hello and welcome to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle candidate trump was criticized for not having a coherent understanding of global affairs indeed he largely dismissed the foreign policy elites a year after his election in since his inauguration is there such a thing as a trumpy in view of the international system. across talking the world according to trump i'm joined by my guest george samuel in new york he is a fellow at the global policy institute of london metropolitan university and author of the book bombs for peace in miami we have tied barry he is the washington d.c. coordinator for the woman led peace in social justice movement code pink and in berkeley

we have john walsh he is a scientist peace activist and author of numerous anti-war publications are gentlemen cross-talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate john let me go to you first because you got up early as for this program i much appreciate it. if we're if we look at cam the campaign trail we look at candidate trump and we look at his foreign policy eleven months in here first of all there's a great discrepancy but is there any coherence to his foreign policy in respect of what he ran on from the time he was inaugurated to now do you see a trumpy in vision out there go ahead john then it's a really difficult question because as you noted there are powerful forces against the vision that here take you they did such as it was during the campaign and i think maybe it's good to go back to that for a second because. i'm especially interested in how. american

progressives are reacting to his clearly what were themes of peace and so let's can we can we go back to that for just a second in the in the campaign donald trump said in the primaries where he was confronting a really a rather hawkish base he wanted to get along with russia progressives dismiss that as so much talk but if you think about it why would he say that to an audience that would not like the message he only thing that would do and the only thing it did do was lose him votes so he wasn't saying it out of opportunism so that was genuine the idea of especially getting along with russia. a simple way to say it but really do you need to say much more was genuine and other things were genuine to the progressive should have applauded like the trans-pacific partnership

which is progressive to then working against for years and years and. then on the first day and there was a silence no one said hey that's good maybe we can work together and actually bernie sanders did ok all right really understanding let me let me let me go to george now in new york here but george on almost everything else i'm glad that john mentioned those things here i brought my own little short list here pretty much stayed the course in the middle east the tragedy of yemen in there which is you know a disgrace to humanity and everyone involved in it should be ashamed of themselves it's awful what's going on there afghanistan stay the course ok he did leave the iran nuclear deal or in the process the only thing that barack obama did right in foreign policy as far as i can tow arming ukraine syria is a mixed bag north korea of course the tensions we have there which is a lot more complicated than the mainstream media want to talk about and of course as john has pointed out u.s. russia relations are dead in the water go ahead george. yes that's absolutely right

by and large he hasn't affected any serious change in u.s. foreign policy but there are indications that he would like to effect some kind of a serious change i mean despite all of the criticisms that he is on the for his supposed that friendliness toward russia even though there's no evidence for it. and despite of the fact that he's facing a serious prospect of impeachment over his supposed. traitorous attitude toward russia he has maintained a friendly stance towards russia. he didn't need to meet with putin he did meet with him and then he didn't need to. talk to the press and tell them that he thinks of relations with russia is a good thing and not a bad thing so he took a considerable political risk in doing that and that would indicate to me that he

is interested in improving relations with russia so it's a credible a mixed bag we don't yet know how things will evolve i mean you can take a more optimistic view that this is still the first year of a trumpet ministration and that he may decide to go his own way in the second and third years and actually go with his instinct which i think is to improve relations with russia george let me get it in miami you do say go his own way i think that's a very interesting way of looking at it inside the thing is that it's not good if trump wants to go is own way or not is if he's going to be allowed to can i think this is what i look at is not necessarily policy but the institutional barriers that are in front of him this is what he faces more than anything else personally i think he would like to rebuild america the him but i believe all that stuff he had to say infrastructure sup like that ok and i think it's something he understands. foreign policy well when he was had the lebanese prime minister right next to me he

started criticizing his blog and everybody kind of broke out in laughter hezbollah is part of the government ok but what about the institutional obstacles that are in the way of any kind of trompe and worldview go ahead. well first we came into this trump presidency thinking he would be an isolationist and he would take us out of foreign wars and the fact is that he's got us deeper and deeper in barack obama's war as you stated rightly peter this shameful horrific human rights violating catastrophe that's going on in yemen but what i see is i see trump the big business man and i see that he's his idea of foreign policy is tweeting name calling and arming to the teeth these oligarchs in in saudi arabia and causing havoc there is now two thousand soldiers u.s.

soldiers we found out in syria these are the trump administration is all over the place they don't have a foreign policy the only foreign policy is coming from generals and generals in his cabinet are the ones that are holding him back they're the ones who are actually the same ones in the room is supposedly but i think that trump the idea of going becoming more friendly with russia is a great idea we want to be have friends around the world but we can't do it when you've got a media that's so controlled and it's so headstrong and their idea of deciding what our foreign policy should be foreign policy should come from our government we should have more control in congress over this this out of control president we see more be pretty who thought that the trumps presidency would bring peace to the world on every front was well i. was dreaming that's

not what he said is not what he promised and that's not what we should expect i think i think well yes but i think that. to go back to first of all there is some progress in syria that the trump and and putin did arrange the ceasefire and south was so. area the situation there is improved dramatically now they're their forces against that but that's their trump did meet twice with putin once in hamburg and once in southeast asia even though there was a lot of pressure not to do that the atmospherics at those meetings were very good even though there was pressure against all that and the other thing we have to look at is president xi the atmospherics there are very good i think you know to go back to the t p p that was not just that was the economic i'm not looking for everything in the process and it's not an election if you if he does something you support it

be the world was going to sing kumbaya ok with the election of donald trump what he i was going to i'm going on his word a little bit like that less less interventionism i mean i would have been happy with that just last a bit all right go ahead or go ahead ty go ahead with yeah i just want to ask john i mean when you call. the head of a government in north korea little rocket man and you provoke and you provoke a new killer powered country country that is dangerous you that is you got us our policy that is lunatic changing this no i'm just saying as he would say on when you're talking about p.p. i'm just saying this is a very very dangerous part of his foreign policy if that's a policy at all. wow due out how are we going to deal with this if they're if this if this gets if this heightens the tensions between the united states and north korea not south korea north korea or china north korea but the united states in

particular and north korea ok we're going to talk a little bit more about who is going to pull out what i just think hang hang on gentlemen i'm going to go to a hard break and after that a hard break we'll continue our discussion on trump's foreign policy stage with our . there are. a batch or sudden passing i've only just learned you worry yourself and taken your last turn. up to you as we all knew it would i tell you i'm sorry i could so i write these last words in hopes to put to rest these things that i never got off my chest. i remember when we first met my life turned on each breath. but then my feeling started to change you talked about war like it was again still some are fond of you

those that didn't like to question our ark and i secretly promised to never again like it said one does not leave a funeral the same as one enters the mind it's consumed with death this one quite different i speak to you now because there are no other takers. to claim that mainstream media has met its maker. welcome to the wonderful world of blood donation i come here every three weeks to get my transfusion to be specific i receive immunoglobulin my body gets and supporters that i cannot produce itself around the world giving blood is seen as a see bruce as the prize winner of cook and. one of the risks of a donation in a tree they put themselves on a log they did accept the reject. sold it all in the waters of the house.

there should. welcome back across the uk where all things considered i'm peter remind you we're discussing trump's world view. ok gentlemen the more we talk about of the more we seem to disagree which is good john you want to react quickly to something that tie in georgia and myself i just say go ahead i just want to point out i made two points that i thought are maybe three if you want to include d.p.p. where trump had done well now what was the response to that from. the response to

that was well let's look at north korea i wasn't talking about north korea i'm not expecting a lot of north korea are though i don't think there's going to be a war there because of the stance of russia and china here but i would i think everyone i would ask a simple i don't ask this simple a quick opt out one and i want to i want to i want to ask the simple question trump did. there was something we would like in meeting with putin and meeting with good atmosphere with shade and even having some fine economic agreements did you see in any progressive publications did you see any dispatches from the code pink or any of the progressive organizations praising with one word of praise for that i use you know what have you know here i have with you john green with you john i mean the mainstream media is not going to say get anything good about it all about donald trump and that is not talking about the mainstream media well that's what

most people get their and their information from you know i'm sure you you know. and let me go to george on time george one of the problems i had you know i'll be really honest with you is i was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this president until he attacked syria a gross violation of international law based on a foul us now in retrospect if somebody had actually done so i judgments and point fingers here that's when i just said no i'm going to push back i didn't want hillary clinton i'm still glad she wasn't president but i made it very clear if we see the same bad behavior i'm going to call it out and that was wrong that is probably a war crime go ahead george. no there's no question that that was a war crime it was a violation of international lawyer was an act of naked aggression it wasn't done on any basis of any kind of serious investigation he rushed into that bombing campaign without doing any kind of laying the groundwork or anything like

that. and that's that's a terrible blot on the administration however it's interesting that he hasn't really followed up on that yet many people who actually were chairing the saw or the mainstream media who are excited by this expected him now to follow up on this and to launch some kind of a serious bombing campaign against syria or you know a regime change operation of the kind that obama didn't dare venture against assad he didn't do that and having done that bombing he kind of gone back to a much more reasonable. on syria in which he's got a wound down the c.i. a jihadi network and from. what we can gather from that conversation with. last week it looks like it's going to wind down the cooperation with the kurds so

it it does look like he's instinct would be during the campaign which was to basically end the whole regime change operation in syria it does seem to be bearing fruit now yeah and so the good thing is that he didn't follow the hands free money they rule i think there's an gentlemen i think there's a very interesting litmus test right before our eyes right now and it's ukraine time i let me go to you because again there are conflicting reports apparently there is a debate going on inside the white house and in the in the other agencies the report to the executive branch i think it's very interesting is that you know if lethal weapons were given to the partition go regime that conflict will heat up more. ok after what almost twelve thousand deaths there has been aggression coming from kim towards the dumbass here if trump somehow signs off on that then again this is it's this is the same perpetuation of a foreign policy we've seen for decades now i always say in this program it's the

genetic code it doesn't matter who is president the same kind of aggression will continue to be repeated go ahead well we see that a part of of trump's foreign policy is to sell arms wherever anybody is willing to buy the good point so we also have seen a uptick in the violence in eastern ukraine where we're seeing aggression both sides i believe but definitely coming from the the what's called the ukraine government at the moment we we i believe that the trump government the reason it looks like they're hemming and hawing is because they're very covert we don't know what they're doing as opposed to obama being a little bit more open but it getting back to syria i don't know where that's coming from we just found out that there are more soldiers and u.s. soldiers in syria i think the u.s. is responsible for major war crimes there were bombing in in syria is the

fair the problem is is we're not allowed to see what's going on in syria the united states puts a. filter on any news that coming out about there we just heard that there is thirty percent more civilian casualties and that's from a new york times article we don't know the facts but there are thirty times more civilians died in syria in iraq fighting isis then then united swell you know it's to a tie you should know i don't like these you should be thankful to argy because we do report those things ok i'm so proud of this network's coverage of syria. it really blew off the lid of the the pure nonsense that the mainstream was pumping out it was a really disgraceful coverage of the conflict here and i'd like to point out since we're on the topic here. take a look at the mainstream media and you'll never hear that rush it was a play in syria ok it's fine that very troubling go ahead john

well the antis jihad he's so well you oppose well that some of the operations have magnet for terrorists ok i have two thousand troops i find very disturbing and it looks like it is involved in this gambit with the so disturbing are we would all like to see war the better and you know exactly who i'm talking about here but again apparently the state department was in in the dark about this again i find this very troubling that's why i keep asking is there a trumping in view of the world because we keep looking it's separate issues i'm asking are there any dots that connected all go ahead. yeah i mean trump goes to saudi arabia dances with the brutal despots and now they feel emboldened and they're talking about this phony. war with iran you know this ron is backing hezbollah which is rightfully defending lebanon's border against

terrorists from isis and supposedly iran is getting involved in lebanon and the this is all this is all about israel the fact that. jared cushion or is there and trump has not come out and said one word about the building of new giant settlements in palestine there is no push towards of israel palestine peace agreement and the saudis are only instigating terrorism in syria we know that for a fact i don't know why we can't talk about it it seems like the third rail of politics now is not israel it's saudi arabia ok when you read images of let me jump in here let me give john the last word here i'm going to give john the last word twenty five seconds my friend go ahead. well i would say that the whole the killie's heel of trump's wish to to get along as he says with russia has always

been iran i don't think that's possible if he if he turns around into into an enemy but the basic problem there is that trump skull like capitol hill is the israeli occupied territory so that's the problem that is the key problem i think right now in some sort of is stephen cohen calls a detente two point zero with russia and i hope he gets to pursue it now everything he does well i do it i support how he does where we have a lot of differences here but i think at the end of the program i think we came to a lot of agreement at least on one topic here we've run out of time many thanks to my guests in miami new york and in berkeley and thanks to our viewers for watching us here darkie see you next time. on the list of course she just. from where did you do what we have i don't want to. rule. this with all of.

the. weapons tests.