Politics

While the detente between Russia and US president-elect Donald Trump could not have come at a more tense time, the Kremlin appears to be accelerating its head-on collision course with NATO, and as a highly placed defense official said on Monday, Moscow will deploy S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander systems in the exclave of Kaliningrad in retaliation for NATO deployments, confirming previous media reports of Russian intentions to once again blanket central Europe with potential nuclear ICBM coverage.

Trump held meetings with several potential candidates for senior administration jobs over the weekend at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.  While no new official announcements were made over the weekend, we did get a couple of new clues on potential appointments to key positions.

Will be working all weekend in choosing the great men and women who will be helping to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2016

Dan de Luce, Molly O’Toole, and Lara Jakes report on the foreign policy implications of the appointments Trump has made so far. Here they describe Flynn’s views on combating jihadists:

Robert Kagan avoids the obvious in his description of the presidential campaign:

Internationalists such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio went nowhere this year; Bernie Sanders joined Mr Trump in attacking global involvement; and Hillary Clinton was hit from all sides for being too internationalist and too wedded to the idea of the US as the “indispensable nation”, the Bill Clinton phrase that encapsulated the thinking of every president from Harry Truman to George W Bush.