Posted on 12/23/2016 6:07:05 AM PST by governsleastgovernsbest
It was the strangest of settings for some very serious breaking news. There was Mika Brzezinski, cuddled up in her flannels on Morning Joe‘s special Christmas set. In the previous segment, Joe Scarborough had grilled Sean Spicer, whom President-elect Trump yesterday named as his White House spokesman, over Trump’s tweet of yesterday in which he said that the US needed to greatly strengthen its nuclear arsenal.
Spicer repeatedly refused to say that the Trump tweet came in response from a statement by Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier, announcing Russia’s intention to strengthen its own nuclear arsenal.
When the show returned after a break, Spicer was gone, but Mika and Joe announced that during the break Spicer had been on the phone with Trump, that Mika had posed a question about the nuclear tweet, and that in response Trump told her: “let it be an arms race because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
View the video here.
(Excerpt) Read more at legalinsurrection.com ...
Casey also told Reagan that 80% of classified material at CIA came from open sources- newspapers, books, studies etc.
Of course that did leave a crucial 20% gained by clandestine methods, but still...
Peace through strength is our policy under President Trump!
No it is not real. You can tell because Mika does not have her styrofoam cup with booze-laced ‘coffee’ in her hand.
Yep, leading out in front from a position of strength. No double talk and no appeasing the PC crowd...Man is this gonna be good.!
I bet Trump loved Reagan.....
The reason Trump is talking about this is due to the failure of the Obama administration in modernizing our nukes. Without upgrades and resumed production we won’t have working nukes in a few years.
And who was it who sparked the arms race over the past decade? Oh yeah; a man called Barry.
“I’ll say just two words: Star Wars. The nickname given to SDI. It’s what bankrupted the USSR.”
1) Reagan began the biggest military buildup we had seen since the 1950s (when we created the nuclear triad, fought the Korean War and built numerous classes of fighters, bombers and ships, all for less than 10% of GNP). The Soviets realized quickly that they could not overpower us in Europe with existing forces, and began to build up their own forces - which they really couldn’t afford to do, as they were already spending about 20% of GNP on defense, which is a crushingly high burden in ANY economy, let alone one with the built-in massive inefficiencies of Socialism.
2) We did our level best to cut off their supply of hard money from exports. Reagan leaned, HARD, on the Euroweenies to NOT accept the Soviet natural gas pipeline (which would have raised $10 billion/year for them, and allowed them to dictate policy to the Euroweenies - especially during the winter). Putting Pershing II missiles into Germany over great objection showed the Euroweenies and the Russians alike that Reagan had steel in his spine. Additionally, we convinced the Saudis to produce oil like crazy, so as to drive the price of oil down - I remember that for a week or so it even hit $8/bbl. Soviet oil exports became nearly worthless, and they even had to shut down a lot of production because they were losing money hand over fist. We incentivized the Saudis to do this by allowing them to invest in our (booming because of the tax cut and oil price cut) economy, sold them damned near anything they wanted to defend themselves against Iran’s mullahs and a possible Soviet invasion of the Mideast, and gave military guarantees of the security of both their country and their regime (why else do you think that we rushed half a million guys and their equipment - enough to have defeated a Soviet invasion of Europe - to the Gulf in 1990-91?).
3) We had lots of unrest in Eastern Europe, a large part of which was fomented behind the scenes by the anti-Communist Pope, JPII. Don’t wonder too much why there was an assassination attempt against him in May, 1981 - even though it was a Moslem who shot him, no one will ever convince me that the Soviets were NOT behind it (and there is some agreement among people who know a LOT more about it than I do - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II_assassination_attempt ).
4) We (and our allies - particularly Israel in terms of electronics) simply built better weapons. This started even before Reagan, but accelerated under him. I was taking a class in Military Strategy from Edward Luttwak at Georgetown in the Fall of 1982. He had been an advisor to the Reagan transition team, and was a (rather highly) paid consultant to the Pentagon after Reagan took office. At the beginning of the 1982 Lebanon War, Israel shot down over 80 Syrian aircraft in a single day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mole_Cricket_19 Luttwak told us that there was intelligence (that had previously appears in Aviation Week and Space Technology (A.K.A. “Avaiation Leak” - so he didn’t violate any security protocols) that the Soviet General Staff had come to the Politburo and basically told them, “We cannot beat the West because their technology is far better than ours, and is pulling away from us quickly - work out the best political deal that you can to save us.” That, by the way, is why they installed Gorbachev - a reformer - instead of another half-dead, lock-step Communist to continue doing the same old thing.
I would argue that SDI was a very important part of our military build-up, but was far more important as a psychological matter within the minds of the Soviet leadership. They had witnessed, during the 1960s, the US start from WAY behind them in rocket/space technology and then, on the whim of Kennedy’s “we will land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and bring him back alive” speech, proceeded to do exactly that. We completely outstripped them, and as part of that process built an enormous space industry infrastructure that just buried the Soviets. They never forgot that - and the chief lesson that they learned was that if the Americans set their minds and money upon achieving some technological goal, no matter how fantastic and ambitious it may seem at the time, they will achieve it and completely outclass the Soviet Union in the process. So when Reagan proposed SDI and then spent a bunch of money to lay the groundwork for it, they took it seriously - maybe a bit too much, because the stated goals were incredibly ambitious for the technology of the day. We could do that now and over the next decade or so (especially with the improvements in laser technology that have occurred and will occur over the next 5-10 years), but then it was impossible - though the Soviet leadership believed that we could at least negate a large portion of their nuclear arsenal.
Under Trump, we have a far greater economic advantage over the Russians than the US did over the Soviets. Russia has large foreign monetary reserves, but is depleting them quickly. The Russian economy is certainly stronger (which is to say, more capitalistic) than under the Soviets, but they don’t control Ukraine, and don’t have the buffer of Eastern Europe. They are much more of a Potemkin Village than most would believe. If there is an arms race, Trump is correct that we will beat all comers (especially the Russians), and without too much difficulty, at that. China has a lot more money than Russia, but its technology isn’t as good and its population is nowhere near as educated as the US population (yes, even as pitiful as our students are at times). We will have twin gigantic stimuli now, as in the 1980s - a huge tax cut and a massive increase in oil production that will cut the cost of this key cost input of our economy. We will bury THEM.
Interesting - I didn’t know the specifics of that, but it is pure Reagan/Casey.
You might want to look at #48 for more reasons why we buried them.
Trump is reinforcing his reputation as a man who just might push the button to use a inaccurate phrase. Reagan had this reputation and it worked well with our enemies.
I can’t vouch for all of what Kozy said, but I did find that the Soviets were stealing any DEC VAX that they could - and we knew it: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
Morning Joe brought up Kissinger meeting in Trump Tower and also Bob Gates.
The Trump remarks to Mika are not dissimilar to the Kissinger approach, in 1971. However, we know these remarks are vintage Trump.
He tells Putin in so many words “You wanna take your shirt off, I will too!”.
Ah I wrote what an old mind remembers. The author is not White but Peter Schweizer.
The book is, “Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.” 1994.
Read reviews before you buy.
Here’s what it covers, “From those he lays out how the Reagan teamers put the Soviet Union in a fatal chokehold through three main areas: 1) bargaining with Saudi Arabia to drive oil prices down, ruining Russia’s main source of revenue, 2) covert operations to supply the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan with the arms to expel Russian forces from their country, and 3) underground support for Solidarity members in Poland.”
It reads as a report not a novel. You have to be dedicated to read it. Not a Vince Flynn page turner.
EXACTLY!
Not when they don’t have our dollars to spend!
LOL! Though I agree with Trump, that comment will send the libs into a three-foot hover.
..............................................
.....from which they will come crashing down.
Thanks.
Are you speaking of the 1990 book CASEY, by Joseph E. Persico? Great book on the whole story of Casey. his years as head of the OSS in Europe underscores much of his later life. A must read for anyone interested in WW II and the CIA.
Peter Schweizer.
The book is, “Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.” 1994.
Read reviews before you buy.
Yup.
Putin has forgotten the lesson Ronald Reagan taught Russia. The US has a more robust economy and can afford an arms race -- Russia can not.
Might be time for a refresher course.
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The American economy is the underpinning of our military.
The Kenyan's l-o-o-o-ng recession, and massive over regulation of US business was intended to weaken us. It was pure evil intent, not stupidity.
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