David A. Andelman, visiting scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote an op-ed for CNN about Bob Woodward’s new book discussing President Trump’s foreign policy.
According to an excerpt in Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” published in the Washington Post, at a National Security Council meeting on January 19, 2017, when Trump was told about the special intelligence operation that allowed the US to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds, Woodward reported that Trump asked why the government was spending any resources on this region at all.
“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly replied thinly.
Such an existential threat and a host of other real or only narrowly averted catastrophic errors are now, with the first taste of Woodward’s book, coming into sharp focus. But for many world leaders, they long ago began seeking ways to work around the vast gulf between Trump fantasies and hard realities.