Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, Ben Cardin, the senior senator from

Maryland and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job that gives

him oversight of the State Department, but also puts him in contact with foreign leaders and

ambassadors on a daily basis, both here in Washington and traveling around the world.

Cardin told me he thinks America is absolutely in danger of stumbling into war, or wars.

Syria, North Korea, the South China Sea, Ukraine. He sees problems that could get out of hand

all across the planet, And he hasn't seen

any kind of a plan or development of a plan for any of them. From an administration, he says,

worries him both for its understaffing and for being run by a president. He says,

acts in ways that are, and this is his words, very irrational, against U.S. interests, and

unpredictable. And he said, that raises a concern as to whether

he will do the right things under pressure. There's many areas where there could be a miscalculation

that could lead to a shooting war, he told me. And he said, in every one of those circumstances,

the Trump administration has not given us a strategy. He said that's true in particular in Syria,

where the U.S. shot down a Syrian plane

over the weekend, and Russia is now threatening to retaliate by shooting down an American plane

potentially. Two months after President Trump launched the Tomahawk missile strike on Syria,

Cardin said he still never has seen anything that resembles a strategy to him there.

And I started by asking him to describe a meeting that he first told me about last year.

He was in Harare, the Zimbabwe and capital, meeting with Robert Mugabe.

The American embassy had asked him to check in to see what kind of shape Mugabe was in mentally,

whether he was still there.

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