Vladimir Putin Is a Happy Camper These Days

In the Kremlin is the first Russian leader since Nikita Khrushchev to put the use of nuclear weapons on the table (paywall), and who has reveled in provoking Europe, sowing carnage in the Middle East, and destabilizing the USA political process.

But this type of friendship is fickle and flickering. He said that if a new arms race occurs, or indeed if one has already started, it will be due to the George W. Bush administration’s decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russian Federation in 2002.

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday pledged his commitment to the USA nuclear arsenal, saying the country must “greatly strengthen” its capabilities, at least for now. Added to this is Trump’s decision to name Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State, who is up to now Chairman and CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil with known ties to Moscow.

However, Trump told the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday that there should be an “arms race”.

“He talked about a plan to work with them, for example: to hurt Pakistan, to threaten them with nukes until people were rioting, starving in the streets and in his words “couldn’t even get Band Aids, ‘” Kendzior said”.

He said that the hacks were important because they had revealed truthful information, such as the alleged favoritism showed by the DNC to Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

If Trump was responding to Putin, it marks perhaps the first time that comments from the president-elect could be seen, indirectly at least, as challenging the Russian leader.

If Trump were to seek an expansion of the nuclear stockpiles, it would mark a sharp shift in USA national security policy.

During the press conference Putin repeated a line that Trump has used, speculating that “maybe it was some guy sitting on a couch who did it”.

“We could be talking about a return to the Cold War here, when the threat of a nuclear catastrophe was very real”.

Putin made clear that the military build-up of the past few years, on which Russian Federation has spent large amounts of its shrinking budget, is slated to continue – but that it has already had results.

Trump’s use of Twitter to deliver what could be a major policy shift in 140 characters or less frustrated many global scholars who view nuclear arms strategy as a complex process. Yet given Trump’s tendency to accommodate Putin’s oppression and territory-grabbing impulses, as well as his own authoritarian leanings, the president-elect seems unlikely to be a muscular, outspoken defender of democracy around the globe or of dissidents within Russian Federation.