Hello friends and welcome to a very special edition of the Bill Press pod.

You know, two of the most interesting people in the country today are Jerry Brown,

former four-term 16-year governor of California, a good friend whom I had the honor of working with for four years,

and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has surged to the top four of Democratic

candidates running for president in 2020, one toward the end of his long career in public service,

the other near the beginning. Well, I figured the end of his long career in public service, the other near the beginning.

Well, I figured the two of them would have a lot to talk about, and so, with a few phone calls, the help of mutual friends, and a lot of luck,

I was able to bring Jerry Brown and Pete Buttigieg together for you.

And Jerry jumped right into foreign policy.

Pete, really good to be with you. Same here. Nice to be connected again. I'd like to get your sense of

where we are in Syria. I mean, millions of migrants have destabilized the politics in Europe,

particularly in Germany and Italy. So many people have been killed,

women, children, the gas attacks, all the rest of it. So what are your thoughts on Syria?

What is America's role? What should it have been? And where the heck do we go from here?

Well, I think America's priority has to be ensuring American safety.

And we have to accept the fact that there are problems that we can solve, and then there

are problems that you'll just have to manage.

And unfortunately, I think for the near term, a lot of the problems in the Middle East

and in that region are in that second category, problems that we got to manage in a way

that is responsible and that keeps America safe, but that does not mean we shoulder the burden

of what the outcomes are going to be. I actually think that was the direction we were working in

prior to the president's recent decision. In other words, we had a very, very small number of highly specialized people on the ground

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