it’s North Korea or Iraq, for which he has never apologized, for which he was a relentless advocate, and wrong.
So, I just think, temperamentally, Judy, he is the worst possible choice that Donald Trump could make. He is brutal to people who work with him. And I just think, what he is, is he’s a flatterer. And Donald Trump, we know, is incredibly susceptible to flattery.
Judy Woodruff: David, what do you make not only of Bolton, but just the sequence of changes, almost one right after the other, at the White House?
David Brooks, New York Times: Well, first, on Bolton, I think, ideologically, Trump probably should have picked him first. I think a President should pick the sort of person who shares their world view.
And if there is anybody in the Republican foreign policy galaxy who shares President Trump’s world view, it’s John Bolton. In the administration, he came up with the — he was talking about America first long before Donald Trump ever was.
When he served earlier in the earlier Bush administration, he was a relentless foe of sort of the Republican establishment, the Colin Powells. He was a relentless foe of the conservatives — of the neoconservatives, who believed in democracy and human rights.
He was an old-style what we call paleocon, power vs. power kind of conservative. So, Trump at least got somebody he agrees with.
Temperamentally, I agree with Mark. He was famously thought of as a kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He was famously thought of as someone who didn’t look at issues honestly, look at intelligence honestly, but came with a highly ideological predisposition.
I don’t think he’s the worst thing in the world. He comes across a lot of issues that I do think seriously increases the chance that we will have some military action in North Korea and Iran. But he’s not a complete loon. He just has a bellicose, old style, we need just to be more powerful than anybody else around, and we need to threaten that power all the time, which, when you take — combine it with a temperamentally unstable President, that’s a dangerous combination.
Judy Woodruff: Dangerous combination?
Mark Shields: Dangerous, dangerous combination. And I think David is — suffers from an excess of charity.
(LAUGHTER)
Mark Shields: No, I agree with his analysis, up to the point.
Donald Trump, if you will recall, ran on a foreign policy, all by himself, that he had opposed the war in Iraq, that he was the only Republican who had, just as Barack Obama was legitimately the only Democrat in 2008 who had opposed the United States going into Iraq, won the nomination and won the Presidency.
I’m not saying it was the sole reason, but it certainly gave him a uniqueness and distinction that he claimed for himself. The evidence for it wasn’t necessarily overwhelming that he had been a dove from the outset.
But that is the polar opposite of John Bolton in that sense. And Trump wanted a less aggressive, a less assertive American military presence. And I think the voices of restraint in this administration have been diminished. And I think that it’s down to Mattis and Dunford.
And I’m just grateful the two of them are there.
David Brooks: I still think it’s far from a sure thing that it will be super bellicose, super militaristic.
The foreign policy school that Trump has somehow glommed onto and then John Bolton definitely subscribes to really goes back into ancient pre-World War II Republican history, which was much more heartland, much more isolationist almost, but no sense of foreign policy idealism, no sense we want to make the world a better place, that we want to give people dignity, we want to give them human rights.
That’s not part of the equation. It’s much more, we’re in a great power struggle, and they’re tough and we’re tough. And that’s just the way they see the world. It’s an old-fashioned, more, as I say, pre-Cold War style of Republican foreign policy. But it did tend to be non-adventurist.
And so there was some restraint even back in the early America first days.
Judy Woodruff: So you don’t see them being quick on the trigger?
David Brooks:As I say, more quick on the trigger than with Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster, that’s for sure, but I wouldn’t say we’re necessarily marching off to war.
I do think Trump still — his instinct is, I don’t want to spend blood and treasure abroad. His constituency doesn’t want to fight another war. I think he would be slow to want to commit troops anywhere, just by his instinct. He’s a domestic policy guy.
Mark Shields:John Bolton’s application for the job was his most recent piece in The Wall Street Journal advocating the legal case for the United States attacking North Korea preemptively and unilaterally.
That is not World War — pre-World War II Republicanism, which was, if anything, isolationist.
I mean, the National Security Adviser, Judy, has to be, to be successful, an honest broker between Defense and Treasury and State and all the competing interests, and present to the President the distilled views and honest options that are advocated by his appointees.
And there’s no evidence at all that John Bolton is equipped temperamentally or experientially for that role.
David Brooks: Yes, I totally agree with that. He doesn’t fit this job at all.
And I guess the one fear you would add is not so much what you believe, but just a swirl of machismo.
Mark Shields: Yes.
David Brooks:This is an administration which is — whose masculinity is on high decibel, while being extremely unstable.
And so that would be the — the whipping up in a frenzy would be the part I would emphasize, I would worry about.
SUMMARY:President Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is being replaced by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. John Yang joins Judy Woodruff to explain what we know about McMaster's resignation and the man slated to take his place.
SUMMARY: Former UN Ambassador John Bolton will become the third National Security Adviser since President Trump took office, taking over for Army Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster. Bolton is a longtime hawk on foreign policy who has served Republican Presidents since Ronald Reagan, and has held Trump's ear as a commentator on FOX News. Judy Woodruff learns more from Jonathan Landay of Reuters.
SUMMARY: In naming John Bolton to be his next National Security Adviser, President Trump has picked a long time foreign policy commentator and practitioner, and conservative hawk who has called for military action against North Korea and Iran. What change will Bolton bring to the job? Judy Woodruff gets assessments from former diplomat and NSC staff member Nancy McEldowney, and Matthew Kroenig of Georgetown University.
SUMMARY: In a wide-ranging interview with PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff, former Vice President Joe Biden said he believes the U.S. is closer than ever to nuclear war, adding President Trump "undermines" the office of the President. He also talks about his latest book, "Promise me, Dad," which chronicles his son Beau's brain cancer diagnosis and death, and his own decision not to run for President in 2016.
SUMMARY: President Donald Trump uses Twitter to speak directly to the American people. How is this mode of communication heard in foreign nations? Former ambassador Nancy McEldowney who is now at Georgetown University, and Kenneth Weinstein, president and CEO of the Hudson Institute think tank, lend their perspectives.
SUMMARY: Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Tamara Keith of NPR join Judy Woodruff to discuss President Trump's learning curve in his first 100 days, as well as former President Obama's first public appearance.
SUMMARY: President Trump came to office intent on shaking up Washington. While he's run into obstacles in Congress and the courts, there have been clear victories. John Yang offers a recap of the President's domestic moves, and presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Barbara Perry of the University of Virginia Miller Center sit down with Judy Woodruff to discuss how he compares to his predecessors.
SUMMARY: President Trump's mantra "America First" was a signal that he planned to focus on improving prospects at home. But in his first 100 days, global crises have challenged him with frequent and treacherous tests. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner looks back, then Hari Sreenivasan gets analysis from David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy and James Carafano of The Heritage Foundation.
SUMMARY: April 29 marks President Donald Trump's 100th day in office, a common benchmark for measuring the achievements of incoming presidents. The standard was set by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose leadership in 1933 pushed a flurry of major legislation through Congress. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Jeff Greenfield joins Megan Thompson for analysis on the first 100 days of Trump's Presidency.
SUMMARY: President Trump acted on one of his most polarizing promises, signing an executive action to curb the admission of refugees, including an indefinite ban on accepting refugees from war-torn Syria. Lisa Desjardins offers a roundup of news from the White House, including a press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa Day and a phone call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
SUMMARY: An executive order to limit refugees, immigrants and visitors to the United States, especially from Muslim countries, is meant to reduce the chance of terrorist attacks on home soil. But is the move by President Trump an effective form of deterrence? Antonio Mora talks with Reuel Marc Gerecht from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and former State Department official Daniel Benjamin.
SUMMARY: The U.S. admitted 12,500 Syrian refugees in 2016, but President Donald Trump's executive order Friday indefinitely bans any more from entering the U.S. NewsHour Weekend Correspondent Megan Thompson reports on how the Trump administration's policy has left some refugees already in the country very concerned.
SUMMARY: Protests erupted across the country following President Trump's executive order banning immigrants from seven countries. The administration cited national security concerns as the reason for the order, even as a federal judge blocked part of it on Saturday night. USA Today Immigration Reporter Alan Gomez joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.
SUMMARY: A federal judge on Saturday issued a stay to halt portions of President Trump's executive order banning entry to the U.S. for people from seven countries. The order prevents the government from deporting people that are detained at U.S. airports. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, whose organization filed the complaint, joins Hari Sreenivasan to help us understand what happened.
SUMMARY: It was a packed week of congressional hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees, with inauguration days away. Judy Woodruff speaks with syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks about the Russian intrigue in U.S. politics, the future of Mr. Trump's relationship to his business and saying goodbye to President Obama.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And welcome to you both. There is so much to talk about, but let's start with talking about the president-elect and Russia.
We had the news today — on top of all the confirmation that the Russians interfered in the U.S. election, today, we learned — and we talked about earlier it on the show — David, that General Michael Flynn had phone conversations with the Russian ambassador in December, several of them.
Tonight, we're learning that the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to expand what was already an investigation into the Russian interference into in election to look at any contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the Clinton campaign, although the main focus is Donald Trump.
What do we make of all this?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times:I was first struck by David Ignatius' comment earlier in the program that they just could be trying to be destabilize the United States across the board. And that's a — I hadn't heard that thought before and it's a live possibility.
Putin is someone who has been undermining the norms of what we consider the world order since he got into power and in increasing success. What's interesting about the Trump administration is how bitterly divided they are in their attitudes towards Putin.
Steve Bannon and General Flynn have warm feelings. Putin has been — and with a lot of the groups, the conservative groups, the more extreme conservative groups that underlie Trump, he's a bit of a hero because he speaks for traditional values, he's against the global institutions.
They see him as someone who has been on the defensive from an aggressive E.U., an aggressive NATO. And there is a lot of sympathy there, actually.
And then, if you look at the more establishment Republicans, they see him as what I just described, subversive of the world order. And so to me the question will be, will Trump and Bannon control policy toward the foreign policy, or will everyone else basically?
And my money is on everyone else, because I think Trump's attention span is super low. I don't think he has the expertise to actually run a foreign policy. And at the end of the day — and I think this is a major story of the Trump administration — he's going to want the affirmation of the establishment, as he always has.
The reason he had Clintons at his wedding because he wants that affirmation. When he gets the chance to have it, I think he will bend gradually in that direction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How are you looking at all this?
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Donald Trump is to traditional values what I am to marathon running.
(LAUGHTER)
MARK SHIELDS: It just doesn't — it doesn't fit.
I have to say, Judy, I am perplexed, and I think an increasing number of Republicans are perplexed and actually nervous about Donald Trump and Russia, nervous in the sense that he is gratuitously giving Democrats the national security advantage, that they're standing up for the country.
We have testimony of General Mattis, the nominee for secretary of defense, asserting that the objective, the stated objective and the mission of Vladimir Putin's Russia is to destabilize the North Atlantic Alliance, and he, who believes in NATO and believes it's been one of the great alliances in modern history, that Putin represents a threat to this, that "Russia Today" is nothing but a propaganda arm, that General Flynn went to celebrate its anniversary, sitting at Putin's table for money, paid to show up.
So, I mean, these questions, essentially, they have just given it to the Democrats to stand up and say, wait a minute, where do you believe in this country, plus the suspicions, and real, about in fact the involvement of Russia in this election.
The question, the real moment of truth is going to arrive very shortly, a couple of weeks, when sanctions arrive on Donald Trump's — President Donald Trump's desk passed by a Republican Congress. Is he going to oppose those sanctions? What's he going to do?
I just think it's inexplicable and irrational, his policy on Russia. ----- JUDY WOODRUFF: Two more major things I want to ask both of you about.
The first one is what Donald Trump said, Mark, this week about his business interests. He said he’s basically turning everything over to his sons, that it will be a kind of a blind trust. Did he go far enough?
MARK SHIELDS: Of course he didn’t, Judy.
He said after eight years, he will grade his sons, and if they didn’t perform well, they’re fired, sort of an offhand line, but showing that he did have a continuing interest.
There’s never been a sense of public service about this man. And I don’t think there is in this alleged arrangement. It’s anything but a blind trust. It’s a seeing-eye trust.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes.
It’s a blind trust. I’m giving it to my closest relatives.
MARK SHIELDS: Yes.
DAVID BROOKS: It’s not really serious.
JUDY WOODRUFF: He said he’s not going to talk to them about it.
DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, right. (sarcastically)
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID BROOKS: He has a different model.
I mean, most — the way the laws are envisioned, they are for people who work in the government — or work in a private sector, and then they cut it offer and they go to public service. And that’s how you’re supposed to do it.
But he has a pre-modern monarchic family structure. His business is a monarchy with family members all around. His administration is a monarchy with family members all around. So the laws are just not going to apply to him. And he will wind up with some corruption problems, probably.
SUMMARY: In our most recent interview with a top Obama administration official, Judy Woodruff sits down with Secretary of State John Kerry as the presidential transition nears. They discuss Secretary Kerry's assessment of the U.S.-Russia relationship, now that intelligence has confirmed hacking; the administration's legacy in Syria and Israel; challenges for his successor, Rex Tillerson and more.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And now to my interview with Secretary of State John Kerry.
I sat down with him earlier today at the State Department, before the public release of that intelligence report on Russia.
But I began by asking, now that we have confirmation Russia interfered in the election, does that fundamentally change Washington's relationship with Moscow?
Secretary of State John Kerry, thank you very much for talking with us.
JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State: My pleasure. Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, now that it has been confirmed that the Russians interfered aggressively in the U.S. election, does this represent a fundamental change in the United States' relationship with Russia?
JOHN KERRY: Well, that remains to be determined.
It certainly represents a major challenge in that relationship. It's a hostile act. It has serious consequences, and we're going to have to work that through.
And I say we. I mean the United States, the next administration is going to have to approach Russia very clearly understanding what has happened.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you think more needs to be done to retaliate as of now?
JOHN KERRY: Well, I think that President Obama made it clear that we would retaliate at a time of our choosing and ways of our choosing.
And that means some of them, the public will know about, some of them, they will not know about. Obviously, with two weeks left, I think that the administration coming in is going to have to make some judgments of its own about what the next steps will be.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, it's reported the Russians were celebrating the election of Donald Trump. Why would they be celebrating? What do you think?
JOHN KERRY: I'm not going to speculate. I really think it's too important. And I just am not going to speculate.
I think there has been a lot of news articles. You all have been covering this for some period of time. People are going to draw their own judgments, but I'm not going to add to that speculation.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think Vladimir Putin wants? You have been dealing with him for a long time. What do you think he's after?
JOHN KERRY: Well, he's after a lot of things.
There are a lot of motivations. He obviously has agreed with us on some things and disagreed with us on others. And we managed to find common ground and work together effectively on the Iran nuclear agreement, where Russia assumed major responsibilities to try to get the agreement done and to make it work.
So I can give you a long list of things where Russia and President Putin have found common ground and worked with the United States. But, on Ukraine, on the implementation of the Minsk agreement, on Syria, we have obviously not been able to find the same kind of common ground, despite good efforts.
And those are problems that are going to continue into the next administration. My hope is the next administration will approach Russia strategically, with a clear purpose of trying to find more common ground, but without giving up on fundamental values and principles that are at the core of the United States' foreign policy.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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