YouSaid · the spoken record

David Sanger

lines on the record: 80
first: 2017-11-27
most recent: 2017-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He does the same thing in Japan. I mean, in Japan the other day, when he did the first stop on his trip, he said, we have to get to a point where the Japanese are producing cars to be sold in America, in America. Well, I went back and checked. The Japanese are now producing 3.4 million cars in the United States Now, depending on how you measure their content that's half to 70% of what they're selling in the United States, but that's a very different world than it was when I was a correspondent in Japan, and Toyota had just opened up its first plant here”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. I mean, the TPP, people forget this. China was not on the inside of it. It was on the outside. They could have joined it, but they would have had to go change a lot to go do it. So walking away from that, whatever you thought of the restrictions or not was a gift to the Chinese. And now they're going off and picking off the members of the TPP and striking individual trade deals with them. So we keep handing them one victory after another, and at some point we're going to have to learn how to design our national security strategy around the A recognition that China is going to be a relatively equal power.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese leadership is in deep trouble, and they know it. So they've got a lot of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but we're not spending our time thinking about What areas we can really cooperate with them on other than North Korea, and what areas we have to set or say we're all going to grow together. Because if the plan is that we're going to contain China, That one's over. We're not containing them. It won't be contained, and we couldn't do it if we wanted to. So then the question is, do you make space in the international system to go deal with them? I'm not sure that I'm seeing very creative thinking about this within this administration.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we don't keep our eye on that ball even while we are dealing with Iran and North Korea and cyber weapons and the future of nuclear weapons, and of course the huge domestic agenda here, starting with inequality issues, if we don't keep focused on that, when historians go back and they write about what happened to the American polity, that is going to be the big story. And that doesn't mean that China is on a straight run up. They've got all kinds of internal problems of their own. They've got to create jobs at a pace that is absolutely astounding. And right now have no ideological core to the country. Their appeal is all one of economic growth. And if that music stops playing,”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hundred years later, nineteen forty nine Mao declares China an independent country, but a dead poor one, right? They're no longer poor, they aren't at our scale yet on military or economic power, and certainly on the attractiveness of their system. But we're giving them many opportunities to make that case, and what he argued was that by twenty forty nine. Not all that far away. A hundredth anniversary of Mao's declaration of China as the modern Chinese state, the country should emerge as the world's biggest economic and military power.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Chinese can't believe their luck. First They had a president in George W. Bush who after 9-11 and the United States was understandably on its heels, went back and started us off on what became sixteen years of non stop war in a part of the world that the Chinese fundamentally weren't that considered that central. And that period of time was the time period of China's greatest growth. And when you go back and you read what Xi Jinping said during the Nineteenth Party Congress a week and a half ago, where he really cemented his He laid out a kind of historical tale that the Chinese very much believe. It starts in the eighteen thirties or forties during the worst of the opium wars where China felt like it was most under the heel of the West.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that division's always been there. Look, when I covered President Bush, we'd go down to Crawford and I'd go running in the morning and I remember I would stop at a Starbucks and I'd pick up a New York Times off the rack there to go buy it with my cup of coffee. And one day a lady tapped me on the shoulder and said, do you read that? And I looked at her and I said, ma'am, it's so much worse than you know. I write some of this. And she said, you really need to get with your people. She said. That existed long before Donald Trump came onto the scene. He has. Taken that wedge and made it all the greater, and that worries me because I don't want to see the United States go back to the ears of Adams and Jefferson, where you had press that was directly linked to specific parties and candidates”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's that tell you? That tells you there's good, aggressive reporting going on. We're moving from an administration to that declared in February there was no contact between their campaign and the Russians, to by my count eight or nine members of the nine guys.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best news organizations in America, and the news organizations that really make you recognize why the First Amendment means so much. And I think we've all learned a lot in the past year about why it means so much, become part of what's called the resistance. We're not there to be the resistance to President Trump. That's not our role. And if we're doing that, we're making a big mistake. We're playing right into his game. We are there to report the news as aggressively as we can. And when you think back at the things that President Trump has argued were fake news, disclosures by the New York Times, the Washington Post, many others about the investigation into the Russia case. By and large, the big stories that have been broken by the times in the post have got a very, very high, well over ninety percent accuracy rate.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's got the potential to have a very pernicious effect. I mean, having the president declare that, you know, the failing New York Times, the Lying New York Times, The fake news CNN and William is an effort to try to denigrate major news organizations so that he can go try to push the narrative that you're hearing from many alternative news organizations that have come up, some of which are quite good and some of which are quite partisan. What I worry about is this that we don't want to let”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's happening in these cases is the government is wrapping cyber in so much secrecy that we're unable to have a real debate about how vulnerable we are and what we're doing to other countries. And the two are completely related. You can't set rules for one without the other. The environment for reporting is very hard, but it didn't stop us from reporting on another very big cybercase involving North Korea earlier this year. It was a program that President Obama had authorized or sped up in 2014 to go attack North Korea's missiles using a cyber and electronic warfare techniques.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tough with the hardest national security issues like the cyber issues, and we try to be pretty careful with those. I mean, we're not just out publishing everything that we've learned. In the case of Stuxnet, it's now pretty well revealed that of things that came out in FOIA and in the Cartwright case. And he wasn't convicted. He didn't plead guilty to leaking. He completed guilty to lying to the FBI and then was pardoned by President Obama and President Obama's last days in office.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't politically motivated, right? Wasn't done by a state. We don't know what led to who the attacker was yet, or at least I don't know who the attacker was in the case of big credit rating agency that just got hit. Their CEO lost his job as well. And it was entirely predictable. I mean, they went through the usual process of denying that it happened and telling you very little about it. I remember saying to one of their crisis managers who was giving me excuses why we couldn't go and talk to their executives about it. I said, you know, I think in about two weeks, if you keep with this, the board is going to come to the conclusion that your chief executive is gone. And I was wrong. It was about 10 days.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, some boys are changing their mind. Target got hit, criminal case, right, a very sophisticated attack, but a criminal one. And their CEO lost it.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be nice if we all came to an agreement that we won't do this, the sort of arms control agreement of cyber. The problem is the NSA would stop and say, wait a minute, we're putting this in systems around the world so that we can deal with our adversaries if we get into a bigger confrontation. Do you want to tell us that we can't have any implants in Russia's systems or China's systems? So we're in a very complex moment.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Command, we already do, but it will be more independent. Our problem is the defense side. Almost all of the targets in the United States and in most major industrialized countries are in private hands. So how are you going to tell a company here's what you have to go do? And even if you could the companies necessarily afford to go do that. You were only as defended as your weakest link, right? So we've all seen Things called implants, basically malware that has been put inside our electric grid and our financial systems. Some days you discover it, some days you don't.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they did get hacked. They got hacked dramatically by either hacked or things stolen from an insider. And the interesting part of this tale is that the North Korean weapon that was used, cyber weapon that was used against Britain, was based on vulnerabilities that had gotten stolen from the NSA, which the NSA does not want to admit to. And that's part of the problem here. We've wrapped such secrecy around cyber that we're not having sort of an open debate about how we want to go use this the way we did on nuclear weapons. So we built up a U.S. cyber command, which came about in good part during the Obama administration and is now sort of ready, just about ready to go off on its own. So we'll have a, you know, we have Northern Command and we have Central Command to do the Middle East and we have Space Command and we will soon have a separate cyber.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the offensive side of the US is building up quite rapidly. The National Security Agency has gotten much more skill than I think remains probably the most skillful player in the world, although the Russians and the Chinese are right behind them.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the moment's going to come, and the comparison here is sort of when the airplane was invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright, and it took about Six or seven years before somebody said, hey, I can put a machine gun on one of these things and then took another four or five years before we had World War I in the Red Baron and 35 years later we used an airplane combined with another technology to level Hiroshima. We're at kind of the World War I stage right now with cyber weapons.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's nothing to attack. So there are other things you could go do. And in the case of Iran, we did have big cyber plans, and Alex Gibney made a movie based in part on Confront and Conceal and the story about Olympic Games called Zero Days. And in the course of that, he revealed another program called NitroZeus, which happened during the Obama administration, which was a plan for how you would basically shut down Iran using cyber weapons if we got into a war with them. Fortunately, we never had to go do that. But it was an enormously complex, big military plan to go do this. So we're in a different world now. We are in a world in which countries that previously had nuclear weapons but couldn't really use them are now building up huge arsenals of cyber weapons, and they have so far not broken out into a broad cyber.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know? We might not see it, but one of the great things about being North Korea is you're pretty invulnerable to cyber attack. If your country is one of the least wired in the world, then you have all of the advantages in attacking one of the most wired ones.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For it from the few times that a president is actually identified a country responsible for one of these things and imposed a few sanctions that I bet the North Koreans never felt among all the other sanctions they've had. And that was pretty much it. So we have not”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what really was going on there was they melted down seventy percent of Sony Picture Entertainment's computer systems. Imagine do this thought experiment for a minute, David. Imagine that they had landed some saboteurs at Long Beach, and they had called an Uber and fought their way through the traffic to get up to the Sony studio. And when they got there, they had stuck some dynamite under the movie studio and run like hell. And you turned on CNN and you saw Sony burning. Whoever was sitting in the Oval Office would have had to go do something to the North Koreans that was pretty obvious. Instead they got that much damage done or more with a cyber weapon that no one ever saw coming, that they spent months planning out inside, working inside the Sony computer systems. And when it happened, what happened to them? President Obama blamed the”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And even maybe when it happens. So people like to compare cyber weapons and nuclear weapons a lot. And the comparison doesn't work much because nuclear weapons are on an on and off switch. And if the North Koreans used one on us You know what would happen to Pyongyang forty five minutes later? But they felt free to use cyber weapons in a way that they wouldn't even feel free to use saboteurs. So think about the Sony hack. The Sony, you may remember it for the released emails about Angelina Jolie.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that you can go from blowing up a facility under the sands in Iran to trying to blow up an election using very subtle techniques over social media.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That used cyber techniques, as you may have heard, over the election, right? And which gives you a sense of what the range of cyber weapons are.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he was mostly holding seminars and campaign events around protecting ourselves from cyber intrusions, a big issue then and bigger now. When he became president he suddenly discovered he was inheriting this remarkable cyber program which I described in a book called Confront and Conceal. And it turns out that that effort, which he was reluctant about, he was fearful that once it came out, he knew eventually it would, other countries might use it as an excuse to attack us. It turns out that Stuxnet was the starting gate for the remarkable acceleration in cyber attacks between countries. At the time I was writing that story and covering it, we couldn't really find another big state-on-state attack that Russians have done some things against Estonia and so forth. Now, the Iranians have attacked the Saudis, North Koreans have attacked us at Sony and Britain in just this year.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Stuxnet was a remarkable and remarkably sophisticated effort by the United States and Israel to use a cyber weapon for the first time that could do what previously you could only accomplish by bombing a facility or sending in saboteurs to blow it up, and the target in this case was Iran's nuclear enrichment site. And the program started under President Bush, and when President Obama took over, President Bush said, there are two programs you really want to go stick with, no matter what you may have said on the campaign trail. One was the drone program, which, as you recall, President Obama accelerated significantly. And that one was pretty obvious to everybody. It was sort of the least covert, covert program I've ever seen. And the second was a program called Olympic Games, which was the code name for this effort to go undermine the Iranian program. During the 2008 campaign,”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could have told you that. Yeah, yeah. I should have checked with you first. It turns out that The Iranian view of this whole thing is if you want to blow up the deal, blow up the deal, but then give us our 97% of our uranium back and then we'll start renegotiating from the start. Well, I don't think that's what Washington has in mind right now.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's already happening and he's been re-elected once, but he's going to run out of steam sooner or later. And, you know, as you recall, there was just this remarkable alignment. I was out covering this day-to-day in various European cities as they negotiated. I discovered that you don't get any sympathy from your colleagues when you say, I'm stuck in Vienna for five weeks. Yeah, that's not a lineup.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Congress does nothing, then the deal remains in place. The president can go out in the campaign trail when he runs for reelection and say I decertified the agreement, and his supporters may or may not, depending on how much they know about this, think, well, that means he walked out of it, when in fact he didn't. And this was what his advisors were sort of manipulating him towards. Enable him to say that he desertified it but don't actually do something that left it. The big issue is if the Iranians feel that in the end they got tricked and that they didn't get any economic benefit from it, when the time runs out on this 10 and 15 years from now, there's going to be significant pressure to go back and start up their bond program.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It certainly makes Iranians wonder whether the United States will try to block them from getting the benefits they were supposed to get from the deal, which was economic re-engagement with the world. It also, if you're the North Koreans and you're looking at the United States having changed direction on this deal, you sort of say, well, why would we negotiate a deal with them? I think that you can't overstate here what the president actually accomplished. He decertified the deal, which is a communication between the White House and Congress about whether he would certify that they're complying with it. That does not get the United States out of the deal. It doesn't end it. If Congress does nothing, They had 60 days and now many fewer.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seem to be working. Look, if we could get North Korea to anything even close to resembling the Iran deal, and North Koreans, of course, have their weapons ready. If you could get them back then, it would be the greatest diplomatic accomplishment of the century. But it's all a question of sort of the perspective of where you are.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very short answer And he did finally with some coaching end up with it doesn't last long enough. That's been his main complaint.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one of our interviews with him during the campaign, I did say to him at one point So of this one hundred thirty, one hundred forty page agreement, what part of it would you have gotten up and walked out over? And that was a more difficult question, it turned out.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one critique that President Trump has that I think is quite accurate about the agreement is that it's not permanent starting in year 10, but really at year 15 the Iranians have a lot of restrictions lifted on them. Well, that's a problem. But at a moment when we've got some other problems around the world, it strikes me you may want to kick that one down the road a little bit and deal with it when you need as that moment gets closer. And 15 years from now, it's not going to be the same Supreme Leader running Iran. Might be somebody worse, might be somebody easier, but it's not going to be the same one. And so it struck me that he was looking for a way to fulfill a campaign declaration that he made to me and Maggie Haberman and many others that this was the worst deal ever and he would renegotiate it.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to the negotiations with was that it was better to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon and then confront them on everything else than to let them get a nuclear weapon and try to confront them when they were in nuclear power because that's North Korea right and so”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The agreement has been quite effective for at least the year and a half it has been actually implemented and in effect. We have not found any evidence, U.S. intelligence agencies haven't found any evidence that they have cheated on what's actually in the agreement, which is why the president had to go reach for things beyond the agreement. Well, they're shooting off missiles, which they shouldn't do. It's a violation of UN resolutions, but it's not in the agreement. Well, they are supporting terrorism, and they are menacing their neighbors and all that. Absolutely true. But the theory that the Obama administration went into the...”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you'd need inspections if you were actually going to freeze them from building up the size of their arsenal, and they have never let inspectors go beyond that one major reactor site at Yong Byon that we talked about from the 1980s. And the country is so mountainous that I can't imagine on our intelligence about it so poor that it's very hard to imagine how you would get. Inspectors into the places you needed them to be or even would know. If you had inspected, if you don't know how many nuclear weapons they have, if you only have a guess, then you'll never know you've rounded them all up.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the theory of a freeze itself is that you wouldn't need inspections because you would know if they violated it if they”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chinese have been pushing this, the Russians have pushed this. And while it sounds reasonable they freeze their missile tests and their nuclear tests we freeze doing our military exercises. The fact of the matter is freezing them in this state is a lot different than freezing them ten years ago. You are essentially enshrining a nuclear capability that is basically what Pakistan's was by the late 90s or early 2000s. Leaving yourself open to the possibility that they could always threaten to hit an American city. Now, the thought is if you negotiated it quickly, they couldn't prove that they could hit an American city. If I was Kim Jong-un, and I actually think he's a pretty rational player in this, I wouldn't enter that negotiation until he had actually proven what he can hit and then say, sure, I'll freeze because at that moment.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second option is that the president decides he's actually going to take some kind of limited military action, a preemptive strike against some of the launch facilities or some of the nuclear facilities. If he did this in a kinetic way to blow things up, it's got all the risks that you just described. And you've heard the South Korean president say that he's not going to permit that to happen. If he really rolls a dice and tries a negotiated settlement, and if the North Koreans are willing to go along and negotiate, which is not at all clear, Then I think the best he could get would be a freeze of their existing capability.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the president said starting january second just before he took office in a tweet was that he was going to solve the North Korean nuclear problem. And I wish him luck in that because many of his predecessors have tried that. What his real options are, I think there are basically three. I think one, which may be the most likely, is acquiescence, that they will get their capability and that the president will decide as each of his predecessors did, that the risk is just too high and that it will split us from the Japanese and the South Koreans who will be on the receiving end of the worst part of this.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like that. We have cities in America with significantly bigger GDPs than... Korea, that they could manage to both build a nuclear weapon with a lot of help from the Chinese, the Russians, and others, and actually build cyber weapons that they used quite successfully to attack Sony and then turned around to attack the British hospital system earlier this year. You know, they're playing well above their weight class.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, if his grandfather and his father were interested mostly in survival, there's a lot of evidence to support the theory that Kim Jong-un wants more than that, that he actually thinks that he can reunify the Korean peninsula under North Korea, that South Korea has all the money and the technology, but that North Korea has the pure Korean understanding of what Korea should be, and that with this weapon, it's entirely possible, and we just won't know until he's got it and he can use it, he's got the world's greatest blackmail material. The fact that this broken and broke country whose GDP is about $25 billion that has fewer internet connections,”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we have a hard enough time trying to figure out what our own leaders are thinking, so you can imagine how hard it is, Kim Jung.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After you had moved back here, that he came to the conclusion that he really needed a crash program to start their missile program.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's what you do. Present Bush used to say to me when I was covering the White House, which I did from the end of the Clinton administration through most of the Bush administration, were not going to tolerate A nuclear North Korea. In fact, he sat down with me just Half a mile from where we're sitting today one day when he was giving a big speech at the science museum here, right after the North Koreans had conducted their nuclear test and said, you know, we're not going to tolerate this. Well, he has tolerated it. He tolerated it. President Obama, and you witnessed a good deal of this in the early days, made a perfectly reasonable decision that he should focus on Iran because Iran didn't yet have the bomb and that North Korea was sort of already in the rearview mirror. And it was only later in his presidency that he”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To try to stop them and create a crisis, and each one of those decisions was perfectly defensible if you took it in isolation. If you stack them up over twenty five years, you get the North Korea we have today, which is armed with 20 to 60 nuclear weapons, depending on whose estimate you believe, and missiles that are just about on the capability of reaching LA, Chicago. We don't know yet whether they can actually deliver the weapon and keep it from burning up coming into the atmosphere, but if they can't now, they'll get that figured out. There are a lot of presidents to blame if you looked at any one of their decisions in isolation. It's perfectly defensible, but boy, you add them up, and you've created a new nuclear state run by a pretty unstable guy.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was before the North Koreans had tested a nuclear weapon. They didn't test one until 2006. The story we're talking about starts in the late 80s and goes all the way through the Bush administration in the 90s. Clinton and the Bush administrations. At every point each American president said it's not worth the risk to soul, which the North Koreans could destroy with conventional weapons right along the DMZ.”
2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source