SUMMARY: President Trump announced over the weekend that the U.S. will quit the 1987 nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Trump claims that Russia has violated the terms. Russia is now warning of countermeasures if the U.S. follows through. Judy Woodruff speaks to Richard Burt former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, and Rebeccah Heinrichs senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
SUMMARY: The Trump administration's blueprint for America's arsenal continues the Obama administration's plans to rebuild all nuclear submarines, aircraft, and missiles, but also calls for deploying new capabilities. Critics say the plan will spark a new arms race. Nick Schifrin gets two views from Jon Wolfsthal of the Nuclear Crisis Group and Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute.
SUMMARY: Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, says Israel is still waiting for the Trump administration to offer its plan on how to move forward with the Palestinians. Barak joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the deadline for changing the location of the U.S. embassy, why he doesn’t think pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal would be helpful, and the threat for Israel of a post-war Syria.
SUMMARY: North Korea's Tuesday missile launch crossed the intercontinental threshold the U.S. had been hoping to prevent. At the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, the U.S. tried to rally the world to punish and isolate the regime. Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un insisted he will never negotiate away his missile and nuclear programs. Nick Schifrin reports on the American response so far.
SUMMARY: When it comes to facing the threat of North Korea, there are no easy answers and few good options. Could new economic sanctions change the trajectory of the country’s? Judy Woodruff gets views from John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and David S. Cohen a former CIA and Treasury Department official.
SUMMARY: President-elect Donald Trump made headlines this week for his reference to a possible arms race and his involvement in U.S. foreign policy prior to taking office. Judy Woodruff speaks with syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks about whether Mr. Trump's strategy is to keep people “off balance,” as well as potential conflicts of interest within his Cabinet.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Gentlemen, welcome.
So let's start out talking about two major foreign policy waves, I guess you could say, that Donald Trump is making today, David. He directly intervened with the White House as they were deciding how to handle this U.N. resolution on Israel. There is now an open rift with President Obama. This is different, isn't it, from the way we see a transition normally work?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: Certainly, the country can't have two Presidents at once, so the tradition has been to hang back if you're the president-elect and wait for your time in office. Trump is not a hang-back kind of guy.
And he has shifted — President Obama has shifted American policy in a much more critical way in Israel with the settlements than the previous Presidents. But we're about to get a head-snapping shift the other way. President-elect Trump's Ambassador to Israel is further to the right than almost anyone in Israel, further to the right than Bibi Netanyahu on the settlements, and almost opposes the two-state solution, does in fact.
So, we are about to see a tremendous shift in American policy toward the Middle East.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you see this, Mark? Are there consequences of this or is this going to be something we look back on and say, well, that's what happened?
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: No, I mean, I think Donald Trump is sui generis. I mean, he is acting by president or tradition. He's not acting as Donald Trump has throughout his entire public career of, what, a year and a half, and that is to be impulsive, be spontaneous, keep his opponents or adversaries off balance. That's his approach. He is not into nuance, that is not his strength.
And the President (Obama) said this week, he's (Trump) entitled to his own policies and but just hope that it's deliberate and thoughtful. And this strikes me as anything but.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, in addition to Israel, what we were sitting here talking about nuclear policy because Donald Trump tweeted, as far as we can tell, out of the blue yesterday, David, that the United States needs to beef up its nuclear arsenal. He did an interview with Mika Brzezinski of NBC this morning and I’m just reading the quote here. He said, “Let it be an arms race, we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
So, what does this say?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, one of the things I think about with Donald Trump is what are his words actually attached to? With a normal President like President Obama, he says a word, and that’s because there has been some thought that he’s done and there had been policy papers and there’s been aides and there’s been advisors and then there is a connection to an actual set of policies. And so, the words like have roots into actual stuff.
With Trump, I’m not sure the words have roots. They are emanations of his psyche, but has he thought it through? Is there an argument, is there a policy implication?
Even in this nuclear thing, he says we should be stronger and expand. What does that mean? So, what is concrete in what he’s saying?
And I think as we interpret him and frankly as the world learns to interpret Donald Trump, are these just words that are enigmatic things floating on air or are they actually shifts in policy and will they change moment by moment, day by day without any underlying connection to the actual stuff of governance? I don’t know.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, we’re talking about nuclear arms policy. This is something that in the past, it was something that people spent time thinking about before statements were made. You know, you said a minute ago, you think he’s keeping everybody off balance. Is this a deliberate strategy?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think that’s part of it. The points David make I think really deserve reflection and consideration. I think Donald Trump, we have to understand, has not had experiences like any other President we’ve ever had. He’s never been accountable to anybody, save Donald Trump.
I mean, he has no investors. He has — he has debtors, but he doesn’t have a board of directors. He doesn’t have a corporate structure he’s had to answer to. So he’s been able to kind of wing it at every stage.
I just don’t think he understands — the point David was making is when a President makes a statement, Judy, it is studied around the world, the nuance and was there an emphasis here, and what was in the last statement that’s missing — perhaps overly done, maybe overly analyzed. But because the President’s words are pretentious, they really carry with them enormous significance and are usually reflective of great consideration and even arguments within, that one side is wanted, one particular paragraph or sentence, while the other said, no, that shouldn’t be in there.
So, I just think that Trump — he has not made the transition, it seems to me, from candidate to even President in waiting. He has been a sore winner. He continues to in his rallies to berate Hillary Clinton. That sense of gracious, generosity or larger vision has eluded him so far.
SUMMARY: President-elect Trump tweeted this week that the U.S. needs to build up its nuclear arsenal. He also declared that should an arms race occur, the U.S. would triumph over any adversary. John Yang talks to Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund and Matthew Kroenig of Georgetown University about the reaction to Mr. Trump's words and the status of American weaponry.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We return now to President-elect Trump's comments about the need to build up the United States' nuclear arsenal — and to John Yang for that.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): Are the president-elect's tweets and comments signaling a change in U.S. nuclear weapons policy? And should the nation beef up its nuclear arsenal?
For that, we turn to Matthew Kroenig, an associate professor at Georgetown University who's written extensively about nuclear weapons; and Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a non-profit organization that advocates for disarmament. He, too, has written widely on the subject.
Gentlemen, thank you both for joining us tonight.
Mr. Cirincione, let me start with you, when you hear or read the president-elect saying that the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability and then tell Mika Brzezinski this morning, “Let it be an arms race,” what's your reaction?
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, Ploughshares Fund: Stunned. An ill-considered, disrespectful and dangerous series of statements. This would upend decades of Republican and Democratic policy that ever since Ronald Reagan has been reducing nuclear arsenals, both in the United States and Russia and around the world, stopping other countries from getting nuclear weapons.
By using that word “expand”, he says he wants to grow the arsenal or grow the capabilities. Look, nobody is against keeping a strong nuclear deterrent. If that's all he said, we wouldn't be having this debate.
President Obama has put in train a trillion-dollar program to replace every single nuclear weapon we have over the next 25 years. Donald Trump seems to be saying he wants to go ahead with this. His advisors tried to walk it back, but he himself said this morning, let it be an arms race. That is an extremely dangerous posture, that's why people all over the globe are worried and talking about this today.
JOHN YANG: Matthew Kroenig, what's your take?
MATTHEW KROENIG, Georgetown University: Well, the statement is certainly controversial but I think Trump is basically right. U.S. nuclear policy in the U.S. can't be static, it has to respond to international politics and all America's nuclear armed rivals, Russia, China, North Korea, are expanding and modernizing their arsenals. So, it doesn't make sense for the United States to continue reducing its arsenal as our adversaries are going in the other directions. And moreover, many of these countries, especially Russia, are relying more not less on nuclear weapons in their strategy.
So, again, the United States needs to take that into account as it formulates its own nuclear posture. And so, I think some strengthening of U.S. nuclear strategy and U.S. nuclear posture has been long overdue.
JOHN YANG: Matthew Kroenig, when you say the United States shouldn't be reducing its arsenal, but isn't that what's called for under an existing treaty with Russia?
MATTHEW KROENIG: Well, the existing treaty with Russia, the new START treaty was signed in 2011. According to the treaty, both countries can have 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. Right now, the United States is actually well under 200 or so warheads under. The Russians are 250 warheads above.
So, there is a gap of about 400 warheads that's worrying in and of itself, and it raises questions about Russia — whether Russia actually intends to follow through on this agreement or not. So, this is one of the measures that a new President can take to strengthen America's nuclear arsenal to increase the size of the arsenal, at least to the limits allowed for under new START.
