CBS "Face the Nation" interviews during 2018: on War & Peace

Bernie Sanders: Withdraw US support for Saudi-led war in Yemen

SANDERS: I do. When we brought this up in March we ended up with 44 votes--only 5 Republicans. I think we now have a chance to get a majority of the Senate. I think people are looking at the horrific humanitarian disaster now taking place in Yemen. There was a recent report that over the last number of years some 75,000 children have died of starvation. This is a country dealing with cholera, with a terrible level of famine. This war was never authorized by the US Congress in violation of our constitution. And you got the Khashoggi incident which says that we have a Saudi government led by a despotic ruler who killed a political opponent in cold blood. Add that all together. I think the American people & Congress are now saying let us end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Rand Paul: Cut off arms sales to Saudis; war in Yemen hurts US security

PAUL: That evidence is overwhelming and, no, I don't think we can sweep this under the rug.

Q: President Trump imposed sanctions.

PAUL: The [Saudis] will see sanctions as weakness and if the President wants to act strongly he should cut off the arms sale not only because of the killing but until they stop indiscriminately bombing civilian populations.

Q: You're talking about in Yemen?

PAUL: Yes, in Yemen.

Q: Should this trigger some change in policy? The president says he's not going to hurt the economic benefits of arms sales.

PAUL: The arms sales don't make us safer. When we sell arms to a foreign country, it should not ever be for jobs, it should be for our national security. The Saudis' involving us in their war in Yemen is not good for our national security. So we should quit arming the Saudis.

Marco Rubio: Selling arms to Saudi Arabia gives us leverage over them

RUBIO: In Congress right now there is no pro-Saudi element that's going to stick with our relationship with Saudi Arabia as it's currently structured if they lured this man into this consulate, and killed him. As far as the options that are concerned, people talk a lot about the arms sales.

Q: The President said, basically, because there's $110 billion arms purchases on order from Saudi Arabia that that has to be weighed in the response.

RUBIO: It's not about the money; I would have phrased it differently. There are plenty other countries that would want to buy arms from the U.S. But when you sell arms to Saudi Arabia, it gives you leverage over them because they need replacement parts and training. You can't sanction a country by cutting them off of something if you never provided it in the first place.

Marco Rubio: Khashoggi: stop Saudi arms sales & reduce Yemen involvement

FLAKE: Well, severe action needs to be taken and I think the Congress will take it upon themselves to take that action if Saudi Arabia was involved.

Q: The president has ruled That involvement barely survived in the last go-round with the National Defense Authorization Act. It certainly won't survive with this kind of accusation

Q: You say if it is true. Is there any other explanation at this point?

FLAKE: There sure doesn't seem to be. There's just no good explanation and I think they know it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear different explanations that frankly won't make much sense, that it was done by lower level folks. That's what I would expect to come next.

Mike Pence: Progress toward denuclearization & peace on Korean Peninsula

PENCE: We're making progress restoring American strength in the world, seeing the opportunity for peace emerge on the Korean Peninsula. We're expecting a letter from Kim Jong-un communicating his reaffirmation of his commitment to denuclearization. No more nuclear tests. No more missile tests. Our hostages are home. That's all the result of the President's leadership.

Q: But the Secretary of State called off his visit?

PENCE: The President canceled the meeting a week ago because he wasn't seeing enough progress in denuclearization that that may well have resulted in what Kim Jong-un communicated to a South Korean envoy just last week, and we're anticipating the letter from Kim Jong-un and all the while our sanctions remain in place.

John Kerry: Change calculation in Syria by enforcing ceasefires

KERRY: Well, from the moment I was nominated, I said we have to change Assad's calculation. Throughout the 4 years I was secretary of state, I always raised the issue about how we needed to change that calculation. I particularly believed that after Assad had been violating ceasefires. It was clear he needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to know that we were going to hold him accountable. I believed that we had several options we could have done at very low risk. The President was not persuaded by my argument.

Q: Was he too risk averse?

KERRY: No, I think he had an attitude about Syria and a judgment about Syria. The President is the decider. And he had a feeling about where that might take him if he made some of the decisions that I and others proffered.

John Kerry: Use of force to respond to Syrian sarin gas attacks

KERRY: Chemical weapons. Yes, that's absolutely correct. And I supported President Trump's response to those partially. I supported the use of force, but I don't support just a one-off where you drop a few bombs and there's no follow-up diplomacy. I thought that President Trump should have done that.

Q: You thought President Obama should have done that, too.

KERRY: Yes. That's correct.

Q: [As Obama's Secretary of State] you were sent around the world to rally support for other countries to stand with the US to say that this red line on use of chemical weapons needed to be enforced. How difficult was that for you given that the President decided not to go through with those military strikes.

KERRY: Congress was clearly not going to give him the authority that he wanted.

Q: But you thought that the President could have gone ahead with those strikes?

KERRY: I did. Yes, I did.

John Kasich: Talk with North Korea, but reimpose sanctions if no results

KASICH: I'm worried about our foreign policy. I'm very, very concerned about this upcoming meeting with North Korea. I think we have to be extremely careful. Every time we have entered an agreement, they have backed away from it, they have misled us, and we cannot let the pressure up on North Korea. So, you know, promises don't matter. To me, it has to be a verifiable agreement. And if we relax these sanctions at all, we ought to be committed to being able to reimpose them if the North Koreans break their word. If you let the pressure up, I am very, very fearful that we will just find ourselves in this same situation or worse situation down the road. I'm glad they're talking. I'm glad they're meeting. But don't let the pressure up until we get verifiable results. Anything other than that will weaken our position and strengthen them. And we know what the history of that regime is.

Marco Rubio: North Korea should denuclearize, but I'm not optimistic

RUBIO: It depends. North Korea is a strange place. They're playing a game. Kim Jong-un, these nuclear weapons are something he's psychologically attached to. They're what give him the prestige and importance. We're not talking about him because of his global and economic power. We're talking about them because they have nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. And he knows that. And so for him to give that up is going to be very difficult. So, my suspicion remains that he is going to try to get as much sanctions relief as possible without having to give up his weapons. And I think it's going to be a lot of twists and turns along the way to try to get there, if it's even possible. But I hope I'm wrong. I would love to see them denuclearize. I'm not very optimistic about that.

Lindsey Graham: Iran nuke deal allows a bomb after 15 years

GRAHAM: Well, he's got a strategy to deny Iran a pathway to a bomb by withdrawing from this agreement [Obama's nuclear deal]. Fifteen years from now, all the restrictions on their uranium program go away. They can enrich and reprocess uranium and potentially plutonium without limitation. So, getting out of the agreement stops a nuclear arms race. But when it comes to containing Iran on the ground in Syria and other places, we don't have much of a strategy.

Q: How does exiting Obama's deal to freeze the nuclear program stop Iran from getting a bomb?

GRAHAM: The mere passage of time, they can have an industrial-strength enrichment program. And every Arab nation in the region has said that this deal was terrible. It meant that Iran one day would get a bomb without cheating. Israel believes it's a bad deal. I believe it's a bad deal.

Nikki Haley: Military action & sanctions against Syrian chemical weapons

HALEY: Obviously this was cumulative. Assad had been using chemical weapons multiple times. But more so, this was about the Security Council resolutions--Russia had vetoed all of them. So we felt like we had gone through every diplomatic measure of talking that we could, and it was time for action. We hope Assad got the message [that] the international community will not allow chemical weapons to come back into our everyday life, and the fact that he was making this more normal and that Russia was covering it up, all of that has to stop.

Q: Are there any consequences for Assad's patrons, Russia and Iran, who continue to protect him?

HALEY: Absolutely. So, you will see that Russian sanctions will be coming down. They will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons used.

Tim Kaine: Respond to Syrian chemical attack, but only via Congress

KAINE: When President Obama came to Congress on exactly the same instance in 2014, saying, "Syria has used chemical weapons against civilians, Congress should give authority for us to take military action," I voted for that as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But the president was doing it the right way. He came forward with a plan and a strategy. And we voted yes.

Q: Obama wasn't going to get the full support of Congress on that one.

KAINE: We got a Senate resolution, and then Syria said, "we will give up our weapons stockpile."

Q: They did not, clearly.

KAINE: In 2014, citizen Donald Trump said the president can't constitutionally do this without coming to Congress. I'm troubled that this is a president who seemed to understand what the Constitution required when Obama was in office, but now he thinks he's a king and he can do whatever he wants without Congress.

Rand Paul: Lesson of Iraq: unintended consequences from regime change

PAUL: When it comes to foreign policy, the thing I liked about President Trump was his opposition to the Iraq War. I guess what I'm perplexed by is that he keeps nominating people around him on foreign policy who actually thought the Iraq War was so good that they want to have an Iran war now. The lesson of the Iraq War was that there are unintended consequences from regime change. And so I don't think somebody being the head of secretary of state who wants regime change in Iran is a good thing or wants regime change in North Korea. You really want a diplomat to be in charge of the State Department, not someone who is advocating for war. So, I can't vote for Pompeo.

Q: Will you filibuster?

PAUL: I will do everything [possible but] I don't have the power to stop nominations.

Rand Paul: We're actively in war in 7 countries, and none are declared

PAUL: I think the mission is beyond what we need to be. We're actively in war in about seven countries, and yet the Congress hasn't voted on declaring or authorizing the use of military force in over I think the Afghan war is long past its mission. I think we killed and captured and disrupted the people who attacked us on 9/11 long ago. And I think now it's a nation-building exercise. We're spending $50 billion a year. And if the president really is serious about infrastructure, a lot of that money could be spent at home. Instead of building bridges and schools and roads in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, I think we could do that at home.