Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” while discussing President-elect Donald Trump’s tweet last week saying the United States needs to “expand its nuclear capability,” and MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski reporting that Trump told her, “Let it be an arms race,” Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward said President-elect Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is advising Trump “let’s be tough, let’s be strong, let’s build up.”
Woodward said, “Well, as Trump believes, at least according to General Flynn, and I think he’s a voice of authority on this, because he sits in these meetings and briefings, that Trump, premise one is, let’s be tough, let’s be strong, let’s build up. and then negotiate with Putin in a way that he thinks Obama has not. Now, whether that’s going to be realized, we obviously don’t know. I mean, what was interesting, Flynn said last night that there’s a kind of mythology about the relationship between Trump and Putin.”
“Now, clearly, Trump has said very nice things,” he continued. “Putin has said some nice things. Are they going to be friendly adversaries? Are they going to be able to do things that are in the United States’ interest and Russia’s interest, that don’t throw these other countries over the side? I suspect that’s the goal. But, you know, this is years of work to build up the nuclear deterrents that this country has. and, I think, you know, if you ask Trump, he would say, yeah, that’s job one. we have got to do that. It’s going to be very expensive. It’s going to be very controversial. So, keep our seat belts on, once again.”
He added, “These briefings and the briefings are for military and intelligence people. China is doing the same thing Russia has been doing, building up, more missiles, much more aggressive. So the concern is not just Russia, but China, very much And how Russia and China play off each other, you know, that’s the unknown. What’s interesting here, and I think is significant — obviously, any discussion of nuclear weapons is about as important as a discussion can be — but that Trump is taking this page from Reagan. We’re going to be tough if. And if you go back to the early ’80s, Reagan was tough. Spent a vast amount of money on the military buildup. Lots of people said, do we really need this? It turns out, in history, it scared the bejesus out of the soviets and Gorbachev and the Soviet Union went away, as we know it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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