where the united states military has come in a response of this humanitarian disaster. and that's new. >> kevin, thank you, and thank you for your patience tonight's as we've been covering this ongoing live event. general barry mccaffery remains with us from seattle tonight. of course the retired four-star u.s. army general combat veteran in vet nam, combat vet plan desert storm. general, it's been hours since we last spoke. we were just learn being what had transpired. what have been your thoughts in the intervening hours? >> i think this was a definitive move on this chess board of dealing with syria. it probablieny enciency encienc enhanced our ability to talk to russia and demand some action. it probably had an kbag on the

syria aviation elements that are certified and train to deliver chemical munitions. i would be astonished if they weren't devastated by the strike. as many of your commentators have discussed already, it's highly unlikely to have any significant impact on assad's survival instinct to not be overwhelmed by sunni muslim rebellion factions. so i hope the next step, though, if they continue to use u.s. military power, is not to use proportional power, but to go try and destroy the syrian air force in place. >> well now talk about that. what kind of an air campaign would that be? >> always harder than one would imagine. these -- we would have to get more carriers in the region. we would have to negotiate political support out of saudi arabia or other regional states, the egyptians to support an air

strike. i bet it would be a matter of weeks, not days. we would lose aircraft. we would kill russians. it would be considered by most an overt act of war against the existing syrian government. there would be counter-strikes potentially by the iranian revolutionary guards or hezbollah militias in lebanon. so it would be ricky business. but, brian, i have always been uneasy about political signaling with military airpower. >> i can't help but notice that's seattle behind you. and seattle was mentioned in the news this week as one of the potential west coast cities that a north korean ballistic missile -- it would take a bank shot for kim jong-un technologically as of yet, but combining a nuclear weapon with the ballistic missile he is so

happy to test into the sea of japan would put seattle, los angeles at risk. tomorrow our attention is going to necessarily turn to that front as president trump and the leader of 20% of the people on earth are meeting in mar-a-lago in florida. and boy, that's a tougher equation, is it not? >> oh, no question. the number one threat to the american people in our security interest is north korea. they are potentially irrational. they may have 15 nuclear weapons already. they without question will have an icbm capability. you know, particular a time frame, five years, ten years. they are going to have a sublaunch ballistic missile capability. they have already involved solid fuel rockets, mobile launchers. these people are dangerous. the question is what do you do about it? it's unlikely that we would consider preemptive u.s.

military strike on north korea. i don't think we are going do it for a variety of reasons. a disaster for south korea, prlkbprlk b -- probably for japan also. i think the answer there is going to be developing serious ballistic missile defense capability in japan, south korea and the u.s. navy. >> general barry mccaffery joining us from seattle. he has been with us for hours as part of our coverage of the air strike tonight. general, thank you very much. another gentlemen who we call upon a lot around here who has been with us for many hours as we've been developing what it is we are covering tonight, washington editor at large for the atlantic, steve clemens. start wherever you wish, what you make of the news we got from overseas tonight. >> thanks brian. i think the first thing that occurs the me is, you know, slightly what kevin barron laid out although i have a slightly different take. we don't know by donald trump

taking this action whether in the long run this looks weak to the rest of the world or strong. what i mean by that is that barack obama when he took action in libya or in december 2015 when he aligned 34 islamic nations to join other european allies in attacking isis and bombing them in just as spectacular a raitt raid as the attacks that you have been showing frequently in that department of defense clip. president obama made sure he had both international and regional support for the action. he made sure that there was an assessment that the deployment of force would have an impact, and that the, you know, that the ripple effects of this were contained and looked at. and that we had allies wrrking with us. that isn't the case here. donald trump has certainly sent a signal that he can take a step unilaterally without coordinating with allies, without necessarily doing -- and take an action. and we are going to have to see down the road where that

unilateral impulse, that nudge is perceived like countries like china, he is sitting with xi jinping in florida with others. is one of strength or one of weakness. i don't think we have discussed that yet. that's the first thank that comes to find. >> steve i don't mean this argumentativecally. look at all the signals prior to this, 75 days of this administration, that the world has sat back and been watching. >> i mean, the world has sat back and watched. certainly we had chemicals weapons there, chemical weapons are an sexual assault on humanity. humanity was not gathered by the united states to respond to al assad. certainly donald trump took leadership. he took steps forward. he demonstrated a resolve to be muscular in attack. i don't think that means necessarily at the end of the day that he is going to be interested in state building or trying to make sure we have a warmer cuddlier syria later on down the road. he demonstrated he is willing to take action but it's not one

coordinated with the rest of the worlds. he hasn't demonstrated i think in contrast to george w. bush or barack obama, they sew together international alliances to take these kinds of action. donald trump and his team did not do that here and i find that interesting. >> steve, you know washington well, and the structure of government. how much of the normal national security structure around this president from state to pentagon to national security council is just not there? they are missing. they are not nominated. they haven't been confirmed. >> enormous layers are missing. i have huge respect for h.r. mcmaster, general jim mattis at the pentagon and general kelly and even tom bossert the president's assistant for homeland security. he has a very good top echelon team. i interviewed john mccain in brussels. he said while at that point he had not yet met donald trump during his presidency he had

hopes that donald trump would listen to his high quality national security team. what happens in a contingency like this is that you have lots of players that come in and begin thinking about rachel was discussing earlier unintended consequences, the ripple effects, relationship management, alliance management. and a lot of that second and third tier level of folks aren't there. i think he has very good people around him and advising him. but in my book it's not enough to handle the complexity of where this might good morning many people have calked about iran. turkey is in the picture. russia is certainly in the picture. and we just don't know what the next second and third steps this might be. all i remember is december 2015 when president obama launched a spectacular attack against isis. and we were all on msnbc all night looking a the dramatic pictures we saw. and very quickly we saw how little was achieved. how hard it was to hold that alliance together.

how quickly allies fell out and how the story and script changed. >> steve clemens who is the way we so often find out about what's going to be the next day's story and script, and how tonight's events will be covered going forward. steve thank you very much. >> thank you. >> and thank you for your patience it's been a busy night. rick stengel who was on 24 hours ago is back with us 24 hours later. former undersecretary of state for public diplomat maes and deposit affairs at the state department in the obama administration, and oh, by way was the editor of "time" magazine for a long time. eugene robinson, a fellow scribe remains here with us. steve schmidt remains by satellite with us. rick, we talked about this possibility. this is -- i heard the political discussion tonight on chris matthews before we knew what we were going to be covering. this is the opposite of the bannon nationalists. but this is also something barack obama was unwilling to

do. >> and i have to take a little bit of issue with what steve was saying. i mean, you know what they don't teach you at diplomacy school? >> what don't they teach you? >> they don't teach you that you have to make foreign policy for prim tiffs. i was traveling around the middle east at the time that president obama did not follow through on the red line. and every sunni country i went to, they were like what is up with you guys? why are you not acting? the truth is that with these prim tiffs around the world, and there has been a growth in autocrats and auto accuracies and prim tiffs they are going to go there is a strong man finally. and steve was talking about the fact that president obama which i devoutly belief in tried to form alliances. that's a different kinds of policy than the unilateral speak loudly and carry a big stik that a lot of folks around the world like america to have. what this will do is it will buy him purchase with a lot of these

sunni nations. he will be able to begin to make different calculations about the middle east. the relationship to iran will change. that threatened all of the sunni countries that are our allies. it's changing things. >> eugene, why am i thinking of the invasion of grenada, the bombing attack on libya? these kind of one-act acts. >> i think that's one way it might play out. that's one impact it might have. i wonder, though, about the fact that it is being billed as a proportional attack, meaning limited. it -- one airbase they didn't bomb the runway. they hit the arms depots or whatever. now, 59 cruise missiles, you know, that's a lot. >> that's a lot. >> but -- >> especially when you are on the seving end. >> i think it's also possible that -- on the receiving end. >> i think it's also seen as an agent of symbolism more than anything else. an act that pertains merely to

chemical weapons and not to the bigger picture of syria. and that doesn't change the strategic calculus of the syrian conflict and therefore maybe not the strategic calculus of the crisis-ridden middle east. i'm not sure. >> i think that's why president obama didn't want to get in there. it is a witch's brew of complexity. extremists of every sort. a lot of the isis guys who went to syria, they went to fight assad. and we told them to. >> yeah. >> so part of this is that anything you touch there has repercussions that you don't know, which is why president obama took an essentially conservative approach, which is to say am i going to make the situation worse or better? >> that's exactly the question. and the question no one has ever been able to answer satisfactorily is how do i make this better? okay, you know, i want to do. -- i want to do something. so do something. there is no evidence that this is the answer.

but just sort of signature back is also not a very good answer. >> steve schmidt, it strikes me, this and related topics are all you read about, all you think about, and all you talk about. what about rick stengel's theory of this particular grab, of this particular level of presidential power versus the kind of years of brainier coalition building as an approach? >> well, look, the years of brainier coalition approach has produce ads humanitarian disaster in syria. he's correct. it's an incredibly complex situation. it's a witch's brew. nothing happened tonight that changes that situation on the ground strategically. i do think there is some interesting politics. this week we saw the removal of steve bannon from the principle's committee of the national security council. and steve bannon is a member of that committee is someone who

serves as the white house has been deeply hostile retorically to the post world war ii u.s.-led liberal global order values based rules based and one of the unwritten rules of the road was that the use of chemical weapons was not acceptable. this is what led barack obama to draw the initial red line to say that if you cross that line, if you use these weapons, the united states will respond militarily. now of course assad did use those weapons. president obama severely diminished his credibility by not following through on that red line. and president trump today, while having a clearly inconsistent policy on syria, having no real strategy on syria, i think re-established the red line that if you use these weapons, there will be a military response by

the united states. and when you look at that in the context of the fighting at the national security council, the disagreements in this administration between the nationalist wing, the internationalist wing, this is clearly a victory at a policy level for general mcmaster, for general mattis, and for people in the administration who believe in a u.s.-led liberal global order based on rules, based on values. >> steve, how do you process what happened tonight against an administration you have been so justifiably critical of for these first what are we -- 75 days? >> well, again, this is another extension of the lack of credibility on the administration. its reof the reic conduct. we had earlier in the week that the administration saying that it was no longer american policy

to wish for regime change against assad. by the end of the we can we are launching 59 cruise missiles. the president's refugee policy stands in stark contrast to his comments talking about his deep simple these for the syrian people. the president has previously said that it would be inappropriate to attack syria without a use of military force authorization by the congress, which clearly he does not have and is something that will be hotlyly debated over the days ahead. but clearly this administration is all over the map. the inconsistencies are everywhere you look, including around the reasons for the attack tonight. so i think as the modern dawns on washington, d.c. tomorrow one of the things to be looking for is consistency. is there going to be a strategy

that someone from the white house is able to articulate with regard to american policy in this part of the world? and how does this attack fit into that strategic context? we have no idea about any of those things at this hour. >> we are also joined, thank you steve, by heidi pris bolla, senior politics correspondent for u.s.a. today, who is with us from washington, which may be good because she went to michigan state and eugene here went to michigan. so we try to keep at least one city between them at all times. heidi, what do you make of the follow-on? tomorrow morning is going to dawn to steve's point, we are going to have a discussion about military matters where north korea is concerned. and areas of joint cooperation between china and the u.s. and there has to be some

follow-on on 59 very large objects thrown up into the sky. >> right, brian, because looking at history and our intervention in other parts of the middle east, what happened tonight was the easy part. what happens next, and whether this administration actually has a clear strategy is the hard part. you see the statements that are coming out of congress. there is some split there over whether all members were necessarily supportive of this. but what they are unified in is that this administration now needs to come to congress and to articulate a clear strategy about what happens next. we don't know what syria's next actions are going to be. and if this is the end of it. and there's a big question mark given the dramatic turnabout that we've just seen in the president's position on intervention here that they actually have a strategy. so they are going to have to come to congress and articulate that. and the question also is with the president's tenuous

political situation right now, hate bring in the polls here, but it's relevant, if we do get sucked in further here whether he is going to be able to come to the congress and come to the american people in an effective way and ask them to support him in getting us further involved in a conflict in which he made such a clear statement on in his campaign. >> yeah. >> he just before the election likened getting involved in syria to potentially starting world war iii. and now he is taking this elective action without the consent of congress. and i think that's something that he's going to have to reconcile. >> that was kind of the position of the administration when i came to work this past monday morning. saying nothing of back that far. heidi, not that there is anyone superficial in washington, but in a town where he can't get enough friends to go to get health care, isn't it easier to get support on a show of american force over seas?

>> absolutely. and i think that that is the big shift that we have seen here politically is that we are seeing members of the republican party who frankly would not support the previous out and is statements like marco rubio and house members that i have been monitoring on twitter. just by virtue of this congress being run by and represented by his party i think that there will be more support, but that is limited. and as long as we can make surgical strikes like this that maybe make people feel better about our moral standing and our moral urgency and acting on this, fine. i still am skeptical because what we are basing this on is trump's gut and trump's reaction to images. all americans reacted. those were horrible images. we have seen images like that before. there has been a previous

chemical attack. we saw those images of that syrian boy washing up in the mediterranean sea and these things wane with time. i am still skeptical that there is wide support in this war weary country of getting entangled in another major military conflict. >> after a long night thank you for your patience. thank you for your vies and reflections on what might be your reporting tomorrow. thanks. we go back to malcolm nance, our intelligence expert. for those who did not see his first appearance with us since the attack about an hour ago, malcolm, i want you to go into greater detail. we see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two u.s. navy vessels in the eastern mediterranean. i am tempted to quote the great leonard co hen. i am guided by the beauty of our weapons.

they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armorments making for them what is a brief flight over this air field. what are you convinced that they hit? >> they are beautiful photographs but you have to understand that that is beauty in the destruction of other men and individuals and machines. and they are destructive weapons systems in flight. what they have struck out the air base. right now had a series -- mid 23 aircraft and mid 25s and other helicopters there. but for the most -- we would immediately get rid of capacity to protect aircraft and essentially punish syria by taking away a part of their aircraft fleet. that is the exact strategy that the obama administration had in

2013. they were going to take away a very large part of the syrian air force and change the strategic balance in the middle east by taking their air force away. that would put them at a much weaker position with regards to israel. in this case we decided to just take out the air base where we knew that that aircraft flew out and dropped that chemical weapon. you have to take out its entire capacity to launch and recover aircraft even though i understand that the run way was minimally damaged. we destroyed all of the aircraft or most of the aircraft on the base. you limit their capacity and of course we destroy the weapons storage bunkers. those are the most critical components here. we are very good at that. this is exactly what missiles were designed for.

>> the question is how many casualties did we inflict in this strike? we don't just blow up buildings. when you blow up a building with a 500 pound cruise missile system it sends blast effects which kill and injure individuals. we are already seeing reports from russia today and syrian state television that there were many casualties. russia is claiming there may have been russian casualties. we won't know that from the pentagon's perspective for a couple of days as the intelligence starts to flow in. we did a very significant strike tonight however that is not going to limit bashar al assad's capacity to go in and continue killing civilians. he may shift to a much larger component in order to inflict the damage that he needs to do to meet his strategic goals. >> thank you. that is just a degree of detail

and analysis i have not heard or seen all night and we appreciate you for that. as we near the end of our hour, some thoughts about what could happen tomorrow at this rate? >> i think a lot of people including malcolm have referenced the fact what is next? one of the reasons that regime change is not even mentioned is because we have no idea who would replace bashar al assad. once upon a time when we supported that moderate syrian opposition and like jefferson yn farmers they have gotten way more radical. the combination of extremist groups we don't want those people to replace bashar al assad. we don't have a plan b right now as far as i can tell. >> suggested headline for tomorrow? >> trump goes to war will

probably be the headline. take it a step further. what is the end result? what would be an end result that the united states would like to see in syria that is possible? is it some sort of divided country where you leave assad in power but only of the coastal strip? and then you somehow get rid of isis and then i don't know what you do with the rest of the country because you do something. can you clarify that? can you figure it out? is that something that is possible? how in the world do you get there from the mess that you are in now? i think both of those questions are hard and neither has a good answer right now. >> here is another thing that doesn't have a good answer.

who is the first person to take a whack at it. there is no fix in on russia. we were willing to hit and kill russians in this attack. >> i haven't gotten to him yet. >> really? >> seriously. it's out there. the optics of russian involvement with three minutes left of our hour. it's been in the background all night. >> well, we had allowed the russians to go in there when we did not follow through on the red line. that is a lot of white space there. they have had 40 years of support for the assad family. they had been keeping their powder dry for a long time. they have an investment there. if there could be some kind of very high level summit between russia and the u.s. about

protectort where there are u.s. special operations forces, continued to be russian forces and some kind of peace deal, in a way that would be the best possible outcome. it is incredibly remote and difficult. it's very, very easy to put your foot in the wrong direction there. >> we are joined here in new york two minutes prior to actually going on by chris hayes who anchored the hour before we knew what we were going to be covering tonight. you did your level best because we had reports from our pentagon produc producer. so you had to conduct all of those conversations without a degree of certainty. and now here we are having known what we are covering. >> and the range of options that we were discussing, of course, was something extremely limited

and targeted or something more open ended. this seems more like the former end of the spectrum, something similar to the kinds of things that were being contemplated in 2013 when the then-president came forward and said we can do something to -- these kinds of weapons. i want to get congressional approval. it is interesting tonight to see congressional reaction based on the fact that he was unable to get that congressional approval four years ago. many members of congress praising the president now and saying i am glad i didn't have to go for it. >> don't forget it is easier to find friends in washington following the flexing of u.s. muscle overseas than it is when you doing health care. with thanks to the guests who have allowed our coverage to go seamless for the past several

hours and for the guests who made this past hour possible, with thanks to chris hayes for anchoring his second shift of the night, chris hayes will take now the next hour of our coverage. >> thank you. it is midnight here on the east coast. we are live with our continuing coverage of the air strikes against syria and the syrian regime launched by president trump a few hours ago. i am chris hayes. at 8:40 p.m. eastern time two u.s. war ships fired 59 tomahawk cruise missiles at a single target in syria. the airfield in homs province where military officials say u.s. believe bashar al assad fired chemical weapons into rebel held territory. target was not the run way but the aircraft, aircraft shelters, fuel supply areas and air defense and radar systems. the strikes were in response, the pentagon says,