Page 7 - Reset Policy News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Gregory B. Poling, senior fellow for Southeast Asia and director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, and senior associate Murray Hiebert entitled "Vietnam Party Congress Meets to Choose Leaders, Set Policy Direction": * * * The Vietnam Communist Party launched its 13th congress on January 25, a crucial meeting held every five years to choose the country's top leaders and set its major policy course. Nearly 1,600 delegates will seek to set a direction to boost economic growth and navigate the nation's greatest foreign policy challenge: increasing competition between the world's tw...

Erica, this was not about policy, this was about politics. if it was about policy it would have worked through the embassy process. >> when we talk about the policy, the president certainly as we know had the power to change, to set policy. what's fascinating what sam just touched on here. we have ambassador sondland who had one policy. you hear from bill taylor, you hear from volker who saw something different, who saw perhaps a completely different channel. from a security perspective how concerning is that that there are multiple messages out here and it's not clear which one is official? >...

Ambassadors don't directly have a direct line to the president. key surveillance targets. but ambassadors typically coordinate their work through the national security council. they didn't go directly to the president. what we learned today is gordon sondland considers his work to be part of a regular channel because the leadership was involved. rather than sitting down and having an inner agency channel, there was this informal process, i'll call it irregular because it was so out of touch with reality -- or, excuse me, with actual policy goals, the president to rudy giuliani to volker, sondl...

We just had a career ambassador who i served with in moscow, the consummate professional who understands everything that's going on and then you have somebody like sondland who is basically an amateur. yes, the president, of course, does have the ability to name whoever he wants, but sometimes that not necessarily backfires but has ramifications. one of the ramifications here is that you've got shifting messages, you've got rudy giuliani wandering around, you know, putting across whatever his message is, perhaps directly from the president, perhaps not. i mean, it's all very confusing, not jus...

Whole nature of the struggle. so what i'm saying is sondland's testimony -- ambassador sondland's testimony, as carl mentioned, not only added dots but connected some and it is now clear that sondland was not some kind of rogue elephant, that sondland was implementing a policy that was coming directly to him either via giuliani or from the president himself and that the president's main concern was a corrupt intent. that's very clear, and that's what's so devastating about his testimony. now i don't expect republicans to say, oh, give up. it's over. sorry. oh, we're totally wrong. no. what i'm...