Kevin Rudd: Trump's Syria Strike "Absolutely Right"

Asia Society Policy Institute President Kevin Rudd went on "Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas" to discuss President Donald Trump's decision to carry out a missile strike in Syria on April 6, 2017. He spoke with Bloomberg's Alix Steel, Jonathan Ferro and David Westin about the impact of the strike on the President's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who arrived in the United States earlier in the day for a U.S.-China summit.  

Rudd declared that President Trump's decision to attack Syria in response to its government's chemical weapons attack, which killed more than 80 civilians this week, was "absolutely right," "because if you are silent or inactive in response to the continued use of chemical weapons, you start to normalize it as a global behavior." 

In terms of the attack's impact on the U.S.-China summit in Mar-a-Lago, Rudd estimated that the attack would not "derail or complicate" the U.S.-China summit, which both sides view as intrinsically important. He pointed out that the Chinese government had thus far not directly criticized the attack. Rudd suggested that the Chinese would take the attack "as more of an indication that the United States, under this President, is prepared to take a unilateral action" vis-a-vis North Korea. He warned, however, that "there is an ocean of difference between, frankly, an attack on one airbase in Syria and taking out the nuclear capability of the North Korean regime." (3 min., 42 sec.)